Chapter 73: Chapter 70

The conquest of the Glowing Sea was a complete success, my tangle with the Children of Atom notwithstanding. No casualties, no nasty surprises, and all objectives were completed without complications. Except for my own encounter of course.

Eva had the foresight to have the Zippy Lid’s full sensor suite recording the moment the irradiated spectre thingy manifested, meant for studying in case of future encounters. After clipping some parts, it also made for a good tool to break the spirits of our Children of Atom prisoners.

“You lie!” some had screamed as they were all sat down in one of the Institute’s larger rooms and forced to watch the screening of what could be the avatar of their god being disintegrated by a beam of light seemingly out of nowhere. Sure, the video showed me being badly wounded, but the important part was that I was now standing before them all healthy and hale, not their Atom.

I didn’t have to tell them that the stealthed Zippy Lid carried its own de-radiating emitters (which almost drained the ship’s battery), nor did I have to share that I was as surprised as everyone that it worked so spectacularly well, and that the glowing body wasn’t as stacked in rads as its attacks. Seriously, it only had two thousand rads. I got a shit ton more than that.

Once that little clip was done, the bots carried them through modified healing arches to deactivate their rad resistant genes. Oh, and it made them more susceptible to radiation poisoning too.

No, I didn’t clean the radiation off them first.

“You monster!” an old man cried out in a cracked voice, streaks of tears running down his dirty face as the symptoms of radiation poisoning quickly set in. I simply smirked pettily as they cursed and wailed at me as every one of them succumbed to the effects of the high dosage of radiation on their bodies.

“Give it back! Give back Atom’s blessing you thief!”

“Desecrator! How dare you!”

I left them to suffer a bit before ordering the bots to send them to the healing arches and given clean clothes. They’d still be housed in the same quarantined floor, together with their talismans, weapons and other belongings. Only now, Eva was keeping an eye on them and was ready to drag them to the healing arches before any of them died from the heavily irradiated environment.

Practically all of them broke just days after that, unable to accept that they’ve been rejected by all that they hold sacred. The artefacts were all tossed into an empty cell with none of the reverence they once received as the former Children could no longer stand their presence. I took a peek every now and then to see the broken men and women struggling and failing to keep to their faith.

A week after that, as scheduled, Eva gave them the offer to move to a rad-free environment in exchange for the destruction of all their pile of rejected relics. The floor was emptied out and the former rad-worshippers were given the task of tending to the Institute’s own rad-free hydroponics until their decade-long sentence was completed.

They still had the option of enjoying the ‘normal’ food from the surface. Not that they can tolerate anything with even the slightest bit of rads in it, but we kept that option open as a courtesy.

Despite enjoying the breaking of a cult, I was still aware that whatever it was that I faced back in the crater could return, but knowing how to hurt it meant we were far more prepared for future encounters. The Obelisks of Light for example, were made capable of switching to using de-radiating beams, and new sidearms were being manufactured to utilise the same beam.

Everyone else took the video of ‘the death of Atom’ rather well. I let traders and travellers watch it in R&R 81, had it run by projectors in the parks by popular demand in Caladan, and absently ignored it while it ran on loop in a meeting hall during a celebratory orgy with 1st Company.

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I tell you what, after experiencing near-death for the first time and seeing my stats drop to the reds in the console, I vigorously took to flooding every hole offered to me (ie. all of them) with cum. I was glad to have survived, and enjoyed that fact to the fullest that night.

1st Company enjoyed themselves too, despite (or is it because?) their limp and cum-drenched state at the end..

With the conquest of the Glowing Sea done, I returned to the boring but important job of overseeing the integration of our new lands. An army of rad-cleaning Mr Handies were dropped off in the most irradiated zones and worked their way out, while captured specimens were experimented on in Tleilax and Ix.

With a lot of feral ghoul specimens to work with, we found that unfortunately, there was no cure to ghoulification. Everything we tried was fatal to them; healing arches left them as pristine human corpses as their bodies couldn’t adapt to the shock of having proper organs again, the de-radiators made them fall apart like deanimated corpses as the radiation that sustained them was drained, and trying a combo of the two didn’t work at all either.

The best we managed was to preserve their mental state from decaying by using a souped up version of our Broad Spectrum Cure, but even then it was a temporary thing and would require a top-up jab after a month or so.

Apparently that was still enough a lure to draw in non-feral ghouls. Considering the BSC was one of the essentials on the ‘to clone’ list, it was little issue to provide access to regular jabs for probationary ghoul migrants. Considering that they’re all a couple of centuries old, most of these potential citizens made for very good, if unreliable, sources of information of a pre-war world.

A program was set up to record the long memories of those who were willing to offer it, as a library of sorts that was publicly accessible in Caladan. Useful information like agricultural, administrative or construction practices were added to the Nexus’ own research.

I made it a point that the ghouls would receive the same treatment as normal humans within the Nexus, mostly because I saw the value in having potential veterans of survival and experts of forgotten skills being productive in my lands.

Our local industry was growing rather well, with our artisanal goods supposedly being heavily valued by people beyond our borders. No surprise that well-made designer clothes and gear would be popular, but who knew that woodwork art, statuettes and other artsy stuff would be such a hit with the outside world?

As I made it a point to have our goods priced only for Nexus credits, the exchange station we set up in R&R 81 saw constant traffic for people exchanging caps for our paper currency just to buy our exports. As expected, the credits themselves became a commodity to the Commonwealth as a few traders handed over sacks of caps in exchange for stacks of credits. The exchange rate was currently fixed at ten caps to one credit, a generous ratio that made our wares accessible while still maintaining enough of a luxury air to them.

The credits were also used to give those wasteland traders and tourists a chance to enjoy Caladan, and having the outsiders gawp and marvel at the plains on the seventh floor became a local attraction by itself. Some traders were buying up our food and water as well, using our credits which they exchanged caps for.

I’m no economist so I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but it sounds amusing enough.

As our prosperity slowly leaked out to the greater Commonwealth, I enjoyed watching the Nexus…my Nexus’ progress was making, usually by reading or listening to reports, often with someone under my desk and between my legs, lovingly tending to my cock.

The girls were having a competition, and I had to say, Curie was winning it with her tight synth throat and natural talent.

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