D-4 Landing Platform.
Forty-eight hours of relentless acid rain had not cleaned this massive steel platform. Instead, pools of filthy water slicked with oil had collected in its pitted metal seams.
The Burden of Terra loomed like a silent mountain of steel, weighing on everyone's hearts.
Its engines had long since finished warming up, their low rumble making the surrounding air tremble faintly.
Yet it had not taken off, remaining in low-power standby.
Because of an agreement.
An Asset Preservation Supplementary Agreement drafted by Rovi Dann, signed by Governor Alicia, and ultimately forcing Ministry of the Interior Tax Official Marquez to comply.
At that moment, the half-mechanized tax official irritably arrived at the edge of the loading area.
His brass-cast head kept turning.
His Cybernetic Eye coldly watched the workers lining up to receive alveolar enhancement injections.
Twenty thousand workers.
Twenty thousand injections.
Even for the Burden of Terra, which possessed thousands of Servitors, this was an exceedingly cumbersome extra task.
Marquez's Mechanical Claw made two empty grasping motions in the air, as if he wanted to crush something.
His logic core was on the verge of overload. A torrent of red data concerning "delays," "fuel consumption," and "time costs" frantically flooded his vision.
This waiting was more unbearable than being dismantled.
To ease this logical anxiety, Marquez began pacing across the platform.
His steps were slow, each one accompanied by the heavy sigh of Hydraulic Rods.
Suddenly, he stopped.
His mechanical eye focused on a puddle on the ground.
More than a dozen plump wheat grains lay scattered there, having leaked from a damaged cargo container during loading.
Marquez bent down.
As a high-ranking tax official, he performed an action that left the nearby Arbitrators utterly baffled.
He extended his precise Mechanical Claw and, like a miserly scavenger, picked