The acid rain kept falling, growing more savage.
Searchlight beams from the D-4 landing platform pierced the murky curtain of rain and swept across the empty steel deck.
The mountainlike Burden of Terra had long since vanished above the clouds.
Beneath the canopy, Rovi watched the Imperial Tithe fleet depart.
His expression did not ease.
Jialan, chief Apothecary of the Astral Governors, had taken away a list of Genestealers that could have brought ruin upon all of Fertility II, carrying out a purge Rovi could never speak of.
Marquez, the cold and rigid tax officer, had taken away a shipload of Gray Mule 1 that might have triggered an Imperial Tithe investigation, turning that deadly poison into compliant fuel.
But Rovi knew he had only balanced a rotten account for the moment.
He had deceived an official of the Ministry of the Interior and used the blade of the Astartes.
Every step he had taken was enough to send him to the Ordo's pyre.
It had also been three months since Rovi arrived in this world.
By the habits of his previous life, a quarter had ended. It was time to prepare a "quarterly survival audit report."
Three months ago, he had awakened in the body of a poisoned Rank 4 Scribe.
He had faced a shortfall of 270,000 tons of grain.
He had faced Supervisor Kais's butcher's knife.
And the rotting stench of Nurgle's plague.
Back then, he had been a bad debt destined to be written off.
Now more than ninety days had passed.
He had fulfilled an Imperial Tithe delivery that should have been impossible.
It was a financial report written in blood.
Mixed into it were his toil, lies, schemes, and falsified accounts.
And the ashes of countless ordinary people who had struggled to survive in