Half a klick away, a nervous zhahassi watched from the fourth floor as the crowds continued to grow at street level.
‘Oh, Volscia, if you can hear me, take me away from this place,’ Zesh Sarbin moaned. As a trade legate from Pacifica, a large and wealthy Commonwealth world a few hundred lights from Ariadne, his trip should have been over weeks before. Now he was condemned, an alien among aliens, trapped and terrified.
They’d selected him as part of a wider political push to get Commonwealth money flowing into the Outer Ring of the UN. Central UN funds were a scarce resource this far out in the Terran Hegemony, and in return for zhahassi investment, the industrialised outer worlds of the Demilitarised Zone, which were close to resource exhaustion after centuries of mineral plunder, would get thousands of tonnes of ore from the Ariadne mines. Sarbin’s presence here, in this dusty human shit hole, was the beginning of a much wider push to entwine local galactic economies—even if his expertise lay in provari econometrics.
It was, in any event, all for nothing. He could speak Terran, of course, and understood what was going on from the local networks. Part of him had prayed it was all a bad dream. Now the chanting, angry mobs of humans in the streets below confirmed his worst fears. Ariadne was not going to be defended from the provar, and the people here were—understandably—not happy about it.
Sarbin had fallen off comms since the planet had gone into lockdown at the outbreak of the Ascendancy War. He had been prone to fits of melancholy since adolescence anyway, and the fear and hopelessness that the War had instilled in him had led him to shut himself away and shun those hands held out to him. There had been no point, in his mind, in trying to contact the authorities on his homeworld. They were not coming for him. They would not risk warships this close to the Ascendancy border for one trade legate. He may have been senior—important, even—but these were times of war, and his detailed, slightly obsessive scholarly insights into the economy of the Ascendancy were clearly not valuable enough to the governing minds of the Commonwealth to risk a rescue.
Not that it would have been much a risk, until now.
At first he had been angry, then melancholy; but now he was plain terrified. He paced the diplomatic apartments like a caged grint. He couldn’t bear to hear the news, but he couldn’t brave the outside world either. Nor could he bring himself to commit suicide, though he certainly had access to cranial implants that could do it quickly and painlessly.
Torn by indecision, half-mad with agoraphobia, unwashed and reeking of alien body odour and fear, he paced and prayed to all the zhahassi gods, even if it was unfashionable to be religious in the Commonwealth now, for help.
And help indeed arrived, in the form of a small drone floating outside the townhouse window.
ZESH SARBIN, the holo projected by the drone’s fore optics read, THIS IS CORPORAL KGOSI, UN VERY IMPORTANT PERSON RECOVERY. WE ARE GOING TO TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE SAFE. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR A ROOFTOP EXTRATION WITHIN THE NEXT 10 HOURS. DO NOT BRING ANYTHING WITH YOU. OUR OPERATIONAL FREQUENCY IS 037.2. IF YOU CANNOT CONTACT US FOR WHATEVER REASON, LISTEN AND LOOK OUT FOR THIS: [IMAGE FILE: UNAF V14 MANTICORE]. THE EXTRACTION WILL BE VERY QUICK. YOU MUST BE ON THE ROOF WHEN THE MANTICORE ARRIVES OR WE WILL LEAVE WITHOUT YOU.
‘Oh Volscia, oh sweet Volscia, thank you!’ Sarbin screeched. He activated his communications implant and synced it to the frequency.
‘Hello? Hello? This is Vamana Zesh Sarbin’a of the Zhahassi Commonwealth! I received your message? Is this the corporal?’
‘About fucking time we heard from you,’ the gruff human voice responded. The comm tag identifier read KGOSI, A. CORPORAL UN MARINES. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, get your ass on the roof and await extraction.’