Wuchang had never seen a liquid-mithril coin before, and it had never once occurred to him that the people of this world could actually use a liquid as currency. Gold as money he was of course familiar with, but in this age of interstellar expansion gold had long since stopped being a rare metal; only humanity's hardwired genetic love of the stuff had kept the gold coin down at the very bottom of the currency system.
Rainbow coins, on the other hand, were nothing new to him. After all, he was a miner who dug rainbow crystals. Yet rainbow coins were not made of rainbow crystal at all: they were a specially treated rare alloy, more than twenty elements blended by a top-secret formula into gleaming rainbow coins.
Old Lane had explained it once. The metal in a rainbow coin was worth next to nothing; what was valuable was the processing. That secret process was in fact the same one used to make the casings of folded-space engines. To humanity, the folded-space engine was the key to entering the interstellar age, and so naturally that process was worth a great deal.
Above the rainbow coin sat the mysterious liquid-mithril coin. This currency was even stranger, because it was a liquid money: sealed inside an energy film was utterly pure liquid mithril, a rare metal used not only in all manner of machinery but also as the principal material of human identity tattoos.
What Wuchang now held in his hand was a pouch of liquid-mithril coins. Looking at the despair in Blood Rose's eyes, he guessed that these coins were very likely the single greatest fortune she and Seven possessed. Their entire fortune, most likely.
"You're a sensible woman. Seems I've got no choice but to leave you two a way to live." With that, Wuchang pulled the rope from behind his back, lashed both women securely to the table leg, and stuffed a scrap of torn tablecloth into each of their mouths for good measure.
Wuchang closed the door, went back into the room next door, put on that filthy, tattered cloak, and swaggered out of the Ration Center. As he passed the bar, he tossed a gold coin to the waiter.
"Not bad. That slut in there — I worked her so hard she can't get out of bed, she's still whimpering away inside. This is for your drinks, on me."
Once out of the Ration Center, Wuchang immediately melted into the shadow of a building and moved off at a fast walk, leaving the A332 mining district behind and heading for Huang'e City.
Roughly half an hour later, outside Huang'e City's towering alloy wall, Wuchang met the young thief A Yun, who had been waiting there all along.
"Brother Wuchang, did you pull it off?" A Yun asked excitedly. Wuchang didn't answer; instead he dragged the boy into an empty corner and spoke in a low voice.
"A Yun, there's something I have to tell you..." Wuchang paused, sighed, and went on. "A Yun, that mother you were reunited with — she's a fake mother..."
"Huh?" A Yun froze on the spot, his big eyes fixed on Wuchang as though he'd just heard something utterly absurd.
Wuchang steeled himself and repeated everything he had just overheard, from beginning to end.
"Do you understand now? It was all Blood Rose's scheme. They were using you. You can't go back there again — if you show your face there, your life is in danger..."
Before Wuchang could finish, the dazed A Yun suddenly lunged at him like a maddened tiger, his small fists pounding Wuchang's belly hard enough to actually make him stagger.
"Have you lost your mind?" Wuchang shouted under his breath, gripping the boy's arm.
"You're the one who's lost his mind! You're the crazy one! Your mother's the fake — your whole family's fake..." The furious A Yun couldn't break free of Wuchang's grip no matter how he thrashed, and in the end he bit down on Wuchang's arm, hard enough that Wuchang's brow furrowed.
"You kid — you're being completely unreasonable. Would I lie to you?" Wuchang shook him off and opened the portable terminal on his wrist; Eileen's face appeared on the flickering screen.
"A Yun, Wuchang isn't lying to you. We saw and heard everything that just happened. That woman called Sister Jing really isn't your mother — she's just a swindler..." At this point Eileen started crying too. She simply couldn't bear to watch A Yun suffer; in her heart the boy was like one of her own children.
By now A Yun's face was a mess of tears. He shook his head stubbornly. "You're all lying to me! You just can't stand that I have a mother, you're all jealous of me..." And with that, the furious A Yun darted up to Wuchang and kicked him in the shin.
"Hey? You little brat..." Wuchang, having taken the kick, reached out to grab the boy, only to find that he had already turned and run off. No matter how Wuchang shouted, he didn't look back once.
"All right, Wuchang, come on back. A Yun's just a child, he can't take this reality in all at once. Give him a few days and he'll come around," Eileen said, wiping her tears on the screen.
Wuchang was no fool; of course he could feel A Yun's grief. His own previous life had been that of an orphan — otherwise he'd never have joined the army in his teens and then become a mercenary, a bandit, a thief, right up to the age of twenty-seven, when he'd transmigrated so miserably into this alien world.
But Wuchang had been luckier than A Yun: at twenty he had met the master who changed his fate, and over seven full years he had not only learned a great deal but felt something like a father's love.
Watching the direction in which A Yun had vanished, Wuchang shook his head and turned away.
Just after Wuchang entered Huang'e City, back at the A332 Ration Center, people finally discovered the trapped Blood Rose. The fat woman who had been knocked out first finally came to. She raced to Blood Rose's office to lodge a complaint, and the moment she opened the door she found the two women trussed up inside.
The Ration Center descended into complete chaos. Blood Rose, weeping and wailing, immediately called Seven; the instant the call connected she was already sobbing too hard to speak.
"Gone... all gone... all the liquid-mithril coins we saved up are gone..."
"What did you say, you bitch?" Seven's furious roar came from the other end of the line.
"The liquid-mithril coins are gone! That bastard Wuchang took them, the whole pouch, all of it... ah..." Blood Rose dropped the phone and sat down on the floor, howling.
Mingled with Blood Rose's sobbing came bursts of heavy gunfire and Seven's bellows over the phone. Seven had been bled badly this time.
That same night Seven hurried back to the mining district. Uncharacteristically, he did not take it out on Blood Rose the way he usually did; he only shut himself in the secret room with her and talked for a long time, then went alone to visit Mine Supervisor Roda.
Roda was Seven's diehard ally, and a good share of Seven's business belonged to Roda — at least half of those stolen liquid-mithril coins were his. When Roda heard the news, his eyes rolled back and he passed out cold.
When Roda came to, the fat man cried until his face was a ruin. "Useless! You didn't get the crystal, and now even our money's been robbed from us. You've still got the nerve to be alive? Why don't you just go and die?"
"Mine Supervisor, we can't keep letting Wuchang run wild. Today he robs our money; tomorrow he'll dare to sneak into the mine pits and wreck our operations, and then the crystal quota will never be met."
"And there's one more piece of intelligence you must take note of. Word is Wuchang is carrying a fifteen-centimeter crystal. If we catch him..."
Seven never got to finish. Roda leapt up out of his chair with an agility that ill-matched his bulk. "I'm going to see Ye Tian — see Ye Fei! Weren't they going to run the anti-crime sweep? Now's the time. We move now..."
That night the three big shots of Huang'e City schemed until dawn — Governor Ye Fei, Guard Captain Ye Tian, and Mine Supervisor Roda. No one knows what they discussed in that secret room, but by early the next morning every commoner in the city sensed that something was wrong.
At some unknown hour in the middle of the night, pairs of patrolling soldiers had appeared atop Huang'e City's alloy walls. The walls existed to guard against the cannibal tribes, but today they were held in full battle gear, and even the automatic weapons built into the walls had been cranked out and made ready.
Hovering land vehicles filled the air. The Guard barracks had been noisy half the night, and vehicle after vehicle, loaded with supplies and soldiers, went tearing through the streets.
All leave was canceled. Sentries were posted at every street corner in the city, and even the long-abandoned watchtowers out in the ruined mining districts beyond the walls were manned; the heavy machine guns and small light-energy cannons inside them had been serviced until they gleamed.
Finally, at dawn, every electronic notice board on Huang'e was switched to the same announcement: the long-rumored anti-crime sweep of Huang'e had begun that very morning.
In that instant the whole planet was in an uproar. Countless miners, catching sight of the armed soldiers in the streets, quietly fell back; countless contractors scratched their heads, unable to work out why the sweep had been moved up.
But everyone agreed on one thing: this sweep was no formality — this was the real thing. Every mine owner received a shutdown notice, requiring him to gather his miners at the Ration Center within half a day; after noon that day, any suspicious figure seen on the mining district streets would be shown no quarter.
The miners were dumbstruck; some even suspected the Governor was playing an April Fool's joke. But once noon had passed and dense gunfire rang out along the mining district streets, everyone was struck speechless. This was no joke. This was for real.
The land vehicles racing past didn't even slow down. The moment they spotted a figure on the streets they opened fire, packing those worthless lives off to hell as casually as hunters shooting rabbits. Not a single soldier stopped to check anyone's identity; their orders were unconditional: no quarter.
"Better to kill a thousand by mistake than let one slip. That's the slogan of this sweep. I don't care who you are or whose backing you have — anyone who won't cooperate with this sweep has the fire prison waiting for him — and bullets besides..."
Across the whole of Huang'e, wherever anyone lived, the Governor's voice rang out.
Those on the streets who had been counting on their luck could not escape death, and the miners who had dutifully assembled at the Ration Centers might not escape it either. When the newest model of blue-light scanner was switched on in each hall, the crowd immediately descended into chaos.
"Blue light! Shit, a networked blue-light scanner — Ye Fei and Ye Tian have lost their goddamn minds. They're really doing this..."
How could the people not panic? At least a third of the miners were using fake identities — the very kind Wuchang had first wanted to buy for five hundred gold coins. On any ordinary day it wouldn't matter, but that kind of identity could not fool a networked blue-light scanner. The rotten machine would instantly transmit the identity data to every planet in the Horsehead Star Ring and verify its authenticity at the fastest possible speed.
"Shit! If you won't let me live, then I won't let you live either!"
"One kill breaks even, two and I'm ahead! Brothers, don't just sit here waiting to die!"
Huang'e's miners were never short of men with nothing left to lose, and at the line between life and death such men had no fear at all of rebellion. Within moments, the mining district was ablaze with fighting.