Huang'e was the most degenerate planet in the Horsehead Star Ring. Its brutal living conditions attracted no decent miners at all, and greedy merchants would never offer a wage that made anyone's heart flutter. But the crystal still had to be mined — no nation would ever give up a strategic resource as precious as crystal.
Over time, with everyone deliberately letting it slide, refugees, criminals and terrorists from every planet converged here, and the reputation of the Planet of Sin grew louder and louder.
On the Planet of Sin there was an unwritten law. It had not been laid down by the Governor, nor by the Emperor on Three Seas Star; it was simply a law passed by word of mouth among countless miners over a hundred years, kept generation after generation.
"You can exploit the miners, you can beat them and curse them, you can even kill the ones who won't obey — on this planet of sin, human life is the cheapest thing there is. But you must never pry the lid off identity, because the moment you do, you cut off the last road to survival for the whole miner tribe..."
Just like now. The desperate miners all thought back to the pasts they could not bear to remember, or to the secrets buried at the bottom of their hearts. To hide those things they had thrown away their human dignity and come to Huang'e to be miners. Yet now they suddenly realized that even if they were willing slaves, the punishment that was coming would come all the same.
If that was how it was, they might as well rebel. And so the great riot on Huang'e, triggered by the identity question, finally broke out.
The miners in the Ration Centers lunged at the soldiers trying to check their identities like starving wolves. They kicked the expensive blue-light identity scanners to pieces, snatched up anything within reach that could serve as a weapon and hurled it at the soldiers, and some even ganged up to drag soldiers to the ground and take their weapons.
In a single instant, the airtight doors of hundreds of Ration Centers flew open. What poured out was not only soldiers running for their lives but furious miners, and the black tide of humanity flattened those soldiers in their bright uniforms to the ground, turning them in a heartbeat into puddles of mud in the volcanic ash.
Once the miners and the soldiers clashed, the first to take the hit were the contractors. They picked up their phones, hid in safe corners and rooms, and vented their grievances at Huang'e's administrative apparatus; some of the wealthiest, hopping mad, hurled obscenities at every woman in the three big bosses' families.
The merchants' anger was understandable. What the fighting smashed was their property, dead miners would eat into their income, and as for the dead soldiers, their compensation would come winding round in the end and land right back on the merchants' heads.
Fine — a little more tax, nobody had a problem with that; smashed equipment could be replaced with money. But what was the meaning of killing off all the miners? How are we supposed to make a living?
"Ye Tian, you'd better give me an explanation. If you keep going your own way, I'll take this to the capital star and bring charges against you..."
"Roda, you've pocketed so many kickbacks from us — is this how you repay us? Don't think your uncle can protect you forever. Right now you've offended every merchant on Huang'e..."
"Governor, sir, you must give me an explanation. If you don't want impeachment proceedings brought up on Three Seas Star, then you have to halt this reckless order right now..."
Countless wealthy, well-connected merchants, shielded by their bodyguards, holed up in safe places and vented their displeasure at Huang'e's three big bosses. But not five minutes passed before an encrypted mail arrived on the portable terminals on their wrists.
The mail was short, just one sentence, but every merchant understood what it meant, and right then and there smiles spread across their faces.
"His Majesty has just retaken the mortal star of Ouma; over a hundred thousand prisoners are being escorted to Three Seas Star..."
Good — that one sentence was enough. The Governor had just revealed his plan, and it was a plan everyone was thoroughly satisfied with. With the most usable labor of all, the prisoners, at hand, whether these miners lived or died no longer mattered.
Smirking, the merchants began a slow withdrawal to the outer edges of the mining district, their bodyguards around them. Some went into the military towers to seek protection; most chose the back paths toward Huang'e City.
And while the merchants were making their great evacuation, in the B1313 pit one contractor chose not to run: Coyote Seven. He was at that very moment working alongside the Guard soldiers, checking the miners' identities one by one.
Maybe Seven's preparations had been good, maybe the explosives on the confinement bracelets had simply not been removed. Either way, the several hundred miners under him were as docile as lambs.
"Brothers, you all know Coyote Seven's strong point — I'm loyal, right? Your business is my business, your troubles are my troubles. With me here, you'll all come through this sweep safe..."
"I know plenty of you are serious criminals. The blue-light scanner isn't easy to fool — there's no hiding your past from it. To be honest, just now we already turned up six felons who are dead men for sure."
"But look at this — has a single one of you been arrested? No, right? That's all thanks to my face, Coyote Seven's face. I've put my own credit up as your guarantee. Now you know what my loyalty's worth, don't you?"
At this point Seven leaped up onto an alloy tool rack, pointed at the sounds of fighting and the firelight coming from all over the pit, and said, "Look at those idiots. Not one of them has a good boss like me to protect him, so all they can do is charge out into the street and fight our heroic Guard to the death, throwing their bare bodies against land vehicles. They're asking to die."
"You think handguns are for show? You think the Swarm Phalanx is for show? You think the orbital ship cannons are for show? And they still dare rebel, dare make trouble — that's just asking to die..."
As if to accompany Seven's speech, just as he was at his most heated, the military towers scattered across the pit opened fire all at once. The chatter of chain-fed heavy machine guns merged into a single roar, and screams rose straight to the sky.
Standing up high, Seven closed his eyes and cocked an ear to those waves of dense fire, savoring the heavy machine guns' distinctive rhythm, and was seized with wild joy.
"Oh, that's good. That is so good. Now you trash know what fear feels like, huh! Every miner who's already been checked — get your asses down the mine shafts. If you don't hand in crystals bigger than ten centimeters by the end of the month, you've let me down, and don't blame Coyote Seven for not being loyal then."
With that, Poison Wasp Adu led his men charging into the crowd, beating and kicking the already-cleared miners down into the shafts.
Just then a soldier ran up and whispered a few words in Seven's ear. His face changed, and he hurried off toward the nearest tower.
This ordinary watchtower served as Guard Captain Ye Tian's temporary command post. When he saw Seven come in wearing an ingratiating grin, he wasted no courtesy at all before cursing him out.
"Fuck, is everyone you keep a piece of trash? Out of ten of them, six turn out to be prisoners who are dead men, and the other four have records that would earn them life sentences. If Roda hadn't pleaded for you, yours would be the first pit I cleaned out..."
Ye Tian's spittle sprayed as far as the coyote tattoo on the top of Seven's head, but Seven did not complain at all. He stood there meek and submissive, grinning like a fool.
"Captain Ye, calm down, it's all for the crystal, isn't it? Time's tight and the job's heavy — there's no way around using this trash. Rest assured, once the crystal is in hand, you won't have to lift a finger; I'll personally stuff every last piece of this trash into the mine shafts. Don't be angry, sir. Getting this angry is bad for your health..."
Ye Tian curled his lip and said with a cold laugh, "I'll give Roda his face, of course I will. But what does giving him face get him? Does he really think a month is enough to turn things around? Seven, think carefully about your future. Don't get on the wrong ship..."
Coyote Seven was just about to speak when a burst of dense gunfire came from the top of the tower — this tower's heavy machine gun had opened up as well.
"Come on, keep me company and let's go see a fine view." With that, Ye Tian led Seven up to the roof.
The view from the roof was like nothing Seven had seen in his life. A long ammunition belt fed into the two-man heavy machine gun; one high-energy round after another glittered with power before the barrel turned them into columns of searing, explosive energy that poured down onto the crowds in the streets.
Here, people could no longer be called people. They were rag dolls, one after another; the high-energy beams sliced through human flesh, and splattering blood and steaming innards carpeted the ground. At six hundred rounds a minute the beams joined into a single high-speed blade of light, and the gunner need only swing his arm gently for that blade to grind up countless bodies in the crowd.
"Good God, there must be more than a thousand of them down there?" Seven's eyes had gone glassy. He had killed men before, but he had never seen a one-sided slaughter like this; under the shock his lips went white and he nearly threw up.
Ye Tian looked at that cowardly expression and said with contempt, "Fuck, you're nothing but a back-alley thug. Send you to the front lines and you'd have been dead eight hundred times over..."
The heavy machine guns roared for only five or six minutes, but in that short span there was nothing left standing in the streets. Blood mixed with the thick volcanic ash to form one bog of muck after another.
Then the land vehicles hidden in the corners emerged, hovering over the piles of corpses to search for survivors and putting in a few extra shots from time to time.
The same scene repeated itself over and over around Huang'e City. The military towers that had gone unused for so long bared their cruel fangs at this moment. Each tower had its own zone of control, and the spacing between tower and tower had been strictly calculated — the entire mining district lay under the heavy machine guns of the towers.
The killing went on for over half an hour. When the gunfire died down, the walkie-talkies of every size hidden in the street corners suddenly came crackling to life.
"Attention, all miners. You have ten minutes to get back to the Ration Center of your own pit and await identity verification. Remember, you have only ten minutes..."
With that voice came figures like walking corpses, swaying and shuffling back to their own pits to wait for their unknown fate.
Someone later counted that in little more than an hour of suppression, some twenty thousand miners and more were killed — that was the official figure, of course. Years afterward, when the old miners recalled the scene, they could describe it only as a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood. Usually, though, those old miners would add one more line.
"About two months after that suppression, the prisoners started arriving, a batch at a time. Over three months of transport they brought in maybe sixty thousand prisoners, but even when the last transport was done, I never felt the place had gotten one bit more crowded. You can figure out for yourselves just how many died in that massacre..."
While everything outside Huang'e City was boiling into one bloody mess, in the city's northwest quarter near the lava falls, in a grubby little building that was easy to overlook, a group of people was anxiously analyzing the situation before them.
"Tell me something — is this sweep aimed at us? And if it is, then why kick up such a fuss?" The one asking was none other than Wuchang, fresh off yesterday's robbery.