The roar of twelve heavy assault corvettes shook the crystal leaves of the newly planted palm trees along Open-Pit #1.
Hovering five hundred feet above the newly paved resort boulevard, the lead gunboat lowered its landing ramps. The vessel bore the black-and-gold imperial crest of the Blood-Tax High Audit Tribunal, bristling with heavy torpedo tubes and automated railguns.
Down the steel ramp marched Lord Malve, Regional Inspector of the Seventh Silk Road Sector.
Malve had a personal integrity score of 2/100. He wore a colossal three-layer coat made from the pelt of an arctic white bear, lined with heavy thermite plates and topped with a gilded officer’s cap. A jeweled riding crop rested beneath his arm, and an arrogant smirk curved beneath his thin mustache.
Behind him walked his favorite concubine, Lady Vera. She wore an imported polar silk gown, adorned with thousands of frozen diamond sequins, her face painted in heavy porcelain powder. Behind them marched twenty armored bodyguards carrying plasma halberds.
Malve had timed his arrival with great care. Every year on this exact date, he visited Planet #44 to inspect the frozen slave mines, confiscate forty thousand tons of frost-iron tribute, and personally whip ten miners to keep production quotas high.
