One hour later, on the wide iron loading dock of Dust-Rock Moon Station #1, fifty thousand captured Blood-Skull space pirates squatted in neat rows of one thousand men each, holding their heads in their hands.
At the very front of Row 1 sat Vanguard Captain Mad-Dog Kui.
A lump the size of a goose egg swelled right in the center of his forehead where General Tie Zhan had headbutted him, and his proud demon-wolf fur coat had been confiscated as “unclean contraband.” Beside him squatted First Mate Scar-Face Liu, Second Mate One-Ear Wang, Iron-Tooth Ma, and Butcher Sun, all of whom had been issued cheap gray cotton trousers by the railway lost-and-found so they wouldn’t freeze their knees off.
In front of them stood a long wooden table covered in green felt.
Behind the table sat Abacus Su, Hong Ling, and twenty fast-fingered Moon-Rabbit clerks who were dumping bags of looted treasure out of the pirates’ spatial rings and sorting them into neat piles with their long white ears flopping happily.
Clink-clink-clatter!
“Three million, one hundred and forty-two thousand, six hundred and ten low-grade Spirit Stones!” Hong Ling announced, hopping down from a wooden stool after weighing the last iron chest with one hand. She curled her lip in disgust and tapped one of her laser-cleavers against the empty chest. “Young Master, look at how poor these space pirates are! Fifty huge ships, fifty thousand grown men, and they only have three million Spirit Stones between all of them? That’s…
