Over the next seven days, a sight never before seen in cosmic history played out across the eighty inhabited planets and three hundred moons of Systems #81 through #90.
Every day at eleven-thirty in the morning and five-thirty in the afternoon, the sky would light up with golden rainbows as 100,000 yellow Solar-Fire Delivery Chariots zoomed down from orbit along Ye Guhan’s newly paved Light-Speed Solar Highways.
At the head of the fleet rode Great General Jin Xiao on his three-steed Command Delivery Chariot #00001, the six yellow kangaroo ears on his roof and helmet flapping proudly in the stellar wind.
On his first day of driving the takeout cart, Jin Xiao had kept telling himself that he was only playing along to “destroy Pei Xuan’s braised worm-rice supplies” and protect his captured soldiers.
By the third day, however, as Jin Xiao drove through the mining towns of System #85 and the farming valleys of System #88, he started noticing things that made his three-thousand-year-old military mind spin.
Under the Golden-Crow Sun Clan’s rule, the two hundred billion residents of Systems #81 to #90 had been skin-and-bones serfs. Their children coughed up black coal-dust, their fields were frozen ten months out of the year because the Clan hoarded the solar heat, and whenever Jin Xiao’s war-chariots flew overhead, every mortal on the street would drop flat in the mud and tremble like kicked dogs. Even with a hundred thousand elite soldiers whipping them day and night, the ten systems barely…
