The Last Empress of Mars

royal coffers. While tribute was a part of the reason for adding new regions to the fold, the Chinese felt that what they shared in culture and technology far outweighed what they received in return so that these people would be benefitting greatly. It was also designed to create new colonies of Chinese settlers all around the world. A further reason for this voyage was to find and establish a southern counterpart to the Polar Star that the Chinese could use in the same way to calculate latitude anywhere in the world. Currently, once this Star was out of sight just past the equator, they would lose their ability to do such calculations. Achieving these goals would, however, require sailing to mostly uncharted and possibly highly dangerous waters and unknown to them at the time of departure, only one in ten departing sailors would ever return to see China again and in fact, even those survivors could hardly fathom that they would return to a very different China than the one they were preparing to leave. However, the principal reason for this sixth voyage was truly top secret and only a handful of individuals knew the real reasons for this enterprise. The order came straight from Zhu Di, the exalted Ming Emperor himself, who had been entrusted with the care of 8 most unusual and wonderful artifacts by his father, the second Ming Emperor. The story was that these artifacts had in fact been left thousands of years ago by wise men with long white beards who had emerged from the depths of the earth and were the last survivors of a highly advanced race that ruled the world 20,000 plus years ago and which had been destroyed by massive floods and gigantic earthquakes causing the sea level to rise over 80 meters worldwide overnight and it was all caused by the shifting of the poles as a result of what could have been a comet or meteor shower striking the earth. These wise men had left very precise instructions that these artifacts must be safeguarded from the Deceivers and used for the good of mankind and that whoever possessed and protected them would also be granted power, riches, wisdom, and longevity. The Ming Emperor was getting old and was worried that he could die or be overthrown and these precious artifacts would fall into the wrong hands, either Mongol hordes or those of his nemesis, the Mandarins, who had managed to sway