BWOOOOOOOOM—!
Fifty massive, spike-covered black warships tore down the four lanes of the newly paved space highway like a pack of rabid iron wolves.
Unlike the honest merchant barges that stayed neatly between the white lane lines and obeyed the sixty-mile-an-hour tunnel speed limit, General Iron-Fang’s vanguard fleet drove straight down the center dividers, belching thick purple sulfur smoke from their rear thrusters and knocking over three plastic traffic cones along the way!
“Pull over to the service shoulder! Clear the main lanes!”
Old Wei blew his brass traffic whistle twice and waved the merchant ships into the wide emergency parking bays beside Toll Booth #1. Within thirty seconds, Captain Zhao and the hundreds of frontier cargo boats were safely tucked behind the stone curb, peering out their cabin windows with wide eyes.
Down on the pavement in front of Lane One, Rat-Whisker Liu dropped his toothbrush into his soap bucket and scrambled behind a stone pillar.
“Lord Pei! Run!” Rat-Whisker Liu yelled, his voice cracking with panic. “That’s General Iron-Fang, the mad dog of the First Star-Lord! His flagship has a solid star-iron ram on the bow that smashed the city gates of three planets last year! And he never pays for anything—last month he ate forty roast sheep at the Black-Sand Market and paid the innkeeper by punching his teeth out!”
