PING! CLANG! CRACK!
At Mile Marker Eight Thousand—where the wormhole highway branched into two elevated space-ramps leading toward Planet Eleven (Cinder-Rock World) on the left and Planet Twelve (Dry-Crater World) on the right—a hailstorm of jagged black iron gravel slammed against the front cowcatcher of Lead Locomotive Number One.
Inside the locomotive cab, Boom-Pot Sun ducked as a fist-sized chunk of spinning star-ore bounced off the thick quartz windshield, leaving a white spiderweb crack right in front of his nose.
“Curse these flying pebbles!” Boom-Pot Sun shouted over the roar of the boiler, pulling the train’s handbrake until the iron wheels screeched to a halt. “Lord Pei! We can’t push the passenger cars any further! Ten thousand years ago, when the Broken Star Belt shattered, a whole iron moon blew up between Planet Eleven and Planet Twelve! There’s a two-thousand-mile ring of loose gravel and jagged iron shrapnel spinning around both worlds like a giant grindstone!”
Outside on the highway shoulder, General Iron-Fang and his five thousand yellow-vested Debtor soldiers were trying to sweep the falling gravel off the tracks with their bamboo brooms.
SWISH—THUD! THUD! THUD!
For every ten stones they swept into the gutter, fifty more rained down out of the dark orbital ring! Within five minutes, a three-foot-high drift of jagged black gravel had buried the front train wheels, and one of Iron-Fang’s centurions got bonked on the helmet by a bowling-ball-sized chunk of iron ore.
