For ten thousand years, the Dark-Ice Sector had been known across the Broken Star Belt as a place of tears, frostbite, and death. No traveler from the inner worlds ever visited Worlds 23 through 26 unless they were dragged there in chains to dig iron ore.
Yet by Friday afternoon of Pei Xuan’s first week in the sector, the smooth white snow-hills surrounding World 26’s steaming Hot-Spring Lake looked like a fairy-tale winter wonderland!
Pei Xuan stood on the highest glacier overlook above the lake, looking down at the hundred miles of clean, powdery white slopes that General Frost-Beard’s snow-plow fleet had neatly graded and packed.
Beside Pei Xuan stood three long freight trains loaded with supplies from the inner worlds: fifty thousand strings of seven-colored Spirit-Glass Lanterns, two million waxed Hardwood Toboggans and Ski Boards, and ten thousand cast-iron Charcoal Sweet-Potato Barrel Ovens accompanied by mountains of honey-sweet red tubers grown in World 16’s worm-soil.
“Everything is unloaded, My Lord,” Abacus Su reported, rubbing his hands together as he looked at the empty glacier slopes. “Our weekend commuter trains from Planet 1, World 15, and World 22 are already boarding at the wormhole gates! Five hundred million desert and forge-world citizens bought weekend round-trip tickets in the first hour alone!”
