CHOMP-CHOMP-PURRRRRR!
Out on the gleaming amber pavement of the Sticky Candy Flypaper Highway on World 34, the twenty-foot Rank 6 Tarantula Queen rubbed her big fuzzy black head against Old Guo’s knee like an oversized puppy.
All eight of her red eyes were squinted into happy half-moons as she munched on a giant steamed bamboo basket of Braised Meat-Potato Peels seasoned with a pinch of maltose sugar and warm mutton gravy.
Every time she swallowed a mouthful of potato skins, her round abdomen gave a happy wiggle, and a shimmering, wrist-thick cable of snow-white Rank 5 Silver Iron-Silk poured smoothly out of her rear spinnerets onto a wooden reel held by two Dry-Well soldiers!
“Look at the speed on that silk reel!” General Tie Zhan marveled, tapping his heavy black-iron halberd against the taut silver thread.
CLANG-BOING!
Even when Tie Zhan put fifty thousand pounds of Rank 7 arm strength into the sharp edge of his halberd, the silver spider-silk didn’t fray by a single hair! Instead, it stretched two inches like a high-tension bowstring and bounced the heavy halberd blade right back into the air!
“By the ancestors, Lord Pei!” Tie Zhan’s eyes lit up with excitement. “That thread is tougher than our army’s Rank 4 chainmail, and it weighs less than a goose feather! Do you know how many pairs of pants my asteroid miners on Worlds 15 through 30 rip open every week on sharp space rocks? Half my mining squads have to tie iron plates to…
