Midnight fell over the Dead-Ship Gravity Whirlpool.
Because the hundred-thousand-mile stone highway ran straight through the heart of the light-bending vortex, the natural starlight from distant suns was still curved away from the roadbed. Apart from the red cooking fires under Old Guo’s supper cauldrons and a few small oil lanterns hanging from the cement-mixer cars, the wide four-lane stone highway sat wrapped in pitch-black darkness.
Fifty thousand miles out on the center span of the bridge, Tie Zhan’s road builders and Crag-Devourer were taking their midnight break.
“Hold the lantern a little lower, Old Wei!” Crag-Devourer grunted, squinting down at the freshly laid white-stone asphalt while holding a ten-foot wooden smoothing trowel. “It’s so dark out here I just accidentally smoothed one of Tie Zhan’s iron boots into the tar!”
“Hey! That’s my spare left boot!” Tie Zhan hopped over on one foot, pulling his iron boot out of the warm white road tar with a loud SCHLUCK. “Lord Pei, this whirlpool sky is darker than the bottom of a coal pit! Once the commuter Star-Trains and cargo wagons start driving across at night, how are the drivers supposed to see the lane markers?”
“Don’t worry,” Pei Xuan said, walking over to the main transformer box of the Great Whirlpool Hydro-Qi Dam in the center of the bridge. “We already have fifty thousand tons of iron lamp-posts bolted along both guardrails, one every mile on the left and right. Now that the waterwheels are spinning at full speed, I…
