“Drive a ten-mile passenger train into a whale’s mouth in System #15... and roll out of another whale’s mouth twenty light-years away in System #16?!”
On the observation roof of Dry-Well Station #15, General Tie Zhan stared at Pei Xuan with his mouth half-open, nearly dropping the pork bun in his hand.
Even Ye Guhan—who had spent the last six years slicing mountain tunnels, paving asteroid highways, and welding sword-beam tracks across fifty planets without ever blinking—took off his blue railway conductor cap and looked down at Big Gray and the sixty-one other hundred-mile-long Void Whales floating outside the dock.
“Lord Pei,” Ye Guhan said seriously, measuring Big Gray’s twenty-mile-wide mouth against the width of Locomotive #01. “The width of the whale’s jaws is certainly large enough to fit eight train tracks side by side. However, if a passenger train drives into a living beast’s stomach, won’t the passengers get splashed by stomach acid or shaken around every time the whale wags its tail?”
“And what about the smell?” Hong Ling added, pinching her nose with two fingers while her kitchen cleavers clinked at her hip. “Young Master, if our first-class train cars smell like wet whale breath, nobody is going to pay two Grain-Notes for a ticket!”
