CLANG! CRASH! THUD!
A rusted iron cargo ship the size of a mountain range skidded sideways through the freezing dark void, sparks flying off its cracked hull before it slammed straight into the golden barrier of Border Toll Booth #1 at the edge of the Milky Way Spiral Arm.
Inside the warm wooden toll booth, Hong Ling nearly spilled her cup of brown-sugar ginger tea.
“Hey! Watch the paint!” Hong Ling jumped off her cushioned stool, slammed her heavy bronze abacus onto the counter, and pressed the button on her loud-speaker array. Even though she was now a Rank 9 Early Galactic Minister of Finance, she still wore two red ribbons in her hair and carried a pair of forged star-iron kitchen cleavers on her belt. “Do you know how much it costs to polish that golden guardrail?! Back up your ship right now and show your driver’s license!”
Outside in the dark vacuum of inter-galactic space, the rusted cargo ship didn’t back up. It couldn’t.
Three inches of pitch-black cosmic frost coated its broken engines. And right behind it, another four hundred thousand battered wooden arks, hollowed-out meteor barges, and patched-up iron shuttles were drifting out of the dark void like frozen leaves in a winter storm, crashing into each other and piling up against the glowing border fence of Pei Xuan’s territory.
