Clack-clack-clack-clack!
The sound of Abacus Su’s golden abacus echoed across the silent inter-galactic void like a courtroom gavel sentencing a man to ten thousand years of hard labor.
Down at the edge of Mile-Marker #65, Pirate King Du Gu and his five hundred Void-Fang battlecruisers were still glued flat against the outer highway guardrail by Old Yellow’s Super-Heavy Taming Loogies. Even though Du Gu was a mighty Rank 9 Mid Galactic expert who had terrorized thirty outer galaxies for two millennia, he couldn’t even lift his chin half an inch off the cold black brick.
Abacus Su crouched beside the guardrail, pulled out a three-foot brass measuring tape, and carefully measured the green Void-Leviathan drool marks on three of the Black-Hole Compressed Bricks.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Abacus Su clicked his tongue, shaking his head as if looking at a tragic crime scene. “Look at this, Lord Pei. Brick Number Forty-Eight thousand nine hundred and two has three square inches of green acid stain on its upper bevel! Brick Number Forty-Eight thousand nine hundred and three has a tooth scratch that shaved off zero point zero two millimeters of Boom-Pot Sun’s glow-in-the-dark yellow paint! And worst of all—when their Vice-Boss fired those twenty acid torpedoes without a fireworks permit, the smoke smudged our reflective lane markers!”
