Out in the giant golden skimmer basket above the Nebula-Scale Central Canteen Wok, the solar-system-sized Queen Mother Locust rubbed her round head affectionately against one of the mechanical star-iron spatulas, humming like a giant kitten.
Now that the Upper-World Blood Seal and the toxic poison core had been dissolved by Pei Xuan’s brown-sugar dough, she was desperate to shed the ugly, jagged locust carapace that the Heaven-Reaping Ministry had forced upon her body a hundred thousand years ago.
“Look at her wings,” Old Guo said sympathetically, leaning over the bridge rail. “Those dark blood-curses made her outer shell all thorny and stiff. When she was originally an ancient Golden Honey-Cloud Empress, she must have been a gentle spirit beast that brewed star-nectar instead of chewing rocks.”
“Even better,” Hong Ling said, looking up from her logistics ledger with bright eyes. “Young Master, our Inter-Galactic Bullet Star-Trains carry food from galaxy to galaxy in fifteen minutes, and local planetary shuttles take it to the town stations. But what about the last mile—the deep-space mining asteroids, the lone lighthouse keepers on border moons, and the millions of bone-tractor drivers out in the middle of the Ring-World fields? If they want a hot steamed bun and a jar of honey tea while working in the field, walking back to the train station takes half an hour!”
