Inside the chili-smoke-filled bridge of the lead poacher frigate Bone-Flayer, Poacher-Captain Hook was having the worst afternoon of his forty-year criminal career. With seven red-hot, Sichuan-spiced Blood-Barnacles clamped firmly to the seat of his leather breeches. Moreover, Another one dangling from the tip of his nose, he slammed his iron hook down on the red emergency hyperdrive button.
WHIRRRRR—CLUNK-CLUNK!
Beneath the stern of the three skull-painted frigates, their illegal dark-matter warp engines began spinning up, glowing with a jagged, unstable crimson light. Meanwhile, They prepared to tear open a spatial rift and flee the Asteroid Corridor.
“Haha—cough, cough—so long, you crazy spatula-swinging hick!” Captain Hook wheezed into the external loudspeaker, wiping spicy tears from his swollen eyes while hopping from foot to foot. “Once our warp drives hit full charge in ten seconds, nobody in Sector 5 can catch—”
“WUUUUUUU!”
A shadow sixty miles long fell across the three poacher frigates, blotting out the starlight like an eclipse.
Freshly scrubbed, peppermint-scented, and gleaming with a warm coat of golden Spirit-Beeswax, the Astral Void Whale matriarch and her eleven pod-mates rolled upright from their belly-rub circle. For three agonizing weeks, those three black ships had stalked them through the dark drifts, shooting barbed parasite-pods into their backs and trying to separate their youngest calf from the herd.
