With Poacher-Captain Hook and his forty dizzy, chili-stained crewmen locked securely inside Grandpa Fu’s brig. Their three stealth frigates stripped of weapons and hitched behind the merchant tugboats—peace returned to the glittering indigo drift of the Sector 5 Asteroid Corridor.
Yet as Merchant-Guild Master Qian prepared to signal his five thousand cargo skiffs to resume their voyage, a deep, rumbling sound echoed across the void that made every teacup on the Cloud-Steamer Courtyard’s porch rattle in its saucer.
GRRRRRROOOOOOOWWWWL—!
It wasn’t an asteroidquake, nor was it an enemy cannon.
Floating in a neat semicolon around the courtyard’s front picket fence, the two-hundred-mile Astral Void Whale Matriarch, her fifty-mile juvenile calf. The other ten adult whales all pressed their pectoral flippers against their freshly washed, snowy-white bellies and let out a synchronized, embarrassed chorus of stomach rumbles!
“Wuuuuu...” The fifty-mile baby whale rested its broad silver chin on the edge of the courtyard’s wooden dock, blinking its huge sapphire eyes at eight-year-old Jiang Tuntun. Meanwhile, Its tummy growled a second time like distant rolling thunder.
“Aha! I knew that sound!” Eight-year-old Jiang Tuntun gasped, immediately putting both hands over her own round stomach in deep, heartfelt sympathy.
“Papa! Auntie Qin! The big fishies haven’t eaten lunch for two whole days because those mean bugs were biting them!
