“Papa, I don’t think Grandma Whale and her family want to say goodbye,” twelve-year-old Gu Nian said from the starboard veranda, smiling. Meanwhile, The fifty-mile juvenile calf rested its chin right beside the porch steps and nudged three-year-old Little Fifth’s red overalls with the tip of its whisker.
Out in the cleared shipping lane of the Asteroid Corridor, all twelve Rank 7 Astral Void Whales. Stuffed full of a hundred ten-ton sweet-potato-and-cabbage soup-dumplings apiece and gleaming like polished silver moons after their peppermint-and-beeswax spa treatment. Had lined up in two parallel rows of six flanking the [Gu Family Flying Courtyard].
Every time Gu Changsheng adjusted the courtyard’s helm one degree to the left, all twelve sixty-to-two-hundred-mile whales glided one degree to the left in crisp, military-grade unison.
On the bridge of the lead merchant skiff Golden Abacus, Merchant-Guild Master Qian stared at his fuel and hull gauges with a mixture of awe and worry.
“Immortal Master Gu,” Master Qian called over the external comms, clasping his hands respectfully from his observation deck, “now that the Void Whales have recognized your family. Meanwhile, Their guardians, the entire corridor is safer than it’s been in a century!
However... I just received the damage report from our five thousand small merchant skiffs. During the emergency braking maneuver earlier, over three thousand of our wooden cargo skiffs burned out their bronze propulsion coils or cracked their steering rudders.
