2.06 - Gestation of Wrot

[Transcript]Wrots. Iron psychic celestial parasites. Most stars aren’t sentient until one of the fissile larva takes root. Commune of Vortixi gave us the job. Their wrot is one of the few to have survived solar collapse, the worm god entombed behind the event horizon, bound to a singularity. Reality breaking power, if only it could get free.The commune is only one of three out in the Yan quadrant and I reckon a big reason the Pure Shards haven’t poked too far into the region. That and they have their hands full of Boklin Marauders.I fancy myself a humanoid hard to surprise anymore. I don’t know what I thought the Vortixi Commune wanted us to transport from their temples to Thregosis, but I was humbled and not a little disturbed when they rolled a sarcophagus into our cargo bay. The same kind I’ve sleep in every night.Destination coordinates. No other instructions save to jettison the box at a precis velocity upon arrival. We make quick time, me pushing the collector-fire conduits to max, nearly scraping the neutrino substrate dry trying to get us there as fast as possible. I don’t like that on the ship. Hamark and I stay in the cockpit but I catch Zery and Ruthin probing the second sarcophagus. The two have gotten along a lot better than I’d thought since Ruthin’s become more active.They rupture the seal. Something gurgles inside. I catch only a glimpse from the front. 2 meter long maggots, thin as ropes squirming over each other, webbed together with some kind of amniotic membrane the color of cobalt. Then the temperature drops. Condensation turns frost before we’re all encased in nitrogen ice. The Hamark manages to avoid solidification as the larva drains the thermal energy from the room deadly fast. He slams the lid down. We thaw for the rest of the trip.We arrive at Thregosis, a super cluster of astroids. It’ll likely be a planet in a few hundred thousand years. 31 and a half m/s2 goes the 2nd sarcophagus from our coordinates into the super cluster. It tumbles end over end into the darkness, the shrouded asteroid masses swaddle the occult coffin, hiding it for the future.