Chapter Five
I drop the rest of the bar and jump backward, out of the cart’s passenger compartment and six paces across the warehouse floor, before I stop to pull myself together.
Everything in me tells me to run — I didn’t survive profiteering on Valnoc by not running when I see a Kryssitid eggbomb — but leaving a cart full of them sitting in an unquarantined warehouse on a station I can’t leave won’t end well for anyone, including me.
With shaking hands, I re-seal the hazard suit around myself and climb back onto the cart to examine the remains of the bar.
The larvae have stopped squirming and now only steam. The unhatched egg sacs among them have broken open, but the molten gold, now re-hardening into streams of foamy grit, seems to have contained and neutralized them.
Carefully, I
