The corridor groaned.

  It wasn't alive, but it moved all the same. A blue light rolled down from overhead panels, the illumination coming in waves; each pulse mimicked a fading heartbeat.

  A low hum resonated through the passageway, deep and constant.

  Above, the ceiling was a mess of piping, twisted, coiled, and black with grime. Veins, almost.

  They dripped at the joints, heavy drops patterning the rust stained floor like old wounds being kept open. Now and then, the corridor let out another groan, the kind of sound steel makes when it is holding back too much pressure.

  ?A letter loomed ahead: B.

  What was left of it was painted on a blast door, faded, cracked, and peeling like skin. Next to it, streaked across the wall in a thick smear of brown-black, was a handprint.

  ?But it wasn't a hand. Not human, anyway.

  The ends were long, too long, ending in sharpened points. The wrist twisted wrong, bent backward and sideways, like someone had redrawn the rules of anatomy and forgotten to care about pain.

  Worse still: it was wet. Whoever or whatever had left it had just been there. Might still be here.

  A scream flew through the dark, sharp and undeniably human, only to be cut short by something else. It wasn't an echo, but a violent succession of cracks and pops.

  ?Then came another sound. Closer. A voice. Panicked.

  "No... no, no, please, I didn't, I'm not"

  ?The lights cut out. Not dimmed, not flickered. Gone.

  Everything was black, a darkness that smothered thought. No depth. No shape. No direction.

  ?Then... nothing.

  ?The lights came back in a blink, pulsing again as if they'd never left. But the air was colder. Heavier. The hallway was empty. Just silence and more of the corridor, waiting, groaning.

  ?With a sudden hiss, the blast door began to open. Metal scraped against metal, slow, grinding. The door struggled, coming to a halt three-quarters of the way up to reveal the silence of the crew lounge.

  It was a space designed for comfort that had been curdled by violence.

  ?A low-gravity chessboard sat bolted to a central table, its blood-splattered pieces scattered across the deck like tiny plastic corpses. Three ferns, once green, lay uprooted and crushed across the floor. They were coated in a fine layer of thick red, the foliage dripping as the heat of the blood turned the spilled soil into a dark, iron-scented muck.

  ?To the left, a row of heavy-duty utility lockers lined the wall, their reinforced steel faces dented as if something large had brushed against them with indifferent force. ?Spilled coffee and the snap of fried circuits fought for the air, but the metallic tang of blood won out.

  ?Behind the third locker door, Rowan's world was reduced to three horizontal slivers of pulsing blue light. She was wedged into the back of the narrow space, her spine grinding against the cold curve of a steel rack. Her hands were clamped over her mouth, fingers white-knuckled and trembling.

  Every breath was a battle, a sound that couldn't be loud enough to reveal her hiding place.

  ?Across the front of her grease-stained coveralls, the name ROWAN was stitched in white thread. At forty-two, she was a planetary archaeologist, a woman trained to reconstruct entire worlds from a fragment of a tooth or the curve of a collapsed arch.

  Now, from the little she could see through the locker's slats, she found herself trying to make sense of what was in front of her.

  ?A limb, thick, jointed, and dull-skinned, moved into her field of vision. Its surface was pale and chalky, threaded with darker seams like mineral veins. It was followed by that clicking, a grinding sound that came with each subtle adjustment, as if internal joints were locking and releasing.

  It stopped directly in front of her door. Rowan shut her eyes tight, a single tear carving a path through the grime on her cheek. She prayed to a god she hadn't spoken to in years that the thing couldn't hear the frantic, thudding hammer of her heart.

  ?A forward appendage extended, ending in a split claw. The paired edges pressed against the metal of the locker and dragged downward in a slow pull. The sound vibrated through the steel and settled into Rowan's skull.

  ?The scraping ceased, leaving an absolute silence. Then, Bishop, the station's nervous system, flickered. Its voice, eroded by layers of static and digital decay, wheezed from the overhead speakers.

  "Secur-ity... Room... Br-each... Det-ected... Sec-tor H..." clicking in time with the failing hardware somewhere in the station's gut.

  ?Rowan's eyes locked onto the three horizontal slats of the locker. She saw it move. It was a heavy, deliberate distribution of weight, a long body carried low on multiple long limbs that bent too many times before meeting the floor.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Smaller appendages shifted near its front, brushing the lockers as it passed. Its shadow stretched and snapped across the blue-lit deck, and the weight in the air evaporated as the creature moved away.

  ?Rowan didn't move for a long time. She waited until the groaning of the hull was the only thing left. When she finally pushed, the locker door resisted, the metal warped by a pressure it was never meant to sustain. She shoved harder, her arms barking in pain, until the door swung wide with a piercing metallic shriek.

  ?She tumbled out, her knees hitting the blood-soaked floor with a wet thud. In the center of the room, mangled near the chessboard like a discarded coat, was a shape that made Rowan's stomach wrench.

  ?The woman was unrecognizable from the waist up. Rowan saw the name HUNTER stitched to her shredded clothing. The attack hadn't just been violent; it had been invasive.

  Her flight suit had been peeled open, the fabric soaked so thoroughly it appeared black in the pulsing light. What remained of her torso was hollowed-out, the ribs splayed like the teeth of a trap.

  ?Rowan forced herself to crawl closer, her breath shallow. She was trying not to focus on Hunter's body; she couldn't. She was looking for the green power-light of the comms headset tangled in the body's matted hair.

  ?She reached forward and her fingers slipped twice on the gore-slicked plastic before she could unclip the headset. With a wet, suctioning sound, the device came free. Rowan scrambled back, hitting the base of the lockers. She wiped the blood from the earpiece onto her shoulder and slid the unit over her head. The silence in the earpiece was painful as she climbed into another locker and closed the door.

  ?She keyed the general frequency. She didn't scream. She didn't sob. Her panic was cold.

  "This is Rowan," she whispered, her voice a dry rasp against the microphone. "ID five-six-five. Hunter is... Hunter is dead. Is there anyone left? Does anyone copy?"

  ?Static roared, a chaotic, white-noise ocean. She was about to key the mic again when a sound broke through the interference: a ragged, wet cough.

  "Rowan!?"

  ?The voice was thin, trembling with the kind of shock that precedes the end, but it was human. She recognized him.

  "Cord?" she breathed, pressing the headset so hard against her ear it hurt.

  He was the crew's youngest recruit, hired the same day Rowan had been brought on board.

  ?"Rowan?" The name came through the earpiece like a whispered prayer. "God... I can't believe I'm hearing your voice. I thought...when the screaming started in the mess hall...I thought everyone was gone."

  ?Rowan closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the cold steel of the locker. The vibration of Bishop's engines felt like a low fever. "I'm here, Cord. I'm here. What's your status? Where are the others?"

  ?"They're dead, Rowan. All of them." A sharp, indrawn breath hissed through the comms, followed by the sound of Cord choking. He didn't sound good.

  "It came for us in the Tech Hub. Molina... he didn't even have time to scream. It just opened him up. I managed to slide behind the main server bank, but it caught me... Rowan, there's so much blood. I don't know how much longer I can stay awake."

  ?"Stay with me, Cord," she commanded, her voice sharpening. "Bishop just called out a security breach in Sector H. Do you know what's happening?"

  ?"I'm blind," Cord rasped, followed by a rattled breath. "The optical leads are shredded. I've got no eyes on the cameras. All I have is the motion grid and comms network. Sector H is used for storage, Rowan... but it's not just a breach. That entire sector has gone dark. It's the only sector not showing up on the grid at all."

  ?Rowan kept her back pressed against the cold locker wall, her eyes scanning the three narrow openings in the door. The blue light pulsed on, off, on, off.

  ?"Cord, listen to me. I'm wearing Hunter's headset. Can you track the signal? Can you see where I am on the grid?"

  ?Silence followed. It was a long, agonizing void filled only by the crackle of static and the shallow whistling of Cord's lungs.

  Rowan held her breath. Then, a faint, crystalline beep chirped in her ear.

  ?"I've got you," he whispered. "One green dot in a sea of shadow."

  ?Rowan's hand searched the side wall of the locker until it found the heavy, cold weight of a maintenance wrench clipped to the rack. She gripped the steel handle until her knuckles ached, the physical weight of the tool giving her a ghost of a chance.

  "I need to get to the maintenance tunnels. If I can get into the crawlspaces, I can bypass the main corridors."

  ?"Okay," Cord breathed, his voice sounding smaller, more distant. "Okay. The hatch is down Corridor B. Down the hall, it'll be the first right."

  ?Rowan nudged the locker door. It swung open with a slow groan that seemed to echo forever in the lounge. She stepped out, her boots sticking slightly to the deck before she reached dry metal. The blue light pulsed, casting long shadows that made the uprooted ferns look like reaching hands.

  She didn't look at Hunter as she passed the table. She just kept her eyes on the dark, yawning mouth of Corridor B.

  ?"I'm out," she whispered into the mic. "I'm in the hall."

  ?"Copy," Cord rasped. His voice was getting airier, the sound of a man whose lungs were filling with something other than oxygen. "Keep the wall to your right."

  ?Rowan pressed her shoulder against the cold, grime-streaked wall. Every few seconds, the ceiling pipes overhead let out a sharp ping of contracting metal.

  Each time, she froze, the wrench raised, her heart hammering against her ribs. The air here was colder than the lounge.

  ?"Cord," she breathed, trying to keep him talking. "Have you ever heard of a biological signature like this? The way it... it moved."

  ?"No," he coughed, a wet, rattling sound. "You're the archaeologist, Rowan. You've seen a thousand dead worlds. You tell me."

  ?Rowan looked at the black veins of the piping overhead, thinking of the dig site where they had found the chamber. "I've seen plenty of species. Bones, mostly. Dust. But this... this is a violation. I'm sorry, Cord. I'm so sorry I cleared that site for extraction. I should have seen the warnings. I unearthed this thing."

  ?"Don't," Cord whispered. "Nobody knew. Besides... I'm glad it's you on the other end of this. You were always nice... you were easy to talk to. Even when the rest of the crew was pushing me around because of my age, or the rations, or the pay. It's a small mercy, I guess. Knowing someone like you might actually make it out of this."

  ?Rowan reached the junction. The air felt heavier here, thick with a static charge that made the hair on her arms stand up.

  "I'm at the turn. Going right."

  ?"Ten meters on the left. A grate in the floor with a yellow stripe. It's a drop into the maintenance crawl. The lever is under the lip." Cord wheezed.

  ?Click. Click-click.

  It wasn't a footstep. It was that sound. It was close. The lounge.

  Joints popping and cracking violently with movement.

  ?"Rowan," Cord's voice was a frantic, dying hiss. "It's on the grid. It's showing up on the fucking grid."

  ?She didn't run; she lunged. She hit the floor by the yellow-striped grate, her fingers clawing at the lever. She slammed the end of the wrench against it, a sob breaking from her throat as she tried to pry it open.

  With a screech of protesting iron, the hatch popped upward.

  She rolled into the dark hole just as a rapid, frantic, dry clatter of clicking erupted in the corridor behind her. She reached up and pulled the hatch shut, the heavy plate thudding into place.

  ?Above her, the world was thin. Through the ceiling of the horizontal crawlspace, the floor of the corridor above, she heard the creature.

  Click. Click. Click. Searching for the heat of her breath. It was a slow, painful sound that made her skin crawl.

  ?"Rowan..." Cord's voice in her ear was frayed by a thick, wet rattle that he could no longer clear from his throat. "You're... in....the... crawlspace?"

  ?"I'm here," she whispered, her lips almost touching the microphone.

  ?She began to pull herself forward on her elbows, her fingers tracing the veins of the station, bundles of thick, vibrating cables and jagged junction boxes that scraped her knuckles in the three-foot-high tunnel.

  ?"Then keep... keep...crawling. Straight for twenty... meters. Don't stop." He let out a sharp, jagged gasp. "I need to... I need to...give you the rest of ...the turns now, Rowan. I'm not sure... I can't see the screen ...clearly anymore."

  ?"Cord, stay with me," she pleaded, her voice cracking. "I'm at the first transition."

  ?"Where... are you trying ...to go?" Cord wheezed. "I need to know... which.... path to give ....you?"

  ?Rowan froze in the dark. The wrench was tucked into her belt, pressing into her hip, a useless piece of iron against a nightmare.

  She thought of the violation she had unearthed, the way it had displayed Hunter's insides. She could think of two options: the station's reactor or the escape pods. If she went to the reactor, the story of Spacestation Bishop would end in a cleansing fire. If she went to the pods, she might carry the creature back to the colonies.

  ?Rowan leaned her forehead against a junction box. She thought of the husband and daughter she'd left behind on the colony, the life she had intended to return to after this survey. ?

  "If I blow the station, Cord, we're just a 'lost asset' on a spreadsheet. The Company will send a recovery team to find out why. And they'll find that planet."

  ?She gripped the maintenance wrench in her belt. "We only saw the ridge, but the scans showed thousands more fossils buried across the entire surface. It's a graveyard, and the Company is too greedy to leave it alone. If I don't get back to testify, to tell them exactly why that planet needs to be wiped out, they'll just keep feeding crews to that rock until someone brings a fucking nightmare home."

  ?"The pods," she whispered. "How do I get to the pods?"

  ?____________________________________________________________________________