The corridor lights cut without warning.

One moment, the sterile hum of overhead fluorescent bathed the security team in pale corporate white, next, the abyss swallowed everything. Helmets flickered uselessly. The backup generators failed to whine. Comms snapped to static.

Then came the sound.

Wet. Low. Somewhere between a growl and something choking on its own birth.

Private Kellar whispered a curse, sweeping his rifle through the dark, the beam of his shoulder-mounted lamp barely reaching the end of his own barrel. Behind him, someone was breathing too fast. Another voice muttered prayers, old ones, from before the company scrubbed faith from the ranks.

The air turned heavy, thick with iron and mildew, as if the walls were weeping.

Something moved. Fast. Behind them.

A scream. Cut short.

Then silence again.

One by one, they would learn:
This wasn't a systems failure.
It was a feeding ground.

And they had been left here to be consumed.


-


Power loss in Orbital Relay Theta-7. No distress beacons. No survivor pings. The corporation sent in their private guard detail, twelve men, armed and armored, to assess and secure.

The lights were dead. The emergency bulkheads frozen mid-seal. Something had pried them open from the outside.

Rodriguez tightened his grip on his rifle. The darkness wasn’t silence, it breathed. The deeper they went, the more their motion trackers glitched, spitting out false readings. Or maybe not so false.

No one said it aloud, but they all saw the impact site on the upper hull. The metal scorched and warped inward, as if the void itself had spat something hateful into their orbit.

And now it walked the halls.

Long-limbed. Star-born. Wrong.
Its shape shifted when you weren’t looking.
Its breath tasted like ozone and memory.

One by one, the guards were taken. Lifted into the dark with no struggle, only a crackle of static and a final, wet crunch.