Rowan swallowed the lump in her throat and began to crawl again, her movements relied on the fading instructions of a dying man as she navigated the labyrinth of pipes.

  ?"Left ....at ....the ....coolant ....bypass."

  "Right... at ...the .....oxygen .....scrubbers."

  ?She navigated by the texture of steel and the sound of Cord's dying breaths.

  ?"Cord," she whispered, "One last time. Look at the grid. Are you sure... is there no one else? No one on the bridge? No one in medical?"

  ?There was a long pause, the static on the line growing louder, more aggressive.

  "The ...sensors are ...quiet. It's... just you....the last ....soul... on the .....Bishop."

  "Thank you, Cord." Rowan said softly.

  The crawlspace narrowed further as Rowan pressed on, the silence from the other end of the comms line feeling heavier than the steel pressing against her back.

  The dark of the tunnel was finally broken by a faint, sickly glow ahead.

  As Rowan pulled herself forward, she found a small, cracked emergency panel mounted beside a vertical shaft.

  ?In the dim, flickering amber light, she could just make out the stenciled lettering on the rim: SECTOR E - POD BAY ANNEX. Below the text, a rusted arrow pointed down into the gloom, indicating a ladder descent into the belly of the station.

  "Cord? I'm at the vertical transition," she whispered, her voice barely a thread. "The panel says Sector E. I'm going down the ladder."

  There was no reply, only the roar of static.

  ?She descended the vertical shaft, a lightless throat of steel that seemed to drop forever. Every ten meters, she passed a glowing pressure gauge or a bundle of weeping conduits, but the ladder continued down into the gut of the station. Her muscles burned, and the slickness of her palms made every grip a gamble.

  ?Finally, Rowan saw a narrow metal platform, a grated landing suspended over a dark abyss of machinery. Stepping off of the ladder, ?the platform hummed with the vibration of the station's distant core.

  Above her, a heavy, reinforced hatch. In the dim amber light of another emergency panel, she could see the stenciled lettering on the rim: SECTOR E.

  Rowan reached up, her muscles screaming as she jammed the head of the wrench into the spokes of the locking wheel. It was seized, stubborn as a mountain, but she threw her entire body weight into the leverage.

  ?With a violent release of pressure, the seal broke. She heaved the wheel around and pried the reinforced hatch upward. It was heavy, resisting her like a living thing, until it finally swung back with a groan of protesting iron.

  ?A violent, strobing yellow light slashed through the darkness. It turned the pod bay's long gallery into a series of jagged, disconnected snapshots.

  ?Flash.

  The long row of escape pods stood like ivory teeth in the dark. The sound of a distant, metallic scrape.

  Flash.

  Rowan pulled herself out of the tunnel and onto the deck, the wrench gripped so tight her hand felt numb.

  ?She moved toward the first station.

  Empty.

  The docking clamps had been sheared off with a force that had curled the reinforced steel like paper. The pod was gone, leaving only a flapping, black umbilical cord dripping with hydraulic fluid.

  ?Flash.

  "Cord, pod one is gone," she said into the mic, her breath hitching. "Moving to two." ?She reached the second station.

  Flash.

  The pod was still there, but the viewport was a spiderweb of shattered glass. Inside, the pilot's seat had been shredded into ribbons of foam and leather.

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  ?Her heart hammered against her ribs. She moved to pod three, then four. Each step felt like walking deeper into a tomb.

  Flash.

  At pod five, she found the door hanging by a single hinge, the interior dark.

  ?"Cord, answer me," she sobbed, her composure fracturing. "They're all ruined. Cord, please!" ?

  Nothing. The earpiece remained a void.

  Flash.

  She reached pod six, the final unit at the end of the line. The door was cracked, the green "Ready" light flickering weakly in the strobing yellow chaos. It looked like a way home.

  ?Rowan reached for the pod, her fingers centimeters from the cold handle.

  ?Flash.

  In the sudden burst of yellow light, she saw it. Not through the glass, but through the gap where the door had been opened.

  ?A limb uncoiled from the darkness of the pod. It was thick, jointed, and dull-skinned, moving with a terrifying grace that snapped joints with each motion.

  It didn't have a hand. Instead, the appendage extended into that split claw.

  ?Rowan screamed. The limb lashed out, the clawed tips whistling past her ear, missing her temple by a hair's breath.

  The force of the strike shattered the control panel next to her head, sending a spray of sparks and glass into her face.

  ?She didn't wait for a second strike. She threw herself backward, her boots skidding on the deck. The creature's weight shifted inside the pod, that sound of joints popping like grinding stones, as it began to pull itself out into the gallery with three limbs.

  Rowan scrambled for the hatch, her vision a blur of strobing yellow panic.

  She dove headfirst into the opening, fingers clawing the steel rim as she plummeted back toward the platform.

  ?Gasping in the sudden humid dark, she leaped across the grated platform and hit the ladder shaft, climbing downward with frantic, animal energy. The hunt was no longer a secret. This time, it knew exactly where she was.

  ?She keyed the mic one last time, her voice a broken panic. "Cord... ...it was in the pods. It's in the bay. Tell me there's another way, talk to me..." ?"Shit!," she yelled.

  Rowan's boots rang against the ladder as she scrambled downward. She was descending blindly into a void, losing track of floors and minutes until a sudden clicking shocked her limbs into stillness.

  ?The sound didn't come from the ladder above her. It came from the headset.

  ?Click, Click-click.

  ?The noise was unmistakable. It wasn't the sound of Cord's lungs anymore. It was the sound of jointed limbs distributing weight.

  ?"Cord?" she whispered, her voice trembling. "Cord, What is that?"

  ?There was no verbal answer, only a sudden, sharp hiss of static and then, from the earpiece, the sound of metal being peeled back like the lid of a tin can. Underneath the screech of the steel, she heard that familiar, dry clicking in her ear coming from the Tech Hub where Cord had been guiding her.

  Her heart stopped. If the creature was at the Tech Hub, then what was,

  ?Thump.

  ?The sound echoed through the tunnel. It was a heavy strike against the grated landing platform above her.

  ?Click. Click-click.

  ?The sounds were identical. One was being fed directly into her ear through the comms and the other was vibrating through the very ladder she was clinging to.

  ?Rowan's eyes went wide in the dark. The scans had returned thousands of fossils. But the crew only brought one on board.

  ?But she was hearing two. One in the Tech Hub and one currently popping and snapping its way towards her.

  ??"There's more than one," she breathed, the words disappearing into the hum of the shaft. "Fuck, there's more than one."

  Gravity was her only ally now. She let herself slide between rungs, skin raw against the cold steel, dropping floors in seconds while the sounds from the headset and the creature above merged into a single, terrifying symphony.

  ?Pop. Crack. Click.

  ?The vibration in the ladder was heavy, but hindered. It seemed slower than in the main corridors.

  Rowan's mind, honed by decades of analyzing ancient fossils and long-dead colonies, latched onto a sliver of hope.

  The creature was built for the open sprawl of the corridors, like the large tunnels found in the ridge, and the vaulted ceilings of the dig site. In the narrow confines of the maintenance tunnels, those multi-jointed limbs had to fold and fight for purchase. The station's cramped skeleton was a cage it hadn't yet mastered.

  ?"The chamber," she thought, the memory flooding back with sickening clarity. She saw the den where they had found the primary fossil. The tunnels hadn't been carved by tools; they had been secreted.

  The walls were covered in a translucent, hardened resin, common with insect species.

  ?A single organism splitting its biomass was unheard of in insects found across the galaxy.

  "Unless it wasn't a single organism."

  "Perhaps a hitchhiker I had missed in our haste to clear the site."

  Her mind raced.

  Whatever the origin of the second creature, mutation, division, or something far worse, speculation would not save her. Regret would not slow it. She had unearthed it. That was enough.

  She had no choice but to keep moving down.

  ?She reached up, her trembling fingers fumbling with the comms unit as her legs moved. She didn't key the general frequency. Instead, she opened the private channel to the long-range relay, the one that archived personal logs.

  "Visari Relay, This is Rowan Saze. To my husband Elian" Her voice faltered as her boot slipped again. She caught herself with a grunt. "And to my little star, Mara. If you're hearing this, it means I didn't make it back through orbit clearance."

  The clicking above sharpened, faster now.

  "Mara, I'm sorry I missed your recital. I kept the holo you sent. I watched it every night in my quarters." Her breath hitched. "You were braver on that stage than I've ever been."

  The shaft trembled. A bolt sheared somewhere overhead.

  "Elian... don't let the Company tell you this was an accident. The planet...we were wrong. I was wrong. I thought I could bring something extraordinary home." Her voice cracked. "I unearthed a monster instead. And I have to be the one to bury it again."

  "I love you," she whispered, hauling herself down as a shadow of a jointed limb flickered in the amber light above.

  "Don't let them go back. Don't let them find that place."

  She cut the recording. And kept climbing.

  Rowan didn't stop climbing. She couldn't.

  "Sector N."

  "The reactor."

  If she couldn't escape, she could end it. Overload the core. Turn The Bishop into a brief, cleansing star. Ash was better than infestation.

  She forced herself to picture the route, but the schematic in her mind fractured. The maintenance shafts skirted the central spine; they didn't cut cleanly through it. She didn't work in maintenance and hadn't worked on The Bishop long enough to remember the tunnels anyway.

  To reach the reactor, she'd have to enter the main corridors.

  Open space. High ceilings. Room for those limbs to unfold.

  Her grip tightened on the wrench. "You dug it up," she muttered. "You bury it."

  A metallic shriek rang above her. Something warm struck the back of her neck.

  Rowan froze on the ladder. Another drop hit her hand gripping the rung.

  Thick. Not blood.

  It wasn't liquid the way water was liquid. It had weight. Body. The small drops flattened against her skin and began tightening almost immediately.

  "Resin," she thought. More drops fell.

  One hit the back of her ear and slid into her collar.

  That one made her move. She dropped a few more rungs and swung onto another narrow grated landing. A horizontal crawl junction branched left and right, two steel throats leading to more darkness. Faint amber emergency strips traced their edges.

  Rowan didn't think, she just went left.

  Her shoulder scraped the metal as she forced herself into the narrow tunnel. Pipes pressed low against her back, and the amber emergency lights flickered weakly along the steel walls.

  Behind her. Click. She froze. A pale limb slid into the tunnel entrance.

  It unfolded slowly, joint after joint snapping outward with dry pops. The chalky skin was streaked with dark mineral seams, now slick with thick resin. At the end, the split claw opened like a pair of shears.

  It reached toward her. Rowan held her breath and crawled.

  The limb stretched farther until it struck a ceiling pipe. The claw hovered in the air, opening and closing slowly as if tasting the space.

  Searching. It was close. Too close. Then the limb withdrew. Joint by joint.

  Click. Click-click.

  Rowan didn't wait, moving quickly through the tight tunnel.

  After several meters the passage opened to a jagged ventilation grate. Rowan pushed it aside slightly and peered through.

  A main corridor stretched beyond it.

  High ceilings. Another blue light rolling down in waves. Across a half-open blast door were the faded stenciled words:

  SECTOR H

  Rowan's stomach dropped.

  Cord's voice echoed in her head.

  "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.."

  If you happened to find this story and gave it a try, I truly appreciate it. It felt good to actually finish a story after so long. Though I'm no professional, this short story was a huge mental health win for me. Thank you for your time.