…before I dared to open my eyes. The red glare of the warning lights had faded to a dull, pulsing amber, casting long, sickly shadows across the ribbed walls of the maintenance conduit. I exhaled, a ragged sound that fogged the inside of my visor. For a long, terrifying minute, the only noise was the wet, desperate rattle of my own breath against the recycled air. Then, a second sound, faint but distinct, cut through the silence: a metallic *scrape*.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I forced my eyes open, the haziness of adrenaline slowly giving way to the stark reality of my surroundings. The conduit was narrow, barely wide enough for me to squeeze through on my hands and knees. Above, thick bundles of cables snaked along the ceiling, their plastic sheathing gleaming under the intermittent amber light. The air, already stale, now carried a faint, metallic tang, like old blood and ozone.
The scraping sound came again, closer this time. It was the sound of something heavy being dragged across metal. My gloved hands instinctively tightened on the worn grip of the plasma cutter I’d been carrying. It felt pathetically inadequate against whatever was making that noise. The amber light pulsed, a slow, rhythmic beat that mirrored the frantic tempo of my pulse. Each pulse seemed to push the shadows deeper, making the already cramped space feel suffocating.
I crawled forward, inch by agonizing inch, my helmet scraping against the conduit wall. Every nerve ending screamed at me to turn back, to retreat to the relative safety of the access tunnel. But a morbid curiosity, a desperate need to know what was lurking in the darkness, propelled me onward. The scraping stopped. The silence that followed was more unnerving than the noise itself. I held my breath, straining to hear anything, any clue to the source of the disturbance.
Then, from directly ahead, a low, guttural chittering echoed through the conduit. It was not human. It was not animal. It was something alien, something that resonated with a primal fear in the deepest recesses of my mind. I flicked on my helmet’s headlamp, the beam cutting through the oppressive gloom. It illuminated a section of the conduit floor a few meters in front of me. And there, scrawled in what looked disturbingly like dried blood, were three words, stark against the grey metal:
*WE KNOW YOU'RE HERE.*