On an abandoned mining moon choked with sulfur fog, a descent team searches for a missing recon specialist and medical cache. But they are not the first team. The first team has already gone silent, and the ship above them is running out of breathable air.

They soon find out why Team One went dark: what was perceived as the moon’s surface — the ground itself — is an alien mega-organism that traps soldiers under shifting plates, vents spores into their suits, and grows through every broken seam.

Fighting the organism only spreads it faster, and every explosion seeds new living tissue into the ground beneath their feet.

This is “Shelfbacks Never Stop” by Sascha Schmidt.