They Kept the Colonists Alive to Feed on Fear | Military Sci-Fi Infantry Story for Sleep

Pressure Vault Seven is a quarantined cylinder station with a flooded algae basin, failing pumps, and corridors narrowed by alien-grown ribs. A six-person military rescue squad enters to revive seventeen hibernating colonists and extract them through Axial Maintenance Corridor 4 before the station tears itself apart.

The Ribbers do not just hunt bodies. They track fear-metabolites, feed through suit seals, and reshape the station into living infestation structure, while something inside the shared hibernation dream keeps the colonists alive as a renewable terror supply.

This is "The Fear Engine" by Sascha Schmidt