Note sull'episodio
On Blackwater 19, a deep-space cryogenic hydrogen fuel depot, the original crew has been dead for seventeen years while the station's automated transponder continues to broadcast a false operational signal. A squad of manufactured infantry—soldiers secretly assigned here to be disposed of for behavioral deviations—is sent in to conduct routine fuel security operations. They are completely unaware that the cache has been overtaken by Dabih Widows, massive translucent organisms that wait anchored to the tank frames and mimic distress signals to lure prey.
The squad begins a standard patrol along the zero-gravity handlines, pulling themselves from tank to tank without using thrusters to avoid triggering dormant alien larvae. They quickly discover that the station's steel cables have been secretly replaced by alien mucus cement, and that human remains from the original crew have been dissolved and reconstituted into the station's load-bearing architecture. When a soldier's grip tears through a disguised cable and he drifts into the void, the team faces a brutal choice: let him die or burn their thrusters to save him.
They fire the thrusters. The vibration works, but a hidden secessionist vessel broadcasts a trigger frequency that initiates a simultaneous, cache-wide larval emergence. With solid-core rail rifle rounds strictly prohibited to avoid rupturing the volatile cryogenic tanks, the squad is defenseless against the swarms. As the juvenile organisms pour from the walls toward their heat signatures, the narrator pushes off into the absolute vacuum of deep space to manually force open an exterior docking collar, leaving the remaining squad behind to face the emerging horror while his own suit seals fracture and his oxygen bleeds into the void.
This is "The Dabih Widow" by Sascha Schmidt.
Military Sci-Fi Story for Sleep is an anthology of immersive military science fiction told from the infantry perspective. Each standalone sleep story blends grounded sci-fi military operations, hostile alien encounters, survival horror, and impossible missions in deep space with calm, steady narration created for sleep.