We hauled him back on the tether. Then we saw what they were growing in his chest. | Military Sci-Fi Infantry Story for Sleep

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On Hiker One, a decaying deep-space generation station attached to the wandering resource body Magellan, the flooded lower decks have been lost to the Septari—an alien organism that dissolves human tissue to propagate. A four-man Seal & Scuttle demolition squad is sent down into the zero-visibility murk to plant seismic charges and collapse a submerged Septari nursery gallery before the infestation breaches the upper residential cylinders.

The squad descends in a tethered diamond formation through the flooded maintenance spine, using magnetic boots and low-light optics to navigate the shifting gravity plates. But the Septari use bioluminescent disorientation to blind their prey, and corrosive enzymes to dissolve them from the inside out. When the point man is snatched in the dark, the team reels him back—only to find his chest cavity hollowed out, with translucent alien egg-sacs already gestating in the dissolved sludge.

With the squad cut down by shifting gravity and hostile ambushes, the last surviving demolitionist discovers the detonator firmware has been secretly rigged for remote command detonation. Command never planned for them to exfiltrate. As the floodgate seals fail and the station's structural groan becomes a deafening roar, he severs the remote receiver, rigs the charges for manual detonation, and waits with his thumb on the switch while the water rises around him.

This is "Hiker One" 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.