People told us we shouldn't have named our orbital after the most cryptid infested patch of dirt in the Old World. They were right. Station Appalachia inherited more than a name. We brought the ghosts with us.
I work maintenance on Sub-Deck 4. You spend enough time alone with the hum of the life support recyclers and you start seeing things. Only I am not the only one seeing them.
Old Earth had the Mothman. We have the Baffle-Jack. It lives in the primary thermal exhaust vents. Jenna swears she saw it last shift.
"It was all angles. Like folded sheet metal but it moved like a spider. Had these two glowing sensor clusters where a head should be."
"You just saw a rogue welding drone."
"Drones don't bleed hydraulic fluid when you hit them with a wrench."
I shut up after that. The maintenance logs show three people went missing in the thermal shafts this year. Command says it was an airlock malfunction. We know better.
Out in the deep rings comms get fuzzy. Solar radiation messes with the tightbeams. That is when you hear her. The Siren.
"Can anyone copy?"
The voice is always young. Always scared.
"Life support is failing. Please."
Caleb answered it once. He locked himself in Comm Station Delta and rerouted all auxiliary power to a dead sector of the void. We had to cut through the bulkhead to stop him.
"She was so cold. I had to give her some heat."
He froze to death in the brig two days later. The med-bay said his core temperature just vanished.
Watch the reinforced glass in the observation deck. Sometimes the starfield shifts. A patch of absolute blackness blots out the stars. It moves parallel to the station.
O'Connor calls them Void-Hounds.
"They track the radiation wake of the main drives. Like wolves following a wounded elk."
"Have they ever breached the hull?"
He laughed. A dry, awful sound.
"They don't need to breach. They wait for you to go outside."
Nobody takes EVAs anymore unless they double up. Even then you hear scratching on the exterior plating.