Katherine Ross stood up from the workstation in her modest-sized laboratory and felt a sudden chill work its way up and then down her spine, eventually hardening into a metaphorical ball of ice in her stomach. Pausing and resting a bundle of electronics on the table next to her computer, she looked around suspiciously. Her lab was usually well heated and comfortable and she had never felt anything like this before. She stood still for a moment, daring the sensation to come back. When it didn't, she dismissed it and returned to her work. Picking up the pile of circuits she had been previously examining, she crossed the room and switched on her computer. She adjusted the microphone and began to speak clearly.

"Doctor Katherine Ross, logging on," she said. "Password: sigma-fifteen-blue."
"Good morning, Doctor," a monotone computer voice greeted in return. Dr. Ross rolled her eyes. After decades of advancements in the field of voice-recognition technology, she would have thought that her computer could sound at least a little more human. She shrugged. It was still better than the old days when people actually had to use keyboards to enter information into a system.
"Computer, please begin a memo," she said.
"Recipients?" the computer asked.
"Doctor Yung and the rest of the development staff, please." She didn't have to be polite to the computer, but to her it was a force of habit to be courteous when asking for information from anyone. A second later, the personal email addresses of her entire research team were inserted into the 'to' bar of her memo.

"My friends and colleagues," she began. "We are at a pivotal point in our work. The results I have gathered in my lab today will not only guarantee the success of the project, but will forever alter the fate of mankind and the future of the world." She paused, gathering her thoughts. The email wouldn't go anywhere until she ordered the computer to send it, and she wanted this to be worded just right. She backed her chair up and rose from her seat, careful not to say a word. As intelligent as they were, computers were not yet smart enough to differentiate between what a human wanted the microphone to pick up and what people casually said to themselves when they thought no one was listening. As soon as she was standing, she felt that strange surge of coldness in her body again. Now with growing apprehension, she checked the thermostat on the wall. Her room was almost seventy degrees Fahrenheit and there was no reason why she should be feeling this way. Perhaps something was wrong with the temperature reader, she thought. She tapped the thermostat a few times and frowned. Shaking her head and sighing in disgust, Dr. Ross began to walk to the intercom to call maintenance when suddenly the lights went out, plunging her into darkness.

"Oh, dammit!" she said and gripped onto the back of her chair to keep from stumbling. A few seconds later, the emergency power came on, bathing the room in soft blue light. She looked at the now dark screen of her computer, remembering that emergency power could only be used for so many things. Letting her breath out in a hiss, she realized that she would have to start the memo over again when the power came back. Still, it wasn't that much of a loss. It had only been a few sentences so far. She walked to the door and pushed a button on the wall. The door slid open, admitting her to the main corridor of the research base. She exited her lab and began walking down the hall towards the reactor room to try and find Dr. Yung. As the head scientist on her team, he would surely know before anyone else what was wrong with the power. With their kind of work, electrical outages were extremely rare and there should be safeguards to keep something like this from happening at all. She opened another door and stepped into what was the core of their project.

The reactor room was huge. Nearly a hundred meters from wall to wall, it housed a piece of equipment that was as powerful and complex as it was expensive. Capable of bending gravity and light, it was an awesome machine – possibly UAC's, or even mankind's greatest achievement to date. The light bulb, automobile, nuclear bomb, and in past years, the intersystem spaceship, all dwarfed in comparison to the reactor that she and a handful of scientists of assorted backgrounds and fields had constructed. Usually very noisy and alive with flashing lights, the reactor now stood silent, the pale blue emergency light playing over it, creating flickering shadows that allowed for pools of darkness to form in the corners.

Seeing no one in the room, Ross turned to leave when something caught her eye. Craning her head in a suspicious manner, she bent down to investigate. She couldn't believe her eyes. Muddy footprints, beginning behind one of the operation consoles, led out of the room through the very door she had just entered. She frowned, studying the tracks closer. They were longer than the average human foot, and looked more like an animal's claw, rather than the traditional mark left by soled shoes. And what was further confusing was that the footprints began right in the middle of the room and walked towards the door, rather than away from it. It was as if whatever had left the tracks had somehow materialized from out of thin air.

With a growing excitement, she followed the footprints out of the reactor room and back into the main hallway. After several meters, the mud on the intruder's feet began to wear off and Ross was afraid that she was going to lose the trail. Finally the tracks ended altogether and Ross had no idea which way to go next.

Studying the prints, she wondered what it could be from. They were on a research lab on Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons and she had never heard of any kind of indigenous life on this satellite. Perhaps later when the power came back on, she could sit down in the video room and try to spot the animal on one of the hundreds of remote controlled cameras that watched over almost every room in the base. It would be a welcome relief from the monotony that her work usually consisted of.

Ross walked on, searching the floor for any trace of the animal's presence. Turning a corner, she spotted her mentor and the head of the station, Dr. Chris Yung in the corridor about twenty meters ahead. Ross was confused when she saw the doctor. He appeared to be staring intently into an air duct, as if something was inside. Whatever Dr. Yung saw, it clearly had his full attention. "Professor!" she said to him. Dr. Yung jumped and turned to look at her.

"God, Kathy, you scared the hell out of me," he called, forgetting about the duct. He started walking towards her when a heartbeat later, something to the right caught his attention. Even from as far away as she was, Ross could see his eyes pop open in fright and the doctor recoiled suddenly to the left, his hands going up to cover his face. However, he was too late. Before Ross' eyes, something huge pounced on the head scientist with the speed and lethality of a cheetah hunting its prey. Ross screamed as the gigantic shadowy form picked Dr. Yung up and tore him in two with the comparative ease of a man pulling the wings off a fly. With only the emergency lighting for illumination, all Ross could make out were two dark silhouettes, the one that had been Dr. Yung now falling to the floor in fleshy pieces. She then heard a howl that would haunt her for the rest of her life, which would be considerably short, and the thing turned and charged towards her at a seemingly impossible speed. It stuck to the shadows and moved with a smooth liquid precision that paralyzed Ross with fear. Even as it drew closer, the only shape she could make out in the dark was a vaguely human-like figure with light green skin and no eyes. That was the most frightening aspect of it all – the thing was blind but could see her more clearly than she could see it. Ross had time for one last scream before it leapt on her. And then there was a brief flash of pain and finally nothing at all.

"Attention all passengers," a female voice said over the ship-wide public address system. "We are now passing the orbit of Mars and expect to deploy over Phobos within the hour."

Sergeant Anton Steber mused over the announcer's choice of words. Passengers... like he was on some kind of luxury cruise here... He sighed and gazed at his watch, wishing that he were anywhere else but on a military space cruiser orbiting Earth's closest neighbor, a big red ice ball named Mars. In the seventy or so years since humans had first begun visiting planets outside their home solar system, dozens of new worlds had been found, none of which being capable of supporting any kind of life. Despite this, he would rather be in any of those places now. Terraformers and explorers certainly made better company than a collection of egghead scientists wondering what had happened to their little pet research colony on Phobos.

The chime at the door of Steber's cabin rang, indicating that he had a visitor. He sighed again and went to answer it. He opened the door and as he expected, one of the scientists, an overweight, arrogant man named Walter Cray, moved to step into the room before Steber even had a chance to back away from the door.

"What's up, doc?" Steber mocked, making no effort to hide his displeasure at having Cray in the room.
"What's going on is that we are scheduled to deploy the dropship in less than forty minutes and your team isn't at their position!" Cray exploded, drawing himself up to full height and still coming up about four inches short of the man he was currently threatening.
"Look, my team will be ready on time," Steber said. "You don't tell me how to conduct a search and rescue operation and I won't tell you how to be a fat and overpaid bureaucrat."

Cray took a step back, his mouth working like a fish as he desperately tried to think up a comeback that would put Steber in his place. When nothing would come, he made a face and stormed out of the room, the automatic door silently sliding shut behind him. That's the problem with technology today, Steber thought to himself with a grin, doors can no longer be slammed when you leave a room pissed. He walked over to the intercom and called his second in command, Corporal Michael Edwards.

"Edwards here," came the reply.
"Mike, how's the team coming? Are they almost set to go?" Steber asked.
"Yeah, they've been ready for the past twenty minutes. I still don't know why you insisted on having them remain in their quarters, rather than form up in the hangar."
"I just had a visit from our good friend, Doctor Cray," Steber began.
"Oh Christ," Edwards said.
"I thought it would be fun to rattle his cage for a little while. You know how much he loves to stick to those schedules of his."
"You're going to get us both court-martialed someday, you know that?" Edwards said with an amused sigh. Steber laughed. "You're probably right. Tell the others to be at the dropship in five minutes. I'll meet you in the hanger."
"We'll be there," Edwards said and disconnected.

Steber turned off his end of the intercom and after one last glance around the room, making sure he hadn't forgotten anything; he exited into the hallway and made his way to the shuttle bay.

"Do you have any idea what we are dealing with here?" Cray shouted to the line of five marines standing at attention in front of him. Behind the doctor, an equally pompous sycophant named Dwayne Warren nodded, making it seem like he had some input in Cray's tantrum.
"No, sir, I don't believe that we do," the team's heavy-weapons specialist said. A young man in his twenties, Vince Porter was a Private First Class with a love for destruction. Having found an outlet for his talents, he joined UAC at an early age and adored every minute of his career.
"Perhaps if we had been better briefed, then we would know what we were dealing with," he said.

Cray stormed down the line of marines and stopped in front of Steber, who was doing his best not to burst into laughter.
"You're encouraging this kind of insolent behavior!" the doctor yelled. Steber smiled, "I've done the best I could, sir."

Cray shook his head and recommenced pacing. "For those of you who didn't bother to study the dossiers I prepared and distributed before we even left Earth, our primary objective is to investigate a distress call from the small research facility on the Martian moon of Phobos."
"Sorry, doc, but your writing just isn't my style," Craig Mitchell, the team's communication tech said with a laugh. Ignoring the last comment, Cray continued. "We have only a garbled SOS to go on, but what we were able to piece together is that the scientists on Phobos were suddenly attacked and overwhelmed by something they were totally unprepared against." With this bit of news, the team finally grew serious.
"Overwhelmed by what?" Steber asked.
"That's for you to find out," Cray said with a smirk. "If you five deserve even half of your reputation, this operation should go smoothly and my group of scientists will regain control of the base with relative ease. You are dismissed."

The marines nodded and one by one, filed into the dropship, which would take them down to the moon that they were now orbiting. Steber secured his weapons under his seat and strapped himself in. A moment later, Elena Crowley, the team's medic, sat down beside him.

"How do you feel about this one?" she asked. Steber thought for a minute. "I don't like it," he finally said.
"What do you think it could be that took over the station?" she said.
"Space pirates, most likely," Porter said.
"I don't know," Edwards said, stashing his own equipment. "I've never heard of pirates attacking anything this close to Earth before."
"Yeah, usually they stick to the deep space colonies," Mitchell said.
"Well, I think we're going to find out soon enough," Steber said. "Here we go."

The lights dimmed and the team felt a lurch as the dropship detached from its mothership, The Godspeed. The dropship picked up speed and within minutes, they were close enough to the moon's landscape to make out individual rock formations. They crossed the terminator line and everything went dark as the moon's mass came between them and the sun. Turning on the ship's lights, the pilot was able to make out the research station as they flew nearer. Once the dropship was flying in the moon's atmosphere, rather than deep space, Steber got up from his seat and went to look out one of the viewports. He did a double take and squinted out the window.

"I thought you said that they lost power before the attack," he said to Cray.
"That's right," the senior scientist said in a mystified tone. "Somehow they got it back."
"If they have power again, then why haven't they sent another signal telling us what's going on?" Edwards wondered aloud.
"I'm telling you, we're probably going to find a group of pirates down there," Porter said. "They killed the lights to take over and now have control of the base."

Steber ignored him and continued to gaze out the window. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it seemed like there was something wrong with the lights that lined the outside of the base. They seemed to pulse like a heartbeat, giving the illusion that the station was alive.

"Something bad is going on in there," Crowley said. "I just know it." Steber gazed at the medic and was about to open his mouth to counter what she had said, but instead decided to remain silent. He had an awful feeling that she was right.

Due to Phobos' lack of breathable air, the dropship had to extend a life-support umbilical to the station's main entrance after landing. Steber was the first to walk down the corridor, which was made of a thin metal that was sufficient to keep the near vacuum of the moon's atmosphere at bay. The other four marines followed closely behind, their faces alert. Steber and Edwards carried heavy armor-piercing machine rifles, a staple weapon for UAC marines. Porter also had one but in addition, carried a small anti-personnel rocket launcher strapped to his back. Being respectively a technician and a medic, Mitchell and Crowley had no heavy weapons, but each team member carried a small pistol as well as heavy combat armor that protected their chests, legs, and arms. Bringing up the rear, Dr. Cray led a group of three additional scientists, all of which were completely unarmed. This meant that it was nine humans up against whatever had taken over the base. Steber didn't like those odds.

As soon as Mitchell was able to open the outer doors, the team was introduced to the first casualty of the station. A middle-aged scientist in a white lab coat had been leaning against the door when he had died. He fell out into the umbilical and every member of the marine team jumped back in surprise.

"Jesus," Mitchell said, staring at the dead man.
"What the hell did this?" Crowley asked.
"Look at the back of his coat," Edwards said. "It's blackened as if he was set on fire."
"My god," Steber whispered, turning the body over. Suddenly he jumped up, letting the body slump back to the ground.
"What is it?" Mitchell asked.
"It's still warm!" Steber said. "I'm no forensics expert, but this man was killed less than half an hour ago! And look at his throat. It's been completely torn away!"
"Let me see that," Cray snapped, finally daring to come nearer. Upon closer inspection, where the scientist's neck had once been was nothing more than a mess of bloody flesh. Edwards shot a glance at Porter. "Still think it was pirates?" he said. The weapons expert could only shake his head in wonder.
"How many people were there on Phobos? Crowley asked.
"Thirty-five," Cray said. "Scientists, cooks, maintenance men, office workers..."
"Ok, then we have thirty-four more to find," Steber said. "Let's get moving."

The team moved inside, Steber again in the lead. They walked down the main corridor, which would eventually lead from the airlock to the central control room. Edwards looked at the four scientists in the rear and said, "I want you guy to stay behind us. We'll secure each room and then you follow. If something is going to happen, we'll take care of it." After coming across a corpse the minute they entered the station, the scientists were only too happy to comply. Stopping along the way, the team checked each individual room, searching for any survivors. Finding none, they would close each door behind them and continue on. After less than ten minutes of searching, they emerged into a large room with several hallways branching off from it. Edwards gave a wave and Cray bounded into the room and sat down at one of the computers. The remaining three scientists stayed behind, waiting for orders from their superior, who was engrossed in a piece of equipment at the console.

"What do you have for us, doc?" Porter asked.
"I'm reading signs of life in the next room over," Cray said.
"One of the Phobos scientists?" Steber asked.
"Um, not sure," Cray said.
"If there's something up ahead, we'd better get the others," Edwards said. "Cray, call your pals." The doctor got up from the machine and shouted for his team to join him. Cray then turned back to work, but realized a few moments later that there was no answer to his request.
"Will you guys get in here?" Cray shouted in an annoyed tone. Steber shushed him, pointing to the monitor. It indicated movement not only in front of them, but in the rear as well.

"I don't like the looks of this," Crowley said nervously.
"They must be back in the last room we were in," Cray said.
"Porter, go check it out," Steber said. The weapons expert nodded and returned to where the group had just come from. A moment later, he rejoined the team.
"They're not there," he said.
"Well, they didn't just disappear!" Cray said angrily.
"Look!" Crowley screamed and pointed to the ceiling.

Five meters above them, the team barely glimpsed a pair of kicking legs being dragged into a ventilation duct. They heard a muffled cry and then the legs were gone. The team heard a heavy thumping sound as the scientists were dragged through the duct. Moments later, the noise faded, leaving the team standing in silence.

"No way," Mitchell muttered and drew his pistol. Crowley did the same. Their backs to each other, Steber and the marines formed a defensive circle pointing outwards. Having no weapon, Cray stood in the center of the circle, trembling.
"What the hell is going on here?" Cray shouted to no one in particular. "Do something!"
"Here, take this!" Porter said and tossed the scientist his pistol. Cray checked to make sure it was loaded and readied the weapon.

A moment later, one of the computer consoles suddenly exploded on the left side of the room, showering the marines with a rain of sparks and flying pieces of metal. Already nearly jumping out of their skin, the marines screamed. Mitchell grabbed an extinguisher off the wall and ran to put out the fire while the rest stood guard. No sooner did he coat the desk with foam then two more terminals unexpectedly burst, adding to the chaos. Mitchell spun around and let loose with the extinguisher, but the flames were too hot and spreading too fast to be easily contained. Steber saw another extinguisher on the wall next to him. Emptying its contents, the marine was finally able to put out the fire.

The team's attention effectively diverted, no one heard a low rumble coming from an open door on the right side of the chamber. A massive shape shifted and raised its head; stringy drool dripping from its mouth. Without warning, the Beast chose that instant to attack. Just as Steber stepped back from the ruins of the workstation, Crowley glimpsed a large moving form out of the corner of her eye and had just enough time to turn around before two heavy paws slammed her to the floor. Her armor held for half a second and then crumpled in, along with her chest. Her midsection completely crushed, the medic couldn't even scream and was dead an instant later. Hearing a sickening thud behind them, the rest of the team turned around and stiffened in horror.

There was a monster hunched over the ruins of Crowley's body. Dirt-brown in color and easily the size of a small rhino, it had a curved head and tough-looking leathery skin. The Beast opened a mouth full of small pointy teeth and roared, simultaneously stomping on Crowley, whose features were being mashed into pabulum by its heavy paws. Having just witnessed the brutal death of one of his closest friends, Steber could only stare for a second, before giving an order. That second was not wasted, however, and the Beast pounced again, this time landing on Edwards. In the blink of an eye, the thing unhinged its jaw and completely enveloped the man's head. Another second later, the Beast snapped its mouth shut and a decapitated Edwards tumbled to the deck, blood already pooling around his body.

His paralysis finally broken, Steber was able to bark out one order before the Beast could attack again.