Booker DeWitt

The power has gone out. Routine automated maintenance systems and life support are the only things running. They're not enough. The lights have gone out, and they won't be on again for three days. The miner of the Midnight Isle used to take these power downs as unofficial holidays. Card games by battery-operated lights, cold canned dinners and gossip among men who were away from home a year or more at a time. But not now. Now the darkness was silent...

...until it wasn't.

The sounds in the walls, the scratching and slithering get louder and louder until there's a crash from somewhere deep in the ground. That's when the screams start. Inhuman screams from inhuman throats broken only by the sounds of crystalline claws on the metal floors. Shadows grew into monstrous forms with ebon-black scales and no eyes. The monsters of the Midnight Isle were freed from the dark.

And they were hungry.

The remote mining colony on CX-4593 had been radio silent for six months.

The colony, nicknamed the Midnight Isle by the miners trapped in its perpetual darkness, had been running at peak efficency until the drills hit and cracked a mineral that their local geologists could not identify. After sending a copy of the readings and initial scientific findings back to Earthbase Epsilon, the miner recorded that they intended to resume drilling the next day. After that last broadcast, communication stopped. The colony managers, safe in their homes on Epsilon attempted many times to re-initiate communication, but to no avail.

A proposed rescue mission is still being discussed in committee and to the outside world, the mining company reports that everything is normal, just some routine communication bugs.

Meanwhile, the radio silence continues, but all is not silent on the Midnight Isle. There is clicking and scratching inside the walls and floors, distant echoes in the halls, and the electronic hum of a station still at full power. But absent are the sounds of the miners, and everywhere are the signs of distress and danger. Meals left abandoned covered in mold and dust. Chairs and tables stacked, as if in barricades, and most worrying of all, the smears of blood in the halls and pooled on the floors, absent of bodies, but full of unanswered questions.

And now, six months after the strange mineral was discovered, there are doors opening and strangers are arriving.