The Shadow Over Psyche Station
Space is not empty. It is full—of evil.
Incensepunk readers get a free preview of the first chapter of The Shadow Over Psyche Station, the new sci-fi horror novella coming out March 31 by Yuval Kordov!
Copyright © 2026 Yuval Kordov
Releasing March 31 in ebook and paperback
Pre-order the ebook today: https://books2read.com/psychestation
Chapter 1: The Void
Marcus stared into the void, and the void stared back.
The shuttle window was tiny, only enough hard glass for a nominal view, but even so the imperial assessor always expected… more. Brilliant nebulae, rivers of cosmic dust, constellations as dense as the glimmering spaceport beacons on windswept Mars. Anything. Instead, there were only dim pinpricks of light, scant suggestions of life. All false, assuredly. A vast and empty ocean, punctuated by a handful of ramshackle human outposts.
The last of them.
The void had been his life for the last six months, transiting from Mars to the asteroid belt, then from one mining station to the next. Eros, Themis, Hygiea, Ceres—his prior stop, on whose shuttle he was currently riding under autopilot. Assessing, as assessors do, on behalf of a distant empire.
Mars was dying, cut off from Earth after the War, a mewling babe desperate for sustenance. The asteroid belt was its only lifeline, and that line had frayed to a thread. Shipments had slowed, loads were light or tainted. Particularly those from 16 Psyche, his current and much maligned final destination. It was his job to find out why.
16 Psyche.
A swell of nausea rolled through his guts, gurgling past the armor plates of his exosuit. He fiddled with the keys on his wrist terminal for the thousandth time, trying to get his compression settings just right. He never could, and his cramped accommodations didn’t help. The shuttle’s passenger compartment had barely enough room to stand and turn about, never mind stretch, designed as it was for cargo first, humans second or not at all. Compressing him, transmuting all emotions to anxiety.
“It’s not right over there,” the Ceres administrator had warned the morning before Marcus disembarked. They were floating together in the airlock, the man’s knuckles white as he gripped the bulkhead, a viscous line of sweat seeping from his brow. It was unclear if his concern was for the assessor or his shuttle, but he hadn’t been eager to release either.
Marcus always compartmentalized his scrutiny while on tour, rarely discussing the shortfalls of other stations. There were perceptions to maintain, after all. Each station must think the others to be in order, and the threat of military intervention—mostly an empty one, given the state back home—reserved only for them. But the outburst piqued his interest, given the criticality of local trade. Mining stations were as dependent on each other as Mars was on all of them. There was only so much onboard recycling capability, and the primary asteroids, however resource-rich, made Mars seem like Eden by comparison. Transport shuttles met every month at relay points between stations, swapping pilots and pleasantries along with their essential cargo.
But not Psyche Station.
“We haven’t seen them in years,” the man had admitted, a faraway look in his eyes as he shielded the pressure door controls with his body. “Last we did, they weren’t right. Looked funny, smelled funny.”
Not much of an assessment, especially to a professional assessor. That’s what logs and an abundance of travel time were for. And the deeper Marcus delved, the more he found. Vague and disturbing reports from all the other stations, not just Ceres, intensifying as the years counted down. Errant behavior, belligerence toward local trade, accusations of heresy even. By the end of it, the reports verged on hysterical, declaring the inhabitants of Psyche Station no longer human. The last sighting described their shuttle pilot as gray-skinned, bloated in the middle, and gangly all around, like some sort of spaceborne octopod.
Just stories, surely.
Everyone out here suffered from an excess of darkness and a deficit of gravity. The void was a curse, erosive to body and mind. There was a regimen for it: drugs and exercise. And the near-Mars gravity of rotating station habitats helped when not traveling between them for weeks on end. But spinning around in space brought its own issues. They were all changed by it, even Marcus, especially him, allergic as he was to the standard pharmaceutical cocktail.
He had only his shiny white military-grade exosuit to compensate. It was an old Earth model, far superior to anything currently manufactured. Even so, climate control, mag boots, and the sophisticated compression layer beneath its armor plating could only do so much in microgravity. It had begun to feel too short, his custom-refit helmet too tight. Wherever mirrors presented themselves, he averted his gaze just in case. Truly, he was poorly suited to this task, his mind as disturbed in sleep as his body was when awake, wracked with dreams of floating naked in the dark. And yet he had volunteered, driven by some deep-seated yearning he had yet to identify.
Just stories… except for the station-to-station cargo manifests, which complained of the same issues as Mars-receiving: a peculiar sheen to the ore, luminescent when it should have been inert; an equally peculiar smell, like rotting fruit; and always underweight. As well as autonomous systems behaving strangely, prone to wandering off course despite no sign of damage to their circuitry.
Some of the reports were obviously exaggerated, but others required delicate separation of fact from fiction—the story of his life. In any case, Ceres had all but cut themselves off from their neighbors. Local trade was reduced and accomplished through autopilot, just as he was traveling now, trusting his life to a decrepit navigational computer.
Marcus stared out the window again, seeking the relay station where his shuttle would meet up with Psyche Station’s. At that point, one of their pilots would board and manually transport him the rest of the way, as had been mandated in the original summons. There was nothing out there. Not yet. He was still a day away, but each idle minute brought more trepidation.
16 Psyche.
Named after the Greek goddess of the soul. Thought by scientists to be the core of an ancient protoplanet, obliterated at the dawn of the solar system. Cast out. He was not the superstitious type, but it didn’t take long in space to start seeing monsters in every shadow, clinging to every lumen of manmade light for succor. What sort of malignancy did the ancient rock carry, festering over billions of years? What curse had it laid on the souls of those who mined it?
Marcus brought up a pixelated image of the asteroid on his heads up display, thumbing the directional pad on his wrist terminal to rotate it this way and that. An ugly thing from any angle: ovoid, pockmarked, a blot of diffuse green streaked with throbbing veins of rust and dull gold.
He tapped through an adjacent menu, pivoting the perspective around to focus on Psyche Station. It was the first of the mining outposts, now almost forty years old. A cylindrical core attached by four thick spokes to a habitat ring, 170 meters in diameter according to the readout, docking ports on the “bottom” and insectoid antennae bristling from its head. The whole thing spun on its axis, locked in place over 16 Psyche as though by an invisible tether, the two conjoined in a slow dance around the sun.
There were only five of the original six stations left, transporting their precious goods via automated drone across long and ponderous space lanes. Should that number drop any further, the result would be disastrous. There were no new technological advances, no new colonies, no help from the homeworld, only ever-increasing demand. Mars, once pitched as a second Earth, was falling toward entropy.
He zoomed into the rotating avatar, squinting as though the station’s malicious inhabitants might reveal themselves through the windows. Tabbing through each of its cargo drones, seeking trails of leaking gas or debris—telltale signs of malfunction. There would be none, of course, as this image was conjured from the original schematics, but the longer he looked the faster his pulse, as though something might yet break through the simulation.
“Enough, already,” he muttered.
Soon he would be there and could download all the local logs he needed. Until then, the third party reports were just conjecture, which served no one. If anything, it was probably time to rotate out some of the other station staff.
He brought up a series of file windows on his HUD, shuffling through dozens of incomplete spreadsheets and evaluations until he found his most recent draft recommendations, then held down the dictation key on his wrist. “Review personnel tenures, cross-reference with anomalous reports, and suggest rotations.”
A new text line appeared after an empty checkbox, below a stack of other unchecked to-dos. He should have been caught up by now, but time flowed differently in transit. Each day began with log reviews, only for him to find himself staring out the window hours later with little work completed, followed by exhaustion and restless sleep. The dreams, maybe. Even as his total sleep time increased, his fatigue worsened.
Marcus flipped up his visor and doffed a gauntlet to rub at his eyes. The cabin air was thin and tainted by the malodor of alien minerals. He breathed through his mouth as wan knuckles pushed against his eyeballs and long fingers clawed at the stubble along his jaw. He needed a shower and a shave.
A jagged fingernail caught on his neck and drew blood. He withdrew the hand and stared at it, struck for a moment by its appearance: too long, smooth fingers removed of their color. Though affixed to his body, it seemed autonomous, treacherous, like one of the rogue mining drones. With some effort, he commanded it back into its glove and dropped his visor down, breathing deeply as climate control kicked in.
The draft file was still centered on his HUD. He scanned the prior entries, blinking away a brief bout of double vision. But even as his eyesight returned to normal, he realized the to-dos on the last page were all the same, nearly to the word. He had been repeating himself.
He closed the file with a hard tap on his terminal, swallowing back a rising lump in his throat. It was almost eighteen hundred hours anyway—bedtime. He spared a final glance out the window, blinking away afterimages of an ugly green ovoid pulsing in the pitch, then shut his eyes.
Pre-order the ebook today: https://books2read.com/psychestation