Military Sci-Fi Story for Sleep

Across the Nerezh basin salt flats, an infantry escort moves Soren Bale and his two children toward the tidal platform for extraction.Under the mineral crust, crowns and rakebacks follow weight, heat, vibration, spilled water, and blood until the ground itself begins to feed.Every step has to be measured across unstable salt, untreated nursery beds, drone lanes, credential checkpoints, and dust fronts that erase the route ahead. Bale is not just cargo; he is a defecting engineer trying to get his children out after their mother’s death. Then a damaged gate pulse wakes the flats...This is "Hungry Ground" by Sascha Schmidt

On a storm-choked industrial moon, a battered infantry section drops from a damaged carrier toward a buried command stack to recover a data crucible.But the enemy is already inside the ship, closing corridors around them while the carrier begins receiving accurate damage reports and death reports minutes before they happen.Broken systems, chemical haze, narrow passageways, and pressure failures turn every movement into a gamble.As the descent field bends telemetry into near-future loops, the retrieval mission stops being about securing the vault and becomes a fight to understand which warning is real.This is "The Descent Loop" by Sascha Schmidt