Through the panoramic window of the shuttle 'Aurora', the light of an unknown star cut through the velvety blackness of space with a thousand flashes. Seventeen-year-old Lena looked at the planet Kestus-4, engulfed in a blue-violet glow. She felt a sense of excitement - being chosen to be part of the first youth interstellar expedition was a dream come true. Sitting next to her were her best friends - Irek, the eternally sceptical technician, and Zoya, an expert in foreign languages. Everyone listened with bated breath to Commander Kalani, who repeated the safety rules one last time. The Beta-12 research station had been inactive for years. The last contact broke off abruptly. Officially, a systems failure was blamed. However, no repair drones were returning with an answer. Now it was up to Lena, Irek and Zoya to find out what had really happened. After docking, the shuttle's steel doors opened with a hiss. The station corridor was shrouded in the faint glow of the emergency lights. Everyone was on the comms, cameras recording every step. The silence was thick, as if a cocoon surrounded them. After a few minutes, Zoya discovered a glimpse of a coded signal on the surveillance monitor. The data was arranged in a strange, jumping sequence. "This doesn't look like any language I know," she said, biting her lip. Irek entered the main server room, illuminating the room with a torch. Each terminal pulsed with a soft light, as if the station still had life in it. Lena felt a chill at the nape of her neck as the door behind them automatically closed. "Why don't we split up?" she suggested in a trembling voice, looking at the screens flooded with strange symbols. Suddenly, all the lights flickered. A metallic clatter swept through the communications system and an unintelligible message appeared on the main monitor - rhythmic, pulsing, reminiscent of a heartbeat. Zoya looked at Lena and Irek. "This... I think something has spotted us here." At that moment, a deep, vibrating wave of sound filled the entire corridor, and the door to the rest of the station opened on its own, inviting them into the depths of the unknown....