On the night shift of Osiris station, hovering above Neptune's ice bands, Lena Kowal was learning to listen for silence. She was a space acoustics intern, calibrating antennas, filtering noise and measuring patience. Spectrograms moved like rivers, full of unexpected shapes and coded errors. When a breath-like rhythm blossomed in the background, Lena pushed the cup away, muffled the alarm and increased the sensitivity. Silence didn't defend itself, but it could respond if one listened long enough. - 'Milton, mark the anomaly as curious but not an emergency,' she said to the system. - 'No anomaly in the protocol,' replied the synthetic voice politely, overconfident in its own filters. The night should have belonged to the sleeping crew, but the rhythm was returning in waves from the dark orbit where the sun was almost gone. Lena bunched the antennae into a narrow beam and saved the buffer without waking Kira from captain's duty. Three repetitive peaks shuddered on the screen, then the "Swan-3" tag popped up, long since erased. This transport had disappeared before Lena went to kindergarten; its story was a warning in the textbooks. The rhythm snagged on her name, as if someone was faking familiar letters in too much wind. - 'Tariq, are you at the hangar? - She whispered in a private channel, without waking the common queue. - 'If it's another one of your ghosts, bring him some tea,' he muttered, but fired up the scout Skif. The edge of Neptune and a cloud of ice dust swam across the monitors, followed by darkness. Skif-10 moved into the shadows, the receiver strained like a string, and the signal thickened. The delay grew, but the letters finally folded into a simple whisper: "Lena, don't speak." Milton noted the veil warning, then reluctantly muted the headline as if someone had squeezed his conscience. - 'This is too clever for a drifting scrap,' Tariq said quietly. The camera picked out panels like ripped gills and a cadaverous name on the side: Swan-3. Under the number were repainted fresh signs, dated last week, which made no sense at all. A slime keypad flicked in the starlight and pulsed with the 'open' sequence, as if someone was exercising patience. - 'Hold on,' Lena tightened her fingers on the desk, as Skif's sensors detected an alien propulsion plume in the deep shadow zone. Someone was approaching without lights, and the echo split into two identical voices, ahead and behind. There was a new whisper on the private channel: - If you hear it, don't answer; they are listening. In the next frame, the ice reflected Lena's face, though she was sitting far away after all, and the image began to whiten rapidly.