From inside the dome of the 'Kopernik' Observatory, the Earth looked like a calm, blue-white blob suspended against a bottomless black background. Lena Mycielska had a habit of catching it with her gaze every time she pulled away from the screens: a thin sickle, sometimes fuller, sometimes barely a default glow. She liked to think it was the pulse of a heart, a beat that can only be heard when it's really quiet. There was a silence of a different kind at point L2 - one in which every bearing rasp, every static crackle and every wrong peak on the chart sounded like crumbs of truth about infinity. - Have you got it? - Adrian slipped out of the shadow of the console, still pinned to the rail, still with his hair standing up like needles from the electrifying air. Even here, in the artificial twilight of the station, he looked as if he had just risen from sleep, still blurred between waking and orbit. - 'I've got it,' Lena replied and tapped her fingernail on the spectrometer screen. - See. It's not a hum. The signal is coming back. And it's doing it in intervals that I've counted three times. In between the even plays of sounds that the station picked up like a mushroom picker picks up the sounds of the forest, a pattern stood out. Hard, delicate and ridiculously clear. Like someone learning to speak in a whisper. Lena turned up the listening channel, though she knew it was a pointless gesture - at this altitude, in this purring vacuum, hearing gets used to silence the way the soul gets used to solitude. - 'Two, three, five, seven...', Adrian calculated after a moment, then moved away from the panel. - The intervals between the pulses are prime numbers. Blimey, this is not normal telemetry. The word 'normal' sounded like a joke here. Nothing was normal on the 'Copernicus', except for the regularity of the rotations and plans that someone had laid out on Earth and sent out with orders in data packets. Today's plan was to calibrate the external antenna on Ring A and test fly the geodetic drone over the shadow cone. Plain, clean work - for trainees like Lena and Adrian seemingly difficult, but safe, in their belts and under the gaze of Dr Kamila Ryter, who had a gift for simultaneously comforting and frothing with a sentence so apt that it stayed under the skin for years. - Did you report? - Adrian asked, reaching for the drinks hitch and grabbing a bottle of water. In microgravity, a sip becomes a ritual: you have to watch the drop and catch it at the right moment, otherwise it has escaped. - The main channels are clogged. Cassiopeia is firing up its engines. Dr Kamila told us not to touch the external antennas for an hour. - Lena croaked. - 'But that's... that's not the background. See again. The power rises and falls like a breath. And these pauses - as if someone was counting with us. Adrian hovered beside her, fastening the carabiner to the other rail, as if the conversation might suddenly knock them into the glass. - Since when has this thing been around? - For twelve minutes. Earlier I saw a slight fluctuation at Calibrator B, but I dropped it to space dust. Now... "Now it stopped being a coincidence," she wanted to finish, but the words themselves sounded too simple. She was seventeen and had already learned that many phenomena only look like a miracle before they get a name. And yet, inside, she was itching for that childish tremor: something is unknown and touches you like cold water. - 'Show the source vector,' Adrian asked, turning on the sky map. For a second, a thick scattering of dots flashed over the screen, as if someone had spilled silver on velvet. Lena superimposed the directional characteristics of the antennas: the ellipses intersected... not where they should. - 'This is on the border of the dark sector,' she said quietly. They had been joking about the name for months: the dark sector was simply an area of observation where the station had less sensitivity due to the geometry of the shields and the old shadow from the previous platform. This part of the sky was sometimes less clear, and thus aroused the proper human reflexes - you can always see more in the dim. - Ring A misaligned again? - Adrian snorted. - Great. After the test flight we were going to check it anyway. We'll do it now and confirm if it's a fake. Lena hesitated, looking at Dr Ryter's communicator. Regulations said 'no', curiosity said 'now'. In a space where every second of delayed communication meant delayed decisions, she had learned one more thing: the ability to ask for forgiveness was sometimes more valuable than the ability to ask for permission. - Let's go,' she concluded, and grabbed the railing. - 'We'll do a quick tour, check the mechanics of the antenna. If it's a mistake, we'll fix it. If not... - If not, we'd better have a good record,' Adrian finished. They smiled awkwardly at each other, with the kind of agreement where a little fear tastes like lime in your tea. They quickly sailed through the maintenance airlock to the small service hangar. "Sikorka-2", a two-person skiff attached to the station like a bow tie to a whale's fur, looked inconspicuous, but it was fast and had enough sensors to study the breath of a comet. The skiffs conformed to their bodies, flexing softly where gravity couldn't help, and the screens in the helmets turned on with the bluish glow of the interfaces. - Pressure aligned. Local channel on. Lena, can you hear me? - I can hear you. I'm ripping parameters and pulses. - She swallowed. - And I'm taking that sound with me. I swear that if it turns out to be a resonance from a transducer of some kind, I'm going to unravel everything myself. - Put it together first,' Adrian muttered and opened the outer airlock. The space extended towards them like a tongue of ice. Nothing moved except the fine snow of micrometeoroids, which sometimes shone, sometimes melted into darkness. "Peak-2" broke away from the docking track and floated out into a slow trajectory. The station stayed behind them - blue-grey rings, lamplight and a thin thread of charging currents shining lightly against the velvet. Lena didn't stop to listen. Pulse. Pause. Pulse. Pause longer. First. First. First. The mathematics felt like the skin of a second glance. - Vector set. Flight along service corridor, then deviate three degrees, Adrian reported. - Hold on to the panels. - I'm holding,' she whispered, as if someone might overhear her here. And yet everything they said went back to the nodes, stored in the station's memory and became part of the story of this moment, which someone would one day open, run their finger over the charts and say: "This is where it all started". The A-ring emerged from the shadows like a huge garland of petals, each panel slightly tilted, each with a ribbed surface covered in snakes of tiny wires. Lena liked these panels. She liked the touch they demanded from her hands and her thoughts: patient, precise, a little tender. - 'Look at sector 17,' Adrian said. - Can you see the streaks? She saw. Thin, as if scorched by frost. They weren't dust impact scratches, because those left irregular, dull spots. These lines were repetitive, arched, arranged in a pattern that could not be immediately named. She felt that if someone had fingerprints made of light, they would look just like this. - 'I'm collecting a spectral sample,' she said. - 'Local temperatures?... Adrian, they're lower than they should be. It's like someone is draining the heat from the edges. - That's not possible without an active installation - he muttered. - Check the orientation connections. Maybe the autopointer went crazy. The autopointer - the system that rotated the antennas so that they tracked selected parts of the sky - slowly moved the panels another fraction of a degree. Lena raised her hand as if she could stop it with a gesture. A nuance lit up in the helmet: the black background of the sky melted into tiny movements that were not errors of the eyes. - See? - Her voice was no longer just a whisper. - This passage. There, between Deneb and the edge of the grid. Is it... bending? The field of vision was obscured by a tiny, elliptical shadow, so subtle that in another situation Lena would have taken it for dirt on the glass. But this shadow was not staying still. It moved and didn't move at the same time, as if it were a speck on the inner surface of the eye of the universe. The stars right next to it seemed to move away slightly, like a magnolia retracting its petals before the rain. - 'I'm registering a curvature,' Adrian said, and his voice trembled for the first time. - 'It looks like microlensing, but on the wrong scale. There's no mass there, Lena. It shouldn't be like that. The signal meanwhile was rhythmically hammering into silence. Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen. At one point the pauses lengthened so that Lena reflexively held her own breath. "Tit-2" gently rotated around its axis. Consciousness was focused on a point that logically remained a joke. And yet something about this joke pulled with such force that one forgot about reason. - 'Turn off the autopointer,' she said. - We'll switch to manual. I don't want something trying to align the image before we see it. - Off - confirmed Adrian. - Simple movements, minimal adjustments. I see a flare on the side channel. Lena unlocked the manipulator and slid the service arm out of its socket. The sensor column flashed like an earthworm made of mirrors. She pressed the tip against the edge of the panel with strange marks. In the same second, the pulse in the headphones changed - to shorter, more intense, as if the signal knew someone had touched its door. - Lena... - Adrian said slowly. - The auxiliary channel grasps something. An alternate pattern. Not what's on the main band. - Switch to listen,' she whispered. And then she heard it. Not a digital staccato, not a mathematical 'yes-no', but something unusually soft and human, like the voice of a sailor from an old map returning from the edge of the world. First a fragment, snapped off as if by solar noise. Then syllables, clumsy, as if squeezed through a narrow tunnel. - ...on... The sound hovered between them. Lena felt a sudden pang in her sternum. It wasn't because someone had said "Lena" - it could have been a coincidence, an echo of whatever name reminded her of her own for half a second. But the sound... the timbre, the soft rounding of the 'e'.... - Did you hear it? - She asked. She couldn't feel her feet, though she wasn't touching the floor anyway. - I heard. - Adrian grunted, as if he could restore sobriety with his larynx. - It could be a phase modulation, a cluster of voices.... - It could be anything,' she interrupted him. - But... She wanted to add 'it's her voice', but swallowed the words. Her mother had disappeared in a mission three years ago, further and further away, all the way beyond the orbit of Saturn, and then silence. Lena had cut off her right to fantasise, because fantasy burned like dry ice. Now, however, something about the colour made her whole body recall things she had learned not to remember. - Lena. - The voice came back, clearer, as if it was biting through the fabric of reality. - 'If you're receiving this, don't interrupt the call. Don't use the main channel. They can hear... The signal broke off. At the same instant, a tiny ellipse, a shadow in the stars, vibrated. Everything in 'Sikorce-2' trembled so subtly that one might think it was a hallucination. Only that the instruments went crazy: a momentary drop in background radiation, an inexplicable shift in the time transfer, micro-rotations of structures were detected. The panel to which the arm was applied blared a warning tone. - Lena! - Adrian grabbed her forearm through the layer of her spacesuit, as if the touch could really make a difference to what was happening behind the glass. - A message will fly. Dr Kamila will kill us if we don't.... - Another second. - She didn't know if she was asking him or everything around her. The dark elliptical shadow widened slightly, like a pupil in the light. The stars next to it moved away, forming a thin ring. It was as beautiful and cold as an alien eye. A white noise bubbled in the headphones, through which a single, low tone broke through. And then something that wasn't a sound twitched at the edge of perception - like the edge of a field, like a crack in the taffrail. - Lena... - A voice, this time painfully familiar, almost a whisper at the nape of your neck. - 'Put your hand back. Whatever you do, don't touch.... The service arm twitched as if bitten by electricity. A microscopic arc ignited for a moment at the tip of the manipulative tip, which gave off no light but drank it from the area like the purest blackness. The A-ring trembled. The shadow changed shape, as if someone from within had put a hand to the membrane of the space, preparing to leave.