The night at the Siren listening station was thick as oil, though strangely cloudless. Lena Kwiatkowska, communications officer on night watch, fought the drowsiness with fresh coffee. Beyond the portholes flowed the dark clouds of Titan and the silent, distant flashes of Saturn's rings. The antennae were leading their relentless prayer, searching for patterns in the hum of the empty cosmos this night. Today the movement was unusually quiet, as if the whole orbit had held its breath for a long moment. Just after three o'clock, an amber spot lit up in the console and something pinched in the ear. The signal was almost too clear, carried by a carrier with an extremely narrow spectrum. The heading identified itself as Swan-Delta, a probe lost seventy years ago, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. And then the computer spoke her name in a synthesiser voice: 'Lena Kwiatkowska - attention, private message'. Nastka, the onboard artificial assistant, hesitated longer than usual before opening the decoding. There was an unusual time signature in the data, indicating the sender from fourteen minutes in the future. The triangulation hinted at a location in Titan's shadow, barely ninety thousand kilometres from the station. 'That's impossible,' Lena muttered, but the screen typed out a single command, clear and insistent: GO TO C-12. The C-12 lab was sealed after a routine inspection, no sensation, just no crew. Lena unlocked the door with the code sent in the package, and Nastka protested with a half-whisper of procedures. The corridor pulsed with the quiet pounding of pumps, and the metal underfoot resonated with her footsteps. Portholes flowed to her right, through which rings looked like pale lines on a score. The file decoded in layers, like a peeled onion, revealing an increasingly peculiar structure. In one channel there was a sound, quiet and husky, reminiscent of her voice. 'You're about to drop your pen,' the recording said, and the metal stylus fell out of her glove. For a moment Lena stood motionless, listening to her own accelerated breathing in the control suit. 'Don't panic,' the voice added, 'take what's standing in C-12 and don't open it'. Nastka turned down the channel, as if afraid that someone else on the station was listening along with them. Inside there was semi-darkness and the smell of old ozone, like a lightning box. In the middle stood a cylinder storing a vacuum memory, frosted with the slight chill of the server. On the casing was her name, written in a character disturbingly similar to her own handwriting. The light flashed in a signal rhythm, three short, one long, three short again. 'Leno, back off,' Nastka whispered, but the cylinder unlocked with a hiss, as if relieved. A pale flare came from the rings, forming the sign of the Swan-Delta probe against Titan. The station trembled, the air thickened, and a warning whisper sounded from within the cylinder: 'Don't open ... yet'.