The planet had no sunrise or sunset. In the face of the interstellar blackness, it was night itself, illuminated only by the green arcs of the aurora that spilled through its atmosphere like an inkwell splashing through water. The research vessel Helisa sailed in silence, the hull shivering from a chill that could not be called mere frost - it was a chill that gave things new weight and took away their colour. - 'Again,' said Lena Karpowicz, not taking her eyes off the screen. The pulse marked itself with a thin needle on the graph, returning in an endless, raw rhythm. - Prime numbers. Precise, down to the ninth hundredth of a second. - 'If we were alone in space, this would be the worst joke,' muttered Marek Osa, the pilot, embracing the armrests with his hands. In his voice sounded the calm of someone who had already seen comets torn from their orbits and docked with asteroids rotated by almost ninety degrees. - Junona? - Affirmative. Sequence: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11.... - the artificial navigator spoke up. Junona sounded like she was whispering directly into their suits, softly and without adornment. - Source located. Planetary surface, coordinates marked as Arctic Node. Archive record: Polar Station Whisper-12 Status: lost contact twenty-two years ago. Lena moved away from the console and felt the ship very slowly deviate from its course, as if it was not so much turning as changing its mind. Acheron-3 - that's what the catalogue called this sunless ball of ice - had a mass greater than the Earth and a gravity that could be felt even through the sides of Helisa. On the map, Polar Station Whisper-12 looked like a scratch on glass: a small complex covered in snow, pinned to the ice crust by massive anchors. - Two people from the station were reported missing, five dead, Junona added. - The records are flawed. Edits, gaps, conflicting dates. - You like it when documents match reality, don't you? - smiled Marek, but the smile did not reach his eyes. - Approach on automatic or by hand? - Manual - said Lena faster than she should have. - I want to hear the signal without filters. She saw it for the first time when they got close enough. Whisper-12 was unlike any station she knew. It was not so much built as fused into ice, as if someone had dissolved metal into it and let it solidify into twisted, organic shapes. Slender, tilted platforms and outlandish bubbles protruded in the spotlight, as if frozen bubbles of air. An aurora spilled over the complex, glinting on the edges of the powdery snow. - Who designed it like this? - whispered Marek, and Lena felt a shiver run down the back of her neck. - Did we have similar things in the catalogue? Some kind of beauty contest in the middle of nowhere? - According to the file, the station was modular,' she replied. - No mention of this ... shape. - 'Strange,' Junona said in a voice too even for the word 'strange'. - The energy trace is not from any known standard. I detect modulation at frequencies that should be lost in thermal noise. They docked to the lower airlock, which looked like an ice-bitten sheet. The flaps weren't responding to standard pinging, so Marek pulled out a mechanical coupler and plugged Helisa in by force. After a moment, a white, glassy oval of the airlock appeared behind the porthole, with frost growing on it, arranging itself in filigree patterns. - 'I'm standing on overpressure,' said Marek. - 'Junona, give us minimal heating in the atrium. I don't want to disturb the ice structure. - Secured. Pressure inside the station: one to one with the outside. Oxygen: trace. Temperature: unfriendly. - Beautiful - Lena fastened the snap hook of the belay rope and tapped her glove lightly on the buckle of her wetsuit. - I love trips to places no one wants to visit. - That's why you're the best," said Marek softly. - And that's why I'll turn the light on for you. As the inner airlock gave way with a groan of material, they entered a corridor that should not have existed. It wasn't a standard composite panel tunnel, but something like a vein in a glacier - the walls were smooth, glossy and dark, shining through in a few places with a deep, cold blue. Lena crouched down and touched the surface with her glove; she felt a tiny tremor under her fingers, as if a distant next wave of sound was passing through the ice. - Can you hear? - She asked, but Marek remained silent. So did Junona. Just a pulse. 2, 3, 5, 7... And then - a clear, almost exemplary tone that turned into something familiar for a second. Lena stopped, feeling the suit suddenly becoming too tight. - 'It's a lullaby,' she said very quietly. - My mother used to sing it to me when I was little. Where is it... Where did it come from? - 'I'm recording,' Junona said, and only now could the shadow of delay be heard in her voice. - Source unchanged. Central axis of the station. They walked slowly, as if every movement would awaken something better left alone. At the bend of the corridor there was fine dust, snow or crystallised vapour particles that did not fall, but circulated in gentle spirals, like planets in a model of a correlated private cosmos. Helisa's lamps drew long, arcing shadows on the walls, which sometimes arranged themselves into recognisable shapes: silhouettes, hands, profiles, only to dissolve immediately into the cold sheen of ice. They reached the central room, where the ceiling opened up like the vault of a small cathedral. In the very centre, in a recess resembling a bowl oval, stood a technical element - something between a machine and a sculpture. Constructed of dark metal, the rings overlapped each other, criss-crossed by thin sheets of transparent substance in which tiny, shiny particles were frozen. The whole thing looked as if it was simultaneously flowing and standing still. Lena had the sudden, absurd impression that she was looking at a drop of water stretched out in time. - 'The indicators are going crazy,' said Marek, inspecting the panel in his sleeve. - 'We've got the temperature gradients reversed, the gravity readings are jumping like crazy. Junona? - Analysis in progress. Data doesn't fit the models. I do not recommend touching. - And I won't promise not to touch," Lena whispered in passing. She took two steps closer and stopped. - Can you hear it more clearly? The tone with its modulation of prime numbers changed to a series of shorter, jittery sounds. A thin white inscription appeared on the visor of the helmet: Transmission space. Calibration. It then became a string of characters that were not any familiar script, but nevertheless not unfamiliar. Lena felt the taste of rust and cinnamon in her tongue - an old memory of the rehearsal room at university, of the first recordings of birdsong that she had converted into phonemes. - 'There's a semantic stimulus,' she said, in an all too professional tone that betrayed that she was not at all calm. - 'It's not random. It's trying to tune into our system. - Or to you,' Marek remarked. The word 'you' hung in the air and fell together with the dust, which unexpectedly began to behave as if someone had suddenly remembered gravity. The particles fell in one concerted gesture. At the same instant, the rings of the machine shifted relative to each other by a fraction of a millimetre and there was a sound as if, far out in the ice, someone was moving a heavy, smooth plate one after the other. - 'Someone's here,' Lena said before she could stop herself. Because in her headphones, from very far away, she heard a good, warm sound and a childhood accent. - Marek... it's my voice again. - It's an echo - he tried to dispose, but too sharply, as if he had jammed on a word. - Junona, detect the source. - Source: inside the structure. The interference vector indicates ... - Junona fell silent. - Phonemic identification: concordance ninety-nine coma nine per cent with Lena Karpowicz. In the light of the torches, something that could be considered movement flashed behind one of the transparent plates - a shadow of light, a thickening in the structure. Lena felt herself take one step forward, though Marek squeezed her shoulder so hard that the fabric of the suit protested with a quiet sizzle. - 'Don't do that,' he said. - 'You see what gravity does. We don't know if it's not going to collapse, or if it's not going to blow our helmets off. We don't know anything. - That's why we're here,' she replied and tried to smile. - If it's a language, I can hear it. If it's an echo, we'll filter it out. If it's someone who cares that we understand it, we can't pretend we can't hear it. She took a second step and then the light in the room changed temperature. No, it wasn't the light - it was the ice walls that took on a deeper sheen, as if someone had increased their transparency. In the slab opposite, something folded into an image. It wasn't sharp, but it was obscenely intimate: her own face. Not a reflection. The image. Her eyes, her eyebrows, the short scar above her upper lip that only she and the dentist in Kraków knew about. Her face raised its eyebrows a little before she did. Her lips moved as if they were about to utter a word she did not yet know. - 'Marek,' Lena said, and her voice broke on a single tone, not out of fear, but out of humility. - This is not a mirror. - We're going back,' he firmly replied, but with his words the door to the corridor closed quietly behind them. They heard a locking sound - soft, like a book being closed. Whatever was in the panel inclined its head at exactly the angle she would have inclined it, concerned and attentive. And then her own voice, with the same hoarseness at the end of sentences, rang out from inside the station, close as a whisper at her ear: - Lena, don't run away. You started it, now you have to see what it means. At that moment, the rings in the centre skipped quite silently against another crack, and a subtle tremor swept through the floor, like the first beat of a heart. Junona spoke up suddenly with a tension they had never heard before: - A recorded spatial shift. Unknown greeting protocol. Impulse approaching. Lena raised her head and looked into her own eyes on that side of the shiny plate. Her reflection - the non-reflection - opened its mouth wider, as if it wanted to say her name again, this time differently, more. And then the light in the room twitched like a flame in the wind and something she didn't have time to name began to form just beyond the thin, transparent layer of ice.