Aboard the sailing sailing ship Warta Lena kept a lonely night watch that night. The ship creaked quietly as the wide sails vibrated under the measured wind of photons. Outside the window stretched the void, decorated by the cool glow of the asteroid belt. She was seventeen years old and freshly passed her navigation exam, still smelling of ink. A beam flashed on the communications panel in an archaic format, almost forgotten in space. "It shouldn't go this way" - she muttered, then switched on the sift filter. The record of the waves arranged itself into the melody her mother used to hum to her before bed. At the end, someone whispered her name, as if from a very old radio. "Basia, source?" - Lena touched the screen and the artificial navigator dimmed with hesitation. "Variable location, vector indicates comet GR-121 Janina, uncatalogued zone," - she replied. "Is Oskar asleep?" - she asked still, although she knew the answer from the crew panel. She didn't want to wake the team; she had her first solo patrol and something to prove. She corrected her course by millimetres, using the movement of the sails to avoid raising alarms. The comet turned out to be not so much a lump of ice as a sharply cut ball of dark panels. Beneath the thin coating of ice smouldered a lattice, resembling the skeleton of a giant hedgehog. Basia increased the contrast and added: "The object does not appear in the registers or in the probes' memory." There was a pulse of signal coming from inside, increasingly clear, as if someone had just tuned a transmitter. "Can you hear me, Lena?" - the words carried around the cabin, and she felt goosebumps. She put on her jumpsuit, fastened the line and slipped the portable sound recorder into her pocket. "Leave the door on the bolts and count my pulse," she instructed Basi, swinging the airlock open. She floated above the surface like a frozen lake, with the stars as beacons. By the grid of panels she found an oval hatch, frosted and almost invisible to the eye. Beneath the ice was a grated eagle and a word of which only the letter P remained. The signal jumped, shifted to a snarling whisper, as if someone had breathed right on her helmet. The metal beneath her fingers trembled and the hatchway lit up with lines, pulsing with the rhythm of an alien heart. "Authorisation accepted." - said an unfamiliar voice in Polish, warm but not belonging to a human being. Inside, something like a corridor opened up, and a bright gaze came out of the darkness. Lena tightened her hand on the handle when she suddenly heard a second, very familiar call. And before she had time to answer, something from inside began to slide her name badge card through the hatch gap.