On the Eos orbital base, a routine experiment turns into something impossible when a signal arrives from Andromeda and the station begins to answer back.
Eos hung five hundred kilometres above Earth, its hull washed in the cold pulse of station lights. Through the research module windows, the planet below glowed blue and silent, streaked with aurora fire near the edge of the horizon. It was supposed to be the last calm hour before they signed off.
Alicia Trzeciak stood over the holographic display, watching streams of code drift like pale insects across the air. Beside her, Leon Hauer was tugging his hair into a ponytail while he reran the quantum detector diagnostics for the third time. Tamara, the youngest of the three, hovered near the experiment chamber, eyes fixed on the microgravity particle simulation as if staring hard enough might force it to behave.
The warning flashed so suddenly that all three flinched. The detector had caught an energy pulse from the direction of Andromeda.
Leon was the first to move. His fingers flew across the interface, pulling up the data in a tighter, cleaner sequence. Alicia leaned in, her breath catching as the graph collapsed into something else entirely: a lattice of symbols, unnervingly precise, repeating with mathematical patience.
"That can't be natural," Tamara whispered.
"It's not any pattern I've seen," Leon said, already launching a decryption sweep. "Unless somebody built this to be read."
Alicia stared at the symbols until they seemed to stare back. "From Andromeda?" she said. "That's not a signal. That's a decision."
The station shuddered.
Not violently, not enough to throw them off their feet, but with the deep, unmistakable tremor of something vast brushing past. Every light in the research segment died at once. In the darkness, the control panel woke by itself, lines of unfamiliar characters spilling across the screen in sharp white bursts.
Then the communicator crackled.
A voice, flat and metallic, began speaking over the dead channel. It did not sound human. It did not sound Earth-born. It repeated the same sequence the detector had just received, and then, after a pause that felt far too deliberate, it said it again.
In Polish.