Three young researchers board an abandoned station at the edge of the galaxy and find a signal, a warning, and a chamber that should not be open.
Antares Space Station hung in the dark like a dead thing, its hull silvered by distant stars and the bruised glow of the nebula beyond. Out here, on the edge of mapped space, silence felt heavy enough to press against the skin.
Lena watched the station grow in the panoramic window while the shuttle matched its drift. Adam, their pilot and expedition leader, kept one hand on the controls and the other on the mission log. Taro sat forward in his harness, eyes fixed on the scanner feed as if it might confess something if he stared hard enough.
Their official assignment was simple: survey the station, recover energy core samples, document the damage. Nothing in the briefing had prepared them for the way the docking ring looked half-buried in frost, or for the fact that no beacon answered their approach.
Lena checked the comms panel again. "Still nothing," she said. "Not even static."
"We didn't come all this way for a welcome party," Adam said, but his voice had gone flat with concentration. "Stay sharp. Report everything."
Taro frowned at his display. "The readings are wrong."
"How wrong?" Lena asked.
He looked up. "Wrong enough that I don't like being here."
The airlock sealed behind them with a metallic удар of finality, and the station's corridor stretched ahead under a film of dust, old cables, and dim emergency strips that shouldn't still have power. A half-open cupboard swayed gently in the zero gravity, its contents scattered as if someone had left in a hurry and never meant to come back.
Then the radio crackled.
At first it was only static, a feverish hiss under the hum of their suits. Then a voice forced its way through it, broken and distant, as though it had travelled years to reach them.
"...rescue... don't... it's not human..."
Adam stopped so suddenly Lena almost bumped into him. "That can't be live," he muttered. "It has to be an old loop."
Before anyone could answer, a door at the end of the corridor slid open by itself.
Light spilled out, pale and shifting, pulsing like a slow heartbeat. It painted the walls in silver waves and turned the dust into moving shadows. Taro raised his detector. Lena took one careful step forward. Adam braced himself beside the corridor barrier.
Inside the technical room, suspended in the air as if gravity had forgotten it, was an oval object of polished black metal, smooth as glass and utterly out of place. It seemed to be waiting for them.