Four teens enter an interplanetary competition aboard Zenith 7, but one wrong signal pulls their ship off course and into an unknown world no map has ever marked.
The observation dome of the Zenith 7 orbital station hummed with noise, light, and nerves. Teen crews from across the Solar System moved between the launch bays, their voices mixing in a dozen languages while the window wall held the Orion Nebula in a cold, distant blaze.
For Mai, Alexie, Zoska, and Nils, it was the moment they had spent months chasing. The Interplanetary Exploration Competition was finally starting.
They had earned their place on the Orion X team for very different reasons. Alexie could thread a ship through danger as if the controls belonged to him. Zoska saw patterns in navigation data that other people missed. Mai knew how to read a world by the life that might cling to it, even before they landed. Nils could identify a broken panel, a hidden seam, or a useless tool at a glance.
Together, they looked ready. The kind of team judges liked to call balanced.
The briefing was short and sharp. Find a rare mineral on one of the remote asteroids near the edge of the Orion Nebula. Collect a sample. Return within forty-eight hours. No detours. No heroics.
By the time they strapped into their light research vessel, the excitement in the cabin had turned brittle. Alexie checked the engines twice. Nils ran a hand over the storage locks. Mai stared through the front canopy at the dark spill of space ahead, trying not to think about how far the station already seemed.
Then Zoska froze over the navigation screen.
A signal blinked where there should have been nothing.
She leaned closer, her fingers flying across the controls. "This isn't on the route," she said. The image sharpened into a jagged pulse of violet light, too steady to be noise. "And it isn't natural."
Alexie glanced at the clock. They were still well inside the schedule. They should have ignored it.
Instead, the ship turned.
The closer they got, the stranger the readings became. The stars ahead dimmed behind a rolling curtain of violet haze, as if space itself had folded and forgotten to open again. The hull shuddered. Alarms flashed. One by one, the comm lights died.
"Base, respond," Nils said into the dead channel. Only static answered.
Mai pressed her face to the side window and saw something that made her breath catch. Through the haze, below them, lay a planet no chart had named. Its surface glimmered with enormous geometric structures, sharp and deliberate, like a civilisation had left them waiting.
Then the ship dropped hard, and the hatch controls lit up on their own.
The door began to open, and a pale, pulsing light spilled into the cabin.