Three teenagers board an abandoned research station at the edge of the solar system and find signs that something alive may still be moving through its dark corridors.
The transport pod shuddered as its clamps locked onto the hull of Proxima-3. Nicodemus released his harness and stared through the porthole. The station floated against the black, a skeletal shape of steel and broken light, abandoned so long ago it seemed less like a place than a warning.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Lena asked. She tugged at the seal of her helmet, trying and failing to sound casual. The radio flattened her voice, but not enough to hide the nerves underneath.
"No," Nicodemus said. "But we came this far. If the station still has the data, we need to know what they found here."
Sajra was already checking the pack at her hip. Spare cells. Cable cutters. A compact drone folded into the shape of a metal insect. She was the oldest of them by a year, and she wore that year like armour, though even she kept looking back toward the pod’s dim cabin as if expecting someone else to be standing there.
The outer airlock gave with a slow, protesting groan. Beyond it, Proxima-3 smelled of cold dust, old metal, and something faintly bitter that Nicodemus could not place. Their helmet lamps cut narrow cones through the dark. The main corridor stretched ahead, littered with loose papers, snapped panels, and the twisted remains of a wall display. Whatever had happened here, it had not been tidy.
They moved carefully, boots ringing softly against the floor. Every sound seemed to travel too far. Every shadow looked deliberately placed.
Then Lena stopped so suddenly that Nicodemus almost ran into her.
"Did you hear that?"
At first he heard nothing. Then, from somewhere beneath the deck plates, came a faint scraping sound. Slow. Uneven. As if something heavy were being dragged through the walls.
Sajra’s hand closed around the drone. "Stay behind me."
She sent it skimming forward. Its camera feed bloomed on their visors: overturned chairs, a mess of torn packaging, a cup still half full of dried dark liquid. Then the image flickered, and something moved through it.
A mist. Black as ink, thin at the edges, pulsing as though it had a heartbeat.
It slid along the floor without touching it.
Lena made a sound too small to be a word. Sajra went rigid. Nicodemus felt his throat go dry as the drone backed away on trembling rotors, the fog following after it with impossible patience.
"That isn't vapour," Sajra whispered. "That station was abandoned for a reason."
The fog lunged.
Static burst through their comms. The drone’s feed collapsed into snow. For one stunned second, the corridor was silent again.
Then something on the other side of the nearest door hit the metal from within, hard enough to rattle the frame, and a voice spoke in the dark.