Teen trainees on an interstellar station intercept a signal from beyond known space, and the first attempt to trace it ends with the station sealing itself off.
The outer ring of the Day and Night Station sat in a darkness so complete it felt sealed away from the rest of the universe. On one side of the glass, stars burned in a cold, impossible scatter. On the other, the station’s thin corridor lights pulsed over steel, cables, and tired faces.
Alex had been staring at the communications console long enough for the numbers to blur. Seventeen, three months into his apprenticeship, and already he was beginning to understand the station’s real rhythm: the hum of recycled air, the low vibration of the engines, the long pauses between emergencies. Earth felt far away enough to belong to someone else.
Most of the crew on the ring were students like him, pulled in from moons, colonies, and stations scattered across the solar system. Elara, born on Mars, tapped a restless beat against the table and watched Jupiter’s shadow drift across the window like a bruise. Julian, the oldest among them, had one earbud in and the other out, listening to a forest soundtrack that only made the station seem colder.
They were supposed to be learning. Instead, for the past four nights, they had been taking turns monitoring an unknown transmission drifting in from deep space, beyond any charted sector. The commander had called it probably nothing: a broken probe, debris with a pulse, interference from a dead relay. But Alex had seen too much in the pattern to believe that.
He widened the signal display. The bursts were short, precise, and never the same twice. Not random. Not quite a code either.
"Any luck?" Elara asked, leaning in.
"Not yet," Alex said. "But it changes when we do."
Julian looked up. "Changes how?"
Alex pointed to the graph. Every time they shifted the console’s scan angle, the signal answered. Not after a delay. Not by coincidence. Immediately, as if something out there knew exactly when they were watching.
Elara stopped tapping. "So it’s reacting to us."
The room went still. Somewhere deep in the station, metal rang once against metal, a small sound that should have meant nothing. Then every light in the communications room flickered at once.
A hard удар shuddered through the hull.
The bulkheads slammed shut. Red alarms bloomed across the ring. The speakers cracked, and a voice poured through them—warped, distorted, almost human, but not quite. Alex turned as every screen in the room filled with symbols none of them had ever seen before.
He could barely breathe.
"It’s not just a signal," he whispered.
A shape passed across the main window, blotting out the stars.