Lena and Maks uncover a strange signal beneath a Martian farming dome, and when it changes, it sounds less like noise and more like someone trying to reach them.
In 2146, the Martian colony never really slept. Even at shift change, the domes hummed with pumps, heaters, and air recyclers, and the red dust outside kept pressing at the glass like it wanted in.
Lena liked that the cultivation district had its own rhythm. The rest of the colony felt sharp-edged and metallic, but Zone 7 was different: rows of experimental Earth fruit trees, pale leaves trembling under artificial light, the air thick with controlled humidity and the faint sweetness of growing things. Seventeen and already responsible for half the sensor grid, Lena spent most of her time watching numbers scroll across a wall of screens and pretending that the future was as stable as the climate logs claimed.
It was supposed to be a quiet evening. She was checking oxygen levels near the old communication shaft when Maks burst through the lab door, nearly dropping his tablet in the process.
"Lena," he said, out of breath, "you need to see this."
The screen in his hands was filled with a wave pattern that kept repeating, precise and unnervingly clean. Not colony traffic. Not static. Not anything she recognised.
Lena took the tablet and narrowed her eyes. The signal pulsed once every ten minutes, always from the same direction, always too organised to be random. She pulled up the channel map and felt her stomach tighten.
"That frequency's dead," she said. "It hasn't been assigned since before the last expansion."
Maks gave her a look that was half excitement, half alarm. "So either someone shouldn't be using it, or no one was supposed to hear it."
They crossed to the old console in the shaft, where the light was dimmer and the metal walls sweated cold condensation. Lena linked the tablet to the receiver. The signal spiked immediately, sharp enough to make the speakers crackle.
Then the pattern changed.
The clean waves collapsed into a broken stream of letters and numbers, like someone on the other side was forcing a message through a damaged throat. Lena leaned closer, her pulse thudding in her ears.
A voice came through the speaker, thin and metallic, but unmistakably human.
"Are you there?"
Lena froze. Maks stopped breathing.
The console lit up again before either of them could speak, and a second line began to form on the screen, slower this time, as if the sender already knew they were listening.