Olga and Maks spot a strange signal in the night sky, and when the telescope answers back, their quiet garden turns into the edge of something far bigger.
The night was still and glittering, as if someone had spilled a handful of silver dust across the sky. Olga lay back on a cushion in the garden deckchair, one eye pressed to the telescope, while Maks crouched beside her with a notebook balanced on his knees and his hair sticking up in every direction.
“Do you see that star near the top of the constellation?” Olga whispered.
Maks squinted. “The one that keeps blinking?”
“That’s not normal blinking,” Olga said. “It looks like it’s answering.”
Maks’s face lit up the way it always did when he was about to invent something impossible. “Then maybe it’s a ship. Or a hidden base. Or a message from another galaxy.”
Before Olga could laugh, the headphones crackled with a thin, metallic whisper. Both of them went still. On the monitor beside the telescope, a line of strange symbols flickered into view, one after another, quick and sharp, as if some invisible hand was trying to write in the dark.
Olga sat up so fast the cushion slid under her. “Maks. Look.”
He leaned closer, his mouth falling open. The symbols were unlike anything they had ever seen: some curved like tiny moons, some pointed like stars, and some looked almost like little doors.
Maks grabbed his notebook. “Write them down. Quickly.”
Olga copied the shapes as carefully as she could, but the screen kept changing. A high, clear tone rang through the speaker, so bright it felt as if it had come from inside the telescope itself. Then a new symbol flashed at the centre of the monitor: a circle, ringed by six sharp rays.
“It’s getting stronger,” Maks whispered.
Olga reached for the zoom control.
Something rustled hard in the bushes behind them. A cat shot out, arching its back and hissing at the sky. At the same moment, a pale beam of light cut across the garden and hung above their house, steady as a rope.
Olga and Maks froze.
In the middle of the beam, a dark shape slowly began to move.