At the edge of the Orion Nebula, the Pulsar crew intercepts a signal that seems to come from inside the station itself, and the first warning comes with a bang in the dark.
Pulsar Station hung at the edge of the Orion Nebula, where the trade lanes thinned out and the map gave way to blank, unclaimed space. Beyond the armour glass, ice crystals drifted in slow, glittering arcs around the station's hull. Inside Control, the light was dim and the air carried that tired, metallic hush that settled in after a long shift.
Nela stood at the window with one hand on the frame, watching the shards turn in silence. Behind her, Olek scrolled through the quantum logs with a growing frown. The station held only six crew, and each of them had arrived for a different reason: Nela for the work, Olek to outrun Earth, Dr Qiang for the particles no one else believed were real, Zoe and Zara to keep the systems alive, and Marek, the youngest of them, to bury his genius in code and avoid speaking unless he had to.
That night, no one was talking much.
Then the main monitor broke the silence with a pulse of light.
Numbers flashed across the screen in a pattern too fast to read at first, then too deliberate to dismiss. Nela crossed to the console. "Olek? Did you load this feed?"
He shook his head without looking away from the data. "No. I don't recognise the transmission format. I've never seen parameters like these."
Marek was already at the terminal before anyone could stop him. He dragged the file open, his fingers flying across the keys. Lines of code spilled onto the screen, ugly and unfamiliar, as if some other hand had been there before him.
Zoe exchanged a look with Zara. "Where's it coming from?"
Zara pulled up the station map, zooming in on the outer shell, then zooming in again. The marker blinked once and vanished.
Marek went still. "It's not outside," he said quietly. "It says the source is on the station's hull. Right on top of us."
A deep удар jolted through the corridor.
The lights stuttered, went red, and came back in a harsher, sickly pulse. An alarm began to climb in pitch. Somewhere beyond the bulkhead, something metal scraped against metal, slow and deliberate, as if the station had started to wake up in pain.
Nela reached for the emergency torch. "Everybody up. Now. We go together."
The corridor beyond Control was already darkening, and whatever had just touched Pulsar was still out there, moving along the hull.