On the drifting station Arcadia, Lena, Michal, and Zuza investigate a missing service drone and uncover a strange piece of alien technology hidden in the dark.
Arcadia drifted at the edge of the solar system like a silent, metal city. From the inside, it was anything but quiet. Lights hummed in the corridors, pumps throbbed behind the walls, and every section had its own pulse of life. Lena, Michal, and Zuza knew the station better than most adults did, because they were the ones who got sent to fix the annoying little problems nobody else wanted.
That morning, they were still doing the usual rounds: tightening loose fasteners on the solar arrays, checking the hydroponics lines, making sure the lettuce trays had not clogged again. Ordinary work. Safe work. The kind that made Arcadia feel steady.
Then Michal stopped in front of the technical dock and frowned.
“Where’s C7?” he asked.
Lena looked up from her tool case. “The drone?”
He tapped the status panel. The list of docked units scrolled down the screen, neat and complete, except for one empty slot. Drone C7 had not reported in for over two hours.
Zuza folded her arms. “Maybe the system glitched.”
“Or maybe it didn’t,” Lena said.
She was already moving.
The three of them left the dock and headed deeper into the station. The corridor lights stretched ahead in long white bars, reflecting off the polished walls. Everything looked normal at first glance, but the farther they went, the stranger it became. Doors that should have opened stayed locked. Status lights blinked amber where they should have been green. Sections of the station seemed to be cutting themselves off, one after another, as if Arcadia were trying to hide something.
By the time they reached Segment C, none of them were talking anymore.
The spare parts stores were supposed to be there, along with the maintenance bays and C7’s charging rack. Lena entered the emergency code, and the door slid open with a tired hiss.
Inside, the room looked as if someone had searched it in a hurry. Tools lay scattered across the floor. A cabinet hung open. One workbench had been shoved sideways hard enough to scrape the deck plating.
And where C7 should have been, there was nothing.
Then Lena saw the corner.
Something metallic sat half in shadow beside the storage wall. It was small, but it did not belong there. Its surface was smooth and dark, broken by thin seams that caught the light. A faint blue glow pulsed from inside it, slow and steady, like a heartbeat.
For a second, nobody moved.
Then their communicators burst into static.
The lights overhead flickered once, twice, then dipped so low the room seemed to sink into itself. Shadows spread across the floor in uneven waves, wrong and shifting, as if something had just passed through them.
Zuza took an involuntary step back. “Do you see that?” she whispered.
Before anyone could answer, the door slammed shut behind them.
The control panel flashed red.
Alien object detected.
Black box protocol activated.
Minimal access.
Lena stared at the message, then at the glowing object in the corner, and felt the station go suddenly, deeply silent around them.