Four friends on patrol in the asteroid belt find a hidden ship that should not exist, and the moment they board it, the dark begins to answer back.
Space had a way of making even the boldest thoughts feel temporary. Oskar kept the Argo steady through the asteroid belt while Lena watched the scanner, Maks traced half-dreaming lines across the console, and Julia sat ready in her suit, restless and alert. After hours of quiet patrol, the ship had settled into that tired, mechanical calm that made every warning light seem louder than it should.
Then Lena leaned forward. "There," she said, almost under her breath.
On the monitor, between two drifting rocks, something held its shape too cleanly to be stone. Not an asteroid. Not debris. A vessel, blackened with age and shadow, gliding so still it looked anchored to the void itself.
Oskar narrowed his eyes and nudged the Argo closer. The object grew slowly in the viewport, revealing a hull scored with old impacts and a surface that caught the starlight in hard, silver flashes. It was too large to be a probe, too silent to be a wreck. Whatever it was, it had waited here a very long time.
"No registry," Maks muttered after a glance at the readout. He tried again, frowned, and looked up. "Not even a language match. The scanner doesn't know what it's seeing."
Julia was already rising from her seat. "Then we look ourselves." She moved to the airlock with the kind of calm that usually came just before trouble.
Oskar should have hesitated. Instead, curiosity won. The Argo slid alongside the strange ship, and the docking clamps locked with a heavy, reluctant clank. When the outer hatch opened, a breath of frozen darkness spilled into the corridor between them.
They crossed onto the other vessel one by one.
The metal beneath their boots was smooth and cold, marked with symbols etched so deeply they seemed less carved than grown into the hull. Along the entrance panel, a ring of almond-shaped signs pulsed once, faintly, as Lena brushed her glove over them. The whole structure answered at once.
Blue light burst across the doorway.
A low vibration ran through the deck, through their boots, through their teeth. The hatch unfolded with a deep, measured groan, and a corridor opened before them as if the ship had been waiting for that exact touch.
Inside, the air felt wrong. Not poisoned, not stale, just unfamiliar in a way that made the skin tighten. The walls shifted through colours that had no name, dimming and brightening like something breathing behind the metal. Their footsteps returned to them a heartbeat late, then again from farther away, as if the corridor itself were repeating them in mockery.
Maks turned back first. The door behind them was closing.
Ahead, slender lights snapped on one by one, drawing a path deeper into the vessel. Julia stopped at the edge of the glow, her voice suddenly thin in the strange hush.
"Something brought us here," she said. "Or something wanted us trapped."
The corridor curved out of sight. At the bend, a pale mist gathered in a slow spiral, and from somewhere inside it came a voice, barely audible, carrying through the ship like a thought that was not their own.