On the research station Epsilon Prime orbiting Liora, three engineers intercept an impossible signal from the dark edge of the planet’s shadow and take a risky step toward the source.
Epsilon Prime never truly slept. The Colonial Nest hung in orbit above the gas giant Liora like a ring of steel and light, its corridors humming with power, its docks breathing in ships from every corner of the known galaxy. Beyond the observation windows, freight lanes blinked through the dark. Inside, under layers of decks and conduit, the maintenance tunnels belonged to the people who worked late enough to hear the station think.
Dari, Rina, and Leks had claimed one of those tunnels for themselves. It was a cramped service bay lined with discarded panels, repair drones missing half their limbs, and a table that had long since stopped pretending to be clean. Most nights they patched together improvised tools, argued over broken sensors, and listened to the satellite feed for anything interesting enough to cut through the station’s usual noise.
Dari was the first to break the silence. He drained the last of his synthetic coffee, set the cup down, and ran a finger across the glass tabletop. "Tell me we’ve found something better than orbital debris this time."
Rina didn’t look up from the console. Her eyes were fixed on a strip of scrolling data, her expression sharpened by a concentration that had been building for days. "We have," she said. "I caught a signal. It doesn’t match any fleet channel, beacon code, or research transmission on file. It repeats every eleven hours, exact to the second."
Leks leaned closer, the light from the display turning his face pale. "And we’re supposed to be impressed because some unknown transmitter likes a schedule?"
Rina flicked a line of code onto the main screen. The waveform unfolded, clean and deliberate, too precise to be random and too strange to be familiar. It wasn’t a language they recognised, not even close. No burst pattern, no checksum, no error drift. Just a sequence that arrived with unnerving patience, as if whatever sent it knew it would be heard.
Dari stopped smiling. The signal had the wrong kind of order to it, the kind that made the air feel thinner. It came from just beyond Liora’s shadow, where radiation interference made whole sectors of space disappear into static and where the larger stations preferred not to point their arrays for long.
"We can bounce a retransmission off the old reconnaissance satellite," Dari said quietly. "If it’s still drifting where the charts say it is, we might be able to trace the source."
Leks gave him a look that was half disbelief, half interest. "That satellite hasn’t responded to anything in years."
"Neither have the people who keep telling us to stay out of that sector," Dari said.
That was enough. Minutes later, they were in pressure suits, moving through the maintenance airlock with the kind of brisk silence that came before a bad decision. Outside, Epsilon Prime fell away behind them in a blue-white blur of metal and light. Liora filled half the sky, swollen and striped with storm bands, its upper atmosphere glowing faintly where charged particles burned against the dark.
The old reconnaissance satellite drifted ahead of them like a dead eye in the void, half-shrouded by stardust and shadow. Its hull was scarred, its antenna array crooked, but it was still close enough to reach if they timed the approach right.
Then the comms died.
Not static. Not a warning. A clean, sudden silence that cut through Dari’s suit channel and left only the faint thrum of his own breathing. Rina twisted in mid-drift, checking her readouts. Leks hit his transmitter once, then again, jaw tightening inside the helmet.
The satellite’s antenna moved.
Slowly, with a mechanical hesitation that looked almost deliberate, it turned toward them.
A pulse of sound crackled through the external speakers - distorted, layered, almost human and not quite. Dari froze, one gloved hand braced against the satellite’s hull. Rina stared at the flashing panel on her wrist as if it had betrayed her. Leks lifted his head.
And behind Liora, hidden in the spill of shadow, something flared white.