Awakened far beyond Pluto, Julia and her crew find Station Horizon crippled, their systems silent, and something outside the station that should not be there.
Station Horizon drifted at the edge of the Solar System, tucked in the shadow of Pluto's moon like a secret no one had meant to keep. Millions of kilometres from Earth, the station was a needle of steel and light in a dark so complete it seemed to press against the hull. Only the low pulse of life support and the faint vibration of dormant machinery proved they were still inside something built by human hands.
Julia woke choking on cold. The alarm had dragged her out of thirteen years of hibernation, and every breath scraped her throat as if she had swallowed frost. Her eyelids felt glued shut, her hair and lashes rimed with ice. Through the capsule's glass, she caught blurred shapes of the other pods in the row, their occupants still motionless, silver-lit and unreal.
Red warning text strobed across the console beside her: UNPLANNED WAKE-UP. STATUS: CRITICAL. Julia's pulse lurched. Across the chamber, David was already forcing himself upright, shoulders shaking with the effort of waking too fast, while Maya pressed a trembling hand to the side of her capsule and stared at the dead interface on the wall. None of them spoke at first. The mission came back in fragments: the edge of the system, the quantum telescope, the long sleep designed to carry them there without wasting a lifetime awake.
That was the theory. The station around them had other ideas.
The corridors were wrong in a way Julia could not name at first. Too quiet. Too still. The holographic guide that should have been greeting them with status reports and orientation prompts remained dark. Doors that should have opened on command stayed sealed, their locks holding with a stubborn, almost deliberate resistance. Somewhere deeper in the station, something gave a soft mechanical scrape, as if metal had shifted against metal in the dark.
Julia hit the command-centre door again, harder this time. Nothing. Then the monitor beside it flickered awake on its own. A single line appeared across the screen: SOMETHING HAS ARRIVED.
Before she could call out to the others, a shadow moved beyond the thick outer glass, pale and pulsing, as though light itself had found a body. The airlock began to part with a slow, deliberate hiss, and from the opening came a sound none of them recognised at all.