Anka, Emil, and Zoe trace a strange signal into the Heart Nebula and find an ancient station hidden in the gas. What waits inside begins to warp time itself.
The research vessel Astraea hung at the edge of the Heart Nebula, motionless against a bruised field of stars. Purple gas rolled and folded beyond the viewport, luminous as a storm caught in slow motion. Inside the wheelhouse, Captain Anka, Engineer Emil, and Zoe watched a three-dimensional map of the nebula turn above the console, its surface rippling with the same disturbances they had been tracking for three weeks.
The radio had started as static. Then patterns emerged. Repeated fragments. Bursts spaced too deliberately to be natural.
Emil leaned closer to the monitor, his brow tightening. "This isn't random," he said. "It's structured. Like a language."
Zoe was already reaching for the controls. "In this sector? That shouldn't be possible. Not without a civilisation we never knew existed. Unless the signal isn't coming from outside the nebula at all."
The Astraea shuddered.
A sharp pulse tore through the hull, throwing warning lights across the room. The display blurred, then steadied. For a second nobody spoke. Then the map resolved into something none of them had expected: a station, half-buried in the glowing clouds, its outline old and impossible, as if it had been waiting for the nebula to reveal it.
Anka stared at the image. "That structure wasn't there ten minutes ago."
"It was hidden," Zoe said, too quietly. "Or it was phased out."
Emil was already pulling on his helmet. "Then we go in."
The shuttle cut through the mist surrounding the station and docked in eerie silence. No lights answered their approach. No beacon. No visible damage, either. Just a dark hangar mouth, open as if expecting guests.
They crossed the threshold with their beams raised. The corridor beyond was narrow and black, its metal walls covered in symbols that caught the light and seemed to shift when they looked away. Somewhere deeper in the station, a door slid open without a sound.
A cold draft moved past them.
They followed it into a chamber flooded with pale green reflections. Crystals hung in the air as though gravity no longer applied here, turning slowly around a vast object at the centre of the room: a heart-shaped structure of dark metal and luminous seams, larger than the shuttle itself.
Zoe stopped dead. "This is the source."
A metallic scrape echoed from the far side of the chamber.
The heart flared once, violently bright. The symbols along the walls lit in sequence, as if something inside the station had just woken up. Then the shadows moved the wrong way, and a voice - or something that sounded almost like one - began to echo through the corridor behind them.