When Olive, Maks, and Antek pick up a strange signal during astronomy camp, they answer back and wake something up in the dark sky.
Olive, Maks, and Antek had spent all week counting down to summer holidays, but they had not expected their astronomy camp to turn into anything like this.
That evening they carried the telescope into a clearing far from the city, where the sky looked deeper and sharper than anywhere else. The grass was damp, the crickets were noisy, and the dark above them seemed close enough to touch.
Maks bent over the eyepiece. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he jerked back. "Look at that."
Olive leaned in first. High among the stars, one point of light was pulsing green, then red, then green again. It was too steady to be a plane and too strange to be a satellite.
Antek had already reached for the radio equipment. He twisted a dial, pressed a button, and listened with his headphones pressed tight against his ears. At first there was only static. Then the noise broke apart into a pattern.
Three long beeps. One short beep. A pause.
Then the same pattern again.
Olive felt a shiver run down her back. "That’s not random," she whispered. "It’s a message."
They worked until the stars began to fade, trying every setting they knew, scribbling notes on scraps of paper, matching the beeps to numbers, dots, and pulses. Nothing made sense for long. Still, the signal kept returning, as if whatever sent it was waiting for them to answer.
In the end, Antek hovered over the transmitter and looked at the others. No one spoke first. Then Olive nodded once.
He sent their reply into the dark.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, the next night, the clearing was washed in a green glow that did not come from any lamp or screen. The radio crackled violently. A shape appeared above the trees, growing larger with every second, and the three friends froze as something they had never seen before began to land прямо in front of them...