Maja and Tymek board an abandoned station orbiting Neptune, only to wake a hidden system that gives them fifteen minutes to solve a mystery and escape.
Maja tugged at the torn sleeve of her silver jumpsuit and stared through the wide window at Neptune rolling far below, all blue storms and pale, icy light. Beside her, Tymek held their homemade translator so tightly his knuckles had gone white. It was little more than their dad’s old tablet wired to a handful of scavenged parts, but right now it felt like the most important machine in the universe.
They were inside Quartz Station, a vast research vessel that should have been dead, dark, and drifting. Instead, it still hung in orbit, silent as a held breath. Every corridor they crossed sent their footsteps bouncing back at them. Every doorway looked too clean, too ready, as if the station had been waiting for someone to come aboard.
“Did you see that?” Tymek whispered.
The lab door had opened by itself.
Maja’s stomach tightened. Blue and green lights ran along the walls in sharp, repeating patterns. Then something deep inside the station shuddered awake. A low hum grew into a rising whine, and a hologram burst into the air above the central console: a crystal, spinning slowly in the dark.
A voice followed, crackling through the speakers in a language they didn’t know.
Tymek shoved the translator toward the console. The device flashed once, twice, then gave a sharp beep. For one brief second, the words made sense.
Mission initiated.
Time remaining: 15 minutes.
Before Maja could speak, every door in the lab slammed shut at once. The lights strobed harder. An alarm wailed through the station, and a new panel slid out of the floor between them, revealing three glowing buttons and a screen covered in symbols that kept changing shape.
Maja looked at Tymek.
The translator buzzed again, and this time the message on the screen was only one line long:
Choose correctly, or Quartz Station will lock its secret forever.