Three friends in a Martian colony pick up a strange signal from an abandoned research station and sneak out to investigate what should have stayed silent.
Martian night pressed against the observatory windows, turning the pink sky into a dark, dusty bruise. Veronica, Igor, and Lena sat together under the soft hum of the colony’s machines, watching the lights of Quartz Colony blink below them. Most nights there was homework, patrol drills, or another long stretch of nothing at all. Tonight, something finally stirred.
Veronica leaned closer to the screen. A signal had appeared on the station monitor, thin and jagged, coming from Quartz North Station. The abandoned research base had been sealed after a strange accident two years earlier, and nobody in the colony liked to talk about it. The signal flashed once, vanished, and came back again a few minutes later, as if someone were trying to speak in code.
Igor adjusted the display. “That’s not interference,” he said quietly.
Lena hugged her arms. “There isn’t supposed to be anyone there.”
“There isn’t,” Veronica said, though she didn’t sound certain. On the screen, the signal pulsed again. Then a second line appeared beneath it, colder and steadier than the first.
They found the service tunnel on the colony maps and hurried to the equipment locker for torches, communicators, and Cosmik, Igor’s robot penguin, who beeped once as if he understood more than he was saying. The tunnel toward Quartz North Station was narrow and dim, with metal walls that carried every footstep back at them. Halfway through, Lena spotted something shining on the floor and bent to pick it up.
It was a shard of glass, warm in her palm, etched with a symbol none of them recognized.
By the time they reached the station door, the blue light behind its cracked glass had grown brighter. Veronica lifted her hand toward the opening panel. Before she could press it, something moved on the other side with a slow metallic scrape.
The door began to slide open.
Then a voice spoke from the darkness inside.
“Please come in,” it said. “I have been waiting for you...”