Chapter 1: The Last Signal
The universe was silent. For three hundred years, no radio telescope had picked up anything but the hum of distant stars and the echo of the Big Bang. Humanity, scattered across hundreds of colonies in the Orion Arm, had long forgotten what "contact" meant. But in 2478, on the abandoned station Echo-9, orbiting a nameless gas giant, something changed.
Lyra Kain, a third-class technician, sat in the control room, surrounded by flickering consoles and the smell of burnt wiring. She was twenty-three and had spent five years fixing Echo-9's rusty systems, dreaming of something more than endless repairs. The station, built before her birth, was a relic of an era when humans believed in signals from the stars. Now, it was just a pitstop for cargo drones that arrived once every six months.
Lyra reached for her mug of synthetic coffee when the old radio receiver, wired to the station's antenna, crackled to life. A low, rhythmic hum, like a heartbeat, filled the room. She froze, spilling coffee on her worn jumpsuit. This wasn't interference-the signal was too clear, too... deliberate.
"What the hell?" she muttered, tweaking the tuning knob. The hum shifted into a series of pulses, forming a repeating sequence. Lyra activated the decoder, but it spat out a string of meaningless symbols. This wasn't any known communication protocol. Not human. Not machine.
She switched on the intercom, hoping to reach someone from the crew, but Echo-9 was nearly empty. Besides her, only Ren, a gruff engineer with a mechanical arm, and Dr. Avis, a biologist obsessed with studying local microbes in cryogenic samples, remained. The rest had left on the last shuttle two months ago.
"Ren, Avis, wake up!" Lyra shouted into the mic. "We've got... a signal. A real one."
No response. Just static and that same rhythmic hum, now feeling like it was sinking into her bones. Lyra patched the signal into the station's main computer, hoping the ancient AI could make sense of it. The screen flickered, displaying: "Source: unknown. Probability of extraterrestrial origin: 92%."
Lyra's heart pounded. She knew what this meant. First contact. Or a trap. In recent decades, rumors swirled of pirates using old frequencies to lure ships. But this signal was too strange, too alien.
She activated the station's external cameras. The gas giant, vast and crimson, hung in the void, its rings sparkling in the light of a distant star. Nothing unusual. But then one camera caught movement-a faint shimmer in the shadow of the rings. Something was approaching. Not a ship, not a drone. Its shape was wrong, fluid, like mercury sliding across glass.
A chill ran down Lyra's spine. She called Ren and Avis again, but silence answered. The station's quiet became unbearable, broken only by the signal's hum, now louder, more insistent. As if someone-or something-knew she was listening.
She stood, grabbing a flashlight and portable decoder. If Ren and Avis weren't responding, she'd find them herself. But deep down, Lyra knew: whatever was sending this signal was already here. And it wasn't waiting.