The signal arrived at 03:47 standard ship time.
Elena was the only one awake in station Nyx-7, cycling through the long night with only the hum of life support and her own breathing for company. She sat in the observation module, watching through the reinforced viewport as dust storms rolled across the moon's surface like breathing giants, their movements slow and inexorable. On the small shelf beside her chair sat a framed photograph — her four crewmates in happier days, back on Earth. She touched the glass with her thumb, a ritual she'd repeated every night for six months.
Six months alone. Alone except for the four others in cryo, frozen in their pods, waiting for their six-month rotation. Six months of monitoring sensors, sending reports, watching the endless gray landscape.
The console flashed — amber, not red. Not an emergency. Just something.
Elena pushed herself from the chair, the station's low gravity making the motion effortless. She drifted through the air to the console, fingers grasping handholds to guide herself. Nyx-7 was a surface station, anchored into the volcanic rock beneath, but the moon's gravity was only a third of Earth's — enough to walk, but easy to float when you stopped paying attention.
She pulled herself into the chair, securing the straps, and began navigating through screens.
Source: Unknown. Origin: Surface. Signal strength: Variable. Rising.
She frowned. The only things on the surface were dust and dead volcanoes. Nothing that transmitted. Nothing that moved. The automated sensors picked up geological tremors, solar flares, cosmic radiation. Not this.
The waveform scrolled across her screen — not regular like a machine, not chaotic like radiation. It was almost... rhythmic. Like speech.
Her heart kicked against her ribs.
She opened the audio channel. Static at first, white noise hissing through the speakers. Then something else beneath it. Whispers. Too many to count. Too layered to be natural. They came in waves, dozens of voices overlapping, speaking over each other, through each other.
Elena leaned forward, reaching for her headphones.
"—wake—"
"—found—"
"—door—"
Her breath stalled. She tore the headphones off and flung them across the console. The room was silent. The hum of the station, the distant rattle of ventilation, the soft beep of instruments. Nothing else. But on her screen, the waveform continued scrolling — the signal was still there, still rising, still alive with those impossible voices.
She stared at the headphones, lying on the console where she'd thrown them. She didn't want to put them back on. Every instinct screamed at her to wake the others, to hit the emergency protocol, to report this to command.
But command was three light-years away. They'd know in three years what was happening right now. And the crew in cryo — what could they do that she couldn't? Wake them, and they'd spend days in cryo-sickness, confused and disoriented. By the time they understood, the signal might be gone.
Or it might have done something to her.
The thought surfaced before she could push it away. What if it already had?
She checked the logs. The signal had started two hours ago. Two hours of this. Growing stronger. Evolving. The early entries showed chaotic static. The later ones — the ones from the last ten minutes — were forming words.
Her fingers hovered over the emergency protocol, shaking. The amber light on the console pulsed rhythmically.
"—don't—open—"
She froze. She hadn't put the headphones back on. The words hadn't come through the speakers. They'd come from the station itself — or somewhere inside her own head.
"—we're—behind—"
"—it's—coming—through—"
"—the—door—won't—hold—"
The whispers were clearer now. More coherent. More desperate. And they were talking about a door — and something that wanted to open it.
Elena sat for a long time, her options narrowing with every beat of her heart. Report it, and they'd think she was cracking under the isolation — six months alone could break anyone. Wake the crew, and she'd have to explain what she was hearing, and she wasn't sure she could explain it to herself.
She pulled the headphones back from the console, the cable trailing across her lap. She didn't put them on. She couldn't. But she could record.
Her fingers moved across the keyboard, opening the audio capture software. She set it to maximum fidelity, to record not just the signal but every artifact, every nuance, everything the system could capture.
"—you—hear—us—"
"—we—need—help—"
"—before—it's—too—late—"
Elena watched the recording time ticking upward. One minute. Two. The whispers continued, a chorus of terrified voices speaking from somewhere beneath the surface, or somewhere far beyond it, or somewhere inside her own unraveling mind.
Then she did the only thing she could think of.
She began writing down everything they said.
[end of chapter]