The samples arrived seventeen hours later.
Elena hadn't slept. She had sat in the hub, watching the drill feed from the southern pole, watching the machines bite into ice that shouldn't have contained anything but more ice. She had watched the crystalline fragments emerge, one by one, and she had felt something shift in her chest—not excitement, not fear, but recognition.
She knew these shapes. She didn't know how.
"Careful," Yuki said, though no one was being careless. They had all seen the containment protocols. The fragments were in vacuum-sealed cases, quarantine level three, everything they had trained for when handling potentially biological material from an alien world.
But these weren't biological. Elena knew that the moment she saw them through the observation glass.
They were memory.
"Dr. Voss?" Reeves stood beside her, close enough that she could smell the coffee on his breath. He had been drinking it black for the past fourteen hours, trying to stay sharp, trying to pretend he wasn't staring at the end of everything he understood about the universe. "Your assessment?"
"I need to examine them directly," she said.
"Quarantine protocols—"
"I know." She finally looked at him. His eyes were red, rimmed with exhaustion, but there was something else there too. Wonder. The same wonder she had felt, once, before the recognition set in. "They're not biological, Marcus. They're not even physical, not really. Look at the spectrograph."
She pulled up the data on the nearest screen. The crystals didn't register on standard material scans. No carbon chains, no silicon lattices, no molecular structure that their instruments could identify. They existed in a state that their science barely had words for—solid, yes, but solid the way a photograph is solid. Fixed light. Frozen time.
"What are they, then?" Reeves asked.
Elena turned back to the observation glass. One of the fragments was moving. Not much. Just a slight vibration, a hum that she could feel in her teeth even through the containment shielding.
"They're impressions," she said. "Like footprints. Or fingerprints. Someone touched this place, a long time ago, and left something behind."
"A message?"
She shook her head. "Not a message. Messages are intentional. This is... residue. The leftover shape of a mind that passed through here."
She didn't know where the words came from. She had never spoken like this before, not in her professional life, not in the papers she had published on xenolinguistic theory, not even in the speculative fiction she secretly wrote and never showed anyone. But the words felt right. They felt true.
The fragment vibrated again. This time, she heard it—not with her ears, but with something deeper, something that lived in the hollow spaces between her ribs.
Waiting,* it said. Or something like waiting. Something that meant: *I have been here so long, and now you are here, and I do not know if you are the next chapter or the end of the story.
Elena pressed her palm against the observation glass. The crystal pulsed once, a flash of light that wasn't light, and she felt something pass through her—not into her, through her, the way wind passes through a screen door.
She saw, for a moment, something else. A different sky. A different sun. A mind that had built this place, or grown it, or become it—she couldn't tell which—and had left behind not words, not meaning, but experience.
Fear. Anticipation. The particular terror of waiting for a verdict that might never come.
"Elena?" Reeves' hand was on her shoulder. "You okay?"
She blinked. The vision was gone. The crystal was still again, inert, just a piece of alien rock in a containment case.
But she wasn't.
"I need to work with it," she said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, distant and layered, like two people speaking in unison. "Direct contact. The quarantine protocols won't work because it's not contamination we're dealing with. It's... translation."
"Translation of what?"
She looked at him. At all of them, watching her now with expressions that ranged from concern to suspicion to that particular brand of scientific hunger that had brought them all to this station, to this world, to this moment.
"I don't know yet," she said.
But she was lying. She knew. She had felt it, in that moment of contact—a vast structure of thought that didn't think the way humans thought, that didn't remember the way humans remembered. Something that stored fear the way a library stores books. Something that judged.
And something that was waking up.
"Give me twelve hours," she said. "Alone with the samples. I'll tell you what we're dealing with."
Reeves hesitated. She could see him weighing protocols against possibilities, caution against the thing they had all come here to find: proof that humanity wasn't alone.
"Twelve hours," he finally said. "But I'm keeping the cameras running. And if anything—"
"I know," she said. "If anything happens, seal the lab. I understand."
She didn't tell him that the lab was already sealed, in a way he couldn't see. That the moment she had touched the glass, something had locked into place—not around the crystals, but around her.
The archive had found its translator.
And it was patient. It had waited millions of years.
It could wait twelve hours more.
End of Chapter 2