A fleet.
Astra Kael, the last remaining archivist, hadn’t spoken to another human in 400 days. The evacuation order had come in 2323, right before the quantum comms collapsed. "Solar system closed. Outer colonies abandoned."
"You found the file. Now the archive is open. Prepare for contact. PUSATFILM21.INFO will be our first shore."
No. Not an object.
The station was never meant for war. Once a vast cultural archive—movies, music, forgotten histories—it now drifted on the edge of the solar system, its dishes pointed not at stars, but at the silent abyss.
No one knew how it got there. The timestamp said 2024—three centuries old, from Earth’s early streaming age. But the encryption was quantum-level, impossible for 21st-century tech.
Until today.
Every day, Astra tried to crack it. Every day, the file resisted.
Incoming. Unidentified object. Trajectory: originating from beneath Uranus's cloud tops.
It was a lighthouse.
She opened the file. Grainy video flickered to life. A woman in an old-style news studio spoke urgently:
Astra leaned back, heart pounding. The archive was never a museum.