LJ shrugged. “They’re going to ask questions either way. This way, we’re at least trying to make contact on our terms.”

  Marcus remained silent, watching the exchange with a knowing look. If there were questions, they wouldn’t be coming from the public—at least, not yet.

  Tash keyed in a test sequence, overlaying it on the LRO’s current antenna profile. “We can run a simple burst—short pulses, prime number intervals, clean carrier. Keep it tight-band and focused on the anomaly site. It’ll look like diagnostic noise unless someone knows exactly what they’re looking at.”

  Jazz crossed her arms. “So we send it. And wait.”

  LJ gave a small nod. “Exactly.”

  Marcus looked around the room, gauging the tension. “Alright. Do it. But keep it quiet. Log everything, and make sure I’m looped in on any response—immediate or delayed.”

  Tash was already compiling the pulse sequence, her screen a flurry of waveforms and timing markers.

  “This is what passes for a first contact protocol?” Nate muttered. “Beep if you’re intelligent?”

  Jazz shot him a look. “Got anything better?”

  He held up his hands. “Nope. Just saying. It’s either this or send them an emoji.”

  Tash hit enter, and a moment later, the pulse sequence began uploading to the orbital relay.

  The message—basic, elegant, and undeniably artificial—was on its way.

  Jazz was already scribbling something down. “We should log everything we send and any return response. If this works—hell, if anything happens—we need a clean chain of what was said and when.”

  “I’m on it,” Marcus said. “And I’ll get someone from comms to isolate the transmissions.”

  There was a brief lull. A collective pause, the kind that stretches just long enough to feel heavy. Everyone glanced around, silently waiting for someone to break it—to say what they all were thinking.

  LJ was the one to do it, his voice quiet but certain. “Let’s see if it talks back.”

  The first signal went out cleanly—short, deliberate pulses marking prime numbers, transmitted on a carrier frequency pulled from the band detected during the original anomaly.

  The room fell into a tense silence.

  All eyes were on the monitors displaying the return telemetry. Signal strength, packet logs, background noise. Dozens of metrics updated in real time.

  Ten seconds passed. Then twenty.

  LJ leaned in, watching the data with clinical precision. “We should see some kind of fluctuation. Anything that indicates a reaction.”

  Tash frowned at the flat response graph. “We’re getting a clean bounce from the surface—perfect signal return. But there’s no modulation, no shift. No feedback. Nothing that looks even remotely artificial.”

  Nate tapped his fingers against the edge of his console, the sound just sharp enough to cut the silence. “So… either it didn’t hear us, or it’s giving us the silent treatment.”

  Jazz crossed her arms, eyes still on the telemetry. “Let’s assume it heard us. What’s our next line?”

  A short pause followed as options hung in the air.

  “Try a different pattern,” Nate said. “Fibonacci, maybe Pi. Something with structure, but not the same kind of mathematical rigidity.”

  LJ raised an eyebrow. “Why? The prime sequence isn’t naturally occurring—it’s the cleanest indicator of intelligence. That should be enough.”

  “Yeah, but what if it’s not about what should be enough?” Tash countered, already pulling up the new transmission interface. “Fibonacci’s more organic, more likely to show up in nature. If it’s working off pattern recognition or some kind of predictive model, it might be more responsive to that than primes.”

  Nate gave a shrug. “I’m just saying—if we’re going fishing, we might as well try a few different lures.”

  LJ gave a reluctant nod. “Fair point.”

  “Besides,” Tash added, fingers already typing, “you want to be the one who said not to try them?”

  No one answered.

  Tash keyed in the second transmission—short pulses following the Fibonacci sequence, clean timing intervals, no encoding beyond the rhythm itself.

  The pulses changed—slightly different rhythm, but still unmistakably structured. A new sequence, a new message.

  Again, they waited.

  Again, nothing.

  LJ rubbed his jaw. “Try Pi. Maybe the irrationality will show we’re not just echoing something from nature.”

  Tash hesitated. “Up to how many digits?”

  “Keep it tight. Forty, maybe fifty. Enough to make it clear we know what we’re doing.”

  The third transmission went out—clean, sharp bursts spaced with mechanical precision.

  And still, the return was nothing but silence.

  That was when the engineering instinct kicked in.

  They sent patterns— e, phi, the golden ratio. Numbers to say: we’re here. Silence, in reply. No blink. No pulse. Just stillness.

  Nate leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “We’re painting the side of a barn with laser pointers and hoping it blinks at us.”

  Jazz turned to him, frowning. “Now’s not the time for jokes.”

  The words weren’t sharp, but they weren’t light either. Not this time.

  Nate blinked, surprised. “I was—“

  “Because this might be first contact,” she cut in. “And I don’t think snark is going to cut it.”

  He held up a hand, backing off slightly. “Alright. Sorry.”

  It passed quickly, but the sting lingered.

  Tash leaned back, exasperated. “For all we know, we’re beaming noise into a rock that hasn’t listened to anything for a million years.”

  Jazz didn’t say anything, just stared at the silent telemetry feed. Her fingers tightened around her pen until her knuckles went white—like she could squeeze meaning out of silence if she just held on tight enough.

  And still—nothing.

  No pulse. No echo. No change.

  Hours passed. At first, the room had buzzed with energy, speculation, quiet jokes, too much coffee. But as the attempts dragged on, that energy dulled into silence. People shifted in their chairs, stared longer at their screens without really seeing them.

  Four hours. Dozens of combinations. Nothing.

  Jazz let her head fall back against her chair with a frustrated groan. “You’ve got to be kidding me. At least say something. Do something. Ugh.”

  LJ rubbed at his temples. “Maybe it’s still dormant. Or still trying to decide whether to respond at all.”

  “Or,” Nate offered, “it heard us and decided to ghost humanity.”

  Jazz shot him a look, but didn’t argue.

  Marcus finally stepped forward from where he’d been watching quietly, arms folded. His tone was firm, but not unkind. “That’s enough for tonight. You need to rest. We need you at peak tomorrow—for the landing, and whatever comes after.”

  No one protested. They were too tired to.

  The scent of something warm and tomato-rich drifted from the kitchen, luring the crew in with the promise of real food. The fridge, now well-stocked thanks to the latest supply run, offered a small lineup of vacuum-sealed, chef-prepped meals—nothing fancy, but leagues above their initial experience. After the hours of silence, second-guessing, and unanswered questions, it might as well have been fine dining.

  Jazz leaned against the counter, arms folded as she waited for the microwave to chirp. “Do you think it’s ignoring us out of politeness, or spite?”

  LJ, seated with his elbows on the table and eyes half-lidded, gave a soft grunt. “Could be it’s trying to figure out how to politely say ‘stop poking me.’ If we stop talking about it, does that mean it didn’t happen?”

  Across the room, Nate suddenly straightened like someone had hit him with a cattle prod. His eyes locked on Tash.

  “Tash! Holy crap! You missed it! And if there was ever a more opportune moment—“

  Tash blinked at him over a forkful of rice. “What are you talking about?”

  Jazz and LJ looked up in sync. The tone in Nate’s voice was urgent enough to cut through the fog of fatigue.

  Nate pointed dramatically toward the screen in the adjacent lab, where a still image of the landing site floated in stark monochrome. “You’ll never forgive yourself.”

  Tash squinted at the display, then back at him. “Nate, what are you on about?”

  Nate grinned like a kid who’d just pulled off the perfect prank. “If there was ever a time for you to trot out the line, ‘That’s no moon…’”

  Tash sighed, deadpan. “’It’s a space station.’”

  LJ pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nate, you should be very happy there isn’t an airlock nearby, otherwise…”

  Tash didn’t bother hiding the smirk. “Nathan Carter, please be assured I hate you. With the fiery passion of a thousand suns.”

  “You’re welcome,” Nate said, grinning like he knew exactly what he'd just done.

  Marcus, who had been quietly observing from the doorway, leaned toward LJ with just enough volume for the rest of the table to hear. “Just so you know—we still have access to the ‘sleepy-time’ cocktail. No paperwork required.”

  LJ chuckled, not looking up from his tray. “I’ll think about it.”

  The microwave chirped. Jazz retrieved her food and dropped into the chair opposite him. “Okay, I’m officially too tired to argue—this might not be Mum’s five-spice pork belly, but right now, I’m beyond caring.”

  They ate quietly for a few minutes, the occasional clink of cutlery filling the space. It wasn’t quite comfort, but it was something close—an unspoken agreement that, for just a little while, they didn’t need to figure everything out.

  Eventually, they began to move, standing one by one, stretching tired limbs, collecting trays and clearing space in a quiet, practiced rhythm. The room dimmed as someone thumbed the light control, bathing the kitchen in a low amber glow.

  From the doorway, Marcus gave a short nod, his voice steady but low. “Get some sleep. You’ll want a clear head tomorrow.”

  No one argued. There was no need.

  They drifted out, footsteps soft against the polished floor, the last traces of shared laughter still clinging to the air as they slipped away toward their rooms.

  Touchdown was only hours away.

  And with it, the beginning of whatever came next.

  —

  Despite the exhaustion, anticipation hung in the air like static. The crew returned to their stations, faces drawn but focused, the light from their monitors catching in tired eyes.

  Systems were re-checked. Trajectories confirmed. Communications protocols reviewed and backed up.

  Marcus moved through the room with quiet precision. “Status?”

  LJ, eyes fixed on the screen in front of him, gave a small nod. “As it’s ever going to get for a mission built and launched in a very short window.”

  Marcus grimaced. “Not a standard I’d like to repeat.”

  Off to the side, one of the overnight monitoring techs raised a hand. “Uh—just to flag, we logged something around 3am.”

  Marcus was already moving to the screen. “Go on.”

  “Heat signature under the structure grew slightly—slow but consistent increase. Peaked around three hours before projected touchdown.”

  Tash leaned in to look at the graph. “Still well below anything volcanic or mechanical, but… yeah. That’s not residual heat. That’s internal.”

  Jazz looked between them. “So it heard us, and now it’s just… waiting?”

  LJ’s uneasy expression was mirrored by Tash. No one had an answer.

  And the clock was still ticking.

  The quiet wasn’t routine. It pressed on their shoulders, made every movement feel too loud.

  Every screen was alive with telemetry—velocity readouts, orientation markers, descent rate indicators—all of it updating in real time as the rover began its final approach.

  No one spoke. No one shifted.

  The team had run the numbers. They’d double-checked every vector and line of control code, every live function onboard. But the truth sat beneath all of it like a pressure front: there had been no full test of this landing configuration. No rehearsals. No margin for error.

  It was all theoretical—mathematically sound, thoroughly reviewed. But this wasn’t a simulation. This was opening night, and their star performer was stepping onstage for the first time, live.

  Tash stared at the rover’s telemetry with white-knuckled stillness, her lips moving silently as if willing the machine into position.

  Jazz hovered near the rear of the room, not daring to speak. Even Nate had gone quiet, jaw set, eyes fixed on the display.

  Marcus stood with his arms folded, gaze unreadable. He exhaled slowly, just loud enough to be heard. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

  LJ’s mouth twitched at the quote, but he didn’t look up. “Then let’s hope the enemy’s in a forgiving mood.”

  “Final descent begins now,” Tash said softly. “Altitude… 1.2 kilometres.”

  The engines fired, low, steady pulses as the rover adjusted its attitude and slowed its vertical speed.

  A murmur broke the tension. One of the analysts at the back of the room looked up towards the team. “Uh… there’s more regolith down there than we expected. Surface disruption’s deeper. That’s not the contour from the last pass.”

  Tash’s eyes widened as she panned the descent cam. “Dammit. If we drop straight into that, we’re going to sink. Adjusting trajectory—shifting target zone a hundred metres east.”

  Marcus snapped to attention. “Do we have enough fuel for that?”

  “Technically?” Tash said, fingers flying across the console. “Yes. Comfortably? Probably not.”

  As she keyed in the new burn vector, her jaw tightened—just for a second—then vanished beneath pure focus. No hesitation in her hands, but the weight of what they were risking sat clearly on her face.

  Nate muttered under his breath. “So it might be more of a bumpy landing than we anticipated.”

  Marcus exhaled through his nose. “Wonderful. We modify a billion-dollar rover in a few days, fly it to the Moon with no testing, and now we’re gambling the final descent on a fuel margin.

  “Yay for expedited science,” Jazz muttered.

  The final seconds stretched long. Altitude fell. Velocity dropped. Lateral thrusters fired in short, sharp bursts.

  Then—

  A jolt. A dust plume.

  Contact.

  “Telemetry stable,” Tash breathed. “We’re down.”

  Nate let out a sharp exhale and leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. “I’m never doing that sober again.”

  Tash didn’t move right away—just stared at the screen, jaw clenched tight.

  Marcus, still watching her, caught the way her hands trembled slightly over the console. Not enough for anyone else to see. But he saw it.

  “We can do this,” she said softly.

  He leaned in, just enough that no one else could hear. “You okay?”

  Her reply was barely above a whisper. “I’m not used to being unsure if the math is enough.”

  Marcus didn’t respond right away. He didn’t need to.

  Then, before he could say anything, she straightened her shoulders, pushed back from the console, and turned to the team. “Let’s get the telemetry up and running.”

  A soft chime broke the tension.

  Transmission: SYSTEM HEARTBEAT CONFIRM

  The chime echoed through the room. The screen blinked. It was alive. And it hadn’t been told to be.

  Jazz leaned in. “Is it supposed to do that?”

  LJ’s brow furrowed. “…We didn’t give it the nod yet.”

  Marcus looked towards Tash. “Trouble?”

  She glanced at the signal trace, then shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. Could be a heartbeat ping from the onboard firmware—flutter from system init. Normal-ish for a cold boot.” Her hand hovered near the console, not alarmed, but not ready to relax either.

  Jazz raised an eyebrow. “’Normal-ish’ isn’t wildly comforting.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” Tash said—though she didn’t look away from the telemetry stream.

  LJ didn’t move, eyes still fixed on the image streaming in from the rover’s first panoramic capture.

  The image feed stuttered, brief static, then a flicker. For a moment, the screen was all fractured greys. Then it resolved, grainy at first, sharpening as the software smoothed the frame.

  The landing site lay bathed in hard, silver-toned sunlight. Shadow fell across the foreground, cast by a single object.

  Smooth lines. Hard angles.

  A geometric structure, half-buried in dust. Deliberate. Artificial. Impossible to mistake.

  LJ didn’t speak. Couldn’t. Whatever this was—it hadn’t just survived. It had waited.

  Jazz stared at the screen, voice barely audible.

  “…Holy shit.”

  It had symmetry. Intent. The kind of precision nature didn’t leave behind.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE FIRST FULL image silenced the room. The structure jutted from the dust like a blade, too smooth. Too deliberate.

  Geology didn’t make right angles. Not in clusters. Not this clean.

  Jazz stared at the screen, her voice barely more than breath. “How did we not find this? All the satellites, all the passes, all the mapping…”

  LJ leaned in, elbows on the console, eyes narrowed in concentration. “It wasn’t here. Not on any maps or Apollo data. Nothing from LRO, Chandrayaan, or Smart-1. It was under the surface. Buried deep enough that even radar didn’t catch it.”

  He hesitated, then added, “Or it was hidden. Shielded.” He said it like the word had just occurred to him, and now he couldn’t unsee it.

  No one contradicted him.

  The room had shifted from tension to reverence. The air felt thinner, the hum of the systems suddenly loud in the quiet that followed.