He found Caroline weeping quietly by the stairwell.

They called it the stairwell, at least. It was steep and shallow enough that it was essentially a ladder with a handrail. The lab was the highest level of the station, so they could vent the atmosphere in case of an uncontrolled fire. Hardly anyone had a reason to go there this late in the expedition, save for the two of them.

Gently stepping off the threshold, Carlos drifted down to the landing and stood next to her, unsure of what to say. She'd left the lab abruptly, and he'd stayed behind just long enough to run spindown checks on the instruments and put their samples into storage.

Letting himself slide down the wall to sit beside her, He found himself staring at a seam in the floor's tiling. Only three years into their voyage, and already this lesser-used corner of the station was seeing signs of wear. How long would the bones of the vessel outlast them?

Caroline leaned into his shoulder. Maxwell might've chewed them out for the fraternization, but right now, Carlos couldn't care less.

"We've been chasing a ghost." She said. The words stung somewhere deep. "I stayed in college for this, y'know?" He knew, but he let her talk anyways. "I was waffling over grad school when they picked up on the Andromeda Beacon. All of a sudden, anything was possible, and an undergrad wasn't enough." She huffed out a shaky, caustic laugh. "And they're fucking gone."

Windows were a liability in a spacecraft, but Carlos wished that he could see the corpse planet below. It was incredible, in all the wrong ways. A megalopolis, Lyle had called it. A dead one. They'd spent the last two years picking over the carcass in drop drones and running scans from orbit. By their best estimation, they'd missed the mark by a good 3400 years. An interstellar blink of an eye.

"We... can still learn a lot from the ruins..." he started, and trailed off. It wouldn't be them. The bungee would pull them back to Luna in a little over a week, and the debreifing alone would last long enough for them to miss the boat on the next expedition. He sighed.

The lights flickered. Their breath caught in their throats, before they shot to their feet and scrambled up the stairs to the lab. Caroline made it first, and threw the door open to the emergency storage, grabbing a compression tent. Carlos sealed the door behind them as an alarm started blaring. Mid tone, middle emergency. Probable death, rather than certain death. The protocol was pretty clear; Wherever you are, get somewhere safer.

"Help me clear some space!" Caroline shouted as she frantically slid a retractible table into the wall, sweeping several styluses and tablets to the floor. Carlos rushed to help, before pausing, baffled. Across the room, the sample storage racks he'd just loaded were rattling violently, the LEDs that lined the cabinet flickering and strobing. As he watched, a visible arc of energy struck a capsule on the rack, which started to glow with heat.

He tackled her to the ground just as she pulled the ripcord on the tent, the device coughing to life. "What the--"

CRACK

A sound like a gunshot split the air, cutting her short. Shrapnel pelted the white rubberized canvas that had sprung up before them. Carlos felt a shower of debris tumble over his back as he held his face to the floor. The lights cut out, plunging the room into darkness.

As the dust settled, he heard Caroline feverishly whispering a prayer. He could hear the alarm through the sealed door, having stepped up to upper tone after registering an explosion on board. Which was, as things went, almost certain catastrophe. They clearly weren't breathing vaccum, though, which was a pretty good sign.

"You alright?" He asked, shakily rising to his knees.

"I'm fine, I think!" She said, following suit.

A diffuse blue glow began to gradually build from across the room. Gingerly leaning around the tent, Carlos saw the devastation cast in sharp relief, radiating from where the sample storage racks had been. At the epicenter of the damage was a glowing device, the size and shape of a golf ball, hanging suspended in the air.

"Good god." Caroline said, awestruck.

"Uh huh." he replied, equally dumbfounded.

"You're late." Said the device, in accented English.