Desperate for answers, the science officer returned to the signal data, mapping the pulses against neurological readings she had secretly collected from the crew, and the results made her chest tighten with a cold, undeniable terror; the waveform wasn't merely responding, it was mimicking, adapting, aligning itself to brain patterns, heartbeats, and emotional spikes, a living lure designed to attract intelligence, curiosity, and fear, and the realization struck her like a physical blow: this was not a message, it was a trap, not meant to communicate but to ensnare, to bait the thinking creatures aboard the station into responding, and when she traced the origin back to the asteroid she understood the horrifying truth—the asteroid had not sent a signal, it had broadcast a beacon, a warning, and the entity that answered it was now inside Astra-9, moving among them, feeding on their terror, learning their patterns, calculating their weaknesses, and the creature had not come from the asteroid at all, it had always been there, dormant, waiting, awakened only by the lure that had reached across the void to find them, and as she stared at the pulsing waveform that now seemed alive, conscious, almost gleeful in its intent, she realized with a chill that they were trapped, hunted not by a mindless monster but by something patient, intelligent, and impossibly alien, something that did not need to attack to dominate, for fear alone had become its weapon, and the station itself was already its playground.