The transport reached the Jupiter station eighteen months after Peter left Mercury. It docked with the station by synchronizing its spin with the station's, then, slowly, the wheel on the end of the transport moving towards and locking into the corresponding wheel at the end of the station.
Peter was greeted by a woman.
"Dr. Bowman. I'm Dr. Kate Krakowski. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Please, come with me."
Peter followed Dr. Krakowski as they made their way through the wheels of the station and hallways connecting the wheels. They continued to speak while they were walking.
"I hear that your work is very impressive, but I hope you'll forgive that I haven't been following it," Dr. Krakowski said.
"I understand; I don't know that I'll be following it much, myself, anymore. Listen, I have a lot of questions about the Antares project."
"Okay. Feel free to ask me any questions you have right now."
"The coordinates directed you towards Antares. What did you see when you looked at Antares?"
"A message. A blinking light, using Morse code. The change in brightness wasn't very large, and it wasn't perceptible by any telescope on or orbiting Earth or Venus. We only saw it here."
"What did it say?"
" 'We are coming. Be ready.' Then it stopped. That's the only thing it said, and it only said it once. They would have had to have sent the message over five hundred years ago."
Peter thought about the message while they were walking before responding.
"They know our language. They use our own languages to communicate with us. How?"
"They know a lot about us. Probably more than we do, actually."
"Who are they?"
"We still don't really know. We just call them 'the aliens'."
"Are they the ones that sent the device?"
"We think so, but you'll learn soon that the device is only one part of our concern right now."
Dr. Krakowski used a keycard to open a door to a room that was relatively large for a space station. With a table in the middle, littered with numerous abandoned coffee cups, it seemed to be a meeting room. In it, a man was waiting.
"Dr. Bowman," the man said as he stood. "I'm Dr. Parker Samuels. Kate and I have been working on this project for some time."
"I know how important this is," Peter said, "so I want to do everything that I can do help. Are there briefing materials that I can read? What do you need me to do?"
"We don't really know yet, exactly" Dr. Samuels said.
Peter was confused. "Well, then, why am I here?"
Dr. Krakowsky responded. "They asked for you."
Peter looked at Dr. Krakowsky. " 'They'?"
"The aliens."
"But you said the only thing they said was 'We are coming'."
"In the Morse code message, yes," Dr. Krakowsky said. "But that was fourteen years ago. They've come, and they're here on this station."
"Look," Dr. Samuels said, "I'm sure that you feel overwhelmed right now and you have a lot of questions. They seem like the patient type, but I'm not, and I've been waiting for you to get here for well over a year and a half. I'd really like to introduce you to them immediately. By the time you're done talking to them, I'm pretty sure we'll be the ones asking you questions."
Without waiting for a response from Peter, Dr. Samuels hurriedly walked to a panel on the wall and pushed a button. On the other side of the room, a door opened. Peter walked through it.
In the room was an object against the wall that the human eye could not fully perceive and the human mind could not comprehend. The outline of the object was as a large door with an arch on top, but the inside showed the heavens in the distance. Beyond the door, space itself would bend, with the stars, planets, and nebula appearing as stones underneath rippling water. They would move, out of sync with one another, without any discernible distance between any two objects or size of any one object. Stretching out of the door and into the distance was an ornate marble bridge with no handrails, reaching much further than Peter could see.
On either side of the door were two large figures, each about ten feet tall, that appeared to be nothing more than fire, even though they were certainly solid. They were humanoid, though each had six wings, and they looked at Peter as he entered the room.
"They asked for you, specifically," Dr. Samuels said. "They won't let anybody else in."
