Henry woke up to a sharp alarm. The siren sounded so shrill that his ears popped. Without wasting a second, he jumped out of bed and rushed to the control panels.

— What’s going on? — he had to shout over Judy, who was already leaning over the dashboards.

— I think we’ve hit some kind of particle flux,’ she tried to make sense of the growing data stream. — The systems are going crazy!

Henry crouched down beside her and looked at the instrument readings. Whatever it was, they were clearly in for an anxious night in orbit.

Together with the International Space Expedition ISS-126, they had been working aboard the space station for the third month on a programme to study the long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body. The last week of March was particularly busy. Over the previous few days, the station’s airlock had been inundated with a veritable swarm of micrometeorites and space debris, significantly complicating spacewalk operations. And today, it seems, the situation is out of control….

Scraps of radar data showed a cloud of high-velocity particles around the station! The first calculations showed that by composition they were mostly ice and silicate rocks, but they were moving at an astonishing speed, uncharacteristic of the usual debris belt. The first meteor shower had already fallen on the station’s protective shields, creating characteristic flashes at high impact velocities.

Having weighed all the risks, the ISS-126 expedition leadership had to make the difficult decision to make an emergency evacuation. The astronauts had only to gather the essentials and anxiously await the arrival of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which was to evacuate them to Earth.

The countdown came from all the station’s loudspeakers, accompanied by the roar of the engines of the docking Soyuz MS-25 rescue shuttle. Henry and his crew watched the approaching ship from the panoramic porthole of the living compartment. It was about a minute to docking.

In the tense silence of waiting, Henry felt Judy’s hand on his shoulder, a light, friendly shake. Instead of a thousand words. They already understood everything without even voicing their thoughts aloud. Their little ISS-126 expedition had been the best they had ever been on orbit. For these few months they had managed to become a real family, in which everyone trusted each other unconditionally. And now all this was suddenly cut short, collapsed by a sudden capricious swarm of celestial bodies.

Through his eyes, clouded with excitement and regret, Henry saw something shining brightly in the pulsating cloud of particles ahead on the course, illuminating their little world with its radiance. He squinted, trying to get a better look, but in the next instant the picturesque flash dissolved and faded away. The whistle of docking clamps and the hiss of pressure equalisation heralded the arrival of the rescue crew. The fateful swarm of meteorites made itself known again, intensifying the bombardment of their temporary home. The top priority for them all now was to evacuate as soon as possible.

The land below was so beautiful. The undulating horizon was flush with the shimmering stroke of seas and oceans, occasionally sprinkled with handfuls of sharp iceberg peaks. Henry nestled against the limited porthole of their time shuttle, cherishing each of their last moments of contemplation of their home planet before returning to Earth. They had travelled a long way back, gradually dropping from record orbital speeds to acceptable altitudes for a safe descent. Now all that remained was to wait patiently for the point of no return, when their compartment would separate from the main spacecraft and fly on a ballistic trajectory into Earth’s atmosphere.

The atmospheric corkscrew was always the most anxious moment in the return. A fireball around the habitable compartment, millions of tiny particles sweeping away everything in their path like a sea vortex. Henry recalled the recent collision with a mysterious flow of matter in outer space, and reflections from the former exalted flight of spirit to the acute longing and sadness of the aborted expedition. And then there was the flash-the restless spume of light between the swarms of debris that glittered so brightly on the last spin round the station.

‘What if it is the comet Ket itself!’ an agonising conjecture struck the sudden discovery.

They had encountered the legendary nucleus of the comet, which for the last hundred years had been travelling through the thickness of the galaxy, gathering swarms of rocky debris like a gravitational funnel!

Everything fit together — the unnaturally high speeds, and the dense nucleus of ice and silicates that apparently used to be part of a distant exoplanet…. Like a mysterious ghost from another time, the comet swept through the entire solar system, sending out a blue glow of ionised gas tail under the direct stream of solar radiation. A millennia-old mystery that has haunted scientists throughout the history of astronomy, and they inadvertently ran into it! One of the last great guardians of the interstellar pathways of the universe.

It was as if everything around them had slowed down, blurred into a single impression of exciting events. They had time to touch the Great One, to realise the mystery of the cosmic depths… and carry it back to Earth with them. Except that the crumbling walls of their temporary shelter heralded the beginning of the final corkscrew through the atmospheric barrier. The countdown to landing had begun….

The explosive shockwave sideways knocked the parachute of their descent compartment, and they began to corkscrew uncontrollably across the atmospheric turbulence.

— Stay focused, Henry. Grisha, one of the Russian team members, struggled to control the unguided module. The parachute seemed to have burned out completely, and the estimated landing point near the Baikonur Cosmodrome was hopelessly gone.

The air grinded with a roar in the red-hot armour of the shields carrying the habitation module. Only the sturdy hull structure and heat-resistant materials held out against the onslaught of the universal elements.

— This can’t go on forever! — Judy stared helplessly at the dashboards crumbling from heatstroke. — We have to equalise the tilt angle!

Henry had to use considerable force as the tiny servos pulled up the front rudders of the brutal hull. If only there was enough power for levelling to survive the impact on landing … And most importantly, not to lose the threads of control in this rebellion of the elements…..

Finally, their power ran out. The broken flaming hull of the living compartment hit the merciless ground somewhere in the middle of the Asian steppes. Incredibly, they were still alive! Thanks to their efforts, the first impact had landed on the thickened side shields, greatly dampening the force of the fall. Ahead of them was an extremely hard final landing, but without the ability to steer.

A terrifying shudder shook their temporary shelter from its foundations, followed by acrid puffs of dust and smoke. And a moment later, the rapid uncontrollable spinning finally ceased, as if a giant’s palm had swept them to a final halt.

The rumbling of the last crumbling debris subsided, and the unbearable silence of the desert wilderness reigned.

Their space shuttle was badly damaged, mangled by the ballistic trajectory of the landing manoeuvre. Broken pieces of plating protruded from the blistered metal in every direction, and the ground was dented everywhere. A good third of the electronics were now permanently disabled, but in the living compartment itself they had survived without significant bruising, thanks to the reinforced construction.

— Thank God they’re alive… — Judy exhaled a muffled breath and stretched her lips in a faint smile of relief.

Their entire team was slowly regaining consciousness, assessing the damage and calculating their next steps. Despite the radio silence, there was no doubt that Mission Control was already tracking them relentlessly through all possible communication channels. All that remained was to wait…

Henry was interested in the main question: how far had they travelled from the original landing corridor? Having given the command to reset the standard location systems, he stared with a biased look at the fragments of the surviving information board….

Unbelievable! No, this simply couldn’t be…

According to the surviving geopositioning data, they had landed in the middle of the impenetrable steppes of central Mongolia, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlements or major roads. Right in the centre of the giant closed ring of circumpolar wasteland called the Gobi Valley! What could have diverted them so seriously from their planned landing area?

The astronauts’ camp was lit by the dim glow of a fire lit for this endless starry night. Pulling back the canopy of the escape tent, Henry lifted his head to the crystalline scattering of honeyed acres and stretched out his arms to encompass the entire firmament of the universe in an instant.

— It’s beautiful. — was all he could breathe out as he looked at Judy, who came closer, mesmerised. — Look how clearly you can see all the nebulae!

The deep desert night had thrown off the shackles of artificial civilisation from the restless human souls, plunging them into the eternal triumph of the vast expanse of the heavens. The Milky Way spread its ridge here, studded with myriads of stars of tiny carbon fire. And in all directions, there is a light haze of dark nebulae, the true and primordial matrices from which the entire cosmic cycle of life and death is derived.

— I think I see her… — Henry whispered almost silently, catching the only thread of light in the sky.

A barely discernible flicker that slid along the misty fringe and mingled with the delicate messier scattering. It was her after all-the wandering comet like a witch had guided their rescue shuttle away from its scheduled landing! Ket’s core, strewn with billions of years of comet dust, and a very real threat to the artificial orbital inhabitants, unprepared to face a real alien from Interstellar.

Fascinated, they stood silently listening to the dazzling cosmic spectacle unfolding on the very dome of the starry sky. The path of the comet’s tail was gradually turning ghostly blue in the polar highlands that enveloped them. The line of the comet’s tail became more and more distinct in the night sky, casting a faint bluish glow on the sand dunes around their temporary camp. Henry could not take his eyes off this mesmerising sight, for not long ago they had miraculously escaped a collision with the nucleus of the comet itself in outer space.

In the weightlessness of that anomalous region of space, the particles of icy comet dust would have swept their tiny shuttlecraft out of orbit like a grain of sand. But here, on his native Earth, the sight of this eternal wanderer of the universe caused Henry only awe.

— I think we were the first people to see Comet Ket up close and personal, Judy said quietly, squeezing his palm in hers.

Henry nodded silently, still unable to collect his thoughts. He was well aware that their incredible chance encounter with an interstellar body had been one of the greatest discoveries in human history. After all, ‘Ket’ was a legendary comet, making a complete revolution around the solar system only once every few million years!

One could only wonder when it would return to the embrace of its stellar home to reappear before the eyes of future generations of Earthlings after many epochs. Perhaps, by that time people will already have the opportunity to travel between star worlds and meet her in outer space.

The ghostly comet luminary slowly moved across the night dome, moving away towards the northern horizon. As it disappeared from sight, it continued to exude a mysterious glow, gradually colouring the line of its tail with a deeper azure hue.

Henry shuddered with a sudden chill and pulled his life blanket tighter around him. They would be evacuated from this backwater at dawn tomorrow, but there was plenty of time to think about what was coming.

For now, he would simply savour the moment of eternity they shared with Judy and the rest of their expedition mates. A moment that had burst upon them in an unexpected meteor swarm and had nearly been fatal. A moment in which the legendary messenger of other worlds, the comet Ket, shone a mysterious light over the vast expanse of the Gobi….