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come, it went, and she stepped into the SUV and slid herself along the rear bench. Her constant struggle with strange people and situations wasn't going to get in her way today.
    'I'm sorry for all this secrecy and haste,' Bales said, getting into the car and shutting the door behind him, 'but we want to keep what we know and what they know entirely separate.'
    The car pulled away, accelerating at an uncomfortable pace past the rear of the hangers.
    'Who are they ?' Sally asked.
    The car slowed, reaching a chain-link gate that started retracting straight away. Outside, a group of people clutching big cameras with fat lenses and tall flash guns pushed their way in through the growing gap. They crowded the car, thrusting their cameras up against the windows, blasting flash after flash through the glass. Sally recoiled, shielding her eyes from the relentless onslaught.
    'D on't worry, they can't see you. You're quite safe in here,' Bales reassured her.
    The driver leaned on the horn, edging the car forward through the small crowd. It didn't take long until they were free, and soon they were travelling along a lightly trafficked highway, overtaking everything else on it.
    'I take it there's more to this than a simple malfunction on the International Space Station?' Sally said, watching the traffic flying backwards on the dull, grey infrastructure.
    'Yes, there is,' Bales said.
    'And I don't think you need me just bec ause I'm good with light, either,' Sally continued, eyes jumping from tree to tree as they took over from the bricks-and-mortar landscape. A field rushed by, its crop trimmed to the ground, stumps yellow and withered.
    ' No,' Bales said.
    Sally looked at him; he was studying her. His tanned face was doing well to hide it, but his searching eyes betrayed his curiosity. Sally was used to it. Her reputation often preceded her, and it was one of the reasons she had shied away from the lecture halls and seminars, retiring to the seclusion of SETI research. Ever since she was young, she had been under constant scrutiny.
    'What have you found?' Sally asked, breaking eye contact with Bales to hide the excitement crackling inside her belly.
    'Well, you could say that it found us .'
    Sally looked back at him, her eyes tracing his features to see if he was mocking her. He wasn't. 'So it's true.'
    'What's true?'
    'Well, it was just a rumour,' she said, playing with her fingers, 'but word is that the ISS had made contact with an entity … not of this world.'
    The rumour wasn't true at all, but Sally thought she might be able to squeeze more truth out of the man if he believed his information had already been compromised. She knew how these things worked: information was dished out on a need-to-know basis, and no one ever needed to know — especially not her. She was a component in a machine, a piece in a puzzle.
    They considered each other, and she worried for a fleeting moment that he had seen straight through her ruse. He broke his gaze with her and looked out the window as concrete expanse began to consume nature once again, not saying anything. Sally took this as a cue to drop the conversation — at least for now.
    T he car slowed as it threaded its way through the tightening asphalt canyons between the tall industrial structures of West Korolyov. It came to a stop outside a dominating yellow brick building whose tall, cuboid structure seemed to have far too few windows for its size, almost like a prison. The barrier opened as they pulled up to it, and closed behind them again right away.
    'Please put this on,' the non descript man said, handing her a lanyard with a plastic card dangling from the end. Although she understood the languages of the cosmos unlike anyone else, she struggled with the languages of other countries, and the Russian text on the card meant nothing to her. She slipped it over her head.
    They parked up and climbed out the SUV, and Bales alone led her into the building. They followed corridor after