He scrolled back past the first image to the latest scene. There was something wrong with the file: it should have been a video – but it wouldn’t play, despite his urging.

“I’m going to have to do this the hard way after all. Can you make sure I’m not disturbed?”

[The Americans have retreated to an ARCO drilling facility some two kilometres distant. I have set up a perimeter to keep them away from the settlement, but they appear content to stay where they are. I have lost seven teletroopers due to mechanical failure, another three to enemy action. Of the remaining twenty-two, only fifteen are fully operational. However, it is the sterilisation they have ordered that concerns me.]

Petrovitch stumbled into the table in front of him, spilling his coffee and dislodging one of the biscuits so that it rolled on to the floor. “St… what?”

[A flight of planes from Eielson has been delayed due to the weather. Delayed, but not postponed.]

“How long do I have?”

[Perhaps as much as twenty minutes.]

“Yebat’ kopat’.” He went back to his bag. Right down at the bottom was a tube of conducting glue.

[Pin values for the data card.] An image hovered in front of him.

“Thanks.”

[You will need to supply two point seven volts to pin four.]

“Yeah. I know.”

[Pin three is ground. These two must be connected first.]

“Michael. Shut the huy up.” He filleted his reader, extruding the wires in a fan. “I was doing this before you were born.”

[I am only twelve.]

“Precisely my point.” He stripped the sleeving off each wire with his teeth. “You don’t even have opposable thumbs.”

Petrovitch remotely accessed the reader’s set-up screen, and assigned the correct values to the wires. He cleared a space on the workbench with a sweep of his arm and set out the reader, its bundle of wires and the card. Bending low, he cranked up the magnification on his eyes, and started to stick each wire to each metal contact in turn.

“Yes? No?”

[One moment.]

“I don’t have a yebani moment. They’re going to bomb the town flat in less than fifteen minutes and I need to know if this card tells me Lucy’s in the line of fire.”

The light on the reader flicked from steady green to blinking yellow.

[Interesting. The most recent file is incomplete: I will recreate the end-of-file data. Done. The file is ready to play. We have analysts standing by.]

Petrovitch blinked, and suddenly it was night.

Night, but not dark. A streamer of burning light tore through the sky, east to west, shedding pieces as it went. In the raw data, the camera jerked and shook, but he could correct for that, keeping the main incandescent mass in the centre of the frame, while bits calved off and flashed with their own energy.

It wasn’t quiet. Two voices exchanged opinions on the meteor: one was the camera operator, distinct and loud. The other was quieter but more excitable, standing a little way off. They talked in Inupiat and English, swapping between the two when the vocabulary in one became stretched. Behind both men was the distant grumble of air being superheated and torn aside, and the yowl and yip of husky dogs.

The speed of the thing meant that the image sometimes went dark. Then the lens was hurriedly re-aimed and the white-orange glare would fill the little screen once more.

Twenty seconds in, the interference started. Another ten, and the information stopped being stored, the electronics overwhelmed by the intense magnetic field passing overhead. He was lucky the portion that remained wasn’t corrupted beyond recognition. Old tech: the camera had simply ceased working, while a newer device would have tried to self-repair, and in failing, junked the file.

Thirty seconds of moving images at twenty-five frames a second. One of those hundreds of pictures was important.

He went through them in twos, flicking from frame to frame, mapping the differences between each pair, building up a picture of what had happened to that thing that had fallen from space. Breaking up, for sure, with fragments of its skin peeling off and spinning away as it crashed towards the Bering Strait.

The shards burnt bright, briefly, until they were either consumed, or had slowed enough to turn invisible.

That was it. He backed up to the beginning, looking at the size of each piece as it spalled off the main mass. There: fifteen seconds in. With a flare that almost whited out the screen, a piece detached itself. In the next frame, it had gone.

He repeated the three frames, over and over again: before, during and after. Then he sat back and thought about it, clearing the images from his vision and realising that he was still sitting in a hangar, surrounded by broken machinery, and his coffee had gone cold.

[Have you spotted it?]

“Yeah. Anyone else?”

[One group has zeroed in on those particular frames. They are discussing the significance of them currently, and will inevitably reach the conclusion you have.]

“It was a re-entry capsule, under power.” Petrovitch picked up his equipment and stuffed everything back in his bag. “Other bits, when they came off, you can see them for up to five, six frames. This thing? It’s off and gone. That flare? Explosive bolts and rocket fuel.

[This scenario remains highly speculative.]

“Look, we’ve been circling around this idea for a while without actually coming out and saying it straight. This is a secret Chinese Moon mission, using some sort of prototype fusion drive. If it was manned, the astronauts may have had both the opportunity and the means to bail. Nothing else fits.”

[Except there is no evidence of the Chinese having developed a fusion drive.]

“You’re wrong. There is evidence, and we’re looking right at it.”

[No external evidence, then. There is also the question of why. Why would the Americans shoot down a Chinese spaceship, and risk a confrontation that would be in no one’s interest?]

“I don’t know why. Maybe they’re just stupid. Maybe it was an accident.” He thumbed the lock on his bag and swung up his axe. “But seriously. It has to be the Chinese. Who the huy else could it be?”

Michael, always ready with an opinion, was silent.

Petrovitch blinked and stared at the wall. “Huy tebe v’zhopu zamesto ukropu!”

[Have you worked it out, Sasha?]

“You’re serious. Of course you’re serious. Chyort. Chyort vos’mi.” He disconnected the data card from his jerry-rigged reader and held it up to his face. “How long have you known, and when were you going to tell me?”

[The possibility – at an admittedly tiny probability – has been one of the options since the beginning, as have many other extremely unlikely causes, including an evaporating black hole and antimatter collisions. However, the more we learned, the more accurately I could assign probabilities to the various scenarios. Now that we have the final piece of information required to finally choose between them, there is only one that has anything approaching my full confidence.]

“But…” Petrovitch stared at his cold coffee. He didn’t want it any more. He wanted something a lot stronger. There was that hip flask in the first bag he’d emptied, and there’d definitely been something in it. “Yobany stos. Zhao said ‘that satellite’. That satellite was not ours. But wasn’t a satellite. It was aliens.”

[The First Vice Premier was not lying,] said Michael. [He did not know what it was, he still does not know. We do. It is the only possible answer to all the questions we have been asking.]

Petrovitch reeled into a chair, knocking it over. “The re-entry pod?”

[The strewn field of debris would easily encompass the research station. The object moved almost directly overhead. Once ejected, the descent module could have achieved either a controlled landing, or an uncontrolled impact, depending on the mechanical state of its components, its design limits, and whether any automatic systems were functioning at the time. If their technology relied on electrical impulses to transmit information, it would have been unlikely to withstand such intense electromagnetic fields at such short range, no matter how well shielded.]