10th February 2001 (68:9:18)
— Contact plus 05.05.07:16.30

Beth was abruptly jolted awake by the alarm thrumming through her, harsh and sharp and grating.

She twitched, flailing, as though trying to cringe away from it — her elbow slammed into something soft, she heard a strangled groan. "Ugh, sorry. Fucking thing..."

There was a high whine behind her, the bed shifting, Beth blindly reaching over for the nightstand. Voice low and slurring, unfocussed, "Is that you or me?"

"Me, I think." Finally her numb hand found the smooth ceramic of her phone, she flopped onto her back, the alarm finally going quiet as she brought up the message, multicoloured illusions appearing before her eyes. She grimaced — even imaginary light could still hurt your eyes if they weren't adjusted for it — blearily blinked again and again, fighting to get the images to come into focus.

Once she did, she sprung up to a seat, tension spanging down her spine. "Fuck. Did you get it too?"

The illusory light not illuminating their surroundings at all, Beth could barely make out Katie, a vague blob of a shape an arm's length away. "Yeah, I got it too."

The message she'd gotten was very brief: 2001.02.10:03.27 ORANGE-2 GWS–DS confirmed and tracking. Stand by for assignment. It was only the second time, ever, that she'd seen a Code Orange, going on three and a half years after the last — the first and only time the aliens had gotten reinforcements from outside the solar system. The only thing this message could mean was that their telescopes and shite pointed at the sky had spotted new ships out there, meaning the war was probably going to start up again soon.

"Were you called in? Lights on." Thankfully, the lights were set to come on low, but Beth still grimaced at the soft yellow blooming to fill the room. Katie was already moving, shuffling to the edge of the bed, shielding her face with one handing and hissing curses through her teeth.

"No, I'm supposed to wait for assignment." They were probably waiting to see exactly what their new guests were up to before telling people where to go, which she guessed made sense — her orders were likely going to be wildly different depending on how much time they thought they had. She slipped over to sit on the edge of the bed, slipped her wand holster over her wrist and started tightening the straps. "You?"

"Report at nine. Come on, maybe the news has something."

Good idea, that. Beth stumbled around the bedroom of Katie's little flat, trying to gather her clothes. She found her vest right away, she could see her jumper where she'd hung it up by the door when they'd gotten in yesterday — which was only, fuck, seven hours ago? "Three in the morning, why is it three in the morning?"

"Scabs are cruel bastards."

"Ugh..." She didn't see where her pants had ended up, or her denims — fuck it, she detoured to her drawer in Katie's dresser, retrieved a fresh pair of pants and the trousers from the spare uniform she kept here. While she'd been bumbling around like an idiot, Katie had gotten into the toilet first, but by the time she was done gathering the things she'd need she was leaving again anyway, still in pants and vest but with her hair straightened out. Beth was distracted a second watching her walk by, Katie shooting her a sleepy smirk, before slipping into the bathroom herself. Mostly just to cut off and vanish her hair, it hadn't been long enough she actually needed to use the toilet — somehow that was still enough time for her hair to grow back, though, fucking nonsense...

By the time she got out, Katie was fully dressed — in her militia uniform, despite that she didn't need to be there for five and a half hours, because it was stupid early — Beth just went for her jumper, nearly tripping on her denims in the kitchen/dining area on the way, fuck, what were these doing here?! She whipped her denims (with yesterday's knickers still inside) over toward the bed with a sloppy wandless charm, grumbling under her breath.

It wasn't until she was pulling on her boots, idly watching Katie boil water for tea, that she remembered what her clothes were doing all the way over here. She'd been pouring drinks when Katie had come up behind her, one thing led to another and Katie ended up lifting her up onto the counter and eating her out right there — she'd even spilled a little bit of the brandy, she thought? Right, mystery solved.

Good thing Katie had interrupted her, in retrospect, when they were about to be attacked was a terrible time to still be coming off a night of drinking...

Beth slung her bag over her shoulder, double-checked that she had everything important. Katie handed her a sizeable mug, the handle of her teaball sticking over the rim — she'd taken to drinking jasmine tea ages ago (popping back to Hà Nội once a month to get it directly), which Katie didn't like at all, so their cups had to be brewed separately — and they stepped out into the hallway. Katie had lived here for a couple years now, one of the big public housing projects the UK had been building since Zero Day. Some of them, including this building, the residents were put up by the government rent-free, as part of the terms of their employment — the Great Britain Defence Service (so named because it was particular to this island, for organisational reasons) was held in reserve in case of another alien attack, and a couple times to deal with unrest at home, but they were also shipped around all over the island to help with construction projects, or to help clear land or on irrigation, or occasionally providing more hands for some big enchanting project, whatever. Katie had been with the GBDS for years now, partly because she got a flat out of the deal. She had, like, eight siblings or some shite, and their house was tiny, and they didn't exactly have extra money to spend on a second place, so.

Of course, Katie did just want to help too, but a programme that also gave her a free place to live was obviously very attractive. She was hardly the only person who'd joined the GBDS for that reason.

They clearly weren't the only people who'd gotten the Code Orange: other doors were opening, people in various states of dress and alertness stumbling out, streaming through the hall. (The building was relatively plain, the floor orangish-brown ceramic tile and the walls a pale sky blue with little decoration anywhere, but it was clean and comfortable, and also free, so who gave a fuck.) Most of the traffic was going this way — though a few people, more thoroughly dressed in proper uniforms, were trying to struggle against the tide in the opposite direction — there was a lounge over here...

The magical technology that Hermione had helped invent (and had continued working on ever since) had come a long way in just five years. Beth honestly didn't know if that was normal for this kind of thing, but she guessed the serious emergency they'd been in during the initial invasion and there being millions of unemployed people with nothing better to do might have helped to get things going quicker. The mobile phone in Beth's bag was a good example of that — though Hermione was still a little exasperated that people had immediately reverted to calling them that, she insisted the terminology wasn't accurate. (Which Beth thought was silly, they were phones you could carry around in your pocket, honestly, Hermione...) It was basically just slapping the crystal radios and the magical computers they'd come up with into one thing, which sounded simple when she put it like that, but she understood it was actually very complicated. Apparently most of the stuff was actually done by huge fucking magical supercomputers in a warehouse somewhere, and the phone was just synced to a part of it, through the same shite that carried the signal for the old crystal radios? It was all over Beth's head, honestly, even when Hermione tried to explain, and she didn't really care — she knew how to use them, and that was all that mattered for her.

Over the last few years, some creative bastard had gotten around to replacing television too. Wireless television broadcasts had the same problem that muggle radio did, and you could do it wired, but so many things were magical now, you'd get serious issues getting a clean signal through...and also getting the television itself to work. After a bit of practice, they figured out ways to record video and audio, and they got better at doing things with Hermione's computers to the point that they could actually edit it, and from that point starting up entirely magical television broadcasts was pretty simple maths. It was still a new thing, the programmes going on were limited, but they were slowly getting more stuff — it'd probably be a while until they had nearly as much variety as they'd had before, but, you know, the worst of the disaster behind them, people getting back to doing art, they'd get there.

Also, the broadcast was three-dimensional, the same kind of projections the computers used, which was very neat. On the other hand, the receivers were still very expensive — especially since the economy was still a mess, so not very many people had much to spare on that kind of luxury — so mostly it was just a thing that existed in public places, like things set up by the government for information reasons, or in like cafes and shite for the patrons. This building had public lounges dotted here and there through it, for the residents to hang out, in part because the flats were kind of small and it was better not to spend all your time in there. These lounges did have these magic television things in them, so.

The lounge area was relatively nice and open, sofas and chairs around, tables for eating or playing cards at or whatever. There was a shared kitchen over there — Beth knew there were occasional big dinners held in here, with various people from Katie's section of the building, but she'd never been to one. It was a little more colourful than the hallways, residents having left their things around, or pinned things up on the walls, or brought in bloody houseplants or whatever else, a wide bank of windows looking over Leicester. Though, of course, it was three in the fucking morning, so the view was mostly hidden in the night, lights outlining the streets and in windows speckled like stars.

And it was way more full in here than usual, not a surprise, dozens of people trading hushed, nervous mutters, crowded around the corner the display was in. Katie took a quick glance around before grabbing Beth's hand and pulling her toward the stairs. There was a second level to the lounge up here, more seating and stuff for table tennis, for whatever reason. Not as many people had gotten the idea to come up, Katie led them over to the railing overlooking the floor below, squeezing between the handful of people who were already here — they could easily make out the display from above, the illusions coming into focus after a second.

Ever since the failure of their last attack on Earth over three years ago now, the aliens had been hanging around Jupiter — there were people keeping an eye on them, Beth had seen pictures, read analyses speculating about what they were doing out there. Their best guess, watching what they were doing with the moons and counting ships, was that they were trying to rebuild their fleet to prepare another attack. Some of the smaller rocky moons had been chewed up for raw materials, they were obviously using the icy moons, like Ganymede and Callisto, for something, they caught images of what looked like gases of some kind being syphoned up out of Jupiter itself. Their ship count was only changing very slowly, though. The best theory they had was that the environment out there was less than ideal for their purposes — there had to be a reason they'd wanted Earth so badly — so they had to make do with what they had. Over the last three years, they'd built up a fleet that was almost the size as the one they'd had for their last attack — though they looked different, they assumed maybe simpler designs, and they speculated that the scabs didn't have the manpower to properly staff them anyway. They did still have one of the big spiral ships, but there was really no telling how many people were on those, and a lot of them were probably common labourers or whatever...

Just as they were watching the scabs, they were certain the scabs were watching them. Every now and then, a ship would come by to lob lavabombs down at Earth — targeting airfields, especially where new things were being tested. (Beth had been familiar with a handful of test pilots who'd been killed in the attacks.) The ships never stayed long, though, dropping their bombs and getting the fuck out, wary of being blown out of the sky. It seemed like the aliens were trying to keep them from getting off-world, so they could build up their fleet without interference. There weren't even any satellites or anything in orbit yet, either, which Hermioen said they needed to test getting magic things to work in space, they'd tried a couple times but the scabs would just show up and destroy them anyway. And so they'd been stuck in a slow stalemate, for years now — they couldn't reach the aliens up there, the scabs too scared to come back here and give it another go.

Unless they'd just gotten enough reinforcements for them to think they were prepared to try it again — it'd been like three and a half years since any more aliens had shown up, but it wasn't out of the question. (They really had no idea what was going on outside their solar system, and had no way to find out.) Beth liked their odds, honestly — they'd done pretty damn well against the aliens in their two previous invasions, all things considered, and they were better organised and had more advanced enchanted equipment now than they had then — but obviously any attack would still result in a lot of people dying. She'd bet on them winning, but it would still suck.

Looking at the display below, though, she was getting a funny feeling. Floating in the air in the corner of the room — the illusions mostly solid, almost looking like physical objects but still with a subtle shimmer of spellglow — was a model of the Jupiter system, focussed on the big spiral ship floating over Ganymede. Beth had seen a lot of models of Jupiter and its moons by this point, so she could instantly tell that the planet and its moons weren't to scale — Jupiter was too small relative to the moons, the moons were too small relative to the alien ships, and everything was too close together relative to their sizes, but you kind of had to do that to make anything out. (Before looking over images of the alien fleet out there and reading commentary and stuff — and, honestly more importantly, Hermione explaining it to her — she'd never really thought about how bloody huge space was.) All the alien ships were outlined in red, plus their sprawling settlement on Ganymede directly under the big spiralling mothership. There was a cloud of stuff in orbit around Ganymede, various moons and astroids they'd towed over to pick apart for resources, little red needles and specks of smaller ships zipping around...mostly downward, toward the settlement on the surface, or in toward the mothership.

In the last update Beth had seen, the aliens had been spread out somewhat, densest around their main base on Ganymede but a few ships scattered here and there throughout the Jupiter system, a couple ships now and then popping over to the astroid belt or somewhere around Saturn to pick up stuff. (They made regular supply runs to Titan, one of Saturn's moons — apparently there was something there they could use for stuff, but it wasn't enough to move the whole fleet over there.) But it looked like all of them had pulled in around Ganymede, the rest of the system empty, coming together in a blob between the mothership and a second cloud of ships approaching from the edges of the Jupiter system, zipping in on a gentle arc straight for them. The motion looked slow, but Beth realised the distances involved were immense, they must actually be moving crazy fast, coming in to...

...to attack.

"They're not scabs," Beth said.

Katie nodded, her grip on Beth's hand tightening a little. "Yeah, I think you're right."

"Um, Corporal?" one of the other people at the railing with them asked, leaning around a nervous-looking woman at Beth's other side. Beth didn't recognise him, but apparently he recognised her. Not really a surprise, honestly — as far as she knew, they were the only lesbians on the floor, and some people were weird about that...and also Beth was still annoyingly famous, that too. At least they weren't still calling her Princess or whatever, she guessed she'd take it. "Are you sure? How can you tell?"

"They're attacking."

"Yeah," Katie said, pointing at the formation of newcomers, "look at how they're coming in, with the smaller ships in a wedge in front, with bigger ones behind." Beth could tell she was thinking of quidditch formations, but some of the same principles applied. "And the scabs are moving to protect the mothership, see?"

"And the ships look different."

"Do they? They're too small for me to tell if they're made of the same stuff."

Yeah, Beth couldn't really make them out either — not that she thought there was anything to make out, it was likely this was just an animation some computer somewhere was converting raw data into. "They might or might not be, but look at how narrow and pointy they are, and that big one right there, like, kind of triangular? Coming to a point at the front like that, none of the scabs' ships do that." Apparently someone somewhere agreed with Katie and Beth, the red outline around the newcomers' ships abruptly switched to yellow: for caution, not a known ally but not an enemy either.

There was a brief quiet from the people at the railing with them, the announcer's voice coming out of the display explaining the tentative judgement from the higher ups that these weren't scabs (and possibly not enemies), mutters hissing through the crowd below. "So, you're saying these are completely different aliens."

"Looks like it."

"...Is that a good or a bad thing?"

"Honestly? Hard to say." There'd been some speculation from various people that there was some kind of interstellar war going on, the scabs fighting someone else out there — their habit of calling mages dzhēdaj, despite not having any mages of their own, and that they'd apparently come to Earth in the first place to resupply seemed to suggest as much. Given that hardly any reinforcements had come in, their assumption was even that the scabs were losing. (Not a surprise, honestly, considering they'd managed to kick their arses here, despite being what a spacefaring civilisation would likely consider to be a 'primitive' people.) It wasn't the worst guess in the world that these new aliens coming in were the side that was winning.

That they were obviously fighting the scabs was probably a good sign, but there was really no way to tell whether they'd be any nicer to 'primitive' planets under their control. All they could do was sit and wait to see what happened after the upcoming battle.

The announcer was continuing to explain that they were increasingly becoming very sure that these weren't scabs. They'd gotten spectroscopic analysis in first, shortly after they'd come out from behind the sun. (From their flightpath, they thought they'd come out of faster-than-light travel near Uranus or Neptune, but those planets were too close to directly behind the sun at the moment, difficult to make them out.) Beth was familiar with that term, from Hermione explaining the stuff about what the alien fleet was up to — going over the different wavelengths of light coming off of a thing to try to figure out what it was made out of. A couple graphs of spiky peaks and valleys was projected into an unused part of the display — raw data for anyone in the audience who was enough of a nerd to read that — the material was unfamiliar, but the labcoats had quickly decided it was a polished, reflective metal of some kind.

There was some more murmuring through the lounge at that — obviously, the scabs did not build ships out of metal. The graphs were soon replaced with an image, which the announcer said was the highest magnification, real-colour picture they'd gotten so far, a line pointing at the largest, triangular-shaped wedge in the middle of the formation, the yellow outline blinking. The shape actually had a much narrower profile than Beth had thought from the model, and it was rounded more like a long needle, flaring out a bit at the back end (giving the illusion of a flat wedge-shape from a distance), maybe where the engines were? The surface was a dark, greyish-blueish silvery colour, and definitely metal of some kind, brighter spots from reflections blooming here and there over the surface. The picture was a bit fuzzy — it was dozens of millions of kilometres away, space was huge — Beth thought she made out little features on the surface that might be guns of some kind, but it was hard to tell for sure, might just be noise.

That was the largest ship, the announcer explained, they thought it was maybe three-quarters to one and a half kilometres in length, probably toward the shorter end — it was hard to be precise from such a distance, they'd refine the estimate as they gathered more pictures — and they thought it was probably the flagship. More pictures appeared of the bigger ones in the middle, most of them also narrow spears of metal with only slightly different profiles, one was wider and more knobbly — they thought that one might be a carrier of some kind, protected toward the rear of the formation. They also showed some smaller ships, but these images were very fuzzy, hard to make anything out — the same metal, straight lines with narrow profiles, almost certainly military craft.

New aliens, no doubt about it. Hopefully these ones were more friendly.

The new fleet was coming around Jupiter now, closing in on the scabs. New pictures showed up, brilliant white-blue light extending from the wider ends of the ships — their engines going, slowing down to a speed they could better fight at? Those were definitely technological engines, burning something, more familiar than the weird biological shite the scabs used. Approaching Ganymede, the scab fleet moving a little to better put themselves between the new aliens and the mothership. A flat red plane was drawn across the space between them — their best guess of the scabs' weapons range, assuming the new aliens had a similar range the battle would start when they got there.

Two minutes to contact, the chatter in the room confused and surprised and excited...

One minute to contact, conversation trailing off, the room tense, everyone seeming to hold their breath at once, Katie's hand in hers tightening...

Abruptly, a whole bunch more ships appeared out of nowhere — there were a couple seconds of confusion as whoever was managing the model scrambled to adjust, more yellow ships labelled 'above' the scab fleet, pinning them against Ganymede, a second group appearing behind them, directly coming in at the mothership from its undefended side. Ah ha, clever bastards, they must have split up their fleet, got the scabs' attention with one division, and then brought the others through FTL right on top of them at the last second. The shock clear on his voice, the announcer updated the ship count, the newcomers' fleet had just doubled, tripled, they were detecting light bursts that they thought might be torpedo launches, the torpedoes themselves too small for them to see, dozens and dozens of them—

"Come on," Beth hissed, all but bouncing on her toes, "get 'em..."

Green dots flashed on the red-labelled alien ships — confirmed hits. More pictures appeared, showing familiar scab ships (fuzzy from distance) with clouds of fire and debris bursting out of them, some hit from multiple sides, pockmarks of fire appearing on the mothership...

Green Xs started blinking in and out over some of the red-outlined ships — confirmed kills.

Cheers started sweeping through the room, some laughter and jeers, egging on the new aliens. Which was a little silly, sure, since it wasn't like the newcomers could hear them anyway — also, they still weren't sure these were actually friends yet — but Beth understood the sentiment. It really was very satisfying watching someone kick the piss out of the scabs, Beth could feel herself grinning. Served them fucking right...

The scabs fared very badly in the first exchange, caught on the back foot, but they scrambled to recover before long, the fight over Ganymede devolving into a tangled snarl. It looked like the new aliens had the scabs out-gunned, gradually chipping away at them — they did lose ships, marked with blinking red Xs, but they obviously had the advantage. As big as space was and as large as the fleets were, all told the battle probably took over a half hour. Over that time the lounge descended into a party, someone heated up some sausage rolls and chips and the like, drinks being passed around, chatter loud and bright, occasionally cheering as another scab ship broke apart. Katie and Beth both refused the drinks — they would both have places to be later — sitting in a chair Katie conjured just in front of the railing, Beth in Katie's lap and Katie's arms around her waist, watching the battle proceed, the scabs just falling apart...

See you in hell, bastards.

Surprisingly, as the fleet battle died down, a few ships chasing some survivors trying to hide out in the moons, the newcomers didn't just bombard the surface settlement from orbit — at least, there weren't any obvious huge explosions their telescopes managed to catch. The assumption, according to the announcer, was that they were landing troops to take care of it face-to-face, but Beth really had no idea why they would bother. Surely it would be safer to just blow it up? Whatever.

The lounge had thoroughly devolved into a party, music and chatter loud enough she could only half-hear the announcer. The battle was mostly done by now, but Beth was still watching — despite the distraction of Katie's arms around her waist, her breath on her neck — eyes drawn to the red Xs of the newcomers' lost ships, a box with a tally at the side of the display. It was only a fraction of the fleet, yes, the losses were very lopsided between the two sides, but Beth couldn't help a bad feeling about it. The newcomers had, certainly, lost people — it was worth worrying that they might want something in exchange for dealing with Earth's scab problem.

She really hoped she was being overly paranoid, but she couldn't help the niggling suspicion that they might just be trading one alien threat for another.

That feeling only got sharper when a sudden note of alarm entered the announcer's voice, and the model of the Jupiter system was swapped for one of the moon, the newcomers' flagship floating in orbit over it. Beth hadn't even noticed it move, too distracted, must have used their FTL shite to close the distance faster...

"Hey!" Beth wiggled her way out of Katie's lap, raising her voice, "Hold up, something's happening!" She wasn't the only one to notice, other people shouting for quiet, after a little bit someone turned the music off. Leaning against the railing, she was soon surrounded by people pressing in again, watching the image of the alien ship hanging over the moon. It was much closer now, they were able to get a better picture of it — dark blue-silver metal, faintly reflective, the surface looked rather less smooth and homogenous now, bristling with tiny structures all over the place. Someone started adding annotations to the picture, tentatively labelling rows of what looked like weapon emplacements, bars with more precise measurements, the ship just under a kilometre long. Smaller than the bigger scab ships, yes, but getting enough metal to make something that big was kind of absurd to think about, and the power you'd need to move it, fuck.

Another picture popped up, zoomed in further, showing a gap in the structure, a glow of harsh sterile white light spilling out. Something was moving in there, Beth leaned forward, and then it was coming out, moving away from the flagship — and then the image abruptly lost it as there was a burst of blue fire sprouting out of the back of the thing, and zipped out of view.

Beth felt a buzz shivering through her, twitched, scrambled to grab her phone. 2001.02.10:04.13 BLUE-3 Alien vessel in LEO identified as unarmed diplomatic transport. Stand by for special assignment. She blinked at the message, glanced back over at the display below. It was still trying to track the ship on approach to Earth, but they were having trouble keeping a stable image, the thing moving too fast. She guessed the broadcast must be somewhat behind actual events, which she guessed made sense — someone somewhere probably had to approve these materials for public release, even if it was a quick rubberstamp it'd still take a couple minutes.

Some of the tension dribbling out of her, Beth sighed. So, they'd decided it looked like these aliens wanted to talk. Good, that was good.

Nudging her with an elbow, Katie whispered, "What is it?" Beth hesitated for a second, before holding her phone out to Katie — she touched her fingers to the smooth ceramic, cueing the illusions to display for her. "...Oh. Well, that's good news."

"Yeah."

"Special assignment, what, do they want you to try to translate at our first talk with literal space aliens, or what?"

Beth grimaced. "I think that's exactly what it is, yeah." Unfortunately for her, seceding from magical Britain had abruptly made her the highest-ranking omniglot in the world. Not military rank, obviously, she meant social rank — to her chagrin, the constitution the committees had worked up had retained her as a permanent head of state. (She'd wanted to tell them to go back to the drawing board, but Sirius had argued it was a better idea to keep it during the transition, for complicated economic and legitimacy reasons, so whatever, fine.) Since she was technically the leader of an independent country (if mostly just on paper), literally a bloody princess and everything, and an especially quick-learning omniglot, and seriously dangerous in a fight if something went wrong, she'd found herself being dragged along for all kinds of diplomatic meetings and the like. The travelling around part she didn't mind so much — and it meant she'd missed most of the internal security jobs her unit had been called up for, those tended to make her feel kind of gross — but it was so tedious and boring sometimes.

Also, she had no idea what fucking good they thought she was going to do talking to some brand new aliens — she learned quicker than most omniglots, sure, but it still took a week or two before she could even begin to try to translate anything serious. This was going to be a bloody mess, but whatever, she guessed...

On the display, the alien ship had reached Earth orbit, to the nervous muttering of the people packed into the lounge. They had a much better, clearer image now — the ship was rather flat, a long, round, narrow central section intersecting with a crescent shape, wider where it met the central section about a third from the front tip and narrowing as they swept back to end in points facing the rear. Wings, maybe? It didn't really look much like muggle aeroplanes, but there was some flat surface area there, it didn't seem an unreasonable guess that it was meant for atmospheric flight as well as space travel. This one seemed to be made out of a different material, a brighter steely sort of colour, shining where the sun caught it. The announcer was saying that they couldn't see anything that looked like weapons, this shape here might be the door?

They'd identified some kind of insignia, on the wings and the side of the central section: a ring of...nine six-pointed stars, white on black, wrapped around a deep red circle, laid over it a solid white five-fingered hand, held up palm out and fingers spread. There was writing of some kind printed on the ship, maybe a name, swirling curly shapes in complicated designs. By the density and variety of the symbols, she assumed it must be the same kind of writing as something like, say, Chinese? They found a second script, made out of much simpler angular lines, that might be an alphabet — still gibberish, of course, but the pattern was recognisable. First impression, but these aliens seemed way more familiar than the scabs, using industrial technology and even written language that looked way more like what they had on Earth.

Far more advanced industrial technology, obviously, but still.

While the announcer was babbling on — explaining again that there didn't seem to be any signs of weapons anywhere, they were assuming this was a civilian transport of some kind — the tips of the crescent at the back suddenly lit up, bright enough to wash out the camera, hiding the ship in a burst of white. The light went out, but after a brief pause it lit up again — twice this time, in close succession. Another pause, and then three bursts of light. And then two...and then one...and then two again...and three...

Somewhere nearby, Beth heard someone ask, "What are they doing?"

"Knocking on the door," she said, raising her voice a little so more people would hear it — feeling very confident about that interpretation, despite it just being a guess. She thought they were supposed to flash a light in the same pattern — one, two, three, two, one, and so on — where and when they wanted their guests to land. "Looks like someone wants to—" She was about to say come down and have a chat, but she was interrupted by another message coming through on her phone. 2001.02.10:04.21 Report to OX-3 soonest, no. 1 or cultural dress.

Beth couldn't help but grimace a little. Yeah, looked like they wanted her there for their first talk with the new aliens, awesome. As much as dress blues were vaguely uncomfortable, she guessed she'd be going with that — by "cultural dress" they meant whatever ceremonial formalwear would be appropriate for, like, different minority cultures and shite, and she'd rather not turn up in ridiculous dress robes, thanks...

"You have to go?" Katie asked.

"Yeah, I need to swing by home to get dressed. I'll message you when they let me go, but I really have no idea how long that's going to be." The chances they shared any language at all with bloody space aliens was zero, so it could be ages to even get to a basic understanding...

"That's all right, focus on the job." Before Beth could start moving, Katie reached over, snagged her shoulder at the base of her neck with one hand, leaned in for a quick kiss. "Good luck."

Beth huffed. "Let's hope I don't need it." She started to slip through the dense, tense crowd — she could disapparate straight from here, but if someone was touching her she might accidentally splinch off something, so. Glancing over her shoulder, she added, "Some friendly aliens for once would be a nice change of pace..."