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entered, hands on hips, chest rising and falling.
    'What's the situation?' asked Bales, his apparent fitness allowing him to speak in his usual composed way. The junior flight controller led them to the comms desk as he spoke.
    'We had another window — a brief one — and we had enough time to catch a message from the ISS.'
    He nodded to the operator sat at Aleks' desk, who, waiting for the command, thumbed the playback button on the recorder.
    'It isn't much,' the junior flight controller said, the whites of his eyes bold and bright, 'but I think you need to hear it.'
    The speakers erupted with a distorted chatter, swelling and throbbing with guttural hisses and stabs of noise that sounded like tearing paper. An underlying current of speech also seemed to be threading its way through the static, but it sounded distant and muffled, and not quite defined enough to form any recognisable words. The operator turned the gain up, and the hiss rose, becoming almost too loud to bear.
    Then, clearly, through the mist of distortion flushing from the speakers, a word — and then another — pressed against the eardrums of everyone in the room, the voice made unrecognisable through the strain of distress:
    'Help … me …' it said.

Section 2 — Progress
    Chapter 4
     
    An orange flame of daw n light pierced through the small window, straight into Sally Fisher's eyes. She pulled the blind down and repositioned herself so her head was resting up against the small jet's leather-trimmed fuselage.
    Sally had received the call from NASA the evening before, around ten thirty at night. A call from NASA wasn't unusual, because they sponsored her SETI work in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, but the timing was. Although she had still been working — as she always seemed to be, and that's how she liked it — it was way past what she considered to be an appropriate time for a business call.
    Her annoyances were soon forgotten when the voice on the other end of the phone relayed its message. She had been summoned, not to the NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. or to the Kennedy Space Centre like she had been on a few previous occasions, but to Moscow. Her work was her life; there was no spouse, partner, or even cat to consult with, and so her response had been an immediate, resounding, and what she hoped didn't sound too much like an over-excited schoolgirl, yes .
    Not six hours later, she had met her NASA liaison at the Moffett Federal Airfield, a short drive from the Carl Sagan Centre where she conducted most of her research. She had been ushered onto a small, unexpectedly luxurious private jet. The jet's turbines where already whining at idle as she boarded, and within minutes of buckling up her seatbelt, they were airborne. No one had even asked to see her passport.
    The soft, creamy leather should have been comfortable , yet Sally struggled to sit still on its velvety folds. Her brain was a muddle of exhilaration, anticipation, nervousness; a mixed bag of pure ecstasy and unadulterated fear.
    They had told her on the phone that she was needed right away in Moscow, but little more than that. The NASA escort at the airport hadn't uttered a word beyond polite pleasantries and the odd instruction. She surmised that whatever it was they wanted from her, it could only be one of two things: firstly, Sally was a communications expert. That didn't mean she was good with radios — although she was — more that her research led the way in the field of deep space transmission. Her first MIT doctorate thesis, completed when she was just twenty-three, helped NASA extend its field of view into the cosmos to make sense of the fine detail received by its space telescopes like Hubble and ROSAT. Her second thesis helped NASA and CalTech push space telescope technology to the next generation, enabling NuSTAR to be launched. Despite her extraordinary technical ability and almost god-like understanding of light in all its wavelengths, Sally