It takes another three days for us to get a breakthrough. Rob seems to be settling into his new position and, while we have been waiting for data, has taken to sitting in my office and talking with Minerva and myself about just about anything and everything.

Quite a few of the other members of the team are still reluctant to associate with him and there have been a few words quietly shared between them and Melina. She was always going to place professionalism above opinion, but apparently others needed to be reminded that there was a job to be done and an expert was required.

At one point yesterday, I’d been informed that Romulus was in her office and things do seem to have improved markedly since his appearance. I’ve no idea what was said, or to whom, but it seems to have done the trick for now.

Rob has spent a few minutes trying to explain just how a pulse rifle works and, more importantly, how it is much better than an old-fashioned chemically propelled weapon, even though he prefers to shoot with an old-fashioned rifle. Even watching video of them in action doesn’t really help me much.

“I’ll have to take you out to the range and show you,” Rob tells me in exasperation.

<It will have to wait,> Minerva suggests. <We have broken one of the cyphers. We’re all wanted in the main lecture room.>

There’s a rapid scramble. Rob and I join the others now filling the corridor and Minerva winks out of existence. Minerva will be off to focus more of her considerable talents to the translation efforts. Rob and myself arrive in the lecture hall and take seats near the front – there’s always a certain hierarchy to seating for a formal meeting and in this case I’m quite important, as is Rob.

Nexi and Argus are both up on the stage, along with Melina and a couple of the directors of the IEG. I know that Argus has been doing most of the co-ordination on this, so it makes sense that he’s the one to give a progress report.

<Okay, settle down please,> he begins, making his avatar appear to stand off to one side of the stage. There’s a rapid lessening in the noise levels and the last couple of people find their seats quickly.

<We’re lucky that binary is still the most obvious way to store data, or we would be in trouble here. We have broken the encryption on one of the two data streams from Thermia. It is the one that seems to account for about forty percent of the traffic. We do not know if this is significant.> His tone is firm and steady, almost without emotion and none of his usual light-hearted tone.

<There is data in a wide variety of formats and some of this means little to us yet. What appears to be plain text is in an alphabet, or encoding system that is quite obviously alien. We can read the symbols, but have no idea what they mean as yet.>

<Then, there’s a huge amount of what appears to be audio. Again, there are only so many ways to practically compress, encode and transmit this sort of data and we’ve made some progress with it. There is also a fair amount of broadcast video. It doesn’t look like video is used for personal communications to any great degree, but that’s probably what most of the audio is, so broadcast is what we get.>

There’s an obvious shuffling of people in their seats at this news. I feel it is my responsibility to ask the obvious question. “Does this mean that we can see who – or what – we are dealing with?”

<It didn’t ten minutes ago, but now, we think we have something we can share.> The white wall behind Argus’s shoulder begins to glow bright white before a flat image appears.

I can instantly recognise what must be a news broadcast. The similarities to 21st century Earth newscasts are uncanny. A single being sits to one side of the image, speaking in a series of unrecognisable sounds. Over his shoulder there is a video feed of what appears to be a battlefield, or the preparations for a fight. Armoured vehicles stream down a highway bordered by shattered alien trees and broken buildings. In a coloured bar across the bottom of the screen, a ticker of strange characters streams across from left to right.

The newsreader is clearly humanoid in appearance, bilaterally symmetrical with two eyes, a single, almost lipless mouth, no obvious ears or hair and two arms that end in four-fingered hands with opposable thumbs. His head – I’m guessing at gender here – has a very pronounced ridge or crest that might be four or five centimetres tall that has a strong suggestion of scales that is missing from the rest of his visible skin, which is quite smooth. He is clothed in what appears to be a military uniform, complete with a badge on his left-side upper chest. With vertical slit-eyed pupils, he is truly alien in a way that the Valatan are not.

Most of us are, rightly, stunned by this footage. There’s a silence that stretches for minutes as we continue to watch. When the current story is finished and the newsreader transitions to the next report, there’s an audible gasp from the lecture hall as a whole and Nexi lets out an extraordinarily uncharacteristic <Fuck!>

The small video feed behind the presenter stretches to fill the whole screen, showing a fuzzy, indistinct, distant but, to us at least, very obvious view of Manannan as she currently approaches Thermia; tail first and engines blazing.

“If we ever needed a translation of anything,” I mutter to Rob beside me, “this is that time.”

Argus cuts the video out with a wave of his avatar hand. He gives us all a moment to settle down again before he continues.

<Right, that changes things a little. We’re not a secret anymore. I’ll have the decoding team pass video and audio to you all as we work through it. Minerva and her team are already making some progress on translations and we’ll get that out as quickly as we can. There’s no pulling out now, so let’s just work the problem.>