"Or moon rockets," she says, slightly wistfully. "Or sputniks."

"If those things worked any more." The film is in: he leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the first of the disks, a couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it takes a telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. "Do you remember the moon?"

Maddy shrugs. "I was just a kid when it happened. But I saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too."

He nods. "Not like some of the kids these days. Tell them we used to live on a big spinning sphere and they look at you like you're mad."

"What do they think the speed of the disks will tell them?" She asks.

"Whether they're all as massive as this one. What they could be made of. What that tells us about who it was that made them." He shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than bugs." He chuckles. "It's a new world out here."

She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the first time: "I guess it is."

Chapter Three: Boldly Go

"So tell me, comrade colonel, how did it really feel?"

The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He's forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. "I was very busy all the time," he says with a self-deprecating little shrug. "I didn't have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes, what did you expect? If you really want to know, Gherman's the man to ask. He had more time."

"Time." His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back on two legs. It's a horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift to some Tsar or other many years before the October revolution. "What a joke. Ninety minutes, two days, that's all we got before they changed the rules on us."