They reached the valley as dusk settled, the car winding along a road that was little more than a dirt track. Their destination had no official designation, only a local name, and if the driver knew it he wasn’t sharing. He hadn’t said a single word to Vash since they had left the conurbation, the language barrier between them reinforced by a deep mistrust.

The town appeared almost untouched by time, as though the mountainous valley in which it nestled had shielded it. The dun-coloured mudbrick walls of the settlement seemed like an emergent, natural feature of the surrounding landscape and from a distance only the electric lights marked it as belonging to the modern world.

Vash took solace in the fact that places like this persisted even now. He could almost imagine that here – and if not here, at least somewhere – people might live in blissful ignorance of the wearying world and the tides of change that had swept across it in his lifetime.

But that probably hadn’t been true in centuries and, as he sharply reminded himself, ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s just ignorance.

What does Iskandar have for me? Why make contact after all this time?

‘Look,’ said the driver at last, gesturing through the windscreen at the road ahead. ‘Arco.’

Vash craned forwards to see. A reflective barrier glinted in the glare of their headlights and as they drew closer an armoured vehicle switched on its own, flooding the cabin with light. Vash squinted, fumbling preemptively for his papers.

They pulled to a stop as the soldiers approached. Vash wound down the passenger window and wordlessly handed his documentation to the man outside, hoping nobody would question what he was doing on the edge of a warzone, half a world away from the seat of his authority. He needn’t have worried. After a perfunctory scan of the papers, the soldiers waved them through. A bribe would have worked just as well.

As they reached the town, any lingering sense of serenity dissipated. Arco Enforcers were systematically moving from one tenement to the next, pulling families from their homes and herding them towards the town centre. A loudhailer blared instructions and good tidings in the native language. Vash didn’t need to understand the words to know. These people were to be registered as citizens.

The car nosed its way through the thickening press of humanity, until the streets grew too crowded.

‘You, out now,’ announced the driver.

‘Where am I going?’ The driver shrugged. Vash shook his head. ‘You’ll wait here?’

A slight incline of the head, a slow blink. Did he mean to say that he would?

Vash clambered out of the car, drawing his overcoat around him. Without knowing what else to do he began to instinctively follow the crowd, doing his best not to draw attention to himself. People ignored him, more concerned with their loved ones. There were more than enough strangers in town already. The bright vehicle lights skittered off the dun walls, illuminating dust motes and sending shadows flickering over the crowd.

On the opposite side of the street an armoured personnel carrier slid by, an Enforcer seated in the turret, one hand resting on a mounted machine gun. Up ahead a fight broke out and a trio of soldiers rushed over to break it up, indiscriminately striking at participants and bystanders alike.

Please, don’t let there be trouble, Vash silently beseeched the crowd. Just do as they say and it’ll all be over soon.

The fact was of scant comfort. Vash knew what came next. He could look at the young father walking beside him, his son sitting on his shoulders, and see his whole life play out in fast-forward.

After registration came relocation. In a month or two, kind, well-meaning men and women would arrive in buses. They would explain to the man that conditions in the village were unsanitary, unsafe, that many of the buildings didn’t have electricity or plumbing.

‘And if you just sign on this dotted line here – ignore the Enforcer, he’s just here for my protection – you’ll be taken to a conurbation and provided with modern housing, basic income, healthcare and education. A chance to escape poverty,’ they would promise.

The man would ask if his family would come with him.

‘Of course! We’d never break up a family. Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee all of your community will be placed in the same area,’ they’d say apologetically. ‘But then we wouldn’t want the formation of ghettos, would we? Your children will be taught the new language and you’ll pick it up quickly enough – so you’ll soon feel right at home.’

Reluctantly he would sign his name, knowing that he had little choice. He wasn’t some wastelander fanatic. Could it really be all that bad? And with that the implacable gears of the Arco machine would shudder into motion. Inexorably, every aspect of this man’s identity would be ground down until the apathetic, dependant, isolated husk that remained could be neatly summarised in a series of little boxes and safely filed away.

A pained cry snapped Vash out of his reverie. Two Enforcers were laying into an older man, kicking him where he had fallen.

How did the saying go? Whoever saves a life saves the world. So much for subtlety.

‘Hey!’ he yelled, shouldering his way through the massing crowd of enraged onlookers. The Enforcers continued, oblivious.

‘Hey!’ Vash forced his way to the front of the crowd, shoving his pass in the face of an Enforcer who briefly barred his way.

The Enforcer’s eyes were hidden behind an opaque visor, but he straightened as he caught sight of the glossy, important-looking paper. He motioned hastily for the others to stop.

‘Who’s in command here?’ Vash demanded. The Enforcers exchanged looks.

Where did they find these recruits? He noticed very few of the Enforcers were wearing proper uniforms. And where were the civilians? This operation was probably punitive, carried out by some warlord with the merest figleaf of legitimate authority. It happened all too often, especially in places where insurgencies had smouldered for decades.

‘Who’s in charge of this operation?’ he repeated.

An Enforcer strode through the cordon, his uniform denoting a senior rank.

‘Get him up!’ he snapped. Begrudgingly, the others followed his orders, helping the local to his feet and dusting him off. ‘Have a medic see to him.’

The crowd began to dissipate. The officer turned to Vash.

‘May I see your papers?’ he asked in fluent, if heavily accented English. ‘Just a formality.’

The officer made a show of scrutinising them before handing them back.

‘You’re a long way from home, sir,’ he remarked, innocently. ‘With all due respect, may I inquire if you’re here in an official capacity? Some details about your mandate would clear things up. I wasn’t informed you’d be joining us.’

‘Indeed. But first, I would like to know why there seems to be no record of this operation,’ Vash retorted. A guess, but a safe one. ‘An unauthorised action of this size will be taken very seriously.’

For a moment the Enforcer’s shoulders stiffened. He quickly stifled the reaction, but Vash noticed. That confirmed it.

‘That is certainly concerning, sir. I will seek to correct any errors in documentation immediately. I assure you those responsible will be disciplined. I had no idea we were under inspection.’

‘Spot inspection,’ Vash smiled thinly.

‘That’s highly irregular -’

‘I’m sure it is. Please don’t make me take this up with your superiors. This whole operation is a mess – sort it out.’

‘Yessir.’

Vash stepped past the chastened officer, casting one last meaningful look at the Enforcers before rejoining the dwindling flow of people headed for the central square. Word would spread of his presence, and with any luck good behaviour from the Enforcers would follow in its wake, although he hoped there wouldn’t be any further questioning. He didn’t think they would risk it – it would be far safer to keep their heads down.

Still, he had endangered his mission. A small part of Vash was beginning to wonder if Iskandar would ever make contact, or whether he’d already fled the scene, caught off-guard by the Enforcers. Or was he being set up?

The square was packed. Half of it was a maze of barriers, a line of miserable locals snaking through to a tent on the far side where they’d be chipped and registered. Harsh halogen lights glared down from overhead, turning night to uncomfortable day. He doubted he’d find Iskandar here even if there was anonymity in crowds. There were soldiers everywhere.

As he turned to leave the square, a wiry young man hurrying in the opposite direction barged past him, sending him stumbling. He vanished before Vash could even utter a cry of protest.

Regaining his composure Vash checked his pockets. You could never be too careful – it would be just like the Enforcers to put some pickpocket up to stealing his papers in order to cover their backs. Instead, his hands brushed on something unfamiliar.

A shred of packaging with a simplified map, street name and the words 24 Hour Coffee scrawled on the back.

He found the meeting place without further incident. The café was in a completely nondescript building down one of the side streets, marked out, as promised, by a flickering neon sign advertising round the clock coffee. Inside was a shambles, deserted but for a lone waitress clearing up the mess. Apparently the Enforcers had already been through this way. She nodded wordlessly in the direction of a door leading out the back.

Iskandar was waiting on a tiny concrete-floored verandah, sitting at a low plastic table, head bowed. The coffee house backed out onto a housecube stack, so their meeting spot was walled off on all four sides by high concrete, with only a tiny square of night sky above. An air conditioning unit hummed and a muffled argument filtered down through an open window.

Iskandar didn’t acknowledge Vash as he sat down, barely lifting his eyes from the mug clasped in his hands. The man looked as though he had aged decades since they’d last met. It had been a while, but not that long. He was thin, his papery skin looking as though it was on the edge of flaking away.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ Vash said hesitantly. They hadn’t ended things on the best of terms. The waitress placed another cup of coffee on the table. Vash nodded his thanks, raising it to his lips.

‘I wouldn’t chance it, if I were you,’ said Iskandar, raising his head very slowly, as if it might snap off. ‘Unless you like the taste of soluble cadmium.’

‘They’re poisoning you?’

‘Past tense. The damage is already done – so in fact the coffee’s probably fine.’

A complicated expression crossed Vash’s face. He noticed his old friend’s hand was shaking ever so slightly.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I’ve played my part. I see you’re still receiving regular ichor infusions,’ remarked Iskandar, a bitter edge to his voice. ‘You can’t have aged a day since I last saw you, and you were old even then.’

‘I’d hoped not to outlive you.’

‘Vash, you’re a walking anthropic principle. Always the last man standing, always carrying on. Tough luck – you’ll have to remember for the both of us. I don’t envy you that.’

‘If there is anything I can do…’ Vash trailed off as Iskandar waved the remark away.

‘Forget about it. The Dyn will have their revenge on me one way or another, though I would have preferred a bullet. They’ll chop down any stalk that grows too tall because they don’t have the nerve to pull us out by the root.’

‘You must understand that by their standards, that is mercy,’ said Vash. ‘They could have wiped us out on a whim, and yet they haven’t. I still believe they want to understand us, to find a compromise.’

‘I have no use for Dynic mercy or compromise.’ Iskandar slammed the table, then winced. ‘They left us alive and that was their mistake. For as long as they are unable to break the human spirit, their downfall is inevitable. My only regret is that I will not live to see it happen.’

‘You still believe that?’

‘It’s not a question of belief,’ insisted Iskandar, his words escaping in a sharp staccato. ‘You know that as well as I do. This world is a tinderbox. All we need is the spark that will set it aflame.’

‘The Broadcast?’ asked Vash sceptically.

‘ I didn’t bring you here to rehash old arguments for the sake of posterity. I am tired and my time is running out. But yes, the Dyn Broadcast.’

Iskandar fumbled something from his pocket. He cursed as it slipped from his grasp, falling to the ground with a clatter.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Vash, bending down to retrieve the object. It was a pocket terminal – one that looked like it had come from the first decade after the invasion. That would make it a century old, though it looked almost new. As he placed it on the table the screen lit up, displaying tightly packed mathematics and annotations.

‘We are being played, Vash.’

‘I know that -’

‘Not the Dyn. I don’t know how or by whom, but both us and the Dyn have been set up.’

There was a long pause.

‘I don’t follow.’

‘The Dyn developed far slower than us, but they are still, by my reckoning, not much more than a few hundred thousand years older than our own civilisation. Certainly not more than a million.’

Vash nodded, and Iskandar raised his palms up to the sky. Even through the bright light of the porch he could spot a couple of stars through the opening.

‘What strange skies we find ourselves beneath…’ mused Iskandar, his eyes unfocussed for a moment.

He pushed the terminal towards Vash. He vaguely recognised the calculations; the Bayesian form of the Drake Equation, the results before and after first contact with the Dyn. Vash looked askance at Iskandar.

‘Imagine our situation before first contact; an empty universe seemed all but certain. A universe full of life, ruled out by the empty sky we saw. How could everything be this finely balanced?’ Iskandar patted the air vaguely. ‘Why a near-empty universe?’

‘There is a saying that zero, one and infinity are the only numbers that need no explanation.’

‘You see, of course. That’s why, despite our former differences, I had to bring this to you – who else would listen to my words and consider they might be true? Who else would realise the implications? The others are too preoccupied with squabbling in the dirt to look up at the sky. They aren’t like us.’

‘They are us,’ said Vash. Iskandar ignored him.

‘We don’t know where the Dyn came from. But that’s beside the point. Where is everyone else? Why no multi-million or billion-year old civilisations? Why only the two of us, evenly matched, as if we’re two fighters dropped into a boxing ring? The gap between the birth of our civilisation and theirs… on cosmological time scales it’s nothing. We’re almost twins.’

‘Perhaps that’s simply the way the universe works. There is more to physics than we understand. The Other Moon is evidence of that; there is no imaginable technology that could account for it. With craft like that, who knows how far the Dyn might have come?’

Iskandar shook his head. ‘You’re right on one count. There is far more to our reality than this… thin surface. Something has scoured the galaxy and maybe the universe of intelligent life, all except us two. Hell, maybe this agent has wiped clean even more than that.’

‘What?’

Iskandar barked out a humourless laugh.

‘Aha! So you can be shocked. Perhaps even your open mind has its limits.’

Iskandar grabbed the terminal out of Vash’s hand, twisting it round and flicking through the stored data.

‘The Dyn broadcast; It showed their home.’

A statement that might have been extraordinary, passed off as utterly normal. Iskandar leant forward, casting the top of his face into shadow. Vash realised how thin he looked, with papery skin on the edge of flaking away.

‘Have you seen it?’

‘Not all of it. My father was the one who relayed it; he gave his life so that we might know our enemy. My mother told me the story in the resettlement camp they set up beneath one of the old orbital fountains. She died shortly after we arrived, killed by a rock they flung at us for no reason at all. We dealt with it well. I had my work, and you… you always tried to carry the whole world on your shoulders, as if that somehow made it all easier. It was all so calm in those days, that was what was strange in hindsight. The people we used to be didn’t break under the horror, just got on with their diminished lives…’

Iskandar trailed off and blinked heavily.

Vash waited politely.

‘I knew what she’d told me was important and I never forgot. I was on one of the last ferries back from Luna. That was when we received a massive data dump, relayed from the ship that made first contact with the Dyn, copied so many times that even they couldn’t destroy every receiver right away. I saw it on a display when I was a child. I made copies.’

‘That’s why they’re killing you?’

Iskandar nodded.

‘Your people will have been given an order they could not refuse. And yes, before you interrupt, I am putting your life in danger by telling you this. Why do you think we’re meeting here?’

‘But you judged it was worth the risk.’

Iskandar slapped the terminal back down on the table. It displayed a blurry photograph of a screen, looping through a black starfield and false colour images.

‘I’ve spent years deciphering what I saw that day; it was sheer luck, something I felt compelled to exploit for all it was worth. I’ve taken my time, developed my theories. I’ve learned all that I could of physics and astronomy. This much I have discovered: The Dyn broadcast, the part that I saw, contained an image of the night sky as seen from their homeworld in various wavelengths.’

The waitress returned, looking vaguely affronted that neither of them had touched their drinks. She caught a glance of the terminal on the table, and then made eye contact with Vash. After seeing the bronze delta of Arco administration she turned sharply away, hurrying back inside. Iskandar continued.

‘I think they considered it artistic- nothing more. They don’t care much for pure science. There were labels applied by the ship that relayed the image, the one that made first contact. One of the images was a microwave sky scan.’

The terminal screen displayed a low-resolution full sky view, false colour coded according to temperature. He thought of the distances these images had travelled to reach the surface of a trapped Earth. There was no point trying to encompass it in imagination.

‘I finally understood what I was seeing a few months ago,’ Iskandar widened the image, showing blurry red and blue blotches in a familiar mottled pattern. Vash wracked his brains, trying to remember what he could of astronomy and physics.

‘That is the cosmic microwave background, yes?’

Iskandar scoffed.

‘No, not quite. Not ours.’

Not ours – the words echoed in his mind. Iskandar flicked a second image onto the screen, a second pattern of mottled red and blue, a human image. There were subtle differences, so subtle he didn’t notice them at first.

Vash’s eyes widened.

‘How far did the Dyn travel?’

‘Ha! Now you’re getting it, at last. I have no words for how far, because I do not know. If they can stride between galaxies as you or I step over boulders in a stream, then think what that implies. Faster than light travel, at the very least. Miracles in the hands of inferior minds – the Other Moon. And still, nobody else has come knocking! The skies are empty – almost, but not quite.’

‘You’ve no evidence of that. You have one anomalous observation, that’s all.’

‘The shadows are lengthening. Can’t you feel it? The universe is a cold place, and if the Dyn are the first aliens we’ve encountered, what does that imply, statistically? Are the others all like them, or worse?’

It was hard to listen to, and not just because Vash had to strain to make sense of Iskandar’s words. Everything he said was coloured by fear, but in a certain way it was undeniably reasonable.

‘I will have to think about what you’ve told me.’

‘I have the first pieces of the puzzle, but I do not have much time. You must complete it,’ insisted Iskandar. He fumbled the terminal into Vash’s hands, clasping them.

‘I can’t take this,’ cautioned Vash, pushing it away from him. ‘You’re handing me a death sentence.’

‘I’ve already received mine. Take it.’

Vash left shortly afterwards, rejoining the waiting car and departing the settlement. He imagined vengeful, fearful Dyn staring at him down their scopes. The shanty mixture of improvised huts and housecube stacks gave way to open algae fields, then to a spartan airfield where an Arco-issue short-range aeroshuttle awaited.

Vash boarded the transport in a daze, barely acknowledging the salutes of the pilot and guard. They climbed quickly, circling away from the nameless settlement, no questions asked. The quiet hum of the compressor jets was almost peaceful. Vash leant back in the small passenger seat and stared out of the window at the dark stratospheric sky. He looked up at the stars, piercingly bright and remote, but only for a moment before he returned his gaze to the papers in front of him.