A black Range Rover pulled up outside my house. A tall man got out; he was wearing a black suit and sunglasses. Sunglasses in Yorkshire? No, that wasn’t right; that wasn’t right at all. I think we saw the sun about two weeks ago, and I forget how long it was before that. He walked up my drive and knocked on my door.

I left my security chain on, and I opened my door.

“Ma’am,” he said in a North American accent, “Professor Pierce, Professor Mrs Mica Pierce?”

“And who is asking?” I queried.

“Ma’am, I have been asked to collect you and take you to Fylingdales for a conference, an international conference.”

“I don’t know anyone at Fylingdales.”

“No, Ma’am, but they know of you, and I have been asked to escort you there as a matter of urgency. I can wait a few minutes for you to collect your passport, which you will need for security.”

“I may not wish to come.” Well, of course I would go; this was like something out of a Hollywood film, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Ma’am, I am advised that refusal is not an option.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; this is England. You have no jurisdiction here.”

“Ma’am,” he said, “if you could just answer your phone, please, Ma’am.”

At that point my mobile phone started ringing; it was on the table where I had left it when I went to answer the door. I left the door open and walked to the table and picked up my phone.

“Hello.”

“Professor Pierce, I have the Prime Minister for you,” a clipped voice said. There was a click, and then I heard his unmistakable voice, so familiar from TV.

“Professor Pierce, your country needs you.”

“What for? This is ridiculous; I am just a languages professor. Fylingdales is all spies and cold war and stuff; I know nothing of that.”

“Professor, it is the nearest very secure location to you; we need you to join a conference there. I cannot say any more on this line; please go with the operative that has come to collect you. You are not in any trouble, but your country might be, and it needs your expertise.”

“Who will feed my dog?”

“I will phone your mother personally as soon as we finish this call and ask her to feed Maisie. I will also ask the King to invite her to a Garden party at the palace.”

Shit, alive, he even knew the name of my dog. Mother was a full-blown royalist; she would love the palace. Me? I was more leaning towards being a republican by nature. The royal family did nothing for me.

“Okay.”

“Thank you; please do not text or phone anyone and say where you are going. This is very important.”

“Okay, Christ, this is like something out of James Bond.”

“Goodbye, Professor Pierce.” The line clicked, and that was that. I had spoken with the Prime Minister.

After a boring drive I was escorted through the Fylingdales boundary gates, gapped double gates – I think they call it a ‘tiger trap’ – and then driven to a low building where a man came out to collect me; it seems the man who had driven me did not have authority to enter the building. The building had a huge concrete construction on top with circular indentations in it. I vaguely knew it was some sort of radar array, and that was it.

Inside, I was escorted through brightly lit corridors to a large, dimly lit conference room. At one end was a large screen with a number of people displayed, and there were around ten people in the room sat around the table.

“Professor Pierce”, a man said, “if you could sit here, there is a briefing pack in front of you.”

I sat at the indicated seat and opened the bottle of water that was by the briefing pack and took a sip; this was heady stuff. I flicked through the pack; it really was quite technical. The gist was that we had pretty much made first contact and that the Canadians had a rocket ready to launch to investigate.

It seems the Canadians and their space industry were very much under the radar compared to the Americans, Russians and Chinese, and under the radar was very much a prerequisite. The public suspecting first contact could end up in riots and loss of control. Little was said that could indicate anything untoward.

The conference was hosted and chaired by the American secretary of defence. The head of Space Force America was also there, as were some high-up technical bods from Canada, Russia, China and the UK. I was surprised by how small the actual group of people in the know was and also by how unknown some of the people were. There were none of the usual faces that come out as talking heads on TV when something interesting happens.

It turned out that Voyager 1 had sent some disturbing transmissions back that had the scientists in a tizzy, a neutrino pattern that Voyager should not be able to detect. Further signals came back that could only be artificial, intelligence-made, but no intelligence on Earth could have made them. The fact that there was extraterrestrial intelligence could not be denied.

A while ago Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere, a sort of invisible boundary that encases our solar system and acts as a protective shield, deflecting harmful cosmic rays and other charged particles that come from outside our solar system and so safeguarding Earth and its neighbours. That was all I knew, but it seems the EI (extraterrestrial intelligence) was the other side of the heliosphere boundary. What was it? The scientists were intrigued; they couldn’t explain it, and that made governments nervous. The problem was that Voyager 1 was over twenty-five billion kilometres away, and even with a constantly accelerating nuclear propulsion unit, it would take over a year’s spaceflight to get to it and find out what was happening.

Once whoever got to it, then their messages would take around a day to get back to Earth. So we were looking at over a year, assuming we left today, to find out what the hell was happening beyond the heliosphere.

Key questions were why they hadn’t, whoever they were, crossed the boundary; what did they want; and what could we learn from them? By learning from them, I took that to mean exploit. For me the unspoken and unasked question was, were they a threat to us? Talking went back and forth for a number of hours. Refreshments were brought into the room, and there were a small number of comfort breaks, and eventually a consensus was arrived at. The proposed spacecraft to go and explore would have room for two people, a physicist and a linguist. The physicist had just won out over a biologist, but it had been a close run thing.

The conference wound up, and I assumed that I would be taken home, my head buzzing with words I could not say and knowledge I could not share. I was picked up by a similar car that dropped me off, but I noticed that we went a different way out of the base.

“Where are we going?” I asked the driver.

“RAF Leeming miss,” he replied, his eyes never once wavering from the roads.

“Why are we going there?” I asked.

“Miss, I am just the driver; I was told that is where you are to be delivered to, and that is what I am doing.”

I hadn’t even heard of RAF Leeming, and Google on my phone told me little more than it was an operational airbase able to deliver logistical requirements globally, basically a logistics hub. Why the hell they wanted me to go there was beyond me. I sat back in the car seat, closed my eyes and dozed. It seems my life was not under my control.

I was met at the gate and escorted into a waiting area, and an armed man stood by the exit. I was, so they told me, going to Canada. I didn’t want to go to Canada; I wanted to go back to my house in Bingley. I wanted to go back to teach my students at the university, but apparently what I wanted was irrelevant. My country needed me in Canada, and so that is where I was going.

I was not going on a nice commercial flight; no, I was going by military transport. Functional rather than comfortable, and it was around a ten-hour flight; my amusement at what had originally seemed like a Hollywood film had turned into a nightmare, and to say that I was annoyed was an understatement. It wasn’t that I didn’t ever want to go to Canada; I had never even thought about going there. I mean, who does?

Arrival in Canada was at what I presumed was one of their military bases; there was no customs exchange, a piece of paper was stamped with something, and I was told to keep it with my passport. Then I was whisked away to some large facility out in the middle of what looked like a forest. I was shown to a room and told to get some rest; I would be collected at 0700. To be honest, I had little idea of what the time was; everything had been a whirlwind.

In the room I found a suitcase, actually one of my suitcases from home, and it was full of a selection of my clothes. How the hell had they done that? I assumed when I was at the conference at Fylingdales. I was so far behind with what was going on. My brain was running at around the speed of sound, but my body was exhausted. I used the ensuite bathroom and fell naked into bed and awoke with someone banging on the door and calling my name.

It was damn early in the morning, and my head was humming; I needed coffee. I fell into the shower, and after drying myself and washing my teeth, I threw on some clothes, a simple skater dress over my underwear and some flat shoes, and I headed off to find breakfast.

It seems Canada is like America; sugar is added to everything – bread, cereal, milk – all have added sugar, my God. I got the canteen chef to make me an omelette, stressing that I wanted no sugar added, and I sat at a table and stared forlornly at my breakfast.

“Morning English,” a voice said. Its owner sat opposite me and smiled.

“Er, hello,” I replied.

“I’m Dan, Dan Weikowitz, Professor of Applied Sciences at Harvard.”

“Oh, okay, er, if I’m English, does that make you American?”

“Yes, I suppose it does, but you are the only English gal here. Have they told you anything?”

“Nope, not a damn thing. I was in a conference in England, and when I thought that they were taking me home, they whisked me off to a military base and flew me here. I fell into bed and poured myself into breakfast.”

“I was in that conference but from Houston, but I managed to keep my mouth closed, which, as anyone who knows me will attest, is a pretty rare event.”

I smiled; he was intelligent and amusing, and I was a stranger in what to me was a strange land. A friendly voice was welcome. I finished my omelette and drank my frankly awful coffee. The North American people are so proud of their coffee, yet it is vile and awful; they need to come to Europe and drink proper coffee. Oh well. I bet even the bottles of water are sweetened.

“I think that we are being summoned,” Dan said as he nodded towards the door. I turned and looked; a man was coming our way, beckoning.

“If you will both follow me,” he said as he got to our table, “we are ready to begin.”

“Begin what?” I asked.

“Your training.”

I looked at Dan, and he looked back; he seemed as clueless as I was. I shrugged and got to my feet and followed the flunky out of the room. We went along a couple of corridors and then found ourselves in a room about twenty feet square. There was a huge display screen at one end and chairs dotted around the room. Each of the chairs had one of those small fold-up tables that I was familiar with from uni, and on four of the tables there was a large folder and a pen and a highlighter.

“Pick a seat with a folder,” a woman said. I hadn’t noticed her when I walked in, and I did not recognise her at all; I didn’t even know if I should. As I was taking my seat, there were some sounds behind me. I turned around and saw two more people enter the room. One I recognised, he was Professor Ashok Sandhir, a linguist like myself, a little older and very accomplished. The person that came with him I had no idea of, but Dan smiled at him.

I had an inkling; perhaps he was a scientist like Dan. Interesting.

“Okay, people,” the woman said. “I am Herta Bloenguit; I shall be undertaking your training and acclimation.”

“Training and acclimation for what?” I asked, unable to keep quiet any longer.

“The trip,” she replied.

“What trip?” Dan asked just as I had been about to.

“The trip to the aliens,” she replied. There were gasps from all four of us; I think I managed a ‘what?’

“Look, everyone, I thought that it had been obvious from the conference; we have to send suitably knowledgeable experts, and you four are the leading experts in your fields. Dan and Mica are first choice, Ashok and Jerry are shadows and will go if for some reason the primary can’t go.”

“Well, here is a reason,” I said. “I have no intention of going on a spaceship anywhere. I mean, it is at least a two-year journey; I am not an astronaut, and I never wanted to be. Shit, I even hate flying.”

“That is what the training is for. I have two weeks to teach you enough, and then you take off. Time is tight because of the relative positions of Jupiter and Saturn; we will use their gravity to boost your speed. We think we can get the journey time down to ten months.” Herta stared at me; I wasn’t going to be bowed.

“No, just no. I have been basically kidnapped. I have no intention of going.”

“Professor Pierce, you have no say in the matter, you are going, and quite possibly the future of humanity depends on how much you learn over the next two weeks. This trip is not a holiday to the Bahamas; this is the future of humankind, and you are our best hope, you and Dan.”

My brain was in turmoil; I was furious. This was worse than a Hollywood film. I was in no position to go on a spacecraft; I had students to deal with, and I had Maisie to think of. I didn’t have a partner at this time; my last relationship had ended six months ago, and I had not been in a hurry to find a new one, but nevertheless, this was just wrong.

I was sitting there chuntering to myself and suddenly realised that Herta was standing in front of me.

“You have no choice, Mica,” she said. “I am not joking when I say humanity is depending on you. The thing is, no one knows, apart from a couple of heads of state, and that is it. We have no other options. The best two options are in this room, and the next best two are also in this room; there is no third option. Now, will you get your head out of your ass and start working.”

Dan was smiling; Ashok and Jerry were looking relieved, relieved perhaps that they were second choices or relieved that they didn’t have the might of Herta facing them down.

I shrugged. “I need decent coffee, not the crap your canteen serves; I need espresso. Then, and only then, might I be in a position to agree.”