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Reed slid the reel of film off the projector and held it up to the light. "Do you have a darkroom here?"
Hank pointed across the lab. A curtained-off chamber sat in the corner. "Over there."
Reed marked the exact frame he wanted with a sticky note, then glanced back. "What process are you using? C-41? RA-4?"
"C-41."
"Store-bought chemicals?"
"Kodak."
"Do you have ammonium thiosulfate? Sodium acetate? Sodium bisulfite? Ammonium sulfate, aluminum sulfate, boric acid?"
Hank's brow furrowed. "You're planning to mix your own developer?"
Reed didn't look up, already calculating ratios in his head. "If we want to pull hidden layers of color, of course I am. Factory stock works fine for landscapes. Space imagery? You'll lose half the signal. Might as well pour it down the drain."
Hank only sighed and fetched the supplies. The two of them—both scientists used to working with their hands—improvised tools, clamps, and makeshift frames until they had something workable. After a painstaking process, the frame was finally developed.
When the image cleared and dried, Hank froze. His jaw actually dropped. "What… is that?"
On the photo, faint but undeniable, was a spindle-shaped construct blocking out a portion of the stars. Its reflective surfaces mimicked starlight so well it blended seamlessly with the background, which was why the original footage had seemed empty. Only Reed's modified process had teased it out.
They stepped out of the darkroom. Reed pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket, studying the silhouette with clinical intensity. "Based on starfield displacement, I'd estimate this craft was two to three kilometers from you during your mission. Rough dimensions: six to eight hundred meters long, sixty to a hundred wide, one-twenty to one-forty tall. Give or take."
Hank swallowed hard. "You're saying… there was a third ship out there? Watching us the entire time?"
Reed didn't even look up. "That's the logical conclusion."
"Which faction? Soviets?" Hank asked, almost hopefully.
Reed actually laughed, dry and sharp. "If the Soviets could build this, the Cold War wouldn't have ended the way it did. No. This is extraterrestrial."
"Aliens…" Hank whispered. His mind went straight to one figure—an alien who had once saved Raven, and humbled the X-Men without even truly fighting them.
"What do you think they wanted?" he asked quietly.
Reed set the photo down, already losing interest now that the puzzle was "solved." "Three possibilities. One: the so-called solar flare wasn't a natural phenomenon. It was a weapon test. They were observing effects.
"Two: reconnaissance. They were sizing up Earth's ability to reach space. What comes after that? Who knows.
"Three: dumb luck. They stumbled across the show, parked themselves at a safe distance, and watched. And if I hadn't pointed it out, you'd never have known."
Hank bristled at the jab. The Blackbird jet was cutting-edge for Earth, but its sensors had been designed for terrestrial threats. Expecting them to pierce alien cloaking tech was absurd. In fact, the mere fact that their footage hadn't picked up the ship might itself be proof of how advanced the intruders were.
Still, his thoughts kept circling back: Aliens. Watching us. Connected to that radiation?
And Jean. She had absorbed it. What did that mean for her?
Hank forced down the urge to run straight to Charles and Raven with the news. Instead, he stayed with Reed, focusing on the data. The screens scrolled with endless numbers—timestamps, temperature spikes, wave patterns.
A normal scientist would have needed to chart and re-chart, graphing data in a dozen different ways before patterns emerged. Reed and Hank didn't need that. Their minds automatically filtered the noise, discarding useless groupings, hunting the signal.
Then Reed stiffened. A spark of inspiration. "What visualization tools do you have here?"
Hank blinked. "Homemade. Why?"
"That'll do." Reed shoved the chair back at him and began dictating instructions—graph conversions, overlays, chart comparisons. Hank entered them, one by one.
Soon the clattering of a dot-matrix printer filled the lab. They stacked four, five transparencies on top of each other. Reed lifted the bundle to the light.
Even Hank could see it now: a repeating structure, a rhythm hidden in the chaos. Something no solar flare could produce. Certainly not over a span of mere ten minutes.
Hank's throat went dry. "This… this pattern… it's alive."
Reed didn't answer right away. His eyes glinted with fascination, calculation, and something that looked unnervingly like excitement. Finally, he said, "I don't know. Yet. Can I get a full copy of the data? With my equipment, I might dig deeper."
Hank hesitated, then nodded slowly. "On one condition. The data doesn't leave your hands. And whatever you discover… you share with us."
Reed smirked faintly, already halfway out the door in his mind. "Agreed."
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