“S.A.R” it says on our red jackets: Search and Rescue. Well we found it, now we rescue.

Nobody knows where they came from, or why they’re here. Two weeks earlier, they appeared all around the planet, and I mean appeared. Three hundred and fifty saucers announced their arrival in an instant above cities, oceans, forests and deserts - splitting the air with a giant thunderclap, ball lightning and the smell of ozone.

The great powers made great pronouncements: some accused each other, some made futile attacks on the ships. The paranoid Russians even used a tactical nuke, but still they hung there. We were like ants at a picnic. These spacecraft hung in the air, impassive. Each one floated at an altitude of exactly 15,960 feet AMSL (Above Mean Sea Level). All except this ship: location Mount Vinson, Antarctica, elevation 16,050 feet, against which this one lay, crumpled against the rocky summit.

We are the SAR team from the Halley VI Research Station of the British Antarctic Survey. We’re scientists normally; we observe global earth, atmospheric and space events. But if there’s an emergency, we put on our highly visible red suits and go out to help. It’s what humans do. Well we found it, now we rescue.

I led the final climb up to an obvious hatch angled in the snow. It seemed like an area of 3 square metres around it had been melted into a smooth surface. The hatch was firmly closed. There were footprints of a sort that led away from the hatch, circled around, then back to the hatch. There were frozen splashes of a bodily fluid too. Blood?

We banged on the metal hatch like Neanderthals. Then we started to drill a pilot hole through it, millimetre by millimetre. I cleared another area of ice from the hull and I saw it: a crystal “window”. I shone my light inside where I could make out two creatures: one in a torn spacesuit with tendrils wrapped round the other, which appeared to me to be naked, bleeding, mangled and dying. I had spooked them.

We were getting nowhere. The occupants were clearly doomed. Then from the top of the craft, an ultrabright beam of light split the sky and tore into space. We hid our faces, half blinded. Through the flesh of my arms I could see my bones and the beam pulsing on and off about once per second. This lasted about five minutes and afterwards only the Antarctic summer sunlight illuminated the scene. It looked so dim. We fled down the mountain, scrambling around for an eternity.

Then the air cracked apart. I gasped as my lungs emptied. Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Four bright red cubes materialised above us, surrounding the damaged ship. The red cubes worked urgently to form a sphere of light around it. Huge amounts of energy throbbed inside this sphere, then once more - CRACK!

We survivors gathered our senses and made our way up as far as we could. All that remained at the peak was the glassy inner surface of the sphere we’d witnessed. The ship was gone, along with five thousand tons of rock.

The creatures’ Search And Rescue mission was complete.