Wordmongers' Masque
Communication Breakdown.
"Testing. Testing. This is J. Miller of Delta Station. Repeat. This is Delta Station. Anyone out there?" I wait half a second before putting another mark on the board. That's check eleven of the night. Three more and my shift is done.
I'm just about to go back to my book when the lights of an incoming signal flicker on. The radio crackles to life: "Listen everybody." I run through the list in my head.
Make sure there's a fresh tape in. Check. Hasn't been anything on any radio for months. Either that tape is fresh or it's Collins' singing, which we'd all be glad to be rid of.
Start recording. Check. I may be used to the silence, but damned if a break in it makes me forget to hit that pretty little button.
Give immediate response. Right. Keep it short, but let them know someone is listening.
"This is Delta Station. You're coming in loud and clear."
Right. Next step. Send word to the compound... Shit. That means breaking the number one rule when a signal comes in. Stay on the line, ready to respond. The system was designed for one person to operate, but always have two people manning it. That way, one could always send word to the compound. But we hadn't had an extra person to spare for months. The morning operator won't be in for another hour at least. I guess it's on me.
Again the signal flares up. It is a man's voice. And the words, faint through the crackle of a bad radio, are vaguely familiar: "We've all lost people we love. We're all scared. We just want to go back to the way things were."
Why do I know that voice? It... Oh Christ. That was Suthers. Mike Suthers. This recording must be years old. That speech was from the beginning. When some thought there was still an outside world to go to. Suthers was trying to keep us together. He had to have known it was over. People we giving shouts of war. The idea that we could somehow fight back. Suthers figured it out right away. There had been a war. But we'd lost already. It wasn't time for us to strike back. It was time for us to hide.
He'd known.
He died a year later. A group had gone out to get revenge after we lost Alpha Station. They were gone three days. We presumed them dead. Looking back on it, they probably were. But before they'd died, they'd given us up. The Krags didn't even bother to send an attack force. They just bombed us from the air. More people died that night than had from the entire move to the Beta Station.
"But right now, I need you guys to put that all aside. We have no clue how bad things are elsewhere in the world, but we know how bad it is here. And we need to do what we can here-for us-before we can focus on everyone else."
God damn it. First sign of life outside of Delta and it's a recording. Well. First sign of human life anyway. The Krags are always around now. They're why you never go above ground alone. Hell, you never go above ground at all unless you've got a damn good reason. Me, I haven't seen sunlight since... Since we gave up on recon. Nothing up there but death. We searched for two years. We checked the major cities. The towns. Highways. Farms. Anywhere we could to find more survivors. And the only thing we found was the dead.
I almost shut the whole thing off. But my better judgment kicks in and I start to ask a few questions.
The first is the only one I really get to. Where the hell is this coming from? That should have been answered a few thought processes back. It's definitely on the checklist.
I'm supposed to bounce a meaningless signal back towards the source and track that. It sounds like complete nonsense to me. And to be honest, it most likely is. The system we have set up is complex and I was given the dumbed down tour. That whole bouncing thing amounts to me flipping a switch and turning a dial. It then shows up on a display that looks a lot like one of those old sonar machines. You play with the settings on that, pull out a map and come up with the grid co-ordinates of the incoming signal.
I make a mark on the map and compare the distances. It's a long way off. Too far for us to waste the resources on getting a team out there. At least, too far for a recording. Not that it's my job to decide that.
"Right now is a time to be selfish. To think about you. To think about those around you. Some of us have lost family and friends. Today, we need to band together. We have to be each other's family. We need to be each other's friends."
The recording sounds like a sad mockery of Suthers. He was the reason that almost all of us survived through the beginning. Without him... It's hard to think of. But the voice coming through the radio seems weak. The static gives him an almost broken voice. For some reason it makes me sad.
I allow myself long enough to wonder if I've gone a little bit crazy. Then, I begin to recheck the location of the signal. Busywork. At least that's what I was telling myself. In reality, it was just an instinct.
Good thing too. I had been completely off with my first location. It was almost four miles directly east of where I'd thought it had been. Christ. I may not know exactly how this system works, but I know how to do the work to locate a signal. It was almost completely body memory. So how the hell had I been off so much?
The soft noise of Suthers voice got louder. As if I'd spun the dial up a few notches. "I'm not forcing you to stay here. If you want to leave, you are free to. But consider the fact that the world outside these walls is no better. The only happy ending we'll get is if with stick together. Out there will be chaos. People will be fighting for food. For shelter. For anything they can get." I was sure that wasn't supposed to happen. Buildings, land masses, whatever. They could all interfere enough for a signal to be weakened. But there was nothing between the source and my position. Hell, there had been nothing between either source and my position.
Thinking that our transmitter must be broken and bouncing the signal incorrectly, I turned to the fall back method. The display that looked like an old sonar machine could actually be configured to act kind of like that. It would scan the surrounding area for any open com channels and if it found one, the display would light up a path from the antennae to the source.
Immediately a path was traced. Six miles northeast. Hell, that was close enough to send someone to check it out. I'm just about to shut off the display when it makes another cycle and shows another path.
Four miles northeast. Another cycle pass. Three miles.
My eyes close for a second. And in that second, I understand.
"Oh shit..." I drop to the floor and yank the machine's cord out of the wall. The display shuts down.
The Krags must have been sending the signal. They must have gotten a hold of old tapes. "But here... maybe we can make it work." Christ it's loud now. "We've enough food to last us." They knew we would be keeping the radios on in case of contact. "We've got shelter." They planned this whole damn thing "We've got heat."
And I fell for it.
Faintly, I hear the noise of a Krag ship above the building. Their humming engines. I grab the shotgun off the table. And my pistol. If it's a scout ship... If they're just trying to find us and then send word to their forces. Maybe I have a chance.
I slam the shotgun butt against the little red button on the wall. That gives me less than sixty seconds to get clear of the building. After that, it'll take anyone and anything around it to meet up with God.
"And most importantly, we've got each other. I'm not telling you what to do. And I'm not saying it's going to be easy. I'm just telling you that, as long as you're here, you're one of us."
"Go to hell," I turn to unload a shot or two into the radio. Before I get the chance the wall behind it is blown away. Half a second later, I'm pinned to the floor by a chunk of cement. The shotgun is out of my sights, but my pistol is well within my reach. As I grab it, I realize that there isn't a way out. The Krags don't take prisoners. They don't need to. It's widely believed that they can download information from any living being's brain. But they do have a sadistic pleasure in torture.
I glance a smoky shadow coming through the broken wall and grasp the gun firmly in my hand. And I take the only shot worth taking...
"And together, we're going to make it through this."
Boldness is a mask for fear, however great.
John Dryden