Radio Kill

RADIO KILL

CHAPTER 1: COMMUNIST RADIO

My eyes shot wide open as my alarm clock/cassette player burst into life. It soon enough found itself making friends with the wall.

It still didn't shut up.

Great, now I'd have to get out of bed to turn it off. Curse General Magics and their seemingly indestructible alarm clocks. At least my tape wasn't busted, though. I rolled over to face the wall the clock had recently become closely acquainted with, revealing the time to be Ɛ0:9.

Wait, what?

Oh, right.

"Stupid upside-down clock thinks it can fool me? It's far too early for this sort of shit."

With a sigh, I rolled out of bed and trotted over to the clock, turning it off and placing it back on the nightstand ready for this quaint little ritual to be repeated tomorrow.

I should probably stop denting the wall.

Oh well.

I stretched my wings out and made my way into the bathroom. Shower on, quick look in the mirror: yep, still lookin' good. I left the shower to warm up while I made a coffee. I needed it, the sun wasn't even up yet.

By this point you may be wondering who I am, and why you should care. Well, my name is Dipole, I'm a pegasus, I have a luxurious blonde mane, and I'm an officer in the Equestrian Army. I used to be with the Air Force, but my special talent is radio, and air traffic control is boooooriiing, so I got myself transferred. Now, my job is to listen to Crystal Empire radio broadcasts. Mysterious, am I right? Impressive, even.

No?

Oh, well screw you, too.

Anyway, I listen to these amazing, mysterious, TOP SECRET, SUPER INTRIGUING, IMPORTANT broadcasts so that you can sleep in your bed at night safe from Crystal attack.

Bet my job sounds a whole lot more impressive now, huh?

So anyway, I should hurry up or I'm going to be late. Being late isn't something that goes down too well in the military. Chug coffee, quick shower, cap on, jacket on, grab an apple, out the door. And with minutes to spare!

Buck me, its cold.

Okay, so maybe I should've dried off better before stepping outside into a mid-winter morning, especially this far north.. At least I have my jacket with me. Not wasting any more time, I spread my wings and get airborne, heading west. See, I don't actually live on-base like most army ponies do.  It's still military accommodation, but its in the suburbs of town, so I get a few more liberties I guess. Plus I don't have to share a room with anypony, which is a major plus.

Mostly though, it reminds me of home. I'm from Las Pegasus myself, its a long way from the border. I get a bit restless without the hustle and bustle of civilization, and radio installations are hardly 'where its at', so to speak. And the fine folks of South Spurlin are actually pretty good at the whole 'party' vibe home has. They just know when to be serious too.

Plus they have a pretty bitchin' electronic scene going on. Let me tell you, that is a good night out.

The base is only about a 10 minute flight from the edge of town. I start descending, I'm pretty close to the base now. I pull my ID card out of my jacket and head lower still. With the checkpoint in sight I touch down, I can walk the rest. As I get closer to the booth, I see that Dusty is working this morning, head in hooves and eyes half closed. I don't like Dusty, he's so disinterested in everything, it's just depressing. If he's not working the entrance, he usually wont even acknowledge that you exist.

Sure enough, he doesn't even look at me as I approach the booth.

"Please state your name-"

"Dipole Hooves, Intelligence Officer, Q1015PD." I say with a roll of my eyes. I slide my ID card into the booth.

He just slides it back and opens the gate. Good to know we're hard at work protecting our nation's secrets, right?

Anyway, this is Royal Equestrian Army Spurlin Electronic Surveillance. It's pretty drab, standard Army fare, really, but its the inside where the fun is. The COMINT building where I work is on the other side of the base. Under any other circumstance I'd just fly there, but the base has surface-to-air missiles installed for defense.

I don't trust them.

So, right past the barracks, and then follow the road up behind the hangar (damn right we have planes based here!) until you reach the buck-off huge SIGINT dish. Then it's the squat little building next to it. That's my office.

Well, it's the place I work.

I'm not important enough for my own office. Yet.

It doesn't look like much, but from here, I get to listen in to the other side of the Spurlin wall and beyond. We can get a pretty strong signal for transmissions all the way from the heart of the SSCE, domestic and military. They make us listen to everything, because 'anything could be useful'. It's pretty rare that anything broadcast on the public stations is useful, but some of the radio shows are admittedly funny.

Ha, I can imagine the look on Dad's face if I told him that 'those commies' where actually pretty funny.

They're not even communist, for Celestia's sake!

Right, actual work. I make my way to the entrance, ID card out again to prove I've not suddenly become a different pony between the entrance and here, then its through the big security door, and here we are, one of many Equestrian Army intelligence gathering operations.

I trot over to my station to get started. Nopony even looks up, although to be fair, I doubt they heard me come in anyway. There's no briefing today, we all know what we're doing, so I just get stuck right into it. Cap off, earphones on, power on, and...that's it. Really. What did you expect, fancy arrays and secret codes? All I have is the radio, and audio recorder (for if I find anything important) and a note book for writing down...notes. Not for drawing in.

Basically, I spend a good 12 hours a day combing through radio frequencies until I hear something useful. It's actually way more fun than it sounds, I promise.

Best get started, I suppose. I use my wing to tweak the dial to...4000 kHz, why not?

Static.

"Interesting..." I mused.

No, really. This frequency is usually one of the busiest, picking up nothing is pretty odd. I made a note of it- I used the notebook for its intended purpose!- and began dialing though the radio waves.

Okay, so it turns out that if somepony disconnects my equipment from the system, I only hear static. I could see Swirls snickering to herself and glancing over at me when she was sure I wasn't looking.

What a dick.

Okay then, earphones on again, power back on, starting for real this time, back at 4000 kHz, aaaannnnd-

Ah, that's more like it. Crystal domestic radio during daytime. Right now, I was listening to a local news program for some little border town. Foreign traffic reports weren't particularly useful to me, so I moved on. This was when the job was boring, scanning through adverts and trivial stuff to find the important things, or at least the entertaining things.

'I think I'll dial....hmm.'

I'm spoiled for choice, truth be told. Which frequency do I go for? I decide to fall back onto my fool proof plan of 'spin the dial and just work from where it lands'. I reach out a hoof, and, twirl the dial, clicking as it spins.

"'Round and 'round the dial goes, where it stops, nopony knows!"

Heh, it's times like these that glad nopony can hear me through their earphones. The clicking slowed and the dial came to a stop at 505.6 kHz. AM radio, boring. I flip it up to Megahertz and spin again, maybe I'll pick up some of those sweet pirate radio stations. Truth be told, this was probably the most useful setting to be in, seeing as how most military broadcasts were transmitted in the high frequency band, along with a whole slew of other things. So I settled in and got twirling.

Like I was saying, official broadcasts are incredibly dry. I've just spent the last 15 minutes listening to some captain or something radioing in to a depot to complain that their base hasn't received its shipment of shirts. 'You never know when something important will come up', they say. That may be so, but I can't take any more of this, I swear if I hear the word 'shirts' one more time...

I'm getting distracted (hardly my fault, I might add, this station is desperately boring), and being distracted means I'm not doing my job properly. Therefore I am unable to continue monitoring this frequency to the best of my abilities. The only thing I can do now is change to another.

If I make it sound reasonable like that maybe the boss wont be angry if he finds out.

Or he'll rightfully call bullshit, could go either way.

Eh, I'll deal with that if it comes to it.

Changing the frequency finally drags me out of the clothing based debacle and into...silence. Great.

Moving on.

Spinning some more, I manage to find something genuinely intriguing. Not anything secret, but interesting none the less. If what I was hearing was anything to go by, I'd just tuned into a space launch. And space is hella cool. I think I can vibe with this for a while.

"-current fuel level at 78%. Time to launch, T minus 21 hours and-"

Okay, so maybe I wont be sticking around for this after all. And that would've been neat, too. Guess I can listen in for a bit and find out what the mission is. Maybe a new satellite, or some kinda-

"Ow!"

I brought a hoof up to my face to cover my eye. Swirls had just thrown a paper plane at me. At my eye. I didn't even need to look around to know it was Swirls. Nopony else here has the mental age of a 12 year old.

What a dick.

I glare at her, but she isn't looking. She's doing a terrible job of hiding her laughter though. You'd think that the military would be one of the places where this kind of twattery didn't happen, but apparently not. Sighing, I settle back into this mildly interesting broadcast and speculate what they'll be firing into the void today.

A light collision and a 'pap' noise informs me that my headphones have been struck by another projectile. I look over at Swirls with a deadpan expression, she's almost rolling around with laughter.

I wonder how severe the punishment will be if I break her horn...

Fuck this, I'm getting some coffee.

Vending machines are like, Celestia's gift to Ponykind, or something. Seriously, I love them, they dispense cheap drinks and snacks. The fact we have them in the building almost makes Swirls bearable.

Maybe they should stop her from using the vending machines. I bet it's the near constant intake of caffeine and sugar that makes her act like a dick. Unless she's just naturally has an awful personality.

So I'm sat outside the 'radio room' with a far-too-hot coffee in one wing, and a bag of baby carrots in the other. They're basically the only non-apple food products on base since Sweet Apple Hectares won that catering contract. A stallion can only eat so many apple-based foods a day before he is violently ill all over the corridor and his superior officer.

I frown slightly. Some things are best left forgotten.

I head for the break room at a brisk pace: the coffee is way too hot, I can feel it burning me through the cheap paper cup. Opening the door, I find that the room is completely empty. More room for me I guess, it's pretty rare that I can actually find a seat in here. They even have today's newspapers this time! I'm practically being spoiled. It must still be earlier than I though if nopony else had been here yet.  Lets have a look...

'CARNAGE IN 'KILLDOZER' INCIDENT'

Huh. Neat.

The picture says it all. It's an armored bulldozer driving through a building while being chased by police officers. Now, as an active member of the army, I should find this act of injustice awful, but Luna damn it, that thing is cool.

I want one.

From what I gather, basically whoever built it was pissed at the local government and I guess decided to 'complain', as it were. In a very dramatic way, at that.

Where do you even get a bulldozer from?

These are the pressing matters that we need to know.

Deciding I need to investigate this further, I volunteer to read into it more. I settle into the oddly vacant break room, beverage near by, and try and see what I can find. And to think they said I was a time waster.

That was a useless endeavor, at no point does it say where the bulldozer came from. Disappointed, I finish my drink and head back into the radio room, slinking in quietly, unseen.

I don't have to sneak around, but I like to make a game of it.

Sitting back down, I flip the power back on on my radio, pleasantly surprised that it has not been sabotaged or played with in any way this time. Deciding I should probably start doing some actual work, I dive straight into some military broadcasts. Pretty quickly I find some kind of air combat drill going on in some part of the tundra. These happen pretty regularly, but it could still be useful to listen in for a bit to try and hear if they're using any new tactics, or weapons, or even planes.

This brings me back to my air force days. Damn, that makes me sound old. It was only, like, a year or two ago. Having air force credentials has sort of made me the unofficial go-to guy for SSCE air power related transmissions. Although, it doesn't really make any difference, I just have a slightly better picture of what's happening than the rest of the poines. They're all trained to know what everything  they hear means. Military wise, at least. Though, I guess it would mean I'd have a better background knowledge of this sort of stuff.

Right now it sounds like they're practicing some kind of ground attack drill. Probably on a dummy village or something. Ground attack is something the Crystal Empire have become particularly good at, over the years. Well, if their transmissions and propaganda are anything to go by.

Though, to be fair, we do have footage of some of their big intense live fire war games sorta spiel. They look very efficient at that sort of thing.

The transmissions don't seem to be offering any new information, and they're certainly not doing or using anything new. Time to switch frequencies, methinks.

Turning the dial, I seem to be picking up a whole lot of static and dead air. A little odd, but nothing super weird, so I keep going. Turning through all the nothing, I suddenly hear a blip. Blips are interesting. A lot more interesting than nothing, anyway. Dialing back, I still get nothing.

Okay, now I'm getting a bit annoyed. I dial through it again, still nothing.

"Euughgh."

Again, it's a good thing everypony is wearing earphones, or I'd look like a huge weirdo right about now.

Taking a calming breath, I figure I was tuning too fast, so I tune much slower this time. This sounded like a good idea, but now I'm back into the endless void of static. Fun fact! Static is supposedly some sort of echo-remnants from the start of the univ-FOUND IT!

Oh, well this is underwhelming. It's just a jaunty little tune. A vaguely spooky sounding tune, but pretty unremarkable otherwise. Admittedly, it is odd finding something like this in a wavelength usually used for military stuff. But is it noteworthy?

Eh, I got nothing to lose, all that could happen is that it gets ignored. I make a quick note of the frequency, and then...just sorta do nothing. Guess I got distracted by the weird sounds. It's sorta catchy, in a really odd way. And then just like that, it stops.

I sigh a little in disappointment, and reach a hoof out to turn the dial an move on, but before I do, something comes back.

It's a voice. It's slightly distorted, and I have a poor signal, but it's definitely a voice. Sounds like a mare. And she's counting? No, not counting, just saying numbers in Germane.

Okay, I guess it just became noteworthy. I start scrawling down the numbers, it could mean anything. Some subliminal broadcasting weapon? Top secret information? Who knows, all I can say is that it sounds important. That, and that it's definitely not air force chatter.

And why in Germane? I mean, I get that it's a pretty popular language on both sides of the border, but the official languages of both Equestria and the Crystal Empire is Equestrian. Is it just to add another layer of confusion? Maybe to put ponies off of listening to it, because they wouldn't understand? But then why broadcast it in a largely Germane speaking part of the map?

'It's shortwave' my brain tells me. 'It isn't broadcast from here, you can just hear it here. You could probably hear it anywhere.' I raise a good point.

By now, the numbers are just repeating themselves. I have quite a few of the sequences written down. After a minute or so, the voice stopped and the odd tune came back. Then the tune went too. Total radio silence.

What an odd turn of events. I'll have to get these numbers to somepony and see what they make of it. Turning back to the radio, I'm almost hesitant to change frequencies, in case something else comes up, but I decide I should probably move on. Besides, I have the tuning written down if I want to come back to it later.

Moving on!

The airwaves have been pretty dead for the last hour or so. Dead or of no importance. Once again I find myself idly meandering through frequencies in the hopes of finding something interesting. More slowly this time, though. After finding that number thing by chance, I do't want to potentially miss anything else.

Shame that there wasn't really anything to miss. I'd managed to listen into a marine comm or two, but that's really been about it. And even they were about 45 minutes ago now.

I sigh and continue trawling through. As boring as it is, I have to do it.

Continuing on my journey, I turn the dial up more. Still nothing, but there's a slowly increasing buzzing, and something else. Voices? I slow down even more to fine tune my machine.

Sure enough, there are indeed voices. Muffled and hard to discern, but voices nonetheless. It's not much, but it's better than more dead air. I can at least try to make something of this.

Straining my ears, I can sorta make out a few words here and there. Nothing much, and not anything that makes any coherent sense given the fact that I'm missing the rest of the conversation, but I can hear maybe a gasp or a murmured agreement now and then, Sometimes a shout. I just wish I knew what was happening.

And then it went quiet again. The voices stopped, but the buzz persisted.

Great, now I-

"HEY THERE, ARMY PONY!"

I damn near jumped out of my own coat! Somepony was talking now, loud and clear!

"Now listen here," The voice (she) continued. "You're not meant to be listening to this. Nuh-uh, Crystal Ponies only."

Wait, did she know where I was listening from?

"So listen here, army pony, because I'm only going to say it once. I could say it twice, but I'd only get in more trouble, since I'm not meant to be talking to you at all. Just stop listening, 'kay? Can you do that for me?"

I do nothing. This is getting very interesting.

"Fine, have it your way. but don't say I didn't warn you."

So she knows I'm still here then. But what did she mean by 'don't say I-

"KHKKHHTHTHKTHK-"

"GAHFUCK!"

I jump back and fall out of my seat in shock, recoiling from the sheer volume of the horrible noise pumping out of my earphones. I tear my headpiece off, and lay on the floor, breathing deeply from the unwelcome surprise. I feel eyes on me. This time, everypony in the room heard that, and they're all looking at me with a mixture of shock, amusement and annoyance.

Just what the hell was that? Guess she really wanted me to go, if the ringing in my ears is anything to go by. Just how loud was that?

Looking up, I see Circuits is trying to talk to me, but I can't hear a word he's saying. He looks angry, probably thinks I'm ignoring him or something. Yeah, I don't think I'll be listening to any more radio today. Maybe if I explain the situation, they'll let me go home early...