“Chief,” Flynn
whispered by the communications station. “We’re receiving an open broadcast on
all channels. The computer has flagged it with a code of FX, but that’s not a
standard operation code.”
“First time
on the Hierarchy frontier, right?” Chief Petty Officer Hargrave whispered back.
The blocky
chief pulled up the waveform of the transmission, showing a repeating pattern.
“Go ahead,
give a listen,” the Chief passed him a headset.
Flynn
quirked his head sideways, then pulled the headset on, hearing what sounded
like waves . . . no, wind. A howling wind, but it was clearly produced
digitally.
“What the
flaring sun is that?” Flynn asked.
“A PsyOp,”
said a new voice.
Flynn
snapped to attention as he recognized Lt. Commander Tollensen. The petite woman
scared him. She seemed pleasant until you did something wrong, at which point
the celestial furies were easier to face than her dressing down.
“At ease,”
she said. “The Hierarchy believes their forces are more fearsome when
accompanied by a soundtrack.”
“Sir?
I—well, that’s just dumb. We don’t have to open the channel and listen to it.”
“But we do
have to coordinate with other ships and communicate. Not only have they
blanketed all of local space in this flaring noise, they figured out a way to
piggyback the waveform onto encrypted transmissions. Any time we need to
communicate, this will be in the background. Fortunately, we have a protocol to
deal with it. Use communications protocol Golden,” she said, walking away.
“Golden?”
Flynn whispered to the Chief.
“As in
‘Silence is golden,’” the chief whispered back.