Codename Alpha

Chapter 11

As idyllic as the landscape was, the strong winds forced me to pull the door back into a semi-closed position. It wasn't too hard to align it so there was still a small opening, as it was quite rusted, and seemed to stick at any place, if one applied enough force. I stopped recording and walked back to Lieutenant Kovalev and Ensign Pearce.

"So, we obviously can't contact anyone in orbit right now, because they're not searching for us," I said.

"Is there something else we can do with the radio, then?" Kovalev asked. "Maybe listen into their military communications? We may not speak the language, but I feel we could learn something from their... inflection?"

Pearce nodded. "They've definitely got their military communications on a secure frequency. Same probably goes for their police scanner, too. I feel the most important thing here is to find a way to communicate with them peacefully. We've got no other options, too. The problem there is that we don't have a basis from which to translate. Back home, we could just use paw signals or what have you to try and get across our intent. For these people, waving to them could mean something completely different from 'how do you do' or 'good day.'"

I felt the need to interject. "Yeah, I feel like we actually lucked out when it comes to these aliens. We could've gotten, like... methane-based gas people that communicate via infrared, or some freaky bug-monster race that talks with pheromones. We've got a culture that communicates with a spoken language... and I'll be honest, it doesn't seem too dissimilar from any languages from any number of languages on Valdera."

"Right," he said. "Especially on that whole bug thing. I probably wouldn't have tried as hard to evade those missiles if they had been launched by giant cockroaches. Do any of us know anything about linguistics?"

"Actually, sir, I took a semester-long class on linguistics at second-level. I can speak a fair amount of languages, but I doubt any of them really apply here," I said.

"Are you any good at learning new ones?" he asked.

"If I've got a background on the language and all that, sure. But in this situation I'd be starting completely from scratch. I may be able to pick up on specific words here or there, but I highly doubt that. Although... it might help if we recorded the radio, or really just any speech we get, so we can take it back to the Valiant and work up some sort of translation system there. It may be something out of science fiction, but we've got translators for every language back home, so..."

He fiddled around with some of the switches on the radio before speaking again. Lieutenant Kovalev was watching with curiosity as he plugged some cords into an unseen device in the backpack. "Well, you know what they say. There's no time like now to start learning a new one." He turned on the radio, and immediately, our ears were assaulted by loud static. He quickly turned the volume down. "I was hoping it would already be tuned to music or something..." he grumbled.

"We were listening in on their civilian radio before, right? I'm interested to see if we can actually hear any of their music. I've gotten a bit tired of listening to the same Markovian symphony soundbite every morning."

"Yeah, who even chooses the wakeup call music?" I asked, rhetorically.

After yawning, Pearce began to tune the radio. Both he and Lieutenant Kovalev seemed as if they were about to fall asleep at any moment. I felt fine, though. After a few seconds of static, Ensign Pearce found a specific frequency where music was playing. The alien language began to fill the container, accompanied with an immediately catchy beat. It sounded like a pop song, like the ones that were all over the internet, as well as the radio, back during the 50s.
I wished that I could understand any of the lyrics, and the low quality audio we were getting certainly wasn't helping. The alien that was singing was doing so in a rather monotone voice. Without any knowledge of how their phonetic structures worked in the first place, it was tough to piece out any bit of alien wording. However, I could tell from the pauses that this song had something to do with a 'herz ist trumpf,' among other things. The song possessed similar progression to something that I would listen to back on either Valdera, as well as Veta.