Meanwhile, in a Red Blok tracking station somewhere on Elysee:
Technician 1st Class Vasilly Switchov was bored, very bored. He stared vacantly at the screen before him willing something to happen. His earphones were silent and his ears were burning after eight hours of
wearing them. All he had heard was routine traffic and the usual background hiss. At least his shift would finish soon and he could watch TV. After all, Red Blok TV was the best in the known universe. He hated these quiet times. Mind you, he wasn't too keen on the alternative either. He was just preparing to hand over to one of his colleagues when something caught his attention.
"Dimitri," he called out to one of his comrades. "Look at this". Dimitri walked briskly across to him.
"What is it?"
"Ever seen this before?"
Dimitri studied the monitor. His brow furrowed with concentration. At last it dawned on him and he gasped in surprise. It was a message being sent over the Therian EMI grid and somehow their equipment had intercepted it. To them it appeared as a marching series of 1's and 0's but it meant something to the morphos.
"What should we do?" asked Vasilly. "We can't keep it to ourselves. It might be important."
"Get in touch with HQ and tell them to send out a specialist. How the hell did we pick this up?"
There had never been an instance of Therian internal communications being intercepted other than with specialist equipment. This station was only supposed to be able to detect traffic, not see it.
Later that week:Red Blok IntelHQ, Elysee
General Kutizedov sat at his desk and leaned back in his plush chair. He regarded the report lying before him with a mixture of anger and amusement. Over the last week the Red Blok intelligence forces on Elysee had been frantically trying to make sense of the message intercepted by Listening Station X-21 and this was the result. It was not the announcement of a major offensive or any such sensitive information. It did not give away any secrets, other than the alien imperialists were mighty confident; but then that wasn't really a secret. No, the message was merely a rallying cry, exhorting the morphos to more expansionist aggression. The general smiled grimly, picked up the piece of alien propaganda, scrunched it into a ball and tossed it into the fire. His attention then turned to more pressing matters.
"So comrades come rally
and the last fight let us face.
The intersiderial unites the human race."
| 
