Chapter Text
The On Air sign blinked to life, the red light barely more than a faint glow in the booth. A man sat hunched over an aging microphone and adjusted his headset. He twisted out his cigarette into the ashtray by his elbow before clearing his throat and leaning forward.
“Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, faithful listeners. Time for your on the hour news reports.”
He looked at the pile of scribbled notes sitting aside the ashtray, leafing through them for a fresh-printed sheet with the news summaries. Peering over his glasses he skimmed over the contents, giving the paper an officious shake.
“Looks like plans for the Sydney memorial park are well under way, thanks as usual to the push of public support for our girls and boys in shining Jaeger armor. Mutavore’s mess has been completely swept up and cleared out, leaving plenty of room for the commemorative space honoring late Striker Eureka pilot Chuck Hansen…a fine use of tax payer funds, if I may say in my oh-so-biased opinion.”
He squinted at the sheet again.
“Speakin’ of Sydney, looks like at least one Wall of Life has been officially greenlighted for tear-down. No word yet on others like the Los Angeles or Sitka sites, though with Sydney’s grand mistake being ripped down, they’re sure to follow. Nothing like a good dose of public embarrassment about misuse of resources and funds to get our beloved United Nations into action, am I right?”
He gave a gravelly chuckle, giving the print-out one last look. The lighting in the booth was very dim aside from a half-dead lamp tucked into one corner of the room and the faded red glow of the old On Air sign, and he had to bring the paper almost up to his nose.
“Next up… I’ve been asked a few times now about a matter of public concern: where oh where have the BuenaKai gone? Everybody’s favorite Church of the Breach got a quick second wind six months ago with that week-long Apocalypse rehash, but ever since the quelling of the Second Wave we’ve heard nary a peep from ‘em. Sects the world ‘round have either been disbanding or slinking off into the wild blue yonder without so much as a ‘hail Godzilla’ to mark their passage.”
The man set the sheet aside, his mouth twisting in distaste at the very thought of the BuenaKai; his meager phone lines had been clogged up with kaiju-worshipers more than once proclaiming his newscasts and open support of the Pan Pacific Defense Corp as heresy. He was used to the threats of heavenly retribution and couldn’t have cared less what any of the cultists said, but their absence from his phones had been a disconcerting - if not entirely unwelcome- surprise.
“Now I’m not one for conspiracy theories,” he continued. “But a church with a following that big and that crazy? Gotta wonder why they suddenly disappeared when the Breaches zipped themselves back up. The closure of the first big Breach shook ‘em, but they were up and ready with the holiest of holy ‘I told you so’s during the Wave. Can it be they’ve retreated to bunkers waiting for invasion attempt number three, out of sight and mind forever? One can hope, surely. Here’s hoping wherever they’ve gone, they stay.”
He glanced at the clock, marking his time. The news briefs were always quick intervals between song sets in peacetime; during emergency situations his little station became almost exclusively talk radio. There hadn’t been many such situations the PPDC Emergency Broadcast Network hadn’t already covered, but he liked to fill in the official announcements with more explanatory material than what the somewhat sterile EBN offered.
“Last but not least, oh listeners mine – we’ve got reports of yet another outbreak of breachlings wandering out from the Sonoran Desert. The little bastards are hungry and mean as ever, and they’re sneaky as hell. Anyone within the Colorado No Man’s Land too stubborn to pick up sticks – as always, I applaud your bravery in the face of all those teeth and nasty rippin’ claws, but there comes a time when survival is more important that keeping up the homestead. International reports of breachling activity aren’t any sunnier than stuff State-side, I’m afraid.”
He glanced up at the corkboard hanging on the left-hand wall; it was plastered over with magazine and newspaper clippings, one of the foremost featuring a photo of a dead bull breachling and the PPDC hunters that had brought it down. It smacked of posing with a kill after a big game hunt, but the man couldn’t spare any tears for the little monsters; breachlings were vicious, hunting in packs and breeding generation after generation of equally-nasty replacements that tore up anything unlucky enough to cross their paths.
“I’ve received reports from people with boots on the ground all over the place about nests of breachlings being dug up. While the infestation in Thailand has been officially declared eradicated, there’s news of the critters making themselves at home as far as the coastal caves of the Dead Sea. Matter of fact, PPDC just had themselves a field trip to the Sea and firebombed a couple dozen caves, cleaning out over the breeding pairs and their spawn.”
He sighed, taking off his glasses and rubbing tiredly at the bridge of his nose.
“The reach of the invaders and their kaiju attack dogs is long, listeners. So take heed: the big ones might not be busting down our cities anymore, but we still live in times where we gotta be careful even walking out the front door.”
Another glance at the clock told him his self-allotted news time was almost up. He sat up, adjusting the microphone.
“Sorry to end this hour on a pessimistic note, but you know how it is. Thank you as always for tuning in. This is Radio Free Jaeger, and I? I am your one, I am your only…DJ Icarus, signing off.”
The On Air sign clicked off. Icarus switched over to music once more to play until morning, easing off his headset and pushing away from the console. He left the booth and then backtracked for his pack of cigarettes, patting his pant pockets for his lighter as he went outside. A muggy, quiet night greeted him as he went out the back door of his studio – or rather, the converted garage he operated out of. Radio Free Jaeger wasn’t very impressive to look at from the outside; jerry rigged towers and broadcast equipment that crowned his rundown house and dotted his overgrown front yard, all running from power sources of questionable stability. Icarus was proud of what he’d made all the same- it was his, built with his own two hands and years of experience in the mechanical as well as broadcasting fields. He did it without expectation of thanks, or credit or hell, even for attention – but people gave those things to him all the same, and it felt good to know he was making some kind of difference.
Icarus sat down on the cracked plastic chair overlooking the back yard in desperate need of landscaping. Trees cloaked with Spanish moss stood in hunched-over lines, bordering his property on all sides. The air felt thick with humidity and he coughed as he smoked the day’s last cigarette. The habit was catching up to him and he knew he ought to quit; Icarus smoked the cigarette down to the filter anyway and twisted the stub under his heel, heading back inside and feeling like he had to wring out his shirt, the humidity clinging to him like a second skin.
The phone line was dead when he came back in; he felt a little disappointed, though he didn’t mind not having to deal with any callers so late at night. They always lit up like crazy after a news break, people overflowing with tips and eye-witness accounts, the BuenaKai threatening him with Kaiju Blue-tainted hellfire…he had tracked their rise when they had been just another delusional doomsday cult. It was the natural order of things for people to try and frame understanding around the unconceivable, and Icarus had waited for the news of the cult’s self-inflicted demise. To his relief in one aspect, that expectation had never been met – unlike other doomsday cults the BuenaKai hadn’t seemed interested in flinging their souls to the judgment of their reptilian overlords.
Instead they had grown, and that Icarus found more disturbing than anything else; they had gained a veneer of legitimacy, taking over where other faiths began to flounder. He glanced over at the phone lines and found they were still dormant. Emails yielded the same collection of news subscriptions as always, tips and stories he would sort through in the morning…a few marked with high importance, the titles highlighted in red.
Icarus wavered, caught between curiosity and wanting to go to bed; he cursed himself half-earnestly for giving in to the urge for ‘one last email’ and sat down at the computer, clicking through the list. The computer was hideously slow to load – he found holocomputer set ups with their haptic screens to be a luxury that was entirely unnecessary and ridiculous, but as he listened to his old rig whirr with the effort of loading a damn photo file he found himself reconsidering the anti-upgrade stance.
The written portion of the email wasn’t in a language Icarus knew; auto-translate marked it as Icelandic, and the translated message was mangled as per usual by the cheap program. He puzzled through it, transcribing the poor translation onto his notepad as the photo images continued to load, his touchy Wi-Fi processing pictures at a crawl. He sat back, looking over his re-translation of the email with a frown.
“Thought this is interesting for you; entire area around Hekla [??] volcano is declared off-limits by government, saying volcano is 'unstable' and the land unsafe. Authority/Army [???] declared no-fly zone as well - twenty mile radius. There is surveillance all over border/perimeter [get better translator app!!] - set up that is worst fake scientist camps [????] set-up I have ever seen. Hekla is active and army using it to cover up this – almost got caught last time, will try again for more pictures.”
Icarus frowned at his notes, then over at the computer screen; he was used to conspiracy theorists and overzealous would-be informants giving him information he had to research and clean up before he could present them to his audience. It was helpful to have eyewitnesses eager to share their view from the field, and Icarus couldn’t even begin to count the times he had passed along important information before the network broadcasts could so much as sniff around for a story. This, he realized with a growing cold knot in his chest, was going to be one of those times. He pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at the photos, clicking through one after the other. A scarred, volcanic landscape, several photos of the ‘outposts’ the emailer had mentioned… a barren pit of a valley that sunk deep below the broken crust of lava fields, and sitting inside…
“Well, shit.”