“That is the lowest frequency at which the structure is transmitting. It’s almost as if the music—if that’s what it is—is meant to serve as a base or a backdrop for the other messages.”
“Can you make that any louder?” Captain Carter asked, his brow furrowing in concentration.
“Of course, sir,” Raj nodded. His finger hovered over the console for a moment before depressing a button. Suddenly the eerie melody was piping not from the small speakers in the console itself, but from the larger ones situated discretely around the deck. For long moments, every person on the deck was silent, held in rapt attention by its subtle intricacies. The sound was dominated by a low, nearly unvarying drone, but weaving through it were, to Lamont’s ears, easily dozens of other tones—one that sounded almost like a wailing chorus, another that sounded like thin piping, and yet another that formed an odd sort of tympanic chittering. It should have been unpleasant in its strangeness, but Lamont found it to be unaccountably captivating, and judging from the expressions of the others as he looked around the room, he was not alone in this.
“Remarkable,” Francis whispered.
“You say the structure is broadcasting thousands of such signals?” Milo asked Abigail.
The navigator nodded, tapping her fingers on the back of the stool in which Raj sat. “But not like this. The other signals sound either like spoken language or some kind of electronic code. I suppose this could be code of a more sophisticated sort.”
Lazarus, who had wandered away from the console to gaze out the observation window, shook his head. “It’s got to be music.”
Raj sat back, stroking the tiny black beard that grew beneath his bottom lip. “That is the lowest frequency at which the structure is transmitting. It’s almost as if the music—if that’s what it is—is meant to serve as a base or a backdrop for the other messages.”
“Messages transmitted out into empty space,” Captain Carter reflected.
As he was saying this, the doors to the hallway slid open, admitting Phobos and a rather perturbed looking Ed Spratt, the senior technician.
“Is there a problem?” Francis asked.
“What’s the big idea of playing that weird racket all over the ship?” Ed asked heatedly.
“All over the—” Carter began, looking at Raj questioningly.
Raj looked down at the console, panic dawning in his eyes. Bishop made an expression that was half-grin, half-grimace. “You used the C-6 circuit to amplify the signal,” she explained. “That’s not tied into the routing system, so when you switched it off the local channel, it ignored your patch and went shipwide.”
“And spooked the hell out of the engineering crew,” Spratt added.
“Well!” Milo exclaimed, rubbing his knobby hands together with visible delight, “That should make for lively breakfast conversation in the morning!”
Next: Full of Grace