The signal was really strong once you got past the outer bands. The wavelength variation and signal modulation certainly made it look like it had intelligent origins. More to the point, the pattern would complete after 22 hours, 54 minutes. The meters would be idle for about 30 seconds, then the signal would repeat. It had been repeating for more than 20 years now.

"So, you don't think it's a manufactured signal Williams?" Fisher was probably the strongest of the believers in the crew. "You think some 'natural phenomenon' is responsible for an organized signal that's been repeating for more than 20 years."

Williams was never bothered by the skepticism the other's approached his skepticism with.

"All I'm saying is that we don't know if it's from an intelligent source. All we know is that we can't explain the signal using our current knowledge of the universe. I didn't say it can't be intelligent and I didn't say it has to be natural."

"So what are you saying?" Murphy was a believer, but still, she had her doubts.

"I'm saying that we need to keep an open mind. Fisher, you're setting yourself up for huge disappointment if you're wrong. You're so fixated on meeting some fantastical alien life form that you're likely to crash and burn if it's just some crazy magnetic field phenom."

"No Williams, you're just so afraid of meeting a species more intelligent than you that you'll probably crap yourself and pass out when we finally meet them." And that's pretty much how the entire journey had gone so far.

The trip had been so uneventful that these 'discussions' were the only thing that kept the travelers from going stir crazy. The origin point of the signal was in the Sqia'lon system and that was 8.6 light years from the DarkStar station from which the mission launched. The Dual-Singularity Drive that powered the ship had been in development when the signal was first detected. Without that , the trip would have taken several thousand years to complete. The DS-Drive, however, made it possible to bend Space-Time and jump from location to location in seconds, regardless the distance.

Five years after the signal was identified and the origin located, the Star Chaser was ready to begin the first manned interstellar flight in human history. It would take several jumps to get to the mission's destination and between jumps it would take nearly 2 years (Earth years) to recharge the power cells to make the next jump. The solar arrays were very efficient, but the distance to various stars along the way would make the recharge a maddeningly slow process. Still, 15 years to travel to a star system 8.6 light years distant wasn't too bad.

"Gravitational generator activated. Primary Objective development has begun." Williams was at the engineering station. "Anchor established, Secondary Objective generating."

"Telemetry established." Murphy watched her screen intently. "Dilation in 3 seconds. 2. 1. Dila..." As always, the final countdown was cut short as the crew and ship were drawn forward by the phenomenal forces of the two artificially generated black holes that gave the Dual Singularity Drive its name.

Time became meaningless to everyone aboard the Star Chaser. Although the jump took only a few seconds the way the humans that crewed the ship normally measured time, for them the jump stretched to near infinity. It had taken years to develop the mental discipline required for them to wrap themselves in a blanket of self and hold tight until the jump was complete. Once out of the jump, the time dilation normalized and the reality that they had only been 'gone' a few seconds would settle in and the crew would begin the process of recovering from jump fatigue. Then the 'discussions' would start up again.

"Ok team, fight club's over. We've got work to do!" Captain Gillard tended to stay out of the Intel vs. Natural debate. It was easier to pull them back together if he remained neutral. "Just one more jump and we're there. Williams, let's get the solar array deployed and start charging up the batteries. Murphy, start the system checks. I want to know if this tub needs any repairs for the next round."

Everyone basically ignored his commands. The routine was the same after each jump. But if shouting orders made the Captain feel better, then so be it. The work was the same either way. The only difference this time was the universal knowledge that with the next jump came the end of the debate. Sqia'lon and the answer to their puzzling deliberations was just two years away. So the buildup to the next jump began.

"I don't know Murphy." Williams sounded perplexed. "During our last jump we must have crossed some kind of magnetic barrier. All I know right now is that the signal is like, ten times stronger than it was before we jumped."

"Well, it's been getting stronger as we closed in on the coordinates, but this sudden increase just doesn't make sense." Murphy wasn't happy with this development. "I'm going to run some scans. I don't know. Look for something. It just isn't right." Murphy spun on her heel and stalked off to her station.

"I don't know what the big deal is." Fisher was nonplussed. "We get closer, the signal gets stronger. Works for me." Williams looked up from his console.

"It's too strong though Fisher. She needs to know why, that's all"

"I'm just sayin', it is what it is. Next jump she'll have her answers." Fisher shrugged and made is way down the central corridor toward the crew's quarters. He wasn't going to figure Murphy out. It didn't really matter anyway. She'll know soon enough.

Murphy didn't bother getting involved in the normal off-duty banter after that. The arguments over intelligent design and natural phenomenon no longer interested her. This was a puzzlement and she wanted it resolved. So she dove head first into her science console and started examining, re-examining, filtering, recording, oscillating, triangulating... pretty much anything she could think of that might shed some light on her little mystery.

Serendipity can be a peculiar, if entertaining, phenomenon. She had loaded both an old recording of the signal and a fresh version of the stronger sequence into her audio editing app. Looking at the visualization screens she noticed something she didn't expect.

"Captain, can you come to the Science Suite? I need to run something by you concerning the signal." The PA system resounded throughout the ship.

Although Murphy's invitation was directed toward the Captain, anything having to do with the signal interested everyone, so soon she had them all seated around the room. The primary monitor above the computer bank was alive with the two visual representations of the signal: old and new.

"Ok, everyone. Take a look at the monitor. Both of those spectrograms are our friendly signal we've been following through space. The top spectro is the signal we recorded before the last jump and the one under it was recorded last week." Everyone stared intently at the display. There was an obvious difference but it wasn't obvious why it was important.

"Although the old recording shows a clear pattern, the noise between the peaks and valleys is barely discernable, visually at least." Here Murphy used the display's pointer to note the shallow changes that represented the pattern that had intrigued them for years.

"The signal has been converted to an and played as an audio file, but the level of noise in the original signal obscured all but the most prominent of features. The result was always a hissing sound that varied slightly in a distinct pattern. Interesting to listen to, but basically meaningless." Now she closed the old recording and expanded the new version so it overlaid the entire screen.

"Whatever was blocking the strength of the signal before we last jumped, was also injecting its own noise. That obscured the signal more than I would have thought possible. You can see that the peaks and valleys are much more pronounced in this recording."

"Come on Murphy. What are you getting at? We've all got work to do you know." Fisher wasn't impressed by her theatrics.

"Murphy?" The Captain was less verbal, but the message was the same. Only Williams stayed silent. When he made eye contact with Murphy she could see that he had seen the same thing she did. She turned to the console and typed up a few quick commands.

"Just restructure that as an audio oscillogram..." A few more quick taps on the screen. "and now we run it through the media player, and..." She didn't need to say anything more. She had the volume turned up and what emanated from the speakers flooded the entire suite with sounds that could only be described as captivating. Jaws dropped all around. Had they lived a hundred years earlier, the crew might have commented that it sounded much like whale song. The tones were eloquent, complex and downright enthralling. They all sat in silence and listened to the 'song' in amazement.

"It probably is a language." Murphy was in her own element here. "But there's really no doubt that this is intelligence based. I'm running the song through my cryptography app. Hopefully I'll be able to translate it long before we're ready to jump again."

Now it was the Captain's turn to chime it.

"It would be really helpful to have some way to communicate when we get there. This will really make this trip a breakthrough. Not only locating another intelligent species, but actually communicating at first contact!" Captain Gillard was finally getting excited about the prospect. "Look, we've still got a lot to do before we're ready to jump. I want everyone to work together to free up as much time as possible for Murphy. Getting this translation is a top priority now."

"Leave it to Murphy to find a way to stick us with her work and spend the rest of the trip geeking!" William's words would have stung if they hadn't been accompanied by a big, toothy smile. The crowd broke up and everyone headed out to their stations to continue prepping for the upcoming jump.

The excitement was contagious and lively conversation filled the ship any time two or more crewmates were in earshot of each other. At first Murphy's daily reports were fascinating. Each afternoon she seemed to have decoded another word or phrase and although the progress was slow, it was progress none the less. Around the fourth month in, the progress seemed to stop.

"What do you mean it's nonsense, Murph?" Williams was trying to decide whether it was the trip, the translation or the language itself that was nonsense.

"All of it!" Murphy was obviously having hard time dealing with this phase of her pet project. "Every time I think I've made headway, I come up against a term or phrase that just doesn't fit the syntax I've developed."

"Ok, but it's an alien language, right? So it shouldn't surprise you that it's not set up the same as Earth languages." Fisher was trying to see a bright side here. "You just keep plugging away until it makes sense."

"No Fisher, it doesn't work like that." But Murphy was having none of it. "As I identify more phrases or concepts, the whole thing should be getting clearer. But right now I've had to scrap everything and start from scratch at least 6 times. I can find individual words by looking at universal language properties and assigning Earth concepts to recognizable patterns.

"But as I start to build a lexicon, I start running into phrases that seem to be gibberish. It's happened over and over again. I wasn't expecting to get this in an afternoon, but I'm doing something so wrong here that I don't seem to be making any progress at all."

"You're being too hard on yourself. You've never had the opportunity to do this before. No one has. You probably have half the damn thing translated already, you just don't see it yet."

"No. No I don't Fisher. You don't get it. I can get hundreds of words translated but when I apply them to the entire signal it's like, I don't know." She was fishing around in her head for the right word. Almost as if she was losing her own language as she failed to comprehend the new one. "It's like you have a box full of words and you just shook them up and dumped them on the table. You can read all of them but there's no structure. Gibberish."

After that, Murphy's reports became dark, infrequent and eventually stopped altogether. She hadn't quit, but she didn't see any point in reporting 'nothing yet' over and over again. No one else seemed affected by the failure to translate the signal though. Discussions were generally bright and the main argument now concerned the nature of the aliens. Would they be Carbon Based? What about Silicone? Would they dwell in the 'air' or be sea-bound creatures? Could they fly on their own or, like Earthers, need mechanical assistance to defy gravity?

The topics and options were endless. The discussions so involved that natural time seemed to fly by and before anyone could really wrap their heads around it, it was time to jump.

Once again, the DS-Drive started its rapid climb to a full-power state. As electrons raced through the coils and temperatures began dropping, the singularities formed in their signature configuration. One last time the ship was catapulted to supernatural speeds. Space-Time twisted and folded. Crew members cocooned themselves mentally as well as physically. Existence crumbled. Time stopped then accelerated to infinity. Seconds stretched to eons while ages became micro-seconds. For an eternity the fragile ship, with its delicate crew, hung suspended between two realities. All the while, Sqia'lon's song echoed throughout the universe, calling the travelers near. Bringing them closer to their destination and the answers they sought.

The Star Chaser emerged from the jump well outside the target planetary system. Now that they were in the vicinity, the interplanety drive was their means of propulsion. As the crew settled in, post jump fatigue, they had the song playing on ship's address system almost constantly. The song was soothing and helped them concentrate on the tasks that were required after a jump.

Murphy hadn't stopped trying to translate the message, but she never seemed to make any real progress. At interplanetary speeds, it would be another 3 months before they were close enough to Sqia'lon to begin scanning the planets for signs if life. Hopefully by then they would have determined the most likely of the 14 planets orbiting the star.

Williams had the job of triangulating the signal in an attempt to determine which planet was broadcasting the hypnotic song. At first they were too far from the system to be accurate. So he concentrated on identifying the quadrant the signal originated in. That meant he could rule out any planets in different portions of their orbits. Now that was done and Captain Gillard had determined where to enter the system and begin the search in earnest.

About half way through the song, the tempo would pick up, almost like an action scene in an old film. The crew would, unknowingly, pick up their pace in whatever task they were engaged in. The song drove them to dive deep into their projects. After hours of intense work, the song would mellow. The work would slow, but become intense. Then the song sweetened, the mood lightened and the crew would settle into an almost sleep state. Staring at the monitors full of unseen data, the crew would drift in and out for an hour or so before the tempo shifted again and brought them to full attention. The song controlled their moods, their actions, their level of consciousness, but always ended on a note of promise and the crew felt optimistic about their mission. They knew they were almost there.

"Williams! I need to see you in the Science Suite right away." Murphy hadn't sounded this agitated since before the last jump.

"On my way Murphy." Williams had been working tirelessly trying to identify which planet the song was coming from. He had it narrowed down to Six, Seven or Eight. They were in close proximity to each other at this point in their orbits and he couldn't be absolutely sure. "I've almost got it nailed. What have you got?"

"I don't know for sure yet. I need your opinion." Murphy had several screens open and the casual observer wouldn't have made much of the streams of numbers crossing them.

"This dish is focused on Sqia'lon Seven. From the strength of the signal I believe that's the point of origin." Murpy pointed at one of the screens. "Do you concur?"

"I hadn't come to a firm conclusion yet, but looking at your data I'd say you're right." Williams had been thinking 'Seven' for a while now, but hadn't gotten the hard data he wanted to claim a conclusion. "So it's Seven. That can't be what you called me in for. It sounded more urgent than that.

"You're right, but I needed to have you agree with me. Look at the numbers. There's something going on here that the long range scans didn't show. First of all, Seven is twins. We've seen Sister Suns, these are Sister Planets. They orbit each other roughly every 22 hours.

"But look at this. These readings, right here. I don't know. It looks like a large group of small objects; possibly in orbit around one of the twins." Murphy stared at the screen with an intensity that seemed to say 'Tell me what you mean!'.

"Let me take a look from my console. Maybe I can get a clearer picture of the situation." Williams turned to head back to the Navigation Suite. "I'll contact Gillard."

"No, don't yet. We can't go to him with more questions than answers. I'll dig deeper and when you get something we'll put our findings together and take them to the Captain."

"Ok. We're still a week or more out. We've got time to get some answers ready." Williams walked away and Murphy turned back to her screens just as the song became appropriately enigmatic.

The Star Chaser held its course toward Sqia'lon and the mysterious signal that had the crew enthralled. The course took them into a wide orbit around the star. In order to maintain their distance safely outside the orbit of the outer most planets, they had to start out at a speed nearly double that of the 14th planet. Decelerating would cause their orbit to deteriorate bringing them closer and closer to their target planet.

The plan was to enter Seven's orbit path just a few hundred thousand kilometers ahead of the planet and then slowly decelerate, allowing the planet to catch up with them. As Seven approached, they would fire retros causing a sharp braking action and they would 'fall' into a planetary orbit from which they could begin detailed scans of the surface. Surely that's when they would finally come in contact with the composers of the song.

Murphy's call to Williams this time was down right frantic. He didn't delay. He replied quickly and headed right out to her suite. Murphy had been quiet for a few days now. Questions elicited terse, one word answers when they elicited any response at all. She hadn't slept more than a few hours over the past week, and it showed.

"What the hell's going on Murph?" Williams could tell she was seriously disturbed and he couldn't imagine what it could be.

"Look at this." A terse, three word answer.

"What am I looking at Murphy? These readings look like a junk pile to me."

"Exactly!"

"Exactly what?"

"Junk!"

"What?"

"Junk. Debris. Parts!"

"I'm not following you Murph, slow down and take it from the top."

"Ok." Deep breath. "I've been looking at these readings for days now and I finally figured it out." She stopped talking and was staring at the screens again.

"Murph! Snap out of it! What are you trying to tell me?"

##############################################

While Williams and Murphy were discussing Murphy's revelation, the Captain was on the bridge with Fisher. Williams' program for entering planetary orbit around Seven had been activated. The ship was slowing down at an alarming rate as it approached the speeding, spinning planet. In just a few short minutes the Star Chaser would be in geosynchronous orbit and the real search could begin.

"Captain, retro-braking complete. Adjusting attitude for geosynchronous navigation. Orbit will be attained in 2 minutes, 36 seconds. " Fisher was focused on his panel. Everything was going smoothly.

  ##############################################  

"Ok Murphy, I get it, but I don't see where you're going with this." Williams had been listening for several minutes now, but Murphy's thoughts seemed disjointed. She really was sleep deprived. "Explain it to me, Murph. Don't make me figure it out."

"It's the debris field that I couldn't wrap my head around. It's comprised of ship debris. Pieces of ships. Millions of pieces! They interact with the magnetic fields of the two planets. They were too small to pick up farther out, but now that we're close, I can see that the song we've been listening to, the signal we followed out here is generated by the two planet's magnetic fields.

"Every 22 hours the twins get close enough for their magnetic fields to interact. It would be just a blast of static noise, but the debris interacts with the fields too. Each piece resonates differently as it passes between the two planets. Those signals bounce back and forth between the two creating what we heard as an organized signal."

  ##############################################  

"Orbit stable sir. Geosynchronisation confirmed. We can begin planetary scans on your command." Fisher had it all under control.

"Ok, Fisher. Deploy probe one. Let's get this started.

"Ok, I get that. It's not artificially composed. That doesn't explain the panic on your face Murphy."

"It's a debris field Williams. Millions of pieces of ships in orbit around the two planets. Think about it! Where did they come from?"

  ##############################################  

Although the orbit the Star Chaser was in made it appear that Seven-A was stationary, it was actually traveling at a fantastic speed. The orbit that Seven-B carved around its sister wasn't circular. It was more egg shaped with the wide end tens of millions of kilometers wide while the tight end was only a few million. The gravitational pull of the two caused a tidal effect on the debris field trapped in orbit around Seven-A

As Seven-B entered the small end of it's orbital path, the increased attraction between the two bodies multiplied exponentially and dragged the secondary planet to higher and higher speeds. Coming up behind the relatively slow moving ship, the twin to Seven-A was barely discernable it was moving so fast.

"Williams, where the hell are you? The Nav-com's going crazy. You need to be at your station. Fisher's got all he can handle up here!"

"On my way Captain." Williams looked at Murphy hoping to find some comfort, but none was to be found. She turned back to her monitor and increased the volume of the song.

"Fisher, have you got this under control yet. It feels like we're shaking apart for crying out loud!"

As the secondary planet sped by the first, the Star Chaser was just entering the debris field. The opposing gravitational and magnetic forces generated by the two bodies was more than the fragile ship could handle and it was ripped apart as it was pulled in opposite directions.

Quickly its mass was added to the field of metal and plastic scraps that populated the debris field. The newly acquired components reacted violently with the forces, resonating previously unheard tones and radiating newly contrived wavelengths along with the rest of the field.

Radiating out into the void the song acquired a new chorus , never heard before in the eons the song had been sung. This new verse sang of adventure, travelers from distant lands and tragedy to break your heart. The song reverberated through the galaxy and out into deep space, calling to the universe to come. Come and seek, seek and find, find and compose the next verse to the Siren Song of Sqia'lon Seven.