The Stars Sing, The Stars Scream - Chapter One

Pathfinder-16 could hardly be called silent. It constantly murmured with the mechanical hum and whirr that reassured Stone that everything was functioning, that the air was cycling, that the small ship was still floating through space on its set course.

It never howled. It never made the kind of twisted, screeching roar that filled the tiny compartments now, making the bulkheads vibrate. The hackles shot up on the back of Stone’s neck, and his hands slipped from the stasis tube controls, suddenly slick with his sweat.

He wiped them off on his jumpsuit, and unlocked the door to the middle of the ship. The inhabitable part of Pathfinder 16 was simply a long tube, sectioned off into decks with two or three cramped compartments each. A ladder connected all of them, and Stone wiped his hands again before he grasped the rungs. The ungodly roar was coming from above him and on the opposite side of the ship.

He climbed the ladder one deck up and stepped off at the door leading to the recorder room. He thought about knocking, but given the screeching howl from within, there seemed little point. Stone spun the release lever. He couldn’t even hear the hiss of the seal releasing.

Gillies was sitting in front of the recorder console, measuring the wavelengths and graphs with bars that flickered up and down. The speakers shrieked the horrifying noise all across the ship. It seemed to shake and thicken the conditioned air.

“Gillies! Turn it down!”

Gillies seemed to spot him out of the corner of his eye, and jumped. He turned the speakers down.

“Jesus, Stone, don’t you knock?”

“Would you even have heard it over... whatever the hell that is?”

Gillies chuckled. “Ah. No, probably not.”

It took two short steps to take Stone to the consoles. “Don’t you have earphones?”

“Yeah, but I like listening to this kind of thing through the speakers too. When the sound is more ambient you pick up different things.”

Stone folded his arms. “And what are you listening to, exactly?”

Gillies pointed to one of the screens and switched from the graphs to the exterior cameras. Pathfinder 16 was orbiting a gas giant, a brilliant blue-green, winds swirling and rushing through the clouds. Half day, half night, the dark side was invisible to the naked eye. The roar seemed to match the storms perfectly.

Stone stared at it. “How are we hearing it? Sound doesn’t travel in space.”

Gillies tapped the readouts. “You’re hearing electromagnetic emissions, translated into sound. Helps to hear if there’s a signal, or gives an idea of the planet’s make-up, things like that. Hey, how are the tubes?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, they’re fine. We’re calibrated for suspended animation. We’ve got three stops to make in this star system, right?”

“Yup. Enough power for the home stretch?”

“Yeah, no danger there.”

Both of them turned at a knock on the open door. Rezhnov grinned in at them both. “Anything good on?”

“After this gas giant shuts up, the next one’ll be playing Zepplin’s greatest hits,” Gillies leaned back in his chair, and Stone heard his back pop. “What’s going on?”

“Squirts from 15 and 17. They’ve found a few mining locations, but that’s about it. This area of space is pretty dead, seems like.”

“Pff...” Gillies stretched. “Doc, you mind holding down the fort here for a second? I need to hit the head.”

Stone squeezed past him and sat down. “Uh, sure.”

Gillies patted Rezhnov on the shoulder as he started down the ladder to the trio of tiny cabins on deck three.

Rezhnov stepped into the room and knocked on the screen where the gas giant sat. “That what’s making all the racket?”

“Yeah apparently so.” Stone plugged in the earphones. “He says it sounds different through these, here.”

Rezhnov put them on and grimaced. “Ugh, sounds like someone putting a V8 engine through a wood chipper.”

Stone grinned. “How much can you take before you give up, huh Rez?”

“Not this much.” Rezhnov tossed the earphones to him. “Go on.”

Stone put them on. The hum of Pathfinder 16 vanished. What replaced it was a more focused, more intense version of the roaring scream of the gas giant. Through the earphones it had a note of agony to it, a hint of anger, and even terror, as if the planet was trapped in an eternally horrified state. It no longer sounded like the winds of the constant storm blowing in the atmosphere. It truly sounded vocal, with a hint of the mechanical.

“You know... it actually does sound diff-”

Then something hissed up beneath the roar. Something a lot more vocal.

Stone threw off the earphones and stumbled off the chair. Rezhnov laughed at him. “Spooked by space, doc? You’ll get used to it.”

“No. No, no, no, that’s not what it was. Did you hear the… whispering when you listened?”

Rezhnov raised both his eyebrows and laughed again. “What?”

Gillies ducked in and glanced at the two of them. “What’s got you two in a mood?”

Stone pressed his fingertips into his temples. “The fucking planet… whispered to me!”

Gillies paused in the middle of sitting down. When he settled, he turned around in the chair and stared at him. Then he glanced at Rezhnov.

Stone leaned forwards and ripped the earphone cord out of the console. The howl filled the room again, but there was no whisper now, no matter how hard he listened.

Gillies folded his arms. “Satisfied?”

“No. Play it back. Two minutes ago.”

Gillies turned back slowly with a grin at Rezhnov. He typed for a moment, then the roar paused, and when it played again, it seemed more intense. “Okay, doc, here we are.”

Rezhnov snickered from the doorway. Stone snapped to him with a hiss. “Shut up!”

Stone closed his eyes, and sure enough, there it was. Beneath the pain and horror. He tapped Gillies on the shoulder frantically, but both he and Rezhnov had already heard it. The smile was gone from Rezhnov’s face. Gillies’s fingers were drumming across the keyboard in front of him. “I’m isolating it, hold on.”

After a moment, the whisper was the only thing coming from the speakers. It wasn’t clear if words were being spoken, exactly, at least not words that Stone could recognise. There was something about it that screamed intelligence, though, that sounded like it had to be a voice.

“That’s too weird,” Gillies muttered. “It doesn’t match with anything else I’m hearing from the planet. Rez, play back the navigational telemetry. Is anything else out there in range?”

Rezhnov jumped across the ladder to the cockpit as Stone leaned over Gillies. “What is it?”

“Well, I don’t know what it is. Give me a second.”

Rezhnov called out from the opposite compartment. “Telemetry coming through now.”

“Okay.” Gillies ran the two datastreams side by side on a screen. He plugged the earphones back in and put them on. After listening closely for a few seconds, he took them off and tapped the screen. “There. A moon.”

Stone peered at the image of the planet. He could see it now, a little disk of bright white, beginning to peer from behind the cyan atmosphere.

“Do we check it out?”

Gillies frowned up at Stone. “What do you mean? This is our job, yeah we’re checking it out. Rez! Lay in a course for that moon and start the orbital burn!”

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