The Song of Sqia'lon Seven

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 discernible, 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."