C:\>Sirens in the Night

I lost my family in the single dying breath of an entire civilization. I won't bore you with the details, not because they aren't interesting, but because they aren't important. There was time, though, just remember that. Time enough to scheme of escaping, the sins of one burning planet washed away in the rivers of the next. That was not our mission, however.

As radio astronomy became more and more seasoned over idle centuries, the discovery of regularly repeating cosmic signals became pedestrian. What was once the hopeful telltale of another sentient society gradually eroded into a deluge of new and exciting flavors of pulsar. None could be mistaken for another voice deep in the star fields...Except one. We called it the Slow Song.

Noticing it had been a fluke, naturally. The first measurements were traced back to bulk data dumps from before computers had made the jump to quantum. Yet it only drew our attention recently as, instead of repeating on a scale of seconds or minutes, it did so on a scale of hundreds of years. Generations came and went until, finally, we heard it singing. It was coming from within our solar system.

There were five of us aboard. The captain knew Saturn well, having run shipping routes in wide evasive curves around her frozen rings for most of his career. Protected stellar monument and all that. He'd have almost seemed giddy as he gave the order to steer directly in between the planet and its glittering finery if his face hadn't become stuck in a rictus of bleak submission years ago. The old man, with tangled beard kept in direct violation of space travel regulations, never broke his line of sight with the impossible origin of Slow Song. The only proof of his weeping were the shining tracks of tears on his dull cheeks.

They don't send the best of the best on an expedition like this, and we were all well aware. They send the disposable ones. The broken ones. The ones with no family to miss and no future to speak of. If we were lost, we wouldn't be the first. I never knew for sure whether the fierce kin-like bonds that form within crews like ours were a purposeful feature meant to ensure our unified longevity, or simply an unintended quirk of our shared burden. Ultimately, the results would have been the same.

We were expecting a false alarm, and a slow, disappointing voyage back home. We were not expecting the intense sensation of vertigo as we neared the instrument-determined signal source. We were not expecting the lights sparking in our eyes, or the way our bodies seemed to stretch exponentially as we drew closer and closer.

We were not expecting to suddenly see the sun. Or rather, suns. Twin stars, locked in an achingly stagnant binary orbit, cast every surface of the ship, inside and out, in sickly crimson. It didn't even occur to us to wonder where Saturn had gone. They were so close...close enough to warp our sense of perspective, but they were cold. Dead. Something crawling in from some place half real, half imagined, and we could feel it.

The navigator was the first. I remember watching the woman who had become my sister standing with her hands and face pressed flush with the carbon glass of the main viewport, heavy breath leaving a film of moisture around her slack mouth like a halo. Rapture fixed shining eyes at the very centerpoint between the suns, eyes that hadn't blinked for hours. I almost wasn't surprised when I heard the unmistakable Whoomp of the airlock evacuating, then saw the gentle arch of her small body as it was pulled faster and faster into something dark, something dense, and something hungry hiding right in front of us.

Eventually they were all lost. Our resident boozy uncle, the life support tech, was found with his upper torso pushed through the small porthole window in his quarters, having smashed it out with a wrench. The mother hen systems engineer had effectively hot-wired the escape capsule so that she could "finally hear it," as those remaining learned in between fits of manic laughter coming in over the radio. Even the old captain-- solid, reliable, the twinkle-in-the-eye grandfather to us all-- had methodically bashed his own head in on the interior wall of the forward hull.

Then there was one. The hands of a failed surgeon turned backwater ship's medic turned stubborn child shook above the airlock's manual release lever, the thick padding of the spacesuit leaving my limbs heavy and hot. The glowing red of the twins filled my vision. I could feel them staring back at me, eyes that burned with half-dead dreams of forgotten ages drowning out everything but the inevitable blackness beyond.

In my mind...I heard singing.