The voice was discernible as language, even she couldn’t parse the meaning of a single word. One voice made a statement, and then another offered a chant. A long phrase was spoken in legato, with no identifiable pause between words. But it was the choral harmony that stayed with her. It echoed.

There was nothing different this time. The sounds made no more sense than they had done the time before. The signal was fragmented and composed of conflicting phonemes. She wasn’t even sure if it was linear. And yet, even without the benefit of language, the series of disjointed statements contained a spectral refrain. A repeated pattern that resonated from distant memory.

Except, Nova had listened to the signal so many times, she couldn’t be certain if the memory was from her own lifetime or if it was simply a recollection of the first time she’d listened to the transmission. The first time the Universal Translator defied her and refused to transform the sounds into meaning.

Her eyes drifted over the series of reports that were awaiting her review. The headlines were uninspiring — mere minutia related to their race back to the Barzan Wormhole and the recovering Alpha Quadrant beyond. The more she tried to focus on the reports, the more her vision blurred. Nova blinked.

Nova tapped the holographic comms panel, replaying the recording.

“Lieutenant, have I done something to offend you?” Commander Calumn asked. The executive officer’s chair on the bridge was hardly two metres away from her station, and he swivelled around to stare at her, unblinking. His dark eyes locked on her.

“Pardon, commander?” Nova asked. Her laser-focus on the transmission gradually expanded to take in the whole of the bridge. While Constellation journeyed at cruising speed, days away from its next destination, the bridge crew had begun to shake off the intensity of the Vaadwaur conflict. Between the hushed conversations and LCARS telltales, the cavernous command centre had taken on the collegial atmosphere of a study hall. Calumn had so monopolised Captain Taes in conversation, Nova convinced herself she was in a different wing of the study hall than the two of them.

“Three days, lieutenant,” Calumn said. He spoke in a matter-of-fact staccato. His fingers drummed one of the percussive rhythms from the recording on his armrest. “You have subjected us to that recording for three days incessantly. For how many days longer can we expect?”

From the science hub on the port side, Yuulik stridently interjected, “If I may, commander, when we want to shuffle through obscure interstellar law, we’ll–”

“No, it’s I who may,” Nova said, raising her voice to talk over Yuulik. Never again would Yuulik speak on her behalf. “I plan to continue until I understand the message. Sir.”

Calumn sighed at her. And he didn’t blink. “I’m not well with this. I’ve been drafting the next shift schedule and every time I want to write Lieutenant Cellar Door, I just hear chucka-chucka-chah echoing in my head.”

“If you had sent a distress call, commander,” Nova decried, “You would hope a passing ship would give it more than a cursory listen.”

Yuulik snorted. “Or you’d still be bleeding out on that Trabe wreck, sir.”

“I see,” Calumn said to Nova. He nodded to her with a softness in his expression. It was almost humility, but then his jaw had set when his head bobbed back up.

Pointedly, he asked, “Does that mean you’ve located the origin of the signal?”

Nova sucked in a ragged breath, but she didn’t break eye-contact with Calumn. Maybe he was right. Maybe this was a frustrating exercise with no pay-off. It was possible she was only hearing herself in the message, her own imagination.

But then she saw the glee of a checkmate behind his dark eyes. Even if he was right, she couldn’t let it go.

“Our probe only caught the signal as we left the Nekrit Expanse behind,” she said. “The plasma storms and electrodynamic turbulence obscured the point of origin. I don’t even know if it came from a starship, a planet or another probe in space. But I hear something in it. A pattern in the signal. It feels familiar.”

From flight control, Lieutenant Cellar Door piped in to say, “Feelings are valid. And it’s also true that the signal was too degraded to gather any meaningful intelligence from it.”

“That’s what the crew of the USS Brigadoon told me. They said our link to real space was too tenuous to matter, to make a difference,” Nova said.

Remembering who she was then, every hint of tentativeness or apology drained from her voice. She looked to every face around the bridge and she jut out her chin. She silently dared them to tell her she couldn’t solve this.

That harmony in the recording, that damn choral harmony, she could feel it in her guts. It wasn’t identical, it wasn’t exactly the same, but that was almost what her crew had sounded like while living non-corporeally inside the subspace fold. Nova haven’t even noticed how desperately she had been craving that sound for the past year.

“It took me one-hundred-and-forty years, but I dragged them all out of subspace. …What have you all done lately?”