Sci-Fi Friday: Song of the Sea

The crimson sun, a dying giant on the verge of implosion, cast long, grotesque shadows across the ochre landscape. Captain Amelia Singh planted her titanium boots into the unforgiving dust, the echo of her own breath inside her helmet amplified by the desolate silence. Nothing stirred on the barren plains, no wind whispered through skeletal rock formations, just the hum of her suit and the gnawing emptiness that mirrored the planet before her. The only anomaly: a vast, cobalt ocean, impossibly smooth and impossibly still, stretched across the horizon, a stark counterpoint to the cracked and lifeless world. It pulsed with an unnatural luminescence, an enigma Amelia longed to unravel, even if it meant staring into the abyss of the unknown.

Amelia knelt beside the obsidian expanse of the ocean. Its liquid mirror reflected the dying star, transforming the water into a swirling kaleidoscope of crimson and violet. She extended a slender probe, its metallic tip humming as it pierced the surface. For a few seconds, there was silence, then a torrent of data flooded her suit display. Her eyes widened. Bio-signatures. Teeming, unimaginable bio-signatures. Life, in a profusion she’d never encountered, pulsed beneath the alien waves.

It wasn’t just the sheer amount that sent shivers down her spine. The probe had also picked up a signal, faint at first, then rising, cresting like a wave of pure sound. It wasn’t speech, not…