Space Stations Part 15

She thumbed the controls of her skimmer, taking the runty craft once around the station, past the large docking bay, then closing on the side facing Earth. Here, she faintly made out Yerkes-Two in block black letters that had been pitted by s.p.a.ce debris. Though Yerkes-Two was the station's official designation, the first team of astronomers serving aboard it referred to it instead as Auriga's Streetcar, a name that seemed untoward but that nevertheless stuck.

Hoshi supposed the station had the vague shape of a streetcar-she'd seen one in a California museum more than a few decades ago. But this lacked the riotous color she remembered. Lacked any color-there weren't even shades to the gray.

To her, the s.p.a.ce station looked more like a brick, and that is precisely what Auriga's Streetcar had become. Its...o...b..t was approaching the final stages of decay, and in a handful of days it would touch the upper limits of Earth's atmosphere, then pa.s.s through it and drop like that proverbial brick, breaking into pieces and burning up as it went. The Streetcar would be colorful then.

Hoshi told herself she'd timed this visit just right-the station's...o...b..t taking it over j.a.pan, requiring little use of fuel cells and little time to reach it. And there was more than enough time to thoroughly explore every nook and cranny and retrieve its precious antiquities. In truth, she'd hoped to make this trip months ago, but she'd been ill and her ship needed repairs. It was possible other scavengers had already visited the station in the meantime. She sucked in a breath, praying they had not beat her to the Streetcar. At her age she had little time for wasted trips.

The University of Chicago last year announced they were abandoning this station.

They said its equipment was outdated, that it was too expensive to replace all the telescopes and their housings with the new more powerful refractors being manufactured. Too expensive to send ships and personnel to nudge the station into a higher, stable orbit and to keep it operating-as they had done when they refitted it three times before. Building a new station to study the stars was ultimately more economical now, the university financiers deemed. It was even judged too expensive to send a team of salvagers, not that the university thought there was anything worth retrieving from Auriga's Streetcar-not even the largest lenses.

They said let the whole thing drop into the Atlantic Ocean. The station was simply too old to bother with.

Old.

Hoshi was old.

She brushed at a strand of thin silvery hair as she edged her craft into the small docking bay under the Yerkes-Two insignia and locked hatches with the station.

Indeed, she felt very old today, achy and a little out of sorts. It had been quite a while since she felt thoroughly good. She was chilled, despite keeping the temperature well above normal in her craft. Poor circulation, she mused-the years could be cruel to s.p.a.ce stations and people. Her limbs were stiff, despite the zero-G.

At eighty-four, she was among the senior of her country's independent s.p.a.cers, and the only one who worked so often and who dealt exclusively in salvaging abandoned in-system stations and satellites. Abandoned-she wasn't a pirate, didn't go after anything that truly belonged to anyone.

Hoshi'd made a very good living at salvaging, and she certainly didn't need to keepat it, didn't need to be here when she was feeling every one of her years. Her grandson frequently begged her to "act her age," to retire and come live inland with him in Yashiro. But she was acting her age, she told him. She so enjoyed piloting and staying busy, finding technological treasures amid things people had unthinkingly left behind. More so, she enjoyed the solitude-of being away from the crowded, noisy, light-plagued Earth. And above all of that, she cherished being out where she could see the stars.

Hoshi-the name meant "star."

Slipping into her enviro-suit, she fastened her helmet and flicked on its beam. A few deep breaths and she floated from her skimmer, through the docking hatch, and into the empty Streetcar. The beam cast a ghost-light down a narrow corridor with walls as gray as the station's exterior. It was all so still, the only sound her breathing and the soft clicking her helmet made as it b.u.mped against the ceiling. She started humming, faintly, a tune from her youth, as her gloved fingers guided her like a bobbing balloon-past an empty locker, then to a storage room.

A look inside: grav-boots all held neatly on shelves-she made a note to check later if there were any small enough to fit her; cartons of lens cleaners; panels of circuitry. The latter, and the thin layer of film that covered everything, nudged Hoshi's lips into a slight smile. It was obvious no one had been here since the last astronomer left, all the scavengers taking the university's word for it that there was nothing worthwhile remaining. It was all hers. There were other odds and ends in this storage room and the next two, most fastened tight onto shelves, only a few things floated free. Nothing of any particular value or interest, so Hoshi moved on, pausing only when she heard the groan of metal and sensed the station shudder. Perhaps the Streetcar didn't have that handful of days.

She pa.s.sed what served as either a conference room or a cafeteria-wherein hung the only bit of color she'd seen so far-paintings of Earth scenes arranged without any real sense of art. The Golden Gate Bridge highlighted by a fiery sunset, the Sydney Harbor filled with sailing boats, London at night, a wide-eyed child looking up at a seated statue of Abraham Lincoln, China's Great Wall. None of the pictures were worth taking.

There were crew quarters, these far more s.p.a.cious than on the other stations Hoshi had explored. There were no bunk beds or wall-nets. There were real beds with thick mattresses, comfortable-looking chairs, and desks-all bolted to a gray floor.

She fumbled at a panel on the wall, and a heartbeat later a section on the ceiling glowed bright enough to light the room. She felt a gradual heaviness, and realized artificial gravity was kicking in. Earth norm from the feel of it. The University of Chicago astronomers had been patricians as far as scientists went-hence the fine room that served as their escape from work and zero-g. Likely, they had taken all of their meager personal possessions with them, save the snugly fitted sheets and blankets and quilts, the plush pillows tied down with ribbons. Hoshi didn't bother to check the cabinets and closets. Her interests were elsewhere.

It took her nearly an hour to reach the main observatory, which occupied the entire upper level of the Streetcar. She had dallied here and there along the way.

Incessantly curious, Hoshi inspected everything she pa.s.sed. And she knew it could take her quite some time to properly inspect this room.

There were banks upon banks of instrumentation, and Hoshi began working controls she recognized-lighting the room so she could turn off her helmet beam, coaxing a livable temperature, bringing a little gravity to the place, though certainly not Earth norm. She felt more comfortable in a near-weightless environment. A slightthrumming indicated she'd found the oxygen system. It would take many long minutes, she guessed, for it to flood this room so she could remove her helmet. The station groaned again and shook.

Hoshi ignored the threat and glided toward an exterior wall, eyes as wide as the child's at Lincoln's feet. s.p.a.ced every three meters were telescopes, and she had but to nudge the controls to extend them through the Streetcar's sh.e.l.l and really look at the stars. She nearly did just that, stopping herself halfway there when she spotted the large telescope at the far end of the room. The true prize of Auriga's Streetcar-what she had journeyed here for. She felt her heart hammer in her small chest, and she hurried toward the telescope, the chill and ache washing from her body to be replaced with a youthful giddiness.

"How could men of science leave this behind?" she breathed-at once thankful they had so she could claim it, and sad that it meant nothing to them. "So old."

More than two hundred years old to be precise, she knew. Hoshi had studied up on the station and its telescopes when she was younger, and again this year when she'd been ill. The pair of forty-inch polished lenses in this one telescope were fashioned in 1891. Three times the station had been refitted, and each time the lenses were placed in a new telescope. It was out of a sense of nostalgia that the astronomers must have continued to use the lenses-better, smaller ones had been developed in the centuries since and were doubtless in the other telescopes s.p.a.ced throughout the observatory.

It was because of these antique lenses that the station had been named the Yerkes-Two.

It was in October of 1892 that Charles Tyson Yerkes, a wealthy Chicago businessman who owned the North Side Streetcar Company, was asked to donate funds to finance what would be the world's largest telescope. The request wasn't without precedent. In long ago times Galileo sought the financial support of Cosimo II de'Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany. Yerkes had in a sense been the Duke of Chicago.

Yerkes needed something to elevate himself in the public's eye. In those years he was attacked daily in the newspapers for the way he ran his ma.s.s-transit empire and conducted his other business dealings. And so he agreed to this scientific venture, and went on to also fund an observatory in which the mammoth telescope would be housed. Hoshi recalled from her research that it was in October of 1897 that the Yerkes Observatory was officially dedicated. Nestled in quaint Williams Bay, Wisconsin, it fell under the auspices of the University of Chicago. There were other telescopes there, of course, but none so large as the refractor with the forty-inch lenses. It wasn't until 2025 that a larger telescope was built.

Hoshi would have liked to have seen the old telescope that the lenses were originally attached to-it was in a museum somewhere gathering dust. The observatory closed shortly before she was born, history reporting that the lights from a nearby dog racetrack and its parking lot caused so much havoc the stars could no longer properly be viewed.

It was the same all over Earth-from years back Up to this day. So much light.

From the cities and streets and attractions. Lights everywhere to keep the darkness at bay. To keep the stars hidden. When she was a child, her parents took her to the top of the Tateyama Mountains. People used to stargaze there. But eventually the lights reached there, too, and the stargazers were relegated to only a few remote patches of desert. And later, they were relegated to... nothing. There was not a spot on Earth where one could stand and view the stars.So the astronomers built satellites to compensate, the Hubble telescope being the first. This way man could still view the stars, though not firsthand. The Hubble was designed to last only two decades, and-unmanned-it required an extensive number of people and hours to plot each movement of the satellite and its scope. Subsequent satellites had similar limitations, despite the ever-increasing technology. And so the Yerkes-Two was launched, in 2031.

That was why the station was plain, unremarkable. It was among the first several birthed-and the only one designed for stargazing, the only one from its day still in orbit. It was primitive compared to what had been crafted in the decades since and certainly compared to the others Hoshi had traipsed through. Primitive, but nonetheless functional, with a full crew of astronomers charting stars that men on Earth could only see in pictures because of the light pollution.

The Streetcar shuddered just as Hoshi activated the great telescope. She intended to retrieve these lenses, cut the gravity in the observatory, and maneuver her treasures into the hold of her skimmer. These lenses and the ones from the other telescopes, perhaps a few more trinkets, would be whisked away before Auriga's Streetcar plummeted Earthward. She couldn't take much, her ship being so small. But she could take what was historically important, what she would briefly covet and show to close friends, and what antique collectors would pay dearly for.

"Beautiful. Wonderful," she p.r.o.nounced, as she stared through the scope.

Diamonds on black silk, she thought of the stars. So bright and visually intense, hypnotizing. She believed there was nothing more incredible than a vivid starscape.

She blinked away tears as she continued to watch-so happy to see such distant systems, so grief-stricken to know that those on the Earth below could never experience this.

She took off her helmet, the air uncomfortably cool and the oxygen content satisfactory now, though laced with the artificial metallic scent that settled distastefully in her mouth. She could see better without her visor in the way, though her breath feathered away from her face in a lacy fan.

Hoshi stared through the scope for what she sensed was hours, as her legs began to cramp and the ache returned to every inch of her body. The chill air that swirled around her face set her teeth to chattering. Couldn't she coax more heat into the room? Later, perhaps. Too much to see to be interrupted.

She fixated on what were considered the constellations of autumn, as would be viewed from the middle north lat.i.tudes. Ca.s.siopiea and Perseus. A curved line of stars that made up part of Perseus extended toward Auriga.

"Auriga the Charioteer," Hoshi stated when she took in the large constellation.

Auriga was the last of the autumn formations. The stars heralded the approach of winter. Capella, a bright triple star on Auriga's chest glared hotly at her. Capella was sometimes called "The Goat," and near it were a triangle of stars referred to as the kids. She noted several open cl.u.s.ters in the formation, each containing about a hundred stars and-according to the readings on the telescope-sitting nearly three thousand light-years away. She could see them plainly when she made a few adjustments. The starlight was intoxicating.

"Auriga's Streetcar." Named for the constellation this telescope was keyed to and for the shape of the station and the business Charles Yerkes had been famous for. "An appropriate name after all," she decided. Auriga the Charioteer that beckoned winter. Hoshi was well into the winter of her life.

She would have watched longer, had the ache in her joints not become a dull,persistent pain she could no longer ignore, had the cold not sunk in to become unbearable and forced her to replace her helmet, had the station not groaned and shuddered once more. With a great sigh, she reluctantly edged away from the refractor and busied herself with removing the lenses from two of the smaller telescopes. Were she younger and stronger, she could have taken more this trip.

As she turned to leave, a small telescope on the opposite end of the observatory caught her notice. It looked much newer than everything else. Not an antique, it would be her last priority.

Hoshi patiently made her way back through the narrow gray tunnels and to her skimmer, carefully placing the treasures in her hold and retrieving thick silk padded slipcases that she intended to use for the largest lenses. She tried hard to thrust to the back of her mind the groaning of the station. It moved more this time, slipping in its...o...b..t, causing her to curse her slow, old woman's body. The station hadn't days left, she knew now. It likely had only hours. And she would have to push herself to gain Yerkes' antique lenses and more.

A glance through the large refractor when she was again in the observatory.

Auriga had moved, or rather, the Streetcar had moved significantly. Hoshi worked fast to remove the lenses, a task that should take two or more people, or that should take time and great care-she couldn't afford the time.

Somehow she handled the task. And with the room now at zero-g, and the lenses protected by the silk, she maneuvered them through the ghost-lit corridors. She would have taken one at a time, Hoshi had the patience for it. It would have been safer for the lenses, easier for her to deal with. But she handled the time limitations presented her, and she fought to keep from crying out as her fingers-clamped viselike around the edges of the slipcases-ached so terribly from age that they felt on fire.

"A few minutes more," she told herself. "Just a few more." Then she would be settled in her skimmer and heading toward her Takasago home on the coast, contacting several potential buyers and cherishing her look through the telescope, her oh-so-wonderful view of Auriga's goat and kids. What a story she would tell her grandson.

"No." Her fingers opened in surprise, and she had to struggle to catch the slipcases as they floated upward. "No!" Looking out through the hatch window, Hiroshi could see the stars. But she couldn't see her ship.

Was she at the wrong bay? Had her aging mind took her down a different corridor and to the bays on the other side of the Streetcar? Had she...?

Hoshi froze, eyes locked onto a spot below a second-magnitude star. There was her skimmer, drifting free of the Streetcar. "How?" her gaze settled on the hatch door.

She'd done nothing to release it, nothing to break the lock. "How is it possible?"

Turning and swallowing her fear, she summoned what speed she could and carried the lenses down one corridor and then the next, her helmet beam bouncing light off doorways and protrusions, sending shadows to eerily dancing. Her side burned from exertion by the time she reached the other bays and spied a sleek freighter. Someone else had made the trip to scavenge from the dying station. That someone had released her ship. There were no markings that she could see from this position. What nationality? She quietly made her way to the hatch, worked the controls, and slipped inside the freighter. Empty-of people anyway. It was otherwise filled. A glance through the hold revealed the lenses she had previously stored on her ship. There were also circuitry cards and various other things-all taken in a hurry judging bythe way they were strewn about.

"Pirates," she cursed, as she carefully placed the antique lenses alongside the others and backed out the hatch. Well, she could be a pirate, too, take this ship and head home. The station lurched and something popped deep inside a corridor, and for an instant she indeed considered taking the freighter right this instant-not only would she be saving her life, but she'd be saving the valuable, historical lenses. In a sense, she had a duty to save both.

But she'd prefer not to leave someone stranded here. And she was curious about the pirates and what else they might be taking from this place.

"How long?" she wondered, as she made her way through the network of corridors, glancing in rooms and in service ways and heading toward the observatory, where she was certain the pirates were working to gather the remaining lenses. "How long does the station have?"

She nearly ran into him as she emerged from the last corridor and into the observatory, and he released what he'd been carrying-a spectroscope, a mechanism used to show the spectra of an object being viewed by the telescope it was attached to.

The device hovered in the s.p.a.ce between them.

"Pirate," she said.

He laughed, the sound odd and echoing in his helmet. It took him a moment to gain his composure.

"Pirate," she repeated.

"Hardly," he returned, his voice rich and deep, matching his youth. He was striking, though she wouldn't call him handsome, with a crooked hawkish nose and an impish grin. A dark lock of hair hung down what she could see of his forehead-skin eggsh.e.l.l white. His brown eyes flashed at her almond-shaped ones. "And you're hardly what I expected. I certainly wouldn't've released your ship if I'd have known that you were... an old woman."

He looked through her faceplate, seeing her myriad wrinkles and noting her anger.

"A very old woman."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed at the spectroscope with a speed that surprised both of them.

"I'm not a pirate."

"A murderer, then," she hissed. "You would have me die, marooning me."

A shrug. "I shouldn't've released your ship. Truly, I'd never done such a thing before. But I'd never been challenged on a find either. It was impulse."

"I was here first."

"You can travel back on my freighter, old woman. I won't maroon you. But all the finds are mine. Be satisfied you'll have your life."

Hoshi opened her mouth to argue. The antique lenses were hers, this find was hers.

Would have been hers much earlier had she not been ill, had her snip not needed repairs. They were all hers-every piece in his hold. But she said nothing. There would be time on the trip back to Earth to think, to plan what to say to port authorities. She had a good reputation, and someone would listen to her. The lenses, and anything else she cared to claim from the young man's craft, would be hers.

He was continuing to talk, and she was shutting out his words, craning her neck around him to see the telescopes, several of which had been cruelly dismantled.

"Barbarian."

"I'll settle for that," he said, taking the spectroscope from her. "Keith Polanger,"

he added by way of introduction.She did not give him her name.

"You could help, grab some of those fittings-they're made of bra.s.s. And I've got a half dozen lenses loose." He nodded upward, and she saw them resting against the ceiling. "And stay close to me, old woman."

It was clear he didn't want her out of his sight, didn't want to risk the chance she might take his freighter and instead maroon him. Two more trips, and Hoshi was moving very slowly, fatigued despite the weightlessness and despite her simmering ire. She would claim all of his hold, she decided, once they were Earthward. His ship for good measure. And she'd see to it he was sent to prison. With fortune, he would be her age when he got out. Port authorities were hard on pirates.

"Aren't you too old for this?" Keith had been saying other things, all trying to draw her out, some an effort at feigned politeness. "I know there are astronauts your age. But aren't you a little old to be out here on your own?"

She still refused to answer.

This trip to the observatory-what had to be their last judging by the creaking of the station and its shifted position-they worked on the last few larger telescopes.

They would leave only a few intact, the smallest and least valuable. He focused his efforts on the newest one, which suited her. She carefully loosened the fittings on her target, several meters away. Lost in thought, she continued to ignore his prattle, until she picked out a few words that piqued her curiosity. She moved aside a miniature-driving clock and glided toward him.

"Don't understand this," he was saying. "Doesn't seem to want to give." He was struggling to free what seemed to be the spectroscope. Except it wasn't the spectroscope. It wasn't anything familiar to Hoshi. Her hand on his arm stopped him.

Hoshi leaned close, her face reflecting back at her on the inside of her helmet. The housing for the mechanism was foreign, unlike anything else on the station. And there was no evidence of the film that covered everything else in this place. Whatever the mechanism was, it had been installed less than eight or nine months ago-since the station had been officially abandoned.

"No time to worry over it," he said. It wasn't as interesting as the older telescopes and equipment anyway. "No worry."

But there was worry in his voice, Hoshi could tell. He was fretting over the Streetcar's decaying orbit and imminent demise. "Yes, no time," she said. "We need to be out of here."

Still... she continued to study the new apparatus, and the telescope it was attached to. She peered through the scope-seeing Earth. Fingers playing along the sides of the tube, she magnified the view, seeing past the clouds and finding the Americas, magnifying more and seeing cities, then buildings, then people in offices-things on desks. She heard things, too, a man talking. He was discussing an upcoming anniversary, wondering where to take his wife for dinner.

Hoshi sprang back, the motion propelling her away from the telescope and against Keith Polanger.

"Did you hear?"

A nod. "So the astronomers were studying more than the stars up here, old woman.

Maybe doing a little corporate spying. Maybe looking in on government officials. No way for them to detect the spying. Doesn't matter. We need to move."

Hoshi moved-closer to the unusual telescope.

"I'll leave you here if you don't hurry, old woman."

"Not the astronomers," she told him, holding tight to the scope when a tremorraced through the station. "Not the University of Chicago. Not any university. None of them put this telescope here." What had the telescope been trained on before Keith Polanger began fussing with it? What had someone been watching and listening to?

From the a.s.sociated circuitry, she could tell images and sounds from the scope were being broadcast... somewhere. "Where?"

"Where? I'm leaving to go home," he stated. "With or without you."

A moment more and he did just that. She heard the soft clink of his helmet bouncing against the ceiling, heard the protest of metal as the station's...o...b..t continued to decay, saw him slip through the doorway and disappear down the corridor. She should follow him, but something held her here. She crossed to the status bank and thumbed it to life. A quick check of the station's position showed she still had some time before the orbit completely decayed, though not much.

He might wait for me, she told herself, feel guilty for leaving an "old woman,"

especially leaving one whose craft he'd released. "The young pirate, he will wait," she said aloud, somehow knowing that he would wait as long as he possibly could. The status bank showed his craft still docked.