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 tremor raced 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 associated 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 orbit 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.
Hoshi returned her attention to the unusual telescope, tugged off one of her gloves. The icy air was daggers against her skin, and she cried out, not expecting so intense a cold.
When she’d reduced the room’s gravity to nothing to aid in transporting the lenses, she also must have reduced the temperature. Defeating the urge to immediately retreat back into her glove, she tentatively touched the telescope. So cold! It didn’t feel like metal.
Not like ceramic or plastic either. It didn’t feel like anything she could put a name to, and it had a silky- softness to it. The glove back on, she turned the telescope’s dials this way and that, discovering markings that were not in English—everything else that she’d spotted on the station was in English. The strange symbols were flowing, like her native script, but they were not Japanese or Chinese. They were nothing familiar to her.
A look through it again, changing the focus and the pitch and discovering she was looking at the outside of the British New Parliament House. Another shift and she was peering through a window, seeing faces, men talking. She heard them. Again the sound coming from so very far away, but so clear as if they were in the same room with her.
Another change and she was viewing the Israel Emirates, closer and she keyed in on one small building in the northern hemisphere—someone’s house. Someone sleeping, a man important or rich from the look of the surroundings. She heard him snoring, heard the soft muffled whisper of two people outside the door. There was urgency to the whispers.
Hoshi wrapped her arms about the scope as she made a move to refocus the incredible device again. A series of small tremors rocked the station.
“Should go,” she told herself. Leave with Keith Polanger and claim his cargo when they touched down. But she should take this telescope with her. It was the smallest of those fitted in the observatory. If she could find a way to free it from the panel—where were the fastenings?—she could maneuver it to Polanger’s freighter. Even an old woman could maneuver practically anything in zero-G. Someone on Earth should know that they were being spied on by… by who?
Hoshi poked out her bottom lip and ignored another series of tremors, forced out the sounds of metal scraping metal somewhere overhead, concentrated instead on the snoring of the man caught in the view of the telescope, and the whispers of people beyond his room. She worried at the telescope’s base and at what should be its drive clock. After a few minutes she managed to loosen both a little.
What do you want?
She turned with a start, seeing no one in the observatory with her. A sigh of relief: the voice was the man’s. She glanced in the scope, seeing two men in his room, rousing him from sleep.
President, one was saying. We have a situation.
Something needs your attention, the other said. Lights were flicked on and clothes were brought for the man.
The blue suit, he told them. I wore brown yesterday.
Hoshi resumed her work as she felt the panel beneath her fingers tremble. Something crashed in a room below, and the lighting in the observatory flickered. She turned on her helmet beam as a precaution.
“Hurry,” she told herself. “Hurry or Keith Polanger will leave.”
The station rocked and Hoshi pushed off from the telescope, floating to the status panel.
“How much time?” she asked as she ran her gloved fingers over the controls, searching for the Streetcar’s orbital status.
What is all the fuss about so early this morning? Morning? It’s barely past one.
President, it is a matter of international concern…
“By my father’s memory, no.” Hoshi’s shoulders slumped inside her suit. Polanger’s ship was gone. The precious antique lenses were gone, as were her hopes of returning to Earth alive. She felt so cold, and the ache in her limbs kept at bay by her excitement—settled in again with a vengeance. Too long, she’d waited, caught up in a discovery of…
“Of what?” A telescope meant to study Earth and not the stars. But one she suspected came from the stars. It felt alien, its technology sleek and alluring—alluring enough to cost Hoshi her life. Damn her curiosity. So something alien had placed a scope on an abandoned space station, studying Earth like she might study a dragonfly’s wing beneath a microscope. Studying Earth without anyone noticing.
We’ve detected two ships in orbit, sir. They’re not ours.
China’s? Brazil’s?
