They’re not from Earth, sir.
Are you certain?
When no words immediately followed, Hoshi pictured heads nodding. The station bucked, and Hoshi found herself floating free of the status panel. Red lights were blinking, and she didn’t need to read the indicator labels beneath them to know what was happening. The station was falling.
She felt so cold, achy. Lived long enough, she thought. She’d seen plenty of stars, the goat and the kids up close thanks to this station. In truth, she’d seen more than enough—more stars than practically anyone else on Earth would ever see in their lifetimes. She drifted, listening to the voices coming from the telescope, to the station starting to break up around her.
“We’re out of time!”
The voice came from beneath her. She turned, head down, feet against the ceiling, seeing Keith Polanger emerge through the doorway, fear splayed across his youthful face. “My ship,” he said. “Someone released it from the bay. I thought at first you did it for spite.
But I didn’t think you were the suicidal type.”
They did it, Hoshi thought. The ones who installed the strange telescope. The ones who were in Earth’s orbit, that the President of some English-speaking country had been roused from his sleep over. The ones that she and Keith Polanger would now die because of.
“But there’s still a way out,” he said, reaching up and tugging her down. “I found a pod.
They built an escape pod into this place. It’s quite small, but I believe it will…”
Hoshi pushed away from him, floating toward the alien telescope and worrying at it again.
“Old woman! I’m getting out of here. Didn’t you hear me say there’s a pod?”
“We’re leaving with this,” she said, her voice even and free of the panic so thick in his.
One more tug and she had it, or at least a substantial part. She pushed it toward him, and he grabbed it, scowling and shaking his head. “It belongs to… them, the aliens. Someone below needs to see it, Keith Polanger.”
“Aliens?”
President, there are three ships now. The words still came, though part of the telescope was free of the fitting and in Keith Polanger’s hands. But reports are they’re moving away from Earth now. Fighter shuttles have been scrambled, but they won’t reach the ships in time. We have images, though.
As they have images of Earth, Hoshi thought. Eight months worth of images and sound, things quietly captured from an abandoned fog-gray box called Auriga’s Streetcar. For what purpose had someone… something been watching us? she wondered, as she followed Keith Polanger through the doorway and down one corridor after the next, to an area she hadn’t explored. It contained an egg-shaped pod, just big enough for two.
Outside it were several of the lenses she’d recovered, including the large antique ones.
So Keith Polanger had meant to take the valuables away in the pod when he discovered his ship gone. But he’d come back for her. Guilt? Too much humanity in his heart?
“So you’re not a pirate,” she mused, as she watched him float the alien telescope into the pod, followed by some of the smaller lenses. There wouldn’t be room for the precious Yerkes lenses.
He turned to motion to her, reached out to tug her inside with him. She watched as a mix of horror and surprise flooded his face, saw how quickly his fingers fumbled to reconnect his oxygen tube. She held the other end in her gloved hands.
“So sorry,” she told him. “But there is not room for both of us on the pod—and Yerkes’ lenses. The lenses and the alien scope must return to Earth.”
He flailed about for the tube, which she’d managed to rip free. An old woman could be strong in zero-G. Fortunate he had not invested in a new suit with wholly internal workings. She probably couldn’t have taken him then. “Sorry,” she repeated. “So sorry, Keith Polanger.”
There was one good telescope remaining on the Streetcar. It had not been the best of the lot, and so had escaped the prying fingers of Hoshi and Keith Polanger.
Hoshi was training it now to what she sensed was east of the Perseus constellation. She’d made sure the young man was safely stored aboard the pod, and that the oxygen was flowing freely inside. It would revive him soon. She made sure the lenses were carefully fastened down, and that the alien telescope would be able to weather the brunt of the reentry force. He would have left them behind to save her—a woman well into the winter of her life.
Then she’d released the pod and returned to the observatory, and to this one remaining good telescope.
The lenses were far superior to the pair of old forty-inch ones racing away in the pod, though there was no historical significance to them.
East of Perseus, as seen from the middle-north latitudes of Earth. East and…
“There!” she exclaimed. Auriga the Charioteer. The last of the autumn constellations, as would have been seen from her homeland on Japan’s coast had there not been so much artificial light from the cities to block the stars. Auriga in all his glory. Capella, the bright triple star, the Goat. The kids. The open clusters almost three thousand light-years away.
That was where the Streetcar was headed, the largest of the three alien ships towing it.
The stars twinkling hotly and intensely beautiful all around.
“Wonderful,” Hoshi said.
FALLING STAR
by Brendan DuBois
Brendan DuBois is an award-winning author of short stories and novels. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies.
He has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for his short fiction, and has been nominated three times for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
He’s also the author of the Lewis Cole mystery series—Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, Killer Waves, and the upcoming Buried Dreams. His most recent novel, Betrayed, is a suspense thriller that finally resolves the POW-MIA mystery of the Vietnam War. He lives in Exeter, N.H., with his wife Mono, where he is at work on a new novel. Please visit his website, www.BrendanDuBois.com.
ON A late July day in Boston Falls, New Hampshire, Rick Monroe, the oldest resident of the town, sat on a park bench in the town common, waiting for the grocery and mail wagon to appear from Greenwich. The damn thing was supposed to arrive at two PM, but the Congregational Church clock had just chimed three times and the road from Greenwich remained empty. Four horses and a wagon were hitched up to the post in front of the Boston Falls General Store, some bare-chested kids were playing in the dirt road, and flies were buzzing around his face.
He stretched out his legs, saw the dirt stains at the bottom of the old overalls. Mrs. Chandler, his once-a- week house cleaner, was again doing a lousy job with the laundry, and he knew he should say something to her, but he was reluctant to do it. Having a cleaning woman was a luxury and a bad cleaning woman was better than no cleaning woman at all. Even if she was a snoop and sometimes raided his icebox and frowned whenever she reminded him of the weekly church services.
Some of the kids shouted and started running up the dirt road. He sat up, shaded his eyes with a shaking hand. There, coming down slowly, two tired horses pulling the wagon that had high wooden sides and a canvas top. He waited as the wagon pulled into the store, waited still until it was unloaded. There was really no rush, no rush at all. Let the kids have their excitement, crawling in and around the wagon. When the wagon finally pulled out, heading to the next town over, Jericho, he slowly got up, wincing as his hips screamed at him. He went across the cool grass and then the dirt road, and up to the wooden porch. The children moved away from him, except for young Tom Cooper, who stood there, eyes wide open. Glen Roundell, the owner of the General Store and one of the town’s three selectmen, came up to him with a paper sack and a small packet of envelopes, tied together with an
