“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 eggshell 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 snatched 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 brass. 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 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.