Space Stations

Tom would be surprised when she told him that she was going to ask to be stationed on Luna. They might even travel there together, adrift for a time aboard the shuttlecraft taking them to Luna, anticipating the destination that lay ahead of them. They would follow the sky together.

AURIGA’S STREETCAR

by Jean Rabe

Jean Rabe is the author of eleven fantasy novels and more than two dozen short stories.

Among the former are two DragonLance trilogies, and among the latter are tales published in the DAW anthologies Warrior Fantastic, Creature Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, and Guardians of Tomorrow. She is the editor of two DAW collections, Sol's Children and Historical Hauntings, and a CD anthology: Carnival. When she's not writing or editing (which isn't very often), she plays war games and role-playing games, visits museums, pretends to garden, tugs on old socks with her two dogs, and attempts to put a dent in her towering “to-be-read” stack of books.

IT LOOKED wholly unremarkable—this fog-gray box suspended against the glittering darkness of space.

It possessed none of the technological elegance of its kin, none of the graceful butterfly-wing panels or sculpted solar-scoops. No gently curving sections contrasted with the sharp angles of its thick hull. No lights—not that Hoshi had expected any, as the station had been abandoned more than eight months past. No rotating grav-bands or revolving antenna arrays.

No beauty to it.

Indeed, there was nothing that made this aging space station even the slightest bit interesting to look at. Yet, Hoshi pronounced it…

“Wonderful.”

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 space 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 space station looked more like a brick, and that is precisely what Auriga's Streetcar had become. Its orbit was approaching the final stages of decay, and in a handful of days it would touch the upper limits of Earth's atmosphere, then pass 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 orbit taking it over Japan, 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 space stations and people. Her limbs were stiff, despite the zero-G. At eighty-four, she was among the senior of her country's independent spacers, 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.