Space Station Crisis: Star Challengers Book 2 by Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, June Scobee Rodgers Page A

smile, and her eyes locked with his.
    King took a quick breath of surprise. Was she flirting with him? The tune of an old song, “Can’t Take My Eyes off of You” flashed through his mind, and he quickly decided against humming it. “So, we have that in common, then,” he teased her back.
    Just then, Dr. d’Almeida glided in. “Dr. Wu’s message this morning requested that you go over the images that he sent, Cadet King. Did you find the charts?”
    “Yes, Ma’am, I believe we have them all,” King said, pointing down at the screen. “It’s hard to believe that it takes days or weeks to make each of these sky survey pictures. When I worked with Dr. Wu on the Moon, we used video images, but we used printed ones, too, for the blink test.”
    Dr. d’Almeida chuckled. “Dr. Wu is a brilliant astronomer, and he has some eccentricities. One of them is that he enjoys the feel of real paper in his hands. But as you can probably guess, dealing with hardcopy is impractical on the space station.”
    “Clearly,” Mira said. “You can’t even use paperweights to keep things in place.”
    “There are other ways, of course,” d’Almeida said. “We have vacuum display boards, with tiny pinholes that draw in small amounts of air to keep lightweight objects in place.”
    “Huh,” King mused, “like a reverse air-hockey table.”
    D’Almeida didn’t seem to hear him. She continued. “Or magnetized sheets, or a tacky backing.”
    “Like sticky notes,” Mira observed.
    “But using the display screen is by far the simplest method. You can still do the blink test on screen, of course.” D’Almeida touched the display table and flicked a finger back and forth. The projected deep-sky image changed from one starfield to another and back again. “But if you two have this in hand, I can get back to my other work in the observatory dome. Sometimes a real astronomer needs to look at the stars with her own eyes.” With that, Dr. d’Almeida pushed off and zoomed to the far end of the module and the telescope enclosure, all the while singing softly in a foreign language. Apparently, she wasn’t used to having other people in the module with her.
    “Portuguese folk song,” Mira pointed out. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Maybe Wu isn’t the only eccentric astronomer.”
    “Huh,” King said with a smile. “Well, we all have a few things that make us different. Besides, some of us happen to think that a little bit of music makes the day go better.” He started humming “Whistle While You Work” and flicked a finger on the display screen to switch back and forth between two images. He saw no important changes and switched to another pair of images, then another, then another. He settled into a rhythm, and after a few minutes Mira took over, switching from image to image.
    “It seems like a pointless exercise, doesn’t it?” she said. “They all look pretty much the same—a bunch of light dots on black.”
    King kept his eyes glued to the screen, alert for any differences. If one tiny star moved while the rest of the points remained the same, it would pop out like a jumping flea. “I can understand why Wu thinks it’s important, but with the Kylarn threat, I guess looking for asteroids and comets has been put on the back burner.”
    At the moment, the station’s crew, as well as most people on Earth, were particularly anxious to see the upcoming results of the surveillance probe, Recon-1, which had been launched before the Star Challengers arrived at the ISSC. The spy probe would capture images of the alien base on the far side of the Moon; it was due to arrive and send back its first pictures later that day. King wasn’t surprised that tedious asteroid searches received little fanfare.… On the other hand, they all had to wait a few hours until Recon-1 arrived at its destination. He wanted to do this for Dr. Wu in the meantime.
    Bending over the screens, he spotted a flicker of change