Free The Origami Dragon And Other Tales by C. H. Aalberry

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rubbish tips and garage sales. The switches were large, the screens
small. He was used to space equipment being the best of the best,
but everything on the station was old, cheap and faulty.
    The station
defied the normal economics of space travel: it was larger than it
needed to be, and most of it was empty. Entire sections were
without power, empty halls floating in space.
    The archaic
construction belied the importance of the station: its mission was
to watch the first confirmed alien artefact found in the Sol. The
sphere had arrived unexpectedly, and its origin remained unknown.
Apart from shocking and terrifying Earth’s population by its mere
existence, the artefact did little apart from orbiting Mars. The
Observer Station 3 had been built to watch, and that was all its
crew could do.
    The work was
important, but mindlessly repetitive.
    “And boring,
boring, boring!” Matt muttered.
    Every
thirty-two minutes the Anomaly would glow green for ten seconds,
and then fade back to dull silver. While it was green, it sent out
two identical bursts of electromagnetic energy that may or may not
have been a message. If it was a message, it was wasted on a planet
of people who could only listen in bewilderment. Communicating with
the sphere had proved fruitless, although everything short of
physical contact had been tried.
    So the crew of
Observer 3 watched, and waited, and spent their time fixing
fuses.
    “Anything new?”
asked Matt as he floated into the control room.
    Chen didn’t
even acknowledge the question, but continued playing what appeared
to be a word game on the computer console. He wasn’t talking to
Matt.
    “I fixed the
filter,” said Matt, conversationally.
    Chen looked up
at the huge board of lights above his head. The damage control
panel was another idiosyncratic feature of the station: an old
fashioned mixture of labels interspersed with green and red L.E.Ds.
The panel was connected directly to all systems in the station
using physical wire connections. As Matt watched, the light for the
filtration system changed from green back to red. The fuse he had
just replaced must have broken again.
    “Did you, now?”
asked Chen unkindly as Matt’s face fell.
    Watching the
Anomaly wasn’t difficult work. Computers and sensors of every kind
and size were pointed at the dull sphere. When Matt and Chen
weren’t fixing things they had to trawl through reels of data for
anything unusual. Highlights from the last year of recording
included a passing asteroid and a solar flare. Nothing changed:
there was nothing new or unusual. Boring.
    Matt sent a
routine message back to his superiors on Earth. The date changed,
but the message remained the same.
    Although Matt
and Chen were the only astronauts on the station there were five
crew rooms, each with two beds in them. Chen had taken one, Matt
another. They used a third as a games room and the last two for
storage. They had never been told why they were the only staff on a
ten-person station, or why the station had been empty when they
arrived. It wasn’t normal, and it made Matt uneasy from the first
day.
    Apart from the
maintenance and data crunching there was remarkably little for them
to do. They spent their spare time playing games and betting on the
results. Matt had lost their most recent game, a cross between Risk
and Zero-g darts, and owed Chen three hours maintenance duty and an
hour of pretending to be a chicken. Their current game,
battleship-chess, wasn’t going as well for Chen, and Matt was
quietly confident of a win. When the games got boring, Chen
practised his French while Matthew read his way through the works
of Dickens.
    The Anomaly did
nothing unusual. It barely did anything at all.
    They agreed
that Observer 3 had been built by paranoid idiots. It was the only
rational explanation. Everything important to the station’s
functioning had been built in sets of five, from the life-support
systems to the sensor pods and connecting corridors. In