Peggy Sue (The T'aafhal Inheritance) Read Free Page B

decade that TK had owned the station, he never once told the local Jackaroos, as Australian cowboys are called, what to do. He was a strictly hands off owner, letting his hired manager run the place for a share of the profits.
    What interested TK most lie under the land near the station house. A vast complex of laboratories and construction areas lurked just beneath the hot dry surface scrub. There, safe from prying eyes and the occasional spy satellite, Parker had slowly built up a staff of highly skilled workers. There were scientists—physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, material scientists, etc.—along with information theorists, linguists, code breakers, computer scientists and engineers of all stripe.
    The excavated rubble from Parker’s mad scientist’s lair had been carefully graded into the surrounding landscape, though no one would have thought it strange to have piles of excavated dirt scattered about. At the town of Coober Pedy, several hundred kilometers to the south, there were piles of dirt everywhere. There everyone lived in houses underground, converted from working opal mines. Even so, TK was a cautious man, and nowadays it was unlikely that anyone would remember when excavation work was going on at Parker’s Station.
    Hidden within the labyrinthine installation were bays that held two completed large shuttles, plus another still under construction and a pair of smaller craft. The large shuttles were 16 meters long by 10 wide, blunt arrowheads with lifting body shapes. Between their shape and hull material they were inherently stealthy, very difficult to spot using conventional radar. Each could carry 42 passengers in a 2-2-2 first class seating arrangement within a 6 meter wide cabin. Alternatively, the seats could be collapsed into the deck, resulting in a 10 by 6 by 2.5 meter cargo area.
    A rear stairway could be lowered for passenger loading from the runway underneath the craft, similar to the airstair arrangement on some old Boeing 727s. When docked flush against the hull of the Peggy Sue, the same stairway extended into a purpose built airlock on the spaceship’s upper deck. The windscreen of the flight deck and the entire top of the passenger compartment, from armrest height upward, was constructed much like the nose of the Peggy Sue—large sweeping transparent panels framed by thin silver strips where the panels met. Under normal conditions the panels in the passenger area were kept opaque, but they could be turned transparent in an instant, providing a breathtaking overhead view. Those who experienced the ride to or from orbit with the cabin in transparent mode described the experience as Disnyesque.
    Each smaller shuttle, referred to as a pinnace or Captain’s launch, was built on a similar planform shrunk down to a 10 meter length. With a cabin area roughly equivalent to a corporate jet, they could carry eight with a crew of two. Both types of shuttle were equipped with small fusion reactors, gravitonic drive and acceleration compensating deck gravity generators. Full coverage repulsor arrays were mounted to ward off space junk—a real problem near the incredibly trashy lower Earth orbits—plus the repulsors could turn away small arms fire if the occasion warranted.
    Though the Peggy Sue was fully capable of landing on Earth, doing so and then returning to space required a great expenditure of energy. Even running on muon catalyzed fusion power, such a wasteful use of energy was expensive. Besides, bringing the whole ship to the planet’s surface to embark or disembark passengers and supplies offended TK’s engineering sensibilities. When the Peggy Sue quietly made orbit a few days ago, instead of landing at Parker’s Station—an event that might not have escaped notice—it was one of the large shuttles that flew up to meet the returning starship, bringing up new additions to her crew and ferrying much of the existing crew planetside for some well deserved R&R.
    Among those