Peggy Sue (The T'aafhal Inheritance) (19 page)

“We were just feeling our way back then, Captain, inventing the technology needed to build such a ship. All that is now well in hand and, with the auto-fabricators and nanites working at full tilt, she should be ready in about 10 weeks,” Jo Jo replied. He was going to be a very busy man for the next couple of months.

At least Jo Jo did not have to worry about the new small interceptor ships that were beginning construction elsewhere in the cavernous dock. Those compact craft, dubbed corvettes by the design team, would carry a crew of six and be able to accelerate at nearly 100 Gs for brief sprints. Not intended for long voyages, they mounted a single rail gun and could carry ten of the new gravitonic missiles—some of the navy types were already calling the missiles torpedoes and the vessels PT boats.

“Very good, gentlemen. I’ll leave you to your labors.” Jack said to the two men. “Later today I hope to find out where our next mission will take us.”

Dock Observation Area, Farside Base

Jean-Jacques de Belcour was standing in the observation area that overlooked the cavernous dock where the Peggy Sue currently rested. Cut into the shear side of the dock wall, the observation area was fronted by a large rectangular expanse of transparent material, the same transparent material that was used in the viewing ports on the Peggy Sue. Optically clear and stronger than steel, the 15 by 4 meter transparent wall, located 18 meters above the floor of the dock, provided a panoramic view of the entire dock area. It also allowed the dock to be depressurized without disrupting control operations.

How arrogant these space pirates are,
thought Jean-Jacques contemptuously, observing the Captain and his engineers on the dock floor below. After his abduction, Jean-Jacques had been kept on board the Peggy Sue for more than a month as “a guest of the Captain.” Like the protagonist in a Jules Vern novel, taken captive by the central villain, he was left free to wander the ship and converse with the crew. But that proved an unprofitable pursuit. Most of the crew were ex-military and all held the UN in low esteem. Also, there was not a Francophile among them. Having not made a single friend, de Belcour welcomed the news that he was to move into new quarters on the partially constructed Moon base. 

Arriving at the base a month ago, he was assigned an apartment, given a brief orientation tour and then left to his own devices. Intellectually, he could understand his captors’ reasoning: he was stuck in a base on the farside of the Moon, carved out of the silicate rock of an ancient volcano. Outside the base there was nothing but vacuum, unfiltered radiation from the Sun and temperatures that ranged from more than 100°C during the day down to -150°C by the end of the long lunar night.

The fact was, there was no escape. Even if he could somehow steal a spacesuit, there was no place to run to outside the base. Getting back to Earth would require a spacecraft, and though he helped set UN global space policy, he hadn’t the first clue about operating one of the ships used by these cosmic buccaneers. Still, it galled him to be ignored by his captors. It implied that he was both helpless and inconsequential. Sadly, Jean-Jacques had just about decided that was the case.

As he was standing in front of the huge picture window, overlooking the ship resting in the dock below, a voice behind him asked, “It is a marvelous thing, is it not M. de Belcour?”

It took Jean-Jacques a few seconds to realize that the voice, a woman’s voice, had spoken in French. He turned to reply and saw Lucrezia Piscopia and an oriental woman. “
Bonjour
, Dr. Piscopia,” he replied in his native tongue. “I would count it a marvelous thing if it were not under the control of brigands and madmen.”

Dr. Piscopia made a tisking sound and said, “You know, more people would talk to you if you were not so aggressively disagreeable, Jean-Jacques.” To which the Frenchman replied with a Gallic shrug. Switching to English, Elena motioned to her companion and said, “Might I introduce Dr. Li Wie-chang? Doctor, this is M. Jean-Jacques de Belcour of the UNOOSA.”

Dr. Li Wie-chang, a Chinese botanist and synthetic biologist, and Dr. Eric Fetzer, a noted geologist formerly with NASA, had just made the trip from Earth to join the science team. She ran into Elena in the lunch room and the Italian astronomer offered to show her around. “I am pleased to meet you M. de Belcour,” Dr. Li said in accent-less American English.

“Charmed, Dr. Li. You must call me Jean-Jacques. It seems that most everyone around here is quite informal, everyone except the Captain and his officers that is.”
She is quite attractive for a femme chinoise,
he thought,
short, well built but not stocky like a peasant.
 

“Please call me Sally,” replied the woman, smiling. “I take it that you don’t particularly like our commanding officer?”

“I have seen his crew slaughter UN troops and been kidnapped and taken to the Moon by the man. He is far from being my friend,” Jean-Jacques spat. “Tell me, how did they entice you to join them in this illegal enterprise?”

Dr. Li laughed and looked at Elena. “You warned me, Elena.”

“Warned you about what?” Jean-Jacques demanded, feeling that he had just been made the butt of a private joke.

“That you were so blinded by your own opinions and dislike for the Captain that you alienate everyone who approaches you,” Elena replied.

“You really don’t care why I joined the expedition,” Dr. Li added bluntly, “If I tell you that I am convinced this is the most important thing in the history of humankind will you say that I am also insane or a criminal?”

“Madam, you have not been held incommunicado for more than two months!” he sputtered, red faced.

“Incommunicado? Really?” the Chinese Botanist asked in a puzzled voice. “Have you tried making a call to Earth from your room? The computer built into my apartment’s desk has video chat software that can access the Internet. I have called several colleagues in China and around the world since I’ve been here.”

Jean-Jacques was stunned. He had assumed that he was not allowed to communicate with Earth. Then he realized that every time he had seen the Captain, he always demanded that he be returned to Earth—a request the Captain always flatly denied. He had asked to communicate with his superiors while on board the ship but that was also denied. The Captain would only agree to notify the UN of his whereabouts, which later news broadcasts seem to verify. But Jean-Jacques never asked permission to call his superiors since being transferred to the base.

“You see, Jean-Jacques? Things are not as bad as you make them out to be,” Elena said to the gobsmacked UN official. “The Captain said you are allowed access to all non-hazardous areas of the base, and that you are welcome to attend our planing meetings—as long as you do not disrupt the proceedings.”

“But why?”

“Because the Captain wishes to convince you he is right,” Elena said with a smile, “and he thinks that the facts will speak for themselves.”

Without saying another word, not even adieu, Jean-Jacques hurried off.
Back to his quarters to try and call Earth, undoubtedly,
Sally thought, shaking her head as the Frenchman departed. “Bureaucrats everywhere think the same way, if something is not explicitly permitted it is forbidden. When I went to graduate school in America I found out that Americans think the opposite—if it is not explicitly forbidden then it is permitted.”

“From my experience, even when something is forbidden, if the rules do not make sense to them, Americans do whatever they please,” Elena added, “particularly Texans.”

“I agree,” Sally concurred. “Working with these people is both liberating and frightening.”

 “Come, we must not be late for the planning meeting.”

Polar Bear Quarters, Farside Base

In a service tunnel outside the polar bear habitat four men guided a large metal crate toward a side entrance. Thumping and low moaning sounds emanated from the crate, and occasionally the hover cart that supported it shuddered. “Damn it, hurry up,” said Bud Jones, “I think our cargo is waking up.”

“That’s alright,” replied Joey Sanchez, “It will make getting him out of the crate a lot easier.” The other two members of the group were Steve Hitch and Phil Kowalski. While the ship’s officers would be happy at the display of inter-service cooperation—two SEALs, a sailor and a Marine working together voluntarily—the nature of their enterprise would not have been so readily condoned.

As they positioned the crate in front of the service door, Hitch called out, “Open the door, Joey, this sucker is starting to rock the sled.” Sanchez moved to the panel beside the door and pushed the open button. The door mechanism automatically recognized his comm pip’s code, identifying him as a Marine. Because the Marines were charged with base security they had access to most every part of the complex, including the maintenance tunnels and entrances.

The door slid open and the men quickly pushed the bulky crate through the entrance. They barely cleared the doorway when it started shaking violently from side to side. “Bud, Joey, open the damn crate and I’ll drop the front end,” shouted Hitch, who was controlling the hover cart from the rear.

Around the stark white enclosure, heads popped up, as white as the ice and snow that covered the floor and simulated terrain. From long graceful necks, sets of dark eyes, each flanking a black nose, zeroed in on the surreptitious work party and their crate. Rising like ghosts from the sea of white, two of the largest bears headed unhurriedly toward the humans.

“Which one of you is Tornassuk?” called Bud.

“That would be me, human,” answered the lead bear, a huge male as big as Lt. Bear. “Why?”

“We got a present for you, courtesy of the Peggy Sue’s crew.” Jones and Sanchez opened the doors of the crate to reveal something dark and moving inside. Hitch dropped the front end of the hover cart and a large pinkish-brown mass slid out with a bellow of protest. The male walrus pulled itself from the crate using its tusks and flippers, and advanced two shuffling strides. Then it saw the polar bears.

With a loud bugling roar, the walrus galumphed for all he was worth toward the perceived safety of open water. Unfortunately for the walrus, the water in question belonged to the polar bears’ swimming pool. As the other bears quickly moved to cut off its escape, Tornassuk glanced back at the humans and said, “thanks, I owe you primates one.”

With that he charged after the 1,500kg mammal and leapt onto its back. As the noise of the struggle rose to a crescendo, the four humans wrestled the crate back into the service tunnel and closed the door. “Carajo,” said Joey, “and I thought watching you guys eat was frightening.”

“You said it brother,” answered Phil with conviction. “Come on, we gotta get this back to the shuttle dock before it’s missed. And we gotta hose it out too, there’s walrus shit all over the inside.”

Main Lobby Atrium, Farside Base

Dr. Piscopia and Dr. Li exited the observation room and made their way to the interior of the still growing base. Initially, all that was here was the deep crack that had been transformed into the dock area. When the first construction crew was landed by the Peggy Sue several months ago, they began by setting up a drilling laser. Powered by the ship’s reactor, it sliced through the lunar rock like a knife through soft cheese. After smoothing out the cavern floor the drill was aimed downward, boring a hole ten meters in diameter and a kilometer deep into the volcanic rock.

Into that hole went several large pieces of equipment, transferred from the cargo hold of the Peggy Sue. In a chamber at the bottom of the shaft, a muon catalyzed fusion power plant was assembled. Essentially a clone of the reactor that powered the ship, the buried plant was capable of continuously producing over 100 gigawatts of electrical power, enough to power a city of more than forty million people. Once the base reactor came on line, the ship was free to return to Earth orbit and gather more equipment for transport.

The next freight run delivered a hold full of robotic mining equipment. The mining machines had been used to excavate the complex beneath Parker’s Station, but they had been designed from the beginning to work in a vacuum—TK always planned two steps ahead and he hated wasting money. Several large voids, the empty remains of ancient lava tubes, were soon located and breached by the robotic equipment. The interior chambers were linked and sealed, making them ready to receive more equipment from Earth.

Airlocks were added, dividing the installation into a dozen air tight zones. A lava tube that ventured close to the lunar surface was opened to airless space and turned into an airlock capable of accepting the large shuttles. At this point the shuttles began making trips directly from Earth to the Moon base.

Ferried up from Parker’s Station by the shuttles, a steady stream of equipment, raw material and people made the day long trip from Earth to its Moon. Shuttle #3 in particular was built to haul outsized freight, with large clam-shell doors similar to the ones on the now defunct American Space Shuttle.

 In the shuttles’ holds came cryogenic bladders containing liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. Each shuttle trip brought 120 cubic meters of liquid and, since the net expansion for liquid nitrogen into gas is 645 times the original volume when heated to room temperature, a workable atmosphere was soon established inside the rapidly expanding base. Liquid oxygen is even denser at roughly 1/1000
^th
its gaseous volume, but only a single load of LOX was needed for three of liquid nitrogen to build an Earth-like atmosphere.

More robots began running pipes to carry air and liquids, extruding the piping as they moved around and among the chambers. Flooring was quickly followed by walls and ceilings with artificial lighting. Though mostly constructed of native rock and prefabricated metal, paneling covered with thin wood veneer was installed in many areas to help soften the cold, inorganic ambiance. In the main chamber, with its vaulted 50 meter high ceiling, large terraced planters were installed and filled with soil brought from Earth. Palm trees and other decorative greenery were planted next to a 20 meter water fall that provided both soothing background noise and helped to humidify the air.