Author: Laurence E. Dahners
Date: 2013-04-30T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Thriller; Fantasy; Young Adult
Description: “Habitats" is the seventh in a series of near future SciFi/Thrillers whose young heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation which has made her a genius as well as an athletic phenomenon. In “Habitats,” she is continuing to find uses for the quantum entangled wormholes that she discovered. These wormholes aren’t big enough to send people through, yet they are making huge changes in our world. After a friend lost his hand, Ell finds a way to use ports to build better prostheses for amputees! However, there are terrorists wanting to use ports to cause destruction and the military arms of some count

Habitats

An Ell Donsaii story # 7

By

Laurence E Dahners

Copyright 2013 Laurence E Dahners

Kindle Edition

Author’s Note

Though this book can “stand alone” it will be much easier to understand if read as part of the series including

“Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)”

“Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2)”

“Lieutenant (an Ell Donsaii story #3)”

“Rocket (an Ell Donsaii story #4)”

“Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5)” and

“Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6).”

I have minimized repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the earlier books in order to provide a better reading experience for those of you who are reading the series.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

Preprologue

Allan Donsaii was an unusually gifted quarterback. He was widely recognized to be startling strong and a phenomenally accurate passer. During his college career he finished two full seasons without any interceptions and two games with 100 percent completions. Unfortunately, he wasn’t drafted because the pro teams felt he was too small.

Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and was extraordinarily quick. She rarely played a game without a “steal” and usually had many.

Allan and Kristen dated more and more seriously throughout college and married at the end of their senior year. Their friends teased them that they were only marrying so that they could start their own sports dynasty.

Their daughter Ell had Kristen’s quickness, magnified by Allan’s strength and accuracy. The child also had a new mutation affecting the myelin sheaths surrounding her nerves. This mutation produced nerve transmission speeds that were nearly double those of normal neurons. Nerve impulse transmissions being faster, she had much quicker reflexes. Yet the new myelin sheath was also thinner, allowing more axons, and therefore more neurons, to be packed into the same sized skull. These two factors resulted in a brain which had more neurons, though it wasn’t larger and a more rapid processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller scale CPU architecture that enables faster processor speeds.

Most importantly, under the influence of adrenalin in a “fight or flight” situation, her nerves would transmit even more rapidly than their normally phenomenal speed.

Much more rapidly…

Prologue

Washington D.C.—President Flood defended his administration’s decision to request that Portal Technologies continue their slow ramping up of port production. It has been two and a half years since the ports resulting from Ell Donsaii’s seminal theories burst into the public’s awareness when she used them in diverting Comet Hearth-Daster. Initially the public clamor was for delayed release in order to prevent economic disaster in the various industries that the ports would render obsolescent. However, a rising tide of opinion is demanding more rapid release so that the people can realize the tremendous benefits that will…

Ben Stavos called out to Ell as she walked through the ET Resources’ research area at D5R. “Ell, you’ve got to come over and check out our new toy!”

“What have you got?”

“Hah! I’m not telling!  You’ve got to come and see. I totally refuse to give away my little surprise.”

“OK,” Ell said, turning his way with a grin, “but after that build up you’d better dazzle me.” She saw a funny chair that seemed much like a saddle with stirrups for the feet. On the table in front of it were a pair of long sparkly gloves. The wrists and elbows of the gloves were attached to the shoulder area of the chair with a ball joint and rod arrangement.

“Take a seat,” Ben said sounding excited. “Put the PGR chip from your head band into this one.” He held out a larger headband with screens that would completely cover the eyes.

Ell noticed the new headband also had a sparkly surface. “What’s with the glitter?” she asked pulling off her AI (Artificial Intelligence) headband and pulling the PGR communication chip out of the back of it. She socketed the PGR chip into the bigger headband thus connecting it to the computer that her AI, Allan, ran on.

“It’s just to make it dazzling!” he said, but then he laughed, “Actually the infrared cameras on the desk use the ‘glitter’ to locate your gloves and head in space.”

Ell took a seat on the saddle, stuck her feet in the stirrups and picked up the gloves. “Okaay,” she said, realizing that small linear motors bridged from the fingers to the thumbs so that she wouldn’t actually be able to pick anything up in her hands once her fingers were in the gloves. Setting the gloves back down, she picked up the big headband and settled it onto her head. The room disappeared and she found herself looking into a three dimensional view of space. Heavily strewn stars covered a portion of her field of view. The bottom part of her view field had a number of objects in it, most of them looking like broken rock. To her lower left she saw a large metal structure. Ell tilted her head in consideration and the view tilted too. Her eyes widened and she tipped her head down which brought the broken rock into the center of her field.

There was a pair of mechanical arms hanging in front of her! “Cool!” she exclaimed. She reached out and felt for the gloves. As she suspected, when her fingers bumped a glove and moved it, the right mechanical arm moved a little in her field of view.

By touch, she slid her hands into the gloves, watching the mechanical hands wiggle around as she did so. Once her fingers were all the way into the gloves, she tried opening and closing her hands. The mechanical hands opened and closed as if they were her own. They had a thumb, an index finger and a single “mitten” like group for the small, ring and long fingers. Sure enough, when she lifted her arms, the mechanical arms lifted. Ell reached out and without difficulty grabbed one of the rocks. When she squeezed, she felt resistance as if she actually had it in her hand!

Excitedly Ell pulled her hands out of the gloves and reached up, pulling off the head gear. “This is amazing! The little linear motors between the fingertips in the gloves are what give you the sensation you’re actually holding and squeezing something?”

Ben grinned at her, “Yep.”

Glancing at the jointed apparatus going to the gloves from the shoulders of the chair she said, “And the resistance when I tried to move the rock came from this?”

He nodded.

She tilted her head, “So what do you plan to do with this?”

Ben raised an eyebrow, “Do you mean, what good is it?”

Ell shrugged, “Well yeah. It’s a pretty cool simulation of working in space, but… with your goals of colonizing and building industry in space… how does this fit?” Her brow wrinkled, “As a training aid?”

Ben’s smile nearly split his face, “Hah!” he looked up at his assistant John, “We put one over on the genius!” He reached out and pulled some tape off the front of the station Ell sat in front of. A label hidden behind the tape said, “Waldo.”

Ell’s eyes widened as she stared at it; then looked up at Ben. “Really!? This is going to be a control station for some mechanical arms out in space?”

Ben smirked, “That’s not what it’s ‘going’ to be. That’s what it is.”

Ell turned back to the station and picked up the headgear. “You mean… what I’m seeing here is really… from a set of binocular cameras out in space, not some virtual simulation?!”

As Ell slid her hands back into the gloves she heard Ben say, “Yep.”

“And these mechanical arms are really out there too?”

“Yep.”

“And those rocks are really some fragments from one of your asteroids?”

Ell could hear the triumph in Ben’s voice as he said “Yep,” once again.

“And my mechanical arms. What are they attached to?”

“Your mechanical torso.”

Ell snorted. “Yeah sure!” she said leaning her head forward and down to look at where her abdomen would be. To her astonishment, a torso did indeed swim into view with “Waldo 1” stenciled across its chest. No legs though. As she leaned forward farther, the stars began to roll into view below her torso. “Wait, my waldo seems to be rolling over frontwards. Isn’t it attached to anything?”

“Nope, not attached to anything. Lean back to stop that roll.”

Ell leaned back and sure enough the speed with which the stars were rolling by slowed and then reversed. “Really? Not tethered at all? What if I knock my waldo away into space? How do I get it back to the station?”

“Well, now that you’ve stopped your roll, lean to the right.”

Ell did and her view rolled to the right. She leaned to the left and brought her view back to what she thought of as “upright.”

“Twist to the right.”

Ell did and her field of view began to rotate to the right. She let it continue rolling and the earth swam by, then the moon, then her field of rocks and a large metal box. She stopped the rotation. “So leaning and twisting in the saddle controls attitude jets on my ‘torso’?”

“Got it in one. Now push down lightly on the stirrups with your feet.”

Ell tried it and the view in her headgear gave her the sensation that she was shooting up into the air… or vacuum, or whatever.

“Pull up on the stirrups.”

When Ell did that she slowed, then began “descending.” She gradually sank back to about the location she had started from and pushed down on the stirrups to stop her motion. “So, the stirrups make me go up and down, cool.”

“Yeah. We bought the arms and head from a company that’s been making them for working in dangerous environments. Of course they were all wired and set up to be stationary or to be rolled around on wheels. We put the wiring through a port so it’s mobile and installed the attitude jets. The jets are all compressed air jets except for one big nozzle on the bottom of the torso which is a real rocket. It’s big so you can fly from place to place out there. But you have to tell your AI you want to use it so you don’t accidentally fire the big rocket when you just want to move a little bit or when the nozzle is sitting on something important. Actually, you’d want the AI to fly you if you were going somewhere that was very far, since you’d need to calculate orbital mechanics to go a long distance, not just point yourself that direction and fire off.”

With a series of small twists, leans and pulls, Ell stopped herself next to the asteroid fragments. She grasped one in her left mechanical hand and tossed it gently over to the right hand, catching it there. “Wow! This whole setup is amazingly responsive! It feels just about like I’m actually tossing a rock.” She bobbled the rock, “Except for the lack of gravity. It’s hard not to expect to catch it a little lower… So you’re planning to use it for construction, instead of men in spacesuits?” She pulled her hands out of the gloves and reached up to pull off the headband, turning to look at Ben.

“Yeah. You know how it takes quite a period of time breathing oxygen to decompress and get in a spacesuit? Then even after you’re in the suit at low pressure, the suit is still very clumsy because the air pressure inside of it resists everything you want to do? Worse, we want to do a lot of work in space, and much of that outside of low earth orbit. Out there, radiation is a real problem for flesh and blood workers. Waldo and his brethren are dexterous, radiation tolerant, easy to boot up and can work 24/7. They can even do some kinds of repetitive work with just AI’s directing them. And the things that do need a person driving them can be done by people here on earth working shifts. They can even go home to their families when they aren’t at work.”

“But, don’t you want to go to space yourself?”

“Sure,” Ben grinned, “After Waldo has built me a nice safe habitat out there.”

Ell grinned up at him. “Ben, this is amazing. What are your plans now?”

“Get the company that sold us this one to build a couple hundred more ported waldoes, or at least, as many as we think we can afford. Until now they’ve only made them a few at a time, so they’re preparing a bid for volume production. We want to send some to the asteroid we’re mining. Use some to build us a habitat in low earth orbit and others to start building a real habitat out at L5. It’ll really help us start bringing in money to have waldoes out there to improve our asteroid mining operations. So far our volume of ore retrieved has been low, but we’ve been making a profit anyway because the ore is so high value due to its high percentage of rare metals. At L5 we plan low gravity manufacturing on a large scale that should also help our bottom line.”

Ben shrugged, “Those are our plans anyway. I don’t think we’ll be able to afford as many waldoes as we’d like. Do you think D5Rs investors would be willing to put up some more cash to get us off to a faster start?”

Ell had seen Roger and Emma walking toward the Quantum Research area, “Emma, Roger,” she called, “come check this out.”

Ben got a little nervous as Ell took Roger and Emma through a demonstration of Waldo and what it could do. He worried that she was just putting off an answer about the likelihood of further investment from D5R’s mysterious financial backers. While he believed in the waldoes enough to put a proposal forward without Ell’s support, everyone knew that the money people tended to follow Ell’s recommendations. His nervousness skyrocketed when Ell sat back down on the saddle and started putting Waldo through his paces, spinning him one way, then the other, doing rolls, tossing pieces of asteroid back and forth. He felt sure she was about to break Waldo 1, but his eyes widened as she pushed the mechanical man far beyond what Ben had thought Waldo’s limits were. She brought him to a stop and took off the gloves and headset, grinning at Emma and Roger, “Phil’s gonna be so pissed!”

“Who?” Ben asked.

“Phil’s her astronaut ex-boyfriend.” Emma said.

“Yeah, he’s going to feel like we’re stealing astronaut’s jobs.” Ell snorted. “But you’re right, this will be much safer. How long have you guys been working on this?”

“Months and months. We really got started way back when we were having so much trouble gathering the ore from the asteroid. We needed someone to be ‘hands on’ with the equipment out there but started realizing how dangerous it would be to send out a live astronaut.”

Emma said, “Wait a sec. Why haven’t they been using waldoes for jobs in the vacuum for a long time now? Say to work on the outside of the Space Station?”

“Well, they kinda have. The big Canadarm on the Station is a kind of waldo after all. But something like Waldo 1 here would have had to drag a big power umbilical behind him as he moved around the outside of the station. That is,” he glanced at Ell, “before someone invented ports that you could pass power wiring through. Also, the light speed time delay would be an issue. Trying to control a waldo from Houston when the ISS was on the other side of the world would have been difficult. At L5 the delay would have been several seconds making control really problematic. And, at the asteroid we’re mining, the delay would be a good part of a minute. Delays in that range would make it completely untenable.”

He grinned at Ell again. “Having instantaneous control no matter where a waldo is, through a certain someone’s PGR chips, makes all the difference.”

Ell said, “So are you going to make some huge waldoes for big jobs and tiny ones for little jobs?”

“Yeah, we’ve got three sizes on the drawing boards with the manufacturer right now.”

“That is so cool! Way to go guys! I’m sure our investors will be willing to put up some more money. Draw up a plan for their cost and usage and the expected return etcetera and I’ll get it to them.” Ell turned to walk away with Roger and Emma.

Ben gazed bemusedly after Ell as the beautiful young woman turned the corner toward the Quantum Research area.

John interrupted his woolgathering, “Good God Boss! Did you see the way she handled Waldo? I’ve been working with him for a week now and I keep having to ask the AI to stabilize Waldo’s position. I sure as hell can’t jet him back into place myself like that! I certainly can’t toss a rock back and forth from hand to hand!”

Ben snorted. “Yeah, it’s amazing just how good the reflexes of world’s greatest gymnast actually are, huh?”

***

Mack Williams sat despondently in his truck. He’d driven over to Shelly’s new apartment at seven and he’d been sober then. If only she could see that he could stay sober, he felt sure she’d come back to him. But he’d felt really nervous. When he’d finally gotten the courage to go knock on her door, he’d been glad she wasn’t there.

At first.

Then as he’d sat waiting for her to come home, he’d gotten irritated. She’d only moved out of their home two days ago and she wasn’t even home at seven at night? Mack’s nerves got worse and worse. Finally he decided he had to go get one beer to calm himself. Medicine really. He wasn’t an alcoholic; he just needed a little something to soothe himself when he felt jagged.

He’d been going to buy only a single beer, just one to calm himself. But the store only sold six-packs. Frustrated, he got a six-pack and a pack of gum to keep the smell off his breath. He took one beer and tossed the other five in the back of his truck where they wouldn’t tempt him.

Back at Shelly’s place he started just sipping the beer, but then thinking about how it was “medicine” to calm his nerves he chugged it back and got out a stick of gum. He chewed the life out of it, got out another and got out of the truck. The beer had been disappointing. It hadn’t calmed him like it should. As he walked up to Shelly’s apartment he thought to himself that they were probably watering the beers down.

He knocked.

No answer.

Mack knocked harder and finally pounded on the door.

Back in the truck he’d decided he needed another beer ‘cause Shelly’s being out was really pissin’ him off.

Drinking the last beer in his six-pack, Mack saw Shelly enter her apartment. He realized she hadn’t been “out” engaging in any nightlife because she hadn’t been dressed up. He got out of his truck to go talk to her… then realized that even though a six-pack wasn’t much compared to what he drank sometimes, he’d better not try to talk to her with beer on his breath. With a sigh, he told his truck’s AI to take him home.

To his and Shelly’s empty, lonely home.

He’d just have to come back and talk sense into her tomorrow night.

***

Carter DeWitt sighed. There were no jobs for someone with an undergraduate degree in physics. After all that effort; busting his ass in construction and taking out loans to get enough money to finish his degree, he’d found out that the degree was essentially worthless, at least to him. He’d need a graduate degree to get a real physics job. No one advertised jobs for a physics BS it seemed. Why hadn’t he thought to look at the job market before he’d gone for the degree? He shrugged, he loved physics and it seemed to him like something that should be in demand. There probably were jobs, but he couldn’t find any in this region.

Carter couldn’t afford to go to grad school, he had a child and, already in debt, their financial situation wouldn’t tolerate it. He felt a tap on his arm. He looked down from his HUD (Heads Up Display). His daughter Jennifer’s pale blue eyes stared seriously at him, looking concerned. “Hey Jenny. What’s up?”

Nearly eight, and an unusually serious child, Jennifer crawled onto his lap and he put an arm around her. Quietly she said, “Are you going to be able to get a job Daddy?”

“Of course honey, why wouldn’t I?” he said bravely, thinking to himself that there were a lot of reasons.

“Mommy’s worried about it. She told Aunt Carol. And she told Aunt Carol that her boss might not get his grant renewed. She thinks she might get ‘laid off.’ What does ‘laid off’ mean?”

“That’s when the job you’ve been doing doesn’t need to be done anymore. So your boss can’t keep paying you, ‘cause the boss doesn’t have any work for you to do.”

“Oh.” Jennifer said, frowning. “So then Mommy will have to look for work too?”

“Maybe, but maybe her boss will get his grant.”

“What do you have to do to get a job for you?”

“Well, believe it or not, that’s what I was doing when you patted me on the arm. I’ve been looking at jobs on my HUD.”

“How do you do that?”

“Just ask your AI to look for available jobs for someone like you. So you could look for jobs for beautiful, blond, blue eyed, eight year old girls.”

Jennifer poked him wide eyed, “I’m not beautiful.”

Carter drew his head back in astonishment. “Yes you are!”

“And I’m not eight! I’m still seven.”

Carter frowned, “But you’re smarter than any eight year old.”

She grinned, “Well, I’m gonna find a job for you.” She slid off his lap onto the couch next to him and, looking up at her HUD, she started mumbling to her AI.

After gazing a moment longer at his preternaturally serious little girl, Carter leaned back and looked up at his own HUD.

Carter had given up on his search for physics jobs and started looking at construction jobs when he felt Jennifer patting his arm again. Faintly irritated, he looked her way.

She said, “What about this job?”

A flicker on his HUD told him her AI had passed a listing to his AI. He looked up at it and his excitement grew.

Wanted—individuals with experience in construction and a BS or better degree in Engineering, Physics, or Chemistry.

Carter leaned over to hug his daughter, “Honey, you done good,” he said huskily.

***

Farshid frowned at the small device he held in his hand. It consisted of a small tube, threaded on one end. The other end was closed and attached by wire to a small lump of very hard plastic. “And this will do what, Abbas?”

“Oh, it is a very dangerous device indeed. Hold it over the bowl.”

Farshid did so and then dropped it cursing when water began to pour out of the tube into the bowl. The device fell into the bowl and his chair went over backward. “What! What!” he exclaimed, hoping he didn’t appear as panicked as he felt.

Abbas smiled, “Reza has the other end immersed in the sink in the bathroom upstairs.”

Farshid frowned, “But… how?” He took his seat again staring at the device.

“It’s one of those ‘ports’ that you’ve seen in the news. They can let you move fluids from one location to another. They’re only selling a few so far so I had a terrible time getting this one!”

Farshid frowned at the device in the bowl another moment, then shrugged. “So what?”

Abbas made a small grin and raised an eyebrow, “So, we send that,” he pointed at the device in the bowl, “to the White House. Then we hook Reza’s end up to a propane tank.” His smile broadened further, “Then we hold a match up to our end. Boom!”

Farshid blinked, then fell back in his chair, eyes wide. “Abbas, that is brilliant! I will send a query over our PGR link to get permission. I suspect that the Ayatollah may approve this himself.”

Abbas washed his hands together excitedly. “Do you know that both the PGR link and these ports were invented by that Donsaii girl that we tried to kill at the Olympics about six years ago? It is almost better that we didn’t succeed. First she provided us with unbreakable secret transmissions and now, weapons to use against the Great Satan!”

Chapter One

Shan looked over at “Raquel,” still bemused to be dating Ell Donsaii’s alter ego Raquel Blandon. “You sure you won’t be too bored just watching us play?”

She grinned at him. “Depends on how you play.” She arched an eyebrow. “You gonna impress me?”

His thoughts derailed a moment as he thought back to the time she’d filled in on his team when two of his teammates couldn’t make it. That day he’d thought she played amazingly well “for a girl.” Now he suddenly wondered if “Ell Donsaii” had been holding back to keep from embarrassing the guys who were playing. “Would I be able to impress you?” he asked with a frown.

Her smile widened even further, “You impressed me just by asking that question.”

They approached the court and Ryan tossed the ball to Shan, “Hey go warm up while I try to make time with your girlfriend.”

Shan barked a laugh, “Like you’d have a chance.” He dribbled out onto the court and started taking shots.

Ryan grinned and followed Ell as she walked over under the basket, saying, “Raquel, you ready to dump that guy and go out with a real man yet?”

Ell smiled up at him, “Hmmm, sounds interesting.” She slanted a look up at him, “Do you know a real man?” She rebounded a ball and tossed it back out to Shan.

“Oh! Cheap shot.” Ryan drew himself up, “Don’t you recognize a truly amazing specimen of the human male when you see one?”

Ell let her eyes run up and down him; then looked out at Shan, “Oh, there it is,” she said, grinning and eventually slanting another glance at Ryan out of the corner of her eye.

Hand on his chest Ryan sighed, as if disheartened, then perked up, “How ‘bout if, after the game, Shan and I play a little ‘one on one’ for the privilege of going out with you?”

Ell rebounded another ball to Shan; then looked at Ryan a moment. She’d been thinking that all this was teasing, but now realized that Ryan was half teasing, half serious. She raised an eyebrow, “Surely you aren’t implying that I’m some kind of ‘property’ that you two wannabe alpha males can gamble over?”

He had the decency to blush, “Uh, no. Sorry that didn’t sound very good did it?”

“No it didn’t. If you want to gamble for my ‘favors,’ you’ll have to gamble with me. Horse?”

He frowned a moment until he realized she was offering to play “H-O-R-S-E” with him to determine whether he could take her out. Thinking that, because there was no way she could win at horse, this was just her way of agreeing to a date, he smiled hugely. “Oh, you’re on lady. What’s your favorite restaurant?”

“Whichever one Shan takes me to.”

“Oh, a challenge!” He trotted back onto the court, saying, “Horse after the game then.”

With Ell standing on the sidelines cheering them on Shan, Ryan and their two teammates played well, easily overmatching their opponents. During a period when Shan stood on the sidelines while the other three were playing he quietly asked, “Does it feel weird standing here as our cheering section of one when you’ve had the whole world cheering for you at the Olympics?”

Ell smiled up at him. “Nope, this is fun. The Olympics was only really one day of my life and, though it was amazing… the stuff that happened the next day put a damper on my memory.” She looked up at him and lowered an eyebrow, “Though I hope you don’t think I’m going to come to all of your games?”

He snorted, “No, I’m amazed you came to even one. But thanks, it’s fun having a cheering section.

A little later Ryan and Ell stood on the sidelines together. He shuffled his feet a little and said, “I’ve been thinking how rude it was of me to bet you for a date. And, no matter how much I admire you, it isn’t right for me to do that to my buddy Shan.”

Ell said, “You’re right, want to call it off?”

“No, I want to tell Shan we have the bet to make him sweat. We’ll only tell him that it’s a fake when he’s really sweating you going out with me after we play.”

“Hah! Surely you aren’t assuming you’re going to win?”

Ryan snorted and raised an eyebrow, “Oh no, of course not.”

“Well, I’m still counting on you buying me dinner.”

The guys won their first two games and therefore the match since it was “best two out of three.” This left the court open for Ell and Ryan to play horse. When they stayed out on the court Shan said, “Raquel, I thought we were going to Chipotle?”

“We are, as soon as I put Ryan here in his place. We’ve a wager on a game of horse.” Ell winked at Shan with the eye Ryan couldn’t see.

Shan frowned, “What’s the bet?”

“If he wins he’s buying me dinner.”

Shan snorted, “He’s trying to win a date? That’s low even for Ryan. What about when you win?”

“Oh that’s right.” Ell grinned and turned to Ryan, “What’s your debt when you lose?”

Ryan grinned, “If I lose, I take you out to dinner?”

“Hah, good one. I think when you lose you should take both Shan and I out to dinner.”

Rolling his eyes, Ryan shrugged, “OK.”

Ryan waited for Raquel to dribble a little and shoot a few to “get used to the ball again.” She put up a “rim clanger,” a bank in and one that dropped right through the hoop. “I’m ready,” she said. “How do we decide who goes first.”

Ryan extended an open hand “Ladies first.”

“OK,” Raquel said and tossed him the ball.

“Oh, burn!” he grinned and took the ball to the top of the key. He said, “Nothing fancy, just put it in,” and shot, putting the ball in off the glass.

Shan rebounded and tossed it back out to Raquel. She stepped to the top of the key and dropped the ball in.

Off the glass, Shan noticed. In fact, her shot looked exactly like Ryan’s, though Ryan certainly assumed that that was accidental.

Raquel asked, “So do we keep shooting from the top of the key until one of us misses or do I get to pick a new shot since I made yours?”

Ryan, somewhat surprised that she’d made the shot from the top of the key said, “Pick your own shot.”

Raquel promptly turned around and, holding the ball in both hands in front of her waist, arched over backwards until she could see the basket. Then using two hands she launched a shot that dropped through the hoop without touching the rim.

Ryan missed for his “H.”

Raquel bounced one into the hoop from the free throw line.

Ryan missed for his “O.”

Loping toward the basket, Raquel bounced one off the backboard, back into her hands as she continued her run up, caught the ball off its bounce, and put it in.

Ryan missed for his “R.”

Raquel hooked one, behind her head, into the hoop, from the three point line near the baseline.

Ryan missed for his “S.”

Raquel stood directly beneath the basket, tossed the ball up just in front of the basket, then reached out and kicked it. Up and into the basket!

Ryan missed for his “E.”

When Ryan had rebounded the ball and looked after her in astonishment, Raquel and Shan were walking away. Raquel called back, “We’ll be waiting at Chipotle for you to buy our dinner.”

Gaping, Ryan glanced up at the basket feeling it had betrayed him. He’d never seen such a run of bizarre lucky shots!

As they walked out of the gym, Shan frowned and asked, “Can you dunk?”

Ell glanced back at a basket, considering. “I’ve never tried.”

“But can you jump that high?”

She shrugged, “Maybe… well, almost certainly.”

“Try it!”

She eyed him, “I’m not your freak… I’m your girlfriend. I have no need to know whether I can dunk or not.” She raised an eyebrow, “Neither do you.”

“Hah! I’m back in my place, madam.”

She grinned at him, “And you’d better stay there! I’m pretty hungry. Do you think Ryan will flip out if I eat two burritos?”

***

Shelly stopped half way up the stairs when she saw Mack standing by her door. “Mack,” she said suspiciously, “what are you doing here?”

“I want you to come home.”

“Have you stopped drinking?” Though Shelly had decided that she would have to divorce Mack, she had loved him back when he’d been sober. If he stopped drinking she still considered it possible that they might get back together someday.

“Haven’t had a drink today.”

She sighed, “Come back when you haven’t had a drink for a month. I’d be happy to talk to you then.”

“Come on Shelly. I need your help. With you by my side I’ll be able to do it.”

For a moment she felt guilty, then firmed her resolve. “Mack, I’ve been trying to get you to quit for five years. If you really haven’t had a drink today, maybe me being gone is the best thing that’s happened to you.”

Mack started her way, “Come on, Shelly!”

Shelly shook her head and backed down the stairs. She crossed the quadrangle. When Mack had reached the bottom of the stairs and begun lumbering toward her, she bolted up the other stairs and back over to her apartment, locking herself in. Mack arrived back at the door and started pounding on it. “Mack, do I have to call the police?” Shelly called through the door.

He stopped pounding and leaned on the door for a minute in frustration. Trying not to growl he said, “I’ll be back in a month.” He turned to go. Or maybe in a month and a day, he thought, ‘cause I sure need a drink tonight.

***

Ell looked around the conference table at the D5R leaders. Fred, Vivian and Brian were there from Portal Tech; Rob and Ben represented ET Resources; and Roger and she represented Quantum Research. “All right,” she said, “What’s going on at Portal Tech?”

Fred smiled, “We’re continuing the gradual increase in port production that the government requested. It isn’t really hurting us that much because prices have soared. We’ve had some strategy sessions on how to ramp up more rapidly if the government rescinds their request for slow release in response to the mounting pressure.

“On the research side, we’re about ready to test some prototype twenty and fifty centimeter ports. We don’t know if they’ll work without burning themselves out. The twenty requires a hundred kilowatts and the fifty runs 650 kilowatts so keeping them cool isn’t a trivial problem. For anything but larger solid objects it’s probably better to use multiple five or ten centimeter ports. It’d take four 10cm ports to equal the cross sectional area of a 20cm port and together they’d use a 100 kilowatts too, so it doesn’t really save energy, but they’ll likely be more durable.”

Ell said, “Well, we need to push the envelope on port size so we’ll know what can be done. Good luck.” She turned to Roger, “Can you tell us what you’ve learned about sending living animals through ports, Rog’? If they can make ports big enough, are we going to be able to port ourselves somewhere?”

Roger grimaced, “I’m certainly not ready to hop through a port myself. In addition to the agony that’s associated with putting even a part of yourself through a port, every organism with a nervous system seems to have a pretty serious seizure. It doesn’t seem to shorten the lifespans of bees or mice, but rats don’t do as well on maze type IQ tests for at least a week or two after we put them through. We had some hopes for protecting the animals with drugs or shielding but so far they’ve only diminished, not prevented the effects.”

Ell shrugged, “Shucks. Any other news from the Portal group?”

Vivian said, “We’ve been pretty successful with our antiterrorist program for the ports. The ones we sell have their speed limited according to their intended use in order to prevent people who aren’t certified for it from building a missile. You were right about your circuit modifications by the way. We can limit the speed of one port relative to another with those mods rather than having to have a computer follow them with GPS. So we sell pretty fast ones to aircraft manufacturers and really fast ports only to companies that work in space. The rest of them only go slow.”

“What about toxins, explosives and flammables?”

“Well, as you can imagine, that’s a much tougher problem. A lot of those substances are volatile and we can pick them up through the microscopic ‘sampling’ port on each port we sell, but surveillance of all those ports is nearly impossible. Brian had a great idea though,” she waved at him as he looked embarrassed. “We contracted out with a chemistry research firm and they’ve sold us an insulating compound that dissolves in most organics. Once it dissolves, a couple of wires make contact and that disrupts the port’s circuit. In other words, ports not made to transport flammables become non-functional in contact with most, though not all, flammables.” She tilted her head, “So… we’re trying to push everyone to powering things with electricity delivered through ports by wire rather than with flammables. Companies transporting petroleum products for manufacturing or power plants only get ports that must be stationary relative to one another. We’ve essentially stopped selling ports that will move flammables to car companies, boat companies and propeller driven aircraft companies. We only sell ‘mobile-flammable’ ports to jet aircraft manufacturers and rocketry companies.” She grinned, “Our devious Brian,” she darted another glance at him, “had another great idea there. The mobile-flammable ports have to be mounted in place with our proprietary epoxy that has just the right resistance for some contacts on the surface of the port. That epoxy will tear loose those little contact wires on the surface of the port if someone tries to dismount it. So they won’t work unless you mount them with our epoxy and if you dislodge them from the epoxy, they stop working. So, essentially, you can’t take them back out of the plane once they’re installed and still have them work.”

Brian raised his hand, “Actually you can, you just have to cut out the entire mounting surface with the port, but we’re hoping it takes a long time for terrorists to figure that out.”

Vivian shrugged, “That still leaves us with problems. You may be aware that someone recently published their plan for modification of a Smith and Wesson pistol that would be able to fire ten thousand rounds before someone had to refill the hopper back home in the closet?”

“Yeah, and I’ve heard that the military has similar plans?”

Fred Marsden snorted, “Yeah, every military in the world has been calling. They want ports to fuel their ships and planes, resupply ammunition, send power out to the field. Even the lowly infantryman needs ports.”

“Infantry?”

“Oh yeah. You know that soldiers in the field can be expected to carry 60-80 pounds of supplies? Turns out that a lot of that stuff can be supplied by port instead, making the soldier much more mobile. And they all want to be able to fire a mortar or RPG at their enemies that doesn’t explode immediately. No they want it to pop open and deliver a port. The port delivers an enormous cloud of methane or propane, and they follow it with a spark. Boom, fuel air explosion!”

Ell frowned, “How have you been answering those queries?”

“Our own military gets some kinds of ‘military grade’ port tech. Other countries get the run around. None of them are getting high velocity flammable ports. But it’s getting to be a problem. You’re probably aware that a few murders have been committed using port technology. Knives stuck though ports, cyanide, etc. We’re worried that bad people are starting to recognize their potential. The government is too. They’ve started to include ports in security screens at airports and such.”

“We’ve massively increased security at the plant to prevent theft but I’m starting to worry about the safety of our personnel. So far we’ve been very careful to compartmentalize the knowledge needed to build a working port. We estimate that you’d have to combine the knowledge of more than ten of our employees to have much of a chance to build your own port, and that even then a lot of experimentation would be needed. But that doesn’t mean someone won’t try. I also find it distasteful that our facility is looking more and more like a prison camp. And, prison camp aside, I worry about kidnappings of our personnel away from work.”

Ell sighed and ran her hands through her short reddish blond hair. “Crap! I’ve been worried that this kind of stuff would raise its ugly head. Anyone have any good ideas?”

Roger waved a hand, “I’ve been thinking. You know we’ve worked a way to open a port over a distance of a few millimeters without a port on the other end?”

Ell shot a look at Roger, startled that he’d bring this up. She looked around the group. “These ‘single ended’ ports Roger’s talking about are a pretty well kept secret. Please don’t spread this news around.”

The rest of the group stared at them in astonishment. Fred said, “When will Portal Tech start making these?”

“Maybe never, they could be pretty dangerous.”

“How?”

Ell waved at Roger who said, “Probably the best beneficial use for them would be to deliver drugs like insulin without injections. Similarly they could be used to deliver euphoric drugs without needle tracks, or toxins for untraceable murders. Just opening a port inside certain parts of your body like the brain can do significant harm. Everything is a double edged sword. Ell, I and Emma have had implants put in the subcutaneous tissues under our ears using single ended ports which was great. Just open a single ended port into the fat there and push in the implant. No scars, hardly any pain.”

Fred frowned, “What kind of implants?”

Roger said, “Ones that let us communicate with our AIs even if we lose our headbands. Essentially they contain a little microphone and speaker combo.”

Ell said, “They’re pretty ‘lo-fi’ because you’re listening to sound transmitted through the fat surrounding the implant, but you can understand it and it can pick up your speech and some sound from your surroundings. It even has a little GPS antenna so your AI can determine where you are.”

Roger nodded. “So you guys at least should get the same. Maybe your families? It’s pretty painless and if you got kidnapped your AI would be able to tell us it happened and where you’re located so we can try to rescue you.”

Ell looked around, “We could offer the same to your employees, but since we want to keep the ‘one ended’ ports a secret, they probably should be implanted surgically.” She shrugged, “Think about it.”

Rob Braun waved a hand, “I want one. I also have a suggestion.”

Ell raised an eyebrow at him.

“As you know we’re working on a space station and planning a pretty large space habitat. I’m thinking it would be nice to move the parts of our business that might be subject to spying or sabotage out to the habitat?”

Suddenly there were a lot of raised eyebrows around the table. Fred said, “Really?! How close are you to doing something like that?”

Rob shrugged, “Depends how hard we want to push, and of course, on what our investors are willing to put up to get us there faster. You may know we bought an old freight version Boeing 747. It’s out on D5R’s island being converted into a spacecraft. We’ve pressure tested it and are currently installing the rocket engines. One of its first missions will be to fly up an inflatable space station.”

Vivian frowned, “Inflatable? That doesn’t sound very safe!”

Rob smiled, “Actually some of the modules of the Space Station have been inflated for a long time. They’re made of multiple layers of ballistic fabric like Kevlar and Vectran and when they’re inflated they feel as hard as concrete. Layers of fiber are more resistant to micrometeors than metal. Even the aluminum modules of the Station are mostly sheathed in ballistic fabric for that kind of protection. So we had one of the companies that make them assemble us a cylindrical module, 150 feet in diameter and 130 feet long because we can just squeeze one that size into the 747 after we suck all the air out of it. Just inside the outer layers we’ll have fifteen feet of water for radiation protection and thermal stability. This’ll leave us with a usable cylindrical interior space that’s 120 feet in diameter and 100 feet long. That’s 1.1 million cubic feet, the same amount of space you’d find in a 135,000 square foot building.”

“Holy crap,” someone muttered.

Another asked, “What do you mean by ‘thermal stability?’”

Things out in space get really hot on the sunny side and icy cold on the shadowed side. Water would freeze on the shady side and melt on the sunny side; circulating the water around will even the temps out.”

Ell said, “It sounds pretty good in terms of safety from micrometeors and radiation but weightlessness is a problem all by itself.”

Braun said, “Once we’re confident in the first module, step two would be to put up two smaller modules, each 85 feet in diameter and 130 feet long. They’ll be connected to the first one with 250 meter long tubes and spun around a hub at about a revolution per minute. That will generate nearly 0.3 gravities of acceleration which should keep you pretty healthy.”

Fred blinked, “Wait a minute; that much water is going to weigh a lot. How much tension is going to be on the tubes?”

Ell shrugged, “The water would mass a little over 14,000 metric tons, but at 0.28 gravities it would exert under 4,000 tons force.”

Braun gaped at Ell, “Did you just do that in your head?”

Ell blushed and shrugged, “The formulas are pretty simple.”

Braun snorted, but then turned back to Fred. “Yeah, about 4,000 tons force which we could support with straps having a total cross section 130 square centimeters if they were made of Vectran, though we’d need more for safety overdesign and to compensate for degradation. We’re working on trying to get some of the folks making boron nitride, or carbon nanotubes, or graphene to ramp up if they can. We could get down under 10 square centimeters with that stuff if they can make it in quantity.”

Fred frowned, “Really? It’s that strong?” He glanced doubtfully around at the group.

Ell said, “Yeah, Those materials are astonishingly strong, though they’re hard to get in large quantities and anything we use is susceptible to radiation damage. So we’d want to overdesign, use redundant straps and plan regular replacement for stuff that, if it broke, would shoot some of our folks off on a tangent to the rotation. Probably should have some kind of lifeboat craft attached to the modules in case said tangent puts them into a re-entry trajectory.”

Braun said, “And, if that works in LEO (low earth orbit) then we’d like to build a real habitat out at L5.”

Ell raised an eyebrow, “Real habitat?”

Braun grinned, “Something with a full gravity and tens of thousands of people.”

Ell said “Okaay.” She turned to the group, “And you should see their ‘construction workers.’” She raised an eyebrow.

Brian said, “Wait, you’ve already hired construction workers? I wanted to apply!”

Ell grinned, “You can work a few shifts out there if you want, without ever leaving North Carolina.” She waited until they’d all looked puzzled a moment, “They’ve been building waldoes! They let me try one out. It’s a lot like you’re out there!” She turned to Ben, “You have video to show them, right?”

***

Carter walked down the stairs feeling the butterflies in his stomach. After dithering over what to wear to an interview for “a physics major with construction experience,” he had finally dressed in nice slacks, a button up shirt and a sports coat.

Jenny jumped up from the table and ran to give him a hug. “You look good Daddy. I’m sure they’ll give you the job!”

Carter bent down to hug her in return, “I hope so honey.”

A young woman at the ET Resources facility interviewed Carter in surprising depth. Interviews he had had for construction jobs in the past certainly had never been anything like this. “Why didn’t he intend to go on to grad school?” “Would you mind being tested for mechanical aptitude?”

“No… uh, I don’t mind.”

Carter found himself seated on a saddle with his feet in stirrups. She strapped a glittering, all-encompassing HUD over his eyes and put gloves on his hands. In the HUD it looked like he was in a metal room. He could see a pair of mechanical hands. When he moved his hands in the gloves the mechanical hands did just what he did. He thought, playing some kind of video game is part of this interview?

The young lady said, “If you’ll look down?” Carter did and saw an adjustable wrench on a metal table in front of him. A nut was on a threaded rod sticking out of the table and an empty rod stuck out of the table next to it. She said, “If you’d just take the nut off the one bolt and screw it onto the empty bolt?”

To himself he said, Really?! Outwardly, he said, “OK,” and picked up the wrench. The mechanical fingers were kind of clumsy but he was impressed to realize that they gave him feedback. When he squeezed the wrench the gloves gave him the feeling that he really had something in his fingers. However, the wrench was stuck to the table. He almost said something, but then it came loose and nearly floated away. Hah! The wrench is magnetized to stick to the table and the environment is supposed to be weightless! He managed to catch the wrench before it floated away completely. Adjusting it to fit the nut turned out to be difficult with the slightly clumsy mechanical hands. Then he wondered if the nut was so tight that he needed the wrench and tried to loosen it with his fingers. It wouldn’t come, so he applied the wrench and loosened it. Once loose, it came the rest of the way using just the fingers of the mechanical hand with which he began to feel more and more comfortable. When it came loose from the threaded rod he was ready for it to float away and able to catch it. He moved it to the other rod, screwing it back down and tightening it with the wrench.

Next she had him weld a seam with the mechanical hands. To his surprise this seemed easier than welding in person. He didn’t have to wear gloves or a dark helmet. The HUD just didn’t make the welding arc all that bright and everything else stayed at normal brightness. When he finished he noted with amusement that the “videogame” designers had invested enough time in the realism of the display that the mechanical hands and table showed little marks from the stray sparks of the welder.

His final task, to his amazement, was simply to toss a rock from one hand to the other and back. It was harder than expected; both because he was doing it with the mechanical hands and because the game followed weightless rules so the rock didn’t arc back down toward the table. He nearly missed the first toss, but the return toss went fine.

They gave him the, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you,” routine and sent him home wondering if the “ET” in “ET Resources” stood for “extraterrestrial?” His AI did a search and to his delight discovered that it was a company spun off by D5R, the place made famous by the fact that Ell Donsaii helped found it. They were using Donsaii’s little rockets to explore space.

Maybe, this interview had something to do with working in space? The thought both excited and terrified him. He would love to do that kind of work, but didn’t think he could leave Abby and Jennifer to go work up in some kind of metal can out in space. He assumed the metal room in the videogame was supposed to represent some kind of space station workshop…?

***

Shan climbed down the stairs from the Learjet and onto the tarmac while gazing wonderingly around at the beautiful Caribbean waters surrounding the little island. He and Raquel had gotten on the plane in North Carolina, but shortly into the flight she’d gone into the bathroom and washed “Raquel” off, reappearing as Ell. As he and Ell cleared the stairs, a couple of burly guys headed up to start unloading the equipment that had filled much of the rest of the small plane. Ell walked off toward a big house done in light blue with white trim. It had a huge airy porch. Shan trotted a few steps to catch up. “So they let you catch rides down here anytime you want?”

She grinned up at him, “As long as I’m caught up on my work, the boss lets me enjoy the perks. The plane was coming down here anyway. D5R needs the island for its space research and keeps the guest house open for the people who are working on the island. So the incremental cost of letting us come down and enjoy ourselves isn’t much. Besides,” she arched an eyebrow, “D5R’s got to keep their CSO happy, you know.”

Thirty minutes later, after they’d taken a room on the top floor of the “guest house,” Ell disappeared into the bathroom to wipe the bronzers off the rest of her body. On the plane she’d only done her face and hands. She’d emerged wearing a gauzy, cute beach cover-up. Watching her lithe form as she moved around gathering up snorkels, masks and fins took Shan’s breath away. As he had so many times before, he found it difficult to believe that such an amazing person enjoyed sharing her life with him. And, my God, sooo beautiful! The mind boggled to think that the Raquel he fell in love with was also the Ell that he so much admired.

Standing back up festooned with gear she said, “Hey, you going snorkeling with me or not?”

Startled out of his reverie, Shan stood, “Whoops, sorry, let me get my suit on.”

As they scampered across the hot sand to the water Shan said, “Hey, you aren’t going to embarrass me with some kinds of incredible swimming feats are you?”

“Oh no!” she laughed delightedly. “I’m a terrible swimmer. I don’t have any endurance and swimming is hard work. Besides,” she cast him a chagrined look, “I sink.”

She pulled off the cover-up, revealing a tiny pale blue bikini that took his breath away. Shan loved the way that, though she didn’t look muscle-bound by any means, her muscular definition was easy to see. She definitely didn’t have a lot of fat to help her float.

Ell splashed happily into the water, “Come on slowpoke, you’ve got to see some of the fish they have here! Take this.” She tossed something to him.

He looked at it. It was the mouthpiece of a snorkel, without the snorkel? Oh, I’ll bet it has a port! Sure enough, when he put it in his mouth he could easily breathe through it, despite the area where the snorkel would normally turn upwards being completely sealed. When he got into the water he could breathe without any trouble in the shallow water. Water didn’t water splash in like it would with a snorkel tube. This is great! More like scuba than snorkeling, except he couldn’t go very deep because the air wasn’t pressurized.

Shan climbed the stairs from the beach, admiring Ell’s form enthusiastically bouncing up the steps ahead of him. She’d taken him from spot to spot in the water, delightedly showing him coral and fish… though he’d mostly enjoyed watching her lissome body floating through the crystal water.

As they crossed the big patio Ell squeaked, “Mom!” She dropped her swimming gear and crossed to a table that had a couple in their early forties sitting at it. Bending to hug her mother she exclaimed, “What are you and Miles doing here?”

Feeling embarrassed to be on the island with her daughter when he hadn’t even been introduced, Shan stood uncertainly by the swim gear. He noticed that Ell looked a lot like her mother.

Her mother laughed, “We don’t seem to get to see my daughter nearly often enough, and when she let slip she was coming to the island, we just thought we’d beat her down here.”

“Great! Shan, come let me introduce you to my mother and her boyfriend, Miles Duncan.”

Shan stepped forward and Ell’s mother got up and gave him a hug. “You must be the famous Shan Kinrais. I’m just so glad to see Ell has someone she loves at last.” She looked back and forth from one to the other. “I hope you’ll sit and have some umbrella drinks with us?”

After a pleasant afternoon spent sitting on the patio, trying various tropical drinks and talking, Shan realized that Ell’s mother was just as down to earth and unaffected by her daughter’s fame as Ell herself.

As they reached their room after a dinner of jerk chicken and sea bass Shan said, “Can I introduce you to my parents sometime?”

Ell stopped and tilted her head, “I’d love that… But you have to think about whether you want to be Ell’s, or Raquel’s boyfriend.” She looked hard into his eyes, “Before you decide; you need to understand that Ell’s life is crazy and probably dangerous. If I ever have a family, I expect to do it as Raquel. I wouldn’t want children growing up into the kind of life I have right now.”

“Dangerous?!”

Ell shrugged, “Some of the technologies coming from the PGR chips and the ports have been terribly disruptive. Powerful people are very angry about the effect those technologies have had, or might yet have on their fortunes. Even those people who haven’t been disrupted by the technology often want to try to capitalize on it somehow. I’ve been kidnapped in the past by people wanting me to develop tech for them that depends on my theories.”

He stared out through their window at the horizon a moment. He turned to her, “I want to be the boyfriend of whichever,” he grinned, “of your two split personalities… that you would prefer I be with. If I can support you better as ‘Ell’s’ boyfriend, that’s what I want to do.”

Ell hugged him, “That’s the right answer.”

Shan frowned, “Which one?”

The one where you said, ‘whichever you would prefer.’” She squeezed him. “I’d like you to be Raquel’s boyfriend and Ell’s acquaintance—who you wrote a physics paper with.”

“OK,” he said, pulling her firm body against his… After a moment he leaned back, “Hey?”

“Umhmm?” Ell said dreamily.

“I might get offered a job.”

“Really? Great! Doing what.”

“Academic, they’d like someone in their Math Department that understands that “damned Donsaii math.”

Ell grinned; then her smile turned apprehensive, “Where?”

Shan smiled, “UNC.”

“Hey!” Eyes narrowed, Ell slid her hands up to his ribs, “Were you trying to worry me?”

Already squirming, Shan grabbed her wrists and said,. “Just a little, don’t you dare tickl… Oh, you’re in trouble now!”

***

The box trundled in and passed through the security scanner at the main FedEx hub in Memphis. As it passed through an x-ray scan, the AI running the scanner recognized a port inside the box and flagged it to divert. Before it reached the diversion belt an RFID query received a reply from the port stating that it was in fact a liquid capable port. The security AI then checked the manifest for the package and noted that the shipper did not have a permit to ship a port. Both of those findings resulted in the package dropping off the main line into a concrete safety bunker until further evaluation could be completed.

Fred Hillman looked up at the chime from the security AI. He shook his head, realizing the system had kicked out another port. Most people didn’t understand that they needed a permit to ship a package containing a port so this happened fairly often. Lord only knows what it’ll be like when the ports are more common. He scanned down to see the sender’s information. Sent by a John Smith of Atlanta Georgia. Dropped off at a drop box near downtown Atlanta. He shrugged and scrolled to the destination. “Emily Cline, Social Secretary, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.”

Oh shit!

The front legs of Fred’s chair hit the floor as he told his AI to contact the FedEx liaison at Homeland Security.

“Homeland Security, Harold Wilkerson speaking. What’s the issue?” Harold sounded bored, probably because they got a lot of people “crying wolf.”

“This is Fred Hillman at FedEx Memphis. We have a package transiting our facility that contains an unpermitted port. It’s addressed to the White House.”

Harold no longer sounded bored. He peppered Fred with demands and questions. First to make sure the package was no longer in transit, then to determine it was in a safe location. “What else is in the package?”

“The x-ray scanner AI says there is a probable GPS tracker in the package too.”

“Crap! OK I’m rousting folks from our local office to get out there, but you’ve got to be thinking that if the sender realizes that it’s stopped moving they might start trying to blow it up and damage your facility.”

Fred said, “Should be fine; it’s in a bomb proof concrete bunker.”

Harold raised an eyebrow, “Is that bunker airtight? Cause if it isn’t, and they start sending a flammable like natural gas through that port you could be in for an explosion outside the bunker.”

Fred swallowed, suddenly thinking about how his office wasn’t all that far from the bunker, “Uh, I don’t think so.”

Harold said, “OK, it’s going to take our folks a while to get there. It will also take quite a while for enough gas to go through the port to make it dangerous. Can you get down there quickly and cut the wire between the electronics and the port itself?”

Fred worked his cheeks to moisten a suddenly dry mouth and croaked, “Is that safe?”

Harold said, “Yeah, the current in the wire is small. If you cut it soon there won’t be much gas. Probably none, they’ve got to expect the package to stop briefly in Memphis anyway.”

Fred stood and looked out his window into the distribution center’s maze of belts and the packages making their way through it. The “dangerous package bunker” was only about thirty feet away. He picked up a box cutter and started out the door. “OK, I’m on my way. How am I gonna know what wire to cut? I’ve never seen one of these things.”

“I’ll send a picture to your HUD.”

Fred had just reached the door of the bunker when a flash on his HUD told him the image had arrived. “Got the picture,” he said, looking up.

Harold said, “You see, there’s just the port and the glob of epoxy with the wire between. Only one wire to cut.”

“What if there’s a bomb in the package too? I open the package and it goes boom.”

“Nah, you guys’ve been catching bombs for years. They should know better than to try to send a bomb too. Did your security AI pick up explosives with its sniffers? Or think the wiring looked like a bomb?”

“No.” Fred pushed open the heavy door into the bunker. He glanced up at the night sky visible through the big “chimney” intended to vent any blasts or toxins straight up, wondering if any flammable gas wouldn’t have mostly gone up the chimney. He sniffed. It didn’t smell like gas. He started down the ladder into the bunker, hearing the door close above him with a muffled boom. The package lay on a steel exam table. A tremor went through him as he box cuttered open the side of the package. A port, much like the one he could see on his HUD, lay taped to a piece of cardboard. Another electronic device was taped next to it. He wiped his palm, then holding the box cutter only by its plastic handle, he cut the wire that attached the port to its electronics.

Nothing happened, except for his sudden, raging, need to pee.

In Atlanta, John Smith of 121 Malette Avenue woke to the sound of pounding on his door. He slowly shuffled to the door and peered through the eye hole. A group of men wearing body armor labeled “SWAT” and “POLICE” were on his porch. Suddenly glad he hadn’t gotten his gun he tried to say, “Hello,” but produced an unrecognizable croak. He cleared his throat, “Hello. What do you want?”

“Police. Open up. We have a warrant to search the premises.”

He looked out the eye hole again. There was a police truck in the street with a strobing light. He said, “OK,” and opened the door slowly. Shuffling back he said, “I think you have the wrong John Smith.”

The SWAT team leader swore. The man behind the door had to have at least the 87 years that their AI had told them to expect. The living room looked like an old man’s house would be expected to look. He said, “Sorry sir. I think it’s a mistake too, but we’ve got to come in and look around.”

***

Abbas cursed. “The GPS says the package is still in Memphis at the FedEx hub! They probably have some kind of process to inspect packages to the White House. I told you we should have put the port inside of something that they might expect to be sent to the White House!”

Farshid frowned, “Like what? We don’t know what’s normally delivered to the Social Secretary!”

“She arranges receptions for important people.” Abbas said impatiently, “They must have to buy gifts to give those people all the time. I told you we could just get a metal vase and put the port in it. The metal would block x-ray scans too.”

Farshid scowled, “But why would they stop delivery of a port? It isn’t dangerous.”

“Maybe the FBI has already thought of sending dangerous stuff through them after they arrive.”

Farshid said, “Well, let’s do some damage to FedEx then. After all, it’s just another part of the Great Satan’s establishment.” He turned to the propane tank they’d purchased. Not having the correct fitting to connect the tank to the port, they’d heavily duct taped the two together. He opened the valve. The tape tightened ominously, but held, so he opened the valve the rest of the way. He studied the connection a moment. He worried about using tape, but really, there shouldn’t be any resistance to the flow of the propane out of the tank into the FedEx facility so there wouldn’t be much pressure for the tape to resist. He turned to Abbas and Reza, “It will take time to empty the tank into the FedEx facility. Let us pray.” They all moved into the next room where they kept their prayer rugs.

Behind them the pressure from the tank built against the port that had been closed by the cutting of the wire in Memphis. After another minute the pressure pulled the taped junction loose and propane began pouring into the room. The heavy gas sank to the floor and spread outward.

Finishing their prayers, the three men stood and started back toward the living room of their house. Reza turned the corner first and smelled the propane. Then he saw the port dangling from the tape on the nozzle. “No!” he shouted, just as the propane reached the pilot light of the water heater. With an enormous “whumpf,” the gas flashed into flame, blowing out all the windows and tossing the flaming Reza back across the prayer room to crash bonelessly into the back wall.

A few minutes later Farshid and Abbas staggered out to their car dragging Reza’s limp body. They sped away just before the arrival of the fire trucks.

Chapter Two

Ben Stavos and Rob Braun saw Ell walking into the ET Resources area of the D5R research facility. “Hey guys,” she said, “how close are you to flying your 747 up to LEO?”

“Pretty close, but the damn thing sucks up huge quantities of fuel. We’re just trying to calculate to be sure we have sufficient supply in case we have any trouble.”

“Don’t we still have ports over at Aerogas to supply LOX?”

“Yeah, we have several LOX suppliers. You wouldn’t think we’d have trouble getting enough Liquid Natural Gas, but, as a hazardous flammable material, PHMSA is giving us trouble over sending it directly from the supplier to the plane.”

“Really, why?”

“Just the way they’re reading the rules I think. They want us to move it to our own tank then send it from that tank to the plane.” He sighed, “It’s pretty frustrating because the tank we have is short of the safety margin we’d like.”

“But if you’re putting it into the tank from the supplier as fast as you’re sending it to the 747?”

He barked a laugh, “No! Then they consider it to be a ‘pipe’ with a reservoir tank, still against the rules.”

Ell frowned, “Won’t the rockets on the 747 burn hydrogen?”

Braun shrugged, “Sure, but hydrogen’s really expensive.”

Ell frowned, “Aren’t you getting hydrogen from Jupiter?”

Braun looked puzzled a moment, then his eyebrows shot up, “You mean…?”

Ben said, “Jupiter?”

Braun turned excitedly to Ben, “Jupiter’s atmosphere is 90% hydrogen and… I think 10% helium with traces of other stuff. But,” disappointedly he turned to Ell, “It’s gaseous. We need liquid to get enough flow through portals.”

Ell said, “Oh, yeah. Well you could use the methane lakes on Titan? That’d be your LNG right there. You just have to drop some ports into them.”

Braun’s eyes narrowed, “There are methane lakes? Really? Or are you just pulling my leg?”

Ell grinned and winked at them, “Why don’t you ask the guys over at ET Resources? They should know the answers to questions like that.”

Ben and Rob both snorted, “That was a low blow. But if you’re right we’ll just have to submerge our embarrassment in gratitude. It’ll just take a while to fly some ports out there.”

Ell tilted her head, “Come on guys, we already flew you some ports out to orbit each of the major planets. You can just roll up some bigger ports and send them through. Then send rockets through those ports and fly them down into the fluid. Submerge them deep enough and you’ll have a good head of pressure driving the LNG into your engines.”

Rob squinched his eyes in frustration, “Sorry, I’d forgotten about the orbiting ports. That’ll work. Do you also have a source of LOX somewhere out there in the solar system?”

“Sorry, no. There may be oxygen slush someplace, but it probably isn’t very pure. Can you let me know when you’re sending the 747 up? I’d like to celebrate with you.” Ell held her hand up for a pause as she got a far-away look, “You know… if you prefer to use hydrogen you could just drop your ports down deep to Jupiter’s atmosphere where the hydrogen has condensed into a liquid? Though it would be hot. It’s only liquid because of the pressure. It might melt the ports so you’d have to look into that a little farther.”

“Sure,” they said, then watched her walk away. Ben turned to Rob, “Dammit, it just seems so obvious after she pointed it out!”

Rob sighed, “Yeah, yeah, it’s always obvious after someone points it out. I suppose we should start thinking about selling LNG here on earth?”

Ben grinned, “How can you make that sound like bad news? Though I suppose first we better find out how clean these ‘methane lakes’ are.”

“I don’t know… I guess I was hoping to do something cooler out there in space than mining natural gas.”

“Just think of it as the way you’re financing your space ‘habitat habit.’”

Roger looked up as Ell walked into the Quantum area. He felt a twinge of sadness. Wearing cutoff jeans and running shoes; looking like she was dancing though she was only walking, she, as always, took his breath away. Her beauty made him wistful for the time he’d loved her and had hoped she might love him in return. He glanced down the table at Emma, animatedly talking to Manuel, smiling, her curls bouncing. Roger truly loved Emma, and she loved him back. Life was good. Still, working around Ell created moments of nostalgia for the “might have beens.”

Ell saw him and came his way, “What’s up?” he asked.

“Are the AI implants ready for our folks yet?”

“Yeah, we’ve got them made and can have a session to install them in the inner circle using single ended ports this weekend. One of the ENT residents from the University hospital has gotten permission to ‘moonlight,’ surgically implanting the others in any of the Portal Tech or ET personnel that want them.”

“Surgically implanting? Sounds like a big procedure?”

“No, just a tiny incision, slide it in and put a drop of skin glue over it. The trick is to know where to put it and doing it with good sterile technique.”

“Sounds good. Any new developments?”

Roger grinned, “This resident that’s going to do the implants for us?”

“Yeah?”

“This is kinda embarrassing, but he pointed out that the reason the sound from the implants is so bad is because of preferential absorption of some frequencies by the fat and other tissues between the implant and the ear. Compensating for loss of some frequencies is something that they do for hearing aids all the time. He’s adjusted the frequency response of mine until it sounds pretty much normal. Actually, all he had to do was tell my AI how to adjust the frequency response. The AI already had software to do the adjusting.”

“Oh. Duh. I feel pretty stupid.”

“You’re going to feel worse. We should be able to place a very small port inside your ear canal that can transmit sound right next to your eardrum. He expects nearly normal sound from that. No ear plugs hanging off your head band.”

Ell put her palm to her forehead in dismay.

“Another one glued to the back of a front tooth can be the microphone.”

Ell closed her eyes and chuckled, “So I didn’t need this implant I’ve had stuck in my head?”

“Well, as a kidnapping risk, I think you should keep it as backup and for the GPS that no one knows is in your neck. If they don’t know it’s there, they can’t find it.”

Ell tilted her head considering, “OK, I don’t feel quite so dumb then.”

“And I think we should still do implants for the inner circle and their families. Also, realize that we could go into the business of providing the audio part of what people’s AI headbands provide them. Then they could wear smaller devices, kind of like the ‘glasses’ people used to wear to correct their vision, just to provide the video part of their AI to them.”

Ell grinned at him, “What, you aren’t proposing to implant a port into peoples’ eyeballs to record and playback video?”

Roger squirmed squeamishly, “That seems a little scary, even to me. But the glasses can be really light weight because the camera can be back home with your AI, just peeking through a tiny port on the glasses. All the projector equipment can also be back with the AI, just sending the beam through a focal point to reflect off your HUD screens. I know modern projectors and cameras are surprisingly tiny, but this would be way smaller and lighter than even they are.”

“Wow Roger, that’s some cool stuff. You need your own division of D5R to work on this stuff.”

He shrugged, “Yeah, Emma and I,” he glanced down the table at his girlfriend, “have been talking about setting up a biomedical arm of D5R.”

As they both looked at Emma, Manuel got up from his conversation with her and headed off. She got up and came down to them, “What are you two conniving over?”

Ell said, “Roger tells me you want to take him away from me and form Quantum Biomed? I’m going to be here all by myself!”

Emma mock glared at Roger, “I’d never leave my girlfriend! Roger might go haring off, but the most I’d do is go to occasional meetings with the drones we’d hire to build the stuff we invented here.” She turned to Ell, “Did he tell you about the Biomed student with the idea for nerve reception?”

Bemusedly, Ell shook her head.

“So this grad student, Ryan Keller, called here wanting to talk to you or ‘whoever did our biomed stuff.’ He got shunted to Roger, but ol’ Rog’ here, was,” Emma tilted her nose up aristocratically, “‘too busy.’ So this student wound up talking to me. Turns out he has a nanoscale system that can be attached to a nerve to pick up impulses from, and transmit impulses to, the axon fibers in the nerve. His problem has been that the wires going through the skin keep getting infected. Obviously that would be a disaster in a patient. So he wants to hook them up through a port.”

Ell frowned, “Why would you want to pick up nerve signals electronically?”

Emma grinned, “Sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, restoring spinal cord function. Minor things like that.”

Ell’s eyes widened, “Holy crap! That’s great! Can we hire him?”

“He’s pretty close to finishing his degree. I’ll ask.” Emma grinned, “By the way, he says he’s friends with someone who works here.”

“Who?”

“Raquel Blandon,” Emma said, eyes twinkling.

“Oh, crap, that Ryan?” Ell asked weakly.

***

Carter drove home from his second visit to ET Resources. They’d called him and told him that they wanted to offer him a job but that he’d have to come in “to discuss” the exact nature of his employment. Driving out, he’d wondered what he’d do if they really were offering him a job in space. It seemed too crazy to believe, even though the test run he’d done with them suggested it.

When he’d arrived, they’d had nondisclosure documents for him to read and sign before they’d even tell him what the job actually was.

Finally he’d met with a guy who’d started with, “Hey, I’m John Parker.” Carter introduced himself and then John said, “What do you think you were doing when we had you in last time?”

“You mean, with the wrench and the nut and the welder?”

The man nodded.

Carter wondered if he should forward his ridiculous hypothesis but decided he didn’t have anything better, “Seemed like you were wondering if I could work on things in a weightless environment.”

John grinned, “Exactly! And you did much better than our other applicants, picking up on the challenges and adapting to them much more rapidly. Do you think you could do work like that?”

Carter swallowed, thinking about the danger and privation of working in space. He didn’t want to appear afraid, “I thought a lot of people got sick up in space. Don’t you need to test me for that kind of stuff before you offer me a job out there?”

John’s smile grew even wider. “The job would be exactly like what you did here. Do you know what a ‘waldo’ is?”

Carter said, “Something my daughter searches for in a book?”

John laughed, “Actually, it’s something from a 1942 story by a science fiction author named Robert Heinlein. He proposed having mechanical devices controlled at a distance by movements of an operator. Essentially, the same thing you did in the test. You moved your hand down here, and a mechanical hand out in space made the same motions, allowing you to move the nut from one threaded rod to another and weld a bead. Such tech is called a ‘waldo’ after Heinlein’s story.”

“Well, it was hard but doable in the videogame test. However, if I were you I’d be worried that the fact I could do it in the test might not mean I could really do it when you actually have a set of mechanical arms out there in space.”

“We actually do have a set of mechanical arms out in space.”

Carter rocked his head back in surprise, “Do you want me to try doing something with them?”

“You already did.”

A moment passed for him to process, “No shit?” Carter breathed. “I already welded a bead in space?”

John nodded, “Obviously, we’d have a lot more and varied tasks than those two. We’re building a space station. But if our little test is any indication, you handle the waldo better than anyone else…” his eyes got a little vacant, “well, barring one.”

“You?”

“Oh no, you’re way better than I am.”

“Oh. Will I be working with this other guy?”

“Gal, and, no… not really.”

When Carter opened the door to their apartment Jenny flew across the room and tackled him, throwing her arms around his waist hugging tight. After a moment she leaned back, “Mom said you went to talk to people about the job?” she asked tentatively.

Carter looked down at her, seeing her desperate need to know. He nodded.

“Did you get the job?”

He nodded again.

“Mom!” she shrieked, “He got the job!”

Carter looked up to see relief blossom over Abby’s face.

He smiled at her, “How about if we go out for pizza and celebrate?”

“Carter,” Abby said, a furrow appearing between her brows. “You know I don’t think we should be splurging when we have all this debt.”

He shrugged, “And I agree, but pizza for dinner isn’t much more expensive than eating at home.”

She stared at him a moment longer, then looked down at her daughter’s pleading eyes. “Oh, OK. Just this once though.”

Jenny began bouncing joyously up and down, clapping her hands together.

Carter reflected that their parsimonious lifestyle made even a little celebration very sweet.

***

Fay Kinrais heard the front door open, “Shan? Is that you?”

“Hey Mama,” he said as he came around the corner into the great room, striding over and giving her a hug. “How are things on the home front?”

“Good…” his mother paused as she saw a young brunette come hesitantly around the corner. Slender and pretty, taller than average she seemed very… elegant. Fay wasn’t sure just why? The girl had on very ordinary jeans and a t-shirt after all. There was just something about the way she moved… that seemed graceful and classy. “You brought a girl home, Shan?” She was pretty sure that Shan dated quite a few young women, but he’d never brought one home before! Did this mean what she hoped?

“Yes Momma,” he said putting an arm around his mother’s shoulders.  “I brought a girl home with me. This is my ‘girlfriend’ Raquel Blandon.”

Fay stepped out from under Shan’s arm and approached Ell smiling, “Hello Raquel. I’m so glad to meet you. Shan’s dad should be home soon.” She glanced back and forth between the two young people, “Will you have dinner with us?”

They went out to dinner and after they’d placed their orders Shan began talking to Malcolm, his father. Fay turned to Ell, wondering what to talk about, “So, Raquel, where did you grow up?”

“Down at the coast, Emerald Isle.”

“That’s near Morehead City where Ell Donsaii grew up right?”

Ell nodded.

“Did you know her?”

“Some. She’s younger than I am. But I’m working at D5R where she works, so I see her nowadays.”

“Did you know that Shan met Donsaii?”

Working to keep her straight face, Ell nodded, “Yes, word is that she was very impressed.” She raised an eyebrow, “Shan made quite a breakthrough in the understanding of the whole dark matter and dark energy problem you know and Donsaii is publishing a paper with him on it.”

“So I understand, though Shan plays it down. I really don’t understand anything about this multidimensional physics. I liked math in school but I haven’t done anything with it for a long time. However, I like to think that Shan got his math gene from me.”

The men had turned their attention back to the ladies. Shan’s dad raised an eyebrow and put a hand to his chest, “Yes, and he inherited his good looks from me.”

Ell smiled at Shan, “Well you did a good job with the looks. All my girlfriends are sooo jealous of me.” She turned back to his parents, “Though I did worry that that Donsaii girl would steal him away from me.” She glanced back at Shan and winked.

Malcolm said, “That’s right Shan. I’d forgotten. What was it like to meet Ms. Donsaii? Is she ‘stuck up’?”

Shan grinned and winked at Ell, “Well, you know it would just be rude to talk about her very much in front of my new girlfriend? But I can definitely say, ‘Not stuck up.’ In fact if you took her to dinner, you’d find her just as pleasant as Raquel here, not snobbish at all.”

Fay turned to Ell, “Tell me how you met Shan?”

“Well, I’m embarrassed to admit, but it was at a bar. I saw this handsome guy out there clogging on the dance floor. I couldn’t help myself. I just had to get out there and dance like that.”

Fay pointed a finger at Shan, “See! I told you you’d appreciate those dance lessons one day.”

“Yes Momma.” Slyly he said, “Maybe if I’d stuck with the lessons I could have impressed Donsaii with my dancing instead of my mind.”

His own mother snorted and said, “Fat chance on that one…”

***

Farshid spoke into his link, “The spawn of Satan killed Reza!”

“They found you?”

“No! Well, I don’t think so. But, somehow they made our end of the port explode! They waited until we were walking into the room and then blew it up, throwing Reza across the room. It broke his neck.”

There was a hiss from the other end of the link. “How did they do this?”

“I don’t know! Abbas thinks they may have sent our propane back to us and then ignited it somehow.”

After a long pause, the man on the other end of the link said, “You and Abbas will link up with another warrior against the Great Satan. A man named Basir in Washington D.C. Together you will work to understand these ports better. I suspect you will need to capture one of the workers at the manufacturing plant and milk him of information. Then, before you make another attempt to attack the Americans, you will contact me to teach me what you have learned.”

***

Ryan Keller arrived at D5R’s facility wondering if he might actually see Ell Donsaii walking around. Or more likely Shan’s girl Raquel. Both of them worked here. Well Raquel worked in D5R proper and he guessed that Donsaii probably spent more time in one of the other areas, but maybe she’d be in Quantum Research today.

To his surprise, the receptionist was the girl that he’d met the night that Shan met Raquel at Vic’s dance club. Just as she said, “Hi Ryan,” he realized with horror that he couldn’t remember her name. She said brightly, “I didn’t think that the next time I’d see you would be here at work.”

Gratefully recognizing that she had on a nametag Ryan said, “Hey Bridget, we should go out dancing again sometime.  Did you know that Raquel and my roommate Shan have really hit it off?

“Yeah,” she grinned, “I’ve heard.”

“I’m supposed to be meeting with a Dr. Kenner. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“No problem,” she said, getting up, “I’ll take you there.”

As they walked Ryan felt nervous about his meeting and wondered if Bridget would have any influence on whether Quantum Research would support his research or not. Maybe even give him a job someday? “Would you be interested in going dancing again sometime?”

She grinned shyly up at him, “Sure, when?”

Thinking that he’d just been asking whether she was interested, he felt like she’d put him on the spot. “Uh, how about this Thursday night? I think they have bluegrass bands on a lot of Thursdays.”

She tilted her head, “OK, but I do like other things besides bluegrass you know.”

“Really?” He tried to look flabbergasted, “Well you’ll have to tell me about them then. See you there at nine?”

“OK,” she waved at a pretty young woman sitting at a big workbench, “This is Dr. Kenner. Emma, this is Ryan Keller, your 11 o’clock.”

Kenner stood up and extended her hand, “You aren’t already dating our staff are you?” she grinned.

Embarrassed about how it must have looked, Ryan shook her hand and said, “Um, sorry, Bridget and I met once before. My roommate is going out pretty steady with her friend Raquel.”

Bridget waved and headed back out front. Kenner smiled and said, “Please sit down. Let’s hear about your nerve interface devices.”

Nonplussed to be sitting out in the middle of a big room rather than an office, Ryan sat across from her at the big workbench. She had on jeans and t-shirt and he felt over dressed in his sport coat and tie. It wasn’t a job interview after all; he just hoped it might lead to a job if he could get them interested. He sat and said, “Thanks Dr. Kenner.”

She said, “Just call me Emma. We aren’t very formal here.” A tall slender guy with wild black hair walked up. She indicated him, “This is Roger Emmerit. He’s been doing most of our biological interface work.”

Ryan stood and shook Roger’s hand, “Hi, Dr. Emmerit.”

“Like Emma said, we aren’t very formal. Call me Roger and show us what you’ve got.”

“Uh, OK Emma, Roger.” He pulled out an envelope, opened it and slid out a wire with a large jack on one end and a clear tube full of fuzz on the other. “This is one of the nerve ‘neurotrodes’ I’ve been working on.”

Emma picked it up and studied the fuzzy end. “‘Neurotrode’ because it connects to a nerve like an electrode, I assume. So, how’s it work?”

“Well, what looks like fuzz inside the tube is actually thousands of tiny micro tubules with a cocktail of growth factors, mostly nerve growth factors, coating their insides. The base of each tubule is hooked up to a nanowire electrode.

“We cut the nerve and put it into the tube. The growth factors induce the axons that sprout out of the end of the cut nerve to grow down into the tubes where they can activate or be activated by the nanowire electrodes. Thus we can pick up outgoing motor signals and input sensory signals. So far I’ve been able to activate reflex arcs in rats.”

Roger said, “Reflex arcs?”

“Yeah,” Ryan nodded, “like when a doctor thumps on your knee?”

They nodded.

“So what happens in that case is the thump stretches the tendon and little stretch sensors in the tendon send a signal to the spinal cord telling it that the tendon has been stretched. Then the spinal cord, without consulting the brain, sends a signal back out to the muscle to contract. Your body has this arc so that if you stumble and the knee is bent suddenly, stretching the tendon, the muscle will be told to tighten, trying to prevent you from falling before your brain even knows about it. The good thing about the arc from our viewpoint is that we can send a signal up a sensory fiber and get back a signal on a motor fiber telling us that our equipment is working without needing to have an intelligent subject to tell us what they’re feeling.”

Roger and Emma glanced at one another, “How many fibers are we talking about here?”

Ryan shrugged, “It depends on the type of nerve and its diameter of course, but tens of thousands at least.”

Emma tilted her head, “Normally, we count on being able to jack and unjack wires that pass through ports so that if we have to close the port we can unjack the wire first and re-jack it after we open the port back up.”

Ryan nodded.

“But you have to have that big jack to be able to accurately connect tens of thousands of wires, right?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve been working on ways to make the jack smaller. But it’s pretty hard to get good connections with jacks this tiny.”

“Alternatively you could pass the smaller nano wire bundle through a port that you plan to keep open at all times. A small port requires only a few watts of power so you could keep it open indefinitely without any problems, the only problem being if something interrupts the port you have to re-operate on your subject to hook it back up.”

Ryan shrugged, “That plan would keep you from having to have a large jack inside the patient so it’s probably worth the risk of having to re-implant.”

They discussed the issues a while longer, eventually deciding to have Ryan make some “ported” neurotrodes of a size that would fit a human nerve and agreeing that Quantum Research would pay for some implantations in an animal model larger than a rat to work out problems that might crop up in a human sized nerve.

On the way out Ryan stopped by Bridget’s desk, “Hey, I was wondering where Raquel’s office is. I was hoping to say hi.”

Bridget raised an eyebrow, “Didn’t you just ask me out for Thursday night?”

“Uh, yeah.”

She frowned at him, “We haven’t even been on our first date and you’re already asking me for help meeting another woman?” She raised an eyebrow, “This doesn’t bode well.”

“Uh sorry, that did sound bad. I just wanted to say ‘Hi’ since we’re friends and she goes out with my roommate.”

She grinned, “Just giving you grief. Raquel’s not here today. She hardly ever works in this facility. She’s more of a troubleshooter, handling problems here and there.

“Oh, OK. See you Thursday still?”

She raised an eyebrow again, “You’d better be there.”

***

“Our ‘allies’ say that they cannot get us access to military grade technology. In fact, they claim that ‘military grade’ port technology doesn’t exist.”

“What’s the difference between a ‘military grade’ port and an ordinary port?” Menahim asked.

“Hah!” he snorted. “Obviously, being able to fire weapons through a port would allow you to carry only a port to battle. Then you could have an assistant back at a depot fire any number of different weapons through that port at enemies you had identified. Anything from a rifle, to a small cannon, flame thrower or grenade launcher. However, two of our people sustained injuries just trying to fire a bullet through a port. Not only didn’t the bullet go through, but the port exploded producing shrapnel and injuring our scientists.

“Then we tried delivering ports with a mortar, the idea being that after the port arrived at the target you could send through flammable gases or liquids, essentially delivering the explosive force of a much bigger weapon. But, they don’t work after they arrive. The people at Portal Technologies say that the mechanism can’t tolerate the accelerations involved with being fired out of a muzzle. However, they don’t work after we deliver them by rocket either. They say that’s because the one port can’t be moved at high velocities relative to the other port, but I must point out that they send ports into space at much higher velocities, so it is possible. They just aren’t sharing that tech with us.”

Menahim leaned back, narrowing his eyes. “And what do your contacts in the American military say?”

Avral shrugged. “They say that, ‘ports have inherent limitations which make them difficult to weaponize.’”

“And you don’t believe this?”

Avral snorted, “No! This technology has enormous potential for weaponization and the Americans are keeping it entirely to themselves. They may claim to be our allies, but they aren’t sharing this technology with us.”

“So they have given us no new military technology based on the ports?”

“No,” he snorted, “well, yes. They have given us their new ‘bottomless canteen,’ so that a soldier never runs out of water and fittings for our military vehicles so that they get electricity and don’t depend on fuel. Even a gas mask that brings in fresh air from elsewhere.” He tilted his head and shrugged a little, “The mask is actually pretty good, not just against a gas attack but also in the smoky, dusty environments which are prevalent in war zones. But, as you can see, nothing of an offensive nature.”

“So you have not been able to create any offensive weapons using this tech?”

“Well, of course. Small radio controlled flying machines, helicopters and ‘model’ sized airplanes. They use electric motors but have had very limited ranges due to battery life. Now they can fly incredible distances at surprising altitudes. They’re great for observation and can even attack if we strap an explosive to them. But imagine if they could land unobserved and then open a port that delivers propane or gasoline.”

Menahim frowned, “That sounds like the kind of weapon that a terrorist would like!”

“Exactly! And we need equipment more advanced than that in order to counter the terrorist threat.”

“Have you told the Americans about your radio controlled small weapons?” Menahim asked.

“Pfft. Let them figure it out for themselves if they can.”

Menahim grinned, “But they’re your allies. It sounds like you aren’t helping them and yet are complaining when they don’t help you.”

Avral frowned darkly, not seeing any humor to it, “They are supposed to help us.”

Menahim lifted his chin momentarily in question, “So, what do you think we should do about it?”

“We’ve already had our scientists try to reverse engineer the ports. The electronics are buried in one of these epoxies that destroy their contents when you try to remove them. We haven’t had any luck figuring it out. We need to hire the Donsaii girl to build us better ports. The Americans don’t seem to have any idea just how important she is. They don’t even guard her, so if she won’t do it for money, we can just bring her back here and ‘convince’ her.”

A raised eyebrow, “You’re suggesting we kidnap her?”

Avral shrugged. Darkly, he said, “Nothing less than the safety of our people depends on this.”

Menahim sighed, “Explore the options, but I doubt we can get approval for a kidnapping. For sure, find out if she can be bought.”

***

Allan, Ell’s AI, said, “You have a call from Gary Pace.”

“Gary from Las Vegas?”

“Yes.”

“Put him on. Hi Gary, what’s happening in your life?”

“Uh, hello Ms. Donsaii. Things are going pretty good. I’ve finished my PhD and I’ve taken a job at Clemson.”

“‘Ms. Donsaii!’ You’re calling me ‘Ms.’? I thought we were friends.”

“Well… we were; then you went off and saved the world. Made me feel like I owed you some respect.”

“Hah, I’m still the same girl you used to toss around in the Millie’s martial arts class. Call me ‘Ms.’ and I’ll have to move you off my ‘friends’ list.”

“OK, ‘Ell’ it is.”

“So, Clemson, that’s not too far from us here. Are you going to be teaching in the Chemistry Department there?”

“No, I’m actually joining their Materials Engineering section. I’ll be continuing research on carbon materials, nanotubes and tori, graphene synthesis. Maybe even some work on boron nitride macromolecules.”

“Great! We’d love to hire you as a consultant. We really need some of those super high tensile strength materials for some of our projects.”

“Well, that’s kinda what I called about. I have an idea for graphene synthesis that depends on a microgravity environment. I was about to call NASA when I realized that you were flying little rockets out there and maybe I could mount a small experiment in one of your flights.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well, you may know that there are a lot of ways to make graphene. The big problem is that so far no one has figured out a way to make the kinds of enormously long sheets like we’d need to build a space elevator.”

“Yeah.”

“One way to make graphene is with vapor deposition from methane. At the right temperature and pressure, the methane will leave behind its carbon as a single layer on certain alloys but it sticks so hard that peeling it off as a continuous sheet is hard. Some of my calculations suggest that we could make it form so it would strip off easily in a microgravity environment. I think I could make a ‘proof of concept’ experiment that’s pretty tiny so it could go up in one of your small rockets.”

“Hmmm, we can send up big payloads too. And we really need high tensile strength materials. Why don’t you build us something that’s big enough to actually try to spool off a long piece?”

“Really? I thought you guys only made little rockets.”

“What we make are the dimensional ports that fuel rockets. Without those ports, little rockets can’t fly very far. But the ports will also fuel large rockets and they’ll deliver unlimited synthesis materials to your ‘graphenator’ too.”

“So… could you actually fly up the device I’ve been trying to work with down here on earth? It’s about four feet, by two feet, by six feet, not counting the methane supply bottles.”

“Sure, and you could go up to orbit with it and run your experiment without even leaving the Learjet. You wouldn’t have to take up the bottles; we can give you ports to send the methane up through.”

“Learjet? I need to get all the way out to a microgravity situation in orbit.”

“Yeah, sorry I didn’t explain. We use a modified Learjet as our spacecraft. It flies out of an island in the Caribbean. It’s plenty big enough to take your experiment up. We can even pick your equipment up from whatever the nearest jet capable airport is. We’d pick you and the device up in a different Learjet and fly you to the island.”

“Wow! That’d be… great!”

“When can you have it ready?”

They spoke further arranging details but Gary hung up from the conversation shaking his head. A Learjet? That doesn’t sound safe. Is she crazy or brilliant? Well, he thought, he knew she was brilliant. But still, it seemed crazy.

***

Manuel left the machine shop and headed over to the purchasing office. He had a cutting head for a three axis CNC machine that needed to be replaced. A few months ago he would have ordered another one and copied the order to the purchasing office. But that was before he’d had to talk to Shelly Williams about an ordering error. Manuel had always liked tall women and Shelly was just a little taller than he, dark hair, usually smiling. He’d made frequent excuses to visit the purchasing area since.

When he heard Shelly had separated from her husband, he’d begun finding more and more reasons to have her order parts. “Hey Shell’, how’s my favorite order magician?”

Shelly smiled broadly at him. “Manuel, you breakin’ more equipment and comin’ ‘round to beg me to get you replacements?”

Manuel shook his head disconsolately, “Just workin’ so hard I’m wearin’ the equipment out Ms. Williams.”

He raised his eyes so Shelly could see them twinkling. She laughed and said, “Come on, show me what you so urgently need me to get for you, but I think you’re going to owe me lunch…”

Chapter Three

Ell got to the “Team Teecee” group a little late. She looked around a little surprised to see that Wheat, Piscova and Norris were all there in person. She looked around and asked, “Did I miss anything interesting?”

Emma grinned at her, “Kira held an actual conversation with Goldy.”

When Ell looked at her with raised eyebrows, Kira said, “We talked about the ‘pecking order’ in their tribe. ‘Pecking order’ probably isn’t a very good term, it’s probably more like their social rank but still, those on top boss around those below them.”

Ell tilted her head, “And how does Goldy rank?”

“Apparently he ranked really low before the adventure he and Silver had when Silver’s wing got injured. I get the impression none of the Teecees have lived through the summer without flying south and the fact that they did it brought them a lot of prestige.”

Harald Wheat said, “We need to publish some of this stuff. Is there really any harm that can come of the public knowing about the Teecees? It’s not like anyone can go to Tau Ceti and exploit them, right?”

Ell sighed, “I just have a bad feeling about telling the world. We’re still trying to sort out the impact from ordinary ports.”

Norris said, “We can’t just suppress this knowledge. Science should be carried out in the public eye.”

Wheat said, “I completely agree with Dr. Norris. Our non-disclosure agreements expired some time ago so we could publish without your permission. I’ve been holding back out of respect for your wishes, but the world deserves to know and to know sometime soon.”

Ell glanced at Roger and Emma who both shrugged.

Ell sighed, “OK.”

Norris said, “I propose that we submit a quartet of papers in Nature. You describe the technology for the one ended ports. I describe the Tau Ceti system and TC3 in particular. Wheat describes the biota of TC3 and Piscova describes the language.”

Ell shook her head, “No paper about the one ended portal tech. It’s far too dangerous.”

Roger raised his eyebrows, “But, with the other papers coming out, people are going to realize that we couldn’t have reached another star without some major technological advance.”

Ell slumped, “Yeah, I know.”

“Maybe you could release a description of single ended ports that have a minimum reach of, say a few AUs. Then people couldn’t use them as weapons here on earth.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought of releasing one ended ports with a reach of between one and fifty AUs for space research or less than 5mm for medical implantation. But I can’t release a ‘description’ of how to do it or people would figure their way around it. The only safe thing to do would be to sell devices that could do those things but not reveal how they’re made.”

Norris shrugged, “There are a lot of smart people out there. They’re going to figure it out from the original patent apps and your papers aren’t they?”

“Yeah, probably they will… eventually.” Ell said wearily, “But I don’t want to be the one who told terrorists how to do this.”

“Wait a minute,” Roger said, “Less than 50 AU? Then they couldn’t reach other stars.”

“Nope, and I don’t want them to do that. Not all aliens we meet are going to be primitives like the Teecees. Believe me; we don’t want every Joe Blow sending a mission to some of the stars out there. We don’t want them doing bad things to the primitives, but we especially don’t want them pissing off one of the advanced races.”

Roger narrowed his eyes, “One of? Sounds like you might have already encountered a more advanced race.” He glanced at Emma; then back at Ell “What did you find at Alpha Centauri?”

Ell shrugged, “Just some pretty primitive looking life. The planet there that’s near the liquid water zone has a pretty eccentric orbit, sometimes frozen, sometimes boiling. There is abundant mushy green stuff, probably single celled, but nothing that anyone would be excited about.”

“But, it sounds like you’ve encountered a more advanced race, where?”

After a long pause that set everyone’s nerves on edge Ell said, “Sorry, I just don’t want to say right now. I don’t know enough about them. I want to more fully evaluate the risks.”

The people in the room looked at one another. Norris exploded, “You can’t keep something like this a secret! An advanced race! That’s hugely important, not something that one person should keep as their own secret! Think what they could teach us.”

Piscova turned to Norris and said, “What if they attack instead of teach?”

“I thought organisms couldn’t pass through the ports?” Wheat asked.

Roger looked at Wheat, “Earth organisms can go through ports and survive, but all the ones with nervous systems appear to have seizures when they pass through ports. Aliens might not, or they may be willing to have seizures in order to get here.”

Wheat said, “I’m not sure we should worry so much. Despite a wealth of science fiction stories about inimical aliens bent on the destruction of the human race, it’s really hard to imagine why they’d want to attack us over interstellar distances. In those stories they’re often proposed to want our planet for living space, our people for slaves, or some precious material we have. First of all our biosphere probably won’t agree with them so they aren’t likely to want to live here. We certainly couldn’t live on TC3 for instance. Second, why would they want to enslave us, when an interstellar level technology likely has robots that would do those tasks better than we would? Third, what kinds of valuable materials or minerals would we have here that wouldn’t be more readily available in their own solar system?”

Ell looked at him consideringly. “I’ve wondered some of those same things Dr. Wheat. Some of the reasons proposed for wars with aliens in sci-fi seem pretty implausible. However, I’d like to more fully evaluate the possible dangers before bringing you guys in on it. By the very nature of their being alien we must recognize that there could be dangers we haven’t thought of.”

After further discussion they agreed to the submission of three papers to Nature about Tau Ceti. Ell would be listed as an author on them but wouldn’t submit anything about the one ended ports. As they walked out of the meeting Emma put a hand on Ell’s arm and quietly asked, “It’s Sigma Draconis isn’t it? I’ve realized that the little explorer rocket we sent there should be arriving about now.”

Ell nodded.

“What have you found there?”

Ell said, “Let’s go to my office. I don’t want to talk about this stuff out here.”

Once in her office Ell sighed, “They have a ringworld, or halo or orbital or whatever you want to call it, at the L5 and L4 locations on the orbit of their apparent homeworld.”

“Ringworld?”

“Constructed habitat. A ring that’s about 20,000 kilometers in diameter. About 5,000 kilometers wide. The rocket isn’t very close yet, but the ring is easier to see than the presumed home planet! Allan thinks the ring is rotating about one revolution every three and a half hours.”

“Wait, what! 20,000 kilometers! Why so freaking big?”

“So a lot of people can live there.”

“What? Why a ring… world?

“You really don’t read much sci-fi do you? The idea is that they live on the inner surface of the ring. At that rotation rate, the centripetal force would provide a simulated 0.34 gravities on the inner surface, pretty much what we estimate the gravity of the home planet to be. High edges along the sides of the ring keep the atmosphere in. In sci-fi stories the rings are even bigger than this so that the rotation matches the day-night cycle of the planet the inhabitants come from, but it seems unlikely that materials with enough tensile strength for that kind of structure are possible. Even one this size is pushing high up into the strength limits of graphene, which is the strongest material we’re aware of.”

Emma blinked, “How much surface area would one of these have?”

“310 million square kilometers. That’s about sixty percent of the surface area of the Earth. Close to three times the area of their presumed home planet.”

Emma sat down, looking a little pale, “My God!”

“Yeah. The rings are astonishing feats of engineering. I’m worried because Allan hasn’t detected any rocket exhausts travelling from world to world. Hopefully that’s because we’re still too far away. But if they’re travelling everywhere using ports or some other technology… then they’re even more frightening… I’m not using the rocket’s engine. I don’t want them noticing it, tracking it down and tracing it back to us.”

“But, traveling on a ballistic trajectory, will it get close enough for you to actually see what’s going on?”

“Well… no. When I first saw the Sigma Draconis ringworld on the video returning from the explorer I resolved not to activate the actual rocket engine on the explorer in an effort to keep it from being detected. But, then I realized that we had just the problem you brought up, it wouldn’t get close enough to be able to see much. So I really wanted to correct its course. Using low levels of thrust far enough away from the destination is going to allow that to be done. I wanted an exhaust that consisted of something present in deep space that would be cold because hot exhaust would show up on infrared imaging. Liquid hydrogen seemed to be the best choice. It would exhaust at a fairly high velocity, imparting significant delta V, yet the hydrogen would be pretty cold and normally found in deep space, even if in lower quantities.

“So I started porting hydrogen under pressure to both the oxygen and the LNG supplies to the main rocket nozzle. Allan controls the thrust by simply flicking the port open and shut at various cycle frequencies.

“Then it was just a matter of orienting the nozzle and opening up. The delta V, being fairly low, required long periods of thrust, far, far from the ringworld. But Allan’s calculations show that it’ll be able to match the rim velocity of the side of the ring that’s travelling away along the explorer’s trajectory. It should be able to land on the rim without any major burns, especially since I’ve got Allan watching and adjusting almost constantly.

“I’ve trailed a wire through the port on the rocket to serve as an antenna and hooked it up to a broad spectrum radio receiver, checking to see if the Draconis might be using radio rather than quantum messaging through the 5th dimension. I couldn’t find any carrier waves or other evidence of non-natural radio sources but I worry that I just don’t know enough about radio comm to recognize their transmissions.” She shrugged, “However, I think the best bet would be that they are using something more advanced.”

Emma left Ell’s office, head spinning with the ramifications. She wanted desperately to talk to someone about it, but Ell had made her promise.

Back in her office Ell wondered again if the Draconis would be using ports. Ell found it hard to imagine that they could build their ringworld using rockets that carried all their fuel with them. You just wouldn’t be able to move such enormous quantities of mass around.

In fact... she leaned back, eyes unfocused, you couldn’t move that much mass with chemical rockets. You’d run out of chemical. Sure a gas giant would have plenty of hydrogen, but you wouldn’t be able to find enough oxidizer. What if you ported liquid hydrogen into your rocket engine and heated the engine’s chamber with a port near the star...?

***

Avral contacted Menahim. “I’ve tried several times and ways under different aliases to reach Donsaii. I haven’t even been successful in setting up a meeting to talk to her. I’ve offered to pay substantial sums just to make a proposal to her. ‘Not interested,’ is all I get back. I’ve tried to find a way to accost her in public but she rarely goes out in public. Probably gets too much unwanted attention from creeps in public.”

“Creeps like you?”

“Not funny.”

Avral said in a flat tone.

“So, what’s your next step?”

“I’ve checked out where she lives. It’s on a semi-isolated small farm, lives there with a girl. A fair number of people come and go. I think that some of them might be guards of some kind because they come and go on a semi regular schedule that leaves them there about eight hours at a time. But it seems like only about three at any one time. I’m pretty sure we could get her out of there.”

Menahim snorted, “You’re back to kidnapping her!”

Avral said, “We need her. Or what she knows anyway.  There isn’t any other way. Get us approval. I’ll work on a more detailed plan.”

“I’ll ask, but I don’t think that’s going to get approved.”

***

Presidential Science Adviser Kant Fladwami spoke to his AI. “Let’s return that call from Donsaii.”

A moment later he heard her voice, “Hello Dr. Fladwami. Thank you for calling me back. I contacted you per your request to be kept up to date about events here at D5R.”

“Oh, no,” he chuckled. “Are you about to throw another monkey wrench into the economy?”

“Uh, no sir… Well I don’t think so anyway. But we are going to be publishing our observations of another intelligent race in the near future.”

Fladwami felt goosebumps run up his neck, “Aliens?” he breathed, “Where?” The first thing that ran through his mind was that somehow aliens had detected her ports or PGR communications and embarked an invasion fleet or something horrific.

“Tau Ceti sir. We’ve managed to send a small observation rocket to the third planet and it has been sending back video of primitive but intelligent beings.”

The word “primitive” washed soothingly over Fladwami. “So, I assume they aren’t about to attack us then?”

“Oh, no sir. Far from it. And so far we haven’t been successful in sending higher level animals through ports without serious neurological consequences, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to go there anytime soon either.”

“Oh… Yeah, how did you get a rocket to Tau Ceti across light years of space without years of travel time?”

“Uh, well, I’ve found a way to open what we call a ‘single ended’ port which doesn’t have to have a device on the other end like the ‘two ended’ ports you’re familiar with.”

Fladwami blinked, “So are they going to supplant the two ended ports then?”

“Oh no sir. The location of the other end of the port is unstable and inaccurate.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“By unstable I mean that about three to five seconds is as long as you can keep a one ended port open, then it spontaneously closes and reopens in another location, closer or farther away. ‘Inaccurate’ refers to the fact that they open plus or minus 5-10% of their intended distance away. So to send a rocket to Tau Ceti we opened many, many ports, waiting for one to randomly open relatively close to the destination. Even when we did get one fairly close it still took four months for the rocket to fly the rest of the way to Tau Ceti.”

“And you found intelligent beings on this first planet? Could they live on Earth? Could we live on their planet?”

“Well, no. The atmosphere of TC3, as we call their planet, is very dense and has a very high oxygen content. The air would be toxic to us. For that matter, I’m sure our atmosphere is far too thin for them.

“I was thinking I could use our secure PGR link to send you some video and other materials to bring you up to speed? Then you could call me with questions.”

“And when are you going to be publishing these results?”

“Well, we’ll submit the papers in the next month or two. Depends on how fast the group gets their papers written to their satisfaction; they want to publish them all together, one on the Tau Ceti system and planet, one on the biota and one on the language of the Teecees, as we’ve been calling them. But then it will take more time for the journal to accept and publish them.”

“OK,” Fladwami said, feeling completely flummoxed as he leaned back in his chair staring sightlessly at the ceiling. “Please send me that summary.” After they’d disconnected he remained motionless a long time, leaning back, staring at the ceiling and wondering what to tell his President.

***

Mack pulled up to Shelly’s apartment complex. The month Shelly’d given him to quit drinking was up. He felt pretty proud because he’d really cut back.  Never more than a six pack in an evening and many nights with only one beer, which wasn’t actually drinking in his mind. Hell, he couldn’t even feel the effect of a single beer. Not that he intended to tell Shelly that he’d only cut back. He’d claim complete abstinence and if she came back home, well then he’d truly stop drinking completely… Except for an occasional one with his friends… and maybe if he got too stressed.

He saw Shelly walking out to her car. She looked great in a skirt and a turtleneck. His eyes narrowed, a short skirt! He’d been about to get out of his truck and tell her the good news about his drinking. He’d been looking forward to inviting her back to their house but now he felt unsure.

While he dithered, she got in her car and drove away.

After a minute Mack pulled out onto the street to follow.

Two hours later Mack pulled into Jed’s Bar. Shelly’d gone to a Mexican food restaurant where she’d met a Hispanic looking guy. The guy was shorter than she was for God’s sake! Mack had sat fuming while his wife had dinner with another man. Eventually he’d gone into the convenience mart across the street and bought a six pack to calm his nerves. In his mind the beer was a necessary medication to keep him from going in and beating the crap out of that guy.

He chuckled to himself to think that the guy’s life had just been saved by a six pack of beer. Poor guy might not even know Shelly’s married.

But she knew she was married.

Mack’s thoughts turned darker. The woman was ruining his life! Life’s mistakes had consequences…

***

Basir shook his head. He’d been told to work with this Farshid and Abbas team. They were long on passion and Abbas had some good ideas, but their attention to detail, or perhaps you could call it their level of ‘professionalism,’ was low. He couldn’t believe that they’d duct taped a port to a propane tank, opened the valve and then left the room! They’d done nothing to even confirm that the port had actually opened! Then they had decided that the explosion at their safe house was due to enemy action rather than their own idiocy.

Basir had considered pointing out that the death of Reza was likely due to their own stupidity. But, telling them that wouldn’t make them smarter. And it might dampen their fanatical enthusiasm for the war against the Christians. The cause could always use a few fanatics willing to sacrifice themselves in the battle. Basir was more pragmatic. He intended to survive this war.

Still he felt unsure about the best way to find someone who worked at the infidels’ Portal Technologies plant. Someone who would know how to make ports, or at least how to disable any safeguards on the ones that could be purchased. Someone who could easily be controlled.

Basir had found it damnably difficult to get good information about the ports. Somehow, the internet had much less information on the ports than on other technologies. Where he saw the lack of information addressed, websites blamed it on “proprietary secret keeping” by Portal Technologies, the company that made the ports.

Basir and the team had been hanging around the exit from the plant parking lot for a week now, following people as they left, trying to find a likely candidate to bribe or terrorize. So far they’d only followed people who went directly to their homes. He’d been expecting to follow someone to a bar by now. A bar where he could ply them with drink and find out whether they knew anything useful or not. Otherwise capturing or negotiating with them would be a waste.

Farshid had been the only one of them so far to follow someone to a bar. Rather than call in Basir like he’d been told to, Farshid had gone into the bar himself and tried to strike up a conversation with the man. The man, of a type known as a ‘red neck’ and in a bad mood to boot, had not taken kindly to being approached by Farshid who spoke poor English. He had exhibited his intolerance and narrow mindedness by giving Farshid a black eye. Basir had had to spend hours talking Farshid out of setting the man’s house on fire. He worried that Farshid’s focus had not come back on their mission even now.

Now it looked like the vehicle Basir had followed out of the Portal Technologies parking lot after the 3-11 shift was approaching an apartment complex and worse, he thought it had a woman at the wheel. He ground his teeth together, more wasted time.

Just as Basir pulled into another lane to head back to their motel, he saw her little car turn into a strip mall. He changed back to the other lane and then turned into the strip mall at the next entrance. The car he’d followed parked in front of a small bar named “Benny’s Beer and Billiards.” The car’s door opened and, as he had feared, a woman got out. She went into the bar though, so he parked and followed her in. He worried that he wouldn’t know which one she was but saw to his relief that there was only one woman with shoulder length blond hair in the bar. Only a scattering of other people populated the place but there were enough people standing at the bar that Basir didn’t think anyone would remark on his taking a position near her. He left a seat between himself and his target.

When the bartender brought her a beer he ordered one of his own, choosing Budweiser because it was the only brand he could remember at the moment. He’d never had any alcohol but would drink some this night as part of maintaining his cover.

Allah would forgive.

The woman immediately struck up a conversation with the bartender so Basir didn’t have to speak, he could just listen.

“Benny, how they hangin’?”

“On the left, Hun’, on the left. How’s second shift treating you?”

She snorted, “One good thing, I don’t feel guilty stopping by here for a beer right after work.”

He shrugged, “You’re a grown woman. You want to stop by at 3:30 after day shift, that’s your business.”

“Damn right.”

“Say do they let you buy ports at a discount? You know for your own use?” He waggled an eyebrow. “Maybe a discount that you could pass on to your friends here?”

Basir’s heart skipped a beat. He successfully resisted glancing at them, but did let his eyes roam over to study them in the mirror behind the bar. She was attractive in a rough, tired looking kind of way. He tsked to himself, she should cover herself though.

“Naw,” the woman said, “I have to buy them somewhere else, just like you do. I wouldn’t even be able to make off with the parts to assemble one myself, they’re all microtagged.”

“You’d be able to build a port if you had the parts?” the bartender asked, impressed or doubtful, Basir wasn’t sure which.

“Sure, no problem. What do you want one for?”

“Scuba diving.”

She frowned, “Scuba?”

He shrugged, “Yeah, install one end of a port on a cut off snorkel, leave the other end up on shore. Then I could go on an endless dive without carrying tanks or worrying about running out of air.”

Basir saw a way to join their conversation. “But it wouldn’t work very deep. The pressure of the water would push the air in your lungs out the port and you wouldn’t be able to pull any air back down to you against the pressure.”

They both looked at him like he was crazy. Benny said, “You’re nuts man, they send divers using air hoses down to do work deep underwater all the time.”

Basir resisted the temptation to laugh at the man’s stupidity. Instead he said, “They pump air under pressure down through those hoses though.”

The bartender shrugged uncertainly and said, “Well, then I’d have to get myself a pump.” He turned back to the blond woman, “Anyway, I’d like to get myself a port.”

She winked at him, “Well, buy me a beer on the house and maybe next time I see one lyin’ around, I’ll snag it for you.”

Basir said, “I’ll buy you a beer if you’ll just tell me how they work.”

She eyed him a moment, then tapped the bar and said, “Let’s see that beer.”

Basir noticed with surprise that her first one was nearly empty. Turning to Benny, he said, “Bring the lady another beer on me.” He turned back to her and extended his hand, “I’m Bart.”

“Stacy,” she replied, tossing back the last of her beer. “Are you gonna get around that beer of yours?” she asked, eyeing it.

Basir picked up his beer, saluted her with it and took his first sip of alcohol. To his surprise it tasted bitter and unpleasant. Somehow he had always pictured beer as having a smoky, smooth taste. He managed to avoid raising his eyebrows in startlement, instead smacking his lips as he set it down, “Ahh, that hit the spot.”

Benny gave Stacy another beer. She turned to Basir, “What do you want to know about ports?”

He shrugged, “How do they work?”

She widened her eyes, “I sure as hell don’t know. The theory on that is complex, man. Most of the big domes have a hard time understanding how they work.” With a sense of pride in her voice she said, “That Donsaii girl is smart.”

Basir, raised his glass at the woman again. “You can say that again.” He took another sip. “I was wondering more what the parts are like and how you put them together?”

She shrugged. “My part of the line gets the disks already wired to a little package of electronics…” she tilted her head as if seeing something far away, “Well the big disks have a big set of electronics. The little ones can run on a battery and the big ones need a lot of power. The electronics are pretty complex and I don’t know circuits, but even if I did, most of it is on chips so I can’t even see what kind of circuits are in the chips. Then the whole thing gets buried in Dexin. You know, that epoxy that makes them impossible to take apart to figure the circuits out after they’re sold.”

“What do you do? Assemble the chips to the electronic boards?”

She laughed, “Oh Gods no. Robots and other machines do almost all the assembly. Us mere humans just make sure the robots are supplied, fix them when they jam and test the finished product. I like doing the testing. It’s pretty cool to power a new port up and see the disk disappear so you can see through the port to whatever’s behind the other end.”

Basir felt disappointment at her lack of understanding, but tried not to show it. Even if she couldn’t build him a port, she might know how to use them and what their limitations were. “So do they all work the same or do you have to have different ones for different tasks. For instance, could I use the same one to power my car, water my lawn and then let Benny borrow it for his snorkel?”

Stacy snorted, “No way. There are special ones made just to jack electrical power conductors through, certain kinds for flammables like gas, special ones for airplanes and even different ones for rockets.”

Aha! Basir thought to himself, if you have to have different ones to send flammables through, that might have been the issue with the one Farshid tried to send to the White House! If they tried to send propane through one made to transport water, then the propane would have wound up in the house with them and could be the reason there was an explosion. To Stacy he said, “Why do they have different ones for airplanes and rockets?”

She shrugged, “The ones for airplanes won’t go fast enough for a rocket. When they get over a certain speed they shut down and the rocket runs out of gas.”

“So, if I wanted to build a rocket, I’d have to get one of the special ones for rockets?”

“Yeah, and you’d better belong to a certified organization that’s going into space too. They don’t want you crashing rockets into things down here on earth.”

Basir nodded. He hadn’t thought of trying to make rockets to bombard the White House until just now, but it sounded like that would have been an unrewarding task anyway. He wondered if it was actually possible to use this technology against the Americans. If there was, he couldn’t see it right now.

Oh well, Stacy had given him the best information he’d gotten so far. He bought her several more beers and managed to have his AI get her contact information before she headed a little unsteadily out to her car to go home. He needed to call his superiors and tell them what he’d found out.

***

Emma and Ell stepped through the door of Slade’s Bar and Grill for a D5R after-hours get together. Ben Stavos saw them and waved. “‘Bout time you ladies got here!” he called. As they approached he said, “Donsaii, I’m buyin’ you a beer and beatin’ your butt at 8 ball.”

Ell grinned, raising an eyebrow and saying, “You and what army?”

“Hah! You may be the world’s greatest gymnast,” he raised an eyebrow, “but that don’t mean squat at the pool table.”

Vivian asked, “Can I bet on Donsaii?”

Ben gave Vivian his best look of astonishment as he said, “Sure you can. You sure you’ve got the money to waste?”

After greeting everyone and having a few nachos, Ell wandered over to the pool table Ben had purchased time on. To her surprise a number of the group got up and straggled over to watch as if pool was some kind of spectator sport.

Ben broke, putting in the 15 ball. Then he put in the 10 and missed the next one.

Ell purposefully missed her shot, but to give herself a challenge left the 1 ball centered in between the cushions in front of the corner pocket. She put some back spin on the cue ball to leave it well aligned on Ben’s 11 ball.

Ben put in the 11 and the 13 but then to Ell’s surprise missed again. She’d heard he was very good and wondered if he was going easy on her.

Vivian leaned over and said, “Hey, I’m counting on you. Don’t let him make off with all my money!”

Ell snorted. “You bet on the wrong horse tonight. I’m no pool player.” Nonetheless she decided she should put in a few balls to make it more interesting. She put in the 7 and the 3, then missed the 5 but left it in front of another corner pocket.

Ben ran the rest of his balls except for the 8 ball which was down at the end where Ell had blocked the corner pockets. He missed a long bank shot at a corner pocket on the other end.

As Ell stepped back up to the table she noticed a large man coming into the bar carrying a pool cue in a case. A big man with his own pool cue reminded her of Bill and “Silent” Joe from her games at 87 West in Raleigh a while back. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. Something seemed off about the man. As if he was already drunk. As she thought this, he staggered a little. She eyed the man curiously as she leaned down to line up a shot. He looked around the room, then his eyes focused on Shelly, the tall brunette from purchasing at D5R.

Ell focused on Shelly too and saw she was talking to Manuel Garcia from the Quantum Research team.

The man with the pool cue looked as if he thought Shelly and Manuel were too friendly. His face flushed with rage and he started that way. Ell found herself dropping into the zone. With her left hand, Ell picked up the cue ball she’d been lining up on.

The man set his case down on a table. The people sitting at that table looked up at him in surprise.

He popped the case open and pulled out, not a cue stick, but a sawed off shotgun.

Ell flipped the cue ball to her right hand, and cocked it back to throw.

People watching the pool game looked around in confusion, wondering why she’d picked up the ball.

The man stepped up across the table from Shelly and began extending the shotgun to point it at her.

Shelly frantically shoved back away from the table, scrabbling her feet and shrieking. The people on either side of her leaned desperately away. Manuel started to stand up and reach toward the man…

Ell desperately wondered, would the man really shoot? Could she stop him by throwing the cue ball or might hitting him cause him to fire? Hitting the shotgun might make it fire. It might make him miss Shelly, but hit someone else instead. Deep in the zone, it seemed like Ell had forever to ponder the horrific consequences of any action she might take, including doing nothing and watching him fire the gun into Shelly’s face.

Agonizing over it, Ell swung the cue ball forward. Unable to think of anything else to do, she let it go…

The ball rocketed toward the man’s extended arm.

The man’s forearm crumpled as the cue ball struck it just behind the wrist. As the bones broke, they bent palmarly, which loosened the tendons to his trigger finger and made his hand release the pistol grip of the gun…

The shotgun flipped into the air tumbling end for end…

Ell leaped up over the pool table, stepped once on a bar table and dove out flat, trying desperately to catch the shotgun before it landed…

Before her hand arrived, the shotgun came down hard on the corner of the table. Trigger guard first…

It fired…

Ell grabbed the gun as she landed, sliding through the glasses, baskets, pitchers, plates and napkin holders to skid off the end of the row of tables D5R had appropriated. She landed on the floor and leapt back to her feet. For a fleeting moment she scanned everyone’s shocked but intact faces and she thought no one had been hurt.

But then she saw Ben’s assistant John Parker grasping his arm and crouching over it.

***

Raleigh, NC—A shooting last night at Slade’s Bar and Grill involved Mack Williams, the estranged husband of Shelly Williams, his intended victim. It has been claimed that Ell Donsaii prevented him from killing his former wife but that someone else was injured. The injured person has not been identified as yet…

Ell sat, elbows on knees and chin on fists. Her mind’s eye constantly replayed the horrifying moments when John stood up, gripping his right proximal forearm in his left hand. Everyone stared at the shredded stump of his arm. His hand dangled beneath it, held on by a few strips of skin and a couple of tendons. Ell kept her eyes on the floor because she couldn’t bear to look at John’s wife Lisa.

Lisa sat across from Ell in the surgical waiting area, her face stricken as she sat staring sightlessly into space. Ben nudged Ell and she looked up to see the surgeon approaching.

Ell glanced at Lisa and saw her look up hopefully at the surgeon, then blanch in horror as the surgeon shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There really wasn’t anything we could do.”

Lisa gasped and leaned forward, throwing her arms around her own knees and beginning to rock slowly back and forth.

Ben got up and moved to the seat next to Lisa, clumsily patting her on the back. Ell wondered if she should try to comfort Lisa somehow, but the horrible guilt she felt over the loss of John’s hand kept her from it. If Ell hadn’t thrown the cue ball—of course, then Shelly would almost certainly be dead. If she’d caught the gun before it went off. If she’d reacted as soon as she noticed the man and thought he looked strange. If, if, if...

The surgeon had stepped away and now returned with a box of Kleenex. “I’m so sorry. I’m Dr. Hanson. Are all three of you family members?” She looked at Ben and Ell, apparently without recognizing Ell.

Ben shook his head. “No, Lisa here,” he nodded at the sobbing woman, “is John’s wife. John’s parents and Lisa’s Mom are flying in from Texas but won’t get here until morning.”

Lisa blew her nose in the Kleenex and wiped her eyes. “There wasn’t anything you could do?”

Dr. Hanson shook her head wearily. “All the structures in the distal forearm were shredded by the blast injury. We just don’t have the ability to reconstruct that many different kinds of missing tissue.”

“Will he… will he be able to have a prosthesis?”

“Yes, though… they aren’t nearly as good as we’d like them to be.”

“Ohhh,” Lisa almost moaned, “Will he be able to work? He… loved his work.”

“Yes, light work. Prosthetic arms aren’t up to heavy physical work. And it will be many months. We’ll have to wait for his wounds to heal and his stems to osseointegrate. Then he’ll have surgery to install transcutaneous stems onto the osseointegrated stems. Then more months for them to stabilize before he can be fitted with a myoelectric prosthesis.”

“Osseo-int?”

“Yes, we put porous metal stems into the ends of the bones of his forearm. The bone will grow into the pores. Once they are solidly attached to the bone we’ll implant stems that protrude from the skin. They have special surfaces to prevent infection from entering around the stems. Then we can mount a prosthesis on the stems.”

Lisa stared uncomprehendingly, “I thought that the artificial arm just slid on over his, his stump.” She obviously had a hard time saying the word.

Hanson said, “That is how it used to be done. The osseointegrated system is much more comfortable and functional than the old style ‘sockets.’ They tended to slide around over the skin of your amputation stump causing sores and giving you poor control.”

Ell thought either option sounded pretty awful and, judging from the expression on her face, Lisa did too. “Lisa,” she said, “John doesn’t have to work, D5R will be happy to continue his salary. But if he wants to work, we’ll be happy to have him back. It’s his mind the company values, not his hand.”

Lisa looked at the floor, then back up into Ell’s eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, “and thank you for trying so hard to catch that gun.”

Fighting to speak through the frog in her throat and the guilt on her soul, Ell croaked, “If I hadn’t thrown that cue ball, the shotgun wouldn’t have fallen and John wouldn’t have been shot.”

Lisa shook her head, “You couldn’t let him shoot Shelly,” she whispered raspily, putting a hand on Ell’s arm, “you did the right thing. We’re just lucky you actually did hit Mack and kept him from killing Shelly.”

“I don’t know,” Ell said, tears streaming down her face, “there must have been something better I could have done… I just couldn’t… couldn’t seem to think of it.”

Chapter Four

Chief of Police Eddy Stewart let himself into the interview room. He was a little embarrassed, feeling that the other cops were going to think that he just wanted to see their famous guest. And they’d be right, he admitted, though only to himself. He was justifying it as an attempt to make sure no bad publicity was generated for the department by “overzealous young investigators.”

Donsaii sat across from Sergeant Neville. Lieutenant Atassi sat at the end of the table, ninety degrees to Donsaii. Stewart stepped to the right and leaned up against the wall next to Brad Holwitz, his second in command. No patrolmen present. It looked like Stewart wasn’t the only one pulling rank to be in on this particular interview.

He looked at Donsaii again. Lord, what a gorgeous young woman! Awfully young. Twenty or so? Could that be, he wondered, and be so famous? He did a little mental arithmetic and decided she actually must be somewhere between 21 and 23.

Neville frowned at Donsaii, “So you thought Mr. Williams ‘looked a little drunk’?”

Far from the arrogance Stewart expected from such a celebrity, Donsaii quietly said, “Yes sir.”

“And so you picked up the cue ball?”

“When I saw him glaring at Ms. Williams, yes sir.”

Neville raised an eyebrow and whispered to his AI. Video of the incident from the AI of someone else who’d been in the room popped up on the big screen in the interview room. He ran back and forth through that part of the sequence until it was obvious that Williams’ eyes had focused on his wife and his face had turned red, though only a few frames before Donsaii picked up the cue ball. “You hadn’t seen anything to suggest he was going to cause anyone any harm at that point though had you?”

In a subdued tone Donsaii said, “No sir.”

“And, if you’ll look at these next frames you’ll see that you were transferring the cue ball to your throwing hand at the same time that he was opening his ‘pool cue case.’” He ran the bit of video in question showing Ell flipping the cue ball to her right hand in the foreground at the same time as the case was being opened in the distance.

“No sir.”

Neville tilted his head, “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“Sir, I think if you go frame by frame you’ll see that the case was open enough to see the trigger and trigger guard before I started transferring the cue ball.”

Neville snorted and carefully ran the video back and forth through the few frames in question. Eventually he tilted his head and said, “Granted, but that’s not enough time for anyone to react.”

So quietly that Stewart could barely hear her, Donsaii whispered, “Sir, I’m very quick.”

Neville rolled his eyes and said, “Granted, but I don’t think anyone can be that quick.” He stared at her a moment, “However, let’s go a little farther.”

“Sir, am I accused of something? Do I need to have counsel present?”

“No,” he said with an air of exaggerated patience. “No one’s accusing you of anything. We’re just trying to make sense of some very odd things on the video sequences from this incident.”

Lieutenant Atassi put her hand on Stewart’s elbow, “Sergeant, you might want to tone it down a little, you do sound pretty accusatory.” She turned to Donsaii and in a pleasant tone said, “Sorry, Ms. Donsaii, we are just trying to understand what ‘went down’ on the evening in question. Some things on the AV record of the events don’t make much sense to us.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Now, here you’re cocking back to throw as he steps forward with the gun.”

“Yes sir.”

“And he reaches out with the gun and you start to throw the cue ball.”

“Yes sir.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That…” there was a catch in her voice, and Stewart saw a tear begin to trickle down her face. “That I didn’t… know what to do.”

“Yet you were throwing the ball.”

“I couldn’t think of anything else that might stop him in time.”

“You didn’t think of ducking like everyone else?”

“No sir, he wasn’t trying to shoot me.”

“So,” Neville said with a tone of disbelief. “You just wildly threw a cue ball? What were you hoping to do, distract him?”

“No sir, I was… hoping… to break his arm,” she croaked.

“You expect us to believe that? That you were actually aiming for his arm? You weren’t just throwing the ball to distract him and accidentally hit his arm?”

“Yes sir.”

“You were what, thirty feet away?”

“Yes sir.”

“And you were trying to hit his arm?”

“Yes sir.”

Neville snorted again, “Why not his head, or the shotgun itself if you’re such an accurate throw?”

“Sir, I didn’t want to kill him. And if I hit the shotgun it would likely just deflect the shot to hit someone else.”

“Which is exactly what happened, right?”

“Yes sir,” she whispered, burying her head in her hands.

Neville said in a tone of complete disbelief, “If we grant that you can hit what you want—why his forearm?”

Without taking her head out of her hands Donsaii said, “Distal forearm. Because driving the wrist dorsally relaxes the tendons that move the fingers, which would loosen his pull on the trigger.”

Neville looked down at his wrist and hand as he flexed his wrist back and forth watching what happened to his fingers. “So, if we believe you, in a few seconds you rationally thought out exactly where to throw that cue ball to make Williams drop the shotgun?”

Donsaii nodded her head; then lifted her wet cheeks from her hands, “I should have been able to think of something better—but I… still haven’t figured it out.”

“On the other hand, if we believe what’s actually possible, you recklessly threw that cue ball in a room full of people and it was sheer luck you didn’t hit someone with it and cause serious injury. And if we believe Mr. Williams claim that he didn’t intend to shoot anyone, just to frighten his wife and her ‘boyfriend,’ no one would have been hurt if you hadn’t knocked the gun out of his hand.”

“The gun wasn’t on safe and he’d started to pull the trigger,” Donsaii whispered disconsolately.

“What?! Did you say the gun wasn’t on safe?”

She nodded.

“You don’t know that! Maybe getting hit by a cue ball and flying through the air took it off safe.”

“If you’ll look at the video from my AI you’ll see that the red ring around the safety was visible.”

“What?” Neville frowned and spoke to his AI. A moment later video from Donsaii’s camera played the clip of Williams extending the gun across the table at his wife. “You’re full of crap,” Neville said. “No red ring is visible.”

Donsaii’s eyes dropped back to the table in front of her. “It was visible when Williams first took it out of the case.”

“Bullshit.” Nonetheless Neville ran the video back. There, as the gun came out of the case and lay flat, the red ring around the safety button was readily evident. Neville said, “OK, I’ll grant you that it wasn’t on safe, but how do you know he didn’t put it on safe after he took it out of the case?”

Donsaii didn’t look up. “His finger never got near the safety.”

They all watched carefully as the sequence ran again. She was right, Williams’ finger never got near the safety. Without commenting on that Neville said, “And you’re claiming that he was pulling the trigger?”

“Yes sir. On slow motion you should be able to see the muscles in his forearm contract and the trigger begin to depress.”

They watched the frames in question. To Stewart’s amazement, she was right.

Neville shook his head, “OK, I’ll grant you all that. Still, I don’t believe for one instant that anyone can be that accurate throwing a ball.”

Head back in her hands Donsaii shrugged her shoulders minutely. Atassi said, “Why don’t we let her try to prove whether she’s that accurate?”

Neville snorted, “Go back to the bar and give her a cue ball?”

“No, let her use that baseball you keep on your desk. She can throw it down the hall outside, it’s long enough.”

To Stewart’s astonishment, after some argument they all trooped out of the interview room to the hall. Neville went to his desk and returned with the worn baseball he liked to handle when he was thinking.

When they handed Donsaii the ball, she looked at unseeingly for a moment then tossed it up a couple of times to get a feel for it. After a moment she said, “To be accurate, I’ll have to throw this really hard.”

“Knock yourself out,” Neville said.

“What do you want me to hit?”

“The doorknob.”

“It’ll damage it.”

Several others had gathered around to watch the show and one of them snickered.

Neville said, “I’ll buy another baseball.”

“It’ll damage the knob too.”

“Lady, that doorknob’s steel. If you can damage it, I’ll buy another doorknob too.”

She shrugged, turned, cocked, and threw the ball so suddenly that Stewart didn’t really realize that it had already happened until a loud bang from the end of the hall had him grabbing for his service pistol.

Then he saw the ball bouncing oddly back toward them from the end of the hall. Its cover had split and it looked pretty deformed. He looked at the doorknob. It looked like it had a big crack in it.

He saw the others looking at one another in startlement. He told his AI to play back the video of what had just happened. The ball crossed the distance in just a couple of frames and struck the doorknob dead in the center.

Atassi had picked up the ball and was turning it over. The cover had burst open on one seam and strings were falling loosely through the gap.

Stewart turned to Donsaii. “I think we’ve seen enough Ms. Donsaii. You may go.”

Neville exclaimed, “But Chief! That could have just been luck!”

“Sergeant, we’ve seen the lady make two throws, hitting her target perfectly both times. If you can hit that knob from here one time in ten I’ll give you twenty bucks. Ms. Donsaii has, however, proven to my satisfaction that her throw of that cue ball was a well-reasoned and accurate attempt to prevent the death of Ms. Williams. It was not a reckless act with which she endangered people in the room.”

Neville said, “But Chief!”

Stewart held up his hand at Neville. He turned back to Donsaii. “Thank you for coming in Ms. Donsaii.”

She nodded minutely and, wiping her eyes, turned to leave.

***

The spaceplane descended back toward earth and, as gravity returned, Gary’s nausea faded. He looked wonderingly at the large pile of gossamer material in his container. His “graphene spinner” had, to the best of his ability to test out here in space, worked perfectly. It had taken some adjusting, so he was glad he’d actually flown up into space with the machine instead of trying to have someone else run it for him. Once he’d gotten the settings right… it had begun spinning a three inch wide strip of graphene as fast as the drum the carbon condensed onto could be turned with the motors he had. At first he hadn’t recognized it was working because the graphene was diaphanous as smoke and it wasn’t until quite a bit had piled up in the receptacle that he’d realized that the machine was working.

The stuff in the receptacle was multilayered graphene about two nanometers in thickness according to his estimates. If it were perfect, the three inch wide strip of barely visible membrane should withstand more than three pounds of tension.

He twisted a piece of it up into an invisible fiber. He couldn’t see it but could feel it when he tugged on it where he had it wrapped around his fingers. He tried to break it. The fiber might not be visible, but he could see the deep groove in made in his skin! As he stared at it, blood started to seep from the groove!

He took great care to unwrap it the same way he’d wrapped it on for fear of getting a tangle he couldn’t undo without cutting off a significant chunk of his own flesh. It had hardly hurt, just like when he’d once cut himself with a really sharp piece of obsidian. However, it started to throb. He had thought he’d be able to pull on it until it broke to find out how strong it was but since it had cut him before it broke he couldn’t estimate if it would take the three pounds he’d calculated.

Nonetheless, he was astonished that something he couldn’t really see could be so strong. He knew the science and the numbers—it still seemed unbelievable.

He couldn’t wait to get back down to earth and test it with something other than his fingers.

***

Menahim accepted another call from Avral over the secure PGM link. “Have you received approval yet?”

“No, they want to know if there is someone else in the organization you can deal with?”

“Someone else?!”

“Yes, someone else. Not so prominent, yet knowing how to make ports. Perhaps more susceptible to bribes.”

“No, I don’t really think anyone else understands the ports. But how could I know? I would have to bribe or capture someone to find out what they knew before I would know. The only one that we can be sure knows what we need is Donsaii! It would be foolish to expend resources, and perhaps alert them, trying to capture someone else. Besides, who knows what other amazing devices Donsaii might develop in the future? We need her, not some weak substitute.”

“Nonetheless, they want you to explore the possibilities. Perhaps that woman who is one of the leaders of the Portal Technologies division of D5R. She’s an electronics engineer and so probably understands the electronics necessary to energize a port. Then all we need is to be able to make the actual disks of the ports themselves. That can’t be all that hard and she probably knows enough about it that our scientists could figure it out.”

Avral sighed, “This is stupid. If we take her and she’s useless, their guard will be up.”

“So, don’t ‘take’ her. Offer her millions.”

“Absolute stupidity.” Avral spat, cutting the connection. He sat back musing. Since his wife had been killed by Islamic extremists when he was only twenty, he had given his life to protection of other innocents. However, he recognized that sometimes he could be somewhat of an extremist himself. In an effort to keep from that path he made every effort to follow orders, no matter how much he was tempted to interpret them creatively.

His temptation was to try to find this Vivian Varka woman alone with Donsaii, then make an offer to both of them and capture them both if they refused. But… he finally admitted to himself, that would be too far from his agreement with himself to follow orders.

He closed his eyes and sighed. Varka was not who they needed though, and he had a grim feeling about negotiating or taking her.

When they had to go after Donsaii later, she’d be on her toes…

***

At a knock on his door John Parker looked up from contemplating how his forearm ended at its midpoint. “Yes.”

The door creaked open a crack, “John? It’s Ell.”

The raspy voice didn’t sound like Donsaii. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her. He’d watched the video of the shooting and the gun wouldn’t have fallen from the man’s hand and blown his arm off if she hadn’t thrown that damned cue ball.

On the other hand, how could he condemn her? She’d done the right thing, and it had saved Shelly’s life. Throwing that ball was the only thing Donsaii could have done. John would hope he would have done the same in her place, if he’d seen what was about to happen. But… it had cost him his hand! Could he forgive that? Finally he croaked, “Come in.”

The door opened a little farther and she slipped in. John’s eyes widened, she looked like shit! Her perfectly proportioned body remained graceful and amazing in a black blouse and slacks but her eyes were red rimmed and her nose looked like it had been rubbed raw. Her hair was a mess. She slipped hesitantly to the side of his bed and knelt as if she were praying. “I’m so… so sorry John. I should… should have been able to do something… else… to stop that man.” Tears began to pour down her cheeks.

John had been prepared to hate her for the loss of her hand, instead he found himself saying, “There wasn’t anything else you could have done. Shelly’d be dead.”

She took a gasping breath, “And then I should have been here when you woke up but the police had me down at the station to question me. And… I’ve been sitting outside for hours now, too chicken to come in to apologize. I’m… so, so sorry. Lisa saw me and told me to come on in.”

John’s wife Lisa had left about ten minutes ago. He could picture the two women talking until now. “Lisa said D5R would continue my salary?”

“Yes,” she pulled a Kleenex out of his bedside box, “they’ve bought you an annuity that will pay your current salary with cost of living increases as long as you live.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, “So, even if D5R goes bankrupt you’ll still have an income. I… I know it doesn’t replace your hand,” her voice broke as she glanced at where his hand should have been, “but at least you don’t have to worry about supporting your family.”

“What I’d like,” he paused and cleared his throat, “would be if D5R would fit me with one of the hands we’re putting on the waldoes. I’ve been looking at the myoelectric hands they make for amputees and they’re complete crap compared to the hands on the waldoes.”

Donsaii’s eyebrows rose, “Really?” she whispered querulously.

“Really, the myoelectrics they showed me are still powered by batteries, believe it or not, instead of through ports. With those batteries they weigh a lot or you have to carry a battery pack on your belt with a wire to the prosthesis. They have very limited sensory capabilities so you can’t hold a delicate object for fear of crushing it because you don’t know how tight you’re squeezing it. You can’t get something out of your pocket because you can’t tell if you’ve got a grip on anything but the inside of your pocket.” He ran down this litany sounding more and more frustrated. In a flat tone, “Really. They’re terrible.” He grimaced, “Our waldo hands are much better.”

She frowned, her distraught expression gone in the face of a problem to solve, “But, the waldo sensation is fed back to your intact hand.”

“Yeah, but surely we can do something better.”

She looked thoughtful, “Roger and Emma are starting a project with a biomechanics grad student trying to use ports to connect electronically to nerves. They’d be a long way, even from a trial, in humans. I don’t even know what’s involved in doing that kind of stuff, but we could talk to them about your ideas.”

“Really?” he said, startled. He’d been wondering why prostheses couldn’t be hooked directly up to nerves.

She nodded.

He looked thoughtful a moment, then said, “Can I transfer to Quantum Research and work on it myself, instead of trying to keep up with it from afar?”

She glanced at his missing hand and croaked, “John, whatever you want to do… will be OK. I’m sure Roger and Emma would love to have someone in QR with a true interest.”

***

Carter looked around in amazement. He’d been working in and on the big steel box out in space.

Or his “waldo” had.

He’d been learning how to maneuver it from place to place and do a number of tasks. John Parker, the guy who’d hired him had gotten hurt shortly after his hiring, though the circumstances of his injury still weren’t clear to Carter. The guy’d gotten shot at some kind of “after work” function which made Carter worry about what they did after work around here.

To his astonishment, with Parker gone, Carter had found himself kind of in charge of the “waldo drivers,” as they called themselves. One of the big shots in the company, a guy named Ben Stavos, gave him general directions. Parker had apparently been Stavos’ second in command on the project and had told Stavos that Carter was the best of the thirty-odd waldo drivers they had hired, which Carter had to admit was true. The other guys were still struggling with things that Carter had found himself able to do on the second day.

So Stavos had put Carter in charge of getting things done out in space. They had ten waldoes at present with more being built. Someone else was testing more people to find them more drivers because they wanted to have three drivers per waldo to keep them running around the clock.

The first task the waldo drivers were assigned was to build a bigger steel box. There’d been a big stack of steel plates outside the box he’d done his first test in. His first day on the job, when he’d “strapped in” to the waldo, as they called it, he’d found himself in a waldo outside the box. There’d been the stack of plates clamped to it. Apparently the plates and the box had been flown up together in one of the company’s “spaceplanes.” Stavos had asked him to start welding the plates into a bigger box according to a plan Stavos sent to Carter’s AI. The big box was to be built around the small box the testing had been held in. Three other guys started with him that first day and he’d bossed as they pulled a plate loose from the stack and held it to the first box.

Talk about a flail! First of all Carter himself had barely begun to master the jets that moved the waldoes around in space but the other guys were terrible with them. Fortunately, moving the waldoes from point A to point B was something that AIs were really good at so when one of the guys got their waldo disoriented and way out of  position, all they had to do was ask their AI to put them back where they had been. Or they could ask the AI to put the waldo in a certain location in the first place. Then they could lock themselves down on the steel plates with powerful electromagnets built into the bases of their waldoes in order to do work with their arms.

So Carter had told the AIs to put two of the guys’ waldoes where he wanted to attach the first plate on the original box according to the plan. He had the AIs lock them in place with their electromagnets. Then he and Alex unclamped a plate and re-clamped the stack. By the time the stack was re-clamped, the plate they’d unclamped was getting away. Carter had grabbed his corner of it and, after some flailing around, Alex had gotten a corner too. Then Carter just asked their AIs to fly them and the plate around to the other guys who were already in position. Once they arrived the first two guys had grabbed and put the plate where Carter wanted it. Once it was in position, he and Alex pulled their welders off their waldo torsos—where they attached magnetically—and spot welded the plate into place.

Then he and Alex had gone to get another plate while the other two guys worked on completing the welds.

Just as they got the next plate in place, Carter got a contact from Ben Stavos on his headset. “Carter, you and the waldo team are needed to unload an inflatable habitat from our big spaceplane.”

“Inflatable habitat?”

“Yeah, it’s going to provide us a pretty big living and working space out there. We had it assembled down here on earth and stuffed it in the big plane to take it up there. We’re going to put it next to the steel box you guys are building to give us a place for people to live and work out there. First though, we’ve got to get it out of the spaceplane so we can try to blow it up.”

“When will it be here?” Carter asked, thinking it was weird to say “here” for the location of his Waldo in space when he himself was actually sitting in a control saddle right there in the D5R facility.

“It’s there, if you aren’t seeing it, you must be facing the wrong direction.”

Carter snapped the welder back to his torso and twisted in the control saddle to activate the jets that would turn his waldo around.

Then he gaped. “Holy crap!” he breathed. A 747 hung in space not far behind him! The big planes were mostly out of service, replaced by lighter, more fuel efficient jets, but Carter was an aviation enthusiast and it was recognizable to him by its bulbous front end. His initial reaction was to wonder how it could have snuck up on him, but of course there was no sound in a vacuum.

As he stared, a puff of gas came from a ring around the nose. Then the nose began hinging up to expose the central cargo cavity. “Hey, Alex,” he said, “Turn around. You’re not gonna believe this…”

Carter and his team gradually flew their waldoes over to the front end of the 747. The nose piece mostly covered the cockpit windows but he could still see the pilots inside staring out at him. Inside the cavernous cargo area was what looked like huge wads of synthetic cloth, completely filling the cargo cavity. “Uh, Mr. Stavos?”

“I hope you aren’t going to tell me you can’t get it out of there?”

“Uh, well I’m concerned. It looks partially inflated. Did it completely fill the cavity wall to wall when it took off?”

“Uh, no. Let me look at the cargo compartment cameras… Damn! We’d pumped the air out of it through the ports inside the habitat. When it left down here it was pretty flat and had one to two feet of space around it, top and sides. Not underneath, of course.”

“I don’t think you pumped enough air out. Now that it’s exposed to the vacuum of space it’s expanded a little and looks like it’s filling the cavity pretty tightly. I’ll give it a tug.” After a moment Carter said, “It doesn’t budge. Admittedly it’s huge but, if it weren’t stuck I’d think it would have moved a little. Did you actually pump it out or did you hook it up to a port out here in the vacuum of space?”

Stavos breathed, “Damn! I can’t believe we used pumps to try to empty it when we could have just hooked it up to a port out there!”

“I think you’re going to have to hook it up to space somehow to get enough air out of it for us to pull it out of the plane.”

“OK, we’ll work on it, but we’ve got a lot of ports in the habitat and in the different layers of the outer wall. It could take a while. We’ve actually got a lot of ports that open to space in various locations around the solar system but right now we’re limited in the number of airtight connectors we can use to join them. Can you guys see the airlock? It’s supposed to be on the end that you’re looking at.”

“We see part of a large metal device.”

“OK, see if you can open it.”

“OK,” Carter said dubiously, jetting that way. “Doesn’t it have some kind of safety interlock to keep both doors from being open at the same time?”

“Oh, probably. I’m seeing if my AI can override… No it can’t. Damn, it looks like the guys flying the plane are going to be out there for a while.”

Carter said, “I think you need to close and pressurize the cargo hold. The pressure will squeeze the remaining air out of the habitat faster.”

“Oh, yeah, good idea. Let me know when your waldoes are clear of the opening.”

“OK, we’ll get back to welding that steel box together,” Carter said starting to jet back toward it and waving the other three waldoes to follow. “Let us know when you’re ready for us to try to pull it out again.”

They’d welded two more plates into place when Stavos said, “Carter, we think we’re ready for you to try it again. We’ve depressurized the hold and the habitat looks loose.”

Carter took his team over. First they tried to pull the habitat out but they had a hard time because they didn’t have much to pull against. The magnetic bases of the waldoes wouldn’t attach to the aluminum frame of the 747 so they had to hold on to the habitat with one hand and the aircraft with the other. Carter considered flying the waldo along the side of the habitat to the other end of the cargo bay and using his waldo’s jets to push the habitat out but the habitat was soft enough in its deflated state that he was afraid it would just mushroom out as he pushed. If it mushroomed up until it was up against the walls the friction could make it hard to move again. Then he realized that once that happened, the air from his jets would build up in the compartment behind the habitat and help push it out. He and Alex flew to the back of the cargo compartment and started pushing. Sure enough the habitat did mushroom. Once it had done that, Carter asked Stavos to open the ports that pressurized the cargo compartment. The air filling the compartment started pushing the habitat out into the vacuum faster and faster. A few minutes later it puffed out into space.

The 747 began pulling away. The waldo team flew around to the other side, gripped the habitat and relinquished control of their jets to their AIs. The AIs then coordinated and used their jets in combination to adjust the position of the habitat until it was stationary relative to the steel box they’d been building. Carter and his team took a break while that was being done.

When Carter once again took control of his waldo and backed it away, the habitat looked different. He realized it had already enlarged a little. They must be pouring air in to fill the central cavity. He supposed that water must be flooding into the outer walls too since Stavos had said that water would provide their radiation shielding and thermal equilibrium.

***

Fladwami spoke to his AI, “See if you can get Donsaii on the line.”

A moment later he heard her voice. It sounded raspy and flat, “Yes, Dr. Fladwami?”

“Hello, I was calling for an update on some things… Is this not a good time?”

“No… go ahead,” she said, an ineffable sense of sadness pervading her words.

With a sense that he might be interrupting a funeral, Fladwami considered just insisting that he call back at a later time. But what would he give as a reason? Finally he said, “Is there anything new on Tau Ceti? Have the publications been submitted?”

“No sir, the authors haven’t completed their manuscripts yet. Well one has, the other two are procrastinators.”

“OK, I’ve looked through the rough summary you sent me. It doesn’t look like there are any major technological advances or ‘dangerous’ knowledge that will result from your observations there?”

“Not that I see sir.”

“Have you found life elsewhere?”

“Primitive life at Alpha Centauri, probably not multicellular. Dead worlds at Epsilon Eridani and 40 Eridani A.”

“Those are the stars you’ve sent missions to so far?”

Her voice still flat, she said, “Pretty much.”

His eyes narrowed, “Pretty much?”

“We’ve sent some other missions, but those arrived very far from their target stars. Because of the distance remaining, those rockets are still in transit to their target planets, so we don’t really know what’s going on in those systems yet.”

“OK, I assume you’ll update me when you do know. Next I’d like to ask about the ‘one ended’ ports. I’m concerned about weaponization?”

“Yes, you’re right to be concerned, but we can only make them to open at distances of less than 5mm or greater than one AU. The short distance ones will be useful in medicine for relatively painless delivery of medications but of course could be used for toxins as well. I would point out that this really wouldn’t work much better than poisoning someone with a needle.”

“And with the other range being no less than one AU, it couldn’t be used as a weapon against anyone here on earth?”

“Well, yes, and remember that even if you tried to attack from more than an AU away, with an AU being 93 million miles, that the plus or minus 10% inaccuracy, means that you’d usually miss your target—by as much as 9 million miles. Not great for a weapon.”

“OK, that puts my mind at ease some. I have one further item to discuss?”

“Go ahead,” she said, still in a monotone.

He wondered if she had a migraine. “The FBI and FedEx intercepted a package addressed to the White House from a false Atlanta address a while back. It contained a port and we believe it was the first real attempt to carry out an attack of terrorism using your ports. We’re wondering what can be done to limit such attacks?”

To Fladwami’s astonishment she proceeded to list multiple strategies that Portal Tech was already implementing to make the use of portals for terrorism difficult, though of course, not impossible. “Of course,” she said, “we could try to stuff the genie back in the bottle but, on balance the ports seem to be a positive force in the world.”

“Agreed. But, we’re thinking that it would be good to have an FBI liaison to your company that could help with investigations of crimes, and of terrorism, perhaps help to brainstorm on prevention?”

“Of course, send someone by. I’ll let Portal Tech know they’re coming.”

After she signed off, Fladwami sat pulling on his lip, worried that something terrible had happened to Donsaii. He hoped not. Eventually he checked the time on his HUD. He got up and headed for the Oval Office.

President David Flood looked up as Fladwami was shown into his office. “Hey Kant.” He leaned back, “What’s shaking in the world of science?”

“Well, Ms. Donsaii… uh, I guess that’d be Dr. Donsaii, NCSU awarded her that doctorate for her work there. Anyway, Donsaii is going to shake up our world again.”

Flood grimaced, “OK, who’s gonna be pissed off this time?”

Fladwami looked blank a moment, “Oh, no, no economic upheavals this time. Some religious groups might be upset. She’s discovered primitive but intelligent aliens on the third planet of Tau Ceti.”

The President sat bolt upright and narrowed his eyes. “Too primitive to attack us?”

“Yes sir.”

Flood sagged back in his chair and closed his eyes, “Well, that’s fascinating and… aw crap. This’ll bite us on the ass somehow won’t it?”

“It shouldn’t, but, yes sir, I imagine it will.”

“OK,” he sighed, “Tell me about them…”

***

Emma knocked on the door to Ell’s office. A door that had seldom been shut in the past but had been closed almost constantly over the last three days. At a grunt from inside she pushed it open.

“I said, wait a minute,” Ell mumbled, dabbing at red eyes and wiping her nose.

Emma stepped inside closed the door and sat down across from her friend saying nothing, just resting her eyes on the distraught young woman. “Hey,” she finally said.

“Hey yourself. What can I do for you?”

Quietly Emma said, “Quit beating yourself up. You saved Shelly’s life, you tried to keep that gun from hurting anyone else. No one could have done better… Everyone but you thinks you’re a hero!”

“I tell myself that too, but I keep feeling that there must have been something…” She sighed, “It keeps replaying in my mind and in my nightmares… Oh Emma, I can’t get my freaking mind off of it!”

Emma stood and dragged her chair around to Ell’s side of the desk. The small office was cramped so it was difficult, but she got it there, then sat down and awkwardly leaned forward, putting her arms around Ell. After hugging her for a while she said, “Have you thought about going somewhere with Shan for a vacation? You could use one.”

Ell sniffed, “I think it’d be even worse. Nothing else to think about except how I failed John. Poor Shan; just got me for a girlfriend and now I’ve turned into this emotional wreck.”

Emma drew her head back and said, “I’m not going to tell you not to feel bad, ‘cause I know that doesn’t work. I am going to mention that everyone that was there that night thinks you were amazing and that you did just the right thing. They believe with all their hearts that no one but you could have saved Shelly and no one else blames you for what happened to John.”

“Thanks,” Ell whispered burying her head in the crook of Emma’s neck.

After a bit Emma leaned back and said, “Can I offer a suggestion?”

Ell picked up a Kleenex, said “Sure,” and blew her nose.

“John said you’d told him that the company would help him make a prosthetic hand based on the waldo arms?”

Ell nodded.

“We could really use your help figuring it out. John’s here talking to us about his ideas for how he wants it to work. He’s heard about Ryan’s neurotrodes and wants to be a guinea pig for them. But even if we can get John’s surgeon to implant experimental neurotrodes, there are huge issues with interpreting the motor signals and inputting sensory signals. I think you could really make a difference. Besides, I think actively helping him create the best prosthesis he can possibly have, would help you get your mind off how you think you let John down.”

Ell tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “Oh, yeah, sorting out what all the impulses mean and converting them into commands will be a real problem won’t it?”

Emma nodded.

Ell wiped her nose and got up. “Let’s go look at the issues together.”

Emma put her hand up in a halting motion, “First, let’s fix your hair.”

They found John dispiritedly hefting the forearm from one of the waldoes with his good left hand. Ell’s eyes immediately darted to the empty sleeve on his other arm. “Hi, John,” she said quietly.

“Hey. I’m having second thoughts about these waldo arms. They’re really heavy, I had no idea just how heavy.”

Ell picked it up. “Oof, that is heavy. I’m sure it would be awful carrying that around all day.” She tilted her head, “It doesn’t seem like it should have to be that heavy. Let’s open it up and see what’s inside.”

“OK.”

In short order they had a power screwdriver and were removing the outer shell. Inside the forearm they found motors. Lots of motors. Removing the palm they found that cables from the motors in the forearm went up, through the palm and into the fingers. The motors wound up the cables and the cables pulled the fingers down and around into a grasping motion. More motors and cables in the back of the forearm pulled the fingers back out to open the hand.

Ell stared the arms insides for a bit then said, “I think a lot of that is stainless steel. It doesn’t look like they were striving for low weight when they designed the waldoes. They were probably shooting for durability and low cost.”

“Why put the motors in the forearm and run everything with cables instead of having motors at each joint?”

“That’s the way our flesh and blood hands work. Most of the muscles are in the forearm pulling on tendons—which are like the cables—that go out to the fingers and pull them into position.”

Ell leaned in closer to look at the hand, “Especially to make a hand for John, it will probably be easier to adjust to his neural responses if it works, as much as possible, the same way as a normal hand. That way we can just have the neurons that normally contract a muscle activate the motor that pulls on the cable that replicates what that muscle normally does.”

Roger said, “We need some way to pull the cables without having all those heavy motors.”

Ell slowly raised her eyes to look up at him. Like a light dawning she developed more and more of a surprised and astonished look, “My God! How could I not have thought of this before? We’ve been working with ports three years plus now!” She glanced around at the others, “We just put a drive shaft through a port to supply power. Leave the motor back home!” She smacked her forehead with her palm, “We should be doing that with practically all mobile motors. Cars, planes, helicopters. None of them should be hauling the weight of their motors around with them!”

The rest of the little group stared at her. Manuel said, “Damn, it’s so obvious now that you said it!”

Emma said, “As usual, great ideas are obvious in retrospect.”

John said, “Couldn’t we just pass the cables through ports? Then the arm wouldn’t even have to have the pulleys that wind up the cables inside of it.”

Ell’s eyes widened, “Oh yeah, great idea John!”

John grinned, “I’d high five you guys, but…” he shrugged and waved his empty sleeve around.

A moment passed while everyone tried to decide whether he meant it as a joke or whether they should be appalled. But then he grinned at them and they broke into a laugh.

“Treat me normally, guys,” he said, “you’re going to build me a great hand and I don’t want you dancing around worried that you might offend me.”

Emma frowned, “Do you mean, treat you like we would a normal human, or treat you like we’d normally treat a weird dude like you?”

He snorted as the group laughed, “Hah, I thought it would take longer than that for you to start giving me shit. I think I’d like it better if you were still on tenterhooks around me.”

“Oh, hell no! You’ve given us permission, now you’re going to have to suck it up and take the crap as we dish it out.”

Ell watched this interchange with raised eyebrows, partly appalled and partly relieved. “Uh… back on task? Seems like we need to buy the design files for the waldo hands. That way we won’t have to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. Then we modify them as needed in order to size a hand correctly for John and create one that has four fingers instead of an index and a mitten paddle. To get the weight down further we need an engineer to tell us which parts we can make out of titanium and which ones we can make out of carbon fiber. We might be able to hire the engineering from the company that makes the waldoes in the first place. Using a braided polymer instead of cables will save weight, but we need to find out which polymer will best tolerate the wear from rubbing up against the sleeves they feed through. We also need more and smaller sensors on John’s hand than there are on the waldo hands. Oh and temperature sensors too.”

Roger said, “We’ll need to provide proprioceptors too.”

Ell frowned, “Proprioceptors?”

“Yeah, proprioceptors."

“Oh, yeah. Joint position sensors?”

“I’ll bet the body uses tendon position and tension sensors too.”

“OK,” Ell said, “Hire people and companies to do this stuff for us wherever you can so you guys can continue thinking creatively. I’ve got authorization from the board to spend as much as we need on this.” She stood and looked around. To her dismay John’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her eyebrows drew together, “John?”

He waved dismissively, “Tears of joy my friends, tears of joy.” He croaked and then wiped ineffectually at the tears, “Thanks for what you’re doing, not just for me but for everyone else out there who’s missing a limb.”

Chapter Five

Having put their name on the list with the hostess, Vivian and Chardet picked their way into the bar and took two adjoining seats. Vivian wondered for a second whether she’d ever feel comfortable using her newfound wealth to pay off a hostess so that they could be seated immediately. Mentally she shrugged. It certainly would be pointless tonight, she and Char were having a night out to enjoy themselves. Rushing to get a table would be counterproductive to the whole “evening out” endeavor. Besides the Wolfpack were playing tonight and she might be able to keep up with the score if Char didn’t catch her eyes on the screen behind the bar too often. After a glance at the score Vivian said, “So which denizens of this bar should we discuss?”

Char got a wicked grin on her face, “Let’s talk about the lesbian couple down at the end.”

“Oh, come on! Those two are absolutely straight, hoping to meet some handsome young men in here tonight.”

Char extravagantly rolled her eyes, “Not a chance, look at…” she trailed off looking at the people on the other side of Vivian.

Vivian glanced into the mirror to see what was happening at the barstool on her left. A man handed the young lady next to Vivian something and she and her young man got up. Vivian wondered if the woman was a prostitute. She frowned, but why the guy? Her pimp? The guy who’d given the young lady something didn’t go with her however. Instead, he sat down in the seat next to Vivian! Vivian had felt like she’d been surreptitious, watching the events in the mirror, but the man caught her eye in the mirror and gave her a little wave.

Vivian’s eyes narrowed. This guy obviously had paid the couple off so he could have the seat. She glanced around, wondering what could be so desirable about the seat. It didn’t seem particularly special other than being next to her. Men just didn’t usually… pursue Vivian. Besides, the fact that she and Chardet were a couple was obvious to most people. That couldn’t be it.

Quietly the man said, “Hello, Ms. Varka.”

Vivian felt astonishment wash over her. Was this someone she knew? She looked at him a little more closely. He seemed Middle Eastern. She would swear she’d never seen him before. “Uh, Hello. Do I know you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. However, I know you very well.”

Vivian frowned and glanced at Char. Char was watching the conversation suspiciously. Vivian shrugged at her and turned back to the man. “So how do you come to know me?”

“It’s my business to know you. Your expertise is extremely precious and my employer would desperately like to hire you.”

Vivian snorted, “You people are getting to have more and more gall all the time. The answer is ‘No,’ just like it would have been if you’d contacted me through email, or calling me at work, or through a head hunter. Nope. I’m happy where I am. I make enough money.”

The man smiled and held his hands out palms up, “You haven’t heard my offer yet.”

“Not interested.”

“Five million dollars a year.”

“Not interested,” Vivian said, turning back to Char.

“Ten million.”

“Go away.”

The man had ruined the bar for Vivian. He got up and left after a few more minutes. Vivian tried to get back to her snarky discussion of the various denizens of the bar with Char, but her heart wasn’t in it. Fortunately, a few minutes later their AI’s told them the hostess had a table for them.

After a nice dinner and a few too many glasses of wine, Vivian and Chardet made their unsteady way out to the curb to wait for their car. A large limo pulled up to the curb just as Vivian’s AI said, “Your car’s AI is not responding.”

A couple of large men crowded the walk behind her, making Vivian and Char step closer to the street. The door of the limo opened and hands reached out for her as something struck her buttock. She felt her muscles all give way and someone behind her lifted her into the outstretched hands of the men inside the limo. Bonelessly Vivian was dragged inside. Dropped into a seat like a sack of potatoes, she saw them dragging Char inside too. The limo door closed. The man from the bar sat across from Vivian. He shrugged apologetically, said, “Sorry,” then reached forward and pulled off the headset of Vivian’s AI. He turned it over and popped the PGR chip out. Another man dropped into the seat next to Vivian and applied cable ties to her wrists and ankles. Her head lolled to the side as the limo pulled away from the curb. It all had taken less than a minute.

A few minutes passed before Vivian felt her muscle control returning. She worked her mouth and tried a groan. To make sure she could speak she glanced at the man from the bar and said, “Asshole.”

He shrugged unrepentantly, “I tried to negotiate.”

Vivian spoke her emergency activation signal, “Hamlet.” She hated Shakespeare so the chance of her accidentally setting off her emergency alert by saying “Hamlet” had seemed miniscule.

The man tilted his head quizzically, “What?”

Vivian worked her mouth and said, “I mean dammit!” To her relief she heard her AI speak in her ear. “Message received. Have contacted the police, D5R security, and Ell Donsaii.”

Vivian felt surprised. She hadn’t thought Donsaii was on the list of contacts… But, on reflection… she was very glad. “Who are you?”

“Call me Abe.”

***

Lying in bed, Ell had been scanning through audio-video snippets from Tau Ceti Three that had been marked “interesting” by whoever had viewed them originally. Her AI Allan spoke in her ear. “Vivian Varka has been abducted. She has activated our emergency procedure via her implanted port. Per her request when the implant was placed, its activation has released the AV archive from her AI to us. Your security team and the police have also been notified.”

Ell had her jeans on and was pulling on a shirt, “Do we know her location?”

“Yes, at present she is proceeding east on I-40 at typical highway speeds.”

Ell snatched her “emergency” backpack and flew down the stairs, “We’ll follow her. Power up the car and connect me to Steve.”

As Ell dropped into the driver’s seat of her car, Steve’s voice came through her earpiece, “Let me get back to you. I have the police on the line.”

“OK Steve. Allan, have this car follow Vivian. Let me see the last 10 minutes of her audio video record prior to her call.” Ell leaned back in the seat to look up at her HUD. Vivian and her friend Char appeared to be leaving Maggiano’s restaurant. “Speed up to 4X.” The viewpoint of Vivian’s camera wiggled rapidly through the restaurant and out to the sidewalk. There was a squeak of high speed sound and Ell got Allan to play that segment back at normal speed.

“Your car’s AI is not responding,” it said in what Ell assumed to be the voice of Vivian’s AI.

Ell said, “Are we able to contact Vivian’s car?”

Allan responded, “No, it’s off line.”

Ell went back to watching the audio-video record. Vivian’s sudden collapse into the limo gave Ell a flashback to her own kidnapping several years ago. Once Vivian had been stabilized in a seat Ell tried to see if she could recognize the people in the car with her. None of them looked familiar however. “Allan, are any of these people in the D5R database?”

“No, however, I must point out that all of them are wearing some form of facial disguise to change their appearance.”

“Oh.” Ell narrowed her eyes as she tried to pick out the various silicone prosthetics they must be wearing. She wondered if she could help the AI in determining what they might look like without the devices but concluded that they were made up well enough that she wouldn’t be much help. “Search Vivian’s record for any earlier encounters with any of those men.”

A moment later Ell watched Vivian’s encounter with “Abe” in the bar at Maggiano’s. Someone wanted Vivian badly enough to offer her large sums of money and then abduct her when she didn’t agree. Someone with numerous accomplices and with the capabilities to carry out an abduction in a very polished fashion. Professionals.

Ell worried about what it meant. Allan said, “Mr. Jacobs is ready to talk to you now.”

“Put him on. Hi Steve, what have you found out?” Ell took the wheel and ordered her car’s AI to disconnect itself from control of her car. She accelerated far above the speed limit.

“Hi, you probably already know that Vivian is in a vehicle heading east on I-40 at highway speed. Presumably, said vehicle is the limousine that she was initially abducted in. The police are aware and have dispatched unmarked vehicles to approach the limo but not to try to stop it as yet. The three members of your security team that were there at your house are following you. I and the three members of the ‘ready team’ are also on our way.” He sighed, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I can talk you into slowing down, dropping back and waiting for the team you hired for this kind of stuff to help the police take care of this?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “no doubt that would be the smart thing to do. But if there’s any chance that some of my, uh, special abilities might make a difference for Vivian… I… couldn’t live with myself if I wasn’t there. I already feel bad enough about John.”

Steve sighed again, “OK, I see you’re exceeding the speed limit. I must point out that if you’re stopped by the police rather than just being sent a speeding autosummons, they will delay you enough that you will have no chance of catching Vivian.”

“Yeah, but if I don’t speed there’s no chance that I’ll catch up to her either, I’ve got to take the chance.”

“OK, I’m sending Randy ahead of you to spring any speed traps. I assume you’ll support his legal defense if they arrest him?”

“Oh. Of course. Tell him to be careful.”

“He will. He’s had extensive training in high speed driving.”

“Now, let’s talk about what’s going to go down. The police are planning to put up a road block out in the country beyond Raleigh, at the end of a long stretch between off ramps so there won’t be any egress from I-40. They’ll appear to be checking all cars but will really only be interested in the limo. They plan to have enough men at that site to control the situation.”

Ell frowned in concentration. “That sounds pretty foolproof, but looking at the A-V from Vivian’s abduction, the team that took her looked pretty professional to me. What did you think?”

Steve sighed again, “I agree, but there’s a limit to what professionalism can buy you when the other guy has all the cards. We know exactly where Vivian is, they don’t know that we’re aware she’s been abducted. We have the police on our side whereas they are outlaws. The police can choose the location of the encounter so that it’s at a site where the limo won’t have any egress.”

“I hope this works.”

“Me too.”

***

“Sir,” one of the men in the front said, “the lead car reports a police road block up ahead. They appear to be doing a “look-see” check of vehicles.”

Abe said, “Shit,” glancing at Vivian, then back toward the front. “Take the next exit.”

“There isn’t an exit between here and there.”

“Goddammit!” He leaned back and rubbed his eyes a moment. Then he sat back up and looked around at the men with him. “Slow the limo down to just under the speed limit. Tell the truck to catch up to us. Have the lead car leave a weapon in plain sight to get the roadblock cops excited and distracted.” He narrowed his eyes at Vivian then turned to the burly guy next to her, “Cut her loose.” To Vivian he said, “Strip.”

“Strip?” she asked indignantly.

The burly guy leaned over and snipped the plasticuffs with a wire cutter.

“Yeah.” Abe said, “This roadblock is probably just a coincidence, but I’m not taking any chances. We’re going to make sure you don’t have any GPS tracking devices on you.”

“No! I refuse.”

He sighed, “Either take ‘em off yourself or Joe’ll Tase you. Then we’ll cut them off. Your choice?”

Vivian hesitated a moment, then, mortified, she reached for her top button.

***

Ell called Amy, “Hey, sorry to wake you up but Vivian’s been kidnapped.”

Amy, whose initial reply had sounded sleepy, suddenly sounded completely awake. “Oh, no! Do you need me to man the ‘emergency station’?”

“Yeah, I’m hoping you can get over there. Hopefully we can handle this without needing any of that stuff, but I’d like for it to be ready.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Steve spoke in Ell’s ear, “The roadblock has been set up and it shouldn’t be long before traffic starts to jam up there. On GPS, Vivian’s location is approaching the block and the speed of her vehicle is starting to drop. According to our mapping you’re only a mile or so behind them now. Randy is a little way ahead of you at the back of the pack of vehicles that are slowing for the roadblock. Barrett, Mary and Jason aren’t far behind you… What are your plans when the traffic gets jammed up between you and them?”

“I’ll pull over onto the shoulder and drive the rest of the way up to Vivian.”

“Come on, Ell! That’s just crazy! First of all, approaching that car all by yourself will give away all we’ve worked for with the roadblock. They’ll see you coming and use Vivian as a hostage instead of a kidnapping victim. There’ll be no chance that the police will be able to just open the door of the limo as if they’re doing a simple inspection, then draw weapons before the kidnappers are able to.”

Ell didn’t say anything for a moment. Just before Steve was about to check the connection she said. “Okaaay. You’re right. But how are we going to deal with it if the kidnappers have a gun in her side when the cops open the doors for their ‘look.’”

“I don’t know, but there’s at least a moderate chance they’ll just think it’s a contraband search and won’t be prepared when the cops open the door. If you show up, they’re going to know the jig’s up.”

“OK, I’ll drive up closer but stop before I look like a threat. I’ll let the cops do their thing.”

After a couple of minutes traffic had slowed to a crawl so Ell pulled out onto the shoulder. She had Allan plot her position versus Vivian’s on a map on her HUD.

Ell had just seen the limo in the distance near the roadblock when a large “four wheeler” crew cab type pickup truck with enormous tires pulled out onto the shoulder ahead of her. At first she was surprised and a little miffed that someone else was also illegally using the shoulder she thought of as “hers.”

But then she watched in horror as the truck stopped beside the limo. Several people leapt out and dragged Vivian, wearing a man’s clothing, across and into the truck. Ell accelerated hard to catch the truck, but she arrived just as it turned, drove down the embankment and right over a fence that it crushed beneath those huge wheels. As she watched it bumped its way out across a field.

To Ell’s horror a couple of the police officers ran a short distance from the roadblock and began shooting at the truck!

Ell tried to follow the truck but her Focus “high centered” on the downed fence, leaving her stuck watching the truck disappear into the darkness away from the headlights on the freeway. “Allan are you still tracking Vivian’s position on GPS? Does it say she’s in that truck crossing the field?

Allan said, “Yes. GPS lock is good. That is her in the truck.”

“Dammit.” Ell breathed. She got out of the car, telling her AI to connect her to Randy. “Randy put your hand up out the window of the car and wave so I can see you.” A moment later she saw a hand waving over the driver’s window of one of the cars up by the road block. Ell ran that way.

As Ell dropped, breathing hard, into the seat next to Randy she said, “Steve, make sure the cops know that the kidnappers took Vivian off across the fields in that big four-wheeler type SUV. Ask them to open up the road block except for arresting whoever is still in the limo. We need them to let us through so we can track those guys down.”

“Yeah,’ Steve said, “I can’t tell the police we want to pursue. We aren’t supposed to be doing their jobs. I can tell them the quarry escaped and they’ll start after them, dropping the road block in the process.”

“OK but Steve? They fired their weapons after the truck! Is that normal police procedure? Firing at a vehicle that has a hostage?”

“Really? Shit! I suppose some of the officers got a little too enthusiastic. I’m pretty sure they aren’t supposed to be firing their weapons unless they think there’s a threat to life. They’ll probably have hell to pay at an ‘after action review’ later.”

The line of cars started to move as the police began waving them through. As Randy drove past, Ell saw the limo off to the side with several police officers around it, guns drawn. “Steve?” she said, “I’m not sure I want these police knowing exactly where Vivian is. They’re a little too excitable for my taste.”

“I don’t think we should start lying to the police. I’ll tell my liaison about the shooting and ask him to get them to be more careful.”

“OK,” Ell said musingly as she watched the progress of Vivian’s GPS location on her HUD. It was following one of the smaller country roads, still heading mostly east. Ell scanned ahead trying to figure out how she and Randy could get there from one of the closer freeway exits. Of course, it would be just her luck that the kidnappers would turn back onto the freeway about the time Ell left it. “Randy, let’s take the next exit. I can see a connector to the road they’re on with Vivian.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Randy, don’t you ‘Ma’am’ me!”

“Yes Ell,” he said patiently, rolling his eyes.

Ell didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried when she saw that Vivian’s location had pulled off the road and stopped. Could they have reached their destination? Were they changing their plan—which Ell had assumed was to get to the beach and meet a boat? Was this an American group rather than a foreign one like she had assumed? Did they have a helicopter or airplane? With some distress Ell realized that the road there looked straight enough for a plane to land and take off.

***

Vivian had been shaken at every turn. First to be abducted, then to be dragged out of the limo into the truck. Again when the truck bounced off the freeway, over a fence and through the field. Now the tremendous road noise the huge tires on the truck made at speed bored into her. Now, without warning, they’d turned into the yard of one of the houses along the road. All but the driver got out at the front of the house and the truck pulled off around back. The men dragged Vivian up on the porch and, without knocking, kicked the door in.

“Abe” dragged Vivian in the door a few minutes later and she found the little family that lived in the house assembled in the kitchen.

Abe addressed the wife, a somewhat matronly woman. Pointing to Vivian, he said, “Find some clothes that will fit her.”

The woman said, “I ain’t helping you!”

Dispassionately Abe turned and backhanded her husband with his pistol. The man fell to the floor, looking dazed. Blood welled from his nose and a large cut on his cheek.

Abe pointed his gun at the woman. “Find some clothes that will fit her.”

The woman covered her mouth and shrieked but didn’t move from where she stood, her wide eyes focused on her man. In a loud, though dispassionate voice, Abe said, “Do I have to hit one of your kids too?”

The woman’s eyes flashed to her son and daughter who looked to be between the ages of five and ten. The children looked terrified. Nonetheless the daughter dropped to her knees and bravely crawled toward her father. The mother reached out toward the daughter but Abe stepped between her and the child. She stared at Abe a moment, then she whimpered and started toward the back of the house. One of Abe’s men followed her. Another knelt and started putting plasticuffs on the kids.

Abe knelt by the man who lay moaning on the floor. “I need an authorization code for your car.” The man only moaned incoherently. Abe sucked his lower lip pensively. His wife returned with some clothes. Abe said, “Give them to her,” indicating Vivian. To Vivian he said, “Change.”

Vivian turned to go around the corner into the living room and Abe said, “Joe, go with her.”

Vivian said, “I can’t have any privacy?”

Abe simply shook his head. He turned to the wife, “I need the authorization code for your car.”

The wife moaned, but Vivian heard her give it to him.

Avral/Abe turned to the driver of the truck who’d just come into the kitchen. He said, “Go. Make sure the code works and then change the code so they can’t remote it after we leave. Change the license plates and see if they have any spray paint you can use to change the car’s appearance.” He knelt and looked at the husband’s eyes, “Pupils are unchanged, just a concussion.”

For a moment Abe just stayed there wondering. Was that roadblock really for them? Or just a coincidence? If it was for them, how had they been tracked? He got up and stepped out of the kitchen. Quietly he spoke the name of the driver of the limo so his AI would connect him, “Did you get through the road block?”

There was no answer.

Next he said, “Eliom,” the name of the man from the lead car. “What happened at the road block?”

“I left my Glock lying out on the front seat like you asked. They didn’t even notice it. Just glanced in the window and waved me through. Did you guys get through OK?”

“Damn! No. We turned off the road in the truck. I can’t reach the guys in the limo so I think they got picked up by the police. I don’t know how they found us, any ideas?”

“You took the woman’s AI and shut it down?”

“Yes. I’m not an idiot.”

“Obviously, we’ve missed something,” Eliom said patiently. “I’m just making sure it isn’t something obvious. Have you discarded the AI in case it has a tracker in it? Have you gone over the woman to make sure she doesn’t have one on her?”

“The headband was in the limo so if that’s what they tracked, it’s gone now. I made her change her clothes, but I’d better search her. Shit!”

Vivian had put on a large t-shirt and some baggy sweatpants. They were a little bit big, but better too big than too small. Abe came into the room and said, “Hold still.” He stepped close and ran his hands over her scalp through her hair. He unhooked her earrings and handed them to Joe, “Smash these.”

Joe put them on the table, pulled out a pistol and smashed them with its butt.

Abe had turned back to Vivian. “Take off the shirt.”

Vivian felt her face getting warm but slowly took it off. She’d had her clothes off in front of these men twice already. However, dragging it out by doing things slowly gave the D5R security team more time to catch up. And, being naked remained embarrassing no matter how many times she did it.

She hoped the fact they were searching her meant that the D5R team was causing them some problems.

Abe walked around her, “Lift your arms.” He made another circuit, “Lift your breasts.”

Humiliated, Vivian did as she was told. He let her put on her shirt, then had her take off the pants for an inspection of her lower regions. By the time he was done she was completely mortified, but at least he hadn’t felt the skin beneath her ear where she had her implant nor looked at the back side of her front teeth where the port to the microphone had been glued. He had peered into her ear, but apparently it was too dark in her ear canal for him to see the little disk of the port next to her eardrum.

Suddenly, in her ear she heard Ell’s voice. “Vivian, cough once if you can hear me.”

Vivian coughed.

Ell said, “We’re almost to your location which looks to be someone’s rural home. Cough once if you think they’re staying there for the night, twice if they’re moving on. Sniff if you don’t know.”

Vivian sniffed.

Abe said, “OK, tie the family up in here, we’re headin’ out.”

Vivian coughed twice.

The men dragged the husband into the living room and attached his ankle to a post for the stair railing with plasticuffs. Then they attached the rest of the family to him with more plasticuffs. Abe walked around the periphery studying what they might be able to reach if they all stretched out. He decided they couldn’t reach anything to free themselves or contact the authorities.

As Abe’s group guided Vivian out the door to the car, Abe turned to Vivian and said, “I’m not a monster you know. It would be safer for us to kill those people. But I have nothing against them. I’ll even call in a day or so to make sure someone rescues them. It’s just that… this technology of Donsaii’s that your company is making… it’s too dangerous. It should never have been released. Your government should never have permitted it.” This last he said quietly but vehemently. He held the car door open for her, then got in beside her. To the driver he said, “Continue toward site QR, stay on back roads.” He turned back to Vivian, “However, now that you have loosed this monstrous technology on the world, I must make sure that my people have access to the most advanced portals and the weaponry that can be created with them.”

“Who are your ‘people’?”

“Ah, that I will not tell you. And, if we are captured, they will deny knowing we even exist. My people cannot afford to wake the slumbering giant.”

“Slumbering giant?”

“America,” he said darkly.

In her ear Vivian heard Ell say, “Viv, keep your mouth open so we can hear what’s going on better.”

Vivian parted her lips. The car pulled out onto the road and accelerated rapidly.

***

Ell ground her teeth in frustration. Randy had just pulled over to the side of the road, barely in view of the house that Vivian had been in. But then Vivian had coughed twice and Ell’s plan to approach the house had been aborted. Minutes later the abductors had left the house and gotten in a sedan out front. Ell wondered where the truck was but then thought she saw a fender behind the back corner of the house. It was hard to tell in the moonlight.

As the car pulled out on the road Ell said, “Follow them.”

A moment passed in which Randy did nothing. “Randy?”

He turned to her. “We want to follow them from out of sight; we’ve got them on GPS after all.”

Ell narrowed her eyes, considering. “Don’t we want them running? Maybe they’d make a mistake.”

Randy shrugged, “Running in a car, the mistake they’d be likely to make would be to get in a wreck. We are trying to keep Ms. Varka alive, right?”

“Yeah,” Ell sighed, “but it really grates on me to sit here doing nothing.”

Randy grinned, “Welcome to my world.”

Ell grunted, “You mean that sitting around waiting for me to step in some pooh isn’t exciting enough for you?”

“My job is 99.99% utter boredom and a tenth of a percent sheer terror.” He pulled the car onto the road and brought it up to speed. Behind them they saw flashing red and blue lights. Ell turned and watched out the back as four police cars pulled up in front of the house they’d just left.

Ell said, “Steve, the cops are arriving at the house Vivian was held at, but she’s gone now. Did you tell them that she’s been taken away from there?”

“I thought you wanted the cops a little bit out of the loop since they fired at the truck? Besides, from listening to Vivian’s audio track I had the impression that they left the family from the house tied up in there and one of them had been injured. I thought it would be good for the police to find them and send for help.”

“Um, yeah, good thinking.”

“We’re about a half mile behind you, planning to stay spaced out so we don’t all come up on the kidnappers in a big group and make them nervous.”

***

The car rolled through the night, occasionally encountering other vehicles. At first Vivian hoped for rescue with every set of headlights. The entire car got tense when a set of headlights overtook them from the rear but when it passed it looked to have been a couple of teenagers in a pickup truck. It careened by; completely unaware of the unholstered guns in the car beside it.

Eventually ennui and tiredness set in and Vivian considered letting herself fall asleep. Instead, she turned to Abe. “Where are we going?”

He examined her amusedly out of the corner of his eye.

After a bit she said, “You know, if you just left us alone, we’re already doing most of what you’re hoping we’ll do.”

Abe raised an eyebrow.

“You know… to keep the ports from being used as weapons.”

He eyed her dubiously.

“No, really. On the one hand you complain that they’re dangerous. On the other you’re concerned because you can’t get them to do some lethal things that you want them to do. That’s because we’re worried about the same things you are.”

Abe grunted, “Go on.”

“So we don’t sell ports that will travel fast enough for military rockets, except to those who are building space vehicles. We’re phasing out the sale of moving ports that will transport flammables. They’re monitored for transport of toxins.”

His eyebrows rose, “You mean all that’s on purpose?”

She nodded.

He said, “Well, good for you. But you can understand of course, that we can’t let your military have this kind of tech when ours does not.”

Vivian narrowed her eyes, “We don’t sell this stuff to our own military either, and I’m not going to help you figure out how to do it for yours.”

He gave her a sad look. “You have no idea just how persuasive we can be.”

She narrowed her eyes, “I’ll kill myself.”

He put a hand on her arm and as if sympathetic, said, “Then we would kill every member of your family that we can find. Until then, we’ll just kill them one at a time if we think you aren’t helping us like you should.”

Vivian jerked her hand back and stared at him in horror, “You… are a monster.”

Grimly, “I do what I must for my people. A few deaths in your family can hardly compare to millions of my peoples dying for the lack of your technology.” As unaffected as if they’d been discussing the weather, he leaned forward and addressed the driver. “We’re close enough. Let’s find a house where we can get some rest and get another car. Then in the morning you can take this car on down to check site QR and be sure it’s clear before the rest of us approach it.”

About ten minutes later they bumped off the road to a double wide “manufactured” house with a quad cab pickup truck out front. Once again everyone got out but the driver. He pulled the sedan around behind the house. They peremptorily kicked the door of the home in. Vivian waited on the porch with Abe until one of the other men returned and said, “Clear.”

As they escorted Vivian inside she saw another wide eyed family of four, this time with two teenage sons. They were all plasticuffed to one another in the living room. Vivian, a neat freak, was appalled at the disorder in the house. Not that the men had torn it up, just that the people living here appeared to be very messy.

The men took her to the back bedroom which had a large bed. They told her to get in. Vivian looked askance at the sheets which looked none too clean. Instead of getting in, she pulled the covers up over the sheets and sat down on them. “I’m not sleeping in those sheets.”

One of them rolled his eyes. “OK, lie down in the middle. We’ll be on both sides of you so you won’t be able to leave without waking us up.”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom before I can sleep.”

He got up and looked in the bathroom. “Come ahead.”

Vivian stepped into the bathroom and started to close the door. He held it open.

“Come on! There aren’t any windows in here. Are you thinking that I’m going to go through the wall?”

He shrugged and said, “The door stays open.”

She pulled her pants down and quickly sat on the toilet, then, despite the tremendous urgency she felt, she held back from actually going. The minutes passed.

Eventually he turned to look at her and said, “Well?”

She shrugged and tried to look chagrined, “Shy bladder. I’ve never been able to go with someone else in the room.”

He sighed and rolled his eyes but closed the door.

Vivian whispered, “Ell?”

To her great relief she immediately heard Ell’s voice, “Yes?”

“I’m in the bathroom; I’ve only got a minute to talk.”

“OK, where are you in the house? Relative to the front door, we know where that is.”

“Uh, we came in and turned left down a hallway. I’m in the last room on the hall, I guess the master bedroom. We’re supposed to be sleeping until morning. I’m going to be on a bed near the back right corner of that end of the house and there’s supposed to be a guard sleeping on each side of me.”

“OK, we’re going to wait about an hour for folks to fall asleep. Then you’ll hear a helicopter go by. That’s just to provide distracting noise. When you hear it, start breathing through the port on your tooth.”

“Breathing…?”

“Yeah, we’ll have opened it to the air back at D5R. It’s small so it’ll be hard to breathe enough through it, but it can be done, I’ve done it with mine. Try it now, close your mouth and try breathing through your mouth, not your nose, the air will go through the port behind your tooth.”

Wonderingly, Vivian did so and found that she could push and pull air through her tooth. It felt kind of like breathing through a small straw.

Ell said, “We’re going to gas the folks in the place and they’ll fall asleep, then we’ll come in and get you.”

Vivian frowned in concentration, “How are you going to gas them?”

“Worry about that later, first I’m going to…”

Joe yelled through the bathroom door, “Are you done?!”

“Just about.” Vivian flushed the toilet and turned on the water in the sink.

The door opened behind her and Joe looked in. “Jeez, come on!”

Vivian slowly walked to the bed and lay down stiffly on her back next to the kidnapper whose name she hadn’t learned. She wondered what else Ell had been about to tell her? She’d been lying there about two minutes, wondering at how tired she felt, yet thinking she couldn’t possibly fall asleep. Then she heard Ell’s voice again. “Viv, cough if you think it’s OK for me to talk to you now.”

Vivian cast her eyes to the right and left. It didn’t seem that the men had heard the faint sound of the port under her ear. Ell was using the implanted one, presumably because it would be even harder for others to hear. She coughed gently.

Ell said, “We’re going to get you a weapon. I’ve done this too, so I know it works. We’re going to push a small Taser dart into your mouth through the tooth port. Normally it’s fired from a Taser gun and the firing activates the dart by striking the back of the dart. We’ve modified them so that just pushing hard on the back with your fingernail will activate them. We’ll push the darts into your mouth, back end first, so try not to press hard on the back end with a tooth or something.”

Vivian felt her eyebrows rising involuntarily at the thought of having an active Taser dart in her mouth. She considered coughing twice to indicate her unwillingness to participate, but then thought about how helpless she felt at present. She coughed once instead.

Ell said, “OK, click your teeth together twice when you’re ready for us to send you a dart.”

With her mouth suddenly dry and her heart thumping, Vivian clicked her teeth twice. A moment later she felt something protruding from the back of her tooth and sliding over her tongue. It seemed very long! She was just wondering if it was going to gag her when Ell said, “OK, that’s almost the whole thing. Remember the end by your front teeth is sharp. Sniff when you’re ready for Roger to let go of that end.”

Vivian sniffed and the dart fell free into her mouth. She carefully spit it into her hand and felt it with her fingers. It felt like it was about an inch and a half long and an eighth of an inch in diameter.

Ell’s voice said, “When you’re ready to use it, push on the back end with something firm like your fingernail. You should feel something click. Then stick it into your opponent. Only throw it in desperation. It’s not very aerodynamic without the little fins on its base and probably wouldn’t hit business end first… Do you want another one?”

Vivian coughed once and another dart slowly pushed itself into her mouth.

She lay tensely on her back with a dart in each hand, thumbs on their bases, ready to stab them into the men on either side of her.

***

Steve stared at Ell, “Come on! There’s nothing you could do over at that house that one of us couldn’t do!”

Ell shrugged, “You’re right, any of you could do the task as well as I could. But the technology is secret.”

He drew his head back, “And using this device, we’d discern the secret?”

She tilted her head, considering. She grinned, “OK, you’ve got me there. I suppose you could use it without understanding the secret, but I want it to be you, not one of the others.”

Steve nodded.

“OK. When the helicopter passes, you run along the back of the house, touching this to the wall and pulling the trigger every couple of feet. You should be about twelve inches above the foundation so that you’ll be above the floor level inside. Try to pull the trigger in time with the chopper blades’ whop-whop-whop.”

“And what’s going to happen?”

“Why,” she grinned again, “nothing, so far as you can tell.”

“OK,” he rolled his eyes, “but why are we doing it?”

“Well, after a bit, everyone inside is going to be unconscious, or close to it, then we just go in and drag them out.”

“Whatever this is won’t affect us?”

“No, not if you guys breathe through these.” Ell reached into her backpack and pulled out some snorkel mouthpieces.

Steve took one and looked at it. There was no tube going up from the mouthpiece like a snorkel would have. He put the mouthpiece in his mouth and, sure enough, could breathe through it even though it had no visible opening. “I assume it has a port in it?”

Ell nodded. “I’d like you to have every available man there at the house, so I’ll drive the car.”

Steve sighed and his shoulders drooped, “It sure is hard to keep you out of harm’s way.”

She snorted, “Driving by on the road out here isn’t going to put me in danger.”

Ten minutes later Steve spoke in Ell’s earphone, “Ready.”

“Amy,” Ell said, “As soon as Steve shoots the ports, open them up.” The gun-like device in Steve’s hand actually contained a one ended port Ell had set at twelve inches. Rolled up double ended ports would be shot through it into the house, unroll and come live on Amy’s display for her to open them. The other ends of the ports were in a pressurized tank filled with a nitrous-halothane-oxygen mixture. Forcing powerful anesthetics into the house under pressure made Ell nervous, even though the mixture contained enough oxygen that in theory it couldn’t suffocate anyone. However, if they got too deep under the anesthetics, the respiratory suppression might still asphyxiate someone. The problem would be to find the sweet spot when the people inside were dopey or asleep without being too far under.

Winding down all the windows on Randy’s car, Ell had Allan feed a helicopter soundtrack into Randy’s very impressive car sound system. Telling Allan to use her earpieces to dampen the sound she gradually turned the stereo up.

***

Vivian coughed once; then inhaled hard through the little port behind her tooth, trying to fill her lungs. The men had stirred at the sound of the helicopter approaching. Joe even sat up and looked around. Once the chopper went by and faded into the distance he laid back down with a sigh. Vivian fingered the darts in her hands, making sure the pointy ends were still outward. Then she concentrated on breathing only through her tooth.

Suddenly Joe sat up, “What’s that smell?”

Vivian tensed and pushed on the back of the dart in her left hand with her thumbnail. She felt a little click.

Joe leaned over away from the bed and said, “Lights on.” As the lights in the room brightened, he picked something up off the floor and held it up.

Vivian recognized one of the ports that could be rolled up and shoved through a smaller port.

Joe cursed and took in a breath as if he were about to shout a warning.

Vivian stabbed him with the dart.

Joe convulsed, falling off the bed and onto the floor.

The man on the other side of her was sitting up. Vivian thumbed the back of the other dart. When he leaned up over her to look at Joe on the floor, Vivian stuck the second dart into his thigh.

He thrashed once and fell on top of her. Vivian shoved him off, pulled a deep breath in through the port and opened her lips to speak, “Lights off. Roger, give me another dart.”

With relief she immediately felt another dart begin to push in over her tongue. She plucked it out, took another deep breath and said, “Another dart.”

The car stopped at the side of the road and Ell ran toward the house. “Vivian, what’s happening in there?”

“The smell tipped them off. I Tasered the two in the room with me. I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the house.”

Ell said, “Steve, we need to get in the house now!”

Avral/Abe woke at a loud thump from the back bedroom. He sniffed. Something sweet was in the air. Holding his breath, he staggered to his feet and headed toward the bedroom with Varka Kom as in in it. He felt drunk and happy. Someone had gassed the place! From his euphoric feeling he realized they must be using nitrous oxide. Stepping into the bedroom with Varka he saw her lying on the bed, apparently unconscious. Golan/Joe was on the floor beside the bed. Probably the “thump” that awakened him. Shimon lay unconscious beside Varka on the bed.

Steve put the snorkel mouthpiece in and kicked the door, surprised when it slammed open easily. The lock had obviously been broken when the kidnappers entered. He could see a dangling piece of the duct tape that had been holding it shut. To his dismay, just as he was about to dive through the door someone inside started shooting wildly. Holes appeared around the door frame. He couldn’t shoot back, he didn’t know where Vivian was!

Holding his Taser pistol at the ready, Steve stepped to the side of the door.

Randy kicked in the back door of the house and Barrett dove low into the kitchen. A man staggered into the kitchen and fired a gun wildly toward the open back door. Barrett shot him with his Taser.

To Steve’s astonishment, a man simply fell out the front door at his feet. He dragged him to the side and spoke to Mary, “Check and cuff him.”

She nodded and knelt beside the man as Steve dove through the doorway.

Vivian watched through slitted eyes as Abe stumbled into the room with a gun in hand. He stepped to the window and used the butt of the gun to hammer the glass out of it. Then he leaned out the broken window and took a couple of deep breaths. He turned toward her and grabbed her wrist.

Playing dead, Vivian thumbed the back of the dart in her other hand. When Abe pulled her up and toward the window she stabbed him with the dart. He flailed to the floor. Vivian staggered against the wall as he fell past her.

For a moment she considered trying to climb out the window, but people were shooting guns in the other room. Playing dead seemed to be working pretty well for her so she dropped back onto the bed and whispered, “Roger, another dart please.” A moment later she felt it pushing into her mouth.

Abe moaned and Vivian peered over the edge of the bed at him. The other two guys had gone under from the gas once they were Tasered, but Abe had had a couple of clean breaths. When he started to rise, she stabbed him with another dart and said, “Roger, another dart.”

A shadow darkened the doorway and she tensed. He pulled something out of his mouth. “Vivian?” It was Steve’s voice.

Vivian stood up and started toward him.

Ell appeared at the other end of the hall saying, “Amy, shut down the ports. Vivian, get outside. Steve, we’ve got to get these men out of here and away from the gas before one of them dies on us.”

Vivian went down the hall and saw Mary and Barrett cutting the family free of their cuffs. She grabbed the smaller of the two teenagers by the wrists and started dragging him toward the front door, surprised at how heavy he was. Once she had him on the patio she lowered his arms slowly so his head wouldn’t bump down too hard. She leaned close. Happily she could tell the boy was breathing. She looked up as Steve dropped Abe off his shoulder and laid him down next to the boy.

To Vivian’s utter astonishment Ell came out the door next with the big burly “Joe” in a fireman’s carry. Vivian’s eyes widened as she lowered him to the ground next to the others. Mary dragged out the other teenager and Jason came out with the husband. The men went back in to get more unconscious people and Mary knelt beside Vivian, checking the victims and applying plasticuffs to those who weren’t part of the family.

Ell brought another one out over her shoulders, dropped him to the ground and immediately leaned down to give him a couple of breaths. She sat up and examined him a moment, then gave him two more. He shuddered and took a deep gasping breath on his own. She watched him take a couple more breaths, then asked Mary to cuff him too. She headed back in the house.

Vivian stood shakily and then went back in the house and looked around. All the people seemed to have been moved outside. Ell was opening all the windows and picking ports up off the floor and stuffing them in her backpack.

Red and blue flashing lights reflecting in through the windows signaled that the police had arrived.

Back outside, Vivian took a deep breath. She sure hoped they hadn’t hurt Char.

Ell came up to her, “Hey, Viv. I’m so sorry about this. Your friend Chardet is OK. How are you holding up?”

Vivian threw her arms around the young woman and squeezed so hard she shook. “I’ll be OK Ell… thanks!”

Avral rose back into consciousness on a hard surface. He felt vaguely nauseated and found that his wrists and ankles had been cuffed together. Slowly he turned his head to the side. He saw the cheap house they’d been staying in. Red and blue lights flashed off its windows and walls.

He saw Donsaii’s slender form flit from one location to another, then approach Varka who threw her arms around the girl.

Dammit! He rolled his head to stare sightlessly up at the sky. Going after Varka instead of Donsaii was like going after a wolverine’s cubs without first taking out the mother!

He resolved to give Menahim a piece of his mind the next time he saw him. He had a sinking feeling that that would be a long time from now though.

Chapter Six

Gary leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. The results of his testing on the graphene he’d spun during his time riding the D5R spaceplane out to orbit continued to astonish him.

Graphene’s properties had been evaluated years ago now by testing tiny specimens. Its tensile strength of over 100 gigapascals, or 14,500,000 pounds per square inch, made it the strongest material known to man. The problem had been that no one could make much of it. Well that wasn’t true; graphite after all was full of graphene. But no one had succeeded in making unbroken sheets of it that were very long without significant flaws that compromised the theoretical strength. But, out in microgravity, with a controlled atmosphere in the chamber, his spinner had spun out kilometers of nearly perfect graphene.

The problem he had was at the edges of the spun strip. The middle of the three inch wide band he’d spun was nearly perfect and microtesting showed it easily exceeded the expected strength figures. But the edge had a lot of irregularities and when tested as a complete specimen, tears started in them. Those flaws made it significantly weaker.

He wondered if Ell would let him go up into orbit again. He could try to make much wider ribbons, or fold over the edges and somehow trim them before they left the chamber. Or maybe he could make graphene as a tube that didn’t have an edge? A carbon macrotube so to speak.

After thinking and drawing feverishly for hours Gary thought he had a workable plan. Finally he asked his AI to try to connect him to Ell.

His heart lifted when she said, “Hi Gar’,” sounding happy to hear from him.

“Uh, hi. I wanted to thank you for lifting me and my project out to space.”

“Really?” she chuckled, “I heard you spent the first hour barfing. I didn’t think you’d be all that grateful.”

Embarrassed he said, “Well yeah, sorry about that.”

She laughed, “I puked my guts up on my first trip too. Did your experiment work out?”

Feeling a little better to hear that she’d also been space sick, Gary launched into an enthusiastic description of the graphene ribbon he’d been able to make.

“So two nanometers thick and 75mm wide?” she asked.

“Yeah. The two nanometers is very consistent but the width varies from 70 to 75mm.”

“Have you tensile tested it?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of hard to grip the ends. If you pull on the ribbon it tends to rip across from one side to the other. I’ve been twisting it into a thread, which is problematic because the resulting threads are hard to see, then I grip them and then they frequently just slip out of the grip because they lay in flaws in the grip metal. But, if they don’t slip, they break at three to four pounds… uh that’d be…”

“Thirteen to eighteen Newtons, so you’re up around a hundred gigapascals?”

“Uh, yeah,” Gary said, surprised that she could get her AI to calculate that for her so quickly.

“Wow! That’s great! Thousands of researchers have worked unsuccessfully on the large scale production of graphene for decades and now you’ve done it on your first shot! We need that stuff for what we’re doing in space. Do you think you could scale up to huge quantities?”

“Um, I hope so. Uh, if I can get a grant to build some modified versions of my current spinner, would you be willing to let me take them up in your space plane again?”

“Absolutely. But you don’t need to apply for a grant. Just get the modifications made and send us the bill.”

“Really?! We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars.”

“No problem. We really need high tensile strength materials and you’re way ahead of the pack. In fact, we’d be happy to have you work at D5R here full time if being in an academic setting isn’t all that important to you.”

Gary’s eyes goggled, “I... I’m honored to be offered the job… but I do want to keep doing research… so I’d probably better stick with academics.”

“Research is what we do. D5R stands for ‘Dimension Five Research’ after all. We’d want you to join our ‘Quantum Research’ subdivision if you came. We start scientists like you at $150K and have great benefits including your retaining 50% of your intellectual property. You know if you perfect the large scale synthesis of graphene while working for us, you should find it pretty easy to get back into academics in Materials Engineering if you wanted. Universities should be jumping at the chance to have you on their faculties.”

“That’d be awesome!” He said excitedly. “I need to check into what my contract says here at Clemson. I’ll get started on the spinner modifications and talk to my department head right away.”

“Uh, Gary?”

“Yeah?”

“You should be worried about what will happen to your existing intellectual property rights if you come to work for us?”

“Oh. Yeah. Do I need a lawyer?”

“Not for us, we’ll grant that the graphene spinning tech is something you brought into your relationship with us so we have no claim on any royalties for your existing methods. But you need to write down exactly what your current tech is because I’ll bet Clemson will feel it has a claim on that.”

“Oh.”

“And if you figure out a completely different way to make it after you start working with us, you’ll want to be able to show that you aren’t using what you brought with you from Clemson.”

“Thanks, I really hadn’t thought about this stuff.”

“My AI says that Clemson’s policy is for you to get 40% of any royalty income from your inventions. D5R’s 50% policy means that anything you invent here will pay you a little better than it would at Clemson. Really important that you have careful documentation of which is which though. The potential profits could give impetus to pretty big legal battles.”

“Uh, thanks for the advice,” Gary said, head spinning. “I think I’d better get some legal advice for sure.”

“Good idea.”

***

Vivian stepped uncomfortably to the front of the room to speak to the Portal Tech employees. She hated public speaking but this was important. “Good morning. We are taking time to speak to you this morning about something that happened to me last week. I was approached by a man interested in hiring me away from Portal Tech for exorbitant amounts of money. When I said I wasn’t interested, he then arranged my kidnapping.” She paused at the sound of indrawn breath. A susurrus of low concerned voices washed over the room. When it had abated and she felt she had their attention, she spoke again. “As you know, we’ve been concerned that something like this might happen and that’s why we’ve offered you implanted ports that would allow you to let us know if you were threatened, attacked or kidnapped. It was through just such a port that I was rescued after my abduction.

“The ports we are producing are a boon to mankind, but as I’m sure you have realized, they can be used as weapons, or to pass weapons as well. We are specifically manufacturing ports that are not easily used as weapons. However, as happened to me, groups out there who want to use ports as weapons may decide to obtain the expertise to do so by bribing or threatening you… or your loved ones. Initial indications are that the men who abducted me work for a foreign government that would like ‘weaponizable’ ports for its military.

“Not many of you have taken us up on our offer to provide you with implanted ports. Now that the potential threat has become real, we wanted to be sure you were aware and remind you of the offer for you to get an implant.

“Also, if you are approached by someone, be cautious, especially of offers that seem ‘too good to be true.’ Let us know what you’ve been offered, we can help you try to determine if it’s a legitimate offer and may be willing to make a counteroffer.

“I’ll be happy to take questions now.”

Hands went up all around the room.

***

Dr. Hanson stepped into the clinic roomette to see John Parker, the man who’d lost his hand to a shotgun blast. His wife sat with him. There also was a young woman and a man, both too old to be Parker’s children. Hanson merely glanced at the two though, focusing instead on her patient. They were probably just other relatives; people needed a lot of support after losing a limb.

After asking how he was doing she briefly examined Parker’s stump where everything appeared to be very well healed. “Well, Mr. Parker, everything seems to be going very well. On x-ray the stems appear to be very solidly fixed in your bones. We need to plan for the secondary surgery to install your transcutaneous stems. Are you up for that yet?”

“Well…"

Hanson frowned, patients sometimes had odd requests and she wondered what this one would be. “What’s that?” She studied his face carefully and glanced at his wife. It wasn’t all that unusual for patients to lose touch with reality and ask for something bizarre. She’d had a patient once ask her to reopen his amputation stump to apply some extract of pig bladder he’d found on the internet. The patient had decided the extract would make his finger grow back.

“I work for this high tech company out in the Triangle and we’ve been working with Ryan Keller here, a grad student in Biomedical Engineering at UNC.

Hanson turned to look at the young man, but found her eyes arrested when she realized that the young woman between Ms. Parker and Keller was Ell Donsaii! Astonished that she could have been oblivious to her presence until then, Hanson said, “Hello,” and nodded to both of them. “Ms. Donsaii.” She turned her eyes back to Parker and raised her eyebrows.

“Ryan has been developing ‘neurotrodes’ which can pick signals up from, and transmit to, transected nerve endings.”

Hanson’s eyebrows rose and she turned to look at the young man, “That’s fascinating. I assume that all motor impulse outflow gets picked up as one unit and all sensory fibers get the sensory signal?”

“Oh, no, each axon grows into its own individual microtube so we can separate the signal for each neuron.”

Suspicion flowed over Hanson, “Well, that’s fascinating… but surely you aren’t thinking that a grad student’s research project is ready for human implantation are you? Even if it worked there would be terrible problems with transcutaneous infection and besides there aren’t any prostheses available for such control at present.”

The people in her office glanced at one another, then Donsaii spoke, “Our company has been using waldoes with mechanical hands for its work in space. We’ve commissioned a modified version of such a hand for John.” She had reached into the bag at her feet and now she pulled out a mechanical hand.

Hanson’s eyebrows rose again. The hand appeared to be very sophisticated, with all the joints of a real hand, rather than just a few like most current myoelectric hands. Donsaii held it out to her and Hanson took it, surprised at how light it was. She’d held some myoelectrics and they were quite heavy. It must not have the motors and batteries installed yet she thought.

“Run program,” Donsaii said, apparently to her AI.

Hanson’s eyebrows shot up as the hand began flexing and extending its fingers. The thumb abducted, adducted, flexed and extended, then the wrist began flexing and extending as well. Hanson turned it to look up into the socket to see the motors, “How… how is it moving?”

“It has all the joints a hand does and polymer cables for each of the muscles and tendons, all entering through ports behind the wrist.”

Ports! Of course! This is the woman that invented them! She closed her eyes thinking “survivors guilt” is probably what’s driving this. And they are going to be so disappointed when all this effort doesn’t work. But, it would be better if I’m not the one to dash their hopes. Carefully she said, “And you want me to…?”

Ryan said, “We think we have enough small animal data to apply for an IRB (Institutional Review Board) protocol to try at least one neurotrode in a human. We need a clinician on the IRB application and we’re hoping you’d be willing?”

Somewhat beseechingly, Mr. Parker said, “I’d really like to try this. Even if it’s just with one nerve for the first run. If it ruins one of the nerves that used to go to my hand, well I’m not using them anyway. And obviously, it would be great to have the neurotrodes implanted at the same surgery as when the stems are put in.”

Hanson sat back, “How are you going to keep these ‘neurotrodes’ from getting infected where the wires come out of the skin?”

“They won’t go ‘through’ the skin. They’ll go through ports and the part of the wire that’s outside the body can be kept in an antiseptic solution.”

Hanson closed her eyes, of course. She sighed. If this worked it would be incredible. This was the kind of thing that could make the reputation of a young academic surgeon. Or totally destroy that same reputation if things went south. “This sounds exciting but I can’t take any more time to think about it while other patients are waiting. Send me your contact information and the data you have so far… I’ll get back to you.”

***

Carter leaned his waldo back to inspect his last weld. He felt pretty comfortable as a waldo driver nowadays. Last week they’d installed an airlock on the big metal box they’d been welding together. Said airlock could also connect in an airtight fashion to any of the airlocks of the huge inflated habitat which filled much of Carter’s field of view at present.

The weld he’d just finished was to hold one of a number of rocket nozzles on different surfaces of the metal box. When they’d taken the first of the nozzles out of the modified Learjet, which he thought of as the “little spaceplane,” he’d been confused by the lack of plumbing connections for fuel, etc. Then he’d remembered with some embarrassment that he worked for the company that came up with ports and that, of course fuel would be entering the rocket engine through ports hidden inside of it. “Ben?” he’d asked, “What are the rocket engines for?”

Ben had laughed, “I’ve been waiting patiently for you to ask me what you and the boys are building out there in space.”

“Well, I have been wondering. What use do you have for a big metal box?”

“Don’t be afraid to ask,” he’d said, “we want you fully engaged in the project… To be honest, mostly it’s been a test bed for space construction and a learning exercise in using the waldoes. But what you’re making while you’re ‘testing’ is a spaceship.”

Carter’s eyes had widened as he had looked at the ungainly box in a new light. “Ah, not one intended to enter the atmosphere,” he’d said, realizing that it didn’t have to be gracefully aerodynamic if it stayed in space.

“Exactly, though we only intend this one to serve as a ‘lifeboat’ for the habitat. Should something happen to the habitat once it’s occupied, we want a place the occupants can move into, that can keep them safe and even change their orbit while awaiting rescue.”

“Ah! That makes sense.”

“So, I’ve sent your AI a plan for attaching the nozzles. You should also find a bunch of ports to install inside.”

“And those ports are for?”

“Well a lot of them are just atmosphere ports to let air into the ‘ship’ from down in North Carolina. Some are for water. Some are big ones that could be used to pass food or other objects in an emergency.”

Woolgathering done, Carter pulled off his gloves and leaned back out of the waldo setup. “Ben?” he said, so that his AI would connect him to Stavos, “Everything’s installed on the…” he suddenly realized he didn’t have a name for it besides “big metal box.” He thought a moment, “On ‘Lifeboat 1,’” he finished.

After a moment Ben came on the line and responded, “Great, I’ll be down in a minute and we can take a ‘waldo tour’ of Lifeboat 1 and of the habitat to see if we think they’re ready to send people up. We’ve hired a few ex-astronauts that we’ll bring in over the next couple of days to evaluate it too. Then we’ll start trying to send some folks up, mostly research types at first.”

***

Trying to calm herself, Denise Emmerit took a couple of deep breaths. It’s only an exhibition, she fiercely told herself. Her gymnastics center put on an exhibition every December, the weekend before the Christmas break from school started. She’d worked so hard to excel and felt proud that, though only thirteen, she’d been chosen to demonstrate the vault.

Denise couldn’t resist glancing over at the “little girls” as she thought of them. They were only a few years younger than she was, but Denise remembered idolizing the older girls chosen for these demonstrations when she’d been that age. She felt very proud to have been chosen as one of the demonstrators this year, yet terrified that she would blow it. She wondered if the older girls she’d idolized in exhibitions gone by could ever have been as nervous as she felt today.

After that thought passed, she paused to wonder if her idol Ell Donsaii had ever been nervous before a meet. Thinking back to the Emmerit Christmas dinners where she’d met the famous Donsaii and even spoken to her once, she decided it would be impossible for someone as amazing as Donsaii to ever have been nervous.

Then the PA system announced, “Now Denise Emmerit will demonstrate the vault.”

Taking another deep breath Denise stood and strode to the vault lane. Trying not to focus on the crowd there for the exhibition, she found and focused her eyes on her mother as she walked up. Then training took over as she took a couple of dancing steps and stepped up to her starting mark. Focusing on the table she began her run, hit her round-off, planted her hands and… her hand slipped to the side! Panic stormed through her, at first horrified to be blowing her vault in front of the crowd, then as she spun out of control—fear of what was about to happen to her.

Gym owner Alice White was spotting for Denise. With horror she realized that the skidding plant of Denise’s hand had spun her vault off to one side. She was going to land out of Alice’s reach. Worse, as Alice tried to leap forward, she recognized that Denise was going to come down out in the crowd! Picturing injuries to both Denise, and the people Denise crashed into, she began berating herself for letting people sit so close.

But then one of the spectators rose to her feet, stepped slightly to her left and gracefully caught Denise by the arm, righting her and lowering her to the ground… unharmed. The woman had made this feat look as if it were a simple, easy thing to do—like the rest of us might catch someone who stumbled.

Gawking, Alice realized that somehow Ell Donsaii had come in and seated herself in the audience without anyone really noticing. She had a ball cap pulled low to cover her signature hair, her HUD was darkened and baggy workout clothes concealed her elegant shape.

Still, how could the world’s most famous gymnast have come in and seated herself at a gymnastics event without causing huge excitement?

Astonished to have arrived on the ground unhurt, Denise looked up to see who had caught her and found herself staring into Ell’s twinkling eyes. Agog, she swallowed but found herself unable to speak.

Ell smiled down at her, “At the Christmas dinner a couple of years ago, I promised you I’d watch you perform some of your gymnastic skills.” She tilted her head and shrugged, “but we got interrupted by a comet. I came by today to make good on my promise.”

Denise stared almost uncomprehendingly at her for another moment, then shrieked and threw her arms around Ell. Murmurs swept the room as people realized who was among them. Then one of the littler girls began clapping excitedly. Moments later a thunderous round of applause erupted and a crush of young gymnasts swept around Ell and Denise. They began jumping up and down in their excitement. Ell bent down near Denise’s ear and said, “Are you ready to try that vault again?”

Denise nodded, unable to speak.

Ell said, “Focus on where you’re going to put that hand this time, OK?”

Denise nodded again.

Ell stood up and spoke to the crowd. “OK, Denise is ready to try her vault again! Let’s back up and give her some room.”

Despite her goosebumps, Alice joined her staff in shepherding the crowd of excited people back to their seats and cajoling the young gymnasts back to their assigned locations. With some envy she watched Donsaii walk Denise back to the start of the runway, hand on the girl’s shoulder, speaking to her quietly.

Distantly Alice felt that she should be offended that someone else had taken it upon herself to coach one of her students. Yet how could you resent it when the very, very best gymnast in the world came to your gym and gave advice to someone you truly cared for?

To her surprise, Denise found that the walk back to the start of the runway with Ell speaking gently to her about her vault gradually calmed her jangling nerves. Ell explained what Denise had done wrong in the failed vault as if she had watched a slow motion replay of it, even though Denise had no idea when she would have had time to scroll it through her HUD. She had been speaking serenely to Denise since the moment she caught her. Nonetheless, Ell’s clear understanding of what went wrong, absolute expectation that Denise wouldn’t make the same mistake again and tranquil assumption that Denise would nail the next vault left her standing at the beginning of the runway, feeling better about an impending vault than she ever had before in her life. She started running down the runway in what she would later describe as a “dreamlike state.” That led to her execution of the best vault she had so far performed in her life. Not a vault of high technical difficulty, but one flawlessly performed. When she stuck her landing the room erupted in applause once again.

The other girls and boys chosen to demonstrate a particular apparatus then demonstrated their skills for the attendees, all doing well and giving Alice a sense of glowing pride. She took the microphone to congratulate them on their performances and thanked Ms. Donsaii for attending and bringing some excitement to the event. “Now, I believe Ms. Underwood has set up refreshments that we may all enjoy…” she paused to look down at Suzie Plaz, one of the younger girls who took gymnastics. Suzie might be little but she filled every space she entered with bubbling enthusiasm. Just now Suzie tugged vigorously on Alice’s jacket demanding attention. Knowing that Suzie would have something cute to say, perhaps a thanks for their famous guest, but sure to be an audience pleaser she leaned down with the mike and said, “Yes, Suzie?”

Not at all intimidated by the microphone Suzie’s voice boomed over the PA, “Please, Ms. Donsaii, will you do a ‘demonstration’ for us too?”

Embarrassed, Alice stood and said, “I’m sure we’d all love that Suzie, but Ms. Donsaii hasn’t done gymnastics for years. We should be grateful, just that she attended, without asking her to do more.” Unfortunately, Alice’s words were almost completely drowned out by the shrieking of young voices, especially the girls, clamoring for their idol. She turned to Ell and gave her an uncomfortable shrug.

Ell was looking down at Denise, who held her hand and stared pleadingly up into her eyes. Ell looked back at Alice and gave her a shrug in return. She walked to the floor exercise area and, removing her shoes, stepped out onto it, bouncing a few times to get back the feel of the sprung floor. She looked around, “Can I have some music?” she asked brightly.

A couple of moments later the opening bars of Velos’ “Concert at the End of the World” came over the speakers. Someone must know of Ell’s love for Velos. Years later Alice would most strongly remember the simple grace with which Donsaii danced simply and beautifully to the slow gentle arpeggiations of the opening section. The baggy exercise suit she had on no longer looking “dressed down” but somehow elegant as it flowed with her languid streaming motions. Everyone’s eyes followed each fluid gesture.

Then the beat strengthened and sped, the bass began to thump and Donsaii began to fly… It may have been years since Donsaii performed in the Olympics, but she left no doubt that she could still do everything she had once done, including the oh so many things Donsaii could do—that it seemed no one else would ever be able to match.

***

Morehead City, NC—Gymnastics fans everywhere were thrilled yesterday when video began to circulate of Ell Donsaii putting on an impromptu performance. This apparently occurred at the request of a child at a local gym in her home town. This floor exercise featured many of the signature moves with which she stunned the world seven years ago at the Olympics. One of the most highly watched video clips in the past 24 hours, it shows her performing the stunning moves no one else has been able to duplicate. The ease with which she performs them has renewed speculation that she may be secretly training for the next Summer Olympics…

***

After a pleasant Christmas Eve dinner with her mother, Gram and Miles, Ell spent the night at her mother’s new house. In the morning they had waffles, opened Christmas presents and then Ell left to spend Christmas evening with the Kinrais family. She felt sad that Shan hadn’t been able to spend Christmas Eve with her family, but if she were going to keep her life as Ell and Raquel separate it would have to be that way. At least, she’d realized that the island would be a place where her family and Shan could see one another.

Ell pulled off the road at a rest stop and entered the bathroom there. A couple of minutes later, Raquel left the bathroom and got into her little truck which had parked itself at the rest stop thirty minutes earlier. The truck started on its way to the Kinrais house. Ell’s Ford Focus left the rest stop a few minutes later and drove itself back to her house in Chapel Hill.

Ell bounced up the steps and touched the doorbell at the Kinrais house. The house AI said, “Hello Ms. Blandon, you are expected, please come in.” Ell heard a click as the door unlocked itself.

Shan’s mother met her in the entry with Shan right behind her, “Raquel, we’re so delighted you could spend the day with us!” They moved into the great room where a Christmas tree stood. Two young women and Shan’s dad sat nursing cups of something steaming. “Let me introduce you to Shan’s sisters, Morgan and Lane.” They rose and each gave Ell a hug which made her feel very welcome.

The Kinrais had small gifts for “Raquel” which made her glad she’d brought some for them. She ran back out to her car for some of the snorkels that had ports in them. She’d wrapped them the day before. “I hope you guys like to swim and snorkel. D5R, where I work, made a bunch of these up. The employees can buy them to give as gifts. Since they aren’t sold anywhere yet, it’s kinda cool that we can give them as Christmas gifts before anyone else can get them.”

Not surprisingly, Shan’s sisters were more excited about the snorkels than his parents. After turning the base ports on and trying breathing through the snorkels, Lane asked, “So do you see Ell Donsaii very often? At work, I mean.”

Feeling a little guilty about keeping a secret like this from Shan’s family, even though she and Shan had discussed it, Ell said, “I don’t work at the main facility very often, but I do see her pretty often when I’m there.”

Lane lifted an eyebrow, “So is she nice at work? I mean, you hear about celebrities who act all nice out in public, but then it turns out that they’re really jerks to the people they work with.”

Ell blushed, “Well… she’s always nice to me…” she glanced at Shan.

Shan grinned at Ell and said, “I’ve talked to her quite a few times, you know, ‘cause of our paper. She’s always been very nice.”

Morgan said, “Good! I’m always so disappointed to find out that someone I admire isn’t who I thought they were.” The family as a whole nodded and Lane began an anecdote about a popular television star who played a pleasant, all knowing father on a sit-com but had treated a friend of hers very badly in person.

Ell almost responded with her own story about what a jerk Michael Fentis had been to her at the Olympics. Then she remembered that she wouldn’t be able to explain what she’d been doing at the Olympics herself. After stifling herself, she sat back as the family’s conversation washed around her, thinking again about how weird it was to have people admiring her because she “knew” Ell, rather than for being Raquel. Yet how could she not like having people admire Ell more than Raquel? She’d purposely kept Raquel low on everyone’s radar after all. She snorted softly and shook her head over her own idiosyncrasies.

The dinner conversation ranged broadly and Ell found herself enjoying Shan’s family a lot. She felt quite touched when they invited her on their annual ski vacation in February, especially when Shan later mentioned that they’d always had a strict no boy/girlfriends policy in the past.

Though the Kinrais’ Christmas dinner was very nice, on the drive back to Chapel Hill Ell admitted to herself that she missed going to the Emmerit’s huge celebration. Who knows what kind of embarrassing things Grandmother Emmerit might have said this year?

Riding beside her, Shan said, “What’re you thinking about with that little smile on your face?”

“Oh, nothing. Just some pleasant ghosts of Christmases past.”

***

Stacy stepped into Benny’s and headed for the bar, looking forward to a couple of beers to take the edge off the day. Her usual stool stood open so she claimed it, “Hey Benny, you got any decent beer? Or just the usual?”

“Stacy, Stacy, you know I serve only the best to my fine clientele. The usual for you?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess it’ll have to do.”

“Let me buy that beer for the lady,” a man said from two stools over. “I’d like some advice.”

Stacy looked at the man, recognizing the fellow who’d bought her several beers a few weeks back. “Hey,” she said, lifting her chin at him, “Thanks. I’ve forgotten your name though.”

“Bart.” Basir said. “You helped me understand those port thingys that first time when I met you. Can I ask you more stuff about them?”

Benny slid a beer over to her and she lifted it at Bart. She winked, “Looks like you’ve paid for the right.” She took a sip. “Ahh, tha’s good.”

“I’ve got this old hot rod I race sometimes. Runs on gasoline. I realized that I could get quite the advantage over the guys I race against if it didn’t have to haul around a tank full of gas. Do you have any ideas about where I could get a port that I could send fuel through?” He lifted an eyebrow, “I’d pay good money.”

Stacy shrugged, “Nah, told you last time. Ports for flammables are restricted. We only make a few of them anymore. And, it would be really hard to lay hands one.”

“Hey, let’s move over to our own little table where we can talk in private. I have some ideas and I could really make it worth your while.”

Stacy’s eyes narrowed as she thought about the little talk that boss lady, Varka, had given them about offers “too good to be true.” Still, it couldn’t hurt to hear what the man had to say. “OK.” She got up off her stool.

***

Dr. Charles Rhoades left his office and saw the math department’s chairman, Jacob Bensen, a little way ahead of him down the hall. Lengthening his stride, he caught up to him, “Jacob, what have you decided about Kinrais?”

Still walking, Benson eyed him, “Well, he’s got good scores…”

Rhoades nodded impatiently.

“And that paper he’s publishing with Donsaii is an amazing piece of work, certainly a firm foundation for his doctorate.”

“More than a ‘foundation.’ His committee voted that he be granted his PhD.”

“Yes, yes, but I worry, what if he just rode Donsaii’s coattails? You know, contributed a little and she decided to list him as an author?”

“Come on Jake! She listed him as first author!”

Benson shrugged, “Maybe she’s just taking the senior author’s place as ‘last author’?”

Rhoades couldn’t believe his ears. He’d never had a student with the potential that Kinrais had, and he’d never really tried to get one a position on the faculty before. Then when Kinrais had had the insight that launched this paper, one he thought might actually win a Nobel for pulling so many things together, he’d thought the young man was a shoo in for a position. He opened his mouth to vent his spleen but Benson shied away, grinning and holding up both hands in defense.

“Come on Charlie, don’t go postal on me! I’m just pulling your chain. I called Donsaii and she was highly laudatory. Called his insight into the long distance implications of her math a ‘stroke of genius.’ She said if we didn’t want him, they’d really like to offer him a job at D5R, however, she thought he’d prefer academics. I’ve got an appointment with young Shan to offer him the job this afternoon.”

“You’re a son of a bitch, Jake, you know that?” Rhoades grinned at him and thumped his own chest, “I was going to have to go in and get my heart restarted if you didn’t give that young man a job.” He paused and narrowed his eyes, “I don’t suppose you’d let me give him the news.”

“Oh hell no. I’ve got to get on the good side of the young lion before he casts his shadow over all of us.”

***

Carter nervously watched the huge 747 based space plane maneuvering closer to the habitat. He waved, or, actually had his waldo wave, at the plane. Eventually the space plane stopped moving relative to the habitat. A couple of Carter’s waldo crew jetted over to open the cover over the large airlock adaptor that had been built into its nose. He jetted into the small airlock on the habitat and pressed the button to close the outer door. He saw the ports open and watched air blasting into the airlock, visible because it fogged a little as it shot into the vacuum in the lock. Once the gauge said the pressure was up, the inner door slowly swung open. He jetted into the habitat and told his AI to close the lock again. He glanced at the main readouts:

Temperature – 24oC

Pressure – 1.0 atmosphere

Oxygen – 21%

CO_2 – 0.035%

The atmosphere pretty much had to be right since there were a bunch of open ports connecting the habitat to North Carolina, but the readouts were up in big lights so everyone could be certain that things were OK.

He turned the waldo to wait for his guests.

When nothing happened for a while, he switched his “presence” momentarily to one of the waldoes that still hung outside. The spaceplane was just puffing into place, the airlock fitting they’d uncovered on its nose seating against the outside of the habitat’s big cargo airlock. Switching back to his inside waldo, he watched the airlock readouts and after a moment saw that the outer door had opened. Shortly afterward it closed again, the inner door cracked open and people in emergency suits with their helmets thrown back began to drift inside.

Carter grinned as he saw their eyes widen. Taking in just how huge the space inside the habitat was should confound them. At 100 feet long and 120 feet in diameter with no intervening walls it just felt enormous. The sense of “huge” was probably enhanced by the relatively featureless walls. Their lack of anything to focus on made it hard to tell just exactly how far away they were. Chuck Lane and Annie Jones, the two experienced astronauts on the trip immediately grabbed onto grab bars on the wall near the airlock. They moved from bar to bar to make room for those behind them.

Carter smiled without surprise when Guy Spaulding, the engineer from the company that fabricated the habitat, pushed through the door without grabbing onto anything and shortly began flailing around with nothing to hang onto. Chuck and Annie shook their heads in amusement. Spaulding was enthusiastic and a sharp engineer, but seemed sorely lacking in common sense. Carter began jetting that way.

When Carter had nearly reached him he said “Dr. Spaulding?” When he’d first found out that the waldoes had speakers on their torsos he’d thought it was pretty silly for something meant to be used in space. But, of course they could be used inside too where a speaker was a great help.

Spaulding continued making spastic, panicked movements, eyes rolling a little like a cow in a terror.

“Dr. Spaulding!” Carter barked at him, “Hold still!”

Spaulding suddenly froze in place, eyes spastically darting to look at Carter, or actually at his waldo—same thing to Carter’s way of thinking nowadays.

“It’s me, Carter. You met me down at the D5R facility yesterday. I’m operating this waldo in front of you. Remember,” Carter said patiently, “you have a reaction pistol in the holster at your right hip. Pull it out, point it away from the airlock and squeeze the trigger. It’ll push you toward the hand holds near the lock. Try to aim it through your center…”

Stiffly, Spaulding had jerked out the pistol shaped jet and, without letting Carter finish, had squirted some compressed air out toward the middle of the habitat. Unfortunately, he did it at an angle to his center of mass, which imparted some spin. The spin panicked him. Then, he kept his finger on the trigger too long which really started tumbling him.

“Dr. Spaulding! Keep calm. I’m going to catch you and stop that spin. Then I’ll take you to the wall. Try not to move your arms and legs.” Carter jetted closer and grabbed a passing arm, then used it to pull Spaulding to him until he had him in a bear hug. Rather than try to do it himself, he just asked his AI to stop the tumbling, which it did with a few judicious puffs of the waldo’s jets. “OK,” he said, “Now we’re going to the wall. If you’re dizzy, it should get better in a few seconds.”

Carter used just a few puffs from his jets to move Spaulding to the wall. Unfortunately, just as they got there, Spaulding threw up. That didn’t surprise Carter. After all, even without the tumbling, just being in a weightless environment made quite a few people sick. Carter had come prepared though. He pulled a port off his torso that connected to the vacuum outside, snapped it on, and quickly sucked up the barf. Even though the vacuum port was only two centimeters in diameter, the amount of vacuum it had pulling to the outside made short work of the mess.

Spaulding gradually settled down and eventually started moving around the inside of the habitat, though he was careful to keep his hands on the strap grips attached all over the inside. Lane and Jones, with their extended experience in weightless environments, were soon bouncing from one place to another and using their reaction jets to scoot around the huge cavity. Carter thought they were doing much of it in pure delight. Not to say that they neglected their inspection; just that they delighted in flying from one spot to another.

The large “cargo” airlock opened and several of Carter’s waldo crew came in with a huge bundle of material. With a little work, Carter and the other waldoes stretched it out at the far end of the habitat, attaching it at the anchor points it had been designed for. The material had been folded carefully enough that they didn’t have much difficulty with tangling. Once stretched tautly, it provided a series of hexagonal chambers like a big honeycomb that could serve as a “dorm” of sorts for visiting researchers.

Each hexagonal chamber was airtight when its door was closed and they all had their own ports connected to sea level air pressure back on earth. The idea being that if the habitat suffered catastrophic decompression, but if you were in a chamber with the door closed, you could ride out the emergency in your chamber until rescuers arrived. Besides, having fresh air constantly entering each room ensured that atmosphere didn’t get stale. Air was exhausted from the habitat near the ends and entered through numerous ports scattered everywhere. Until there was more experience with the habitat, personnel would also be encouraged to wear “emergency suits” which had open ports by each person’s chin. Then if catastrophe struck they could close their helmet, pull on their gloves and be relatively safe wherever they were.

There were even “shower” chambers in each “room” that astronauts could climb into, wearing goggles and a ported snorkel. A port on one end sprayed water and air in, while high altitude ports at the other end sucked it out, keeping a high enough air flow to keep the water moving along. In theory, at least. At the end of your shower, turning off the water port left warm Caribbean air blowing through to dry you. Chuck Lane happily tried it out, having been on many missions where sponge baths were all that were available. He came out proclaiming his delight at getting truly washed in a space environment. The fact that water and air were no longer precious commodities in space was changing life out there.

The next mission was slated to bring up another set of hexagonal chambers. These would be larger to provide work spaces for various microgravity labs and the first synthesis and manufacturing concerns that wanted to rent space on board.

After an extended examination, Spaulding, Lane and Jones proclaimed the habitat ready for occupancy. They had taken “Lifeboat 1” out for a spin. Carter felt proud as they admired its construction.

To Carter’s surprise, before leaving even Spaulding became semi-proficient at jetting around with his reaction pistol.

Chapter Seven

Hanson stepped out into the post-surgical waiting room. She glanced around and found John Parker’s wife. Stepping that way she saw Donsaii again waiting with the woman. She said, “Ms. Parker?”

The woman looked up from her book.

“Everything went fine Ms. Parker. We installed the stems and checked the osseointegration implants. The implants were fine.”

“And the ‘neurotrode?’”

“We put it on the median nerve. Of course we have no idea whether it’s going to work or not yet.”

“No… but I have faith. Thank you Doctor.”

***

Warren Newton said, “Ms. Varka, Mr. Marsden, Mr. Short, thank you for meeting with me. As you know the FBI’s main tasking for me has been to discuss how hardware modifications might be able to diminish the potential of your devices to be used for terrorism. Before we begin talking about that, I’d like to express my relief that you were successfully rescued after your kidnapping, Ms. Varka.”

Vivian nodded at him. “We’d love for you to also advise us on how we might protect our employees from such temptations and threats.”

“Well your little speech to your employees about ‘offers’ that seem too good to be true was a great step in that direction. I’d like to suggest that you offer a substantial reward for reporting such offers.”

The three leaders of Portal Tech looked at one another, then at him, “Do you think that would work? I mean, I would think that avoiding the danger involved in getting mixed up in that kind of thing would be a much more powerful impetus.”

“Imagine you were someone who’s been offered a large bribe to do something like steal plans, or circuits that haven’t been embedded yet. Or something similar? On the one hand, they have an offer of ten thousand dollars to sneak something out of the plant. Something they figure they could get out without getting caught. On the other hand they have, what?”

“We’ve already offered to match or better any offers someone might make… but I guess that was directed at someone offering them money to defect. You might have something there…” Newton leaned back in his chair. “Now about making ports safer, I think I saw that all the big ones have GPS in their electronics?”

“All the ones over 5mm, yes. The GPS circuit is tiny but the little ports are often used for things where everything needs to be really small.”

“Could the FBI give you lists of GPS coordinates for high risk terrorist targets like the White House and have you set the ports so they wouldn’t work in the vicinity of those targets without an FBI approved code being entered?”

The Portal Tech people looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

***

Carter watched again as the huge 747 based space plane crept up on the habitat. It had some of their first scientists on board as well as the scientists’ equipment and the hexagonal “work cells.” Like the “dorm” from the first trip, much of the equipment was too large to carry on the small space planes.

Carter and his waldo team had been welding together an adaptor for the airlock at the other end of the habitat. It attached to the habitat via the airlock and had attachment points for tubes to go to the smaller “bedroom” habitats that would swing around the weightless one. The rotation would provide the living quarters with centripetal simulated gravity to prevent diseases of weightlessness in longer term residents. The adaptor they were building contained the bearings that would allow the rotation. They were constructing it from very heavy steel to withstand the large loads from the rotation.

Chuck Lane and Annie Jones had been living on board the habitat since they had evaluated it earlier. They’d been trying out the facilities and had offered a number of suggestions for further additions to the habitat to make it more livable. Watching them, Carter suspected that the two astronauts were more than just friends and coworkers. They looked like they were truly enjoying their time alone in the weightless environment.

Once he could see that the space plane had successfully attached to the habitat airlock, Carter jetted over and entered through the small airlock. A couple of the other waldoes followed him. Once inside they found Chuck and Annie waiting by the big airlock as well. Though they’d been having fun alone, they were probably going to enjoy having some other people there for company.

Once the lock was open, the two astronauts took charge of shepherding the new personnel in and showing them how to use their reaction pistols to get around. A few of the new folks spun out and got sick but everyone had been pre-armed with vacuum ports to clean up the floating messes.

Carter and the other waldoes brought in the new people’s luggage, taking it to the hexagonal living cell that had been assigned to each person. Once the belongings were put away, the waldoes unloaded the big bundle that would be tensioned into place and would contain the hex cell work areas.

Carter’s shift finished about then and he passed on the work list to the second shift leader who took over his waldo. As he and Alex walked out, Alex turned to him and said, “Why are they sending actual people out there? There isn’t anything they can do out there that us waldoes couldn’t do better… and safer.”

Carter had often wondered the same. “I think that a lot of people believe we need to get real people out in space to learn how to live there. Maybe for when we run out of room down here?” After a minute he followed up with, “You know, I’d kinda like to actually go out there myself sometime. Not to stay, you understand, but just to see what it’s really like. Try a reaction pistol in my flesh and blood hands.”

“Hah,” Alex said, “you’re too late. Didn’t you see the reaction harnesses they brought up this trip?”

Carter raised an eyebrow, “Harnesses?”

“Yeah, it’s a harness that you strap on, has compressed air jets in a bunch of locations. A little “joyball” lets you move yourself around without having to line the pistol up with your center of mass. Twist the ball one way, you turn that way, move it a direction and you move that way. In fact, unless you’re purposely trying to rotate, the AI uses your jets to keep you in the same orientation and location you were in when you let go of the joyball.”

Carter snorted, “Sounds like they took all the fun out of it.”

When Carter got home Jenny met him at the door. “Hey Daddy, I need help with my science project.”

Looking down at his daughter he said, “That sounds like fun. What are you doing?”

She grinned up at him, “I’m making a model of the space habitat you’re building.” She tilted her head and looked at him with her typically serious concern, “Do you still like your job out there?”

“Yes I do. But you know I don’t really go out into space, don’t you?”

She shrugged, “I feel like you do.” She wrinkled her nose at him, then tilted her head and studied him seriously. “Is it a good job?”

Carter nodded, not knowing how to tell her that not only did he love what he was doing, but that they paid him a lot more than he had expected. The excellent salary and Abby’s frugality were going to let them get his loans paid off in just a couple more years.

***

Ell and Emma were walking over to the Quantum Research labs when Emma said, “Did you hear about Michael Fentis, the sprinter?”

Ell shook her head, taken back once again to the time he’d been so rude to her at the Olympics.

“Someone interviewing him for a Track and Field event asked whether he’d met you, ‘cause you know, you were in his last Olympics.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He said no, but his face closed up when he did… Then he volunteered that he thought you’d, ‘just gotten lucky,’ winning those gold medals.”

Ell grinned, thinking that she could picture him doing just that. Fentis was so arrogant. He would find anything that directed the spotlight away from himself and his own achievements really irritating.

Emma glanced at her, “I can’t believe you’re smiling about it, the guy’s such an ass.”

Ell shrugged. “Well he is arrogant, but he kinda has a right to be. He’s an amazing athlete.”

“I think he’s an ass. I guess the interviewer felt the same way because he said, ‘Luck?! No one’s come close to replicating any of Donsaii’s new elements in the years since!’ In response, believe it or not, Fentis said he didn’t know anything about gymnastics because he ‘didn’t really consider it to be a sport!’”

Ell shrugged and grinned, “His prerogative, I guess.”

Emma raised an eyebrow. “The interviewer jumped him for it though. He said, ‘I believe that analysis of the video of her run up to the vault showed that she runs faster than you do?’ Fentis purpled up like he was going to explode and said that ‘those videos had technical problems’ and besides, ‘everyone knew that gymnastic equipment was sprung to let gymnasts do things that couldn’t normally be done.’”

Ell smiled again, “Well, that’s true, there are springs under the floor exercise area.”

“But not the vault runway!”

Ell chuckled, “No.” They came into the QR area and she turned her head, “Hey John, how’s it going?”

Parker was sitting in front of a touch screen with pictures of the front and back of a right hand displayed. He held a stylus in his good left hand and every half second or so would touch a place on the displayed hand. Saying, “Halt,” to his AI, he turned. “It’s going good,” to them.

Ell glanced at his right arm. He had on the new myoelectric hand they’d fitted him with over at the hospital. She nodded at it, “How’s that working?”

He looked down at it and opened and closed the hand. “It’s a mixture of amazing and total crap. You see that the hand just hinges open and closed which means that it really doesn’t fit a lot of objects you might try to pick up. It has a little sensory feedback built into it, but that’s so limited that if I pick up something soft I’ll likely crush it because I have very little idea how hard I’m squeezing.” He held it up and looked at it with some loathing. “At least this is the new model with the power coming in through ports so I don’t have to carry batteries around.” He shrugged, “Also it’s pretty cool that they make these gloves to go over it. Look, they’re printed to match my other hand so I don’t look like such a freak.”

Ell didn’t say anything for a moment and Emma saw her staring at John’s prosthesis, her throat working. Emma said, “It looked like you were registering sensory points for your neurotrode?”

“Yeah,” John said, sounding more enthusiastic. “Ryan apparently has some kind of math genius roommate that ran up this software program in no time. Ryan’s neurotrode feeds a signal to one of the axons in my nerve and then I just mark on the screen where I ‘feel’ the sensation. The stylus has these little buttons that I press if I feel pain, or cold, or heat rather than just touch. Some of the axons give me weird sensations that the finger’s moving or suddenly in a different position. Right now I’m not identifying them. Just trying to write down what kinds of feelings I get from them. Then, after we’ve come up with a list of the ‘position sensations’ I get from them, I’ll go back and note those sensations on the ones that I skip this time.”

“What happens when it stimulates the ones that control muscles?”

“Oh, I already identified those. Really, that was easy. The program showed me a finger moving and I tried to move that finger the same way on my ‘phantom hand.’ Then it identified the axons that fired to try to cause that motion. Now, since the program already learned which axons control muscles, it isn’t trying to stimulate those axons during today’s session.”

“Phantom hand?”

“Yeah, amputees have the sensation that their hand is still there after it’s cut off. It’s called a ‘phantom hand.’”

“Sounds pretty cool.” Emma said.

“Yeah! Watch this.” He turned and picked up his modified “waldo” hand. “Control hand,” he said, evidently to his AI. Suddenly the waldo hand started curling some of its fingers down. John raised his eyebrows, “Pretty cool, huh.”

Emma looked at her own hand and wiggled her fingers around, then narrowed her eyes, “It seems like you should be able to do more movements?”

John grinned, “I’ve only got the median nerve hooked up so far, remember? The ulnar nerve controls most of the little muscles in the hand and the radial nerve controls the muscles that straighten the fingers back out. Without them, the hand is really clumsy. I have an appointment Monday with Dr. Hanson. Hopefully I can talk her into installing neurotrodes on the other nerves then.”

***

Frank Alston felt like getting up and doing a little jig when Donsaii actually entered the studio. She virtually never did interviews and he’d just about given up on getting one before he’d had the idea to get the Olympic committee to ask her to do it. The committee was very interested in promoting next year’s Olympics and getting an interview with the elusive Donsaii on the sports newsfeeds would really grab attention. Despite the fact that she had competed for only one day in, not the last Olympics, but the one before that, she had greater name recognition with the public than virtually any other athlete. His eyes ran over her. She had on tights and a little skirt. She had on heels, though they were much lower than he’d thought at first. Slender, short strawberry blond hair, brilliant green eyes, perfect complexion, pixie face, no makeup. My God, he thought, she’s just as beautiful in person as in all those photos I’d thought were retouched.

He stood, “Hello Ms. Donsaii, thank you so much for coming in. An interview with you will really help in promoting the coming Olympics.”

She shrugged, “I’m not at all sure that’s true. I wasn’t even in the last Olympics.”

“Trust me; you have better name recognition than any other athlete in the world.”

Donsaii frowned, “That can’t actually be true!”

“It is, it is,” Frank said, ushering her into the chair. Once they were seated and the camera people were happy, he began by asking background questions that he knew the answers to. They’d splice this stuff together later. Next he got her to comment on the upcoming Olympics which she said she, “looked forward to.” He had a feeling that she wasn’t really as interested as most sports fans, but she put on an enthusiastic air for his cameras that should serve the US Olympic committee’s purposes.

Finally Alston got to the little ‘T-bone’ he’d been working up to. Crashing in from an unexpected direction he said, “So, what do you think of Michael Fentis’ recent comments?” He hoped to get a rise out of her. Nothing like a little controversy to spark viewing.

Irritatingly, Donsaii smiled sweetly, raised her eyebrows and said, “What did Mr. Fentis have to say?”

“Well first, he said he hadn’t met you. However, we’ve found video documentation of the two of you speaking during the opening ceremony.”

“Oh yes, but at the ceremony, I just asked for his autograph. No reason he’d remember that, he gets asked for autographs all the time.”

“So, you have a ‘Fentis autograph’?”

“Well… no. I don’t think he signs very many.”

Alston felt disappointed. He’d so hoped that Donsaii would call Fentis out for being a jerk. Sports journalists hated him, but couldn’t take someone of his stature down a peg without losing future interview prospects. It would be great for someone like Donsaii to put him in his place though. “Then Mr. Fentis opined that you’d just ‘gotten lucky’ in winning four gold medals and that ‘gymnastics’ wasn’t really a sport.”

Donsaii only grinned.

After waiting a little longer for her to explode, Alston raised an eyebrow, “You’re going to let that comment stand?”

“Well, Mr. Alston,” she said pleasantly, “I was incredibly lucky to win those medals, and, certainly we’re all entitled to our own opinions. Obviously, I think gymnastics is a sport, but I doubt I’ll convince Mr. Fentis of that.” She didn’t appear the least discomfited by Fentis’ comments.

Alston leaned closer, as if revealing a secret, “The interviewer pointed out that the video record shows you running faster than his top speed during your run-up to the vault.”

Donsaii raised her eyebrows, “Does it really?”

Alston knew she must have heard that, it was all over the news back then. “Yes it does. However, Fentis blamed that on faulty video recording and ‘sprung gymnastic equipment.’”

Donsaii smiled sweetly again, “Well the vault runway is much shorter than the 100 meters. He’s probably right don’t you think? It just doesn’t seem reasonable that a girl could have outrun him. He is the ‘world’s fastest man’ after all.”

Alston almost barked a laugh; butter wouldn’t melt in that girl’s mouth! He obviously wasn’t going to get a rise out of her but, he had a feeling that with the right title for this vid clip and some incredulous responses from other interviewees, he could bring in more views than if she had gone off on Fentis like the bastard deserved. Alston wound the interview down and effusively thanked Donsaii for coming. Just before she took her mike off he said, “Is there any chance you’d enter next summer’s Olympics?”

“Oh, my goodness Mr. Alston,” she winked at him, “I’m much too old for that, don’t you think…?”

***

Stacy’s heart beat a little faster. They were making ports for small jet engines today. They’d pass flammables like Bart wanted for his hot rod. She checked her assignment. Yes, she was a “final inspector” today! This was the day she’d been waiting for with a mixture of dread and anticipation. All she’d have to do was down-check one of the ports that came to her station, then toss it in her purse. She could just place her purse next to the discard bucket so it would look like an errant throw. It would go home with her and if they caught her, she could be all wide eyed about how she’d just missed the bucket. Of course the down-checking of a perfectly good port might be harder to explain.

But really, how could they catch her? And Bart had more money than he knew what to do with. The fact that he was offering five grand for a port for his hot rod proved that! If they paid her more for this damned job, maybe she wouldn’t be tempted.

Stacy tried to ignore the fact that they were paying her more at this job than she’d ever earned before. On top of that, she’d been unemployed for a while before they hired her. As she settled into her workstation she wondered about turning Bart in for the reward Portal Tech was offering. At ten grand, it was double what Bart had offered her after all.

But… she liked Bart. He’d been nice to her. Taking her to dinner, buying her beer. He hadn’t even pressed her for sex. A real gentleman, she’d decided. Then she’d decided he was a challenge and eventually invited him to her apartment and seduced him. He’d been kinda clueless and innocent in bed, which she’d enjoyed. He hadn’t invited her over to his place yet and for a while she’d worried that he might be married. His sexual inexperience had reassured her on that point. He had taken her to the races a couple of times and he’d given her money to gamble with, though he didn’t gamble himself. That had been a lot of fun, especially when he’d let her keep the winnings. She shook her head, she couldn’t turn Bart in. She’d rather have five grand he gave her than ten grand for turning him in. Besides, why shouldn’t he have a port for his hot rod?

It’d be fun watching him race his old car too. I wonder why he hasn’t shown it to me. Men usually love to brag about their cars so much that you can’t avoid being taken out to look at one.

As the lunch break approached, Stacy tossed one of the ports into the open mouth of her purse, even though it had tested fine. “Hey, Stace’,” her friend Helen said, “that one missed the bucket and fell in your purse.”

“Oops! Really?” Stacy said, heart suddenly pounding. She hadn’t dreamed anyone would notice. She got down off her stool and stirred through her purse, “Oh my God, you’re right!” she pulled it out and tossed it in the bucket, cursing inwardly to herself.

Helen grinned at her, “Girl, you owe me a beer for keepin’ you out of jail.”

Stacy exclaimed, “Jail?! They wouldn’t send someone to jail for accidentally missing the bucket with a bad port, would they?”

“Hah! You know there’s a guy from the FBI hanging around a lot of days. He’s trying to improve our systems so none of the ports go missing?”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, they’re real serious about this stuff. They think that terrorists and foreign militaries want ports real bad.”

Still testing ports at a steady pace Stacy said, “Terrorists?” Her stomach had turned to ice. Bart said he was a redneck, but he just didn’t act like most of the rednecks she’d known. And sometimes he just didn’t understand things that any self-respecting redneck would’a learned at his mother’s knee. Could he be…?

Helen said, “Yeah, imagine you send this here jet engine port to One World Trade, then late at night you started pouring jet fuel through it…” She waggled her eyes at Stacy.

Stacy narrowed her eyes and decided that she needed to ask Bart some hard questions. She plugged in another port. She didn’t think her Bart could be a terrorist, but if there was one thing Stacy’s dad had raised her to feel strongly about, it was the “good ol’ USofA.”

***

Gary felt amazed at how fast things had moved along since he’d come up to D5R. Clemson had given him a leave of absence like he’d asked. They were pretty excited about his new process. Ell and her lawyers had helped him extensively in crafting agreements favorable to himself, both in regards to Clemson and even in regards to agreements with D5R itself.

D5R had not only agreed to pay for the newer versions of the “graphene spinner,” it turned out they had a great machine shop and excellent machinists that were able to make most of the stuff he needed in house.

They flew him up to orbit for “trials” with the new equipment whenever he wanted because they had flights going up all the time. He’d succeeded in making nearly perfect multilayer graphene thirty nanometers thick by eleven centimeters wide. Before it left the spinner, the machine trimmed it to ten centimeters, curled it so the edges touched one another and catalytically fused them together so that it formed a tube ten centimeters in circumference with a strength of 270 Newtons or about 61 lbs. This from a faintly visible tube that, when he twisted it into a thread, had a diameter under three thousandths of an inch!

The results were so exciting that they were helping him build a larger spinner to install on their new space habitat. There they would start really producing material in quantity. They’d bought the rights to production for their space enterprises but had also licensed production to sell to others for more money than he’d ever dreamed of. They needed him to make some trips up to the space habitat, setting equipment up and teaching some people to use it; then he’d be able to go back to Clemson if he wanted.

He knocked on the door to Ell’s office and felt inordinately pleased by the way she smiled when she looked up and saw him. “Gary! The master materials engineering wizard in person!” She put her hands up and made a little bowing-genuflecting motion in his direction.

“Um,” he said brilliantly, a little embarrassed but hugely proud, “it is going pretty well.”

“Pretty well!? ‘Pretty well,’ the man says! ‘Freaking astonishing,’ is how everyone else characterizes it. We’re re-designing the tethers that the new living quarters for the habitat will swing on so they can be fabricated from your graphene.”

Gary frowned, “What if it fails?”

She snorted, “Gary, the habitat will weigh at most 5,000 metric tons. At its limit, the graphene you’re making could withstand that much load with a strap having a cross section of five and half square centimeters! That’s like a one inch rope! So we use multiple straps totaling thirty square centimeters for overdesign insurance. Then, we back it up with another thirty centimeter strap that has a little slack in it, so if the first one breaks, the second one catches it.”

“Well, I’d have to run the numbers…”

“They’ve been run Gar’, but by all means run them again.” She grinned and waggled her eyebrows at him, then lowered her voice to a whisper, “You’re gonna be rich Gar’!”

***

Carter and some of the other waldoes were “standing by” near the airlocks of the habitat for a docking of one of the small space planes. He routinely had some of the waldoes waiting there during dockings because he worried that one of the pilots would come in hot and bump a space plane into the habitat. He wasn’t sure what he and the other waldoes would or could do if there was a crash, but if there was an emergency, he didn’t want to be at the other end of the habitat. Docking the space planes seemed like the most dangerous thing they did at the habitat and he’d always followed the credo that safety is job #1.

The plane had turned its back to the habitat so that the airlock adaptor on the upper surface of the plane could mate with the smaller airlock. It was very slowly moving into place on tiny puffs of air, the AI and pilot guiding it using video cameras mounted beside the airlock. Carter was connected to the audio on the flight deck of the plane so he would know immediately if they had requests for the waldoes to do anything, though they rarely did. The pilot and copilot were murmuring quietly to one another as if docking a space plane to the habitat was routine, which admittedly, it was on its way to becoming.

“We have a lock,” the copilot said, indicating that the airlock adaptor had mated successfully to the habitat. Carter turned to go and had just started to ask his AI to disconnect him from the audio feed of the flight deck when he heard a muffled but fairly loud bang.

At first he thought something had broken on his waldo, though in the vacuum he shouldn’t have heard a sound. Then he heard the cursing from the flight deck of the space plane and his heart froze.

Spinning his waldo back around he saw gas spewing out of the dorsal tail region of the spaceplane. Most of it seemed to be gushing from the upper surface of the tail end of the fuselage and squirting toward the habitat, but Carter could see a little gas spilling out in the region where the airlock adaptor was set into the plane as well.

“Emergency!” Carter shouted, starting to jet toward the spaceplane. To his AI he said, “Take over all the waldoes in the vicinity of the habitat and send them to the airlock location… Except Alex! Alex, get that big roll of Kevlar strapping and bring it to the airlock area as fast as you can!”

Carter shot his waldo into the space between the plane and the habitat to try to see what was happening. There was a large and jagged hole ripped in the upper fuselage that the air was jetting out of! What in the world? The fuselage seemed to be wiggling around instead of stable like it usually was when attached at the airlock adapter. Presumably the jet of air was wiggling it?

The wiggle suddenly got bigger and Carter reached out his waldo arms intending to ask his AI to use his jets to try to stabilize it, but then he found his waldo backing away…

No! The tail of the plane was moving away from him! Carter looked toward the attachment point in time to witness the airlock adaptor rip itself loose from the upper cabin of the plane. Huge gouts of atmosphere blasted from the hole where the airlock had been, in turn that blast of air pushed the front of the plane away from the habitat.

With horror Carter saw a person in one of the emergency suits squirt out the hole, propelled by the air flow. Then another and another and another! They rebounded off the habitat and bounced away into space! Carter found himself jetting that way. Panicked that one would get too far away to see, he was about to go after the first one, who would bounce the farthest away the fasted.

But then one shot out the hole, spinning and trailing atmosphere.

Carter realized her helmet seal was leaking. She’d pulled her arms out of the inflated sleeves of the emergency suit and was trying to hold the seal shut from inside the suit. He shot after her at the maximum velocity his jets would provide without lighting his rocket. “Jimmy,” he yelled at the first waldo he saw. They’d had lighted nameplates put on their torsos to improve workflow. “Go after the first one, Roger, the second one…” He’d told off a waldo for each of the floating emergency suits by the time he caught the woman with the leaking helmet seal. He threw his waldo’s arms around her and told his AI to stop her tumble and take them to the large airlock. Then he held onto her with only the left arm and used his right to help her hold the leaking helmet seal closed. This was one of the times he wished the waldo had legs he could have wrapped around her to hold on with. Then he could have used both hands on the seal. He also wished the waldo’s face had some mobile features on it so he could smile reassuringly at the panicked looking woman inside the bag. He had no idea who she was, so he couldn’t ask his AI to patch him through to her headset.

Though to be sure, she had plenty to be panicked about. If the seal finished giving way before he could get her in the airlock she’d be done for. As it was he could see her mouth opening wide, trying to pop her ears, bloodshot eyes darting around, chest heaving in the thin air.

Carter looked around. They were approaching the big airlock but it was closed! Speaking to his AI he told it to get the outer door on the big airlock open. “Pass this on to everyone in the habitat, ‘Emergency! We’ve had a hull breach on the space plane! The small airlock is blocked. Please open the outer door on the big airlock and have any people with medical training standing by inside. The first person I’m bringing in has sustained at least some decompression injury.’”

Annie Jones calm voice came back to him, “We’ll be standing by. Good luck.”

Looking around, he saw that some of the first victims had traveled so far, even in this short time, that he had difficulty picking them out. He realized that the emergency bags should have flashing lights on them to make them easier to see and rescue. It was lucky that he’d told off a waldo to follow each of the victims because he could see the lighted nameplates on the waldoes much better than the bags the victims were in. Actually, he realized he was locating the bags by finding the lights of the nearby waldo. He could see five waldoes and a bag for each of them. He was pretty sure five plus the one he had was all that had shot out the hole the airlock had left in the plane.

The big airlock opened and Carter scooted in with the woman. “Close the lock!” He worried that he might be keeping the others outside longer, but none of them had air leaks.

The lock closed and air started pouring in through the ports. In a moment he felt the emergency bag around the woman he’d rescued starting to soften, then collapsing. A green light came on and the inner lock door opened. He pushed the woman through to Chuck and Annie. “Close the inner lock door so I can go back out! I’ve got to help the others.”

Back outside Carter told his AI to take him to the space plane. With the AI driving he could look around to see what was happening to the victims who had bounced away from the plane. Locating the lighted name plates on the waldoes he found all five and saw that each had captured its respective emergency bag and victim. Trusting that they were on their way back to the habitat, he turned to the space plane. Impelled by the outrush of atmosphere from the holes it was slowly tumbling end over end, twisting and moving away from the habitat. One of the waldoes was following it and trying to get into the hole from the airlock. Another appeared to be trying to get a look into the flight deck through its windows.

As he approached he began to wonder how he was going to be able to follow the motion of the tumbling craft to enter the hole at the airlock. The waldo currently trying to get into the airlock had missed a couple of times already. Then he noticed that the waldo outside the cockpit of the craft had been stationkeeping on the window since he’d begun watching—despite the corkscrewing motion of the ship! Carter found himself amazed. He didn’t know any of the other waldo drivers were even close to that good.

Alex came on his comm whispering, “Carter, be forewarned that the big boss lady for all of D5R took over Ed’s waldo. So if you see a waldo out of control out there—that’d be her.”

“Bosslady?” Carter said, as he tried to line up on where he thought the airlock would be during the plane’s next twisting rotation, his idea being to try to jet through the hole as it passed his location. The waldo would get banged around but he felt sure any damage to it would be worth the ability to assess the situation better.

“Yep, Donsaii herself is out here somewhere, or rather, she’s running a waldo out here.” Alex was still whispering, presumably because his waldo control station might be close enough to Donsaii’s for her to hear him directly in the waldo room.

Carter’s brow drew together in irritation at the thought of management getting involved in something they knew nothing about. Even worse, taking a waldo away from someone who actually could use one! Then he dropped his frustration, he had no control over that situation, he could only work with what he did have control of. The airlock was rolling up to his location and he jetted toward it. Damn! Missed that time, he thought as the edge of the hole struck the head of his waldo and spun him away. Asking his AI to stop his waldo’s tumbling, he wondered if he could give his AI a command to fly him into the airlock hole and have the AI comprehend him. AI’s were great at calculating orbits, moving from one place to another and stopping tumbling, but he didn’t feel like he could even explain clearly what he wanted the AI to do in this situation and they weren’t particularly good at matching strange motions. He’d once tried to have his AI help him catch a loose steel plate and had finally had to give up and do it himself. Success in that maneuver had taken a long time which forebode significant problems with the current situation.

As Carter moved back in to have another go at shooting the airlock, the waldo that had been up by the cockpit scooted back along the twisting fuselage and into the airlock hole as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Who in all the hells was that!?

Carter shot the hole again as it came around the next time. This time he got most of the waldo through the hole before the edge hit him. It set him tumbling, but tumbling into the inside of the cabin of the craft this time, rather than outside. He overpowered his urge to ask his AI to stabilize him. If he became stationary in this orbit—something the AI could easily accomplish—the plane would still be tumbling around him. Instead, he grabbed onto one of the seatbacks with one of his powerful waldo hands. That jerked him violently around, but a moment later he was stable in the cabin, facing backward. One more person in an emergency suit was back by the bathroom. When the emergency suit had inflated it had become wedged in the tiny hallway there. He hadn’t considered that a suit might be immobilized in here. The person in the suit looked like he was safe for now, plenty of air, no leak, but how were they going to get him out? Carter turned to face forward and saw the other waldo forced up against the door to the cockpit. What the hell? The waldo didn’t seem to be trying to open the door or anything. It looked like it was trying to force its torso up against the door.

Carter blinked. The glowing nameplate on the back of the torso of that waldo said, “Ed.” He blinked again, then tentatively said, “Ed?” Alex must have been wrong about Ed having to give up his Waldo to the boss… no one without thousands of hours in a waldo could have flown it like that.

Instead of crotchety old Ed’s voice, a young feminine one responded to him. “No, sorry Mr. DeWitt. This is Ell Donsaii. I borrowed Ed’s waldo from him.”

Carter stared uncomprehendingly for long seconds, then shook off his astonishment and said, “What are you trying to do?” The way she was forcing the torso of the waldo forward against the door looked a little obscene.

“Trying to communicate with the pilots by putting the torso speaker of this waldo up against the door for direct sound transmission. From outside the cockpit windows it looks like the pilots knocked their headsets loose closing the helmets on their emergency bags so they can’t hear me through their AIs. But they’ve got the plane’s controls manually locked to prevent outside operation. With us locked out, I can’t stop the space plane’s tumbling, and unfortunately, they aren’t trying to stop it themselves.”

It was silly for her to talk to them when they were in a vacuum, sound wouldn’t transmit. Instead of pointing that out, he asked “Is the air leaking?”

“Oh, no they’ve got atmosphere on the flight deck; it’s airtight from the cabin.”

“Oh… Then why do they have their helmets closed?”

“Standard emergency procedure I suppose. Maybe some panic over the main cabin’s decompression? I’m sure they’ll calm down and figure this out any minute now… Oh wait… my AI found a back door into the plane’s controls. Thank god. Hold on, we’re going to maneuver now.”

Surprised that there would be any back doors into a plane’s software, Carter nonetheless felt some tugging from the seatback and saw the stars that had been rapidly swimming past outside the windows slow, then stop.

“OK,” she said, “A little more maneuvering as we start back toward the habitat.”

Carter felt the push but it was gentle so he started pulling himself along the seatbacks toward the back of the plane to check on the man wedged there.

He heard Donsaii say, “You have any ideas on how to communicate with them? I don’t think this speaker is transmitting enough vibration through the door for them to hear it.”

“Alex,” Carter said, “are you near the space plane?”

“About to come in.”

“Fly around to the front window and motion to the pilots to put their earpieces in.”

“OK, dropping off the Kevlar first,” he said. Carter glanced toward the front of the plane and saw their big spool of Kevlar strapping coming in the hole where the airlock adaptor had been.

Carter and the wide eyed man in the emergency bubble wedged into the back looked at each other. He tugged tentatively on the arm of the bubble to see if he could get it loose. The man looked alarmed and shook his head vigorously. Thankfully the material was fairly translucent; the man pulled his arm in out of its sleeve in the rigidly inflated suit and pointed urgently to a corner of a dropdown table that bulged into the ballooned material. Eyes widening Carter could understand why the man looked worried. If that corner ripped the bag, the guy would be done for.

Of course, Carter thought, the material had to be very strong to withstand the air pressure. But, he thought, that didn’t mean that the sharp corner couldn’t rip a hole in it. How are we going to get it loose?

Donsaii’s voice came on, “Hello, this is Ell Donsaii. My AI believes that it has established an audio connection for all of us here in the vicinity of the space plane. Since our situation seems stable at present I’d like to make sure of our communications. Mr. Anders, you’re listed as our pilot, are you able to hear me now?”

“Yes.” The pilot’s voice sounded on the edge of hysteria.

“And, Ms. Wade, you’re our co-pilot?

“I hear you.” Carter observed that the copilot sounded calm, but he wondered why the woman hadn’t been aware enough to put on her headset without Alex reminding him.

“Dr. Shelton, I assume that’s you in the back of the plane?”

Carter saw the man speak, “Yes, but I’m stuck! I don’t think you can get me loose without breaking my suit!”

Donsaii responded calmly, “We’ve got a lot of very smart people out here Doctor, we’ll figure something out. Don’t forget we’ve got plenty of time, the port in your suit can keep you supplied for an extended period.”

Carter saw the man gulp, then nod nervously, “OK, but please hurry!”

Donsaii said, “OK, I want to make you aware that the other passengers are being placed in the airlock of the habitat as we speak. Right now we have five waldoes here at the plane. Mr. DeWitt, you go by ‘Carter,’ and you’re running the lead waldo, correct?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“And we also have Alex, Megan, Will and Raj?”

A chorus of responses came back.

OK, as I see it, our first task is to get Anders, Wade and Shelton out of the plane and into the habitat. In order to do that we’ll have to depressurize the flight deck so we can get its door open. Also we must somehow get Dr. Shelton loose without tearing his suit. Ideas?”

A babble broke forth that Carter feared would degenerate into hysteria. Each of the people demanded that their own ideas be used. They expressed panicked objections to other’s proposals. He heard some shouting that “that won’t work” before ideas were even fully presented.

“OK, shut it!” Donsaii bellowed, in a good imitation of Carter’s drill sergeant from back in the day. He felt astonished that such a young, feminine voice could be so commanding and, even more, that everyone had immediately fallen silent as told.

“Thank you. Pilots, we are going to have to decompress your cabin and move you in your emergency suits at some point. Dr. Shelton, we understand you are worried, but if you can’t make a constructive suggestion, please remain quiet so our team here can do its job. Carter, you have more experience working in space than anyone else and I heard you start to say something before you were cut off?”

Astonished that she’d been able to sort the pilots’ and Shelton’s conversations out of the babble, Carter said, “Uh, yes Ma’am. Looking at the size of Dr. Shelton’s inflated suit, I don’t think we’ll be able to get the pilots out of their cabin if we depressurize it. The door’s too small.”

Carter saw her waldo look at the door beside her, then back at Shelton. “You’re right. Do you have a suggestion?”

“We’ll have to repressurize the main cabin Ma’am. Once it’s pressurized Dr. Shelton will be able to get free as well.”

“Mmm, how are we going to pressurize with that huge hole?”

“Well we can’t weld patches over the holes because all the plating we have is steel and we don’t currently have equipment that will weld steel to aluminum. However, we do have that large roll of Kevlar strapping,” he waved to the big spool. “We just need something that we can strap to the holes. It doesn’t have to be perfect, nor to hold very long, just long enough for us to get the pressure in here up high enough for Shelton and the pilots to get into the main cabin.”

“Great thinking. Let’s give it a try. If it doesn’t work we won’t have lost anything but a little time.”

“OK,” Carter said, falling immediately into his comfort zone—bossing waldoes. “Raj, Alex, go get us several of the lighter gauge curved plates from the other end of the habitat. Will, Megan, start unspooling several circuits of the Kevlar strapping around the plane so it will be ready to hold the patch over both holes. I’m going to the habitat to scrounge materials to gasket the patches. Ms. Donsaii, would you mind staying here in the plane in case we need to ask you to measure or otherwise assess?”

“No problem,” she said. He felt like she was amused at him for bossing her around, but he couldn’t take time to be embarrassed right now. As he shot over to the big airlock he got Chuck and Annie on the line and brought them up to speed on the situation. “Any ideas on materials to plug the holes with?”

“Just a minute, we’ll talk to the scientists in here.”

When Carter opened the inner door of the big airlock to the habitat Chuck Lane was there by the entrance with some big silicone pads. “Here, Dr. Pace had these wrapped around some his fragile equipment for the ride up.”

“Thanks,” Carter said, taking them and telling the airlock to close again. “Keep looking for other possibilities in case these don’t work.”

Back at the plane Carter began directing his team of waldoes to get the silicone pads over the holes. They were too small for one to cover the airlock hole by itself, so they would need to put two there, closely fitted next to one another.

Donsaii said, “Holes? There’s more than one?”

“Yeah,” Carter described the dorsal hole near the tail. “I think a meteor or piece of space junk ripped a chunk out of the fuselage with a tangential shot. The jet of atmosphere out of the hole torqued the plane against its connection to the habitat airlock and that’s what pulled the lock out of the plane’s fuselage.”

“Damn!” she said. “Sounds like we need a redesign on the airlock’s mounting. But, first priority is to get these folks to safety.”

Carter entered the space plane’s cabin with Donsaii and they worked together to position the pads while the team outside put a big sheet of lighter gauge steel over the pads and began pulling the Kevlar strapping tightly over it. One of the waldoes was a large, high power model with arms more than strong enough to pull the plate down hard against the hole using straps. Carter watched the silicone pad bulge where it was squeezed against the fuselage, first in the middle and eventually all the way around the hole as the straps slowly bent the plate down against it.

With a seal there, they left one waldo holding the single throw knot in the strapping and moved back to the small hole in the aft fuselage. The plane wasn’t exactly cylindrical there as the tail fin had started to rise out of the fuselage. After a couple of failed attempts they stacked three silicone pads on top of one another. That thick pad covered by a smaller steel plate achieved a seal as they snugged it tight.

The ports that supplied the cabin with air had never been closed, so as soon as the holes were sealed, the cabin began to pressurize. After a bit, Dr. Slater’s emergency bag began to soften and a little while later he pulled himself free. With Slater drifting free in the cabin, Donsaii simply opened the door to the cockpit.

“Hey,” Anders’ voice protested, “Hey, you aren’t supposed to be able to open that door without our permission.”

Calmly Donsaii said, “Sorry sir, when you panicked and left yourself offline we had to resort to a brute force computer attack to take over the plane’s AI. We had to be able to do this in order to stop the plane’s motion and rescue you. You no longer have control.”

Carter grinned to himself. She didn’t sound sorry, she sounded like she was just a wee bit irritated. Not anything like as irritated as he would have been if he were in charge.

Anders said in a hostile tone, “We want that door closed until the situation here is secure. There shouldn’t be any way for you to override our AI.”

Wade lifted herself out of the copilot’s chair and pushed off toward the main cabin. “Come on Mike, don’t be ridiculous. We need to get to the habitat if we want to be ‘secure’. The only way to get there is through the cabin.”

A minute passed with Anders sitting motionless in the pilot’s chair, then he drifted up out of it and pushed himself into the main cabin without saying anything.

With the pilots and Slater in the main cabin, they slowly decompressed the plane’s interior so that they could be sure the three suits were functioning safely. Then they pushed the three emergency bags through space to the habitat’s big airlock. Carter wound up pushing Anders and, watching the pilot’s stricken face, thought to himself that Anders probably wouldn’t want to fly any more missions. Not that Carter thought D5R would let Anders fly for them again, even if he wanted to.

Eventually Carter and his team got the damaged plane strapped to the habitat and the airlock adaptor removed safely from the habitat’s airlock. Fortunately, an inspection showed the lock itself hadn’t been injured. Aluminum sheets and welding equipment were ordered to do a temporary repair of the fuselage so the space plane could be flown back down to the island under AI control. The other small spaceplane was already on its way up to take the pilots and anyone else who wanted to leave the habitat back down to terra firma. It would have to make another trip back up with the aluminum patches.

When Carter and his team finally pulled loose from their waldo controllers he found Ell Donsaii standing behind him. She cleared her throat, “Hey, guys.”

When he and his team had turned to her she said, “Thanks for some truly excellent work out there. You guys,” she tilted her head, “I’m including you Megan, where I grew up we include girls in the term ‘guys,’ when referring to a group.”

Megan nodded.

Donsaii continued, “You guys,” she winked at Megan, “really saved our bacon out there. I’ll be asking the directors to put a bonus in your next pay deposit. Especially you, Mr. Dewitt,” she said looking at Carter, “for your excellent leadership in a time of crisis.”

“Thank you Ma’am,” Carter and the others chorused.

Chapter Eight

Ell’s AI, Allan said, “You have a call from Mr. Kinrais.”

“OK.” Ell put on her Raquel accent, “Hey Shan! What’s up?”

“I’m hoping to take my best girl out to dinner tonight? You up for that?”

“Sure! Well… wait. How many girls’ve you got that you have to designate me as your ‘best’ girl?”

“Aw shucks, you’re so far ahead of the pack that I don’t actually recall ever knowing any other girls!”

“Good answer, where are we going?”

“Spanky’s. See you there at 7?”

“Sounds good.”

Ell stepped into Spanky’s, and when stopped by the hostess, pointed to Shan sitting along the side wall. When she dropped into the chair she saw he already had a Coke for her, “Sorry I’m late.”

“Three minutes, Ms. Blandon, I’m so disappointed.” Shan grinned slyly at her.

“You just keep busting my chops Mr. Kinrais, I might have to demote you to ‘worst’ boyfriend.”

Shan put his hands up in a fending motion, “No, no, not that!”

Ell leaned forward, “So what’s the occasion?”

Shan leaned back, a dismayed look on his face, “What? I can’t just take my girl out to dinner?”

“Nope,” she grinned, “broke ass students don’t do that unless they are either in hot pursuit, or celebrating something. Since you’ve already overtaken, I assume you must be celebrating.”

Looking chagrined, he said, “You’re right, I am celebrating something.”

Ell raised her eyebrows, “What?!”

Shan leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “I am no longer a ‘broke ass student.’” He put his hand on his heart, “I, Madam, am now a junior member of the Math faculty at the University of North Carolina.”

With a squeak, Ell leaped to her feet, and, once he stood too, threw her arms around Shan. “Congratulations!” she whispered in his ear; then gave him a long kiss.

As they sat down again, Shan thought to himself that his getting a job really didn’t seem like much compared to the amazing things she’d achieved as Ell Donsaii. The fact that, despite this, she could be so happy and proud for him was both weird and wonderful.

Shan leaned back, “Guess who was on the big sports feed over the bar while I was waiting for you?”

Suspiciously she said, “Who?”

“That Ell Donsaii girl.”

“You’re not about to ruin our date talking about another woman are you?”

“No, no; she was just a run in to another interview with Michael Fentis.”

Ell raised her eyebrows, “And what did the redoubtable Mr. Fentis have to say?”

“Well first they ran a clip of Donsaii reacting to Fentis saying that gymnastics wasn’t a sport and Donsaii had just ‘gotten lucky.’”

Ell nodded.

“And she just agreed she’d been lucky, then ‘begged to differ’ on whether gymnastics was a sport. Very ladylike, I must say.”

“And what did Fentis have to say?”

“That he was glad to see that she understood how incredibly lucky she’d been. But then Donsaii’s interviewer asked her about the video showing she ran faster than Fentis and told her that Fentis said there had been a mistake interpreting the video. Fentis just went off about that! The video analysis had been wrong, it was easier to run in the gym, the distance was short, and no one would ever break his hundred meter speed.” Shan paused and raised an eyebrow.

Ell raised both of hers, “Well, he’s probably right.”

Shan grinned, “That’s what Donsaii said, to quote, “He’s probably right don’t you think? It just doesn’t seem reasonable that a girl could have outrun him. He is the ‘world’s fastest man’ after all.”

Ell shrugged in acquiescence.

“But then the interviewer pointed out to Fentis that she’d acknowledged him as the, ‘world’s fastest man,’ not the world’s fastest person. It looked like Fentis’ head was gonna explode! A lot of bleeping of the conversation, in which Fentis essentially said there was no way that girl could outrun any man in modern track and field, much less himself.”

Ell grinned, “He does have a very high opinion of himself doesn’t he?”

Shan leaned forward and whispered, “Could you outrun him?”

Her eyes widened in shock, “Of course not!” Then she raised an eyebrow and leaned forward conspiratorially, “Donsaii might be able to though.”

***

Stacy looked over at Bart, “Well, I almost got you a port today.”

“Really? What happened?”

Stacy told him about tossing it in her purse but someone seeing it. “She told me that the FBI’s involved in making sure no one makes off with any flammable ports. Apparently, they’re so careful with those ports because they’re worried about terrorists getting them.” She glanced at Bart out of the corner of her eyes.

He looked frustrated. “That’s crazy!” a beat later, “Do you think you can figure out a way to get me one next time?”

Stacy tossed back her beer, “Hey, sweetie, how ‘bout you show me this racing hot rod I’m stealing a port for?”

“Uh, I’d love to, but it’s in the shop right now… Getting a new… header.”

“Humpf,” Stacy leaned against him, “How about we head back to your place?” She turned to him and lifted an eyebrow, “Where we can have a little bit of privacy?”

Bart got pretty flustered. They left the bar, but not before Bart went back to the bathroom.

It wasn’t lost on Stacy that he might have called someone during his little trip to the boy’s room. She rode with him, her car following them. His car pulled into an apartment complex. She thought he’d told her he lived in a house, but now she couldn’t remember for sure that he’d definitely said that, maybe just implied it. She wondered just where he would be keeping that hot rod though. No garage after all.

When Bart’s car had stopped, he didn’t immediately get out, but turned to look at her. Stacy thought about turning to him and seeing if he’d kiss her, but her suspicion levels kept her from wanting a kiss. She opened her door. “Let’s see your place.”

Bart got out slowly and led her to his door. Inside his door, she turned brightly to him, “Wow, this is a big apartment for just one guy, what is it, three bedroom?” She glanced into the living room. Before he responded, she said, “Hey Bart? Can you forgive me? I hope you won’t feel like I was leading you on tonight, but I just remembered that I’m switching to day shift tomorrow.” She shrugged, “I’ve got to get up at six. Can I take a rain check on seeing your bedroom?” She lifted an eyebrow and tried to look flirty.

Bart actually looked relieved. “Hey, no problem.”

Before she’d been suspicious… now she despised him as well.

Basir walked her back out to her car. When he was almost back to the apartment Farshid stepped out of the shadows, “Fool!” Basir said, “You left the Quran out in plain view!”

Farshid sneered, “The word of Allah hides from no one!”

“That may be, but leaving the word of Allah out in plain sight is going to keep us from getting that port we wanted!”

“Bah,” Farshid waved dismissively, “we’ll get it from someone else.”

***

Carter’s HUD chimed and he looked up at it from the story he’d been reading to Jenny. His pay had just been deposited. Curious about the promised bonus, he told his AI to open the statement. “Damn!” he breathed.

“What is it Daddy?” Jenny said, looking at him with concern in her eyes.

“Nothing bad, kiddo,” he said smiling down at his serious daughter. “I got a bonus for helping with the rescue of those people on the space plane.”

She frowned, “What’s a bonus?”

“It’s when they pay you extra.”

Her eyes widened, “So that should help you pay down your college loan?”

“Yep,” he grinned. Jenny focused on his loan because her mother wanted so badly to pay it off before they spent money on frivolous things like going out or movies or vacations. Sometimes it seemed like the little girl looked forward to getting the loan paid off like it would be the beginning of a new life. He winked at her, and in a slightly louder voice said, “Maybe we can talk Mom into going out to dinner and seeing a movie this weekend?”

Abby looked around at them, “What?”

Carter smiled at his wife, “I got a bonus. Jenny and I are thinking we could splurge on dinner and a movie with a little of it this weekend?”

Abby looked at him and sighed, “Come on Carter, I hate always being the bad guy, but we’re still $35,000 in debt. If we can just continue to control our spending, at the rate we’ve been going we’ll have it paid off in a couple more years. Then, we can start ‘splurging.’ But until we’re actually out of debt…” she shrugged, “I want to keep to our promise to avoid extravagant spending.”

Carter turned down to Jenny and grinned, “You heard your Mom,” he stage whispered. “No frivolous spending… until my AI transfers some of this money to Bank of America.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Abby shoot to her feet, putting her hands to her cheeks, “Carter!” she squeaked, “How big was this bonus?!”

He grinned up at her and quietly said, “Fifty K.”

“Oh my God!” Abby put out her hands and Jenny, then Carter rose. She gathered them in a big hug and a moment later they were all jumping up and down together. “Oh, Kiddo,” Abby said to her daughter, “are we gonna splurge this weekend or what?!”

***

Warren’s AI said, “You have a call from Vivian Varka of Portal Technologies.”

“Accept. Hello Ms. Varka, what’s up?”

“One of our employees has been offered money to lift a flammables port. I’m not sure of all the circumstances. There may have been some seduction and a falling out, but in any case, we have an address for you and your FBI boys to check out…”

Thirty minutes after the team had arrived at the address Varka gave him, Warren’s AI said, “DNA on the doorknob matches the DNA in a house that blew up in a propane explosion in Atlanta, as well as DNA on a suspicious package diverted at the Memphis FedEx center. That package contained a port addressed to the White House.”

Abbas went to the door to take delivery of the food they’d ordered. Farshid and Basir both looked up in surprise as Abbas backed back into the room. Then Farshid found himself staring into the barrel of a weapon as men in helmets and bulletproof vests bearing the “FBI” insignia poured into the room.

As he lay on his stomach, arms cuffed behind listening to someone read him those silly “Miranda rights,” Farshid wondered, how did this happen? We were so careful!”

***

Dr. Hanson stepped into the exam room to see John Parker. “Hello Mr. Parker, sorry we’re running behind our schedule. How is your arm doing?” She glanced and saw that not only his wife, but Ell Donsaii had once again accompanied him. She continued to be surprised that someone as well known as Donsaii would come with a man to all of his appointments. Hanson had a vague understanding that Donsaii had stopped the man that shot Parker from killing a woman, and that Parker had somehow got caught with a wild blast of the shotgun. She wondered briefly if Donsaii somehow blamed herself for his injury and that was why she came with him on all these visits.

Parker smiled and said as if proud. “My arm’s OK and my hand’s great!” He held up the prosthetic hand that they’d built at D5R. “Can they be joined yet?”

Hanson’s eyebrows rose when the fingers on the prosthesis moved around in a very lifelike manner. It was hard to keep in mind that all the connections between Parker and the prosthesis, except the bone attachments, went through ports. She worried that Parker would be seriously disappointed when the prosthesis was “joined” to his arm. Most amputees expected much more from their prostheses than the devices delivered. She tilted her head, “Well, let me see how your skin has adapted to the stems.” Parker held out his arm so she could look at the metal stems protruding from the amputation site. The skin looked tightly adherent to the soft tissue binding matrix on the stems. She checked it from all angles. “Looks good. Let’s try it on.”

Parker held the prosthetic hand out to her and, feeling surprised once again at how light the prosthesis felt, Hanson fitted the sockets in the prosthesis over the stems that protruded from his skin. She snapped the fittings into place and leaned back to look at it. Parker pulled at the glove material that had been rolled up onto the wrist of the prosthesis and it came down over the junction between prosthetic and arm. Hanson blinked as Parker pulled the sleeve of his shirt down over his forearm to his wrist. The hand looked very natural! She thought to herself that if she didn’t know it was prosthetic she’d have a hard time telling without touching it. To her amazement, he reached up and smoothly unbuttoned a couple of buttons on his shirt, an immensely difficult task with a prosthesis. He stood up, reached in his pocket with his normal left hand and got out a small Swiss army knife, a chapstick and a digital key. He put the three objects in his prosthetic hand and put it into his right front pocket pulling the hand back out empty.

“Which one should I get out of my pocket?” he asked brightly.

Knowing that this task was nearly impossible with a prosthetic hand, Hanson chose the chapstick because it was the largest and perhaps easiest to for him to recognize by feel. She knew he’d have a difficulty telling if he even had anything in his fingers, much less being able to determine which object it was. She didn’t want him to be too horribly disappointed by failure.

Instead he said, “How about, chapstick pinched between thumb and index and knife between small and ring?” Pulling his hand out of his pocket, he showed them that, indeed, that is exactly how he had them. He grinned at them, “I’ve been cheating and practicing with the hand even though it wasn’t attached to me yet.”

Hanson sat back in her chair, stunned. Despite the initial data, she hadn’t dreamed they would have results like this with their first human trial. She glanced at the others and saw Parker’s wife Lisa staring joyfully at his new hand. Tears were pouring down Donsaii’s cheeks though. Parker saw them and turned to her, “Ell, aren’t you happy for me?” he asked quietly.

In a choked voice, Donsaii said, “So happy, yet...” her voice broke, “so sad.”

Parker leaned over and put his arm around her. His prosthetic arm. He gave her a hug and quietly said, “Ell, I can’t lie and say I wouldn’t rather have my own hand back, but, just think of all the people with prostheses who are going to count this as a great day in history.”

***

Morgan Kinrais admired the shape of Raquel’s slender legs in her new ski tights. Even walking in her freshly rented ski boots the girl somehow managed to appear graceful and elegant instead of awkward like most people. Raquel was supposed to be a beginner and Morgan worried that her brother wouldn’t be patient with her on the slopes. The Kinrais family members usually skied several times a season and were all pretty good. However, Shan had worked a spring semester as a ski bum and had become an excellent skier.

Unfortunately, Shan’s idea of teaching someone to ski was to take them to the top of the mountain, give them a couple of pointers and then tell them he’d check on them as he went by on each of his runs. This had been successful with several of his buddies but had left an earlier girlfriend in tears. “Shan?” When her brother had looked her way Morgan said, “You go burn off some of your energy on the black diamond slopes while Lane and I take Raquel out for an easy run down the mountain.”

“No,” he frowned, “I can go with Raquel. I’ll give her some pointers…”

“No you can’t! You’ll be all critical and lose another girlfriend. We like this one. Besides, it’s time that your sisters had a little girl time with Raquel. We’ll take it easy and have a pleasant time while you’re off beating the mountain into submission.”

Shan paused. It would be nice for Ell and his sisters to get to know each other. But, he’d been kind of looking forward to showing off in front of Ell at a sport where he could finally be guaranteed to be better than she was. It was a little hard to take, having a girlfriend who was better than he was at every sport they’d played together so far. On the other hand, he had been a little antsy about babysitting her on the beginner slopes. He’d reassured himself that, with her amazing athleticism, she’d quickly move up to the intermediate slopes. But he really didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the intermediates either. If his sisters really did want to ski with her while he blew the rust off, that’d be great. He shrugged, “OK, sis.” He pointed a firm finger, “Don’t break my girlfriend,” he admonished and started off toward the lift.

“Wait, Shan,” Raquel called.

Shan turned and stopped. Raquel strode his way in her boots, skis and poles on her shoulder. She leaned close and whispered, “How do I put the skis on?”

He frowned, “You said you’d been skiing?”

She grinned, “Nope, but I’ll learn fast and I didn’t want everyone freaking out over how fast.”

He sighed, suddenly glad that his sisters were taking her up. “Put the skis down and put the toe of your boot into the front of the binding.”

She put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself and tossed a ski down. She put the toe of her boot in, and as he said, “Now, stomp down with your heel,” she did so.

She leaned up and gave him a kiss. “Thanks.” She dropped the other ski and stomped into it, then looked around as if surveying what everyone else was doing.

In fact, looking at what everyone else was doing, was exactly what Ell had in mind. Trying to pick up just how people were getting around on their skis. If she’d known that Shan wouldn’t be taking her up the first time, she would have watched some video of beginning and intermediate skiers in order to have a better idea of how to perform.

Her own skis on, Morgan waved Lane forward. She skied over to where Raquel had kissed Shan goodbye and was just staring around at all the other skiers. “Don’t worry Raquel, you’re better off not having the Shanster trying to give you pointers. He’s notoriously impatient. You ready to head to the slope?

“The Shanster?” Raquel grinned at her.

Morgan wrinkled her nose, and winked. “Old nickname. You ready?”

“Sure.”

Morgan pushed off toward a lift that went up to an area with many relatively easy slopes. She looked back and found Raquel skimming along behind her. Good, she’s not falling down just getting over to the lift. Morgan thought, not a total beginner.

Morgan had picked a triple lift so she and Lane got on either side of Raquel. She noticed that Raquel was tightly focused on the people just in front of them who were getting on the lift, and for a second, she worried that Raquel had never ridden a lift. However, Raquel got on the lift without difficulty. The two sisters sat on either side of Raquel on the way up, chattering delightedly. The skies had cleared and sunshine poured down on a crisp cold day. Turning in the chair, it seemed like they could see forever. Raquel proved to be a lot of fun, laughing with them about the terrible weather on the drive up from the Denver airport the night before. A group of three handsome looking ski bums stopped under the lift waved up at the three girls. Laughing, Lane turned to Raquel and winked, “Too bad you brought your boyfriend on this trip. The three of us could go out in the evenings and devastate the men of this little town.”

Raquel widened her eyes. Lowering her voice she said, “Maybe we could get Shan drunk and ruin the town after he passes out?”

Morgan giggled, “Fat chance of that. The boy can really hold his alcohol. We’re almost to the top, let’s lift the ski rest.” She noticed that when she and Lane lifted the tips of their skis in preparation for getting off, Raquel was a beat late. She wondered how many times the girl had actually been skiing? She didn’t mind an easy ski morning on the first day but she didn’t want to try to teach a total beginner either. If the girl was terrible, maybe she could just suggest a professional lesson?

When Raquel was a beat late standing up and then threw her arms up a little to keep her balance as they shot down the little drop that cleared the landing area Morgan’s heart sank. This could be tedious, she thought. “Let’s go right,” she called to the others, knowing that the easiest green run laid that direction. Raquel’s skis ran straight ahead a moment, then to Morgan’s astonishment the girl jumped slightly into the air, twisted and landed so her skis were already turned to the right. Her skis began to run to the right which would have thrown her over to the left but she almost immediately stabbed out with her left pole and regained her balance.

Morgan had never seen a maneuver with such a combination of… what? Poor technique and… athletic elegance? Morgan pulled up at the start of the broad, mildly sloped run and stopped. “This’ll be a nice easy run to stretch out the kinks.” She glanced at Raquel and saw her eyes darting from skier to skier as if fascinated by the way the rank beginners were navigating the slope. “I’ll lead,” Morgan said as she took off down the middle of the run. Once she felt confident Raquel had fallen behind a little she said to her AI, “Connect me to Lane,” then, “Lane, stay behind her so if she falls you can help her up. Also, watch her so you’ll be able to give her some pointers at the next stop.”

Morgan made a few broad curves and brought herself to a halt at the top of the next, somewhat steeper section. She looked back and found Raquel following smoothly in the tracks that Morgan had made. Raquel even made the same kind of a “turning stop” that Morgan had made, with a couple of tiny judders as if she didn’t quite know what the skis were going to do, but had corrected instantly when they surprised her. Morgan wondered if she’d skied on a different style or length of ski on her previous trips.

When Lane stopped beside them Morgan said, “You ready to head on?”

“Yeah! This is fun!”

Morgan tilted her head, the comment had sounded almost like Raquel had never been skiing before. But she was skiing too well for that. Morgan started down the next, steeper section. When she stopped, she found Raquel right behind her, then Lane zipped on by and onto the next section. Raquel started after Lane and Morgan brought up the rear.

Morgan’s eyebrows went up. Raquel might have made a couple of weird moves at first, but she looked like she was actually a pretty good skier, following Lane, doing exactly what Lane did. Just like Morgan had feared, her younger sister glanced back, saw Raquel on her tail and turned off onto an intermediate slope. Lane always wants to push people, Morgan thought with some irritation.

However, Raquel flawlessly followed Lane down the intermediate slope, still doing exactly whatever Lane had done. Raquel’s skis ran right in Lane’s tracks, her style even looked like Lane’s. Whatever had happened getting off the lift, Raquel had obviously been skiing before. Morgan began to wonder if they might even be able to move up to the expert slopes a little later in the week.

At the bottom of that section of intermediate slope, Lane glanced back again, saw Raquel and Morgan right behind her and shot off the level area and down onto the next section. To Morgan’s surprise, though Raquel had been doing just fine, she pulled to a stop and watched Lane go down that next section from the top. Morgan pulled up next to her, “You OK?”

“Yeah! Sure!” she said a little breathlessly. “Just tired. I don’t have much stamina. But I’ll be ready to go again in just a second.”

Morgan eyed her with some surprise. How could someone so toned, so obviously physically fit, claim to be tired after ten minutes of skiing? If she was a struggling beginner Morgan could believe it, but Raquel showed no evidence that the run had been difficult for her. Nonetheless, she stood beside Raquel a few moments until the girl pushed off down the slope, once again following, as near as Morgan could tell, tightly to the route Morgan thought Lane had followed going down that section.

After that run they went down the mountain on the intermediate slopes again in the same fashion, with Raquel following exactly in the path of whoever skied ahead of her. Raquel continued stopping to “rest” every ten minutes or so, claiming to be worn out, but then skiing perfectly as soon as she’d rested a few minutes. On their third run down the mountain, Raquel finally began skiing freely on her own, rather than just imitating whoever had led. She even led the way down a couple of sections, when both Morgan and Lane had stopped with her while she rested.

After that third run, Raquel said she wanted to go into the lodge for some of the hot chocolate she’d seen advertised. Morgan glanced at Lane, thinking that it seemed like the kind of thing someone would do who was just there to chase boys, not to really ski. But, she shrugged and said, “Sure, I could go for a hot chocolate myself.”

Raquel said, “You don’t have to babysit me. You guys could make a run on your own if you wanted. Pick me up for the next one?”

“No, hot chocolate sounds like a most excellent indulgence. Let’s head in.”

Raquel said, “I’ll stand in the line for a hot chocolate for each of us while you guys get us a table. Would you like some donuts or something else to eat?”

“No,” they laughed. “We’ll get a table.” Morgan said

To Morgan’s complete astonishment, Raquel returned with three large hot chocolates, covered in whipped cream and a half dozen large donuts. Wide eyed, Morgan said, “Who’s going to eat all that!”

Raquel stared in chagrin at the tray she’d brought, “I thought you might change your mind about the donuts. I guess I went a little overboard, huh? I was feeling pretty hungry after all that exercise though.”

“Didn’t you eat breakfast?”

Sitting down on the bench, Raquel said, “A little,” she ducked her head, looking embarrassed, “I kind of eat a lot though.”

Lane straightened up and pointed out that the ski bums who’d been waving at them their first ride up the lift had just come in the lodge. Lane pulled off her stocking hat and swept fingers through her pale blond hair, fluffing it up. Morgan rolled her eyes but took off her cap too. Raquel grinned at the two sisters but left her hat on. The boys made their way over to the table. The one in front smiled at Lane and said, “Mind if we sit with you ladies? There aren’t any empty tables.”

Lane said, “Sure.” Morgan glanced around and saw that, though there weren’t any empty tables, several had more empty seats at them than their own. One of the guys headed off to “get beers,” while the other two sat down next to Lane and Morgan. Morgan felt a little embarrassed to have these guys chasing after them in front of Raquel. Then she worried that Raquel might get too friendly with one of the guys, which, as Shan’s sister she didn’t want to see.

As usual, Lane turned on her flirty charm, getting introduced to Jordan and Axel. Lane then introduced Morgan and Raquel to them. The guys were students at CU Boulder.

The third guy came back with three large beers and a big plate of nachos. He sat down across from Raquel. Lane asked his name and he said he went by “AJ.” Lane introduced him around to the others. When she got to Raquel the girl had just finished stuffing a donut in her mouth and couldn’t talk, but she stuck out a hand to shake, grinning amusedly at everyone. Swallowing, Raquel said, “What do you guys study in school?”

Axel and AJ were in civil engineering. Jordan pridefully said he was studying aerospace engineering. Morgan found the way he said it annoying, as if he were bragging, but Raquel raised her eyebrows and said, “Aerospace? That’s cool. What do you want to do with it when you’re done?”

“Oh, I’ve already got a job lined up working on the new space habitat being built by D5R.”

“You do?” Raquel said, with a wide grin. “What’ll you be doing for them?” She took a big swig of her hot chocolate.

Morgan thought it a little weird that Raquel didn’t tell him she worked at D5R herself. Jordan said, “I’m not sure yet. One of their recruiters contacted me, I guess because of my scores. She told me that I just needed to show up and they’d find work for someone like me.” He frowned a little, “She implied that they needed some design help for the next segments of their habitat. Some of it’s pretty complex you know?”

Raquel just smiled and took a huge bite of another donut. Morgan felt that letting the conversation drop at the end of that little brag seemed kind of rude so she said, “Actually, Raquel works at D5R. Maybe you’ll be seeing more of each other in the future?”

Jordan’s eyes widened, then narrowed a little. “What do you do there?”

Raquel pointed at her full mouth a second as she chewed. When she’d swallowed, she said, “A little of this and a little of that.”

“Kind of a ‘girl Friday’?”

Raquel grinned and nodded, “Kinda,” she said, licking icing off a finger.

“Does your section have anything to do with the habitat?”

“A little,” Raquel said, picking up the last donut.

Morgan’s eyes widened. Had anyone else eaten a donut? She glanced around, as far as she could tell Raquel had eaten all six! If she kept that up she wouldn’t have that amazingly slender figure much longer. Her eyes narrowed, unless my brother’s new girlfriend is bulimic?

Lane pointed up at the big screen hanging nearby, “Hey, check out the newsfeed. It’s something about D5R.”

They all looked up and saw a man waggling his fingers around. He twisted and turned them, picked up a ball and tossed it in the air. Wondering what the big deal was, Morgan dropped her eyes to the text runner, “… Mr. Parker has only had the D5R fabricated prosthetic hand for a few weeks. He can already do almost everything with it that a normal hand can do. As the amputee community has become aware of his phenomenal outcome they have besieged D5R and Dr. Hanson, the UNC surgeon who performed the procedure, for access to this technology…” Morgan looked back up at the video, now in a zoomed in loop of the other movements. That’s an artificial hand?!

Lane turned to Raquel, “Did you know about that prosthesis?”

Raquel shrugged, “A little.”

“Holy crap! How did they keep that a secret?”

“It wasn’t so much that it was a secret, as that no one thought it would work. It isn’t really newsworthy if you’re trying something crazy.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes. It sounded that Raquel knew more than just “a little” about the project. She was about to ask just what Raquel really did there at D5R when Jordan stood up and said, “Let’s hit the slopes!”

To Morgan’s astonishment, as they all got up, she realized that Raquel had eaten some of the guys’ nachos too. When Raquel headed into the bathroom before going out, Morgan tagged along to listen outside the stall. She worried that she’d hear the sounds of Raquel emptying her stomach. With a mixture of relief and concern she heard nothing to suggest it.

In line for the lift, Lane managed to insinuate herself between Jordan and Axel, suggesting that AJ ride up with Raquel and Morgan.

On the ride up Morgan turned to AJ, “So do you guys ski every weekend?”

AJ stared up the mountain, “Jordan skis a lot of weekends. His family’s rich. I can only afford one trip a year.”

Morgan looked him over, realizing that his equipment looked pretty well worn. “Where’d you grow up?”

“Colorado Springs.”

She glanced back at the chair behind them where she saw Lane leaning on Jordan and laughing. “Is Jordan as smart as he puts on?”

“He’s pretty smart. He hardly ever studies and still gets reasonable grades.”

Morgan lifted an eyebrow, “What does he do?”

AJ grinned, “He’s the life of every party.”

“So I should warn my sister away from him?”

“Nah, he’s harmless and she’ll have fun…” then after a pause, he quietly said, “As long as she doesn’t expect too much.”

At the top of the lift the boys turned left onto a somewhat difficult intermediate run. As Morgan expected, Lane followed them, and Raquel followed Lane. To Morgan’s relief Raquel showed no evidence of difficulty on that slope. Morgan saw Jordan looking back over his shoulder at them, then he pulled up to a stop at the top of one of the easier black diamond runs. “You girls up for some real skiing?”

Lane hooted and said, “Let’s do it!”

Morgan turned to Raquel with concern, “You think you can take this one? If not, you and I can take that one to the right and meet them at the bottom.”

Raquel looked over the edge, “No, I think I can do that one now.”

They started down, Jordan just as good as Morgan had expected, Lane pushing herself a little too hard, trying to keep up with him. The other two guys were both good skiers like you might expect in Colorado, though not in Jordan’s class. Then Raquel eased over the edge.

Morgan’s eyes widened. Raquel didn’t do anything spectacular but she made the run down that difficult slope look easy and somehow… flowing… riding over and around the moguls like she was mounted on tall, soft springs. In fact it looked so easy that it gave Morgan the feeling that she wasn’t really going all that fast. Raquel didn’t lose any ground on the guys ahead of her even though they gave the appearance that they were skiing far harder than she was. Morgan dropped over the edge herself, thinking, the girl had to have been pulling our leg when she said she’d only done a little skiing.

When Morgan pulled up to the bottom of that little run she saw that the next section was marked as a double black diamond. Her first reaction was that they’d need to take the “easy” crossing trail that they’d stopped on over a little to a less difficult slope for Raquel. Then she realized that if Raquel could make the run they’d just done look easy, that she’d almost certainly be fine on the double black. Morgan side stepped over next to Raquel, “What the hell? I thought you were supposed to have only been skiing a couple of times! How in the world did you conquer a black diamond run like that?” She raised a suspicious eyebrow.

Raquel’s smile faded and her eyes widened. She glanced back up the slope they’d just come down and then over at some of the other runs that could be seen around the bowl. “Um, yeah… Sorry, I’ve skied more than I let on. It was when I was young so I didn’t think it would come back to me so quickly”

Jordan looked up from where he’d been talking to Lane, “You ladies ready to go on down this next section?”

Then they heard Shan’s voice from upslope, “Hey, wait up!”

Looking up they saw Shan bombing down the run above them, skiing beautifully like Shan always did. He blasted out on to the little flat area where they’d stopped, slamming to a skater’s stop that threw snow onto Raquel and Morgan. He gave them a big grin. “What’s this? I leave you guys alone for a couple of runs and you’ve already picked up some strange men?”

Raquel grinned at him, “Heck yeah, if I’m not gettin’ the attention I need from my current man, there’s no harm in finding another, is there?”

Shan lowered an eyebrow, “Oh, I’ll give you some attention all right.”

Lane quickly introduced Shan to the guys as her brother.

Jordan said, “Let’s do this thang!” and dropped over the edge onto the double black. Lane edged over behind him. The other two guys did too.

Shan looked after her, “Well, that was unsociable of my little sister.” He turned to Morgan, “I can run on down the easy trail with Raquel if you want to take that double black with Lane and your new boyfriends?”

Morgan laughed, “Your girlfriend’s been holding out on you. She’ll be able to go down this double black. She’s a good skier. Show her the way and she’ll follow you down. I’ll bring up the rear.”

Shan’s eyes widened. Then he sighed, Morgan would have sworn, in frustration. He pushed over the edge and blasted down the double black, pushing really hard as if trying to prove something. Too hard evidently, because he wiped out spectacularly, flailing around, losing both skis and skidding down the mountain in a cloud of snow. Chuckling Morgan turned to Raquel, “Men!”

But Raquel was gone.

In fact, she saw Raquel rocketing down the mountain in Shan’s wake, going faster than Morgan had ever seen anyone shoot such a steep, bumpy slope. Not on tall soft springs this time, more like short hard springs. Much of the time the girl caught air from one mogul to the next.

Morgan braced herself for Raquel to start flailing down the mountain end over end behind Shan. The girl shot past the still skidding Shan and vanished in a huge cloud of snow just like Morgan had feared. However, when the cloud cleared, Raquel was below Shan, having caught him in her arms and brought him to a stop. Morgan realized that cloud of snow wasn’t from another spectacular crash, but had been blown up by a phenomenal, crashing skater’s stop on the steep side of the mountain.  Morgan gaped after them a moment, then started picking her own way down the mountain, stopping to pick up Shan’s skis on the way. When she arrived she heard Raquel sniff and say, “Well of course I thought you were hurt! It looked like a couple of your limbs flew off back there!”

Morgan’s eyes widened as she saw tears drying on Raquel’s cheeks. Sure, that was a spectacular wipeout, but why would an incredible skier like Raquel assume he’d been hurt?

Shan reached out to wipe off the tear and said tenderly, “Hey Raq’, you do much more skiing, you’re going to see worse wipe outs than that. Really. I’m fine.”

Much more skiing?! Morgan snorted to herself, Shan still has no idea! She must have been skiing since childhood! Wait ‘til he’s actually watched her ski, he’ll be sooo embarrassed!

They made a few more runs, Lane pushing herself hard to keep up with Jordan. Axel tried to pair up with Morgan but she found herself much more attracted to the less racy AJ. Morgan caught Shan staring at Raquel while she skied. Morgan had to admit watching the girl ski was really something to remember. No matter the difficulty of the slope, Raquel descended it gracefully and with elegance. The fact that her ski tights looked great on those stunning legs didn’t hurt either.

Shan’s gaze sometimes looked admiring, at other times he followed her with a hunger in his eyes. But Morgan saw amused aggravation in his contemplation as well. “Hey Brudder, what’s that look?” she asked him, “Your girl’s an amazing skier, why’s that leave you looking all frustrated?”

Shan snorted, “I could tell you,” he turned and gave her his best ominous look, then finished in a low raspy tone, “but then I’d have to kill you.” He pushed off down the next double black, forestalling more questions. Morgan shook her head. Shan seemed to be pushing really hard, as if he had something to prove. She hoped he didn’t blow out a knee.

At the Kinrais family dinner that night Lane bubbled over with enthusiasm for Jordan and the other two guys they’d met. She had agreed to meet them that night at a local dance club and wanted Morgan to go along. “Shan, you and Raquel should come too. It’ll be a great time!”

Shan hesitated, then said, “I’m up for going out dancing with my girl if she’s not too tired?” He waggled his eyebrows at Raquel.

Raquel shrugged, “Sure.” She raised her own eyebrows. “Do they know how to clog here in Colorado?”

“Hey! I can do other dances you know.” Shan turned to Lane and got a serious look on his face, “Hey Sis, it’s not my place to interfere, but I have a bad feeling about that guy. I think you’re just a conquest to him.”

“Jordan? You’ve got to be kidding!” Lane’s face got red. “You never like any of the guys I date, that’s a given. But, I’ll have you know Jordan’s some kind of genius. He’s graduating at the top of his class in aerospace engineering and already has a job at D5R designing their new space habitat. He’s going to be working with that Ell Donsaii you admire so much! In fact, he’s already given her advice about a better orbit for the habitat.” She snorted, “You know, he’s actually just the kind of guy you’re always trying to set me up with, though not so nerdy.” She raised an eyebrow, “He’s fun, unlike your dweeb friends you’ve had call me.”

Shan turned to look questioningly at Raquel. She looked into his eyes and shook her head, then turned to Lane. “Hey,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship, and, obviously I don’t know everything that happens at D5R.” She shrugged, “But I can tell you with absolute certainty that D5R doesn’t have any recruiters out looking for talent and isn’t hiring anyone for a habitat design team. Jordan’s been lying to you about that… so maybe he’s lying about some other things too?”

White faced and pinched, Lane said, “But you just said you didn’t know everything that’s going on at D5R.”

Quietly, Raquel said, “But I would know that.”

Lane stared at her a few moments, then shook her head sharply, “I trust Jordan. I think this is just one of the things you don’t know.”

Raquel shrugged, then smiled brightly. “OK, but in case you do want to check him out, my AI’s just sent you a link where you could read up on the D5R habitat. A few questions should help you figure out whether he really knows enough about its orbit to give Donsaii advice, huh?”

Lane stared at Raquel hard and Morgan thought for a moment that Lane might explode and say something they’d all regret. Then she said, “OK, I’ll look at your website and ask him some questions… But you’ll see,” she said forcefully, “he’s really brilliant.” She got up and stalked to her room.

They went out pretty late because Lane “didn’t want to get there before Jordan.” Nonetheless, when they got there, Jordan was nowhere to be seen. Obviously disappointed, Lane pulled Morgan out on the dance floor with her while Shan and Raquel went to buy drinks.

Morgan felt like Lane’s flamboyant dancing looked a little bit desperate, but it felt nice to be out with her sister, moving to the beat and having a good time. When she saw Shan and Raquel near the floor with the drinks, she shouted to be heard over the heavy beat, “Let’s get a drink,” she inclined her head at her brother and his girlfriend. When the song finished, they headed over. Lane slugged back her drink and grabbed Raquel’s wrist, dragging her out to the floor for more dancing.

Watching them Morgan tilted her head curiously. Raquel didn’t perform any special moves. In fact, it looked like she was imitating Lane’s moves for the most part, just… more gracefully. Something about her moves… so perfectly on the beat… so coordinated, seemed to show the potential to do… more… Despite the fact that many dancers were performing more exotic moves, Morgan realized that a lot of the others were watching Raquel too. Morgan thought Raquel danced somewhat like Ell Donsaii did when Donsaii danced to slow music. Not doing Donsaii amazing physical feats obviously, but the sinuous, agile, flowing steps and turns had a lot in common. Morgan wondered if Raquel consciously tried to imitate her boss’s style. She pictured her dancing at home in front of a mirror while videos of Donsaii played on a large screen nearby. Maybe I should practice that way?

Suddenly Jordan was dancing next to Lane out on the floor. He looked wild and clumsy in comparison to Raquel. After a moment Morgan recognized that he was drunk. She had the feeling that, sober, he’d still look clumsy on the dance floor. But he had enthusiasm. Lane brightened at his appearance and began dancing with him. After a moment Raquel left the floor and rejoined Morgan and Shan. Belatedly, Morgan realized that AJ stood next to her, watching the floor. She punched him playfully on the shoulder and he turned to her with a shy grin, “Didn’t think you’d ever notice me. Wanna dance?”

AJ danced well and enthusiastically, so Morgan had a great time. Shan and Raquel danced a couple of times, but vanished after a bit, apparently tired of the singles scene. Jordan started trying to get Lane to go someplace “quieter.” Acquiescing, she asked Morgan and AJ to go with them. Thus, Morgan found herself with her sister and the two guys at a midnight deli, picking out snacks and laughing. Lane and Jordan were both pretty drunk and Morgan felt a little unsteady herself. As they sat down, Jordan said, “Heeyy, you ladies should come check out our place. Bottom of the run, big hot tub.” He waggled his eyebrows and took a big bite of his sandwich.

Lane glanced at Morgan, then turned to Jordan, “Hey, you know, that bitchy girlfriend of my brother’s doesn’t believe you have a job at D5R or helped with the orbit for their habitat.”

He snorted, “Glad they went home then, I hate putting people in their places.”

Lane leaned drunkenly away from him, shoulder up against the table and body turned toward him. She sent an admiring smile back his way. “And the type of orbit the habitat’s in now, what kind is that?”

He glanced up to the left, “Uh… geosynchronous, why?”

Lane held her left hand up between them, palm towards herself. “Because,” she reached up with her right hand and pulled down her little finger, “You’re,” she tucked in the thumb, “an,” she pulled down her ring finger, “ass,” she pulled down her index, “hole.” Her hand remained with just the middle finger still extended. Lane straightened in her seat, suddenly looking much more sober, “Morgan, let’s go home,” she picked up her sandwich and stood.

Morgan got up and picked up her own sandwich.

Jordan spluttered, “You’re leaving because of, what, an orbit?!”

“I’m leaving,” Lane smiled, “because you don’t know anything about the habitat’s orbit, you lying, bragging sack of shit.” She snorted and muttered disbelievingly, “Geosynchronous habitat!”

Morgan wanted to applaud her little sister as they walked out.

They walked along, eating their sandwiches and not saying anything. Finally Lane said, “I guess, I owe Raquel an apology.”

“And a ‘thank you’ too, I think.”

Lane nodded and tossed the rest of her sandwich into a trash can.

***

Shan and Ell quickstepped across the frosty deck to the hot tub outside the condo the Kinrais’ had rented. Shan tossed back the cover of the tub, shucked his robe and dropped into the water. Looking up he admired Ell’s amazing body as she let her own robe fall and slid gracefully into the wonderfully hot water next to him. She snuggled in under his arm and said, “Wow, this is nice!”

“Yeah, there’s just something about a hot tub when the weather is frosty,” Shan said with a sigh.

“They don’t always feel this good?”

“You’ve never been in a hot tub before?”

Ell shook her head and looked up at him, looking innocent, “I’ve led a very sheltered life.” She grinned, “Not a dissipated and slothful one like you.”

Shan snorted, but then relaxed and let his head rest back on the rim of the tub. They sat in peaceable silence for a while, then Ell slid a hand up over his firm chest and turned her face up next to his, “Shan?”

“Um hmm?” he said, eyes closed.

“What do you think our future is?” she asked, heart suddenly thumping. Men hated these kinds of relationship questions she knew, but she felt a need to figure out where they were going. Rationally, she didn’t know why she needed to know, but emotionally she had a drive to understand. She hoped it didn’t all blow up in her face.

“Hmmm,” he said, “I don’t know. I haven’t really gotten past hoping you’ll ask me to marry you some day.”

“Me… ask you?” she whispered emphatically. “You’re the guy!”

He opened an eye and peered down at her with one of his lazy grins. “What? You’re not bound by those traditional sexist roles are you?”

“Uh, no…” Then puzzled, “But why haven’t you asked me, if you’re really hoping for such an outcome?”

“Because, you’re Ell Donsaii. I could ask Raquel Blandon, she’s not so scary. She wouldn’t make my manhood vanish by out-skiing my ass on her first day down the slopes.”

Ell grinned at him and poked his hard stomach gently with a finger, “Well then, you should ask Raquel. Because, remember, I want to live my life and have a family as Raquel, not as Ell.”

Shan slid off the seat out into the middle of the tub and turned to face her, then reached down to untie the drawstring on his trunks.

Ell sat up, glancing around, “You’re getting naked out here?! The people in the upper condos can see down into this tub!”

“No,” he grinned, “I have something tied to this drawstring.” He lifted a ring out of the water, “Raquel Blandon, will you marry me?”

Ell’s eyes widened, then she threw herself forward and wrapped her arms around him. “Yes!” she said fiercely. “Yes, a thousand times yes.”

Epilogue

The small rocket squirted air out of its attitude jets a couple of times as the rim of the enormous ring approached. The jets pivoted it so its main engine would push it in over the wall of the ring. The main engine exhausted hydrogen at full thrust for a minute, then turned and thrust the opposite direction once the rocket was over the top of the sidewall.

As the sidewall rose to meet it, the main nozzle turned downward and opened up, gently bringing the rocket down to a landing on the upper surface of the wall. It stood there motionless for a minute, then a circular area on the large, odd fin sticking off to its side went fuzzy and a rolled up tube slid through it, dropped onto the sidewall and also stood motionless for a moment.

The band holding the tube rolled up snapped and the tube unrolled revealing a much larger circle. That circle also vanished and an object three feet long with a maximum width of seven inches extruded through the 15 centimeter circle.

The object lay motionless for a few moments, then sat up, revealing an anthropomorphic form with two legs, two arms and a head. It stood and walked to the edge of the ring’s sidewall. There it stood a while, looking out over the enormous expanse of apparently flat, open land fading into the misty distance ahead. It turned to take in the distant, upwardly curving shape of the ring on either side.

The PGR chip inside it sent back data:

“Apparent gravity 0.338G”

“Apparent atmosphere inside ring, Oxygen 28%, Nitrogen 71%, Others <1%”

The waldo knelt and chipped off a small piece of the material beneath its feet, inspected it for a moment and then dropped it into a port on its chest.

After looking out over the vista ahead another minute, the waldo lifted on a jet of highly compressed air and floated out over the incredibly deep valley ahead.

The End

If you enjoy the Ell Donsaii stories, you might also enjoy reading “Vaz” about a scientifically brilliant but socially inept father, struggling to be allowed to do the research he loves, to be treated fairly by the company he works for and to send his kids to college. A sample is provided at the end of this book.

Hope you liked the book!

If so, please give it a positive review on Amazon.

Try the next in the series, to be published someday soon.

Author’s Afterword

This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I have always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically possible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Then you ask, what if something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the Ell Donsaii stories asks at least one such question.

“Habitats” continues asking what kinds of cool things we could do with even small wormholes or “ports.” Modern prostheses really are terrible and being able to do some of the things that ports would let you do could be a great boon to amputees. However, this book also asks what kind of terrible things might terrorists try to do with them and how might other countries begin to react to the advantages ports give the owners of the technology. It also starts asking what kinds of space habitats might we, or others, might realistically construct (at least, if we had the technological wizardry that ports could provide).

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Elene Trull, Kerry McIntyre and Kat Lind, each of whom significantly improved this story.

Prologue to “Vaz”

Available from the same sellers where you purchased “Habitats”

Lisanne Frye pulled her blond hair back behind her ear and turned her eyes to glance at her teammate. He’d surprised her at every turn since Professor Albrecht had assigned them to be a team at the beginning of the semester. That assignment had been solely based on their positions in the alphabet. She’d had this Vaz Gettnor kid in some of her classes before but had never spoken to him because he seemed so… weird. Stodgy clothes, odd tufty dark hair, never spoke unless spoken to and never looked you in the eye. She thought he must have some kind of psychiatric disorder.

When the Professor had listed them as a team, before even having a first meeting with Gettnor, she’d gone to Albrecht and asked to be reassigned. Albrecht had abruptly dismissed her, “Someday you vill have to work vis people you don’ like,” he’d said in his funny accent. “Just as vell start now.” After cursing Albrecht for a suitable period she’d sent an email to Gettnor asking him to meet her in a study center.

His only reply had been, “OK.”

At the meeting, Gettnor had been waiting uncomfortably at a table in the first floor study area like she’d specified. He’d been sitting, staring at his slate. The slate had been laid out on the table but not turned on. Lisanne had introduced herself and he’d shaken her hand. Even his hand shake had been creepy. It had been a “put your hand out, allow it to be grasped, twitch it, take it back” kind of shake. During the handshake his eyes had risen briefly, though not even to her face, then dropped immediately back to the table.

When she’d asked if he had any ideas on how they should go about the project they’d been assigned, he’d only shaken his head. Deciding she’d have to lead their team, she divided up the various tasks that would need to be accomplished to build the software controller module they’d been assigned. She turned her slate with its list of nine tasks to him and asked him which ones he would like to take on. He’d looked at it a minute and, to her astonishment, selected seven of them.

Bemused she’d picked four and left him with five. In view of his difficulty with communication she hadn’t been surprised that “writing up the results” was one she’d been stuck with.

They’d met a week later to discuss their progress and determine if parts of the project were going to be problematic. She’d said “Hi Vaz,” as she walked up to the table.

After a pause, without looking up from his blank slate, he’d said only, “Hello.” Thinking like the programmer she intended to become, she’d decided he was running some poorly written software that required a lot of processor cycles, just to conclude that he needed to respond to the social debt created by her “Hi.”

She sat beside him and flipped on her slate. “I’ve finished my first task and started on numbers two and three. Of course I haven’t started on number four, the write-up of our results, since I don’t know what they’ll be.” With some dread she said, “How are you coming with your parts?” Her fear that he wouldn’t finish any of his tasks and she’d have to do the entire project herself to pull a decent grade had been giving her stomach cramps.

He said only, “Done.”

Lisanne blinked a moment or two, not sure what he meant. “Done with which part?”

“All of them. Well except the write-up… I suck at that.”

Her eyebrows shot up, “You’ve finished all five of yours?”

“I did the first eight. Even though you’re doing some of them I wanted the practice. We don’t have to use mine though.”

She drew back, “You’ve finished the first eight,” she said dubiously.

He nodded.

Her eyes narrowed. “You haven’t plagiarized some programming off the net have you?”

“No. I looked at a couple, but they weren’t written very well.”

Suspiciously Lisanne said, “Okaaay, send them to me and I’ll look them over.”

He mumbled to his AI (Artificial Intelligence) and a moment later a tone and a blink on her HUD (Heads Up Display) told her she’d received the files.

“Meet here again, same time next week?”

He nodded.

Back in her dorm room she pulled up the files he’d sent her and cursed. They were much too small to be able to achieve the complex goals the team had been set. Rather than start analyzing them line by line, she just tried them to see if they could possibly respond correctly based on Albrecht’s specifications.

They did. Every single one of them.

She began looking through the code he’d written, feeling more and more awed as she went through it. Sparsely written, it didn’t use any of the modules of code that were in such common use that programmers normally just plugged them in to accomplish certain tasks without trying to write something themselves. These common modules were in such wide use that no one knew who’d written them or thought that using them was plagiarism. In places Lisanne could find blocks of Vaz’s code which did the same thing as the canned code blocks. She compared Vaz’s code to three of the modules available out there in various libraries and his were 10-30% more economical of processor cycles. They also spread the load over the available processors very nicely.

With awe, she recognized that what he’d already finished on each of the eight tasks was head and shoulders above what she could do, even if she spent the entire semester on a single one of the tasks.

Lisanne shivered and set out to complete the write-up that would be her only contribution to their shared project.

Lisanne walked into the library the next week and found Gettnor waiting at their usual table. “Hey Vaz, I’m taking you for coffee, let’s get out of this place.”

“I don’t drink coffee.” He hadn’t looked up from the table.

Lisanne grabbed his elbow and tugged. “OK, you can have a Coke or a juice or something.”

Gettnor reluctantly got up from the table, “Where are we going?”

“Union coffee shop. Come on.”

“I’ve never been there,” he said, almost plaintively.

Lisanne didn’t feel any surprise. “There’s always a first time.”

Once she had a coffee and he had a Diet Coke, they sat facing each other at a little table for two. As she sipped her coffee, she stared over the rim of her cup at him. “Vaz, you didn’t use common code blocks in your programs.”

“I know.”

“You wrote everything new?”

“No, I’ve already rewritten most of the common code blocks. I do it for each one I come across. They’re sloppy.” He said this as if he were offended that someone had written code that was inefficient.

She realized that though he was staring down at the table, she thought he had a nice symmetrical face. He might not be “model” handsome but he wasn’t bad looking either. “Vaz, look at me.”

His eyes flashed up at her momentarily, then back to his blank slate. He sucked on the straw in his drink.

“No, really look at me. I don’t think you’ve even seen my face.”

“I have...” he said quietly, “You’re very pretty.”

“When?” she said in surprise.

“On line. There are many pictures of you available.”

She giggled, trying to decide if she should be creeped out that this weird guy spent time looking at her pictures even though he couldn’t bring himself to actually look at her. But he seemed so harmless. Just so exceedingly shy. Finally she said, “Well, I want you to look at me in person! Come on.”

He slowly raised his head and eyes to look at her. His gaze danced around her face, but he never looked her in the eye, merely slid past her eyes on the way to examining other features. After about ten seconds his eyes dropped back to his slate.

“There that wasn’t so bad was it?”

Even at the angle his downward gaze presented she could tell a grin appeared on his face. He shook his head.

“I want to look at you too. Look at me some more.”

He looked up again and she studied him. He actually could be quite attractive she thought, if he could look you in the eye. She turned her head side to side, “What do you think?”

“You’re very beautiful.”

Surprised she said, “Aw, I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

He looked shocked, “No!” His eyes dropped back down and he almost whispered, “I’ve never said that to anyone!”

Realizing how painfully shy Vaz was, Lisanne resolved to stop teasing him. “I was only kidding. We should meet here again next week. You can tell me what you think of the summary I wrote. I sent it to your AI.”

“I’m sure it’s fine. Much better than anything I could write.”

Stifling a giggle, she said “It’s a date, then.”

Lisanne came to feel great joy that they’d been assigned to be a team. Vaz was weird; there was no doubt about that. But he was a genius at programming and would be going on to grad school in, of all things, physics. He may be weird, but weird in a sweet/brilliant sense and as time passed she’d found that she loved his bizarre, introspective sense of humor.

Hope you like it!