Author: Laurence E. Dahners
Date: 2014-01-29T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Thriller
Description: “Wanted" is the tenth of a series of near future SciFi/Thrillers whose young heroine Ell Donsaii’s nerve mutation makes her a genius and provides astonishing athletic abilities. In “Wanted,” President Stockton continues her efforts to imprison Ell in order to protect the world from some of Ell’s dangerous new technology. While the President rightfully wants this technology to be restricted, she wants it to be controlled by the government. Ell doesn’t want even the government to have the terrible destructive potential of a technology that can cut through absolutely any material in the world! Wh
Publisher: Amazon

Wanted

An Ell Donsaii story # 10

By

Laurence E Dahners

Copyright 2014 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)”

“Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6)”

“Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7)”

“Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8)” and

“Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9)”

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

An unusually gifted quarterback, Allan Donsaii had been widely recognized to be startlingly 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, the pro teams never drafted him for fear that his size would allow him to be dominated by bigger opposing players.

Extraordinarily quick, Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and rarely played a game without a “steal.” Usually she 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 highly accurate coordination. The child also had a new mutation affecting the myelin sheaths surrounding her nerves. This mutation produced nerve transmission speeds that nearly doubled those of normal neurons. With faster nerve impulse transmission, she had much quicker reflexes. Yet her new type of 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 faster processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller, faster CPU architecture.

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

Much more rapidly…

Prologue

New York— Marcus Amundsen, the highly respected Secretary of Defense, was relieved of his duties and released from President Stockton’s cabinet yesterday. Despite an attempt to paint it as an amicable “parting of ways,” rumors abound of a serious disagreement. This is suspected to relate to Amundsen’s oft displayed admiration and support for Ell Donsaii. In view of Stockton’s arrest and imprisonment of the young lady in question, Amundsen’s views on Donsaii would certainly bring himself and the President into conflict.

Stockton continues with her vehement denunciations of Donsaii despite the upswelling of support for Donsaii in the press and the polls and a concomitant drop in Stockton’s own approval ratings…

“Mark, what are you going to do about this Stockton travesty?”

Amundsen bemusedly looked up at his wife. “Start looking for a job?”

“Oh hell, Mark, I know you’ll land on your feet. But what about the way Stockton’s been treating Donsaii? My god, the woman saved the entire planet a few years ago, now our President is treating her like a pariah, arrested, imprisoned, called a terrorist! All for failing to comply with this Blaustein bill, which near as I can tell, demands that she turn over something she worked hard to create herself—I see no reason the government has a right to it!”

With a slight grin, Amundsen said, “Well, the President’s worried that Ell might make a diplomatic mistake in an encounter with an advanced race out there in the galaxy. A faux pas with aliens having technological advantages over us could actually be quite disastrous.”

She snorted, “You know how I hate it when you start arguing the position of your opponents. Stockton’s an idiot and you know it. Look at the people on that committee that the Blaustein bill wants Donsaii to turn first contact over to!”

Amundsen grinned again, “Well even I’d have to admit that that committee could have been chosen better. Though, I’d also have to admit that I wouldn’t want Donsaii going through my background the way she did theirs. Lord knows what she’d find!”

“Not much, and you know it!”

Still grinning at his feisty wife, Mark shrugged, “What would you have me do, Mary?”

“Have her impeached!”

“The power of impeachment rests with the House of Representatives, not with dismissed Secretaries of Defense. Besides, it is supposed to be undertaken for treason, bribery, high crimes or misdemeanors. Not for doing things we don’t like. Unpopular presidents get voted out of office,” he tilted his head consideringly, “There are a lot of angry people out there. They weren’t happy about the changes in the job market, but deep inside they still loved Ell Donsaii. I do think Stockton would get voted out if an election were to occur now instead of nearly four years from now.”

“Imprisoning Donsaii without a trial isn’t a crime? Seems like a ‘high crime’ to me!”

“Donsaii had failed to comply with the law as constituted in the Blaustein bill.”

“Oh, come on! You don’t think Donsaii should have complied either.”

Amundsen leaned back and rubbed his chin, “You’ve got me there. She broke the law, not for her own convenience, but because she believed it was the best thing for our country.” He shook his head, “I should only hope that I would have the same courage if it came down to it.”

***

Eddy Clouse looked up as his doctor came back into the room. He noted that Doctor Sloan looked pretty grim. Eddy’s hopes that his cough was just some strange bug faded, but he tried to keep his chin up. “What’s up Doc?” he said with a weak grin.

Sloan shook his head, “Mr. Clouse, I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

Clouse, as he always did, turned to look back over his shoulder. “Mister? No ‘misters’ in here, Doc. Just ol’ Eddy. Call me Eddy.”

Sloan gave him a weak grin in return, “OK, Eddy, but it doesn’t make the news any better. Your chest X-ray shows a large mass in your left lung.”

“Mass, Doc?”

“Yeah, it might be some kind of odd infection, but we’ve got to worry that it might be a tumor. We’ll have to get you in for some scans and a biopsy then figure out the best way to take care of you.”

Eddy’s wife stood suddenly, tears streaming down her face. “It’s that damn WIPP! I told you not to go to work there Eddy! Now look, it’s gonna kill you!”

Eddy turned to Sloan, “Could that be, Doc?”

Sloan put his hands up, “Wait a minute now, nobody’s dyin’ here yet. How long have you been workin’ at WIPP, Eddy?”

“Six months. They told me it was safe. I don’t work near the radiation, just drive a waldo. The waldo actually does all the handlin’ of the radioactive material down there in the salt.”

“Yeah, they’re right. Driving the waldoes, your exposure to radiation isn’t any more than anyone else here in New Mexico. More likely, it’s all those years of smoking catchin’ up to you my friend.”

Holly Clouse said, “Sure, that’s what they tell us! ‘It’s as safe as workin’ anywhere else,’” she said smarmily. “What do they think we are, stooopid? It’s a dangerous radioactive storage site for God’s sake.”

“Even if that were true, Ms. Clouse, Eddy’s tumor is almost certainly older than the six months he’s been working out there.”

Her lip curled, “Yeah, they’re probably payin’ you to say crap like that, aren’t they? You can tell your overlords that I’m going to the newspapers. They’re gonna see a stink, the kinda stink like no one’s ever smelled before.”

Sloan said, “No one’s paying me for any…” Holly Clouse had grabbed a Kleenex and slammed out of the exam room. He turned back to Eddy, “Do you want to give her a little time to settle down Eddy?”

Eddy’s eyes still stared sightlessly after his departed wife. After a moment he shook his head, “Naw, Doc, we’d be waitin’ all day for that to happen.”

Sloan sighed, “OK, let me talk to you about the tests we need to set up…”

***

“Art,” Ell said to Art Jenkins, the lawyer she’d hired to try to deal legally with her attempted imprisonment by Stockton, “what can you tell me about my current legal situation?”

“Well,” he laughed and Ell had the impression he was rubbing at an eye, “we’re filing motions and spending money and all, but it’s a little hard to appeal that you should be freed when you’re actually running around out there. For God’s sake, don’t tell me where.”

“Are you saying that I could make your job easier by going back to jail?”

“Sure, speaking facetiously. But if I were you I’d stay free and let me keep doing whatever I can think of legally. They may just get tired of responding to all my pleas and motions and filings and just drop their charges.”

“Anything I could do to help, besides turning myself in?”

“No, and I’m really only joking about turning yourself in. It’s pretty hard to get a handle on the exact limits of the ‘Executive Powers’ that Stockton used to put you away in the first place. This is such a weird situation that, of course, those limits haven’t been tested for this situation. Any decision by a lower court will be contested to the next higher court by the side unhappy with the result. With you in prison and them battling us all the way to the Supreme Court, dragging their feet at every step, it could take years to get you loose if you did go back in.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, sorry. We’ll keep working but probably won’t be making huge amounts of progress.”

***

Washington—Rumors continue to erupt from the Guantanamo Naval facility in Cuba. Though official sources continue to deny the possibility, many unofficial sources have confirmed Ell Donsaii has apparently escaped from detention there. Many of the rumors state that she never actually arrived, breaking free somewhere en route to the prison grounds. Search activity at Guantanamo Bay, initially exceedingly intense, has dropped off precipitously, suggesting that Dr. Donsaii may have successfully made her way off the island.

The directors of the CIA and FBI were ushered into the Oval Office. Stockton stood, “James, Mason, thank you for dropping by. Can I have Elsie get you some coffee?”

“No Ma’am,” they said, almost in unison.

“Well then, let’s get down to business. You’ve probably heard scuttlebutt that Donsaii escaped. Unfortunately, due to a monumental screw-up down at Gitmo, those rumors are true. So I’m turning to you two gentlemen, hoping you can figure out how to unscrew the pooch and get that little witch locked back up?”

The two men glanced at one another. Mason Phillips cleared his throat, “Are you certain we should be expending resources on the pursuit of Dr. Donsaii, Ma’am? She doesn’t seem like much of a threat to the nation.”

Stockton’s eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed. “Mr. Phillips, I’ll remind you that you ‘serve at the pleasure of the President.’ I’m not asking you whether we should capture Donsaii, I’m asking you for a plan to do so. I’ll point out that she has broken the law, and that if she were to inappropriately handle a meeting with a technologically superior alien race, that such an event could indeed prove to be ‘a threat to the nation.’”

A half an hour later, the two men were ushered out of the Oval Office, having promised to develop a plan to capture Donsaii, whether she was back in the United States or had taken up residence in another country. They glanced at one another as they left the building, neither one happy about this task but neither one willing to talk to the other about their reluctance to push this particular task hard. The FBI had been assigned to lead the investigation so they would meet again tomorrow, but Mason figured they would probably never discuss their personal reluctance to pursue Donsaii with “all possible vigor” as assigned.

***

Washington—Supporters of Ell Donsaii marched in front of the White House today, protesting her arrest and failed imprisonment. Suli Ibrahmin, the protestors’ self-appointed spokesperson, said, “This woman saved the entire world from a comet a few years ago. She’s providing cheap power, heat and air conditioning. She’s reducing greenhouse gases. Now we’re trying to imprison her because she won’t turn over ET contact to a government committee? She deserves more respect than that! Whatever charges have been trumped up against her should be dropped so she can get back to making our world a better place…

Wilson Daster’s AI said, “You have a call from Ell Donsaii. She’s asking that you take out my other PGR chips and speak to her with only her one to one connection active.”

Wilson said, “Oh! OK, tell her just a second.” He got up and walked into one of D5R’s small private conference rooms. Closing the door he took off his HUD (Heads Up Display) and pulled out all but one of the PGR chips. Putting it back on he said, “Ell! Where are you?”

“Back in the States. Out in Texas, but it’s probably better if you don’t know exactly where. Working on a new identity that the government didn’t help me create like the others.”

“Oh! So you don’t think this is all going to blow over pretty soon?”

Ell sighed, “I don’t know Wilson. I hope so, but I’m figuring that I’d better plan like it might not.”

“So, how can I help?”

“I don’t actually need help. I just wanted to warn you that I’m planning to spend a bunch of money, so you’re going to see my accounts drop. I didn’t want you thinking that someone was stealing it.”

“What are you going to spend it on?”

“Probably better that you don’t know that in any detail. But, I’m planning to convert it to cash and use it to buy some real estate and other real property in my new identity. That way I’ll have assets that would be difficult for the government to take away.”

“Oh, well let me at least give you some advice on how to do it?”

“Sure, I could use some of that!”

***

Viveka sighed. The school year was nearly over and she had yet to hear from Ell Donsaii’s company, D5R. It didn’t surprise her, after all Donsaii herself had been arrested and imprisoned. However, Viveka had been hoping against hope that Donsaii had left instructions with the company prior to her own arrest. Preferably instructions to hire one Viveka Janu, freshly graduated chemical engineer. That seemed crazy though, Viveka had only met Donsaii the one time and surely Donsaii had more pressing issues to think about than Viveka’s job. Still, Viveka had decided that she should at least send an e-mail to D5R and tell them how much she would like to work for them. Maybe they would at least have something she could do at one of their subsidiaries in India?

If only she could think of what to say. Not presuming on her meeting with Donsaii, yet somehow mentioning it? How…?

***

Shan stepped into the large B&B suite’s bathroom. When he flipped the light switch it turned on a light across the big bathroom, leaving the near side dim, but even in the dim light he suddenly realized someone was reclining in the big Jacuzzi hot tub.

Startled he said, “Oh! Sorry!” Stepping backwards across the threshold he started to turn away.

“Hi Shan,” a familiar voice said.

Heart suddenly pounding, Shan turned slowly back into the room and looked down.

Reclined in the tub, Ell smiled her crooked little smile at him. “The water’s nice and warm. Want to get in?”

“Ell!” Shan stared at her in shocked amazement. Then he knelt down to give her a hug, not caring that it got his shirt wet. After a bit he drew back. “Hey, should you be in a hot tub if you’re pregnant?”

“Come on. You just had your arms in the water, it isn’t that hot! You’d have to call it a ‘pretty warm tub’ at the most.”

He grinned, “Well let me get my clothes off and I’ll get ‘pretty warm’ with you.”

As he pulled off his pants, he snorted, “You’re the reason I was assigned the biggest suite here at the Wildberry aren’t you?”

Ell wrinkled her nose and gave a minute shrug, “Might be.”

Chapter One

A couple of hours later Shan and Ell, done up as Raquel, poked their heads out of the Blackberry suite. Shan’s parents and sisters looked up from where they were lounging around the enormous great room of the log cabin constructed B&B. They all smirked at the young couple. “Jeez,” Malcolm said, “You’d think you guys were a couple of newlyweds who hadn’t seen each other for a long time!”

Ell blushed, but Shan shook a finger at them, “I can’t believe you guys kept this a secret from me!”

Shan’s mother grinned, “She just called yesterday and said she’d be able to get here. All we did was to change the reservation to put you in the Blackberry suite. You’ll have to blame your new wife for asking us to keep it a secret.”

Shan mock glared at Ell, “Is this true?”

Ell gave another tiny shrug, “Maybe?”

“Well,” he grinned, “It was a pretty sweet surprise, I’ve gotta admit that.”

Ell and her in-laws sat in light jackets out on the big deck of the Wildberry lodge. The big rustic lodge had been built high on the east side of a valley. Chairs out on the deck let them sit and talk, drinking hot chocolate while looking out over the beautiful valley. During a lull in the conversation Morgan turned to Ell and asked, “Do you ever have trouble maintaining the different accents you use with the two identities?”

Ell chuckled, “It’s been worse at times. I’ve got a couple of other identities that you’ve never seen, each with their own accents. I haven’t been using them much lately. But I’ve been using this Raquel identity for so long that it’s pretty much second nature.”

“I keep feeling surprised that I didn’t figure out that you were Ell before you told us. Now I immediately see through your disguise, so I can’t figure out why I didn’t tumble to it before. It’s not like you make huge changes.”

“Yeah, I feel surprised too when I think about just how few people have figured it out without me telling them. But, I think it has a lot to do with just how well the human mind carries out precise measurements of the dimensions of our features to recognize us. I don’t know if you ever tried to do a portrait of someone in art class?”

“Oh man, I suck at that. I’m not bad at painting or drawing but whenever I try to do a particular person it never looks like them! My portraits look like someone, just not the person I tried to paint.”

Ell nodded, “Even professional artists very frequently use some kind of projection system to lay out a face they’re painting so that the dimensions and alignment of all the components of a face are perfectly sized compared to one another. The colors can be all wrong, but if the dimensions are correct you’ll recognize the person. If the dimensions are wrong, everything else can be perfect and it still won’t look like the person you painted. So, a really big part of the disguise involves subtly changing the size or shape of some of the parts of my face.”

Morgan frowned, “Really?”

Ell grinned, “Really. There’s a funny story about a well known actor a while back who got tired of people bugging him in public. He got a Hollywood make-up person to build him a facial prosthesis that subtly changed the shape of his face. Then he went out in public and sure enough, no one recognized him. It worked great, but he didn’t like it. He found that he’d gotten used to people giving him preferential treatment and didn’t like it when they dealt with him like he was an ordinary Joe.”

“Who was that?”

“Kevin Bacon, have you heard of him?”

“Oh yeah. I really liked some of his movies!”

“If you’re interested, on the net you can find a funny interview where he talked about it.”

Malcolm Kinrais stepped out on the deck, “Hey, we’ve got reservations at a restaurant called The Market Place in Asheville, you guys up for heading into town?”

After a nice dinner, Lane wanted to go out bar hopping, though Shan’s folks were heading back to the lodge. “Come on Morgan, the lodge is nice and peaceful, but you’re too young to just sit around. Go out with me! I can’t cruise the Asheville nightlife all by myself.” She turned to Shan, “You too brother. Let’s get out and live a little. Ell stood next to her so Lane nudged her with an elbow, “You’ll go, won’t you Raquel?”

Shan chuckled, “Come on guys, we’d just as well give in now. She won’t let up ‘til we do.”

The four of them walked down Wall Street and around a couple of corners to a small bar that featured acoustic musicians. A young man sat on a stool, playing a “bass box” with his stockinged foot and a guitar with his hands. An older woman sat a few feet away playing mandolin. A bass box is a tuned wooden box with metal plates on the front which can be plucked to produce bass notes. Though most performers sit on their bass boxes, he’d laid his on its side so he could use his toe to pluck the notes. With the bass box for the low end, strummed mandolin for the high tones and arpeggiating guitar in the middle, the two performers produced a spare but nonetheless full sound, rich in tone and sparkle.

Sipping her usual Coke, caffeine free because of the baby, Ell leaned forward, intently focused on the sound produced by the two musicians. Entranced in a fashion that she hadn’t been since the first time she heard Velos, Ell glanced around quickly to see if others were similarly affected. Morgan and Shan appeared to be focused on the musicians as well. To her surprise, she noticed Lane flirting with the guys at the table next to them.

Ell’s head tracked back around when the young man began to sing. He had a warm baritone that seemed to fit well with the three instruments.

And so you came to me

Asking for forgiveness

For sins unremembered

And words oh so senseless

The woman’s raspy alto produced a perfect harmony supporting the chorus.

Don’t go without me

On your lonely ways

Through this life’s journey

And these golden days

A glance around the room during the next verse showed Ell many other people just as entranced as she. She wondered how such wonderful musicians came to be playing for tips in such a small venue. How can some of these people continue their conversations when something this beautiful is happening on the stage?

Then the next chorus began. Many of the people in the room joined in to sing quietly along. Resisting the desire to sing along because she knew she wouldn’t do the song justice, Ell closed her eyes to enjoy the gentle chorus washing over her from all sides.

Another verse passed, sung with passion by the young man, then Ell’s hair stood on end. The musicians obviously had intended an instrumental break, the melody of the chorus played on the guitar. But, from the back of the room a bell clear, young, soprano voice began singing the chorus. When Ell turned to stare, she saw that most of the people in the room had also looked around in amazement. The girl looked like she might be ten. Eyes closed, the platinum blond girl sang as if in a trance, so beautifully that, a few at a time, even the people who had initially continued their conversations stopped and turned to look.

When the chorus came to a close the young man whispered into his mike, “That was magnificent, folks, let’s sing it with her this time,” and he started the chorus again.

This time the young man sang a harmony to the girl’s clear lead and the crowd quietly sang along again. Ell felt prickles in her scalp and her eyes blurred with amazement at just how gorgeous it sounded. The young man took over for a bridge, then said, “Sweetie, would you do us the honor of singing the chorus for us one more time?”

Ell looked around and saw the young girl nod and take a breath. Once again she sang lead and the crowd’s susurrus filled in the background.

The chorus repeated and then the song wound down. Obviously just as touched as Ell, the young man leaned near and whispered into the mike, “I feel privileged to have participated in this musical experience.” He paused a moment, then said, “We’re going to take a short break so I can talk to the star of our show there in the back of the room.”

Excited chatter filled the room as he got up and moved off the stage. Many people glanced repeatedly at the girl as they spoke to the people they were with. So blond her eyebrows looked like little streaks of white, she sat down in her mother’s lap. She looked like someone who’d just come out of a trance, startled and embarrassed. She still had her eyes closed. For a moment Ell thought she was trying to shut out the crowd; then she realized the girl was blind.

Ell turned to Shan, “Did you think that was as amazing as I did?”

He shook his head wonderingly, “Well, now I’m glad that Lanie talked us into going out tonight.”

Morgan uttered a heartfelt, “Amen to that brother.” She sighed, glancing back at the girl, “Breaks your heart to see a little girl that’s blind like that though.”

Lane seemed unaffected. She still leaned to the side so she could talk to a muscular young man at the next table. He had on a lot of leather as if he rode a motorcycle. The other three guys at his table also wore leather.

Ell glanced up to see the young musician walking back toward the stage. His trajectory would take him near their table so she stood and as he approached she said, “Excuse me?”

He glanced at her, obviously reluctant to encourage conversation when he had a set to finish. Ell said, “I’ve got a friend who knows the owner of Vic’s in Chapel Hill. You know, where a lot of acts have been producing their live recordings?”

His eyes had widened a moment, but then obviously concluding that “a friend” probably wouldn’t have any real influence, he said, “I’d love to record there, but we don’t really have a chance. Sorry, I’ve got to get back to the stage.”

Ell said, “Call down there tomorrow. Tell them you’re the Asheville act that Belle told Vic about. I’ll guarantee you he’ll give you a date there if you can get that little girl to sing with you.”

He frowned, “How are you going to ‘guarantee’ something like that?”

Ell winked, “I’m going to send Belle a copy of the audio track my AI recorded tonight to give to Vic. That was truly special you know?”

He stared at her a moment, then nodded, “That it was. I’ll call down there tomorrow. I hope you aren’t just blowing smoke.”

They stayed for the rest of the set, but the little girl didn’t sing again and when the musicians took a break, she and her mother got up to go. Ell turned to Shan and winked as she said, “I’m feeling pretty tired. How do you feel about heading back to the lodge to get some rest?”

Morgan said, “Yeah, I’m ready to head on back myself.” She turned to Lane, “Hey, Lane. Let’s head for the barn.”

Lane turned, eyes wide, “You guys are turning in already? What are you? Sixty?”

Morgan rolled her eyes. “No, just not into the bar scene. You coming?”

The handsome blond guy that Lane had been talking to leaned her way, “Hey, Baby,” he said in a raspy voice, “I can give you a ride back to wherever.” He waved a dismissive hand, “let the dead weights go beddy-bye.”

Lane glared a moment at Shan, Ell and Morgan, then turned to the biker and gave him a little shrug, “Sure, I’d be glad to hang with someone who actually wants to live a little.”

Ell narrowed her eyes at the biker, uncomfortable with his swagger.

Shan also looked uneasy but looking at Lane, he only said, “You’re sure you want to do this?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Go on home.” Lane turned back to her new friend.

“OK,” Shan said, “We’ll send my car back and tell it to park in that same lot for you.”

Ell turned to him, “I’m going to visit the girl’s room; then we can go.”

In the restroom stall, Ell held her hand just below her umbilicus and a tiny AV port fell into it. She spoke to Allan, her AI, again and another small port fell into her hand followed by some small gray disks. Ell peeled a tab off each of the disks and stuck them to the backs of the little ports. Then she peeled the tabs off the other sides of the disks and palming the ports headed back out.

Morgan and Shan were standing near the entrance of the bar but Ell walked over to Lane who now sat at the table with the three guys. Ell came up behind her chair. Leaning down behind her Ell stroked her fingers with the ports up under and out through the back of Lane’s hair while saying, “Hey Lane, if you need anything, just call Shan’s name. Or mine.”

Lane leaned to one side and looked back at Ell with a look somewhere between confused and irritated. “OK, sure.” She turned back to the guys.

Ell glanced down at Lane’s hair. The adhesive on the tiny ports had stuck to the deeper hair as Ell had hoped and the ports weren’t really visible. She turned and went to join Morgan and Shan, telling Allan to notify her if Lane said their names or sounded distressed. She didn’t want to eavesdrop on Lane’s evening but she wanted to be able to help if the guys Lane were with turned out to actually be as dangerous as they acted. Allan had algorithms to detect stress in the human voice that would let him tell Ell if there were a problem, even if Lane didn’t ask for help.

As they walked to their car, Ell wondered just what it was about those guys that set her hair on end. After all Lane was an adult, capable of making her own decisions, as her brother had obviously decided. The fact that the guys rode motorcycles certainly didn’t make them dangerous. A lot of guys liked to cultivate a dangerous image, even when they were anything but.

Back at the lodge, Ell and Shan had a pleasant late evening with his family. Shan and his mother started a game of scrabble. Ell put on her “Belle” voice and called Vic. “Hey Vic, you staying sober?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled, “Haven’t been in a fight for ages. My life is getting to be really dull!”

Ell chuckled in return. “I’m thinking you might be getting a little excitement out of all those big name acts you’ve been booking?”

“Well, there is that. I’d really like to thank you and your aunt for getting me started.”

“You’re welcome, but I’m calling in a debt.”

“I thought I was ‘paid in full’ on that loan?”

“You are, monetarily, to my aunt. I’m calling in the ‘favor’ of me helping you get the loan.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I heard the most amazing thing this evening. It was forwarded to me by a friend.” Ell went on to describe the musicians and the little girl and their performance of “Forgiveness” as if she had witnessed it second hand. “Anyway, my friend promised them you’d talk to them about playing at Vic’s so you could record them. I’m forwarding the AV recording her AI made. I think you’ll see the potential they have.”

“OK,” he said dubiously, “I’ll look at the recording and get back to you, but don’t get your hopes up. I need to maintain high standards if I don’t want to lose business.”

Ell could understand the doubt in his voice but in about five minutes, he called back and said, “You’re right, that was amazing. I’d love to record them so please do give them my contact info. I’m not sure they can create that same magic again, but if they can, it’ll be worth it.”

Ell woke from a sound sleep to the sound of Allan saying in her ear, “I have detected stress in Lane’s voice.”

At first Ell tried to glance up at her HUD for the time, then muzzily realized that she didn’t have her HUD on. She looked at the ceiling where a projected glowclock displayed “02:56.” Reaching for her HUD she put it on and said, “Play back the audio where she began to sound distressed.”

Lane’s voice immediately sounded in Ell’s ear, “No, dammit! I said ‘no!’ Let go of me!” She sounded a little slurred as if moderately drunk, but still pretty aware of her surroundings.

In the background a familiar raspy voice said, “Laney, Laney. You might have been able to tease some of the little boys you’ve known in the past, but now you’re hanging with some real men. You ain’t gonna be able to just tease us.” Other male voices could be heard chuckling a little farther in the background.

Ell slipped out of bed, “Give me real time audio now and bring the hoverbike here. Do you have a location on Lane?” As she picked up her jeans she turned to look at Shan, wondering whether to wake him. And tell him what? That I bugged his sister’s hair?

Ell stepped into the bathroom and found her running shoes, a fresh long sleeved t-shirt and her light jacket. Lane’s voice said, “I haven’t been teasing you. I thought we were just going out on the town?”

Allan said, “I have no location data for Lane. If she still has on her HUD she has not authorized it to provide GPS data.”

“Extrude a GPS antenna through that second port in her hair and figure out where she is.” Ell wondered whether to call Lane and ask for GPS data, it would tell Lane that she’d bugged her though. Should I be letting my embarrassment over attaching those ports to her stand between me and providing her help? “Put through a call to Lane please.”

“OK” Allan said, then fed more of the audio from the port in Lane’s hair to Ell. “Yeah, sure. To a real biker bar, remember?” Then Allan said, “Lane’s AI says she is not taking calls.”

Ell said to Allan, “Call Steve for me, let him know I’m heading into Asheville and a possibly dangerous situation.” Ell’s security team had, to her surprise, shown up out in Texas right after she’d re-entered the States. Some of them had taken other jobs when she’d been arrested, but six remained. They’d apparently been about to cross into Mexico to follow her when she’d crossed back. They’d begun their usual tactics of following her from place to place. As she’d originally requested, they tried to stay out of sight, but be close enough to assist if she were to be captured by someone.

As soon as Ell stopped speaking to Allan, he fed her the most recent audio from Lane. Ell heard Lane’s voice, “Yes, ‘to a biker bar.’ Not to your ‘crib’ or whatever you call this dump.”

“‘Mike’s Bar.’” The gravelly voice said, presumably Mike himself. “That’s what I call this dump. We got a fridge full of beer. Makes it a bar in my opinion.” He snorted, “We’re bikers, so that makes it a ‘biker bar.’”

A voice further in the background said, “Yeah, girl, and you’re this biker bar’s entertainment!”

The bike had just landed by the lodge and she got out her helmet but passed on the Kevlar suit in interest of time. Pulling on the helmet, Ell swung a leg over the saddle of the hoverbike. A moment later she swung the bike up over the ridge behind the lodge and turned toward the lights of Asheville.

In a desperate tone, Lane’s voice said in Ell’s ear, “911! Help! Hey, give me that!”

Mike’s voice said, “Sure, you can have it back, soon as I get this here chip out of it.”

“Lane’s HUD has just gone dead,” Allan said. Then, “The antenna fed through the second port in Lane’s hair has now allowed determination of her GPS location. Would you like the coordinates?”

“Just fly the hoverbike there. Send the coordinates to Steve and any others on the security team that are coming after me.” The sounds of a struggle were coming from the AV port in Lane’s hair. Ell lowered her head and asked Allan to increase the speed of the hoverbike to two hundred miles per hour. Without the Kevlar motorcycle jacket and pants, her jeans and jacket snapped and popped painfully hard in the wind stream but at that speed the seven mile trip only took a couple of minutes.

The hoverbike slowed and Ell peered down, seeing that she was over a doublewide manufactured home with a truck, six motorcycles and Shan’s car parked in front of it. The bike was descending toward the parking area but Ell said, “Hold this altitude. Give the lift harness six inches of slack.”

She reached under the bike and grabbed the harness. “OK, give me three feet of slack on the harness.” Once Ell had pulled the harness up to where she could get a good grip on it, she dropped over the side, forbearing to waste time putting it on. “OK let out enough to get me down to within five feet of the ground.”

Ell found herself essentially freefalling toward the ground and with a little grin to herself over Allan’s literal translation, said “Slow it to ten miles per hour.” Her rate of fall slowed abruptly and she almost lost her grip on the harness. “Dammit,” she muttered to herself. I should have put on the harness, and I should have given Allen a speed when I started, and I should have told him to slow it gradually, and I’m gonna get myself killed without helping Lane if I don’t pull it together! The ground rose to meet her and she dropped lightly to her feet on the moonlit grass next to the truck. I’ll have to give Allan instructions for how to carry out such maneuvers in the future.

Telling Allan to load Taser darts for her left index finger and midazolam for her right, Ell sprinted lightly to the door and tried the knob. As she had expected, it wasn’t locked. Macho guys like that wouldn’t think that their door needed to be locked when they were inside to defend their property. Ell slowly swung the door open a crack. Four cursing guys held Lane’s arms and legs spread eagled on the dirty carpet. Mike sat astride Lane’s hips as she tried violently to buck him off. He snapped open a large knife and snarled, “Hold still!”

Suddenly, as if—in fear of the knife—she had resigned herself to her fate, Lane stopped moving, though she still trembled like a taught bowstring.

“That’s better,” Mike rasped, lifting the front of her shirt and beginning to saw through it from the waist toward the collar.

Ell whispered, “Midazolam, 5mg fifteen feet, shoot.” She saw the tiny flash and the squirt of liquid appeared about a foot short of the thigh of the guy sitting on Lane’s right leg. “Up distance to 16 feet, shoot.” Ell saw the guy reach down to rub his thigh. She shifted her aim from man to man, adjusting the distance slightly as the first guy had been the closest. One other shot missed, short because of the inaccuracy of the port’s distance settings and Ell had to shoot it again. Fortunately, each of the guys flinched or rubbed the site when she shot them so that she could tell when she’d hit them.

Grinning, Mike finished sawing through Lane’s shirt and reached down to grab her bra. As he began to lift it and slid the knife under it to cut it off too, Ell decided she couldn’t wait for the midazolam to work. “Taser, ten feet, fire.”

A tiny flash appeared ten feet from Ell and the Taser dart flew from there to bury itself in Mike’s torso. Stunned and quivering he slowly fell to the side as his friends stared at him, unsure as to what had just happened.

Ell pulled the door open and stepped inside.

Because Ell still had her helmet on, to the men there it at first appeared as if some other biker had just entered. The one who’d been holding Lane’s arm on the far side stood, uncertain as to whether it was a friend come to join the fun or a rival invading their territory.

Ell barked, “Get off of her, now!”

A girl! The bikers thought, hearing the voice and seeing her shape. The one who’d stood raised his eyebrows in amusement, “Come to join the party, girly? There’s plenty to go around.” He stepped around the group toward Ell.

Ell shot him with a Taser dart too. The other three guys stood abruptly, letting Lane go, one of them reaching behind his back, presumably for a weapon. With a sigh, Ell shot the other three, then because Mike was moaning and rolling back to his knees preparatory to getting up, she shot him again.

Lane pulled her ruined shirt back about her and started staggering back to her feet. “Lane!” Ell said, “This way! They’ll be back on their feet pretty quick.”

Lane stumbled toward Ell and Ell said, “Shan’s car is just outside. Tell it to take you back to the lodge.”

Ell looked around the room. Filthy and disordered, it contained a lot of evidence of criminal activity. Several assault weapons stood in a corner next to the door. A rubber tube, syringe and needles sitting on a box by the couch suggested that at least one of the guys shot up. Smudges of white powder were on the table.

It looked like it would be good if the police visited them but Ell didn’t want to call them herself. Stepping to the closest of the guys, Ell pulled off his HUD and, holding it by the edges to keep from leaving a fingerprint or much DNA, spoke into its microphone using a deep voice and a strong southern accent, “Call 911. There’s been a fight here. Help!”

Though they were all showing the effects of the tranquilizer one of the guys staggered to his feet. He stepped toward Ell but tripped over one of his buddies. Ell walked around him to a roll of paper towels standing on the floor by the couch. She stepped on the roll and ripped off a towel. She used the towel to twist open the lock on the doorknob of the back door, then opened the door and left it standing open. Walking back to the men on the floor, she plucked the Taser darts out of them or off the floor. At the front door, she used the towel to wipe any fingerprints off the knob; then left that door standing open as well.

Walking down the steps, Ell directed Allan to flash the LEDs on the harness so she could see it, but then she heard Lane’s voice hiss at her. “Raquel! Over here!”

Ell saw Lane standing by Shan’s car. She’d hoped that Lane would be on her way back to the lodge by now. Damn! I guess, despite the helmet and my attempt to disguise my voice, Lane still knew who I was. I hope it isn’t obvious to anyone listening to those guys’ AIs’ recordings of the events just past. Ell pulled off the helmet and trotted over to the car and she and Lane both got in. “Allan,” she said, “Have this car take us back to the lodge.”

Ell turned to Lane who looked stricken. Clutching the front of her blouse closed with both hands, she had tears streaming down her cheeks as she said, “Thank you.”

Ell leaned toward her and put out her arms. Lane leaned into them and Ell hugged her. Lane didn’t hug her back. Apparently not wanting to let go of her shredded blouse she simply huddled into Ell’s embrace. Ell patted her back and whispered, “It’s OK. You’re safe now. Do you want to go to the hospital?”

Lane sniffed and shook her head sharply where it rested on Ell’s shoulder. Ell mentally shrugged but continued to hold her. In the distance she could see the flashing light of approaching police cars. She said, “Allan, have the car turn right here.”

The car slowed to turn, but Allan said, “This road is a dead end and will not take you back to the lodge.”

“That’s OK,” Ell whispered. “Go to the end and turn around. Have the hoverbike reel in the harness and fly back to its hiding place. Tell Steve things are in control and we’re heading back to the lodge.”

By the time they’d turned around and come back to the main road the police cars had gone by. Ell hadn’t wanted the police to have been able to pick Shan’s license plate off their cars’ cameras. If the police got too curious about just what had happened at Mike’s place they might decide to see if any cars had been leaving the scene when they approached. Ell didn’t want them asking Shan questions.

Ell hoped they would just arrest the bikers on the basis of the incriminating evidence in the doublewide without asking too many questions about exactly what had gone down. If Lane felt like she wanted to press charges when she’d sobered up, Ell would be able to give her a clip of the video from Ell’s AI, showing the guys holding Lane down—after stripping any evidence of who’d recorded it off the record. If Lane would be happy just knowing Mike and his buddies went to jail for their other crimes, without her having to be involved or testify, that could be up to Lane.

To Ell’s surprise, before they got back to the lodge, Lane seemed to relax, then fell asleep in her arms. Ell supposed it was a combination of what Lane had had to drink and the stress and exhaustion of the battle she’d had with those guys. Ell herself felt so keyed up that she couldn’t imagine falling asleep. Of course she’d already slept her usual three hours between midnight, when she and Shan went to bed, and the nearly three AM when Allan had woken her because of Lane’s distress.

Once the car had parked itself at the lodge, Ell got out and looked in the great room to be sure no one was there to see Lane dragging in. The room was empty. As Ell walked back out to the car, she pulled off her jacket.

Opening the car door, Ell leaned in and shook Lane gently, “Lane, Lane, come on girl. We’ve got to get you up to your room.”

Lane got unsteadily out of the car, clutching at her torn blouse. Without the adrenalin of the fight in her it became pretty obvious that she’d had a lot to drink. Ell tugged on one of Lane’s arms and slipped it into the jacket’s sleeve. Then the other arm. As Ell zipped up the jacket, she had to pry Lane’s fingers gently off her ripped blouse to do so. Ell wondered just how much the traumatic events of the evening were going to affect the young woman.

Ell helped Lane up the stairs and quietly opened the door to the room Lane and Morgan were sharing. She watched through the cracked door as Lane stumbled to her bed and got in, still wearing Ell’s jacket.

In Ell’s ear she heard Steve’s voice, “Allan tells me you’re safely back at the lodge. You’re going to need to get some of those hoverbikes for your security team, We didn’t even get to that damn doublewide before you sent us the message that you were OK and had obviously left the scene of the problem.”

Ell said, “Yeah, sorry. I’m getting the shop to make me a flyer out of a new material. If it works out, I’ll get some more hoverbikes for you guys made out of the new stuff.”

After Steve signed off, Ell, stimulated by their little talk, reviewed the notes from Gary and Manuel about their attempts to make a hoverbike out of graphend. At present Gary couldn’t construct things de novo from graphend. What he could do was coat an existing shape with graphend. The problem was how to make the shapes to coat. The main advantage of the graphend was how thin and light it could be and still be strong enough to do a job. Unfortunately, ordinary materials, made as thin and light as the graphend could be, were too weak to hold their shape while the graphend coating was being applied. The blades for the hoverbike fans were a real problem because each one needed to be shaped exactly like the next one. They’d been casting the blades out of foamed plastic but, the thin plastic blade “cores” were so thin and flimsy that they would warp under their own weight or twist in a slight breeze. Right now each blade had to be suspended from its hub end with the rim end tensioned down, then graphend coated while gravity helped pull them out straight. There should be a better way, but Ell hadn’t figured it out as yet. She spent some time searching the net for other materials that might be used as the core for the shapes.

The Wildberry Lodge served wonderful orange flavored French toast for breakfast, though Lane didn’t make it down. Malcolm commented on it, turning to Morgan, “What’s with Lane? Is she dead to the world up there?”

Morgan eyed her dad, “She was up pretty late last night.”

He frowned, “I thought you guys got back at about 10?”

Morgan twisted her lip. “We did. Lane stayed out a little later.”

“By herself?”

Morgan shrugged, “She met some guys… and she didn’t want to… turn in so early.”

Malcolm turned to Shan, “And you let her?”

Shan shrugged, “She’s all grown up, Dad. Likes to make her own decisions… and it is a free country, you know?”

Malcolm rolled his eyes, “Come on, you know she’s always been a little wild. What if she’d gotten in real trouble? We wouldn’t even have known.”

“She didn’t. And she’s an adult under law, able to make her own decisions—no matter how stupid they might be.”

After breakfast, everyone moved out onto the deck with coffee. After a moment Ell slipped back inside to “get a Coke.” The fact that the lodge’s little fridge full of sodas was upstairs gave Ell an excuse to be up near Lane’s room. She knocked gently and opened the door, stepping inside. “Lane?” she said quietly.

Lane rolled, from facing the wall to look at Ell, “Hey.” Her eyes squinty with a hangover, she looked sheepish.

“How are you doing?”

“Feeling pretty stupid. Is my family waiting to jump my shit about last night?”

“I haven’t told them. I figured that should be up to you.”

Lane’s eyes widened in surprise.

“I can tell them if you’d prefer it not come from you?” Ell said with concern. “Are you feeling traumatized? I don’t know much about what you must be going through, but I’ve read that PTSD can be a big problem when you’ve been attacked, even if they didn’t succeed in raping you.”

Lane shrugged, “I guess you stopped them in time, though maybe I’ll have trouble later. Right now, I mostly feel embarrassed and hung over. I knew those guys were assholes…” she sniffed, “seems like I specialize in jerks.”

Ell tilted her head, “Bad boys can be kind of exciting… but, I think it’s a mistake to think that they’ll fall in love and turn into good guys.”

Lane sniffed again, “Yeah, I should have learned that lesson by now.”

Ell said, “Well, if you don’t want your family to know what happened, I need to get back downstairs before they wonder what I’m doing. If you ever want to talk to someone about last night, someone who already knows about it, just call me.”

That afternoon they all wandered around downtown Asheville, poking into some of the craft shops and art galleries. Ell squatted down to look at some wooden bowls that a local artisan had turned on his lathe. They were made from layers of different woods and had been finished to a glossy glow. Standing up, she leaned back and put her elbow back, bending it to rest the heel of her hand on her aching low back.

Behind her, Fay Kinrais gasped, “You’re pregnant!”

Ell turned to smile bemusedly, “How did you know? I feel like I hardly show.”

“That pose, arching your back with your hand on the back of your pelvis. It’s what pregnant ladies do. How far along are you?” Fay asked excitedly.

“Three months.”

“When’s the baby due?”

“Early October.”

Fay stepped closer and threw her arms around Ell, “I’m so very happy for you! I’m gonna be a Grandma!”

“You’re what?” Malcolm asked.

Fay looked at Ell, “Do you want to tell him?”

Ell shrugged and turned to Malcolm, “Hey Grampa.”

A look of confusion crossed his face; then he stepped over to give Ell his own hug.

That evening, out on the porch at the Lodge, Ell called her Mom.

“Ell! Where are you?”

“Safe. I’m thinking I shouldn’t tell you exactly where. Even though they can’t eavesdrop on the PGR connection to your HUD, it’s possible they could pick something up with directional mikes or laser pickups on the windows.”

“OK, but I sure would like to see you sometime.”

“Me too Gram.”

“Gram’s not here tonight. She’s started having a weekly bridge night with some of her friends.”

“That’s nice, but I wasn’t speaking to my grandmother.”

“Huh?”

“I was talking to you.”

“Oh… Oh! Oh Ell, now I really need to see you!”

Ell and her mother spoke for a while. It felt hard to carry on a normal conversation since they worried about someone tracking or somehow listening in on her mother to find Ell. They didn’t want to talk about plans for the future in any detail. They spoke for a few minutes about Duncan Miles, Kristen’s boyfriend. Kristen and Duncan had no plans to get married, they got along fine as they were.

Kristen said, “You’re not going to believe who called last week.”

“Who?”

“Jake.”

“Jake… Your ex-husband Jake?”

“Yup, that’s the one.”

“Really… what did he want?”

Kristen snorted, “Money. I’d heard he had some financial troubles and after a lot of talk it turned out he wanted to borrow some.” She laughed, “You won’t be surprised to hear he couched it as a great deal for me. He told me in no uncertain terms that if I were to pass up investing in his new venture, I’d never forgive myself.”

Ell barked a sharp little laugh. “What did you tell him?”

“Believe it or not, for a little while I found myself feeling sorry for him. But then I came to my senses and told him that if he hadn’t spent all his time trying to push people around or screw them over, that he probably wouldn’t have lost those big contracts. Then I hung up without saying good bye.”

Ell chuckled at the thought of her—always polite—mother hanging up on someone. No doubt, the very height of rudeness in Kristen’s mind.

Chapter Two

Mason Phillips stepped into the Oval Office. Unhappily, expecting a browbeating over the FBI’s failure to apprehend Donsaii. Stockton could be incredibly hostile, but interleaved antagonistic interactions with pleasant and friendly exchanges. In his mind, Phillips likened opening the Oval Office door to checking on Schrodinger’s cat. However, instead of wondering whether the cat would be dead or alive, you were wondering whether you would be confronted by a kitten or a slavering tiger.

This time, Stockton had a pleasant smile. Even a smile didn’t mean things were going to go well but Mason smiled in return and said, “Good afternoon Madam President.”

“Hi Mason, sit down.” Stockton heaved herself up and came around to sit across from him. This was a good sign, usually when she was angry she stayed behind the Resolute desk. “Any issues I should be aware of before we start talking about Donsaii?”

Phillips took that question as a “good news—bad news” proposition. Glad that Stockton was interested in important, non-Donsaii issues; annoyed that Donsaii would still be the major topic of discussion. Taking the attitude that the best defense is a good offense, he brought her up to date on the status of a number of issues that he felt were far more important than whether or not they’d tracked Donsaii down. These ranged from organized crime, to drug running, to terrorists but about the time he felt like he was getting his stride, Stockton put up a hand. “It sounds like you have those well in hand. My compliments on a well laid out strategy for finding those terrorists in South Carolina.”

“Well, they’re more in the nature of crazy red-neck survivalists than true terrorists, but they do pose a threat.”

“Yeah, yeah, let’s move on to Donsaii. What have you learned there?”

Internally, Phillips sighed. He didn’t let it show through to the outside though. “Well, you’re aware that neither the military, nor the CIA have been able to track any egress from Cuba?”

“I thought some kind of aircraft crashed the night of her escape?”

And what a tragedy it would be if Donsaii had been on board, Phillips thought to himself. Aloud, he said, “Well, they did track an intermittent radar return that might have come from Cuba. Unfortunately, of the aircraft sent to investigate, the only one to get ‘eyes on’ reported ‘flying saucers.’ Then the craft disappeared, perhaps crashed into the waves, but a search of the site didn’t turn up any wreckage.”

“You sent down subs?”

“The wreck happened over the ‘Cayman Trough’ a part of the Caribbean that’s over 4 miles deep. Only research subs, which have a very limited field of view, can get down that deep, so the chances of finding anything would be extremely remote.”

“So you think she’s a goner?” Stockton asked, barely concealing her relish of the possibility.

What could make her hate Donsaii so much? Phillips wondered, but he responded, “No, I think that the radar return they got so excited about was some kind of spurious signal. The ‘flying saucer’ report calls everything they saw into doubt.”

“Well, if she’s not at the bottom of that trench, where is she?”

“Most likely? She’s still on Cuba. They’d be happy to have her and certainly wouldn’t tell us about it. Alternatively? She got off the island somehow. We should have picked her up if she came back to the States. It’s really hard to fake an identity nowadays without the help of the Witness Protection people, and doing anything without ID is almost impossible in the States. So, I suspect she’s in some other country.”

“You’ve tapped the phones of all her relatives and associates?”

Trying not to roll his eyes, Phillips said, “Nobody has phones anymore. Tapping into their AI communications is pretty much impossible if they’re using PGR chips.”

“Oh, come on. I know you guys can tap in at the PGR Comm switching stations. Besides, surely you guys have built some kind of bugs based on that same PGR? Something you can install in their houses and on their AI headpieces that can send you untraceable intelligence about what’s going on?”

Phillips nodded. “We do, but we still need the court’s permission to do that kind of monitoring. We’ve asked but been denied.”

“Permission for tapping terrorists isn’t supposed to be a problem!”

“The court didn’t agree that Donsaii met the definition of a terrorist.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit! She’s holding the entire country hostage to her control of these ‘one ended ports.’”

“The court took the stance that she has not engaged in violence or the threat of violence and that, in fact, her suppression of dangerous port technology represents an ‘anti-terrorist’ position.”

“Find a different judge!”

Phillips shrugged, “We’ll try, but that’s gonna be a hard row to hoe.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll guarantee she’s not as squeaky clean as she acts. Start investigating her personal life and finances. I’ll bet you find plenty of indiscretions that we can nail her to the wall with.”

“We can’t ‘nail her’ if we can’t find her. And, aren’t you at all worried that if we continue to treat her in such a hostile fashion, we’ll drive her into the arms of another country? She may already be in such a country, Cuba for instance.”

Stockton waved dismissively, “We don’t need to nail her in person if we just make everyone hate her. You seem to think we need Donsaii more than she needs her country, but that’s a load of crap. She’s just a spoiled little girl, admittedly good at sports, who made a lucky physics discovery. Undoubtedly, the grown-ups at her company are the ones that produced the value from that discovery. Whether she’s already at the bottom of that Caribbean trench or she leaves our country, the country’ll be the better for it. Once you figure out just what kind of indiscretions she’s committed, we’ll smear her in the press and all her so called fans will disappear. As soon as the public starts treating her as a pariah, we’ll nationalize her company and start selling its products to the rest of the world at a premium. Trust me, we’re going to turn this negative into a positive.”

Phillips stared at his President. She’s either bat-shit crazy or completely out of touch with reality! Briefly he wondered whether he should try to stand up to her. After a moment he decided she’d just fire him and put a complete incompetent in his place. Look at the people she’s got on that Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs! And her Science Advisor’s a real piece of work too. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said reluctantly. At least from the inside I can try to minimize the damage, he thought to himself.

***

Hiking up the hill behind the lodge, the Kinrais family was in good spirits. Ell brought up the rear with Lane. “How are you doing?” she asked quietly.

“Fine,” Lane said, looking at Ell with a musing look on her face.

“You aren’t feeling stressed? Reliving the attack?”

“No. I appreciate your concern, but not every assault victim gets PTSD you know?”

Ell looked at her appraisingly, then shrugged, “Some of them are in denial though.” She smiled, “You aren’t one of those, are you? If you are, counseling is supposed to help.”

Lane grinned at her. “Well if I’m really in denial maybe I wouldn’t know it. I promise that if I start having trouble I’ll get help, OK?”

Ell nodded, “I just want to make sure you’re not pretending you’re fine but actually about to have a crisis. I don’t want us to bury our heads in the sand.”

“OK, OK, enough,” Lane said. “I am curious about one thing though.”

“What’s that?”

“How’d you get there so fast?” Lane tilted her head curiously, “It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes between when I called, and when you showed up. I don’t understand how you even knew where I was? They took the chip out of my headband as soon as I called out for help and my AI doesn’t have permission to give my ‘last location’ to anyone but the police.”

Ell stopped, looking ashen. “I’m so sorry Lane. That biker guy worried me, so when I said goodbye to you at the bar, I put a tracker on you.”

“A what?”

“Well, it was actually just a port that I could put a GPS antenna through to find you.”

Lane stared at her, “How did you know I was in trouble? Were you listening in on me?”

“Uh, no,” Ell said, blushing, “I had my AI listen for stress in your voice. So I have no idea what happened or what you said, up ‘til the point where you yelled ‘No, dammit! Let go of me!’ and my AI decided you were stressed.”

Lane looked doubtful, “Your AI can recognize stress in someone’s voice?”

“Um, yeah, I have a pretty high end AI. It downloaded algorithms for that.”

“Hey,” Shan called from a ways up the trail. The rest of the group had stopped and were looking back at Lane and Ell. “You guys hikin’ or gossipin’?”

Lane grimaced, “We’d better start on up the trail. Years of experience tells me your new hubby won’t let up ‘til we do.” Ell and Lane started hiking up towards the rest of the group. Lane glanced at Ell out of the corner of her eye, “It’s pretty hard to be pissed at you for putting this… tracker thing on me, considering that it saved my butt. But still, you got there awfully fast. What were you doing, hanging around nearby ‘cause you were that sure those guys were bad actors?”

“Uh, no, but I have a way to get around pretty fast.”

“A way to get around pretty fast?”

Ell shrugged, “I’d rather not say how. It’s a big part of my plan for staying out of Stockton’s clutches. I wouldn’t want you to accidentally get trapped into saying something about it…”

At the top of the hill behind the lodge the Wildberry had built a small tower that let folks see out over the surrounding forests. The Kinrais climbed up and crowded into the little viewing platform at the top. They gazed in wonder at the view of the mountains and valleys they could take in from there. Though they knew that people lived in the surrounding area, the dense trees kept almost all signs of civilization hidden away.

After oohing and aahing for a while they started climbing down. As Ell started to get on the ladder though, Shan touched her arm. “Hey, how about if we stay here and talk a bit?”

Ell grinned slyly at him, “That’d be fun.”

He snorted, “I meant actually talk.” He turned and yelled down to his family, “Hey, Raquel and I are gonna stay up here and enjoy the view for a bit.” He turned back to Ell who crossed her arms and gave him a disappointed look. “Really. We haven’t had much time to talk. What have you been doing in the couple months between your escape in February and our little vacation here in April?”

Ell sat down on the bench, stretched out her legs and put her arms behind her head, staring consideringly out at the horizon. “I don’t know…” she said hesitantly, “whether I should tell you all of it, because it isn’t all legal and that might make you complicit for not turning me in.” She turned and grinned up at him, “Assuming you didn’t just turn me in for the reward, that is.”

Shan sat down beside her on the little bench, putting his arm around her shoulders. He sighed, “I imagine I’m complicit already, for loving you and being married to you and not turning you in as a simple prison escapee. I’d just as well dig in a little deeper ‘cause I want to be able to help.”

“So, Dr. Kinrais,” she intoned, “you were not only aware of your wife’s nefarious deeds, you also helped in their perpetration?”

Shan grinned at her and gave her a peck on the cheek, “Something like that.”

“OK, “Ell slipped her arm around his waist and her head onto his shoulder. “First, when I got into Texas with the other illegals, we all went to see a guy about ID. I let all of them go first because all they wanted were ID chips.”

Shan frowned, “So, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to make up a chip, but the chip can’t be any good if it doesn’t tie into a verifiable identity on the various governmental records.”

“Yeah, that’s what this guy does. I didn’t want an ID chip, I wanted to know how he did what you just outlined. Not surprisingly, he didn’t want to sell.”

“Well, yeah. He would have thought you wanted to go into business as a competitor.”

Ell nodded. “I had to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

Shan’s eyes widened, “You threatened to kill him?”

Ell looked startled, “Is that what that means? I thought it meant you offered so much money they couldn’t turn you down.”

Shan snorted, “In the movie The Godfather, it meant ‘do as I say or I’ll kill you.’”

“Oh, well, what I did was offer him five kilos of gold.”

“Jeez, how much is that worth?”

“About $320,000.”

Shan grinned, “That would be hard to refuse. So how does he do it?”

“He’s got backdoors into several large governmental data repositories. You’re right, making the chips is simple but inserting supporting data into the records repositories is the real hassle.”

“How much data does he put in?”

“Well, he’s pretty lazy. He’s got a few basic data sets that his AI just inserts the person’s characteristics into. So, height, weight, eye, hair and skin color get filled into a boilerplate identity with the individual’s name and picture and fingerprints.”

Shan laughed, “But your history looks just like a lot of other individuals?”

“No, I suspect the government has AI’s looking for histories that are exactly alike. His boilerplate mixes a lot of possible histories up and prints out a history that the individual is supposed to memorize. I suspect that most of them can’t really remember their supposed history very well and that the police use a few questions based on their supposed history to catch them.”

“So,” Shan squinted out at the horizon, “did you have him mix you up an identity like that?”

“No, I bought his backdoors. For some of the past two months I’ve been working on making up identities with complex histories. I used his backdoors to get from one government system to another and then out into the private sector. So my new identities aren’t just evident in a few databases like the Social Security, Driver’s License and IRS computers; they’re everywhere. These IDs have birth records at hospitals, school records back to age two, bank accounts that go back to age eighteen and so on.”

“Holy crap! I’ve gone from wondering what you’ve done with all your time to wondering how you managed to do all that in just two months? Was it just one or two identities?”

“Oh, no, lots of IDs. But, once I understood how to do it and set up a framework for it, Allan did all the work. In fact, he could make me another ID in about five minutes now.”

“But… you’ve memorized the details for all those IDs?”

“Well, no. When I actually need the details, Allan can feed them to me through the ports in my ears.”

“So, now I’m back to wondering what you’ve been doing with all your time?” He winked, “Why haven’t you been making conjugal visits to your poor husband?”

“Well, I’ve been spending money. Lots of money.”

Shan arched an eyebrow interrogatively.

“Maybe ‘investing’ is a better term. I’ve been buying real estate all over the world. I’ve bought a few companies and a lot of international stock.”

Shan frowned, “What kind of real estate?”

“Well, there’s fifty three acres on the other side of that little peak you see to the west there, and a 944 acre plot over on the east side of Asheville. Undeveloped raw land, here, there and everywhere, owned under all kinds of different identities. Bought a few hotels and resorts too, ones that needed some investment to freshen them back up and make them competitive again. I’m trying to make sure that if Stockton shuts me down as ‘Ell,’ that I’ll be able to go to one of my other identities, cash out some of the holdings in that name and get back to doing research.”

“That reminds me. How is it that the FBI isn’t all over your Raquel identity and me? I mean, the government set up your identities, how is it that they don’t know about them?”

“I think you’re making the same mistake a lot of people do in treating the ‘government’ as a single entity with full knowledge of what all its parts are doing. It isn’t a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, it’s more like you not knowing what your distant cousin’s hand is doing. I have been meaning to ask the lady in the Marshall’s office who set up my old identities about it though.”

Shan shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of confusion. “Wait, back to your new identities. What if someone checks your fingerprints, figures out they’re the same as Ell Donsaii’s?”

“I’ve got prosthetic fingerprints I can pop out of my umbilical port and put on my fingers in a just a few seconds.”

Shan frowned, “And people won’t see them on your fingers?”

Ell shook her head, “They’re transparent. Here, look.” She spoke to Allan a moment and held her cupped hand just below her umbilicus. Something fluttered into her hand. She said, “Now, watch this.” She pulled a little tab off of it, stuck it to her index finger, pulled off another tab, like on a band aid, and rubbed it down onto the finger. She held it up, wiggled it around and said, “See.”

Shan stared. He couldn’t actually see the membrane she’d just glued on her finger. He reached out and touched her index and long fingers, rubbing his finger over them. He couldn’t feel a difference either. “That’s amazing!”

Ell giggled, “You ain’t seen nothing yet buster. Watch this!” Ell spoke to Allan again and her face suddenly changed shape.

“What the Hell!” Shan said, leaning back to get a broader view. “What just happened?”

“Well, I don’t think you ever saw me done up as ‘Belle,’ but for that disguise I had these little silicone prostheses I tucked into my cheeks, kind of like the lumps of cotton wool Marlon Brando wore in The Godfather, but not so over the top.”

Shan nodded dubiously to show he understood.

“So, I molded some prostheses out of silicone to go between my upper gums and cheeks and different ones to go between my lower gums and my cheeks. I even have ones to go between my front gums and my lips. They aren’t all that big, they just make subtle changes.”

“But, you didn’t put any silicone in your mouth a second ago.”

“Nope!” She grinned, “Once I had the shapes I wanted, with little tails that went down on to my teeth and that fit perfectly into the shapes of my gums—that took molding them out of silicone first, then I casted them in Styrofoam—then I had Gary coat them with graphene. They have tiny ports in them and the ports are glued to my teeth in the right location.”

Shan’s eyes widened as he began to understand.

“Then I used acetone to dissolve the Styrofoam out of the little graphene bags, rinsing them a couple of times to get it all out.” She grinned, “So, when I apply a vacuum to the port the graphene bags disappear down to tiny bumps that I can barely feel on my teeth. Hook them up to pressurized air and voila, I have instant cheek prostheses.” She pulled her cheek out with one finger, “And, the graphene has a thin layer of tooth and gum color over it so you can’t really see the prosthesis when it’s inflated.”

Shan shook his head in awe, “That’s amazing,” he breathed.

“Wait! There’s more!” Ell said, unconsciously imitating a cheesy commercial. “I put a piercing on the septum of my nose.” She grimaced, “That was no fun, let me tell you. But the stud has little graphene donuts on it, so,” she spoke to Allan and her nostrils suddenly became wider. Ell raised an eyebrow at Shan’s look of startlement, then gave Allan another command. Abruptly her ears leaned out away from her head.

Shan snorted a laugh at her new big eared, wide nosed look.

“Little graphene balloons behind my ears,” she grinned, “and under my heels, she said, slowly rising to become about an inch taller. “And,” she winked, “being a man, you should like this one.” Over a few seconds, her chest enlarged. “Bra balloons.” Ell snorted at the way Shan stared wide eyed at her chest. “I think I look ridiculous with boobs this big, but I can tell from your glazed look that you actually think these monsters look good.”

Shan blinked, and he waved his hands in surrender, “No, no, I loved you just the way you were!” he gasped out.

Ell rolled her eyes, “Men! You probably won’t like this one.” She stood up and her loose pants gradually got tighter as she inflated balloons inside of them. “I inflate the bra and underpants with water so they’re softer and more flesh like. Even my wigs have bladders in them that can change the shape of my head. It’s a good thing my head is on the smaller size so that I can make it wider or longer without looking like a big headed alien freak.”

Shan, whose eyes had been getting wider and wider, started laughing uncontrollably. As he wound down, he gasped, “That’s amazing!”

“I have to go into a bathroom to change my hair and skin color, but once in a private location, I have lots of wigs that I can pop through, though I have to use a bigger port than my umbilical one.” She shrugged, “Changing my skin color takes a while so almost all my new identities use this same mildly darker color I use for ‘Raquel.’”

They talked a while longer, deciding that they should set Shan up with a couple of identities, facial prostheses and an umbilical port to deliver items to him if he were to need to flee. Shan said, “You ready to head on back?”

“Sure, but let me show you how to ‘get out of Dodge.’” Shan looked at her curiously and Ell said, “Talk to Allan. Tell him to send the hoverbike to your location and lower the lifting harness.”

Shan did as she’d requested then looked around for the hoverbike.

“No, if you want to see it, you have to look really high. It’s up at about 12,000 feet. At that height it’s really hard to see. It only covers about 0.05 degrees in its long dimension and the gray under color matches the sky. Also at that distance the wind noise from the fans isn’t audible.”

“Jeez, at that height, isn’t two miles of even graphene cable going to fill the lifting drum?”

“It’s thousand pound test and a quarter millimeter diameter. Two miles of it wrapped on a four inch drum has a cross sectional area of less than a square inch.”

“Isn’t it going to have a hard time getting the harness to my location from so far up?”

“Yeah, it’s a little difficult. Even with GPS in the harness so Allan knows where it is relative to you, moving the hoverbike way up there takes forever to move the harness’s location down here. So I got Manuel to make up a harness attachment point with air jets on it that let Allan push it one direction or another. Moving things in space is something that AIs are really good at.”

Shan had been looking pretty much straight up. He said, “There it is.”

Ell looked up and sure enough could see the harness dropping rapidly down the last couple of hundred feet. Little puffs of air were deflecting it towards them from where it had been coming down about a hundred feet away. As it swung down Shan snagged it out of the air with a stretched arm. Ell said, “Just in case you need to put it on in a hurry someday, let me show you how.” She showed him how to step into the leg straps and buckle the straps around his thorax. “You want to have him take you up?”

“Sure.”

“Well, tell him how high you want to go. I’d suggest keeping it to about twenty feet so you aren’t visible from down at the lodge. Then give him directions as to which way you want to go.”

A minute later Shan was swinging through the air just above the treetops. By the time Ell climbed down from the tower he was on the ground about fifty yards down the trail. “Hey Raquel? How much longer are you gonna be?”

“Not as long as you hope smart ass!” Ell said as threateningly as she could as she grinned and trotted down the trail after him.

***

Pasadena, California—Dr. Leo Jans of JPL announced today that the unicellular life on the planet circling Alpha Centauri A is DNA based and contains chlorophyll. JPL, in association with D5R, has landed a probe on the planet and determined that the gravity is about three quarters that of Earth, nonetheless, the atmosphere is dense at 1.8 times terrestrial. Further they found that the atmosphere is 67% nitrogen, 31% oxygen, and 1.3% carbon dioxide. It would appear that if we could get there, humans could actually live on the planet although the toxicity of long term exposure to high partial pressures of oxygen would certainly be a concern. “On the other hand,” says Jans, the bland landscape, frequent asteroid bombardment and wide fluctuations in temperature would be undesirable as well. Hopefully, if we do ever find a way to travel to the stars, we’ll find a more hospitable location than either Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti.”

Roger looked around the table of their weekly D5R meeting. He still felt pretty weird leading the group. Especially since Fred and several of the other people there were quite a bit older than he was. Just as he was about to clear his throat and try to bring them to order, Ell’s voice came in his ear, “Hey Rog’, I’ll be listening in ‘real time’ this meeting. I might feed you some suggestions to give to the group if that’s OK?”

Quietly he said, “Sure, but why don’t you just join us remotely with an AV connection?”

“I’d like to, but I don’t really want to put some of them on the spot, trying to decide whether they should be dealing with me when Stockton’s declared me a criminal.” She paused, “Maybe I shouldn’t be putting you in the middle of the same situation?”

“Stockton’s an idiot. Count on me to help anyway I can. I’m happy to put your suggestions out there; I just didn’t want to steal your thunder.” He cleared his throat and said, “Hey folks, shall we get this little meeting underway?”

The group turned to look at him.

“Let’s start with ET resources. What’s happening with your group?”

Rob Braun looked up with a smile. “Things are good. The asteroid mine hit a thousand tons last week and we’re sending out more waldoes to increase output. That’s about eleven million dollars of metal per week. Minus expenses and we’re still making about five million.

“Speaking of asteroids, France has asked us if we can help it dispose of radioactive waste from its old nuclear energy program.” He shrugged, “Well, actually, waste from other programs, like medical radiation etcetera too. Our current plan is to send waldoes into their current storage areas and dump the waste into a crusher. Once it’s small enough to put through a reasonable sized port we’ll just drop it into Neptune’s upper atmosphere.”

Ell had started speaking in Roger’s ear and so he held up a hand, “Dropping them into a gas giant would make them pretty much irretrievable. I’m thinking we should consider that someday there might be some reason or technology for which we might need those radioactives. How about if we set them down on an asteroid somewhere, or inside of one maybe?”

“Good thought. We’ll have to find an asteroid that we’re pretty sure is otherwise useless but has enough gravity to keep them from floating away.”

“Or,” Brian said, “You could inflate a metallic asteroid.” The group turned to look curiously at him and he continued, “You heat it with some of your parabolic mirror ports from down near the sun. Once it’s molten, you sink some high temperature ports into the middle of it and blow it up with gas to make it hollow.”

Rob frowned, “I didn’t think any of your ports would tolerate temperatures that high?”

“They won’t,” Brian winked, “Unless you put them in a tungsten frame that’s cooled with one of your deep space cooling ports.”

Rob smacked his own forehead, “Damn! Good idea. Though maybe it would be easier to just put the stuff down on Pluto somewhere.” He spoke to his AI to make a note, then said, “Our new power generation projects are going well. So far we’ve been using existing plants and supplying the heat to create steam as a substitute for the coal or gas they had been using, but we’re starting to build some plants from scratch. We had hoped to kill two birds with one stone by putting generators in the deserts. Then we’d port them seawater, which we’d heat into steam, run the generator and when the steam cooled we’d have fresh water for the desert. Problem is that saltwater steam is too corrosive and would ruin the turbines so we’re thinking we’d just as well go back to having one plant for desalination and another for power that uses fresh water for its steam.”

Roger blinked, then put up a finger, feeling weird to pretend to have thought of things that Ell had fed him. “Uh, Gary,” he turned to focus on Gary Pace, “Would you be able to coat the turbines and their bearings with diamond to prevent wear and corrosion?”

Gary blinked, “Hah! I’d been planning all sorts of cooler things than that for diamond coatings. But, yeah, that sounds important. I assume these things are huge and we’d have to scale up, but the patents are applied for so we can just license to the companies making the turbines.”

Several people in the room turned to look at each other, Fred said, “I thought you were making graphene? When did you start making diamond?”

Gary grinned, “Allotropes R Us! We’ve only done small sized lab experiments so far, but I’m positive we can scale them up. It’s just a matter of convincing the companies it’s worth the investment.” He looked around, “As long as I have the floor, we’re getting a lot of demand for graphene and are currently planning to buy even more space in the habitats for production. Eventually, I expect we’ll be using an entire habitat and then more than one. So we’ll be providing more and more business for the ET Resource group.”

The group looked back at Rob who said, “Another development is that ILX is getting into the space business, so we’ll have some real competition soon. They’re focusing less on space launch and have started building a habitat and buying some waldoes.”

Vivian said, “Should we be limiting their ability to purchase ports and… ‘put the brakes’ on them so to speak?”

Rob shrugged, “Sure, we’d like that, but Ell told me she thinks it’s important to get other people out there in space exploring and harvesting some resources. Space is too big for just ETR to be developing it.” He laughed, “If they start kicking our ass, we might want you to slow them down, but really, if they beat us with the head start we’ve got, we ought to just take our beating, then go lie down in the corner with our tail between our legs.”

Vivian and Fred then described the enormous numbers of ports now being produced by Portal Tech as well as the sizes of the new port controller warehouses they were building to support the ports. Roger hadn’t considered that, since they were essentially leasing the ports and supplying power and control to all of them that they would have enormous “port server” facilities. Though they didn’t discuss financials in any details at these meetings—the meetings being focused on the science and the progress of implementation—Roger wondered just how much money Portal Tech must be making.

***

New York—A new phenomenon in women’s style has sprung up around the country. Women everywhere, especially young women have started asking for the “Donsaii cut and color.” This is apparently in response to a virally disseminated posting by Sylvie Hatchell, self-proclaimed number one fan of Ell Donsaii. As Hatchell intended, this has resulted in thousands of reports from people claiming to have seen Donsaii, now number one on the FBI’s “most wanted” list. So if you’ve been wondering why you are seeing so many young women with short strawberry blond hair, now you know…

As Shan and Ell drove back down I-40 toward Chapel Hill, Ell asked, “How are you liking being on the faculty at UNC?”

He shrugged, “I like it pretty well. I kind of like teaching and the rest of the faculty cut me a lot of slack as the only one that understands your math. The University as a whole has been pretty upbeat since an anonymous donor started donating huge amounts of money five years ago. She started with 105 million but this last year she put up 700 million. Other donors put up two to three hundred million a year so that puts total donations up near a billion. Even though the majority of the money goes to the Physics Department, the rest of the University is getting a significant upgrade. Salaries are up which makes it easier to recruit top faculty. Well known faculty attract top students to the school. They’re upgrading the buildings. UNC was already considered the best public school in the country, now it and NC State are both on their way to being among the best in the world. There’s no doubt they’re the best or soon will be in Physics.” He gave her a serious look, “But if you’re asking if I could give it up to go somewhere with my girl, the answer would be, ‘Sure, in a heartbeat.’”

Ell leaned over to rest her head on his shoulder. “Good, ‘cause it’s hard to imagine that it’s going to take the FBI all that much longer to figure out who you’re married to.” She looked up at him, “Can I take you to see one of the places we might live as fugitives?”

Shan raised his eyebrows, “Sure.”

They left I-40 and headed south a ways. When they pulled off the pavement onto a dirt road out into the trees, Ell said, “This land belongs to one, ‘Stan Kenner,’ wealthy playboy who likes to come out and stay in the woods. Looks a lot like you, but has dark hair and puffy cheeks.” Ell handed Shan a couple of lumps of congealing silicone, “Tuck these between your upper gums and your cheeks.” Once Shan had done that, Ell massaged his cheeks to get the shape she wanted. “Now don’t talk or move your mouth while it sets up.” While they waited, Ell returned to her description. “Your alter ego’s got a rustic little cabin hidden away in these 109 acres of woods and meadows. The land used to be owned by a lumber company but they got in financial trouble and sold this plot because it was pretty far from the rest of their holdings.” Ell continued describing Shan’s alter ego’s life and statistics.

As they pulled up in front of a tired looking cabin, Ell said, “OK, they should be ready to take out. Let me get a picture of them in situ.” Ell pulled his cheeks back so the cameras on her head band could record the location of his teeth relative to the inserts. “You can take them out now.”

Shan pulled them out and examined them. “You’re going to make graphene balloons in this shape with ports to attach them to my molars?”

“Yeah, you’ll hardly notice them when they’re deflated, but you will when they’re pumped up. And, of course, I’ll have to install an umbilical one ended port for you to get your hair dye and other doodads through.” She smiled ruefully at him, “Getting that put in isn’t any fun.”

He shrugged, “I’m sure I’ll live.”

“Well, let’s go inside.”

The cabin certainly wasn’t upscale, though it had a well-stocked pantry and a closet full of casual clothing. Ell commented, “You could live here for months without having to venture back out in the world if you needed to, though I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that.”

***

In the midst of cooking breakfast, the AI for the headband that Donsaii gave to Viveka chimed for attention, then said, “You have a call from a Bridget Spaulding of D5R.”

For a moment Viveka thought, “Who would call me during breakfast!” and “I don’t know anyone with that name!” Then the “D5R” registered on her brain. “Yes, yes! I’ll take it.”

A young woman’s voice spoke, “Viveka? Is this Viveka Janu of Delhi India?”

“Yes?” Viveka said, trying to keep her voice from trembling.

“Uh, sorry to be getting back to you so late, I know you emailed a while back.”

“Oh, that’s OK.” Viveka’s heart sank. The apologetic tone in Spaulding’s voice said that they wouldn’t have a job for her. I wonder why they even called me back.

“Ms. Donsaii left word that we should find a job for you when you graduated. Have you finished your degree yet?”

Heart pounding and voice breaking, Viveka said, “In three weeks.”

“Are you OK? You sound… frightened. Should I try to contact the police for you?”

“No, no, I’m just very happy that Ms. Donsaii remembered me.”

“Oh, OK. Would you like for us to help you get a visa to come work here in the United States? Or would you prefer that we try to help you get a job with one of our subsidiaries in India?”

Viveka’s knees buckled and she slowly slid to the floor. “In America please,” she whispered…

Chapter Three

Carlsbad New Mexico—A fight broke out at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. A Holly Clouse who claims her husband developed cancer working at the WIPP has been leading protestors who have been complaining of the dangers of the radioactive materials being interred there. A number of employees staged a counter protest, concerned over the loss of their jobs. William Thyrgeson said, “This is a good job. I drive one of those new waldoes. I never even get close to the radioactive waste. It couldn’t be safer. Idiots like them there are going to close WIPP down and our jobs will go somewhere else.”

Of note, France is said to be negotiating with ET Resources to dispose of its radioactive waste to an undisclosed location somewhere out in space. People have begun to ask why we’re continuing to invest in the disposal of such materials here on earth…

US Marshall Gloria Sanchez walked out of the Federal building on New Bern Avenue at seven PM. When she got home, a young woman stepped around the corner of her house and said, “Hey Gloria.”

In the dim light Gloria studied her a moment, then recognized Ell Donsaii, done up in one of the disguises Gloria had helped her set up years ago. “Hey yourself.”

“I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions?”

“Shoot.”

“How come the FBI hasn’t found me? Or, I mean, at least figured out that I have aliases. Are you covering for me?”

Gloria shrugged. “We do keep close track of the criminals in Witness Protection. They have to report in every so often, some of them slip back into a criminal lifestyle and so we watch them. Since you weren’t a criminal, we treated it as a favor we were doing you and your police chief friend in Dallas. We haven’t tried to track you. Even for the criminals in the WP, we hold their identities to just a few people. About fifteen years ago one of them got sold out to the Mafia by a secretary in the Marshall’s office who was desperate for money. Information about our witnesses isn’t available to other government agencies without specific court orders, which would mean someone would have to actually know you’d been given an identity. In your case, I’m the only one who actually knows what identities I set up for you. My boss only knows that I was asked to create an identity for you. He doesn’t know there were more than one or what they were. We haven’t talked about it, but I suspect that neither of us think you deserve this witch hunt you’ve been subjected to. The FBI hasn’t asked us about it so I haven’t told them and I suspect he’s doing the same.” She sighed, “However, if they do come ask, I don’t think either of us will go to jail to protect you. If you want my advice, I’d move to a different country ‘til this all blows over.”

Ell said, “Thanks Gloria, from the bottom of my heart. For setting up my disguises and for keeping them quiet. Someday I hope to repay you. Don’t get yourself in trouble for me though.”

“You take care of yourself.” Gloria said and turned her head away to wipe at the corner of her eye. “Don’t get yourself in trouble for me,” was just the kind of thing you might expect that someone with Donsaii’s class would say. Gloria turned back to say good bye but Donsaii was gone. Gloria stepped over to look around the corner but there was no sign of the young woman. Even if Gloria had thought to look up, Ell would have been far too high in the air by then to be seen in the dimming light.

***

Dressed as “Belle” for the first time in a long time, Ell entered Vic’s. Having decided that Shan should practice with his disguises, Belle was accompanied by “Stan Kenner.”

A respectable crowd graced the bar for a Tuesday night. Not so much because of the nearly unknown act, but because tickets were so hard to come by at Vic’s that almost every night sold out. The fact that occasionally some very big names appeared under an unknown alias just for fun and to get a nice recording contributed to high ticket sales for unknown acts.

Belle spoke to Vic for a moment. “I hope they can recreate the magic you recorded up there in Asheville,” he said, before begging off to finish preparing for the show.

A gentle strumming on the mandolin opened the show. Then the guitar came in and finally the bass box. The lights slowly faded up on the young man and the older woman.

They didn’t sing at all on the first piece but did display their surprising virtuosity on the mandolin and guitar. The crowd cheered lustily when they’d finished. With the crowd in a good mood, they launched “Forgiveness,” the song that had so impressed Ell in Asheville. She looked around eagerly for the young girl but didn’t see her. She hoped they hadn’t left her home because of its being a school night, but could understand why they might have.

Then, when the second chorus came around, just like in Asheville the crowd quietly hummed or sang along. The guitarist played a lick and leaned to the mike, “Now, we have a treat for you,” and he started the chorus again, this time with the bell pure tones of the young girl taking the lead. Other than the music, the room sank into silence as a spotlight slowly faded in on the little platinum blond girl standing out in the middle of the crowd. Dressed in a white dress with a tiny flowered headband on her head, she looked beautiful. If Ell hadn’t known, she’d have thought that the girl only had her eyes closed.

From there, the girl sang the lead on both verses and choruses. When she sang the bridge it seemed almost heartbreaking. When the last notes faded away there was a moment of silence, then a pandemonium of applause.

Ell leaned against Shan, “Even more amazing than they were in Asheville, huh?”

Shan could only nod.

***

Phillips entered the Oval office with his usual mild apprehension. “Hello Madam President.”

“Hey Mason,” Stockton said almost eagerly. “What’cha got for me on Donsaii?”

It’s back to her thinking that Donsaii is the most important thing the FBI is doing! I’d have so much more respect for her if she cared about our other missions! He pasted on a smile, “Well the NSA has pretty good access to Cuba’s internal communications because they have only limited incorporation of PGR chips into their comm systems so far. They report that there is very little mention of Donsaii in searches of their datanet communications. Because it would be unlikely that they could keep all their discussion of something as big as Donsaii’s capture limited to their fledgling PGR network, NSA doesn’t think Donsaii ever made it into Cuban hands. She’s either still hiding on Guantanamo somehow, or she’s out in the world somewhere.”

“Could she be back in the States?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but you’d think someone would have seen her and rumors should have surfaced.” He shrugged, “Well rumors have surfaced but they’ve all been due to her fans dressing and doing their hair to look like her. I can’t believe that the real Donsaii would run around looking like herself, but even if she’s in disguise, you can’t do anything in this country without ID and you can’t just print yourself a fake ID like you used to be able to.” He shrugged, “So, I don’t think she’s here in the States. Unfortunately, she could hide pretty easily in a lot of the less developed foreign countries and finding her in one of them will be very difficult.”

“The CIA and NSA are still looking though, right?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“OK, what deep dark secrets have you discovered sifting through her personal life and finances?”

Phillips shook his head. “Essentially she’s only dated three men that we’ve been able to find out about. A Phillip Zabrisk who was a cadet with her at the Air Force Academy, a Roger Emmerit who works at her company, and she had essentially one date with Gordon Speight, the lead singer of Velos, the rock band. We’ve managed to get agents to speak with all three of them, bringing her up in casual conversation, not formal questioning. They all essentially idolize her. As opposed to most exes, they couldn’t say enough good things about her. So, no kinky sex, no bad breakups.’

He took a breath, “You truly don’t want to piss her off in person, we did find out that the terrorists at the Olympics weren’t the first targets of her wrath. When she was just eleven, some guy attacked her mother, evidently a rape attempt. Donsaii poked him in the eyes and blinded him. It took some serious digging to find out about this. Because she was a minor and her attacking the guy was considered to be justified, the records were sealed and essentially no one knows about it.”

“Blinded a guy, huh?” Stockton unconsciously rubbed her hands together. “That sounds like something that would tarnish her lily white reputation.”

“Blinded a guy who was trying to rape her mother. While she was a child. A guy who was threatening to hurt her as well. And she didn’t expect it to blind him—just thought it would hurt him and might make him stop.” Phillips shrugged, “A lot of people would just respect her even more. The guy was subsequently DNA linked to several other rapes. He needed to be taken off the streets by someone.”

Stockton sighed disappointedly, “OK, what about her finances? She should make a good target for an IRS audit and I personally will be astonished if you didn’t find some other transgressions, eh?”

Phillips looked Stockton in the eye. “She’s your biggest individual taxpayer Ma’am.”

Stockton leaned back, disbelief written all over her face. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that, dollar for dollar, the IRS says she paid more taxes than any other individual in the United States last year.”

“But… but, how can that be?”

“You mean, why didn’t she cheat? Or how did she have so much money? Or why didn’t other rich people pay their taxes?”

Stockton gave a little confused head shake, “Where would she get so much money?”

“Well, you know how everyone in the world uses PGR chips based on her paper about quantum mechanics?”

Stockton nodded.

“She didn’t just write the paper, she invented the chips and holds the patent. This isn’t a secret, just nobody seems to pay any attention to it. Certainly, she never mentions it and it isn’t on any of her personal public information or the website of her company D5R. That patent pays her 12% which this last year added up to fourteen billion dollars!”

“She gets 12% of fourteen billion dollars?”

Phillips shook his head, “Her 12% is fourteen billion.”

“No shit!” Stockton breathed. “The government could use that money, I’ll have to ask Raul to start figuring out how to confiscate it.”

Phillips said, “That isn’t all. It turns out she almost wholly owns D5R and its subsidiaries. Most people are under the impression that it’s owned by a group of private investors, a fiction that Donsaii apparently helps promulgate. That means that the majority of the profits from those subdivisions go to her as well, way more than 12%. There’s a medical arm Quantum Biomed that’ll soon be paying her a few million for those new prosthetic arms they’re going to be licensing. They’re making some kind of heart assist pump, not profitable yet, but probably will be very profitable in the near future. They’re thought to have other things in the pipeline, but are mostly reinvesting profits in the medical arena. There’s another subsidiary named Allosci, making graphene out in space at one of their habitats. There’s huge demand for graphene and therefore a willingness to pay a premium.  They’re churning it out with profits in the hundreds of millions. The ET Resources subsidiary is reinvesting almost all of its income in growth so only paying Donsaii a small amount. Still, that gave her another billion or so of income.”

He looked back down from his HUD where he’d been getting his figures, “All those are small potatoes compared to the income from the ports made by the Portal Tech subsidiary. Portal Tech doesn’t need to reinvest because they’re limiting their expansion according to deals made with the government to diminish their disturbance of the economy. Last year her income from the ports totaled,” Phillips paused and raised an eyebrow, “forty three billion dollars.”

“Jesus!” Stockton said, “What’s the total of all those?”

“Over fifty eight billion dollars income. And get this! As opposed to the rest of the ultra-rich, who find all kinds of ways to dodge their taxes, she doesn’t claim any deductions, use any shelters or invest in fake charities. Nope, she just paid a full 45% or over twenty six billion in Federal income tax. She paid another 4.6 billion in North Carolina State income tax—heck that’s almost 20% of the state’s budget? She has more income from some turnover in her investments, but admittedly she does only pay the standard 20% capital gains tax on that money.”

“In any case, no one would accuse her of cheating on her taxes. In fact if anyone were to accuse her of anything, it would be a tax accountant accusing her of being foolish for not protecting her income from taxes like everyone else does. You’d certainly have a hard time making her out to be a bad guy. Most people would think she’s either incredibly naive or unbelievably righteous.”

Stockton swallowed. After a pause to think she developed a small sneer, “Someone that rich, and she doesn’t even donate to charity?”

“Yes she does. We’ve found 1.4 billion donated to higher education in North Carolina. Donated anonymously and just not claimed as a tax deduction. The agent investigating believes she’s donated hundreds of millions to other charities, all anonymously, but, since she isn’t claiming it on her taxes, it’s almost impossible to track.”

Stockton narrowed her eyes at Phillips, “So… to listen to you, Donsaii’s some kind of saint, huh?”

Inside Phillips grimaced because he could feel what was about to come. “Yes Ma’am, I think she’s as close as ordinary humans ever come to sainthood. The agents I’ve had ‘digging for dirt’ have simply returned with more and more respect for that young woman. If there’s anything she’s doing that’s not aboveboard, our guys have no inkling what it would be.”

“Mr. Phillips, if that’s the case, then your men need to get their asses in gear. There’s no such thing as a human being as pure as they seem to think that young twit is. The mere fact that she has that much money by the age of twenty five tells me something stinks under the floorboards. You and they need to figure out what smells!”

As Phillips left the White House he thought to himself, the fact that she made that much money by the age of twenty five tells me she’s a freaking genius!

***

Ell and Shan drove into their neighborhood shortly after dusk on Sunday evening. Shan had returned after the end of Spring Break and resumed teaching, but Ell had stayed away, worrying that a return to the Chapel Hill area would tempt the fates.

They’d decided that they either needed to give up on Ell’s Raquel identity, or they had to try having Raquel return to the house they shared. Shan had finished teaching his class for the semester, so if this blew their cover he wouldn’t have really let down his students.

Ell turned to him and said, “Shan?”

He turned to her, “Mmm?”

“I’m worried about this.”

“Still can’t believe that the boogey men haven’t actually figured out your Raquel alias?”

Ell gave a wry smile, “Nope. They’ve had months. Even though Gloria says she hasn’t given me away, I just can’t believe—with all their resources—they haven’t figured it out. What if they’ve just been sitting around waiting for Raquel to reappear?”

“You want to turn back? Go somewhere else?”

“No,” she grinned, “if they really haven’t figured it out, I’d like to let you get back to your life as a stuffy academic.”

Shan raised an eyebrow, “Oh, you’re askin’ for it now!”

“But I do think we should be prepared.” She turned and reached into her bag in the backseat. “Here put this on.” She handed him a set of straps.

Taking them, Shan frowned. “What’s this?”

“It’s a simple lifting harness,” she said, sliding her legs into the thigh straps and passing a belt behind her back.

As he did the same, Shan asked, “What’s the plan?”

“The hoverbike is already holding 12,000 feet above our back yard. Snap-on “D” rings attached to graphene cables are lying on our patio. We walk in the house and directly through to the back door. If the G-men show up, we step out the door and snap on the D rings. Allan reels us in and takes us away.”

“Whoa, you’ve given this some serious thought. What if we can’t find the D rings in the dark?”

“They have LEDs on them. Allan will flash them, blue for you, red for me.”

Shan frowned, “Sounds kinda sexist.”

Ell patted him on the shoulder. “As long as we get it right when we’re in a hurry, I don’t care how sexist it is.”

The car pulled into their driveway. They casually got out, retrieved their bags from the back of Shan’s car and walked to the front door. The door AI recognized them and threw the bolt, welcoming them into the house. They walked into the house, setting down their suitcases and proceeding directly to the back door. There they stood, following the feed from the cameras under the eaves of the house on their HUDs. For a couple of minutes tension was high while they waited for men in dark suits to approach at any moment.

After about ten minutes of watching, Ell choked back a giggle. “Looks like they haven’t been just hanging around waiting for me to…” she broke out in a full throated laugh that went on and on. Wiping an eye she finally sputtered out, “show. Well, that was anticlimactic. The FBI’s not hot on our trail after all!”

Shan grinned at her a moment, then drew her into an embrace. “May all our fears be unrealized, eh?”

“Sure.” Ell giggled again. “I think I’ll still have Allan keep the D rings on the patio the rest of tonight, OK? Maybe they’ve just got cameras watching the place.”

Shan raised an eyebrow, “Are you expecting me to wear this harness all night?”

Ell gave him her best stern look

“Just keep it nearby buddy.”

***

Despite her joking with Shan, Ell worried that the FBI would show up that night and slept poorly during her usual three hours. Thinking that, if they were to burst into the house looking for her, they would do it between one and three AM when most people are most deeply asleep she was careful to stay awake until 3:30 instead of three when she usually went to sleep. She had Allan continue to watch for movement outside the house.

When she woke at 6:30 Allan reported that no one had approached the house, not even to go on by.

After pondering a while, Ell started having Allan run some calculations for her. She stared at the results for a while; then, shook her head. She’d need Emma’s help.

As soon as Shan left for work, Ell apprehensively climbed down into the tunnels. Nothing down there looked like it had been disturbed. She walked to Amy’s house where Steve also waited.

Sitting down on the couch with them Ell said, “Thanks for meeting with me.” After some pleasantries, Ell turned to Steve, “You’ve rechecked with the team about whether they really want to keep working for me even though I’m a “persona non grata?”

He nodded and grinned, “The six that are left all say they’ll take their chances.”

“They understand that if the FBI figures out they’ve kept working for me after Stockton declared me a ‘menace,’ they could be in real trouble?”

Steve shrugged, “The FBI interviewed all of us when they figured out we had been on your payroll. We all stuck to the same line, the truth. We told them that we indeed had worked for you in the past and that now that you were gone, we were only held “on retainer” until you returned. Some of the guys have bolstered that story by taking security jobs here and there and of course, four of them did take jobs elsewhere. Our line is that we aren’t working for you; we’re waiting for you to get out of hock with the government. Meanwhile, we’re maintaining our skills until that day. Amazingly, the Feebs never thought to ask if you used any aliases, but if they had, our plan was to claim employer security and refuse to give them up.”

Ell looked back and forth from one to the other with concern in her eyes. “I don’t pretend to be an expert in the law but I’m pretty sure that if you guys help me you’re guilty of ‘aiding and abetting,’ or ‘harboring a fugitive.’”

Steve shook his head, “Aiding and abetting means assisting in the commission of a crime. As I see it, we’re protecting you. We aren’t assisting you in committing any crimes and we aren’t ‘harboring’ you.”

Ell twisted her lips, “By that reasoning you can’t assist me in escaping the police.”

Steve shrugged, “Yeah, that would be true.” He grimaced, “We’d have to consider that on a case by case basis.”

Ell turned to Amy, “I think you should let me help you get a job at D5R. It’s crazy for the single mother of young teenagers to stick her neck out.”

Amy said, “Ell, you need an assistant!”

Ell sighed, “Yeah, I do, but not badly enough to put you and your kids at risk. You put your application in out at D5R and get yourself an honest job. I’ve already greased the skids.”

“OK, but if you need help, you’ll still be able to call on me.”

“Maybe, as some kind of last resort.” Ell turned, “And, Steve, as far as the team is concerned, I want you to be just like you’re on retainer for me. You won’t actively follow me from place to place anymore. You’ll hold yourself available to help with bad guys if I need the help, but certainly not come between me and the police in any of their attempts to capture me.”

Steve wiped at an eye. “Everyone on this planet owes your our lives,” he said hoarsely. “We should all be willing to go the extra mile.”

Ell, tears pouring down her cheeks, hugged each of them.

It was nearly eleven when, done up as Raquel, Ell got into her car and headed back out to D5R for the first time in months.

Emma looked up and her eyes widened as she saw “Raquel” walking her way. “Hey Raquel,” she said, “long time no see.” Realizing that she should act like she didn’t know where Ell/Raquel had been, she said, “Where have you been lately?”

Speaking loudly enough for curious passersby to hear Ell said, “Here and there, some time up at the habitat and some out at the island. And a few other places around the world.” She gave a half wink, “Good to be back.” She sat down next to Emma, “So, what’s been happening girlfriend?”

More quietly Emma said, “Well, we’re working with the FDA to get approval for more than just our limited ‘testing’ of the neurotrodes. Then we’ll be able to start licensing places to provide prostheses to some of the thousands of people who’ve been begging for them.”

Ell waved a negligent hand, “Pish, who cares about that stuff. I want the nitty gritty on how you and Roger are doing.”

“We’re doing fine. He and Dr. Trumble at UNC have been pushing hard to get their heart booster pump approved. He’s also been working with Dr. Mullis to get their port driven ‘artificial pancreas’ accepted by the diabetes research community. It’s just two tiny ports mounted back to back, one goes to the glucose sensor and the other delivers the insulin from a dispenser. It’s small enough to be inserted through a big needle. In animal trials they’ve been able to maintain blood glucose levels with tighter control than the pig’s natural pancreas, so diabetes researchers are pretty pumped. They’re really just starting on their attempt to build an artificial kidney but…”

Ell, grinning, had reached out and put a finger on Emma’s lips. “You know what I want is the skinny on how you and Roger are getting along.”

Emma lifted her left hand out of her lap and put it up on the table.

Ell glanced down, her eyes widening as she saw the sparkling ring on Emma’s finger. She leaned forward to put her arms around her friend. Tears spilling down her cheeks she said, “Oh Emma! I’m so happy for you guys! When did you get engaged?”

“Last Saturday. He was just as sweet and awkward and wonderful as you might expect Roger to be.” A tear trickled down Emma’s cheek as well, “I’m so happy.”

“Let’s go out to lunch and celebrate!”

When they returned from a nice lunch, Ell said, “Hey, I do have favor to ask.”

Emma grinned, “I knew there’d have to be some kind of payback for your services as maid of honor.”

Ell gave her a mock serious look. “Of course.” Then she grinned, “Let’s use the screens in one of the little conference rooms; I need your help designing an odd circuit with a rapidly varying bias…”

As they worked, Allan managed all the data for the design, answering questions so rapidly that Emma had no temptation to use her own AI for any of the design questions that were posed. Once the circuit design had been completed, with Emma’s as usual brilliant suggestions that reduced its size and complexity yet boosted its reliability, Ell took her leave.

As she walked away, Ell spoke quietly to Allan. He removed all traces of their design activity from the memory imbedded in the screens of the conference room. Then she had him modify the circuit design in three ways. The first simple modifications changed the circuit so it would generate the actual currents she needed, rather than the dummy currents she had told Emma she wanted. The second set of modifications left the circuit with a couple of defects that rendered it inoperable without some solder bridges. The third set of modifications produced a section of the circuit that would rapidly overheat under certain demands. She had Allan erase all evidence of the previous versions from his memory. Finally, she had Allan send a request to the circuit fabricator Ell had hidden away in the tunnel in West Virginia for four copies of the circuit to be built, each constructed on a magnesium frame that would immolate the entire circuit if Ell overheated the circuit with the demands specified by the third set of modifications.

The fab waited patiently for the magnesium frame and a number of circuit components it had ordered from Amazon.

Ell considered dropping by her office for a moment but then shook her head. There was nothing in her office that didn’t also exist elsewhere and if the FBI had dropped off some kind of bug in there that reported the presence of someone besides the cleaners, it could produce a huge problem.

***

Gary looked up from his discussion of graphend construction with his team. Somehow, he’d felt eyes on him and sure enough he saw Ell, dressed as Raquel standing on the other side of the big room with a large plastic bag. Turning back to his team, he said, “So, what I want you to work on is constructing large ‘cabinets’ within which we can establish these conditions and rapidly vary the conditions from the construction of one allotrope, to the construction of another. Right now we’re limited by the small volumes of our chambers. Also, the length of time it takes to change from one condition to the other means that it takes a long time to cycle enough layers to make a useful product.” He looked around the table at them, “We have money to spare. I want you to brainstorm different designs. I’ll be back in a bit.” He got up and headed towards Ell. “Hey Raquel, what are you doing slumming around our new facility?”

“Slumming? These are some pretty nice digs you’ve moved into here!” She frowned, “Hey, you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. It’s conceivable you could wind up answering some difficult questions from the government if they were to find out that you talked to me. I can just take off?”

Gary snorted, “I owe you plenty. Like everyone on the planet, I owe you my life, but I also owe you for the start you’ve given my business.” He waved a dismissive hand, “I’ll talk to you about whatever you want, the government be damned.”

“Thanks Gary,” Ell said quietly. “From what I overheard of your conversation, it sounds like you’re getting ready to scale up your graphend coating production?”

“Yeah, the plan is to fill all this space,” he waved vaguely around the insides of the huge building, “with cabinets of various sizes for coating all sorts of objects. My first priority is to make a commercial success out of coating existing objects with diamond or lonsdaleite to prevent wear and scratching. Then, taking your idea we’ll coat Styrofoam objects with graphene to make fancy balloons and with graphend to make incredibly strong but lightweight objects, then dissolve the Styrofoam out of them.”

Ell’s right eyebrow bounced up and she lifted the big plastic bag in her hand, “Want some Styrofoam objects to practice on?”

Gary laughed, “Bring it in here and let’s see what you’ve got,” he said. They went in a small room and Gary leaned forward to look in the bag as Ell opened it. At first all he saw were Styrofoam beads by the millions. “You must have something really delicate packed in there.”

“Well actually, I want the beads coated with graphene too. But,” she reached in and pulled out a long Styrofoam rod with a pointed end and a handle. It was shaped like a rapier though it didn’t have sharp edges.

Gary looked at it bemusedly, “You want a balloon sword?”

Ell thought to herself, Gary hasn’t figured out what happens when you blow one of these up with really high pressures yet, but didn’t comment, only nodded. She grinned at him, “And some graphene underwear.” Beads falling everywhere, she partially lifted out the upper part of a Styrofoam shirt she’d had shaped from laser measurements of her torso at full inspiration. He could see that the Styrofoam seemed to be partitioned into sections. There were front, back and side chest sections visible but he couldn’t see the abdominal section still down in the beads. The arm, forearm and wrist sections were separated by shoulder and elbow sections that seemed each to be made of many small segments. The shirt had a tremendous segmented collar or hoodie that extended up and over the wearer’s head.

Gary stared at it for a minute. “You want that coated with graphene?”

Ell nodded, “Yeah, I know it seems kind of weird.”

Gary hadn’t taken his eyes off of it. Musingly he said, “You’re trying to make some kind of armor aren’t you?”

Ell sighed, “Yeah. I’m worried that some of the people chasing me might use more force than I’d hope when they’re trying to catch me.”

“What’s with the huge collar? It’s practically a helmet.”

Ell tilted her head to the side while studying the Styrofoam model still. “That’s the idea.”

Gary frowned, “Are you thinking you can inflate the graphene collar to make it stand up like the Styrofoam does and protect your head?”

Ell nodded.

“But, Ell, when you inflate it, the inner layer will simply move away from the outer layer until it’s squeezing your head and suffocating you!”

“Ah,” Ell said, as she understood Gary’s concern. “Actually, there are thousands of tiny perforations lasered from the inner to the outer surfaces of the Styrofoam. Hopefully, graphene will form inside the perforations as well, binding the inner and outer layers together so they don’t move apart like you’ve just described.”

Gary’s eyes widened as he considered that possibility. “That’ll be pretty cool, if it works.”

Ell reached into the beads again, moving her hand around and coming out with a stack of thin Styrofoam boards. “Here are some practice boards with the same kind of laser perforations to practice on. In order to let us optimize the design some of them have smaller and larger perforations. They’re marked with the size of their perforations. If I need to perforate the shirt and pants to a different size, we’ll just redo the lasering.”

“There are pants in that bag too?” Gary asked in surprise.

“They’re stacked. One leg’s inside the shirt, the other’s on the outside.”

***

Tucson, Arizona—Dr. Gregory Skipriti of the Department of Astronomy here at the University of Arizona has described the Epsilon Eridani system that they have explored through their grant of access to one of ET Resources’ rockets. This stellar system contains two large debris (asteroid) disks and two supra-jovian gas giant planets. There are two small rocky planets in the inner system, but as both are quite close to E. Eridani, there is no evidence of life on either one.

Ben Stavos sat down saying, “So, I hear you have concerns about landing radioactive waste on Pluto?”

AJ and Carter glanced at one another. Carter said, “Well, yeah, as head waldo driver, I think we’ll have waldo problems there. You know they were designed to work in unfriendly environments but, wow! Pluto’s really cold. We’re talking an average of forty-four degrees above absolute zero. Assuming that the ports that are supposed to deliver the material don’t suffer failures at that temperature, I’m pretty sure we’re going have several waldo problems. First, it would take forever to fly the waldoes there so we’d need to deliver the waldoes out there through very large ports which are expensive to run. Second, I suspect we’d have mechanical failures in the waldoes from frozen joints and occasional fractures of components made brittle by the cold.” He looked at AJ.

AJ said, “We could of course design waldoes to be heated either electrically or with fluids, but then they might melt into the frozen gasses that Pluto is made of.” He shrugged, “However, I think the best reason not to put our waste there is we don’t know what we might find there. That ultra-cold environment might have condensed some interesting molecules, or we might discover that it is an ideal location for some type of research or manufacturing.”

Ben looked back and forth at them, “Hopefully you aren’t just coming to me with a problem you don’t have a solution for?”

“Uh, no sir. We would suggest Juno. It’s an S-type, or stony asteroid so wouldn’t be expected to have great value. Its average temperature is somewhere around a hundred below zero Celsius. Cold, but we know from our mining experience that our waldoes work OK at that temperature. Gravity at its surface is only 1.2% earth normal but its escape velocity is still about four hundred miles per hour, so the radioactive waste we put there isn’t going to just fly away if it gets bumped hard.”

“Also, Juno has a crater that’s a hundred kilometers in diameter. If we put the waste down at the bottom of the crater it should be permanently shaded from the sun. So even though the sun facing surface of Juno occasionally gets above freezing, we should be able to spray water onto waste placed at the bottom of the crater. That way we can freeze the radioactives solidly into place.”

Ben looked back and forth at the two earnest young men. He liked each of them, but together they synergistically formed a team stronger than the sum of its parts. “Way to go guys. Let’s get a waldo on its way out there to do some exploration. Two objectives: first to make sure we haven’t missed some important feature or resource present on Juno that we would want to harvest, and, second to explore the depths of that crater to see if it’s truly suitable and really does stay below freezing.”

After a little more discussion they broke up.

***

Ell threw the covers off.

Shan rolled over and eyed her, “You OK?”

“Jeez, why’d you have to get me all pregnant and huge like this in the summer? The hormones make me hot. My size makes me hot. The weather makes me hot! I’m seriously considering moving up on to one of our properties in the mountains for the rest of the summer.”

Shan said, “You’re not huge—yet. You’re really just kinda big.”

“I’m still hot!”

“You can afford to turn down the thermostat you know.”

“I know, I know. It’s just when I’m laying here with nothing to think about but how I feel, everything seems to irritate me.”

“Hmm, seems like you ought to put on that shirt my dad gave you.”

“Ooh! The cooling shirt?” Ell rolled out of bed and dug through her drawer for the t-shirt with the cooling tubes woven into it. Rather than her original idea for a shirt with cool water tubes in it, this one blew cool air out of little vents all over its inside. She pulled it on and had Allan turn it on. “Ohhh! That’s nice, how could I have forgotten this!”

***

Ell threw a leg over the saddle of the waldo controller. She slipped on its large HUD and felt for the controller gloves. Looking around she mused on the unreality of the situation. The first few times she’d used a waldo, she’d retained her sense of a person directing the waldo. Now, upon putting on the gear and looking out of the waldo’s eyes, she immediately felt as if she were there, walking around in the waldo’s environment as if she were the waldo itself.

She took a step, but then expressed a mental “oops” to herself. Pausing the waldo before she took another step, she had Allan check his sensor records to be sure that no one had been in the main tunnel outside the hidden side tunnel this waldo lived in.

There hadn’t been any vibrations out in the main tunnel for months indicating it should be safe to proceed. Ell walked the waldo over to the circuit fab and picked up the first of the circuits she’d had it make. Upon inspection it looked fine. She walked the circuit over to the work station and made the solder bridges, taking great care not to excessively heat the magnesium frame. Then she went over to a rack of electronic equipment and popped out the circuit currently controlling her left index finger’s one way port. She put the new one in its place. As long as she was there she quickly inspected the thermite charges that were distributed throughout the rack of electronics. The thermite would allow Ell to destroy all the electronics if someone came across them but especially the circuits for the one way ports. She worried that her homemade thermite might corrode or otherwise break down, destroying her equipment when she needed it, or failing to work if she did want to destroy the circuits. All the charges looked fine though.

Ell had Allan run diagnostics on the new circuit. Once it cleared, she dismounted from the waldo controller and looked down at her finger. She had a moment of panic, what’s wrong with me today? If that circuit does something unexpected and bad, I don’t want to be testing it using the port that’s inside my finger! Hair prickling momentarily, she wondered if the pregnancy hormones were disturbing her thought processes. She’d read about other pregnant women feeling that way. Taking a deep breath, she asked Allan to switch the circuit to one of the hand held one ended ports instead of the one in her finger. Then she had him use the waldo to pass the hand held single port through a double ended port she had on her desk. The handheld port was 5 centimeters in diameter and was mounted on a handle shaped like a thick pencil which would give Ell better control of its direction.

Pointing the handle away from herself she had Allan turn on the port at a distance of two feet. As expected, with a spark of light, a two inch black disk representing the back side of the port appeared in space about two feet away. After a few seconds the port disappeared and immediately sparked back into existence a half inch further away. She set the handle of the port down on a table and walked around to look at the other side of the area where the port was appearing and disappearing. Sure enough, from that angle the port looked like a hole in space when it appeared, slightly dark because the lights were dim in the tunnel the port was connecting to. Moving back behind it, Ell had Allan adjust the bias in the circuit while she watched the port hanging there in space. As she’d hoped, the next time it appeared, it had rotated a little. It no longer faced directly away from the handle. It still appeared directly in front of the handle, but had rotated to face about twenty degrees to the side. Ell had Allan increase the bias and it rotated even more, until at Ell’s predicted fifty three volts it faced ninety degrees to the side.

With a sigh, she increased the frequency of port openings and closings up to five hundred per second. With that the disk she saw blurred into a glowing smear that spread out over a distance of about an inch and a quarter. That smear represented the inaccuracy of the port opening distance which she had improved to five percent with this new controller circuit.

Hands shaking, Ell set down the handle for the one ended port and stared at it a moment. This technology is so dangerous. Should I even be using it myself? Taking the chance that somehow that will let others gain control of it? Or is having this tool to protect myself an important means for keeping these single ports out of the hands of those whose intent is not benign?

Eventually, she shook her head and got back on the waldo controller. She completed the other three circuits, tested them and inserted them into the electronics rack. Looking down she had Allan open her umbilical port three inches from her stomach and biased to face the opening directly upwards. She then ran the umbilical port through its paces, making sure she could rotate it all different directions and run it at five hundred Hertz.

She ran the ports in her fingers through the same protocols. Finally, Ell picked up a pencil in her left hand and snapping on the port in her right index finger at 500 Hz and three inches at ninety degrees. She gently waved the glowing smear of light from the rapidly opening and closing port through the pencil.

Goose bumps appeared on her arms as she watched the eraser end of the pencil fall to the floor…

Chapter Four

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming —A forest fire in the park became the first wildlands fire to be brought under control using helicopters carrying ports. Only two helicopters, each carrying twenty fire hose nozzles supplied by two inch ports delivered water from large pumps in Yellowstone lake. Initially the helicopters simply circled the fire, wetting the surrounding forest with wide sprays of water from a spread alignment of the nozzles. Then they vectored in on the fire itself delivering three thousand gallons per minute...

“This represents a paradigm shift in how we will be fighting forest fires in the future,” said Abraham Minout, director of the National Park Service. “Rather than huge helicopters delivering the limited amounts of water they can lift, with this technology we are able to deliver large amounts of water from small helicopters for as long as the pilot’s duty hours allow. When the fire nozzles are active, their downward discharge actually provides additional lift to the helicopter.”

Several city fire departments have already been using port supplied nozzles which allow fire fighters tremendous freedom of mobility. Several departments have ordered helicopters with such nozzles intending to use them for fires in tall buildings but after this demonstration of the technology at Yellowstone one must wonder whether helicopters won’t provide a tremendous advantage in fighting almost every type of fire…

Allan said, “You have a call from Gary.”

“I’ll take it… Hey Gary, have you already finished coating my stuff with graphene?”

“Well, we’re done with the little test plates. We haven’t tried your shirt and pants because we thought you wanted to see which sized perforations worked best?”

“Yeah, let me drop by and look at the test plates. You did all of them?”

“We did all the test plates, but nothing else really. Maybe you’ll have some ideas on coating your little beads? We really don’t want to coat however many thousands of beads you’ve got in that bag one bead at a time!”

“Oh, ‘cause, if you do them in a big pile, the graphene sticks them together?”

“Yep. And with graphene, they’re stuck so you could never get them apart.”

“Hmm, can you fly a batch up to the habitat and do them there? In microgravity, their like static charge should repel them from one another, making them float apart. Then you’d be able to coat them fully. If you charge the walls of the container they’re in, they shouldn’t even stick to the box.”

Gary snorted, “Dammit! I should have been able to think of that for myself! I’ve gotta ask though, what do you want graphene coated beads for anyway?”

Ell said, “If it works, I’ll show you, OK? I should be over this afternoon to look at the test plates.”

Gary said, “Oops, I forgot, the other reason I called is that Manuel finished your graphend hoverbike. He left it here with me since he didn’t know ‘how to get it to Ell Donsaii.’ He asked if I could store it for you ‘until you got out of trouble.’”

“You think he figures that you’re in contact with me somehow?”

“Well, if he knows that Raquel and Ell are the same person, he’s keeping that under his hat.”

Ell said, “He does know I use disguised aliases but he knows about a different one, not about Raquel. But I’ll bet he figures that some people in the company are in contact with me, even if he doesn’t know that I’m actually nearby. After all, he must realize I can contact pretty much anyone I like via PGR chips without the government knowing about it.”

“You’re probably right. In any case, this graphend hoverbike is pretty cool. I’m excited to show it to you.”

Once Gary disconnected, Ell went to the setup she’d created to pump acetone through the ports in Styrofoam objects. Selecting the ports for the Styrofoam plates she’d dropped off with Gary, she turned on the pump and began dissolving the polystyrene out of them.

***

Senate Majority Leader Harold Arkon and House Majority Leader Mary Hoyt were ushered into the Oval Office. Stockton came around her desk smiling, “Harold, Mary,” she said, shaking their hands, “Sit, sit.” Stockton waved a hand at the comfortable chairs. After a few more pleasantries, she smiled and said, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Arkon and Hoyt glanced at one another, uncertain about how to broach the subject. Even when she’d been a Senator, Stockton had been difficult to talk to when the subject conflicted with her worldview. Arkon cleared his throat, “Well, Edith, we wanted to talk to you about Donsaii…” He paused as he saw Stockton’s smile congeal, then fade.

Stockton waved him on, “Go on Harold.”

Trying not to grit his teeth, Arkon plowed ahead, “There’s no doubt that resentment did exist regarding the effects her technology has had on the jobs market. In fact, that is to a large degree responsible for your win in the election.”

One corner of Stockton’s lip lifted momentarily, almost in a sneer, “Don’t dance around Arkon, just say what you’re gonna say.”

Hoyt, lifted her hands placatingly, “Hear us out Edith. The party leadership is worried. Analysis says that the public didn’t actually resent Donsaii; they only worried about the effect of her tech on the job market. They still love her as a person. Our attacks on her are costing us big time in the polls. The fact that she escaped so easily and we have no idea where she is, that’s making us a laughing stock.”

Stockton had leaned back in her chair, now she angrily crossed her arms, looking at the leaders of her party like they were something disgusting she’d found on the bottom of her shoe. “Is that all you think this is? Some kind of popularity contest? Have you forgotten we were elected to do what is best for this country? The country I love? The country for which I, as President, must sometimes make unpopular decisions? A parent who does whatever his children wants will soon spoil them. I may not have children of my own, but I understand that principle.” Stockton leaned forward and eyed Arkon and Hoyt in turn, “It doesn’t matter how popular Donsaii may be, she’s a threat to this nation and I, at least, recognize her as such.”

Arkon resisted the impulse to roll his eyes at Stockton’s pompous little speech. Trying to keep the anger out of his voice, he said, “Edith, you need to consider the likelihood that other nations will offer her asylum. I have it on good authority that the possibility has already been discussed at the highest levels of both the Canadian and German governments.” She raised her eyebrows, “They’re our allies Edith, there’s no telling what our enemies are thinking.”

“They’d be buyin’ a pig in a poke then. That little one trick wonder has shot her wad. They’d gain our enmity for little or no benefit.”

Eyes wide in disbelief, Arkon said, “One trick wonder?”

“Yes, you heard me. The PRG chips and the ports are essentially the same trick. I guarantee that little bimbo isn’t gonna get that lucky again.”

“My God, Edith, the woman’s a genius!”

“No she’s not,” Stockton snorted, “‘She just plays one on TV.’”

Hoyt said, “I’d like permission to negotiate with her. Offer her amnesty if she’ll meet us halfway on the ETs and the means to reach the stars.”

Stockton leaned up out her chair taking a breath to bark out her opinion, then suddenly relaxed with a smile. “Sure now, you just do that. I know I can be a little confrontational some times, maybe we just need someone with a mellower tone to talk to her.”

Having negotiated some kind of compromise, the little meeting broke up.

As they left Arkon said, “I told you we should have talked to her about H.R. 3903 before we brought up Donsaii and derailed the whole conversation.”

Hoyt sighed, “Yeah, you know her best.”

Back in her office Stockton said, “Mason, Mary Hoyt’s going to try to arrange a meet with Donsaii.” She snorted, “She thinks she’s going to ‘negotiate’ some kind of deal with the little bitch. You figure out where they’re having this meet and snatch the girl.”

“You didn’t promise them to keep our hands off?”

“They might think I did ‘cause I wished them well… but I didn’t.”

“We can’t spy on a member of Congress without evidence of criminal intent.”

“Well, she is planning to meet with a criminal, but I’ve got a better idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Just offer to provide the security for the meet.”

“That’d be pretty low.”

“Whatever works Mason, whatever works.”

***

Gary looked up at the approaching footsteps. Seeing Ell dressed as Raquel took him back to when he’d met her in Nevada. A wave of nostalgia came over him momentarily. He’d really… had a thing for her back then. He wondered, was it love, or just infatuation? He tilted his head. Is she gaining weight? She looks a little thicker around the middle than she used to be. Then she said, “Hey Gar’,” in her Raquel accent and he stood to greet her.

Gary said, “Hey yourself, Raquel” giving her a hug and carefully using the name he’d known her by for so long. “Let me take you to where we’ve got your stuff.” As they walked down the hall to the room where he’d put her project, he eyed her and asked quietly, “You holding up OK?”

Ell flashed him a smile, “Yeah, some things are great, some are absolute crap, but that’s life.”

He grinned back, “Sorry. Things are pretty much all great for me right now, so I hope they clean up the mess they’ve made out of your life pretty quick.”

“Me too.” She sighed, “I surely hope none of my crap splatters on you.”

Gary opened the room and stepped inside, “What the hell!” he said, staring at the where the Styrofoam test plates had been lying on a table. The last time he had seen them, they had looked almost exactly like the Styrofoam plates Ell had given him to coat. Only a filmy gray appearance on their surfaces had given away the graphene coating. Now, all he saw were filmy gray smudges laying on the table.

Ell said, “What’s the matter?”

“Your test plates. Something’s happened to the Styrofoam.”

“Oh, yeah. I already pumped some acetone through them to dissolve it.”

Gary closed his eyes a moment, feeling dumb. “Of course you did. Sorry. Then you hooked them up to vacuum to dry them out and deflate them, right?”

Ell said, “Yes,” as she picked one of the plates—now just sheets of graphene—up. The barely visible film draped loosely over her hand, feeling quite silky except for little lumps scattered through it. Gary said, “The little lumps are the ports you ran the acetone through?

Ell nodded, “Oops,” she said, “the acetone dissolved the ink that told us how big the perforations were.”

“Just a second,” Gary said, “I laid them out here on the table this morning. Let me get my AI to call up the AV record and we’ll be able to tell which one is which if you don’t move them around.” He spoke to his AI a moment, then said, “Here, I’ve sent you the image. They were arranged from smallest to largest, so the one you’ve got in your hand had the smallest perforations.”

“Let me inflate it.” Ell snickered, “Uh, I could have told which one was which by which one blew up when I told my AI to inflate the one with the smallest perforations.” To Allan she said, “Go ahead and inflate sample ‘A’ to two atmospheres.”

The specimen, which had been loosely draped over Ell’s hand suddenly snapped out flat, to a lumpy approximation of the shape of the Styrofoam it had been molded over. Then with a popping, ripping sound it changed to a nearly spherical shape.

Ell laughed, “I would guess that graphene bridges don’t form very well in the smallest diameter perforations.” She glanced at Gary who also looked amused. Crossing her fingers she said, “Let’s try the next one, hopefully one of them will hold.”

When the second one snapped out straight, it also had lumps in it, but only in scattered locations and they were significantly smaller. After a moment though, they heard the ripping sound again and several of the lumps coalesced into bigger ones, then into a really big one down at one end.

Ell blinked ruefully at it, then said, “OK, let’s try number three.” She lifted it off the table and said, “Inflate.”

This third plate maintained its shape except for one small lump near a corner. The filled plate had a barely palpable nubbly feel where the graphene bumped out between the perforations. The fourth and fifth plates looked perfect. The sixth and seventh plates had bigger nubbly bumps and visibly shrank a little in their other dimensions when they inflated because the bulging nubs pulled the graphene shorter.

Gary looked at the last two plates and asked, “I’m guessing the bigger bumps on those two are because the perforations are farther apart due to their increased size?”

Ell nodded, “I hope we don’t have to use that design. My armored underwear would shrink a moderate amount when I inflated it. It’d take some more work to design it so it wound up the right size.” She picked up each of the plates and tried to bend them. At a quarter inch thick and inflated with two atmospheres of pressure or 30PSI they were surprisingly stiff though she could still bend them a little. She laid one on a gap between two tables and pulled out a knife with a six inch blade. Placing the point on the plate right over the gap she pushed down on the knife. When nothing happened, she turned to Gary and said, “Despite knowing the numbers, it just seems impossible that this filmy looking stuff can resist being punctured like this!” She leaned much harder on it. Though the knife didn’t penetrate, the plate bowed quite a bit down into the gap.

Gary said, “Looks like you’ve got your armor.”

Ell shook her head, “The way it’s bowing into the gap there under the pressure of a knife, I think it would deform too much if a bullet hit it. If this stuff stopped the bullet, but only after it made a crater about six inches deep into me, I don’t think I’d be very happy. Allan, inflate to 40 atmospheres.”

The plates didn’t visibly change much, though the third one ripped slowly up to form a lumpy ball. Ell laid the fourth one on the gap between the tables and pressed hard with the knife. This time no bowing was visible. She leaned on it even harder, then pulled the knife back and stabbed down into the gap. The knife point actually bounced off and skittered across its surface. Ell turned to Gary, “This is some amazing stuff you’re making here Gar’.”

He stared at the plate he had in his hands and strained unsuccessfully to bend it. He slowly said, “You knew these would be hard as steel at high inflation pressures?”

“Yeah, think back to when you’ve bumped up against the walls of the habitat. Those’re only inflated to 15 PSI and the Vectran they’re made out of is much stretchier than graphene but they still feel like concrete when you hit them.”

Gary said, “I know what you meant before. I can read the numbers and do the math, but it’s really hard to reconcile those numbers that seem so imaginary with what graphene can actually do in reality,”

Ell said musingly, “Yeah.” She shrugged, “Luckily, the perforations I made in the Styrofoam for my armored underwear are the same size as the holes in the fourth plate so it should be fine. Please go ahead and graphene coat it for me as well as the other items in that bag. I’d also like a few graphene balloons, eight feet in diameter. Do I need to get you Styrofoam molds for them, or do you have a way to make them and I just need to get you the ports?”

“We have a process to make balloons in half meter increments. Would some 2.5 meter balloons be close enough?”

“Sure, I’ll send you some ports.”

Gary tilted his head, “We’ve got ports.”

“I need them to be a certain size. Besides, I’ve already got the other ends of these ports hooked up to pressure.” She didn’t mention the fact that she’d actually coated the outer surface of the disks of the ports with quantum entangled particles to make a “port that surrounded the port.”

“OK,” Gary said somewhat dubiously, then grinned, “let me take you to look at your hoverbike.”

Ell’s eyes widened as they entered the next room. She turned to stare at the grinning Gary, “It looks like it’s made out of cellophane!”

Gary laughed, “Yeah, as you know we had a lot of trouble. We finally started casting the parts out of unfoamed polystyrene which is transparent and pretty stiff. The graphend coating gives it that smoky look. It already has the driveshaft ports you gave us built into it, so all you have to do is extend the driveshafts and it’ll be ready to fly.”

Ell squatted down beside it to look at it more carefully. She could see the drums for her graphene lifting cables right through the body of the bike. The helmets and other stuff I put in the compartment under the seat are going to be the most visible part of this thing! The bike wasn’t exactly invisible, any more than any other semiclear plastic object was invisible. Even clear plastic objects are visible due to light refraction differences, especially at corners and edges. But it was kinda hard to see its details. She could see the large fairings that she’d designed to let it fly faster even with a passenger. Even better, the ultrathin graphend would produce a much lower radar profile than her carbon fiber hoverbike. She reached out and picked it up. Even knowing it would be light, she still felt startled at just how easy it was to lift. Her surprised look gave her away and Gary grinned, “Pretty amazing huh? If it weren’t so big, you could put it in your backpack and carry it around with you.”

Ell stared at Gary, then down at the number four plate of rigidly inflated graphene she still had in her left hand. Then at the bike.

Gary said, “No! You can’t be thinking what I’m thinking?”

Ell quirked a grin at him, “I think I’ve got another project for you.”

Gary turned to stare at the hoverbike, tilting his head querulously, “An inflatable hoverbike?”

“Well, not everything could be inflatable, but at least the frame, fans and ducts.”

“That’s pretty much the whole damn thing, except for the motors, wherever you’re keeping them!” Gary shook his head and blew out a long sigh. “I can see I’m gonna have to hire a lot more people, just to keep you happy.”

Ell rolled her eyes, “Gary, Gary, Gary. You’re gonna have to hire a lot of people just to count the money you’re gonna make selling inflatable graphene objects.”

Gary’s eyes widened, “Such as?”

Ell grinned at him, “You start thinking about it. Imagine you’re camping. You find a nice place to set up your tent—pish, tent! I mean your inflatable cabin.” She winked, “I’ll bring you some Styrofoam objects to coat.” She picked up the hoverbike and said, “Meanwhile, if you’ll open the door, I’ll carry this one outside and send it home.”

A couple of minutes later Ell and Gary watched the glassy looking hoverbike whisper off the ground, then shoot rapidly up into the sky until it had faded from sight. Ell turned to Gary, “By the way, I’ve hired you some of that help you’ve been demanding.”

Gary turned to her with a puzzled look, “Help I’ve been demanding?”

“Yeah, you know. How you’re ‘gonna have to hire a lot of people just to keep me happy?’”

“You mean, what I just said a few minutes ago?”

“Yep.” Ell waved and a very young looking Indian woman got out of a Ford Focus and started walking their way.”

Gary gave Ell a sidelong glance, “She was with you when you arrived. You are not going to tell me that she’s in response to my saying I’m gonna have to hire people.”

“Sure, she is. I can predict the future you know.”

He stared at her another moment, “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could, but I think you’re just pulling my leg with a lucky coincidence.”

Ell gave him a sly grin, “Dr. Pace, please meet Viveka Janu, girl genius. She’s only just turned twenty, but already graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology with a degree in Chemical Engineering. We just now got her a work visa and brought her over to help you figure out your allotrope synthesis issues.”

The pretty young woman stared at Gary’s shoes, seeming very shy, but somehow, he already liked her. “Hello, Ms. Janu. Let’s get you inside and figure out how you can help us.”

***

Allan said, “You have a call from the House Majority Leader Mary Hoyt.”

“Wait, are you talking about the House of Representatives?” Ell asked, a little embarrassed that she didn’t know who Mary Hoyt was.

“Yes.”

“United States House of Representatives?”

“Yes.”

“How did she find me?”

“She called your listed number.”

“Do I get many calls on that number?”

“Hundreds per day. Almost none of them meet the screening standards you set for your public number four years ago.”

Ell raised her eyebrows in bemusement, “OK, feed me data about her on my HUD and put her through… Hello Congresswoman Hoyt?”

“Hello Dr. Donsaii.” A picture and description of Mary Hoyt flicked up on Ell’s HUD. “I’m calling on behalf of some of the Congressional leadership. We’ve spoken to President Stockton and obtained her agreement ‘in principle’ to the opening of a dialog with you.”

“Yes?” Ell said, trying to keep the suspicion out of her voice.

“Though you are certainly a polarizing individual and obviously President Stockton feels you are a danger to society, many, many members of congress see you as a hero and want desperately to reach an accommodation. I’m hoping to arrange a quiet meeting where we could discuss amnesty and the possibility of some sort of compromise regarding ET contact and your means for access to the stars. I must confess that I’m completely in agreement with you regarding the competence of the Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs.”

Feeling a frisson of hope, Ell said, “OK. What did you have in mind?”

“For now, just to get an agreement in principle to meet. If we have that, I’ll work out a safe location and get back to you as to when and where.”

“OK,” Ell said. She still felt worried about any meeting with the government. Without a pardon or amnesty prior to the meeting how could she be sure it wasn’t a ruse to recapture her? Although she felt relatively sure she could escape again, should she put the baby into a situation that might call for strenuous activity? At five months pregnant she was feeling thick in the middle and slow moving. Well, I can at least see what they arrange. She thought for a moment. In case this goes ahead I’d better get Gary to make me some armored underwear that’ll fit around my bigger stomach.

***

Greenland—A project sponsored by Portal Tech is harvesting melt-water from the glaciers on Greenland. The river of freshwater running out from under the glaciers pours into a large bank of ports just before it would meet the sea and become saltwater. The water is then ported to drought locations all over the world.

Some have asked why they aren’t trying to “green the Sahara” or other deserts around the world. The Portal Tech spokesperson says they don’t want to get into the controversy that would surely arise regarding the damage such a strategy would produce in delicate desert ecologies. However, “salvaging crops, and farmers’ livelihoods, all while preventing a drought from turning into a famine; those seem to be goals worth striving for.”

Of note, in underdeveloped regions the water is being provided gratis by Portal Tech.

AJ said, “We’ve returned samples from hundreds of locations on Juno. Our geological consultant says none of the minerals are at all remarkable.”

Ben glanced at Rob Braun, then back at AJ and Carter, “And what about the crater?”

Carter said, “It’s surprisingly deep, but even better, it has a huge crevice at the bottom. The crevice alone would hold hundreds of millions of metric tons of radioactive waste. We’ve posted a claim on Juno, like we did the asteroid we’re currently mining and some of the other asteroids we think we might want to mine in the future.

Rob said, “The French say that their crusher is working fine and reducing their vitrified radioactive material down to fragments under five centimeters. They’ve bought some waldoes and trained people to run them. All we have to do is provide them an eight inch port to put under the funnel and they can start pouring their waste through.”

AJ said, “I think they’ve been planning to pour it through the port in a dry state though, right?”

Rob nodded.

“If they wet it prior to crushing, it would limit formation of radioactive dust at the facility. Then they should add more water, cooled to just above freezing to make it into a slush. Something they can still pump at a fast rate so we won’t burn so much power holding the port open, ‘cause a port that size consumes about 350 kilowatts. Then when the slush appears at the port on Juno, it should freeze quickly into a large mass instead of flying around. That way we can keep different types of waste localized to different areas in the crevice.”

“Isn’t the water going to vaporize when it hits vacuum?”

“That’s why we want it to be really cold before it arrives. In fact if it actually froze in the final section of the pipe before it goes through the port so it arrived on Juno as ice, that would be great.”

Rob rubbed his chin, “I think you’re right, but we should have them make up a test slush for us to make trial runs through a two inch port so we can make sure everything works OK.”

AJ said, “Why don’t we make up a nonradioactive test slush here in our lab and try sending it. Safer than practicing with radioactives.”

There were nods all around and the meeting broke up.

***

Gary glanced up from his conversation when he felt a presence behind him. Looking back he saw Ell holding another big plastic bag. “Hey Raquel.” He blinked a moment, deciding that she really was thick around the middle. She must be pregnant. “Your stuff is in that same room. You can head back and look at it; I’ll be there in just a sec.”

When Gary had freed himself up from his conversation and arrived back in the back room, the door was latched. He blinked, but just after he’d jiggled the knob, Ell opened the door. “Sorry Gar’, I was putting on my sexy new underwear.”

He winked at her, “Did it fit over the baby?”

She narrowed an eye at him, “You’d better be glad I’m actually pregnant buster.”

He looked unrepentant, “Come on, I didn’t say anything last time when I thought you just looked a little thick around the middle. This time I had had time to give it serious thought and felt certain the increase in your glowing beauty came from the presence of a little one.”

Ell grinned back at him, “You really know how to lay it on thick. How come you aren’t married already?”

He waved a dismissing hand, “Women want bad boys, not nice men like me. Besides, all other women pale in comparison to a couple of pizza dates I had a few years back.”

Ell looked down at the floor, “If I’d known I was going to be standing in a huge puddle of bullhockey I’d have worn my boots! Or at least shorter pants.” Ell looked back up at him, a big grin on her face.

Intense longing very evident in his eyes, Gary quietly said, “Seriously Raquel, I envy Shan with every fiber of my being.” He stammered a little, “I-i-if he ever gives you any trouble, remember I’m dying to be your backup plan.”

Eyes round, Ell touched his arm, “That’s… very sweet Gary. I’ll keep it in mind, but Shan and I are getting along great.” After a long pause, she stepped back, “Wanna see my underwear in action?”

Gary grinned and bounced his eyebrows, “Do I?!”

Ell shook her head, “Men! You know what I mean! Allan, inflate left forearm to one atmosphere.”

With a “pfft” her long sleeve t-shirt stiffened and stretched out a little around the forearm. She moved her arm around a bit and thumped her forearm with the knuckles of her other hand. “Increase to two atmospheres, now to four,” she continued rapping it, “go to, ten… twenty… forty.”

Concerned, Gary said, “Raquel, what happens if the little graphene tethers from the inner to the outer layer of a section fail. Remember how the test plates blew up to become round? At the pressures you’re using that could crush your arm, or whatever part of you is covered.”

“Yeah,” she said, mind obviously elsewhere as she reached in her big plastic bag, felt around a bit and pulled out a policeman’s nightstick. “Allan is set to vent the pressure instantly if significant flow begins after the initial inflation.” She whacked her forearm with the nightstick, gently, then harder and finally hard enough to break the nightstick. She grinned at Gary and raised an eyebrow, “You make good armor Gar’… Allan, inflate all the non-joint sections to one atmosphere.”

A bigger pfft and the rest of her clothing swelled a little except over her shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and ankles. The oversized graphene collar slowly rose out of the neck of her shirt to envelop her head like one of the cones they put on dogs to keep them from chewing at themselves. “How’s Viveka working out?” Ell asked while this was happening.

The cone, gray, but moderately transparent, left her visible to him and he assumed let her see out just as well. “Your Ms. Janu is amazing. Smart as a whip, just not very assertive.” He tilted his head as he stared at Ell, “You aren’t going to protect the top of your head?”

“Well, you’re right, if someone gets above me and shoots down, I’ll be in trouble.” She turned again to dig in the bag, “So I need you to coat these for me,” she said, handing him some thin Styrofoam skullcaps. “They’ll go under my wigs.”

Gary could see that the skullcaps would cover the parts of her head that hair normally did. “Are they custom fit to your head?”

“Yep, and I’m counting on them gripping my skull when they’re inflated so they’ll keep my wigs on without adhesive or clips. ‘Two birds with one stone, so to speak.’”

“What about your joints?”

“Ah, well let’s try that out,” she said flexing and extending her left elbow. “Allan inflate left elbow, all sections.”

Her arm practically snapped out straight at the elbow as it puffed up a little. Gary could see her straining to bend it. She turned to him and raised an eyebrow, “Insta-splint, or, insta-straight jacket. The military and the prison systems are going to love these… Allan, deflate the elbow interstices.” Ell began to bend her elbow again but it didn’t seem to work very well, “Gary,” she said, pulling up on the wrist of her long sleeve T-shirt, “help me get this shirt up to where we can look at my elbow.”

Together, they slid it up. Gary could see that some sections of the elbow were inflated now, but others weren’t, leaving them flexible. As Ell flexed and extended the elbow, the inflated plates bumped into one another, then shifted up over one another. They looked like they were pinching her skin as they did so. “Hmmm,” Ell said musingly. “Looks like the joints will have to be intelligent.”

“Intelligent?”

“Yeah…” she said, then, “You know, with sensors. When I’m bending my elbow, my AI deflates the ones on the front and inflates the ones in the back—which there’ll have to be more of to allow flexion. When I extend the elbow, it inflates the ones in the front and bends the ones in the back.” She tilted her head consideringly, “With some work, we might be able to make space suits that way too. You know, because joint motion has been a big problem out in space?”

Gary’s mind boggled at the complexity of such a setup, though he knew that for a good AI it wouldn’t be that difficult to do once it had been programmed. Instead he said, “What did you mean about the prisons?”

Still, as if she were mostly thinking about something else, she said, “You know, you could make the prisoners a graphene exoskeleton that they had to wear everywhere except the shower. Much simpler than this thing I’ve got on, just cuffs at the wrists, elbows, thorax, waist, knees and ankles with connecting tubes. If they gave a guard trouble the guard’s AI just inflates the exoskeleton and immobilizes the prisoner with his main joints locked out straight.” She turned and winked at Gary, “Inmates would have a hell of a time breaking out of graphene!”

He pondered that for a moment, then shook his head. He turned and said, “You going to tell me what the thing that looks like a big nozzle with huge handles on it is for?”

“Putting out fires.” Ell grinned at him. “Deflated, every firefighter could carry a couple of them in his pocket. Inflate the nozzle and open the port at the back. The other end of the port is deep in a lake so it has a head of pressure behind it. You’d instantly get a huge volume of water flow. You need the big handles to grip so you’d be able to resist the back pressure. Kind of like having a fire truck in your pocket.”

Gary blinked, “It would be a lot easier than toting a big brass fire hose nozzle and a long hose, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. And they could get fresh air without carrying a tank, and they could have cool water constantly pouring over the outside of their uniforms… Hey, Gar’?”

“Mm hmm,” he said, obviously thinking about something else.

“Remember that Viveka comes from a very paternalistic society. Help her come out of her shell and I think she’ll really be able to contribute.”

Gary, at first startled by the non-sequitur, glanced at Ell, then aside and blushed a little, “Yeah, I really think she’s terrific,” he said, ducking his head a little.

Ell thought musingly, the way he’s talking about her, I’ll bet he won’t be available as my backup plan for all that much longer.

***

Raul Stenner stepped into the Oval Office feeling somewhat like he should have wiped his shoes on the way over. He’d been slogging through so much legal manure that it was hard to feel clean. “Hello, Madam President,” he said dourly.

“Raul! I suppose as usual, you’ve got nothing but bad news to bring me?” she said with a broad smile.

What’s gotten her in such a good mood? Stenner wondered. “I’m afraid that’s so Ma’am? Those lawyers someone’s hired on Donsaii’s behalf are simply burying my office in pleas, demands, requests, writs. Paper is arriving by the truckload and my people can hardly do anything else for trying to deal with it.”

“Well, it turns out that the girl’s richer than anyone would have thought, so she’s probably throwing her own money at it.” Stockton’s eyebrows bounced up and down, “So, all you have to do is figure out how to confiscate her money, and your paperwork issue will take care of itself. Besides we should have her back in custody pretty soon, which should help too.”

“Really?” Stenner lowered his voice, “When?”

Stockton smiled shrewdly, “Can’t tell you yet. But I’ll let you know as soon as the good news comes down.”

Chapter Five

Ell got out of the shower, having washed away her bronzers. She blinked at the mirror, she hadn’t appeared as Ell for quite some time and wasn’t used to her own appearance. She put on her graphene underwear, a lifting harness that already had a clip for the D-ring on the graphene cable of her hoverbike and some loose black exercise pants. A black scarf went around her neck. She slipped into an oversized exercise jacket with a hoodie and felt inside the big pockets for the ports they had in them. The ports in the pockets were two way and at four inches, substantially larger than her umbilical port. Thus, Allan could instantly deliver a number of devices to her that were much too big to fit through the 1.5 centimeter port on her abdomen. She covered her short hair with one of the graphene skullcaps. It had a wig of long strawberry blond hair that was a good match for her own hair, even if she hadn’t ever grown her hair that long. She pondered applying a little makeup but settled for lipstick alone.

Ell peered out the window of the cheap little motel she had rented the room in and saw that dusk was beginning to settle across the landscape outside. She turned to look at the big screen on the wall that showed the small farm a mile farther down the road. The video came from a camera sitting on the roof of one of the homes across the road from the farm and farmhouse that would serve as the “safe house” for her meeting with Hoyt tonight.

Suspiciously, one of Hoyt’s staffers had called two days ago and tried to set up Ell’s meeting with the Congresswoman for that very afternoon. Concerned that someone might be trying to keep Ell from evaluating the location before she arrived, she had claimed to be unable to make it on such short notice. She had insisted on this evening instead.

As soon as they’d agreed to the date, Ell had driven to Roanoke and parked at the airport. Using one of her “throwaway” IDs she’d rented a car and had it take her to a cheap hotel in the DC area.

Meanwhile, she’d had her hoverbikes fly themselves up to the DC area. They’d arrived long before Ell and used their cameras to examine the location she’d been given for the meet. Allan had pulled every scrap of public information about the chosen location off the net as well. In the early morning hours of that night she’d carefully looked it over with some drones dropped off of the hoverbikes.

The drones she’d brought along weren’t quadcopters like most people used for surveillance. Instead Ell had taken some of Gary’s half meter graphene balloons and attached small ports for AV recording and a set of quiet, low velocity, port driven air jets for maneuvering. Filled with helium, they were almost silent as they moved around from place to place. Even in daylight the semitransparent gray balloons could be hard to see in the distance and their radar cross section was microscopic.

Although Ell had spent hours evaluating the original meet location, she’d still had to smile when a staffer had called this afternoon to change the location, “because they were concerned that the first meet site might have been compromised.” Now it would be at a safe house on a farm near Centreville.

Ell suspected that they just didn’t want Ell herself to have enough time to learn very much about the location. However, she hadn’t demurred. She simply had the translucent hoverbike move immediately to hold at 12,000 feet above the new location and begin examining it. She’d had the drones begin examining it as well, though in daytime she didn’t have them fly very close. In fact, the camera on the roof across the road was on a deflated drone. Allan had already downloaded the public information about the farm and its house and he’d found Ell this cheap motel down the road from the farm. By the time she’d checked in, the AV record from the hoverbike had shown her nearly a hundred people bustling about the little farm, going in and out of the outbuildings and through the surrounding fields.

That seemed like a lot more than they should need just to make the meet safe.

Special Agent in Charge Douglas York grimaced. This assignment looked easy, but it would also be very easy for him to step deeply into a huge pile of shit. Over the past week since he’d been tasked with Donsaii’s arrest, his emotions had taken a roller coaster. First over how easy it looked—simply “snatch a girl when she showed up for a meeting.” Then they’d started assigning him resources. A lot of resources.

So he’d stepped back and reevaluated. Somebody thought this would be hard or they wouldn’t be throwing so many assets at it. He’d reviewed Donsaii’s history. What she’d done at the Olympics nine years ago seemed almost impossible to believe. Not what she’d done in gymnastics, though that looked incredible too, but what she’d done to those terrorists. That was just holy crap amazing.

Then last year’s Olympics had proved her to be faster than anyone else on the planet. Of course, that brought to mind the old saw about “no one can outrun a bullet.” But the word was that Director Phillips wanted Donsaii without any bullets in her. That directive had been so emphatic that York had considered having all the agents on this assignment turn in their weapons. Instead, he’d settled for issuing them all Tasers and telling them that if they did use their weapons, they’d lose their jobs.

After watching video of Donsaii performing some of her feats, he’d come up with the current plan. York did not want her getting loose outside, where her speed might let her run circles around his people. So he’d had his team send her instructions to park, disembark her vehicle and enter the house. Then “climb the stairs to the first room on the right.”

Because there was only one staircase, having her go upstairs made the plan almost foolproof. Once she was up there, agents hidden in the kitchen and living room would enter the foyer and surround the bottom of the staircase to prevent egress there. The first bedroom on the right at the top of the stairs didn’t have a window. Once Donsaii entered the room, agents in the other upstairs rooms would enter the hallway to prevent her leaving the room. Inside the room a female agent similar in appearance to Hoyt should fool Donsaii long enough for the other four agents in the room to take her down, make the arrest and cuff her.

The team had been provided titanium carbide hand and ankle cuffs so that Donsaii wouldn’t be able to cut her way free like she’d done at Guantanamo. They had a high security armored prison truck standing by in a motel parking lot about a mile away.

Supposing Donsaii should escape the room, or fail to go into it; by then the house would have been surrounded with a layered arrangement of his agents. They would move in from the outbuildings and surrounding fields as soon as Donsaii entered the house. Even if she managed to jump out a window and tried to flee, someone would get a Taser dart in her.

Hoyt remained the biggest joker in the deck. York had considered sending her to a different safe house and then just telling her that Donsaii never showed up. In their strategy sessions someone had pointed out that Donsaii might watch the road for Hoyt’s vehicle to arrive and because she had Hoyt’s comm, she could even contact Hoyt to ask if that was indeed her arriving at the farm house. They had decided that the safest strategy would be to have Hoyt arrive and go to the master bedroom, upstairs on the back side of the house. That way Hoyt, if Donsaii asked her, would honestly answer that she was in the house.

If some complication arose, as a plan B they could actually direct Donsaii to the room Hoyt was actually in and the “protective detail” agents waiting with Hoyt in that room could arrest Donsaii. As there was only the one room with no windows, the master bedroom they would have Hoyt in would have a window. However, they’d chosen it because its window over the high back side of the house had a twenty foot drop. No one could jump from that high without getting hurt.

York had wanted to do the meet under the cover of darkness and had been dismayed when Hoyt had asked that the meet be held in the late afternoon. To York’s delight, Donsaii had insisted she couldn’t make it until 9:15 PM, which would be well into dusk. He’d had all his agents bring night vision goggles which would give them a huge advantage over Donsaii in the dark.

She might be really fast, but Donsaii was just one girl, after all.

At nine PM, Ell watched on her large screen as a black government car arrived at the farm house and pulled up the driveway to the small parking area off the porch. A woman matching Mary Hoyt’s appearance got out with a man in a gray suit. They went inside and a few minutes later the lights went on in one of the rooms on the back side of the house upstairs. Other than the living room, no other lights were visible.

Ell’s eyes narrowed. According to the floor plans Allan had downloaded off the web, the first room on the right at the top of the stairs was at the northeast corner of the house. Though the floor plan showed a window, it had either never been built, or had been subsequently closed off. The light that had come on, had come on in a room at the southwest corner of the house.

Ell sent one of her drone balloons toward that window to have a look. Meanwhile, she stepped outside and walked to her rental car. Leaning in, she unfolded the dummy that was lying on the floor boards, placed a wig on it and sat it up on the driver’s side. She strapped it in with the shoulder harness, then took a moment to study the large heavy looking square truck parked several spaces away. “BOP” was printed large on its side, but beneath that in smaller print it said, “Federal Bureau of Prisons.” Several men sat in the front and Ell had a feeling she knew exactly what they were waiting for.

She got out of the car. As she walked to the alley behind the motel, her car started up and pulled out of its parking space, then headed out onto the street. In the alley, she picked up the D-ring that had flashed its LEDs at her. She snapped her lifting harness onto it and moments later her hoverbike lifted her into the sky on a slender thread of graphene. She pulled her scarf up over her lower face and lifted the hoodie on her jacket over her head. She cinched the opening of the hoodie around her face leaving only her eyes not covered by black cloth. She felt pretty stuffy all covered up on a summer evening but she turned on the ports and cool air began to blow out of thousands of tiny vents inside the clothing. As she swung through the sky toward the farm she looked up at her HUD. As her drone’s cameras approached, the view displayed in Ell’s HUD zoomed slowly in on the window at the back of the farm house. It confirmed the floor plans Allan had downloaded. The room was the largest one upstairs and had been designated the master bedroom on the plans. It had a little stub hallway extension to a door that connected to the main upstairs hallway. A woman stepped in front of the window, arms behind her back, looking out at the countryside. Ell had the drone fly higher so Hoyt would be less likely to notice it. As the drone approached, Ell could see that the woman was indeed Hoyt.

Or someone very carefully made up to look like her.

As Ell herself dropped down out of the sky toward the farmhouse she turned the cooling in her clothing way up to shut down her IR signature. She said, “Congresswoman Hoyt?”

Hoyt’s voice came back almost immediately, “Yes?”

“Are you aware that there are nearly a hundred people surrounding or inside the farmhouse where we’re supposed to meet?”

“No, no.” Hoyt laughed, “There’s only me, my aide downstairs and five agents from the FBI that are providing security.”

“Hmm,” Ell said as she touched gently down on the roof of the farmhouse. She had Allan maintain tension on the graphene cable so that she’d be light and not thumping about on the roof. Continuing her conversation with Hoyt, she said, “Before you respond to me, I suggest that you ask the two agents in the room with you to step out into the hall to give you privacy for a personal conversation.”  Allan passed Ell her five centimeter hand held single port through the two way port in her jacket pocket. To Hoyt Ell said, “I’m sending you a ‘fast motion’ video clip of the people surrounding the house as they set up this afternoon.”

As Hoyt watched the twenty second quick motion clip showing the people arriving and scattering all around the farm as well as into the farm house, Ell used the single port to pop a set of camera ports into the location where the floor plan said the hallway of the second floor in the farmhouse should be. The AV ports were imbedded in the surface of a one inch graphene balloon which she inflated with helium as soon as it popped through. The balloon fell slowly to the floor, pulled downward and kept upright by the weight of the port in its bottom. Through the AV ports Ell’s HUD showed her several views of the hallway which was indeed empty. To Hoyt Ell continued, “Next you’ll see realtime infrared video of the farm from above. All the ‘hot spots’ you see around the farmhouse are agents.” Ell sighed, “I would submit to you that, whether or not you are aware of it, someone intends to use this meeting you set up to try to capture me.” Watching the cameras in the hallway below, Ell adjusted the location of the flashing end of her one ended port and popped through a deflated 2.5 meter graphene balloon that she left lying on the floor of the hall at the top of the staircase. The thinness of the graphene meant the deflated balloons were only about three fluid ounces in volume.

Hoyt looked down from her HUD and glanced at the two agents in the room with her. She wondered how Donsaii knew how many agents there were in the room. Assuming what she thought of as her ‘stuffy’ air, she said, “Gentlemen, could you step outside the door? I need privacy for this conversation.”

The two agents protested, citing their complete confidentiality, but upon Hoyt’s insistence, reluctantly stepped out into the hall.

Hoyt began her response to Ell, “If those images…”

Ell interrupted, “Please whisper. They have AV pickups in the room with you.”

Hoyt’s eyes widened but she did continue in a whisper, “If those images are real, the FBI has completely misrepresented themselves to me. Do you want to reschedule the meeting?”

Donsaii chuckled, “They’d just do the same thing next time.” Behind Hoyt, another 2.5 meter balloon dropped unnoticed to the floor in the stub of hallway that led to the door out of the master bedroom. Ell passed the hand held port back to safety through the port in her pocket.

Hoyt said, “What do you want to do?”

“Achieve peace and prosperity for all,” Donsaii laughed, “but since that isn’t likely to happen tonight, I’m planning to distract the FBI boys long enough to at least hand you a secure PGR chip. Then we could use that to communicate with. If you’d open the window a little?”

Hoyt turned to look at the window. Donsaii was outside of it! She was apparently braced on the ledge below, clinging to the frame above. Donsaii grinned at her. Mary walked to the window and twisted the latch. She bent down and tried to lift the sash but it was stuck.

Donsaii reached in her pocket and pulled out a large suction cup which she attached to the glass on the outside. She pulled upward as well but the window didn’t budge, suggesting that it had been screwed shut.

Donsaii tilted her head, then said, “OK, we’ll have to go with plan B. This might break the glass, so step back and turn your eyes away.”

When Hoyt stepped back and turned around, she saw a shiny gray membrane in the stub of hallway that went out to the main hallway. She blinked at it as if what she saw might be due to a floater in her eye. Unnoticed behind her, Ell ran her finger tip around the periphery of the glass in the window.

Behind her Donsaii whispered, “There we go.”

When Mary turned to look, Donsaii was leaning in the window, holding the entire pane of glass from the window suspended from the suction cup. She lowered the pane to the floor; then popped off the suction cup and climbed in through the window herself. Putting her suction cup back in her pocket, she stopped and stepped on the glass, breaking it into many pieces.

Downstairs in the dining room, York had chewed a nail as he watched the many screens his tech team had mounted on the table and the walls. He’d wondered why Donsaii was late. If she’d been scared away, someone would come down on him for how much had been spent on an unsuccessful operation, even though he hadn’t been the one to authorize the expenditures.

Then one of his team said, “Sir, a car has turned into the driveway.”

Finally! York had thought, looking at the indicated screen and seeing a small late model Suzuki bumping down the drive. In the enhanced night vision camera observing the car, it was hard to make out details, but the single passenger had moderately long, light colored hair. “Is that her? Goddammit, who’s got eyes on?”

“Sir, our AI has back checked the license plate. It’s a rental car, picked up in Roanoke day before yesterday by an Imelda Takros.”

“Alias? Or did she get someone else to rent it for her? Find out.” York spoke to his AI, “Connect me to the entire team… OK everyone, stay focused. She’s coming up the driveway. Stick to the plan, do not screw this up.”

The Suzuki pulled up and stopped next to Hoyt’s car in the small parking area in front of the house. Then it just sat there!

What the hell is going on? York wondered. Has she been spooked? “Team, she’s just sitting there. We’re not sure what she’s waiting for, but for God’s sake, don’t spook her. Stay the hell out of sight!”

His tech team in the dining room practically quivered with the tension of watching the car and waiting for Donsaii to get out. Or do something!

Long minutes went by as York became more and more frustrated. Finally he said, “Dammit, how long has she been parked?”

“Four and a half minutes, sir.”

York gritted his teeth. “OK, inner perimeter creep in around the parking area. Outer perimeter move closer. Remote the spike strips out onto the driveway so she can’t drive away. Fire up the helicopters and get them in the air, ready to pop up over the farm and light the area. If she spooks and moves, rush the car.”

The infrared camera on the eaves of the house showed his people creeping in towards the parking area. York’s eyes flashed back and forth between the two displays, wondering when Donsaii would react…

Finally, he had people in sprinter’s stances all around the parking area, ready to charge. She still hadn’t reacted, so he stood. “I’m going to go out and arrest her in person.”

He walked through the foyer and opened the front door. Still no reaction from the car. He crossed the porch and descended the steps. As he neared the car he suddenly realized that Donsaii hadn’t even shifted position since the car parked. “Shit!” He stepped to the car and leaned down for a look without touching. It’s a dummy! He reached for the door handle, then stopped with a frisson of danger. Could she have booby-trapped the car? Stepping back and peeking down to the floorboards of the back seat and he stopped to curse continuously for about ten seconds, “OK team, this thing in the car is a dummy. John, you should have been able to tell that with your telescopic sight, dammit!” He paused, then, “In case this damn thing’s booby trapped, nobody touch it until we get a waldo out here. And, just in case it contains a bomb, everyone back away to your original positions. Keep your damn eyes peeled.”

“Er, sir,” came over his earphones.

“What?” he said irritably.

“Uh, Donsaii’s in the room with Hoyt.”

“What!?” he said, turning, pounding up the steps and flinging open the door. Moments later he skidded into the dining room and looked at the screen everyone else was staring at. Sure enough, Hoyt and Donsaii stood next to one another. They were either speaking in whispers or they’d found a way to block the audio pickups in the room. Hoyt’s guards weren’t visible. “Upstairs team, crash the master bedroom! Downstairs team, get up the stairs! Inner and outer perimeters, move in and shift around to concentrate toward the southwest corner in case she goes out the window!” He turned on his technical team, “How the hell did she get in there?”

“Running the vid back,” one of them said.

“The door’s blocked!” Blackwood, one of the agents detailed to stay with Hoyt said.

“Where’s Blackwood?” York asked, hoping Donsaii hadn’t locked him up in a closet or something equally embarrassing to the Bureau.

Several of his tech team pointed to a screen showing the upstairs hallway. Blackwood and the other agent from that room were leaning hard on the door.

York looked at the vid from the master bedroom. He could see the door! It kind of looked like there was a sheet of gray plastic over it but nothing substantial! “Blackwood! Kick that door down! There’s nothing on the other side!”

“I’ve tried!”

On the screen Blackwood stepped back and kicked hard at the door. A lightweight inner door, it had splintered in several locations where Blackwood had kicked it already. “Just kick a big hole in it and crawl through!”

At that moment, several of the broken areas that Blackwood had previously kicked coalesced. But then they bulged outward towards the main hall. Blackwood cursed and bent down, poking at something. He said, “There’s some kind of membrane on the other side pushing towards us. It’s gray but fairly transparent. I can’t budge it!”

“For Christ’s sake, punch a hole in it!”

“I’m trying! My knife just skids off!”

“Shoot it!”

“You’re sure sir? You said no weapons.”

“Don’t aim into the room you idiot! Shoot it at a glancing angle parallel to the door. All you need to do is break the membrane.”

Someone called down from upstairs, “There’s another membrane blocking the hall at the top of the stairs!”

“Christ! I’m gonna have to go upstairs and have a look.”

They heard Blackwood’s gun fire upstairs. With a splintering sound and a puff of gypsum the bullet burst through the ceiling and into one of the monitor screens. With a few sparks that monitor went dark.

“Goddammit Blackwood! We’re down below you. Shoot sideways not downwards!”

“Uh, sorry Boss.” York heard in his earphones as he turned the corner and ran up the stairs. Blackwood’s gun fired again.

“What! That first shot didn’t break it?”

“Um, no sir. Nor the second.”

York had come up behind his five agents who were stymied by the bubble at the top of the stairs. “Let me by!” Several of them stepped back and to the side. There was something bulging out at him. Faintly gray yet translucent enough that he could faintly see into the hall above. He pushed on it. It felt hard like a car tire. What the hell? He pulled out a multitool he always carried with him, folded out its blade and stabbed hard into the membrane. It felt like he’d stabbed a hardwood post. Well, it might deflect a glancing bullet like Blackwood’s shot, but it isn’t going to deflect a straight on shot! York pulled out his nine millimeter and pointed it square at the ballooning membrane from about six inches away. The fact that the membrane was bulging above him let him aim up toward the ceiling of the hallway where the bullet wouldn’t hit anyone after it burst through.

York barely registered one of his team saying, “Nooo!!” before he pulled the trigger.

Then he was falling back down the stairs. Someone had hammered the front of his left shoulder. The blow caught him by surprise as he resisted the recoil if his weapon with his right arm. He twisted around off a little off balance, then missed the step behind him. The agents below him on the stairs caught him and carried him down to the floor of the foyer below. “What happened?” he asked in confusion, feeling the bones in his shoulder grate as they laid him down. It started to hurt, bad.

One of the agents said, “Your bullet bounced back and hit you.”

“It didn’t break that, that, whatever the hell it is?” he said with astonishment.

The man just shook his head. As he cut York’s jacket and shirt, he said, “Eppo, call 911. We need an ambulance!”

One of the techy girls popped out of the dining room and said, “Donsaii’s gone.”

York gasped, “Have the people outside stop her!”

“No, I mean gone. Like way out of reach.”

When Hoyt had turned around and found Donsaii stepping on the glass of the window, breaking it into many pieces on the carpet she had wondered why. Then Donsaii pulled a pair of pliers out of the pocket of her jacket and used it to break more pieces out of the frame of the window, all while talking to Mary. “Sorry this has worked out so poorly, but I think you’ve underestimated the lengths to which President Stockton is willing to go in order to capture me.” Donsaii reached into her pocket again and pulled out a chip. “Here, if you use this PGR chip, slotted directly into the socket in your HUD headset, you’ll have a direct connection to me that no one can listen in on.”

Gaping at Donsaii’s matter of fact attitude about the entire business, Mary said, “H-how did you get in here?”

Donsaii blinked, “Through the window here.”

“No, I know that! But… how?”

Still breaking fragments out of the window with the pliers, Donsaii grinned at her, “Well, you know, I’m kinda good at gymnastics?”

“You couldn’t have jumped up to this window! It’s got to be over twenty feet!”

“Well,” Donsaii shrugged, “it’s not really important how I got here is it?” She smiled brightly, “What matters is whether we can come to some kind of agreement. Obviously, I’d like to be off the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. I’d like to get back to doing what I do, which I for one, think is fun and important. I think it would be to our country and world’s advantage to continue to explore our part of the galaxy. It seems to me that we should be able to negotiate a way for those things to happen.”

Hoyt shook her head to clear it, “I, uh, think so too. Can you tell me what your sticking points, um,” she turned to glance over her shoulder at the door, “are?” She tilted her head and frowned, “If they’re AV monitoring this room why aren’t my guards coming back in here? Especially if they actually are wanting to capture you like you think?”

“Um, I’ve provided them a distraction. My car just pulled up out front so I think they’re all focused on what’s about to happen out there.” Donsaii shrugged, “Besides, I’ve blocked the door, so when they want in, they won’t be able to open it.”

Hoyt turned and looked, “The door’s not blocked!”

“Actually, it is. Anyway, my sticking points are first, that I’m not turning over the tech for reaching the stars to anyone. It’s far too dangerous. Second, I am only willing to provide scientists access to other solar systems after I’ve determined that nothing resides there that could be dangerous to us.” She shrugged, “On the other hand, if we do meet an advanced race that seems peaceful and non-threatening, I’m happy to have someone else undertake the politics and diplomacy of the meeting.”

The door had started thumping and cracks had appeared in it. Now it bulged out away from them, toward the hall. Obviously not listening to Donsaii, Hoyt said, “It is blocked! By what?”

They heard a gunshot. Hoyt squeaked, then said, “Oh God! What are they shooting at?”

Ell said, “I think they’re just trying to get in. I’d better leave before someone gets hurt.”

Hoyt turned.

Donsaii had crouched just behind the window frame.

“What should I do?” Hoyt asked plaintively.

“I recommend that you step over into the corner of the room, out of the line of fire to this window.” Then Donsaii leapt through the frame and swung away into the distance, looking for all the world like Spiderman swinging away on one of his web strands.

Behind Hoyt, the graphene balloon rapidly deflated to a bump on the port that had inflated it. Then the quantum entangled particles painted on the outer circumference of the port disk activated, opening another port. Allan applied suction to that port and the balloon and the port that inflated it were sucked through, leaving nothing but the quantum entangled buckyballs of the outer port which broke apart without their support and floated to the floor as a puff of black dust. The same thing happened with the AV balloon and the 2.5 meter balloons out in the hallway.

Agents ran into the room, Tasers in hand, staring wildly about. Hoyt, standing in the corner as she’d been told, slipped her new PGR chip into her pocket and took a deep breath. “What the hell just happened here!?” she barked at the agents.

Ell had never detached her graphene cable but had had Allan move the hoverbike about 500 feet south of the house, so when she leapt out the window, she was in fact swinging through the air like a huge pendulum on the graphene cable. Though she shouldn’t have hit the ground through the entire arc of a 12,000 foot pendulum, about a hundred feet from the house she had Allan start reeling her in and began rising into the sky. She hoped that if they had been able to track her, her apparent “glide, then rising flight” out the window would further confuse her intended captors as to her abilities. She really didn’t want them to know how she did what she did, thus the removal of her balloons from the safe house. She figured that the longer they kept guessing about her abilities, the longer she’d be able to stay free.

She had Allan turn right just over a rise. After moving off her initial line of flight, Allan set her down on a rise where she could see the farmhouse. She felt no surprise to see two helicopters with spotlights circling over the farmhouse and one “in pursuit” down the track she’d left the house on. After a few more minutes, Hoyt’s car backed away from the house and started down the driveway.

Just after starting down the driveway Hoyt’s car slowed and then pulled to the side. At first Ell didn’t know that this was because it had run over the “spike strips” the FBI had put out to prevent Ell from driving away, but when she zoomed in she glimpsed the spike strip system retracting.

At a command Ell’s car backed out and started out the driveway itself. From the number of agents that started running after the car, Ell assumed that its departure was causing much consternation amongst the FBI. At first Ell intended to rendezvous with the car and remove the dummy but when a helicopter turned to start following the car she gave up on that. The cheap Styrofoam dummy wasn’t worth the effort. It wouldn’t tell the FBI anything except that her DNA had, in fact, been in the car and on the dummy’s clothing.

In fact the car didn’t go very far down the road before it pulled over and stopped. Ell assumed that the FBI had contacted the rental car company and invoked a halt.

To Ell’s dismay, an ambulance pulled into the driveway indicating that someone had been hurt. One of her drones got close enough to hear Mary Hoyt yelling at the agents about her spiked tires. From the vituperative conversation they were having, it certainly didn’t sound like Hoyt had been party to the attempt to arrest Ell.

Her translucent graphend hoverbike landed beside her and Ell climbed on.

Time to head home.

***

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington D.C.—Mason Phillips, Director of the FBI has just announced a reward of up to two million dollars for information leading to the apprehension of Ell Donsaii. This reward, in combination with the thousands of women sporting the “Donsaii look” as advocated by her fan Sylvie Hatchell, is sure to swamp the FBI with sighting reports…

As Cody walked out of the dressing rooms of the Las Vegas show that he and Connie worked at, Connie turned to him and musingly said, “Cody, what was that girl’s name? You know, the one that danced so well with you at Tres Locos a few years back.”

Distractedly Cody said, “‘Raquel,’ but, remember, that was actually Ell Donsaii.”

“Oh, yeah.” Connie said with a sly smile that Cody didn’t see.

***

Bure, France—Long one of the heaviest users of nuclear energy, France has a large accumulation of radioactive waste stored in an underground site at Bure. Today the facility announced their first trial transfer of a quantity of vitrified radioactive waste to the asteroid Juno. This was done with the assistance of American company ET Resources, one of the subsidiaries of D5R.

Though there have been a few complaints about our “contamination” of asteroid resources, most are in agreement that transfer of radioactive waste to an asteroid is far better than our current retention of such materials here on earth, whether in underground bunkers or in storage at nuclear power plants.

Interestingly, one of the reporters asked Ben Stavos, cofounder of ET Resources, about the transfer of American radioactive waste to the Juno repository. Stavos responded that he would not have any part of such a transfer until President Stockton rescinds her executive order declaring D5R’s leader Ell Donsaii “a national menace to be held without trial or recourse at Guantanamo.”

Many find this to be a fascinating tactic. Some have pointed out that if D5R were to deny the United States access to the ports produced by its subsidiary Portal Tech this would be a huge blow to America’s technological preeminence. However, a search by this reporter found an interview with Fred Marsden, one of Portal Tech’s founders, on this very point. Marsden claimed that Donsaii herself had instructed him not to use restriction of their technology as a lever against the government in any attempts to achieve her freedom.

Although that sounds laudable, one must wonder whether Portal Tech’s reluctance to take a stand might instead actually stem from fear that Stockton would simply nationalize their company at the first evidence of resistance. Though the United States does not have the same history of nationalization that many countries do, there is no doubt that it has nationalized industries before and could do it again.

Stockton stood with a smile as Mason Phillips entered the Oval Office. “So, can I announce that we’ve got Donsaii back behind bars…” She trailed off as she saw the expression on Phillips’ face. “You’ve got to be shittin’ me!” she snarled.

Phillips shook his head wearily. “Donsaii has more tricks up her sleeve than anyone would believe.”

“Oh come on!” Stockton said exasperatedly. “What’d she do? Outrun your agents?”

“No, she does have some kind of impenetrable force field or something though.” Phillips went on to describe how he’d sent five times as many agents to the site as the section chief had requested. How they’d changed sites right before the meet to deny Donsaii the ability to evaluate the meet site ahead of time. How they’d set things up for Donsaii to enter a windowless room on her own so that she couldn’t use her athletic abilities to escape.

Then he told Stockton how she’d appeared at a window without appearing on infrared, broken the glass somehow by wiping her finger over it, and then blocked the agents with force fields of some kind. The AV record from within the room showed her appearing at the window from above, as if dropped by a helicopter, but no helicopter had been in the area!

“Then,” he said, exhaustedly, “at the end she just flew away!”

Even though it was embarrassing to the agency, Phillips described how Donsaii had distracted them with the upper half of a Styrofoam mannequin in a car. Finally he explained York’s injury sustained while shooting at the force field or membrane or whatever it was.

“Force field?” Stockton asked.

“Well at first the people on the scene thought it was some kind of membrane, but a membrane should have left something behind. We went over the place with a fine tooth comb looking for remnants of any membrane with no results. Besides, there isn’t any kind of membrane, thin enough to see through, that would be able to resist a bullet.” He shrugged, “Also, it appears to be pushing outward from the center. The sheet rock on the walls in those hallways where she deployed the force fields was buckled outward in between the studs.”

“So, you’re proposing all kinds of new technology she used then? She can fly, she’s got an infrared invisibility suit, she has force fields of some kind, anything else? Oh, yeah, she can cut glass with her fingertip, right? Jesus Christ,” Stockton turned to look out the window, shaking her head in exasperation, “I’m completely surrounded by incompetents!”

Phillips stood up a little straighter and said, “I won’t accept that.” Stockton turned to narrow an eye at him but didn’t say anything so Phillips continued, “I believe that my team took all the reasonable precautions that anyone might have taken without knowing about the new technology Donsaii could bring to bear.”

“Oh, come on! I practically deliver her to you on a platter and you can’t even close the trap?”

“I’ll point out that she never actually entered the trap. I’d also like to return to a point I’ve made before. I’m still very concerned that by antagonizing her you put one of our country’s greatest resources at risk. You have suggested that she simply made one lucky physics discovery, but I’ll submit that her response to our attempted capture confirms that she has a number of additional technologies at her disposal that we are completely unaware of and certainly do not understand.”

Stockton sat down, leaned back and laced her hands behind her head as she considered Phillips. “I’m of half a mind to fire you Mr. Phillips,” she paused and studied Phillips who showed no concern, “but, I’m going to give you one more shot at this.”

In his turn, Phillips studied her. Finally he shrugged, “OK, what do you have in mind?”

“Everyone seems to think she’s sappily loyal to her people. So, arrest her employees and set a trap for her when she comes after them.”

Phillips frowned, “Her employees? Everyone that works for D5R? You’re talking tens of thousands of people! And, you’d be shooting our own economy in the foot!”

“No, no. One of your reports said she had a team of security people that protect her and some kind of a girl Friday who managed her life. They’re her personal employees. Arrest them.”

“On what grounds?”

“Think of something. I’m sure you could suggest that they must be covering for her while she’s a fugitive. Aiding and abetting or something like that.”

“We’re supposed to have evidence!”

Stockton sighed and rolled her eyes, “Well, find some. I’ll have Raul come up with some charges for you.”

As Phillips was leaving, Stockton said, “And Mason?”

“Yes?”

“Remember, what you’re supposed to be doing is what’s best for this country.”

And to hell with any niceties like following the law, Phillips thought.

Chapter Six

Emma stared distantly out the window of the restaurant, but turned at the footsteps behind her. Glancing back she saw Ell done up as Raquel… wearing a really baggy shirt! “You’re pregnant!”

“Hi yourself,” Ell grinned at her.

“When are you due?”

“First of October.”

Emma put a sheepish hand to her face, “How did I not notice when I saw you last month?”

“Well,” Ell gave her a little grin, “I wasn’t as far along, and you might have been a little focused on somebody getting engaged?”

Emma lifted an eyebrow, “Are you implying that I only think about me?”

Ell laughed, “No, no. Well, maybe for a few days after somebody dropped a rock on your finger!”

Emma tilted her nose up. “Well, I’ll concede that might have been true, way back then. So sit down and let’s talk about my wedding!”

The two young women talked about the baby and the wedding over a nice lunch. Emma had picked a date in late October so Ell should be recovered somewhat from the ordeal of her childbirth. Suddenly Ell glanced up and to the right, looking at her HUD, “Tell her I’m busy right now, but could take a call in thirty minutes.”

Emma smirked, “That the President calling, wanting to apologize?”

Ell shrugged, “President alright,” she frowned, “but President of Brazil. Not sure why she’d be trying to reach me.”

Emma’s eyebrows shot up and she hissed in a whisper, “You put a head of state on hold to finish talking to me about my wedding?”

Ell grinned, “Well of course. I do have my priorities you know.” She glanced up again, then rolled her eyes. “Tell her it will be at least an hour and that I can call her back if she’d prefer.”

Emma drew back, “Now you’re going to make her wait even longer?”

“No, different caller, “Mary Hoyt. She says she’s going to try to negotiate a deal with Stockton for me.”

“Mary Hoyt the House Majority Leader?”

Ell nodded.

Emma perked up, “Oh that’s great! If you’ve got some of the Democratic party leadership on your side, maybe Stockton will listen to reason.”

“Not so sure. The FBI tried to capture me when Hoyt and I met to talk about it. I’m afraid Stockton only sees one solution to the ‘Donsaii problem.’”

“Yeah, Stockton impresses me as a very ‘black or white’ kind of person. No shades of gray. Sorry.”

“Not your fault.” Ell narrowed an eye, “Unless you voted for her?”

Emma put up her hands, “No, no, not me!”

In her car after the lunch with Emma, Ell said, “Feed me data on the President of Brazil and let her know that I can take her call now.” A minute later Allan connected her with a man who said, “I will translate for President Goncalves as she does not speak English very well. She tells me to greet you with all cordiality.”

“Oh, thank you. I’m sure this will be more pleasant than AI translation. Please give President Goncalves my best wishes and tell her I am at her disposal.”

After a burst of Portuguese from the translator and from a woman in the background, the man said, “The President asks me to be sure that you are aware that Brazil is the current Chair of the G-20 and will be hosting the next Summit near Rio this October?”

Embarrassed that she didn’t know much about the G-20, Ell glanced up at her HUD. Allan had already displayed information on the G-20’s role as a forum of the world’s largest economies for “cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system.” “Yes?” Ell said, inviting him to go on without displaying her ignorance.

“Because technology based on your discoveries is rapidly changing the economies of the world, President Goncalves would like to invite you to speak at the Summit. She believes that you could provide important insights into future economic changes that will result as these technologies mature and become more widespread.”

“Oh… is the President aware that President Stockton has branded me a ‘menace’ and that I am currently a fugitive from justice in my own country?”

After another brief interlude in Portuguese, the translator said, “Yes, and she, like many other world leaders, finds this to be an unbelievable situation. She would be happy to offer you permanent asylum in Brazil, but at the very least would offer you our protection during the summit.”

“Um, I would normally be happy to participate, but of course I must consider the dangers for me as an individual. At a minimum I should only be on the program as a ‘surprise guest speaker.’ I am afraid that President Stockton’s resolve in efforts to bring me to justice is more substantial than you might believe. I would not want to be the cause of an international incident between Brazil and the United States.”

After some further discussion they concluded their conversation without a definite resolution. Ell felt like she couldn’t commit for sure until just a few days before the meeting because of the volatility of the entire situation.

When Hoyt called, Ell’s car was bumping its way over the dirt road onto a farm she’d purchased as Elsa Gardon. The farm was near Pittsboro, about fifteen miles from Chapel Hill and her existing farm. “Hello Congresswoman, I hope you’re using the chip I gave you?” she said as she got out of the car at the farmhouse.

“Hello, Dr. Donsaii. Yes, I’m using that chip and have even taken out the other chips in my headset, so that my AI is disconnected at present. I must start by apologizing for the behavior of the FBI at our attempted meeting. I hope you weren’t injured.”

“No Ma’am.”

“Please call me Mary. I’m hoping we’ll have more conversations in the process of negotiating a peace between yourself and the President.”

“OK, Mary.” Ell said, opening the door and going in the farmhouse. “I’d be pleased if you called me Ell. I hope none of the agents were injured in all that shooting at the farmhouse?”

“Well, in fact, the lead agent fired his gun at one of your force fields point blank and the bullet bounced back to hit him in the collarbone. However, they tell me he’s going to be OK.”

Appalled, Ell said, “Oh! I’m so sorry.” Force fields? Did they decide the graphene bubbles were some kind of force field?

“You shouldn’t be. There was absolutely no reason for them to be shooting! I’m utterly furious about that and intend to raise hell with the President over it. One of the reasons I’m calling, in addition to talking about any compromises we might make, is to better understand what happened before I talk to her. What were those force fields? Some other new technology you’re developing?”

“Uh,” Actually, Ell realized, the ability to make graphene in something other than long strips or cables was unknown to anyone except herself, Shan, Gary and a very few of the folks working for Gary. “Yes, it is something new. I’d rather not say what it actually is as yet.”

“That’s OK. All I need to know is that it is new. The possibility that you might take your toys and go play in someone else’s sandbox is one of the levers we want to use on Stockton. I can’t wait to tell her about it.”

They talked some more about compromises, Hoyt having not been paying attention at the safe house when Ell had told Hoyt about her own limits and compromises, had, irritatingly enough, not played back the AV record. Or maybe she’s hoping I’ll soften my limits if she gets me to repeat them enough times?

After Hoyt disconnected, Ell finished looking around at the repairs and remodeling her contractor had done to the house, then looked across the field, overgrown since the farmer had retired a few years back. When the farm had been thriving the farmer had built a house for his son. Paying the mortgage for an unoccupied home when his son had declined to live there had contributed substantially to the farm’s failure.

Using one of her other aliases, Ell had also purchased three homes that had been for sale near the farm. She’d told that real estate agent that she intended to “flip” them and had hired a different contractor to update, repair and paint them. It seemed crazy to her just how much real estate she now owned. If the government tried to confiscate her accounts, she hoped that they wouldn’t find all the money and real estate she owned under her many aliases. These houses near Pittsboro seemed like places she could live if the government found out about the “Raquel” alias. Or, rather when they found out about it. It just seemed so unlikely that they hadn’t found out about it so far.

***

Connie walked into the Las Vegas office of the FBI and looked around. She’d thought about contacting them over the net, but really didn’t want there to be any record outside the FBI offices of her turning Donsaii in. She felt a little conflicted, still hating Raquel, the girl who’d made a fool out of Connie dancing at Tres Locos but respecting Ell Donsaii… for all that she’d done.

However, now there was this reward.

Connie approached a desk. The young lady there said, “May I help you?”

“Mmm, yeah. I’m wanting to provide information on Ell Donsaii?”

“Very good Ma’am. Please take a seat.”

“Uh, there’s a reward, right?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

In surprisingly short order, Connie found herself drained of information on “Donsaii alias, Raquel, last name not known.” She provided downloads of pictures and video of “Raquel” dancing including that final sequence at Tres Locos when Ell took off her wig to reveal who she actually was. It didn’t seem like much now that Connie reflected on it.

***

Ell winced and put a hand on her abdomen, “Hey Hubby, your son is trying to escape the womb tonight!”

Shan leaned down next to her tummy, “Hey Buddy, ease up on the kickin’.”

Ell ran her fingers through Shan’s hair. “You know how I was threatening to move to the mountains to escape the heat before you reminded me about your dad’s cooling clothes?”

“Umhmm,” Shan said, sliding his own hands over Ell’s stomach to feel their baby kicking.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about heading up that way anyhow. I’d like to make some changes to one of our little hideaways.

“I could go with you for a bit. I’m not teaching second session summer school.”

“Oh, that’d be fun!”

“Well, I can’t just goof off. I am supposed to be doing research you know.”

Ell blinked, “I thought your research consisted of sitting around contemplating your mathematical navel?”

Shan sniffed, “My mathematical navel is a huge and resounding cavern of infinite depth, imaginary width and theoretical height, such as cannot be explained to the uninitiated.”

Ell grinned, “Have you tried Egol’s marginal calculation? I hear it can condense vast egos down to manageable sizes.”

Shan snorted, “I never get the last word!”

***

Stockton narrowed her eyes at the hostile look on Hoyt’s face as she entered the Oval Office. “Hello Mary.”

“I’m going to dispense with the pleasantries here Edith. I’m so mad I could just spit!”

“Mary…”

“No, don’t you try being pleasant either. The FBI minions at my attempted meet told me that their authorization to attempt to capture Donsaii during my meeting ‘came from the highest levels.’ Were you that ‘highest level’?”

Stockton narrowed her eyes. With a tic in one cheek she said, “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ So your encouragement that I should talk to her had nothing to do with achieving a compromise and everything to do with a devious attempt to get her back in custody?”

“I’m willing to do what it takes to get a job done, yes. I happen to believe that getting Donsaii in control before she does irreparable harm is one of my most important responsibilities as President.”

“Are you at all interested in what compromises Donsaii might be willing to make?”

“Sure, as long as they include a surrender to authority and her turning over D5R’s interstellar technology to the government.”

“She says she won’t release the interstellar tech to anyone. She feels it’s too dangerous.” Hoyt studied Stockton a moment. “Why do you feel she must turn that over? Couldn’t she just provide the ‘star shots’ so to speak, without turning the tech over to us?”

“If it’s that dangerous, then it needs to be under governmental control. A loose cannon like Donsaii should not be the one person in the world controlling such technology.”

“A secret known by more than one person is no longer a secret.”

“Spare me your pithy quotes.”

Hoyt crossed her arms, “You know, you’re almost all alone out here in your dislike of Donsaii. Even the people who lost their jobs because of her still idolize her. She’s performed astonishing services to the human race. I predict your little vendetta is going to cost the party its majority and the Presidency come the next election.”

“That election is three and a half years from now. I’ll admit that bimbo’s been in the right place at the right time several times. But her luck’s going to run out sometime soon and then everyone’s going to realize that she’s not the lily white perfect little angel they’ve thought. When shit finally starts sticking to her, people are going to ask how ol’ Stockton saw through that airheaded, self-serving little witch before everyone else did.”

“I’ll remind you that that ‘lucky bimbo’ showed us at least three major new technologies the night we tried to capture her.” Hoyt shook her head, “Let me know if you ever come to your senses,” she said in a disgusted tone, then turned and left without saying goodbye.

Watching her go, Stockton musingly said, “Three?” while gazing distractedly at one of her Secret Service agents.

After a moment the man said, “Flying, cutting glass with a finger, force fields.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Stockton waved a hand dismissively. “Party tricks and sleight of hand. Anyway, I wasn’t talking to you.”

***

York’s hair prickled as he watched the video of “Donsaii, AKA Raquel” dancing at some bar in Las Vegas five years ago. Damn! She had a false identity five years ago? How could we have missed that for all this time! He wondered if it was a true false identity with ID chips, searchable on databases, or just a costume she put on to go out in public without getting hassled. “When did we get this tip?”

The technical specialist who’d brought it to him said, “It was submitted three days ago out in Vegas.”

“Three days! You’ve been sitting on this for three days?”

“Hey, it took this long for it to float to the top of all the total crap we’re getting. There are thousands of sightings in every shithole in the world!” She sighed, “You know, every teenage girl, and some boys are dressing and wearing their hair like Donsaii. They think they’ve scored big if they get reported to us and we check them out. Some kids are turning themselves in.”

“Jesus,” York said, irritably adjusting the sling on his injured shoulder. “Well, I don’t imagine she’s still using that identity, but do an image search for that face and the name Raquel anyway. We’ll need to invest even more time searching for look alikes now.”

***

Raquel’s little old Chevy Colorado pickup bumped along a road that was no more than a couple of ruts through the forest. Shan was driving because GPS guidance for this trail wouldn’t exist until they’d been up it the first time. Glancing at Ell he said, “You know, it’s kind of exhilarating driving in manual when you know that the AI has no idea what’s happening and can’t bail you out if you do something stupid.”

“Yeah, at least we’re going really slow. Can you imagine the old days when everyone drove everywhere manually at highway speeds, drunk, sleepy and inattentive?”

“I guess that wouldn’t be so exhilarating, huh? Even if you were on your game, the guy in the car coming toward you might be an idiot.”

“Turn right at this fork.”

“How many acres is this? Seems like we’ve been driving forever.”

“109 acres. The whole thing’s a little less than a half mile by a half mile so it isn’t really very far. You just aren’t used to going this slow… and crooked.”

“Shouldn’t we be at the cabin by now? I didn’t think it took this long last time.”

“Well, I’m taking you to the site of our new project first to unload all the supplies out of the back. Then we’ll go back to the cabin.”

“Our new project? When did I get any input on this project?”

“When I said I was coming up here to make some changes and you volunteered yourself as an assistant and general go-fer.”

“Hey, by my recollection I was ‘going with,’ not submitting myself to be your roustabout and general unskilled labor.”

“Surely sir, you wouldn’t want your wife to be working hard in her delicate condition!”

“Oh Jeez!” The truck heaved to a stop at the end of the trail. They were next to a massive formation of granite that thrust out of the forest floor. Shan looked up at it, “That’s one huge chunk of rock. How many of my 109 acres are actually rock and not land?”

Ell grinned at him, “About three. This granite is the biggest reason I wanted this parcel of land.”

“Really? Are you planning to go into the quarry business or something?”

“Nope, but you wanna see something cool?”

“If your tummy wasn’t so big you’d be bouncing up and down wouldn’t you? Sure, show me.”

They got out of the truck and Ell led Shan to the rock and into a large crevice that extended up into the granite formation then turned to the left. The crack tilted a little to the right so that the left side of the massif hung over them a little. The light was pretty dim back there but Shan couldn’t see anything that would have Ell so excited. “Do we need some light?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said and the small lights on her headset came on, lighting the area.

Shan turned his on too, but after casting them here and there still had no idea what she thought was exciting back here. It just seemed like a deep crack in the rock. He glanced down at Ell and saw she’d gotten some kind of tool out of her pocket. She grinned up at him and said, “Ready?”

He nodded, “Sure, what…”

A whooshing sucking sound came from the tool and, as Ell extended it to the rock, a fine line appeared in the granite just ahead of her hand. She quickly traced out an irregular area somewhat smaller than the size of an ordinary house door on the left side of the crevice where a relatively flat rock face was sloping slightly toward her. “Voila! A door into our rock house! Do you want to open it?”

Feeling silly, Shan stepped forward and pushed on the outlined door. Nothing happened.

“Oops.” Ell giggled, “Perhaps we need to free the door from the rock behind it?” Ell stepped forward again. This time she ran the tool carefully back and forth over the entire surface of the door she’d marked on the rock.

When she stepped back this time and Shan pushed hard on the area of the rock that Ell had marked out, it shifted inward a little. “What the hell!” Shan said, staring at the large piece of rock that had just moved. “How did you do that?”

“Pretty cool huh?” Ell said wistfully. “Unfortunately, scary as hell too.” I’ve figured out how to open single ended ports at angles other than parallel to the originating port.” She put her hand on the rock and pushed as well. It didn’t move the door any further. She frowned at it.

Shan tilted his head curiously, “You mean…”

Ell turned back to him, “So normally,” she held up the tool she’d been using, “when I open a single port, like this one at twelve inches.” A two inch port popped open in space about 12 inches from her tool. “The port out there,” Ell pointed at it with her other hand, “opens parallel to the one here in my tool that originated it.” The port disappeared and reappeared slightly closer. “Which is usually fine if you’re just using the port to send objects through space to that point. But recently I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that a port that opens inside of something cuts through any material it opens inside.”

Shan’s eyes widened.

Ell continued, “I’m pretty sure I told you we’ve been using that phenomenon to cut chunks of that asteroid we’re mining into little pieces to send them back to earth, though we’re using double ended ports for that.”

Shan nodded with dawning comprehension.

“So, here I’ve changed the angle of the distant port,” the port disappeared and reappeared at about a ninety degree angle, “and sped up how often it opens and closes.” The port gained a fuzzy texture as it began opening and closing five hundred times a second. “Now I’m going to have it open closer and farther away at a high speed also.” The blurry spot extended itself so that it extended over a ten inch distance from twelve to twenty-two inches away from her tool. She moved it so that it passed through a deadfall limb stuck across the crevice in the granite, parting the wood easier than a razor might go through tissue paper.

Shan breathed, “That’ll cut through anything won’t it?”

Ell nodded, “Diamond or steel just as easy as butter or balsa. This tool has several different sized ports so I cut around the edges of the door with a four millimeter port set at a ninety degree angle and plunging to a depth of thirty millimeters. That produced that fine thin cut around the edge of the door. If I spin the port it actually cuts loose a spherical area.” She grinned, “It acts kind of like a router. I used the five centimeter port, spinning while tilted at sixty degrees and set at a distance of two centimeters to cut the door loose from the underlying granite.” She twisted a lip, “Two centimeter thick granite is too heavy for a good door though. She glanced up at her HUD, “I should have done the calculation before I cut the thing out: it probably weighs around 200 pounds! And if I make it thinner it’ll be too easy to break. Got any ideas for a different kind of door that would still be easy to disguise?”

Shan frowned distractedly, “Why does it make that whooshing sound?”

“Well, I have two way ports right behind the single ports in the tool. The other ends of the double ports are out in the vacuum of deep space so this thing also sucks up the dust and swarf from the cutting as it goes. The vacuum out there is so hard, the two way port is only open part of each second to keep from sucking in things we don’t want going through the cutter.”

Shan stared at it, trying to get his head around the whole concept. “Jeez, Ell this could be amazing for construction! Are you sure you couldn’t sell a version that could only be used for cutting things like tunnels, etcetera?”

Ell looked at him for a minute then quietly said. “It could also be used to cut right through skyscrapers. A terrorist could go around ‘logging buildings’ in New York City.”

Shan’s eyes widened, “Oh! Shit! Yeah, I guess you ought to keep these to yourself.”

Ell nodded, “Hey, let’s unload that stuff out of the back of the truck and head back to the cabin. Tomorrow we’ll come out here and cut out a little rock cave hideaway. Tonight we can try to figure out how to make a door no one will be able to see or open.”

The summer evening was cool in the mountains, so they built a little fire out of deadfall branches and sat out beside it, Shan drinking a beer and Ell her caffeine free Coke.

Shan felt very relaxed. “I could run into town and get a sheet of plywood. Then you could cut that rock down into no more than a thin lamination and we could glue it to the plywood.”

“How ‘bout if you got an actual door with hinges and all? It’d be thicker and studier than plywood. Not so prone to warping. We can trim it to fit with the world’s ultimate saw there.” She pointed to her single port tool. “I think we need the thickness because the lower right corner the rock dips back a little so we’ll have to cut away some of the wood beneath it.”

“Done. You can cut out your little house in the rocks while I’m doing up the door.”

The next morning, when Shan got back with the door he stared around at the huge cavity Ell had created in just a morning. More a series of cavities, like a house with a somewhat random floor plan. “I thought you said a ‘little’ rock hideaway?”

Ell grinned at him, “Well, I haven’t used the entire three acres of granite yet, but I think I’m closing in on a nice emergency hideaway. Let’s look at your plan for the door.”

He looked around a little, “Haven’t you been working a little too hard for a woman in your delicate condition?”

Ell shrugged, “I just carry this thing around, pointing it at rock and watching it disappear. My feet are getting tired, so I did a lot of the last room sitting on our camp toilet, but it isn’t like I’m working hard.”

They went back to the entrance where Ell shaved the piece of granite from the opening much thinner. Then they glued it to the exterior door Shan brought back from Lowe’s hardware. Then Ell gradually trimmed away the rock next to the door until they had a good location for the hinges to be epoxied to the granite.

While they waited for the epoxy to set, they opened the boxes containing their camp toilets sinks and showers, supplied by Shan’s Dad. He’d really gotten into the business of manufacturing and selling outdoors equipment that used ports. First with the clothing that could cool you or keep you warm but later with these camp toilets that flushed with water from a port, into a sewer port. The sinks and showers worked the same way.

They opened boxes containing some of Malcolm Kinrais’ space air conditioners as well, putting one in each of the big rooms of the connected set of cavities in the granite.

The next day they opened the door and looked at it from the outside. Because the crack where Ell had cut it loose was infinitesimally thin except where she’d turned corners with the cutter, it should have been barely visible. In fact it would have been too tight to slide open if she hadn’t sloped the cut outward when she made it so that it could be pushed inward. They’d only been able to open the door initially by removing a lot of material from behind it, then pushing it in, tilting it and pulling it out with the narrow dimension coming out through the wide dimension. However, the hinges didn’t drop it quite perfectly into place, leaving the surface of the door a tiny bit less prominent than the surrounding rock along one edge.

Ell trimmed the outer surface of the surrounding rock and door edge where it wasn’t perfectly level, smoothing it off until the crack at the edges could barely be seen. Unfortunately, this left them with an area of freshly cut granite that stood out in comparison to the weathered granite next to it.

They rubbed dirt and moss onto the newly cut surface of the granite, hoping it would soon look more like the granite in the surrounding area. Shan looked at it, then said, “If you want to hide it better, just cut away the outer layers of some of the other rocks around here so this one won’t be the only one with a freshly cut surface.”

Agreeing that it would be a good idea, Ell went around, randomly cutting away a few millimeters of the outer surface of the granite in big and small patches while Shan rubbed dirt and moss on them behind her.

That night, as they were packing to leave in the morning, Allan said, “You have a call from Steve.”

“I’ll take it… Steverino! How’s it going?”

Steve answered in a whisper, “The FBI’s here at our houses arresting everyone on the team.”

Ell’s heart skipped a beat, “No! On what grounds?”

“Aiding and abetting a fugitive,” Steve whispered.

“Oh, man…” Ell trailed off, “Do you know who all they’re arresting?”

“As near as I can tell it’s everyone on your personal payroll. Essentially, the entire security team plus Amy. They probably pulled the list from our income tax records.”

“My God, who’s going to take care of her kids? She doesn’t have any relatives to take them!”

“They were going to put them in foster care but Amy got Bridget to pick them up, she babysat for them when they were younger so they know her.”

“How do you want to… deal with this?”

There was a knocking sound and Steve said, “I won’t be able to talk much longer, they took our headbands and I’m using my implants but I’ll look like I’m talking to myself once I leave this bathroom. I’ll talk to you again when I can.”

“OK, I’m not going to ask you anything, so you can leave the bathroom. I’m going to tell you the options as I see them. First, that I can have the legal team that’s battling the government for me, take them on for you too. Second, that you could hire your own legal counsel so it doesn’t look so much like you’re associated with me. I’d repay your expenses later. Third, I could break you out of jail and leave you fugitives like myself. You might talk amongst yourselves about which you want to do, though number two seems best to me. Contact me when you can.”

Shan said, “They arrested Steve?”

Ell threw her arms around him. “And all the rest of my security team. And Amy, even though she’d quit working for me personally and taken a job at D5R!”

“Oh, man,” Shan said sadly, holding her. “Shall we leave tonight to get back down there?”

“Gods, I so want to get down there and do something.” She sniffed and knuckled an eye, “But I have a feeling that’s just what it’s intended for—to smoke me out. I’ll bet they’re dragging out the arrest process just in hopes that I’ll show up and try to do something about it. Then they’ll have done exactly what they set out to accomplish.” She turned in his arms to look up at him, “And I certainly wouldn’t want you to get dragged into it.”

“Hey, don’t cry,” Shan patted her shoulder, feeling helpless. He’d never seen Ell really upset. She always seemed to encounter problems with a solution half figured out. He wiped a tear off her cheek, “We’ll figure out how to help them and get ourselves through this somehow.”

“Yeah, logically I know there’s got to be a solution,” she scrubbed at her nose, “probably just all these hormones and feeling like such a waddling incompetent.”

Shan snorted, “Says a woman who just built a house inside a granite massif in two days!”

“Hey buddy,” Ell squinted up at him, “you’re supposed to sympathize.”

“Yes Ma’am,” he grinned, “I’m sorry you’re a waddling incompetent and that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

“Ohhh, you’re askin’ for it now,” Ell said punching him lightly on the shoulder.

“Well at least you’re not crying.”

She snorted, “Yeah, talk about curing the symptom, but not the disease. What are we going to do about my team?”

Shan shrugged, “Take a deep breath, see where they are in the morning and then sic some lawyers on the people who took ‘em away.”

“Yeah, I guess.” She looked around, “Can you finish packing? I’m thinking I ought to talk to Bridget.”

“Sure.” Shan turned to survey the cabin.

“Allan, connect me to Bridget… Bridget, this is Ell. Don’t answer me unless you’re absolutely sure the coast is clear. If you think the Feebs might be listening, cough once.”

Bridget coughed once.

“OK. Are Amy’s kids OK? Cough once for yes, twice for no.”

Bridget coughed once, then followed that with a tiny second cough.

“Does that mean, ‘OK but upset’?”

One cough.

“OK, call me when you think you aren’t being monitored.”

A final single cough.

It was just about midnight when Allan said, “Bridget’s calling.”

“I’ll take it,” Ell said quietly, getting up and moving into the next room so the sleeping Shan wouldn’t be disturbed. “Hey Bridget. Sorry you got sucked into my mess. How are things?”

Bridget spoke quietly, “Not to worry. You got pulled into my mess with Sam back when. I only wish I could help you as much as you helped me. The kids are OK I think. It’s kind of hard to tell with teenagers and I know Amy’s been struggling with Janey. Typical sullen teenage girl stuff. She cried a lot. Did you know they were homeless for a little while?”

“Yeah.” Ell didn’t elaborate on just how well she knew it. “Amy had a pretty rough patch back then. Is Mike doing better than Janey?”

“Hell, I don’t know. He’s fifteen, male and either actually thinks he’s invulnerable or is pretending he is. Anyhow, he says he’s fine, and implies that he’ll get his Mom out himself if the grownups can’t do it. I hope he doesn’t do anything crazy. Uh, I put him in the spare room and Janey in your room, I hope that’s OK?”

“Sure, I’m not using it. Do you mind them staying with you for a while?”

“Nope, when I needed a place to stay, someone took me in… I’m still living in her house. It’d be the least I could do.”

“When you called earlier I was with the kids. I didn’t think I should talk to you in front of them because I don’t know what the FBI might milk out of them… Also, just on principle I don’t talk about you inside your house because, after they searched the house, I’ve always figured they might have left some bugs.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s good thinking. Where are you now?”

“Well, actually, I’m huddled under the covers with a pillow over my head, using my implants in case they bugged my HUD.”

Ell giggled, “So we’re literally engaging in ‘pillow talk’?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think it’d be OK for me to talk to them by their implants tomorrow?”

“Oh, yeah. I think they’d really feel better to have you on their side.”

“They aren’t blaming me for their problems?”

“No, they love you… just like the rest of us.”

“Thanks,” Ell said, wiping at the corner of her eye and trying to swallow the sudden frog in her throat. “I’d better go for now. Call me if there is anything I can do to help, OK?”

After she hung up she wondered for a while just why so many people trusted her and… seemed to like her, even after she’d gotten them in trouble.

Chapter Seven

As Ell and Shan drove home the next morning Ell had Allan put through a call to Amy’s son Mikey, who now greatly preferred to be called Mike. “Hi, Mike. How are you holding up?”

“Uh…” He whispered, “Ms. Blandon… I’m OK. Is it OK to talk?”

“Yeah, it’s OK, though it might be better if you went outside. Can you do that for me?”

There was some rustling and bumping. Ell heard a door slam. “OK, I’m outside but I’ll still talk quietly, OK?”

“Sure, good idea. You know I’m talking to you through your implant rather than through your HUD don’t you.”

“Yeah, I can tell because it sounds different.”

“Messages through your implant don’t go through any commercial servers so you don’t have to worry about the FBI listening in, unless of course you’re in a location they might have bugged.”

“Oh, OK.”

“So you could call your mom and tell her you’re OK. Just take off your HUD to be sure none of your conversation gets sent through it, then ask Allan to connect you to anyone you want, like your mom, or Steve, or me, or your sister. You can specify that the message go to their implant, not their HUD, so you don’t have to worry about it getting picked up at a commercial server, OK?”

“Yeah. Is, uh, Mom going to be OK?”

“Well, I think so. I think you’re old enough to know I can’t promise you that though, right?”

“Do I need to be trying to hire a lawyer for her?”

“No, she’s got a lawyer. Don’t worry about that. Can you talk to Janey about this stuff, or should I call her myself?”

“Uh, she and I don’t get along so good. I don’t think she’d pay much attention to anything I say, so if you have time…?”

“Sure. I’ll call her sometime today.”

“It’s not that, I—I don’t care about her? It’s just that we get in a lot of fights. I… I really do care about her and, and, I’d fight anyone if they hurt her. But I can’t seem to stop fighting with her myself…” his voice broke, “over stupid stuff, mostly.”

“Yeah, I never had a sibling so I don’t understand what you’re going through. I do know that even though almost all siblings fight, they get over it when they get older.”

“I hope you can help my mom.”

“I’d better, she’s in there because she worked for me… which seems pretty unfair.”

“Yeah…” Ell had a feeling the fifteen year old was trying not to cry, “thanks for calling.”

“Of course, you call me anytime you need help, OK?”

“Um, how could you help? I thought you were on the run?”

“That’s true, but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

After Mikey disconnected, Ell called Steve. “Hey Steve, how’re you and the team holding up?”

Steve coughed twice, as they’d used before, to signal he couldn’t talk.

“OK, call me when you can.”

Ell then called Janey and had a conversation with her similar to the one she’d had with Mikey. She hadn’t wanted to call Amy until she could tell her that her kids were OK. She was just about to call Amy when Allan said, “Steve is calling.”

“Put him on… Steve, are you guys OK?”

“Yeah,” he whispered, then sighed, “They’ve been questioning us, it seems like nonstop since they picked us up. They’re holding us separately so we can’t coordinate our stories, but of course, they don’t know about the implants. We’ve been pretty much sticking to the, ‘We want our attorney,’ story so far, with a few, ‘What are we charged withs?’ thrown in for good measure.” He laughed, “I can even tell you that Amy, Mary and Lisa are doing the same, and they’re being held at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp for women in West Virginia.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of weird. GPS says all four of you guys are at US Penitentiary in Jonesville, Virginia but that all seven of yours and the girls’ headsets are at the Federal Correction Complex at Butner North Carolina?”

“Um hmmm.”

“Do you think they’re trying to learn something from the headsets?”

“Oh. No.” Steve gave a little snort. “They’re bait. Remember, they don’t know about the implants. They hope you’re going to go chasing down to Butner trying to free up your team. I’ll guarantee they have a huge layered trap set up there to catch you if you show up.”

“Oops, I should have realized that! Have you guys figured out which option you want to go with. Or thought of a different option?”

“Yeah, most want option three, break us out of here. But enough want to try option two that I contacted your lawyer Art Jenkins and got him to recommend someone else to me. A lady named Victoria Nis. We’ve hired her and she says she’s on her way here to get in their faces, demand to talk to her clients etcetera. She has one of her associates heading up to West Virginia to put the hammer down for the girls.”

“OK, that’s good.”

“Yeah, they aren’t going to have any luck. I’ll bet the prison denies we’re even here. I think we should start figuring out how we’re going to make our prison break.”

Surprised Ell said, “Really? You don’t want to even give the legal folks a chance?”

“Sure, but I just don’t think it’s going to work. When it doesn’t, I want to be ready with plan B… or I guess you called it plan C.”

“OK,” Ell said dubiously. “I’ll get started scoping out the two facilities.”

“Wait, don’t hang up yet. How’d you escape down in Cuba? Can we do something like that?”

“Um, I’d rather not say. The less you know, they less they can get out of you.”

“OK,” Steve said, obviously disappointed. “Let me know if you need anything from us to figure this out?”

“Sure.” Ell sat back to mull it over. After a moment she told Allan to wait until night, then send a couple of hoverbikes with drones out to visit the two prisons and get her some imaging.

“Amy?”

“Yes,” Amy whispered, responding unconsciously to Ell’s “Raquel” accent, “Raquel?”

“Um hmm. How are you doing?”

“Tired. I assume Steve told you where we’re at?”

“Yeah, he said they’ve been interrogating you for hours on end. Sorry. And sorry you got dragged into my mess.”

“Hey, you didn’t complain when you got dragged into my mess with Felton Bonapute. I’m just worried about my kids.”

“I’ve talked to them and they seem to be dealing pretty well. They’re worried about you though. Have you contacted them yet?”

“No, I didn’t want to call them for fear their HUDs would be bugged.”

“Just ask your AI to connect you directly to their implants using our own server.”

“Damn, I should have thought of their implants myself.”

“I’d suggest that the first thing you say, is to ask them if they’re in a location that would be hard to bug. You know they’re staying at my farmhouse with Bridget?”

“Yeah.”

“And the FBI have been in and out of there. They might have left some bugs. So outside is better. Also, your cell might be bugged, so I suggest you only talk quietly with your head under the covers or out in the exercise yard.”

“OK. I’ll call them as soon as we’re done here. Steve says that he’s hired a legal team to try to get us out of here?”

“Yeah.” Ell snorted, “When Allan searches for your location, the Bureau of Prisons says you’re at Butner in North Carolina. That’s where they took your HUDs. I expect that they are expecting to waste a lot of our time just trying to find your actual location, but your legal teams are on their way to talk to you there where you’re actually at, the Alderson facility in West Virginia. If I were you I wouldn’t answer any questions in their interrogations, just keep demanding to talk to your attorney.”

“That’s our plan; I’m sticking to it.”

“Good. Steve says he’s talked to the team and they want to escape if the legal route doesn’t seem to be working. I’m trying to get a read into your feelings. A read that hasn’t been filtered through fearless Steve’s macho. Is that really what you’d want too?”

There was a period of silence, then Amy said, “Yeah, if the legal beagles don’t make fast progress I don’t want to sit in this hole for three and half years of my life, waiting for Stockton to get voted out of office.”

“You’re sure the next president would turn you loose?”

“Without a doubt.”

“I hope you’re right, maybe I’d get a pardon too.”

“Of course you’d get a pardon, the rest of us’d be afterthoughts.”

“Well, if we do need to spring you, it’d be really helpful if you were on the top floor or by a wall. You probably don’t have any say, but if you can influence it, try for those locations.”

“You thinking you could blow out a wall with shaped charges or something?” Amy said apprehensively.

“Something like that, but not so violent. We’ll figure it out no matter where you are. I’m just sayin’…”

“OK, outer wall, top floor. Yes Ma’am,” Amy said, sounding a little more like her old chipper self. “Anything you say Boss lady, I’ll arrange it.” She snorted.

As she disconnected her call with Amy, Ell looked up and tensed as she realized they were pulling into their own neighborhood. The same location where Amy, Steve and the others had been arrested last night. “Allan, any activity on the house monitors since 10 PM last night?”

“No.”

Ell relaxed a little but still kept a close eye out and made sure their graphend hoverbike was standing by. It just seemed so unlikely that the FBI could have arrested her whole team right here in this neighborhood and still not know about her Raquel identity.

Nonetheless, they pulled in and unpacked with no untoward events.

***

Ell called Art Jenkins, her own counsel in their effort to get her off the FBI’s list. “Hey Art, does this thing with them arresting all my personal employees have any effect on my own case?”

“Not really, I’ve checked and they haven’t changed any of the charges against you. Though we’ve gone to lower level courts a couple times with you in absentia and gotten your charges dropped, they just get them reinstated and we have to move on to a higher court. They’re dragging their feet, asking for stays and pleading inability to produce documents, so it seems like it’ll be forever before anything changes with your situation.”

Ell sighed, “I assumed as much. This Victoria Nis you referred Steve to, she’s pretty good at this kind of stuff?”

“As good as anyone. She’s really sharp, but no one has a lot of experience fighting the government in a situation like this.”

“OK, can you make sure she knows that price should be no object? She should hire as much help as she needs.”

“Sure, that should help her bury them in pleas and requests.”

***

Billboard Magazine, New York—The song “Forgiveness” by Ekels and Rosel, featuring blind singing prodigy Stell Simsworth has risen to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Recorded live at Vic’s bar in Carrboro, North Carolina, the song has stunned listeners with the beauty of the young girl’s voice.

Albie White looked up at the woman dressed in the expensive suit, “May I help you?”

“Yes, I’m attorney Victoria Nis and this facility is holding four of my clients. They’re being held on unsubstantiated charges and have not been allowed contact with their attorney, i.e. me.”

Albie frowned, she supposed the woman might be talking about some people in the US Marshall’s holding cells. “Who are you referring to?”

“I’ve ported you their names but they include Steven Jacobs, Barrett…”

Nis paused when Albie lifted a hand and, looking at her HUD, said, “I’ve got your port.” Albie studied the names and asked her AI to handshake with the prison AI to see if they were indeed held in that facility. The names popped up, with their cell numbers and links to the rest of their information, however it also displayed a message to “Tell anyone who asks that they are being held at the Butner facility in North Carolina.” Albie smiled up at Nis and said, “I’m sorry, those individuals are actually being held in the Butner facility in North Carolina.”

Nis leaned down resting her arms on the counter and said quietly, “Ms. White. You know that’s not true. In fact, if you’ll check, I believe you’ll find the individuals I’m asking about are being held in Temporary holding block 3, cells 19 and 25.”

Albie blinked and glanced quickly upward to see that in fact Nis did have the correct cell numbers! She swallowed and began to repeat herself, “I’m sorry, those individuals are actually being held in the Butner…”

Nis had leaned closer and smiled, but without any warmth. “Ms. Albie White, if you repeat that lie I’m going to bring you up on charges for lying to me in an effort to obstruct my legally mandated duty to confer with my clients, as, I might point out, is their right.” She leaned in a little closer yet and whispered, “If I were you, this is the point when I’d kick this potential disaster upstairs to your supervisor.”

Albie swallowed again, then said, “Just a minute.” She got up and went into the back.

Ralph waved a hand, “Just tell her what it said to say on your screen! What was it, ‘that they were actually in Butner’?”

“But… but, it’s not true! And, and she says she’ll put me up on charges for lying, can she do that?”

“Who knows, I’m not a lawyer! Just do what it says on the screen, you can always say you were just following orders.”

“But I just did my training on how you can’t get out of trouble by saying you were following orders if the orders were illegal. And it says, right on the same screen, that those guys are actually here in temp block 3, exactly where she says they are!” Albie’s voice dropped, “Right down to the specific cell numbers. How does she know that?”

“I don’t know! Just go tell her what it says on the screen!”

Albie drew herself up, “No! I won’t do it. It’d be lying and I think that’s an illegal order. If you want her to be told that, you tell herself.”

Ralph rolled his eyes and heaved himself up out of his chair. He had plenty of experience intimidating outsiders. He’d just go be his usual overbearing self. Outside at Albie’s station he said, “Yes?”

Nis gave him a penetrating look then glanced at his nametag. “Mr. Mitchum, is that correct?”

Ralph nodded impassively.

“Well Mr. Mitchum, I’ve explained myself to Ms. White, as I’m sure she passed on to you. Are you hoping to inconvenience me by making me repeat myself?”

Mitchum nodded to the “repeat myself” query before he realized that he’d also confessed to “hoping to inconvenience” her.

“Very well, for the record, I object to this harassment. As to my request, I am here to speak to my clients who have been held here and questioned for hours while being denied their right to an attorney. I have just ported you their names and cell numbers and appended that list to the AV record I’m making. I expect to be allowed immediate access or I will bring charges against the individual who obstructs their legal rights. Will that be you?”

Ralph found himself flustered by this woman who somehow loomed much larger than her actual size. He couldn’t judge her legal knowledge, but her smart dress and intense gaze made him feel that she knew exactly what she was doing. He cleared his throat and began, “Uh, Ma’am, the individuals you are requesting are actually being held...’

Ralph had gradually run down to a stop as Nis had put her hand up in a halting motion. “Please, Mr. Mitchum, do not lie to me on the record here. You and I both know my clients are here in this facility and that their locations and the cell numbers I’ve described are displayed on that screen in front of you.”

To Ralph’s amazement she grabbed the corner of the monitor in front of him and spun it quickly to herself so that her AI would record exactly what the damned screen showed. “Hey!” he said turning it back to himself.

Niss said, “So, now, we both know they’re here and I have a record demonstrating that you know they’re here. Are you going to allow me to speak to my clients as the law demands, or are you going to continue to obstruct the process of justice? Please remember that I’m recording your response.”

Ralph stared round eyed at Niss for a minute, then abruptly turned and went into the back.

***

Special Agent Crispin blinked. “Our detainees are where?”

“Speaking to their attorney in Green room E.”

“What! How’d this attorney, uh, get in here?”

“Showed up, had their names and cell numbers. Said she was here to talk to them. That’s their right isn’t it?”

“Uh… Well yeah, but…” Crispin trailed off before he said something he might regret.

The SAC was gonna be pissed.

***

“SAC York!”

York turned and saw the tech specialist hurrying down the hall behind him. “Yes?”

“There’s a Raquel Kinrais, née Blandon living on the same street behind Donsaii’s farm where Donsaii’s security team lived. Her husband, Shan Kinrais, wrote a paper with Donsaii.”

York’s eyes flashed wide, “You’ve got to be shittin’ me!”

“No sir.”

“Christ! This is like Osama Bin Laden, livin’ right under everyone’s noses!”

“Yes sir.”

He turned and headed back in to the offices set aside for his team. “All right everyone, we finally have a good lead!’ He turned to the tech specialist, “You’ll show us pictures and maps, can you be ready in ten?”

“Yes sir.”

He turned back to the room in general, “Meeting in ten to figure out how to chase it down.”

***

Washington D.C.—The Secretary of the Department of Energy let slip today that he had spoken directly with Ell Donsaii, despite the fact that she is currently a fugitive from the law. This disclosure occurred in the course of an announcement that the DOE had just successfully negotiated with D5R’s subsidiary ET Resources to begin moving the United States’ nuclear waste to ETR’s nuclear waste repository on the asteroid Juno. ETR’s Ben Stavos had initially rebuffed the DOE’s request, “until the President rescinds her executive order declaring D5R’s leader Ell Donsaii ‘a national menace.’” Apparently this refusal was made without Donsaii’s knowledge because the Secretary said that when he spoke to Donsaii, she said she was personally unaware and had herself “never intended for the country to be held hostage to her own disagreement with the President.” Apparently Donsaii subsequently spoke to Stavos who has now agreed to undertake the disposal of radioactives for the United States (as it had already agreed to do for three other countries).

The word in Washington is that President Stockton was absolutely apoplectic when she learned that a member of her own Cabinet had contacted a fugitive on the “most wanted list.”

When Viveka had first arrived at Allosci she’d been astonished to find Dr. Pace making graphene at simply stupendous rates out at the space Habitat. Even in India she’d known that graphene was being synthesized at D5R, though she hadn’t heard of the Allosci subdivision at that time. However, she’d been under the misapprehension that graphene synthesis remained a slow, low volume process. Arriving here and learning that they could create tens of kilometers of graphene per hour had shaken her world view. She no longer wondered how they could afford to start her at a salary of $100,000 per year.

One hundred thousand American dollars per year! And they’d paid her moving costs from India, expecting her to ship furniture. When she’d told them she had no furniture, they’d insisted on paying for two months’ rent in a furnished apartment in lieu of the moving costs.

Of course, at present Viveka remained impoverished. She hadn’t yet received that first paycheck. Even though the flight from India and her astonishingly huge apartment hadn’t cost anything, she’d only had seven hundred dollars when she’d arrived. Dr. Donsaii had given her $10,000 during the Olympics as a prepayment on her employment. Foolishly feeling extraordinarily wealthy, Viveka had given $7,000 to her mother for repairs on her dilapidated childhood home and for her little sister’s education. The look on her mother’s face at the windfall of money had been priceless.

Then Viveka had purchased her printer, an expense she now regretted. A few other purchases and expenses, had left her with the seven hundred dollars she’d had when she left India. Seven hundred had seemed to be so much until she found out that a taxi from the airport to her new apartment would cost sixty dollars here in America. Then there had been a two hundred dollar deposit on her apartment. Cost after cost that she hadn’t expected. A hundred dollar minimum deposit to open the bank account where her paycheck would be deposited.

Thank goodness her genius level AI had been able to figure out how to get a bus most of the way to her job. She still had to walk a half mile to where she would catch a bus and three miles to Allosci from the closest that the bus routes approached.

Food also cost much more than what she’d spent in India. A week ago she’d discovered Raman noodles and had been living on them for a week now. In another ten days she should get her first paycheck though! So much money! She couldn’t wait to send some money home to her mother. Though, she reminded herself, she must begin saving for a visit.

At a chime from the materials testing machine’s AI Viveka looked down. A few minutes later she still stared at the display in disbelief.

Graphend! This combination of graphene and diamond they were making produced measurements that were simply hard to believe. The testing machine was powerful and the graphend specimens were small—still the machine strained near its limits to break these specimens.

Staring in admiration and wondering if she would someday be brought into the secret of the creation of graphend Viveka didn’t hear someone approaching from behind her until she heard Dr. Donsaii’s “Raquel” voice say, “Hello Viveka.”

Viveka scrambled around and to her feet, “Hello Doctor… uh, Raquel.”

Donsaii smiled at her. “Dr. Pace tells me you’re doing very well. He thinks we’re going to be very happy to have you on our team.”

Viveka ducked her head. “Thank you. I’m very glad.”

“A little birdie tells me that you’re walking at least a big part of the way to work though.” Chidingly, “I’m thinking that you might not have a car?”

“No Ma’am.”

“You’ll really need a car here in America, you know.”

“Yes Ma’am.” Viveka said, staring at the floor and trying not to melt through it.

Donsaii studied her another minute, then said, “Oh, you probably don’t have the money do you? I’ll bet you haven’t been paid yet?”

Viveka shook her head, feeling small.

Donsaii laughed, “Well, we can’t have that. There’ll be a deposit in your account tomorrow morning and I’m going to ask Bridget to take you out tomorrow and help you figure out how things work here in America, rent you a car, help you find a different apartment if you like, etcetera. I’m embarrassed we’ve left you to flounder around trying to figure things out for yourself for so long.” She put a gentle hand on Viveka’s shoulder, “I’m sorry and we’ll try to do better. Please let Bridget know if there’s any other way we can help you adjust?”

Viveka nodded spastically but managed to keep the tears from running down her cheek until after Donsaii had turned and cheerfully said, “I’d better get home to my hubby.”

***

Ell lay in bed next to Shan who was reading as he waited to drift off to sleep. She’d been reviewing Roger’s AV recording of the last D5R meeting. “Damn, I could use one of those!” she mumbled to herself.

“What’s that?” Shan asked sleepily.

“Oh. You know how people in the hospital, a lot of the time they have a catheter put into their bladder? It lets the hospital track how much urine they’re making and keeps them from having to get up to go to the bathroom. In fact, during long surgeries, they put them in just so the bladder doesn’t get overstretched by all the urine they’re making while they can’t pee it out.”

“Sounds gross.”

“Yeah, anyway, the Quantum Biomed group has come up with a portal technology for it. They insert a deflated balloon with a port on it, the same way they do a regular catheter. A tiny port blows up the balloon so it stays in the bladder and a bigger port drains out the urine.”

“Why’s that any better than a catheter?”

“Umm, cause the catheters are irritating and they get infected if they have to stay in very long.”

Shan turned his head to frown at her, “Why do you want one?”

“‘Cause your son’s sitting on my bladder and I have to go every ten minutes. Do you have any idea how irritating that is?”

He turned away, “It isn’t every ten minutes.”

“Poetic license. Go to sleep, O unsympathetic one.”

“I’m sympathetic,” he faked a snore.

Ell elbowed him, but gently.

***

York climbed into the mobile command post and turned to the tech specialist. “Frankie, do we know for certain that Donsaii is there at the house?”

Frankie nodded. “Yes sir. We dropped off two video cams this morning, one in the front yard of the northern neighbor and one in back yard of the neighbor to the south. AI’s have monitored those feeds for movement of any type, which they’ve brought to the attention of agents. The only activity has been her husband getting home at 1647 and Donsaii parking in the garage at 1713 hours. Since that time no one has left the home, through either the front or the back door. Infrared on the cams occasionally showed people moving around inside, last movement at 2305.”

“OK,” York said, then turned to the men arrayed behind him. “Drones up?”

“Yes sir, eyes on the house at present.”

“Choppers ready?”

“Can be overhead in seven minutes.”

“Farm team ready?”

“Twenty five agents in two depths in the farm field right behind the ‘Kinrais’ house.”

“Road team ready?”

“Van with eight agents and bus with twenty two, idling just off main road.”

“K-9 teams ready?”

“Yes sir, four dogs on standby. All have Donsaii’s scent already.”

York turned and swept his eyes over the men, “Anyone with any last minute ideas or concerns?”

No one spoke. York resisted the temptation to sigh. This seemed absolutely foolproof, but so had his last trap. “OK, timeline starts now.” He made a chopping motion with his hand. His AI would send the teams on their way per the schedule they’d worked out so that the choppers would arrive overhead as the street team ran up the sidewalk with the big door knocker and the dog teams assumed position at the four corners of the yard, ready to run the woman down if she went out a window.

The woman might be fast, but the dogs were faster.

The big diesel of the command post rumbled to life and it swung in behind the bus full of agents. He’d be last on the scene, but still in plenty of time to be there for the collar.

***

Ell was in the bathroom—again—when Allan spoke in her ear. “A van, a small bus, two more vans and an FBI mobile command post have just turned into the neighborhood. Lights are out on all vehicles. Audio detects the sounds of helicopters.”

Damn! Ell thought. She stood, leaving her pajama bottoms on the floor of the bathroom, and stepped out into the bedroom pulling off the top. “Shan!” she whispered urgently, poking him. “FBI’s on its way. Rise and shine.”

Shan started to reach for the bedside light but Ell grabbed his elbow, pulling his hand away. “No lights! Get your clothes on, grab your emergency pack and head to the basement.”

Ell pulled her own emergency pack out from under the bed and reached into the pocket with her graphene underwear. The stuff was so flimsy it was hard to put on, but she’d practiced and practiced until it was second nature. Next came her black athletic gear with the cooling ports and the extra-large ports in the jacket pockets. Pulling the pants on over her bulging abdomen seemed like more of a struggle than it had been a just a week or two ago when she’d last done it.

She picked up her pack, threw it onto her shoulder and, feeling like a clumsy waddle was the best she could do, stepped out into the hall just in front of Shan.

For his part, Shan felt amazed by the speed with which his oversized wife had dressed and started down the hall in front of him. She opened the door to the basement and started down the stairs.

***

Frankie turned to York, “Movement in the house.”

“Where?”

“Master bedroom on our copy of the plans.”

“Just going to the bathroom?”

She shook her head, “Two figures moving.”

“Shit, shit, shit!” he cursed quietly to himself. “Teams! They’re moving around in the house. Abandon stealth. Get in position now, now, now! No sirens yet.”

The rumble of the street passing by underneath the command post sped up. He glanced out the front window and saw the headlights come on.

***

Ell turned right at the bottom of the stairs and stepped to the big rack of wall shelves containing paint and fertilizer. Reaching up under one of the shelves, she pushed on the loose screw that released the latch. In response to a firm shove the shelves pushed back into the tunnel beyond and she and Shan stepped into the passageway. They turned and shoved the wall of shelves back into place until the latch clicked.

Ell reached into her pocket and tossed something on the floor in front of the false door.

Shan frowned at the object, wondering if his wife might have actually left a bomb or something. Then with a hiss it blew up into a large, somewhat translucent gray balloon which filled the hallway from one side to the other. “Graphene balloon?” he asked.

Ell nodded as she started walking down the tunnel, “Yeah filled to seventy PSI. Even if they find the latch, the door isn’t going to feel like it opens.” She barked a little laugh, “And, they certainly aren’t going to be able to open it!” She got on the little golf cart.

“Aren’t you worried they’ll have some kind of listening equipment that will hear this cart?”

“If they can hear the cart, they can hear us walking. Speed will be important then.” Nonetheless, she didn’t rocket off down the tunnel like she often did, choosing a gentle quiet pace instead. “Allan,” she said, “What’s happening up there? Give Shan a feed too.”

“Agents have surrounded the house. No doubt any longer that they are here for you. I count thirty agents on the street side and twelve on the farm side. Four K-9 teams. Two helicopters are overhead. Some agents are carrying something up the front walk, presumably a door breaker. Neighbors on either side and across the street are peering out their windows.”

“Wow!” Ell said, “Not leaving any holes in their coverage, eh? Are the hoverbikes overhead yet?”

“Yes, holding at 12,000 feet.”

“What altitude are the FBI helicopters?”

“About one hundred feet.”

“And are the choppers staying close over the house?”

“Yes.”

“OK, put the hoverbikes over the groundskeeper’s shack on the farm and drop their cables to the ground just outside the small side door. Pull up the cables if the helicopters get within a hundred meters, we don’t want them getting tangled in the cables and crashing.”

Shan winced internally at the image of a helicopter’s rotor winding up a graphene cable and crashing to a halt. Then the copter itself tumbling to the ground with the pilot having no idea what had just gone wrong.

Ell increased the speed of the golf cart and said, “None of the FBI are moving out toward the farm are they?”

“No.” Allan answered.

They pulled up to the wide area in the tunnel under the groundskeeper’s shack on the farm and got out. Ell said, “Oh man, climbing a ladder with this huge belly is gonna be tough.”

Shan said, “Let me carry your emergency pack.”

***

York watched the front door team hit the door with the buster. As his men poured inside, York got out of the command post and started up the walk himself, eager to confront the woman he’d been chasing for so long.

When he entered the house his agents wouldn’t look him in the eye. York’s dander began to rise, “Where is she?” he barked, turning into the hallway of the modest little home. The only agent who met his eyes shrugged.

York turned into the master bedroom. The bedclothes were rumpled as if someone had slept in them. The room was otherwise fairly tidy. Glancing through the open door into the master bathroom he saw a pair of flannel pajama bottoms pooled on the floor in front of the toilet. “She was on the toilet when we arrived?”

“Believe so sir.”

From behind him York heard someone say, “Basement clear too.”

York said, “All team members,” pausing to be sure his AI would have connected him to everyone. “OK team, she was here when we arrived. The choppers and drones didn’t see her leave. So, she’s still here somewhere. Outside perimeter, stay sharp, we don’t want her bursting out and getting past you guys. Inside team, let’s go over this house with a fine tooth comb. Compare every inch of this place to the construction drawings to be sure there aren’t any hidden closets, spaces under the deck, blocked off parts of the basement etcetera. She’s still here somewhere team, let’s find her.” York himself started down the steps into the basement.

***

If their situation wasn’t so difficult, Shan would have grinned at the spectacle of Ell hauling her enlarged self up the vertical ladder in the narrow shaft. After all he’d never seen his wife struggle with a physical task. He braced himself to support her should she fall but she made it to the top with only some aggravated grunting.

There was a pause while she queried Allan to be sure no one had breached the security of the groundskeeper’s shack, then she cracked open the door and stepped out into the moderately sized area with its mowers and other small equipment. The lights were out but Ell had had his HUD upgraded to milspec like hers so he could see fairly well with the low light enhancement as they picked their way to the small side door.

“OK,” Ell said, “our harnesses should be just outside the door. Mine with a red flashing LED and yours with a blue. Let me know as soon as you’re securely strapped in.”

“Is yours going to fit with you pregnant?”

“Yeah,” she said grimly, “though I might not like wearing it.” She opened the door and they stepped outside.

Shan quickly stepped to the harness with the blue flasher, picked it up and stepped into it. As soon as he’d securely buckled himself into it he said, “Ready.” The harness tugged at him and started pulling him away from Ell. Belatedly, he realized she was also being pulled away from him. Shan swung free from the ground, then rapidly up into the air. His ears popped a couple of times but then they stopped ascending, though they continued swinging rapidly south over the starlit landscape, Shan’s eyes slitted against the wind as he tried to keep an eye on Ell, a couple of hundred meters away.

After about fifteen minutes they slowed and began to descend toward a farmhouse. Ell landed near what appeared to be the back of the house and her harness disappeared into the sky. A minute later Shan landed about twenty feet away and popped the buckles on his own harness. Ell turned to him and said, “Activate your upper cheek implants.”

Shan did so, feeling them puff up by his molars, swelling his cheeks.

By then Ell was at the door which opened without difficulty, the door AI apparently recognizing her.

As Shan stepped up beside her she addressed the door AI and said, “This is my husband, Daniel Reyes. Please open the door for him at any time.” Ell took his hand and, without turning on the lights, took him from room to room around the house showing him what each contained. As they climbed the stairs to the upper level she said, “Allan, revise the door AI’s memory to reflect us first arriving here on a Saturday evening… three months ago. Make sure it’s after I closed on the house by a week or two. Then insert some comings and goings into its memory as well. At first occasionally, then almost daily here recently. This evening we arrived at 1748 and have been here ever since. Erase the visits by Amy and substitute visits by me.”

They had reached the top of the stairs. Shan said, “Amy’s been here?”

“Mmm hmm,” Ell said, leading the way to the end of the little hall, “she stocked it for us.” Ell opened one of the doors. “Spare bedroom.” Coming back down the hall, she opened two more spare bedrooms and then at the fourth one said, “Baby’s room.” She opened that door and Shan saw a bassinette and a crib. Back at the head of the stairs Ell opened the last door, “Our room.” She led the way inside and started disrobing in the dark, “It’s three thirty. We should get some sleep.”

Shan pulled off his own clothes and got into the bed next to her. “Don’t we need to talk about what just happened and what we’re going to do?”

“In the morning. Your poor pregnant wife is exhausted from all this flying around.”

Ell promptly dropped off to sleep but Shan lay beside her staring at the ceiling. How was he going to tell his parents? What would happen with his job at the University? Would they let him take a leave of absence? Would they even talk to a fugitive? What would he do without his teaching job and his other academic pursuits?

***

They had searched the house from attic to basement, measuring every wall and space to be sure there wasn’t a concealed cupboard, recess or passage where Donsaii could be hiding. York let out an inspired stream of profanities. “Where the hell did that bitch go?”

Frankie, the tech specialist, said, “Maybe she’s figured out a way to port people from one place to another?”

York jerked around to stare at Frankie, “I thought that was supposed to be impossible?”

“No, it’s just that they say it’ll make you retarded or something. Maybe Donsaii’s figured a way around it. Or maybe it’s just that she’s so smart, she doesn’t mind being a little dumber to escape from us.”

York felt his eyebrows rising, “Goddammit! How the hell are we supposed to catch her if she can just port herself out of trouble?”

Frankie shrugged.

“OK,” he sighed and asked for a connection to the rest of his agents, “Outside team, head on home. Those of you in the house, let’s give it a toss, looking for any evidence of her hot-shot technology. Then we can head for the barn too.” He sighed and shook his head in disgust. He didn’t know what he could have done better, but knew failure brought few rewards—even if the game had been rigged against you.

For a moment he wondered if there was someone he could blame this fiasco on, but he came up empty…

Chapter Eight

In the morning Shan got up and pulled on his dirty clothes, thinking about all the things he’d need to go out and buy new to start his life over again. In the kitchen downstairs he found Ell holding a mug of tea and staring unseeingly out the window at the fields nearby. “Hey girl, any news?”

She looked up at him, a drawn look on her face. “Yeah, they’ve torn up our house, sorry.”

He frowned, “Torn up?”

“Yeah, ‘tossed it’ I believe would be the technical term. Everything turned upside down and generally trashed, looking for I know not what. Presumably the keys to the stars, that’s what their mandate is for.” She sighed, “The Mattioli is lying face down on the couch. I can’t tell if it’s been damaged from the vid angle but it can’t be good for it to be on its face.”

“Aw man, I loved that painting.”

“Me too,” Ell said quietly. “The rest of the stuff in the house is replaceable.”

“Are you feeling OK? You look beat.”

“Yeah,” she smiled wanly up at him. “This bein’ pregnant, ain’t for sissies. Especially when there’s a lot of rain on your parade.”

Shan got his own cup of tea. He sat with her and they spoke for a while, trying to figure out what to do with Shan’s life now that he couldn’t be Shan Kinrais, at least for a while. Shan decided to call his department chairman, Dr. Benson and see if he could get a leave of absence. Shan’s family had to be told that he’d gone into hiding.

Shan looked at Ell, “What does my family do if the FBI comes around asking them where we are?”

“They can honestly say they don’t know.”

“What if the agents ask if they knew who you were when they saw you up in Asheville?”

“I didn’t think Raquel Blandon was ever registered as being in the Wildberry lodge?”

“Oh, yeah. I don’t think you were.”

“If I wasn’t on the books, they won’t find me with a search of motel registries. If they even go that far. I think they usually just follow the money trail and I didn’t pay for anything as Blandon. I guess if an agent actually shows up at the Wildberry and asks they might find out I was there, but a lot of people have stayed there since then. The owners of the lodge probably won’t even remember.”

“But the Feebs will probably ask my folks if they’ve seen you since you were arrested. Should they lie?”

“I… don’t think they should. Getting caught in a lie is a bad thing because perjury is a crime in its own right.”

“But… then couldn’t they get charged with harboring a fugitive or something?”

“I asked Art Jenkins, my lawyer, about this. To ‘harbor a fugitive,’ you have to ‘harbor, conceal, maintain, assist, or give other aid.’ Mere knowledge of the fugitive’s whereabouts isn’t sufficient for prosecution.” Ell shrugged, “My security team and Amy are in prison under the argument that they had been paid by me, so they must have helped me even though I hadn’t paid them recently.”

“You hadn’t?”

“No, I put a lot of money in Steve’s account way back last year when I thought they might arrest me. The government’s arguing that I prepaid for their services.”

“So my family should be OK because they didn’t help you, even if they didn’t turn you in?”

“That should be true, but realize that Stockton’s not exactly following all the rules. They don’t have any evidence that my security team harbored, concealed, maintained or assisted me but they’re still in jail. And Amy quit her job with me and took one with D5R. She didn’t directly help after I’d been arrested though she helped stock this place among others. Yet, all of them are in jail.”

Shan sighed, “This isn’t going to be an easy conversation to have with my family. I think I’ll take a shower and think about it.”

When Shan got up Ell frowned at him, “If you’re wearin’ that dirty shirt because you don’t think you’ve got any clean, you should check your closet.”

Shan looked surprised, “I’ve got clothes here?”

Ell nodded, “When we were planning for this possibility Amy spent a lot of time in thrift shops getting used clothes in our sizes. Don’t forget to put on your skin bronzer either.”

“Really? The richest person in the world was buying stuff at thrift shops?”

“Seemed kind of unethical to me too, but we needed used clothes and couldn’t think of a better place to get them. We made big donations to the thrift shops so I don’t feel too bad about corrupting their missions, just about the fact that they might not have had enough clothes for the poor people that normally shop there.”

Back upstairs Shan felt bemused to find a partly empty bottle of his favorite shampoo in the shower. Once he felt clean, he stayed in the shower, popping a packet of hair dye out of his umbilical port and applying it. Then doing the same with a packet of skin bronzer. Done, like Ell had told him, he had the port open with a little vacuum behind it to suck up the wrappers.

When Shan looked in the closet, he was astonished to see one side of it fully stocked with used clothing. He picked out a t-shirt and jeans and they fit just fine.

As he came back down the stairs Ell looked up from some kind of electronic project she had laid out on the table. With a Latin accent she said, “Hey, Daniel. You’re lookin’ good this morning.” She winked at him, “I’m going to go shower and change while you make me an omelet.”

“So my new name is ‘Daniel Reyes’?”

“Yup. And I’m Elsa Gardon.” She held up a chip, “Here’s your new ID. You need to go through it and learn your history. Then get Allan to teach you my history too, since you’d be expected to know about your wife. Pass your ‘Shan’ ID to Allan through your umbilical port. He’ll hold it for you if we get our old lives back.”

“When we do. Stockton can’t stay in office forever.”

Ell shrugged.

Shan frowned, “If we’re married, why isn’t your last name Reyes too?”

“I was going with the Latin custom for the wife to keep her last name, then the kid to be named Reyes-Gardon. I guess I should have asked you about it, but, after all, this was just one of several back up plans Amy and I worked on.”

Shan grinned, “Heck, I don’t care. I just wanted to understand is all.” He headed for the kitchen to make breakfast, asking over his shoulder, “What’s that you’re working on?”

“A larger diameter digger, in case I have to dig some more tunnels or rooms underground or something in a hurry.”

“Oh, like the thing you used to hollow out the rooms in the granite up at the place in the mountains?”

“Yeah, it isn’t that it’s hard work; just that it takes a long time with a port that’s only four inches in diameter. This one will be twelve inches. It’ll suck up a megawatt, but ETR’s got so many of those solar powered generators going now that my usage should hardly be noticed.”

***

Allan said, “You have a call from AJ and Carter.”

Ell looked up, wondering why they might be contacting her instead of Ben or Rob. “Put them through… Hey guys, what’s up?”

“Uh, we’ve been talking about going to space.” AJ said.

When AJ paused, Carter said, “The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be much reason to actually send humans out there. With waldoes, we can explore the solar system and even other stars without any danger, finding resources and returning them here through ports.”

“Mmm hmmm.” Ell acknowledged.

“And going to space ourselves, as human beings I mean, not as waldoes, is dangerous.”

“Yep. Lots of radiation out there at the very least.”

“So, it’s hard to justify sending warm bodies.”

“Uh, huh.” Ell said, wondering when they’d get to the point.

“But, we want to go out there. Explore the universe, see the sights etcetera.”

“So, do it as waldoes.”

“Well, we want to go in person, so we’ve been looking for a good reason to go. And of course a backer like you to support our dream.”

“Me, I’m a fugitive!”

“Well that won’t be forever.” AJ said, almost indignantly.

“I’m glad you guys are sure of that,” Ell said with a little laugh.

“Even if Stockton doesn’t come to her senses, she’ll get voted out of office eventually. Anyway, we think we’ve got some rational reasons to get off the planet.”

“OK, let’s hear it.

“Well, the human race needs to be spread out in case of a disaster. Like if a comet came that couldn’t be stopped. Or some kind of horrible nuclear war or something. And, even though we can get all the mineral resources we want from space without going out there, we should be thinking about places to send excess population and to be able to grow additional crops.”

“Hmmm, I’m pretty sure we’re not fully using all the available cropland here on earth are we?”

“Um… probably not now, but someday.”

“And the disasters you’ve proposed would likely leave some survivors here, maybe more than would survive on a small space colony of the type you’re proposing wouldn’t they?”

“Well, yeah, but with everything around them destroyed.”

“And it all sounds like a very expensive undertaking. Do you see a way to make a profit?”

“Uh, no.”

Ell could hear the dismay in their voices at her apparent reluctance. She chuckled, “Well good. We need something to waste excess profits on, but you’ll need to check out the possibilities. Develop a plan for a radiation shielded test facility to grow crops with live humans in attendance, maybe at the southern lunar pole? NASA’s been looking around there. Ask them whether they’re going to build anything. We want to be sure it’s possible by sending a waldo or two, maybe have them grow a test crop, before we send people out there. Look into the regulatory issues, maybe someone’s claimed the best locations? Or maybe an asteroid would provide a better location? Or Mars? Get back to me when you’ve got a plan you think will work. Something with expected costs and risks and the reasons you’ve chosen the location you have.”

“Yes Ma’am,” the two young men chorused, sounding excited to have even a possibility of future authorization.

***

Shan came in from walking around their overgrown fields. He’d decided he should know what their property was like if he was going to live there. “Elsa,” he called without response on the ground floor. So he headed up to the second floor. Ell wasn’t there either. He looked out the window. Their old Toyota Tacoma truck and their ancient Nissan Altima were both still outside so she must be here somewhere. Could she have gone out wandering around the farm after him and they just missed each other? He headed down to the basement. He’d been down there once and hadn’t seen anything of interest.

This time he found a commercial tripod set up with a laser on top of it pointing at a slant down into a large hole in the wall of the basement. He walked down into the tunnel and found Ell standing there about six feet into it. Hands on her hips she was looking unhappily up at the roof of the tunnel.

“What’s the matter?”

“Dirt.” She waved a hand at the roof. “I hoped that I’d be in some kind of rock by now.”

Shan frowned, “So?”

“So, it could collapse. Not a good thing if we were down here inside the tunnel.”

“Oh. Couldn’t we reinforce it like the tunnels under the farm?”

“Yeah, but then we’d have to hire a shotcrete guy. Hard to keep that a secret.”

“Well… how about some graphene bracing?”

“Ooh, great idea! Gary can make us some arch shaped graphene balloons and some long tubes. With enough pressure in them, they’d support the tunnels alright. I’ll go work out some dimensions.”

***

Steve, Randy, Barrett and Dan, the members of Ell’s security team being held at the US Penitentiary in Jonesville Virginia were ushered in to a meeting with their attorney Victoria Nis. “What can you tell us Ma’am? Will you be able to get us out of here anytime soon?”

Looking frustrated, she shook her head, “It should be simple and straightforward. They don’t have evidence of your aiding and abetting. It’s hard to argue that you pose a danger so you should at least be out on bail. Honestly, I thought you’d be out weeks ago. I’ve had several judges order your release, but they just ignore them, citing ‘executive orders.’ I’m going to keep going up the ladder to higher and higher courts, but it looks like they’re just going to keep dragging their feet and running various delaying tactics. I’m sorry.”

“Damn! Can they really do this?”

“They aren’t supposed to be able to. But, what can I say. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and they have you in their possession.” She wrinkled her nose, “Actually that’s a poor analogy referring to possession of real property, it just seems as if it’s applying to your persons in this situation as well.”

“So are you suggesting that we should remove ourselves from their possession?”

“Hah! Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could? It would definitely throw a wrench in their engine, and later it would be pretty easy to argue against prosecution for your escape on the grounds that you were being held illegally in the first place. Unfortunately, attempting to escape is a dangerous proposition and you could easily get seriously hurt or killed just trying to get out of here. Sorry, you just need to try to be patient while the law grinds its interminable way to justice.”

***

Viveka walked out to the parking lot, simply amazed to be going to her own car. Well, her leased car but still. Though it was tiny compared to most American cars, it still was bigger than almost all the cars back in India. More amazing to her than the fact that she had her own car, was the fact that she’d ridden a bus here in America for weeks and never been crowded. No one had rubbed up against her or made any remarks. She would have been perfectly happy riding the bus forever if it weren’t for the fact that everyone warned her not to walk the roads alone at night. Instead of crowds being the problem, it was being alone that was dangerous here.

She got in the car and told its AI to take her to her apartment. She hoped to call her mother tonight because the UPS tracking service said it had delivered the phone she had sent her. Viveka had paid extra to have the phone set up and to have written instructions for her mother included so that her mother would turn it on and be able to receive Viveka’s call. Viveka had considered sending her mother a HUD but no one in their small town had experience with them and so no one would be able to help her figure it out if she couldn’t work it herself. Also, it would make her mother a target.

As Viveka walked in to her apartment, she asked her AI to connect her to her mother’s phone. After one chirp the screen on Viveka’s wall that had come with the apartment flickered to life with her mother’s face, scrunched in concentration as she studied the screen of the phone in front of her. “Mama!” Viveka said with great joy.

***

Ell said, “OK” when Allan told her she had a call from Steve. “Hey Steve, what’s the word from you and the guys?”

“Sorry about calling so late, but I remembered that you didn’t used to go to sleep until really late. Still true I hope?”

“Still true. Call anytime you need to but I do usually sleep between three and six AM.”

“Man, I wish I could get by on three hours a night.”

“Sometimes I wish I could sleep a little longer. Anyway, what’s going on up there?”

“Well our lawyer, Ms. Nis says she isn’t going to be able to get us out of here for a looong time. I’ve talked to the other guys, and to the ladies up at Alderson. All of us are agreed now that we’d like to get out of here ASAP. Do you still feel up to trying to break us out, or should we wait until after you’ve had the baby?”

“Hah! After I’ve had the baby, I’ll need help taking care of him. Be good if at least Amy were out of there and back on my payroll ‘cause I feel woefully inadequate for that task.”

Steve snorted, “So you think breaking us out of prison will be easier than taking care of a baby?”

“Um hmm,” Ell said distractedly. “Which floor are you guys on?”

“Bottom floor.”

“Where? GPS isn’t locating you inside the building.”

“South wall, second room from the west corner. We’re in the high security part of the prison now. I should have had you try to get us out when they first brought us in, we were in the minimum security camp then.”

Ell didn’t comment on the level of security. “Are all four of you guys in the same room now?”

“Yeah, they put us in the same room two days ago. It’s a six person room so there’re a couple of guys in here that are probably snitches. We think the room’s bugged too so we only talk in whispers using our implants and keeping our heads under our pillows. Sure hope they haven’t bugged the mattresses.”

“Hmm, talk about stuff they’ll find interesting but not useful, or at least not currently useful. Do that where they can hear you so they won’t have reason to suspect they need to bug the mattresses.”

“We’re doing that,” Steve said with a “teach your grandma to suck eggs,” tone.

“OK, I’ve got video of the prison from hoverbike overflights and I think I see which room is yours. In a while try to stick your head into the window and see if you can get your AI to send mine a GPS location to be sure.”

“OK.”

“Before I try to pick you up, I’ll shine a laser into your room’s window to be sure I’ve got the right one.”

“How? I mean how are you going to try to get us out.”

“What you don’t know…”

“Yeah, yeah, but at some point you should talk to us so we can help. For instance, these windows are too small to climb out of, even if you’ve got a way to cut the bars.”

“Good thing we’ve got these implants to talk with then, huh? I’ve got to talk to Amy, Mary and Lisa and figure out how we might be able to get them out too. We want everyone out the same night so they don’t find some of you gone and then put the rest in a tougher location.”

“A penitentiary with reinforced concrete walls isn’t tough?”

“Maybe it could be worse? For instance if you got tossed into solitary?”

***

“Amy?” Ell asked, “can you talk?”

Ell heard some rustling, then Amy said, “Yeah, my head’s under my pillow now.”

“Steve says you guys have decided you’d like to escape and live on the lam?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t seem right that we’re stuck in here when we haven’t even committed a crime. Victoria tells us that she’d have had us out of here a couple of weeks ago if it weren’t for the executive order from Stockton.”

“OK, according to the data I’ve got, FPC Alderson, where you’re being held, is a low security facility for white collar female prisoners. Is that the impression you’ve got?”

“Well, I don’t know what a high security prison would be like, but there are fences and guards, the food’s terrible, the inmates are crazy and…” her voice broke, “I hate this place.”

Feeling terrible, Ell said nothing for a moment. Then her own voice cracking, “I’m sorry Amy. So sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that… it was easy or something. I was just trying to figure out what, what the obstacles might be to taking you out of there.”

“Sorry Ell,” Amy sniffed, “I know. I guess the other inmates aren’t the only ones that are kinda crazy in here. You’re right, they don’t have high walls and the fences don’t have barbed wire. We’re on the third floor of the northeast dorm. I don’t see how you could get us out of here. During the day there’s too many people around. At night  we’re locked into just the third floor of the dorm. We really can’t even get near the fence for you to get us over or under it.” After a pause she said, “I’ve heard that there are a lot more guards around, especially at night, than there were before we got here. It’s hard to believe that’s just because of us, but they might be trying to catch you if you come after us.”

“OK, we’ll figure something out. You’re not afraid of heights are you?”

“Uh. No. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I’ve still got to work it out. But you’ll probably be leaving out the window in the middle of the night.”

“It’s three floors up! I can’t climb a wall!”

“We might lift you out the window on a cable.”

“You mean like from a helicopter?”

“Something like that. I’m not sure exactly. Would you be afraid?”

“No, I don’t think so. But they’d hear the helicopter coming over and swarm the place with guards.”

“No, they wouldn’t be able to hear this one. But we may do something different. I’ve got to check a lot of things before I can come up with a final plan.”

***

Stockton stared at Phillips while drumming her fingers on her desk. She hadn’t invited him to sit down. “So, you’re telling me that all this time Donsaii was living in a house in a neighborhood bordering her little farm?”

Almost at attention Phillips ground out, “Yes Ma’am.”

“And the FBI took months to figure this out… just why was that?”

“She had a good disguise and an alias. And this world is a big place. We were looking elsewhere.”

“And then you finally figured it out, with the help of a snitch who turned her in for money?”

Phillips nodded.

“And your team, having confirmed that she was home by watching her arrive, showed up in force, surrounded the house and still let her slip away?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“And you didn’t think this was important enough for your personal supervision?”

“No, Ma’am,” Phillips paused, took a breath, then firmed his jaw. He knew what was about to happen and decided he’d just as well show some spine on the way out, “The Agency has many other missions, most of them much more important than the apprehension of one of our nation’s heroes.”

The corner of Stockton’s lip rose, “So that’s how you ‘roll’ down at your agency. Ignore the president’s priorities. Assign bunglers to the case. A citizen has to toss you an answer you couldn’t find even though it’s practically stuck to your own ass. With that gift, you then throw hundreds of agents at the capture of a mere girl and still manage to let her get away, embarrassing your country at your sheer incompetence in the process?”

Eyes fixed over Stockton’s head, Phillips said, “She’s not a ‘mere’ girl.” A muscle twitching by his right eye gave evidence of just how pissed off Mason Phillips actually felt.

“Oh yeah, I forgot, a really fast girl,” she said derisively. She stared at him for a moment, “Mr. Phillips, you serve ‘at the pleasure of the President,’ and this president is not pleased. Tell Deputy Director Rhodes that she’s now the Acting Director and have her to set up an appointment to talk to me.” She waved dismissing fingers at him, “Go find a job somewhere else… if you can.”

***

Los Angeles—Professor Ari Dunzberg today announced that an analysis of galactic rotation in the Magellanic Cloud carried out by his research team also supports the so-called K-D paper published by Kinrais and Donsaii four years ago. This is the fourth “experimental” paper to support the theoretical work put forth in the K-D paper…

Ell looked up as Shan came in. “Hey man o’ mine, you headin’ out for a run?”

“Yeah, got to do something to burn off energy now that I don’t have anyone to play b-ball with.” He tilted his head, “In a way it’s better. I can think about stuff while I’m running, which I couldn’t do while I was playing.” He winked, “Today, I’m going to ponder the effects of the 5th dimension on the universe as a whole, rather than on a single galaxy at a time.”

“I can’t run in my current state, but I need some exercise. Can I walk a ways with you, then you can run the rest of your route on your own?”

“Sure, that’d be nice.”

Ell got up and they headed out the door for a walk around the farm. “Hey, some of those inflatable graphene braces came in for the tunnel. Good thinkin’ on your part, they work great.”

Shan frowned, “How’d you have them delivered?”

“Gary’s got a port that goes to one of my hideaways. A waldo picks them up and sends them back out to me. Same way we ordered our temp-control suits from your dad’s company except your dad sent them to us through a UPS port.”

Shan shook his head and gave a little laugh, “I feel like an idiot. I’ll bet they’re small until they’re inflated right? I was thinking they’d have to be delivered in a truck or something stupid like that.”

Ell grinned, “Yeah, they’re about a cubic inch each.”

They walked a little ways in silence, then Shan said, “Did I tell you the FBI stopped by to ‘interview’ my parents and sisters?”

“No! I’m so sorry. Are they upset?”

“They don’t seem to be. They said they just answered honestly like you had me tell them to.  They told the men in the suits that they had seen you in Asheville but otherwise hadn’t had contact. They could honestly say they hadn’t provided you any help.” He shrugged, “I guess the fact that they haven’t harbored or aided or otherwise committed a crime is no guarantee against being arrested, especially if those guys decide they want to use them as bait.”

“Yeah,” Ell said wistfully. “I haven’t seen my mom since Stockton first put me away. Well, I’ve seen her on video, but you know.” Her lip twisted, “It just isn’t the same.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think I should even try to visit her because I suspect they haven’t picked her up or interviewed her because they are using her as bait. I’ll bet they have her under observation thinking that surely I’ll go by for a visit sometime. I’m thinking I need to work out a place where we can both meet after dodging any tails.”

“It’s sad to think that our friends and families are being used as lures.”

“Yeah. Speaking of that. I’m planning to go up north tonight and scope out the locations where they’re holding Amy and my security team.”

“Are you sure you should be doing that as pregnant as you are?”

“Well, no, but even if it’ll be kind of unpleasant for me going up there, I’ve got to remember that just being in those places is no walk in the park for my friends.”

Shan frowned, “Don’t you need to leave this afternoon if you’re going to get there in time?”

“The hoverbike can make it in an hour and a half, no problem.”

“I thought you flew pretty high on that thing?”

“Only eight to ten thousand feet, can’t go higher than that without oxygen.”

Shan shook his head, “You should check. I don’t think you want to go even that high when you’re pregnant. Less oxygen at altitude.”

“Ohhh,” Ell glanced up at her HUD, then looked embarrassed. “You’re right. And I already flew pretty high when I was up in Virginia to meet with Hoyt. What am I going to do? I don’t want to leave them in those places for another couple of months until I’ve recovered from the birth. Amy sounds like she’s having a pretty tough time dealing with prison.”

Shan stopped and put his arms around her, pulling her into an embrace. Lips close to her ear he said, “First, stop saying, ‘what am I going to do?’ Say, ‘what are we going to do?’ We’re a team.”

“Oh, Shan,” Ell snuffled a little into his neck, “you shouldn’t get involved in this.”

“We’re a team,” he said firmly. “I’m already involved in it, because my wife’s involved.” He held her out at arm’s length and leaned down to look into her downcast eyes. “I think we should get in our old truck and head that way as soon as I finish my run. It’ll be an adventure.”

“OK,” Ell said, leaning in for another hug. “You go finish your run. I’ll pack up some stuff to take along.”

It was late afternoon when they drove past USP Lee. The penitentiary’s forbidding concrete walls and towers were visible from Highway 58 but they couldn’t see very well because of trees and the fact that the prison was on a little plateau higher than the road. They drove past the prison and into Jonesville, then turned and drove back to Kingsport just across the border into Tennessee. They got a motel room and went out to dinner.

Shan took a nap and at about ten they headed back up into Virginia. They pulled off the road at the Woodway stone quarry, parking far enough inside the rock works that their truck couldn’t be seen. Two of the hoverbikes had already dropped harnesses onto the dirt road there and they flashed the LEDs so they could find them. Ell gave Shan a tripod to carry and a couple of minutes later they were swinging through the air. They crossed the two miles to the penitentiary in a leisurely eight minutes.

Coming down in a small gap in the trees off the south east corner of the prison, they kept their harnesses attached to the graphene cables as they peered at the prison walls. From where they stood, Ell couldn’t see the lowest windows. “Damn!” she said, tugging at an ear.

“What’s the problem?”

“I told Steve I’d shine a laser in his window to make sure it was the right window, but we don’t have line of sight to it.”

“Let me have the laser. I’ll climb a tree.”

“If you fall out of a tree out here, it’ll be problematic to call you an ambulance.”

“Let me rephrase my plan. I’ll have the hoverbike lift me while I guide myself up holding onto tree limbs.”

“Oh, I should have thought of that. I think being this pregnant is muddling my brain.”

A few minutes later Shan had ascended to a level slightly higher than the prison grounds. Working his way a little into the tree until he had a good sturdy limb to steady himself he said, “Ready.”

“OK, it’s the second window from the west corner, bottom floor. Do you see that window?”

“Got it.”

“Try to align the laser with the window by eye. We don’t want that red dot dancing all over the side of the prison while you’re trying to hit the window. The guards in the tower might notice.”

“OK, should I shine it in there now?”

“No. Let me talk to Steve first. Steve… can you talk?”

Allan kept Shan in the connection so he heard Steve whisper, “Yes, I hear you. What’s up?”

“We’re about to shine a laser in your window to be sure we know which one is yours. Is your bed positioned so you can see the wall across from the window?”

“Yeah, but I can’t talk to you with my head out from under the pillow.”

“OK, one cough if you see it. Cough twice if you don’t.”

Steve coughed twice.

“Just a minute, we haven’t tried to shine it in yet. Shan can you shine it?”

“Shining now,” Shan said. The beam had missed the window for a moment, but now he had it going through.

Steve coughed once.

“OK Steve, is that window centered in your room, or off to one side?”

“It’s to the west side of the room. How are you planning to get us out?”

“Through the floor.”

“What, you’re going to dig a tunnel? That’ll take forever, and they’ll hear you!”

Shan broke into the conversation, “Steve, you’re talking to Ell. She’s got a few tricks up her sleeve.”

Steve gave a muffled snort. “Of course she does.”

Ell backed off down the slope into the trees until she could barely see the upper windows of the prison through a small gap in the foliage. She set up the tripod and pointed the laser on top of it at the window, then tilted it down to horizontal.  Stepping to the spot the laser made on the ground she took off her back pack and got out the twelve inch single port she’d made for this. Pointing it at the area of the dot she turned it on at a six foot distance and a twelve inch ball of dirt vanished with a loud sucking sound. “Whoops, I’d better turn down the vacuum so it doesn’t make so much noise.”

Shan frowned, “How do you adjust it? I thought it was connecting to some port out in the asteroid belt.”

“It is, but Allan can just cycle the port on and off. If it’s only open part of each second it doesn’t make so much noise. The opening and closing made noise too, until I increased the frequency into the ultrasonic range.” She started the port again and this time it made a gentle whooshing sound. Ell waved it around a little and soon had a hole about three feet in diameter going back into the dirt of the hillside.

She knelt and crawled back into it. Shan leaned down and said, “Why don’t you make it taller? Surely you don’t want to crawl all the way back there.”

“Yeah, I’m planning to make it taller once we get past the entrance. Can you gather some brush to cover the opening?”

Using the low light feature on his HUD Shan gathered some sticks and leaves. Once he had quite a pile he leaned down into the opening. Ell was surprisingly far away. “Hey, if I cover the entrance, it’ll block the laser beam.”

Ell stopped cutting and stood with her hands on her hips. “I need to be able to turn on some light in here though. Tell you what, I’ll mark the spot the beam’s hitting on the wall here. Then you put a stick in the beam at your end. Then we can move the tripod in here and align it with those two spots.”

Once they’d done that, Shan pulled his pile of brush and sticks over the opening and said “Try turning on your light.”

Ell said, “It’s on, can you see it out there?”

“Nope. Turn it off and I’ll climb inside, cover the opening and then come hold the light for you.”

By the time Shan got inside with the hole covered, it was quite a walk back to where Ell was working. Only the first few feet of the tunnel were dirt. The rest of it was some kind of layered rock. He watched her moving the blue glowing ball of the port around to disintegrate the rock and create a tunnel seven feet tall by three feet wide. To his surprise the laser beam fell along the right edge of the tunnel. Then he realized that, if it were in the center, her body would block the beam much of the time. Taking the light from her he asked, “How are you going to know when you’re deep enough?”

“The laser has a range finder. We’ve got another thirty feet to go.”

Shan walked slowly along behind Ell until she stopped and said, “According to the laser rangefinder and a little trig, we’re twenty feet back and twenty feet under Steve’s room.” She started tunneling upward at a forty five degree angle through the rock, cutting stairs in the floor. “Hey, there’s concrete.”

She looked up at the concrete, then back down the tunnel. “I thought we’d have to go a little farther before we reached the concrete.” She set the big tunneling port down. “Let’s find out if we’re in the right place.” She pointed a finger at the roof of the tunnel. “Steve… I need you to look for glowing lights in your room. Cough if you’re able to do it.”

Steve coughed once.

“OK. Keep your feet off the floor and look for a little blue light moving around just above the surface. Cough if you see it.” Ell began gently waving her upward pointing finger in circles.

Shan tilted his head, “What are you doing?”

“I’ve got the little one ended port in my finger opening twice a second at about eighteen inches above me. I’m increasing the distance two inches at a time. If we’re in the right place it should be visible to Steve because of the little flash of blue light when the port opens.” After a moment she stopped, “Damn!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I think we missed.”

“Why don’t you just keep going higher and wider? If one of the prisoners in another room sees some lights, they’ll just think they’re seeing things.”

“Mmm,” Ell said distractedly, “if the port opens inside of one of them, it could do some serious harm.” She glanced back down the tunnel, then back up at the concrete above her. Picking up the big tunneler she cut away a little to the front and back of it. Suddenly, on the far side Shan saw rock again just as Ell said, “Aha!” She turned to grin back at Shan, “This is just a deeper part of the foundation, probably under the outer wall.”

She slowly cut rock away until she encountered concrete again, then set the big tunneler down. She said “Steve, I’m going to try again. Be on the lookout for the little blue lights.”

Steve coughed and Ell started waving her finger around again.

When Steve coughed once more, Ell said, “Alright! I need you to put your head back under the pillow and tell me where you saw it.”

It turned out that Steve had seen the light under Randy and Barrett’s bunk. “That’s perfect!” Ell said, “I think we’ll be back the night after next to take you guys out of here. Will you be able to gag and restrain the other two guys in the room with you?”

“Uh, sure. We’ll just have to tear up a sheet. I sure wish we had a way to drug them.”

“Don’t tear up a sheet. I’ll bring you some duct tape. Actually, I’ll bring some drug too, but you’ll still have to tape them up until the drug starts working. See you in a couple of nights if it all works out.”

After Ell signed off with Steve she spent some time cutting a chamber right under Barrett’s bunk, complete with stairs leading down into the rest of the tunnel, then she and Shan headed back to their motel room in Kingsport.

The next day Shan and Ell drove to the Greenbrier resort in White Sulfur Springs going a little out of their way to go past FPC Alderson on their way. Though West Virginia 12 followed the Greenbrier River which looped around the prison, they couldn’t actually see the prison because of all the trees on both sides of the river. They debated actually driving over to the prison but decided not to, instead just picking out a likely small side road where they could park their car later on than night.

As their car drove up to the resort Shan looked around, “Whoa, this is a step up from the motel we stayed in last night!”

Ell grinned at him. “I’d heard of this place and when I realized it was only about thirty miles from the prison I figured we’d just as well spend a little of that pile of money and see what it’s like staying in someplace fancy.”

At the entrance the valet frowned at their old Toyota pickup but nonetheless sent its AI parking directions. Shan and Ell walked into the main building with their heads on swivels, neither of them having stayed in an expensive resort like the Greenbrier before. Ell’s eyebrows went up, “This place is pretty hoity-toity isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s really our style do you?”

Ell grinned, “We’ll never know if we don’t try it out.” Taking his hand she headed for the registration desk.

Shan expected the clerk at the registration desk to be dubious of a couple their age and dress checking in to an expensive resort, but the clerk was as unflappable as clerks at expensive hotels usually are. Once she’d tapped “Daniel’s” new credit line to confirm that they could pay for the room she gave them a chip that would guide their truck to their assigned cottage near the back of the Greenbrier grounds. Shan took a nap again in preparation for a possible long night checking out the Alderson Prison Camp. When he woke, they went back to the main building to eat in the Greenbrier’s elegant Prime 44 West restaurant.

At two in the morning they drove back to Alderson, parking on a little side road across the river from the actual prison. The thousand foot ride across the river swinging from their hoverbike harnesses felt peaceful in the cool early morning. Ell said, “Shan, you watch for guards that might be looking up and could see us, I’ll be focused on figuring out where the girls are.”

Once Shan had agreed, Ell called Amy, “Rise and shine girl. We’re going to shine a laser in the window that we think belongs to you. You need to tell us if you see a red dot on your floor.”

Once Amy had awakened enough to get the muzzy out, Ell talked her through the process of coughing when she saw the laser. Then they swung over the big dorms of the prison and Ell shone her laser in the window she thought Amy had specified. “Amy, are you seeing the laser?”

Amy didn’t cough. “If you’re not seeing it, cough twice.”

Amy coughed twice. “Hmm, we’re going to try the next window, do you see it now?”

Still two coughs.

“OK, another window.”

Two coughs again.

“You’re on the third floor right?”

One cough.

“And you’re on the southeast side of the northeast dorm?”

Two coughs. Then Amy spoke, evidently having put her head back under the covers. “We’re on the northeast side of the northeast dorm. Mary and I are at the third window from the north corner and Lisa is at the fifth.”

“Oops. Just a minute until we move to the other side of the dorm.”

This time, when Ell shone her laser pointer Amy coughed once, then evidently went back under the covers. “Ell, where are you that you can shine a laser down on our floor?”

“Hanging outside your window. I told you that you wouldn’t hear our helicopter.”

“Oh.” After a pause Amy said, “I didn’t think to tell you the other night, the windows here have wire imbedded in the glass. You won’t be able to just break them to get us out.”

“That’s OK, we have a way to cut the windows. It would be nice if Lisa would be able to come to your window? What I’ve seen about your facility says you aren’t locked into individual cells, can she come to yours?”

“Yeah, as long as you give us a few minutes warning and none of the guards are making their rounds right then. Are you taking us out right now?” she asked hopefully.

“No, tomorrow night, but I’m going to put some harnesses in through your window tonight so you can have them on when we actually come to get you tomorrow.”

“There’ll be all kinds of questions tomorrow if you cut the window tonight!”

“No holes in the windows. I ported them into your room and they’re already on your floor. There’re directions with each harness. Put them on under whatever you sleep in, preferably dark clothing. Then you’ll be able to snap your hooks onto the D-rings of the cables when we come to get you and quickly swing out and away.”

“OK,” Amy said, sounding dubious.

“And, uh, the cables will be graphene, so they’re hard to see, but trust me, they’re plenty strong enough to lift you.”

“OK, tomorrow night. I expect well after midnight again?”

“Yep. I’ve got some homework for you too. I’ve set up some new identities for you and sent the information to your AIs. Start learning who you are so if you get stopped you’ll be able to answer questions.”

“If we’re stopped? I thought we were flying.”

“We’ll fly you across the river where we’ll have a rental car waiting. You’ll change rental cars a couple of times on your way to a car we bought in Mary’s new name. We didn’t want you driving Mary’s car in this area in case they have video monitoring of the roads near the prison.”

“I guess we’ll all be wearing disguises like you’ve been doing for so long?”

“You can still change your mind, stay in prison, and fight the legal battle if you want. But if you choose to escape I can’t see any way around a false identity.”

Amy sighed, “Neither can I.” After another pause she said disconsolately, “I can’t stay here. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow night.”

Chapter Nine

Lights out was at 10:30 and Steve had intended to stay awake, but he woke to the sound of Ell’s voice in his implant. “Steve, Barrett, Randy, Dan, cough once when you’re awake enough for me to talk to you.”

Steve got out of bed and coughed while he was on the way to the sink to splash a little water in his dry eyes. He could hear the other guys coughing too.

“OK,” Ell said, “Unless you guys have changed your minds, we’re getting you out of here tonight.” She paused for a moment until all of them had mumbled their assent to escaping.

“All right then, I’ve just turned on a port under Randy and Barrett’s bunk and it’s releasing nitrous oxide gas. You guys start breathing through the ports on the backs of your teeth. Cough twice if you have trouble breathing through them or they’re damaged or something.”

No one coughed so Steve assumed that Ell kept the nitrous going for a bit. “OK,” she said, “By my calculations the concentration of nitrous in your cell should be high enough to make anyone breathing it pretty drunk. In a minute or two we’re going to open a hole in the floor under Barrett’s bunk.  You guys’ll need to slide the bunk out into the room and then climb down into the tunnel under the hole.”

Steve rolled out of bed, still sucking his air in through the ports on the back of his front teeth and blowing it out through his nose. He and Dan helped Randy and Barrett actually pick up their bunk and move it quietly away from the wall so as not to make noise. To their amazement they saw an irregular piece of the concrete floor had lifted and tilted a little in its opening. It lifted a little more and Barrett grabbed the edge, lifting it up to reveal a grinning Ell below. They slid it to one side and Ell climbed further down some steps in the opening below. One by one the guys climbed down into the narrow hole. Ell said, “Whoever’s last, pull the bunk back over the hole if you can. Then I’ve got a tube of quick setting concrete adhesive to put around the edge of the hole before you drop that chunk of floor back into its hole.”

Steve, being last, found he could grab the frame of the bunk and with a strong heave, pull it back up against the wall from underneath. Randy climbed up behind him in the narrow little stairway in the rock, flipped on a little flashlight and handed him the tube of adhesive. In the dim light provided Steve squeezed a little of the goop around the inside of the hole, noting that the hole had been cut with an outward slant so that the piece of concrete couldn’t fall through. He also noticed that whatever had cut noiselessly through the concrete had also cut right through the rebar imbedded into it! He grabbed the edge of the concrete slab and pulled it back into place. A little jiggling and it seemed to fit back in place almost perfectly. He hoped that this meant that the floor above had been left with a smooth surface. “Let’s go,” he said.

He felt amazement as he followed the others down some steps into a man sized tunnel cut right through the rock out away from under the prison walls. How did she do this without a jackhammer? For that matter, how did she cut that perfect hole through the floor, rebar and all? A dark skinned man with a crew cut waited in a slightly wider area of the tunnel. Belatedly recognizing Ell’s husband, Steve said, “Hey Shan.”

Shan handed him a bundle of dark clothing and grinned, “I suggest we get you out of prison orange before you head out into the world.” Looking around Steve realized that Ell must have gone on ahead to give them privacy for changing. The other guys had their coveralls off and were pulling on dark jeans. Steve hurried to change himself, relieved to find a HUD at the center of the bundle of clothing. He followed the others down the tunnel, happy to once again be connected to his AI with a better interface than his implants.

***

In the electronic monitoring room at the prison a chime started going off. The Duty Sergeant leaned to the side to look at the Correction Officer’s monitor. “What the hell’s the AI worried about now?”

“Infrared body count’s down in cell 138.”

“Shit, they just shifted under their blankets. Tell the AI to give it five minutes and the count’ll be back up.”

CO Jaynes raised his eyebrows a moment as he looked at the data. IR was only picking up two bodies in that six person cell which didn’t sound like shifting blankets to him, but he’d learned not to question the sergeant on the graveyard shift. He told the AI to give it five.

***

The last six feet or so of the tunnel Steve had to get down on his hands and knees and crawl. Once he made it out into the night air he heard Shan whispering the others, “Your new HUDs have sensitive cameras capable of low light amplification so ask your AI to cast an amplified image for you. We’re going to be walking down a steep slope in the trees here and you don’t want to be doing that in the dark.”

“Where’s Ell?” Randy asked quietly.

“One of the hoverbikes lifted her out of here on a harness and cable setup. I didn’t want her falling down in the dark while she’s pregnant.”

Barrett said, “Man, she’s getting pretty big. You guys should have left us in the joint until after the baby came. We’d have been OK a while longer.”

Shan snorted, “Don’t be pissed at me, but that’s what I argued for!” He chuckled, “But I think you guys know what I was up against, trying to talk Ell into something she doesn’t want to do, don’t you?”

After a mumbled chorus of assent, Steve asked, “So what’s the plan from here?”

“Well, we’re almost down to the road. A rental car is about to stop so you guys can get in. In case they have video monitors of the traffic near here you’re going to get out at the 58/23 intersection. This first rental car will go north on 23 while you get in a different car going south on 23. That car will take you on over to Interstate 81, heading toward Alderson in case we need your help springing the girls. We hope to get them out of Alderson before you’re even close to getting there. Assuming we accomplish that, we’ll message you so you can turn south toward home.”

Steve said, “Have you tunneled into Alderson too?”

“No, Amy, Mary and Lisa are on the third floor there. We’re going to take them out through the window.”

“You’re kidding! Suspended by harness from hoverbikes?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, that’s physical! Ell shouldn’t be doing that in her condition?”

“I agree. You can try to tell her that if you want, but you know just how well she takes that kind of advice.”

“Let me go with you. I can get them out and Ell can stay back!”

“Ell says she has to go because she’s the one that can cut the windows.”

“Is this another one of her techy stunts?”

“Yeah, one she won’t let anyone else touch.”

“Oh Jeez, where is she?”

“She already started for Alderson so she can fly her hoverbike lower and slower. Better for the baby.”

“How many hoverbikes do you have up here?”

“All four of them, but three of them have already started for Alderson. Ell on one and the other two accompanying her.”

“Ell!” Steve said, “Send those two empty hoverbikes back here. They can pick up Barrett and me so you’ll have more physically able bodies up there to help get the girls out!”

“I don’t want you getting involved in breaking people out of pri…”

“Come on Ell! We’re broken out ourselves. Helping get the others out won’t make things any worse.”

After a brief pause Ell said, “OK, the bikes are on their way. Without a person on board, they can come at very high speed so they’ll be back there in just a few minutes. They’ll pick you up at the stone quarry where the fourth hoverbike is waiting for Shan.”

***

In the e-monitoring room at the prison the chime started chirping again. The duty sergeant leaned to the side to look at CO Jaynes’ monitor. “What’s that damn AI saying now?”

“Infrared still only shows two bodies in 138.”

“What the hell? There were four of them missing and you didn’t think to tell me? Get your ass down there and do a physical count!”

Thinking, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Jaynes heaved himself to his feet, hitched his belt and hustled out of the e-room. Turning down the hall and shambling to a trot he called one of the other COs to back him up.

***

As the guys scrambled down the embankment to the road, Steve saw with surprise that Barrett, Randy and Dan all had medium or long hair. Their bundles must have included wigs. For a moment he wondered why he didn’t have a wig, then realized that long hair would look odd on him when his tightly curled facial hair would give away what his hair should look like. A Chevy Impala pulled up, heading east. Randy, their professionally trained driver, jumped in behind the wheel. Shan and the other three filled the rest of the seats. Steve felt pleased that someone on his team had told the car not to turn on the dome lights when the doors were opened. The car started off down the road toward the quarry to the east at a sedate, AI controlled, pace. Two miles later it slowed to a stop across the road from the quarry. Shan, Steve and Barrett jumped out and trotted across the road as the car drove away with Randy and Dan for its meeting at the 58/23 junction. Behind the cover of the heavy brush hiding the quarry from the main road they found two hoverbikes landing next to the one that was already there. Climbing on, the three men took off, letting their AIs control the flight in the dark. Soon they were lying down behind the fairings and popping their ears as the hoverbikes rocketed up to an altitude of 8,000 feet and hit speeds just over 200 miles per hour.

Since the helmet in the saddle compartment of his hoverbike hadn’t been his and wouldn’t go on his head Steve slid as far forward under the fairing as he could jam his bare head. The Kevlar motorcycle jacket had been small too though he did have the pants on. However the legs were too short. In that fierce wind stream the snapping of his exposed pants legs against his ankles was painful, but he gritted his teeth and bore it.

***

CO Jaynes stepped up to cell 138, peering in through the small barred window in the door. He flipped on the lights and barked, “Outta your bunks! Stand by for inspection.” With the lights on, he uneasily saw that two of the double bunks were empty. The third had two inmates in it. They started getting up, swaying like they were drunk! Where the hell are the other four guys? The inmate in the bottom bunk rolled a little too far and fell out of his bunk onto the floor. The one in the top bunk didn’t seem to be quite as drunk but still appeared to be quite unsteady as he grasped the bunk’s ladder.

Still no sign of the other four!

Jaynes peered through the window to the right and left, then had the prison’s AI unlock the door. He pulled his weapon, made sure his backup had his weapon out, then pushed the door slowly open, staying back from the opening in case the missing inmates were hiding to the side waiting to attack him.

Jaynes took off his helmet and put it briefly through the door. Nothing struck it, so he put it back on and looked into the room. No one was hiding beside the door! He noticed a slightly sweet odor as he walked into the room. Checking back over his shoulder to make sure his backup had assumed a post at the door and looked alert, Jaynes pulled the mattresses off the empty bunks to his right.

Definitely empty.

Glancing at the two drunk looking inmates who were standing unsteadily in their assigned positions, Jaynes stepped to the bunk against the far wall. He pulled the mattresses off of those two bunks as well. A strong feeling of unreality passed through him. Where could they be? Looking around the cell again and seeing no possible egress Jaynes stepped to the industrial metal toilet and peered down into it. The fact that he had just looked down a toilet for four prisoners suddenly struck him as very, very funny.

Giggling Jaynes turned to look at his backup guard who he saw had leaned up against the door frame of the cell and begun laughing at this ridiculous situation as well. The sergeant’s voice came from his earpiece, “Jaynes, did you find those inmates?”

Jaynes struggled not to start laughing again about the way the sergeant sounded funny. He said, “No siree. Musta flushed ‘emselves down ‘a toilet!” A giggle escaped again.

The grinding general alarm came on, sounding like the knell of death and sobering Jaynes a little. Moments later guards swarmed the area. The sergeant stopped briefly to rip a strip off of Jaynes’ hide as he stood at attention in the corridor wondering why he’d felt so drunk. He knew he hadn’t had any drugs like the sergeant implied, but he certainly realized that somehow his judgment had been impaired for a while.

The upper ranks of the prison had been rousted out of bed and shown up in bad moods. The two remaining prisoners had been removed and every scrap of material had been removed from cell 138.

Lights were up outside, on and off the prison grounds and teams of guards with dogs were making sweeps out there.

Jaynes, completely sober now, had absolutely no idea how four inmates had vanished, but somehow he knew that the sergeant was going to pin the blame on him. His eyes widened when he saw a man in a suit coming down the hall toward him. FBI?

***

SAC Finton’s HUD began chirping where it sat on his bedside table. Finton sighed and reached for it. Putting it on he said irritably, “What!”

“Uh, SAC?”

Finton recognized the voice of Insky, one of the agents stationed by York at the prison in Virginia where Donsaii’s employees were being held. When York had been demoted and Finton had been put at the head of the Donsaii task force, one of the first things Finton had decided was that this idea of trying to use Donsaii’s employees as bait was stupid. However, when he’d tried to have them released, he’d found out that President Stockton had been the originator of that particular lame brained idea. So, with a mental sigh, he’d left them in prison. However, as part of a “manpower redistribution,” he’d reduced the size of the detail stationed there. Insky was one of the agents he’d left there because Finton just didn’t think Insky was very bright. He’d rather waste a weak agent on a babysitting detail and get the smart ones out there looking for Donsaii. “Yes!” he barked at Insky.

Now however, Finton’s sphincters spasmed as Insky said, “They’ve escaped.”

Gritting his teeth against his desire to scream Finton said, “Who’s escaped?”

“All four of them here at USP Lee.” Then evidently thinking that Finton might not remember who Insky was supposed to be keeping track of, he continued, “You know, Donsaii’s employees, Steven Jacobs, Barrett…”

“I know who you’re talking about goddammit! When? How? People just don’t escape from freaking high security penitentiaries!”

“Uh,” Insky responded, “we don’t know how. They’ve, uh, been going over the cell with a fine toothed comb and, uh, searching the grounds. They have IR cameras in the cells that keep count of the number of bodies and, uh, the AI monitoring the IR reported that those four prisoners were missing. The, other two uh, prisoners in the cell, uh, are still here. They say they didn’t see or hear anything, but, uh, they seemed kinda drugged at first.”

“When, dammit?”

“Uh, when what?”

“When did they escape you idiot?”

“Uh, sir, the AI first reported they were gone at 0037 hours, sir.”

Finton glanced up at the time display on his HUD, “For Christ’s sake Insky, that was an hour ago. Why the hell are you just now calling me?”

“Well, uh, the guards didn’t call me right away, and, uh, they thought the inmates were just hiding somewhere and that we’d find them.”

“Shit!” Finton sighed. “Have you called Alderson to see if they’ve misplaced their prisoners too?”

“Uh, no sir. Do you want me to call them?”

“Of course you haven’t,” Finton said with a disgusted tone. “Don’t bother, I’ll call them myself.” Finton had a sinking feeling that he was learning just how York had gotten himself demoted. He’d thought the guy must be an idiot but wondered if perhaps he’d jumped to judgment too soon.

He told his AI to get him the name and connect him to the lead agent at Alderson. A moment later he had been connected to an agent he didn’t know named Wang. Wang didn’t sound sleepy, though he must have been awakened by Finton’s call. “Wang, do you know if your Donsaii prisoners are still there?”

“They were here right before I went to bed sir. What’s up?”

“The four male prisoners at USP Lee have escaped. You need to check on the women and do everything you can think of to make them harder for someone to extract.”

“Yes sir. I’m on my way. I’ll have them moved to a different location. Do we know if someone outside the prison at USP Lee extracted them, or could they have escaped on their own?”

“No one’s escaped from a high security Federal pen for over a decade. We’ve got to assume that Donsaii extracted them somehow. Exactly what we wanted her to try to do, just not to succeed! The women at Alderson are also supposed to be bait for us to catch Donsaii, so for Chrissake don’t let her get them out too! You’d just as well kiss your career goodbye if that happens.” Though he could feel it spiraling around the inside of the toilet bowl Finton didn’t say anything to Wang about his own career. His AI told him he had a call from Insky, “I’ll take it.”

Insky excitedly said, “They’ve pulled up the record from that IR camera in the cell. All four prisoners gathered around the bunk by the outer wall. They must have moved the bunk away from the wall because one by one they disappeared behind it. With that information we’ve, uh, noticed an odd, kinda circular crack in the concrete floor where the bunk stood. They’re trying to get hammers and chisels in here to see if there’s an opening beneath it.”

Finton closed his eyes, trying to picture it. “You’re thinking they tunneled their way out of the prison so quietly than no one heard them?”

“Um, I don’t know sir. Maybe someone from the outside tunneled in?”

“Through concrete, without any noise?”

“Uh, I don’t know sir.”

Idiot, Finton thought, disconnecting without saying goodbye. “Get me Wang… Wang, the people at USP Lee are thinking that some kind of tunnel might have been used to get the men out of there. Get your prisoners off the ground floor if you can.”

“Sir, they were on the top floor. I’d just been having them moved to the ground floor but I’ll move them back up. Should I review my plan with you?”

“Please.”

“OK. The three prisoners had been held near one end of a big open dorm room. I’m moving them to the other end of the dorm and into a small closed storage room with three of my men. I was doing that on the ground floor, but I’ll just put them in the matching room on the third floor. I’m putting the three female agents assigned to me in the prisoner’s beds as bait. I’ve got Alderson’s own guards posted around the building, trying to keep out of sight but ready to warn us if they see anyone approaching. Everyone is armed with Tasers so that hopefully we can take Donsaii down without any permanent harm.”

***

Ell uncomfortably shifted her belly to the other side of the saddle of the hoverbike and bent her head back down behind the fairing. This hoverbike ride from USP Lee to FPC Alderson was pretty unpleasant, even though she had kept the speed down to a hundred miles per hour and the altitude to 3,000 feet. Shan and the others had already arrived at Alderson and were hovering at 10,000 feet, sending back imaging showing a lot more people out on the grounds than usual.

Ell assumed that they must have noticed the guys’ absence at USP Lee. She’d really hoped to get the girls out of Alderson before they noticed the guys were gone and kicked over the hornet’s nest. But, better the guys already out of high security prison, than the girls out of a low security one. She wondered if they should call off trying to get the girls out tonight and try again later after things had calmed down. On the other hand, they might move the women to a higher security prison and put tougher measures into place. For now, she still hoped to get them out tonight, though she’d feel a lot better about it if she weren’t over eight months pregnant.

Mary pulled the lapel of her robe up like she was wiping the sleep out of her eyes. While it covered her face she whispered to her AI. “Connect me to Ell.” Letting her robe drop back down she turned to the man in the suit and said, “What’s going on? Why are we being moved to the other end of the dorm?”

Ell almost asked Mary what she was talking about, but then realized that Mary had just hooked her into the conversation there at FPC Alderson because she couldn’t speak directly to Ell. Moved. That’s not good. Damn. The other end of the dorm isn’t all that helpful.

Whoever Mary had been speaking to didn’t respond. After a bit Mary’s voice continued, “I don’t like being in this windowless storeroom, I’ve got a little bit of claustrophobia.”

Another voice, irritated and male, said, “This isn’t a storeroom.”

“I think it used to be. Who are you anyway? You aren’t one of the guards… since you’re wearing a suit it makes me think you’re FBI. Are you a Feeb?”

This time the man didn’t respond but Ell smiled a little at the information that Mary had slyly provided. She asked Allan to bring up the floor plan of Alderson that he’d found hidden somewhere on the net. The dorm is long and runs from northwest to southeast. The room they were in was on the northeast side, near the northwest end of the dorm. If, as Mary says, they’ve been moved to the opposite end, then they must be at the southeast end now. But the southeast end of the dorm was a pretty big target. Ell studied the floor plan. There were several rooms without windows, at least on this version of the floor plan. Aha. One of them specified a half door into a hallway, like storerooms often had. Oh, and shelves. That one must be the storeroom, or at least look like one to Mary.

The hoverbike started to slow as it approached Alderson. With a sigh of relief, Ell leaned up, taking some of the pressure off her belly. “Mary,” she said, “I know you can’t talk. I’m going to ask some questions. Cough once or click your teeth together once for yes, twice for no.” Ell then proceeded to ask Mary some questions about her location based on the floor plan, eventually confirming to her satisfaction that Mary was in fact in the room Ell had thought from the plan. Amy and Lisa were with her, as were two agents. Mary thought two more agents were posted outside the room.

Allan said, “Steve is calling.”

“Put him on… Hey Steve, good to have you out of there.”

“Good to be out, but we need to rethink bringing out the girls tonight. The grounds of this place are crawling with guards.”

“I’m worried about it too, but I’m also afraid that if we don’t take them out tonight, they’ll move them somewhere much more difficult.”

“Hey, if you can tunnel through the reinforced concrete floor of a high security prison, I doubt there’s any place you couldn’t get them out of.”

“I can think of some things they could do to make it much harder; I’ll bet they probably can too. And Amy’s not doing very well there. I don’t want to leave her in there if we don’t have to.”

“I’ll guarantee that if you start dangling outside the windows of one of those prison dorms, someone’s going to see you. Worse, since they won’t have any other way to apprehend you, they’ll probably start shooting.”

“How about if I land on the roof? Do they have any personnel up there?”

“No, but you’re still going to have to get down to the window. It’ll just take one guard glancing up.”

“Oh! No, they’ve been moved to a room without a window. Actually, that’s kind of better. We can go in through the roof without disturbing the entire dorm full of inmates.”

“You can go through the roof quietly?”

“We went through the concrete floor of your cell quietly Steve. It isn’t completely silent, there’s a sucking sound but it’s not very loud.” Musingly she said, “One problem is they’ve got two agents or guards in the room with the girls and there are more guys stationed outside the door.”

“Ell, there’s no way you can do this! Let’s regroup and come back another night when they aren’t all keyed up.”

“Steve, I’m landing on the roof right now. I would kind of like your help, but I can understand your reluctance. I do need you guys to have your hoverbikes hold in the area right over Alderson because I’ve just started spooling the graphene cables out of your bikes so they can pull the girls up out of here.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Steve groaned, “this like trying to reason with a rock!” He sighed, “Spool the cable back up. I put on a harness and clipped the cable to it before I left the quarry so it’s just hanging under me in a big loop right now.”

“Just unclip it and let it drop off the side.”

“No, I mean, if you’ll pull it back up some, I’ll drop over the side and ride it down to help you however I can. I just don’t want to jump over and fall a couple of hundred feet before the cable stops me.”

“OK, transferring control of your cable to your AI.”

Shan said, “Pull mine back up and I’ll clip on and come down to help too.”

“No!” Steve and Ell chorused together. Ell continued, “I don’t want you hanging off the side of your hoverbike, trying to grab that cable and falling. You stay safe so I don’t have to worry.”

Ell crouched on the roof, the motor on the cable under AI control to provide just enough tension to keep her overall weight on the roof down to about five pounds. That way she didn’t have to worry about the rafters creaking. Using the twelve inch single port she made an irregular but large hole in the roof right over where she thought the storeroom would be. She’d had Allan help her locate the spot according the plan and her vid images of the roof as she’d descended, simply taking ratios of dimensions. Still very light on her feet, she lowered herself down into the hole and used a hand to brush aside the insulation lying between the ceiling joists in order to get an estimate of just how deep the sheet rock of the ceiling lay beneath her. “Mary, don’t respond to me but look up at the ceiling if you can do it without being too obvious. Do you see a tiny flashing blue light above you anywhere?”

Mary’s eyebrows rose at this instruction. Pretending to stretch she tilted her head back and saw a tiny blue spark flashing just off center in the ceiling. She clicked her teeth once.

“OK,” Ell said quietly. Then she said, “Lisa and Amy, try not to react. Don’t respond except by coughing or clicking your teeth, once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no.’ I’ve been talking to Mary but you need to know what’s going to happen next. My plan is to try to take you out of here now, but it might be dangerous, are you still up for it?

Lisa clicked her teeth. Mary tried not to grin when Amy coughed explosively, startling the two men in the room with them.

Ell continued quietly, “OK, I’m going to open a hole in the ceiling, then Tase the guys in the room with you. Don’t stand too close to them but be ready to grab them so they don’t hurt themselves when they fall.”

Mary clicked her teeth, then resisted a powerful impulse to look up at the ceiling when a sucking whooshing sound emanated from above their heads.

Ell had just used the large single port to cut a twelve inch opening in the ceiling. It only took a second. When the port snapped off, Ell lowered her head just enough to locate the two guards, then fired the Taser darts that her index finger single ports were already set up to fire. The darts didn’t appear in this universe until they were below the ceiling so Ell didn’t have to actually put her fingers through the opening in the ceiling.

Mary had her eyes on the two men and saw them begin to glance upward, startled looks on their faces, then they spasmed, the Asian one grunting a long moan as he tipped toward her like a felled tree. Mary caught him as he fell, lowering him to the ground face down. Glancing up she saw Lisa stumble a little under the larger African-American one. He came down a little hard, though much softer than he would have if Lisa hadn’t been there trying to slow his fall.

Looking up, Mary saw a lopsided, approximately four foot diameter hole in the ceiling, rafters, trusses and all. Ell leaned to one side and Steve dropped through the hole, obviously suspended from something. Since Mary couldn’t see anything suspending him, she assumed it must be one of the graphene cables that could be unwound from under the hoverbikes.

Sure enough, behind Steve came one of the little balls and D-rings that hung from the ends of the cables. Little jets of air from the ball centered the D-ring in the opening as it dropped down to them.

Ell said, “Lisa, clip yourself to that D-ring and let’s get you out of here.”

Steve had crouched and snapped plasticuffs to one of the agents and turned to the other one.

Lisa grabbed the D-ring with one hand, pulling the clip of her harness out of her shirt with the other. As soon as Lisa snapped it on, Ell said, “Allan, take Lisa up.”

Lisa flew up out of the opening in the roof and another ball puffed its way into the opening. Ell said, “Mary, take that one.”

Mary frowned, “What about Amy?” she said, glancing at Amy and seeing a panicked look on her face. She grabbed the D-ring, stepping toward Amy.

Ell said, “Steve’s taking Amy up on his cable, she doesn’t have any experience with riding cables.”

Mary snapped her own harness onto the D-ring. As her feet lifted off the floor and she shot up out of the hole, she glimpsed a pained grimace on Ell’s face.

Looking down she could see light coming up out of the hole in the Alderson dorm’s roof. The light was moving away as Mary swung to the west. Ell came up out of the hole in the roof, then two bodies briefly occluded the light from the opening, presumably Steve and Amy. “Ell, are you OK?”

“I might have overdone it,” Ell grated out.

“Oh my God! Are you having labor pains?”

“Something sure hurts.”

Mary found herself descending to a landing beside a car. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital!”

“Yeah, I don’t think I can go much farther in this harness,” she grunted and ground out, “or on a hoverbike.”

“We can put you in the car!”

“On my way.” Ell grunted.

Mary landed fairly smoothly, stepped to the car and opened its back door. “I’ve got the door open for you.

Steve’s voice broke in, “What’s happening?”

Mary said, “Ell’s in labor, we think. She’s hurting anyway. I’m putting her in the back seat of the car. Lisa and I should fly out of here on hoverbikes so Ell can have the whole back seat to herself. Is Randy here to drive?”

“Dammit! No, Randy’s down south. I think I’m our next best driver. Amy can go with us, she’s at least had a baby of her own. Shan,” he said to his AI, “Shan, Ell’s in pain. Hopefully it’s just labor. I’m going to drive since I’ve had a little training in high speed driving. Amy will ride with us as the person with the most baby experience. You should stay with your hoverbike and fly directly to the hospital. Where’s the nearest hospital that can deliver a baby?”

Though Steve had been speaking to his own AI, Allan came on, saying, “Greenbrier Valley Medical Center. It’s twelve miles but a twenty minute drive at the speed limit.”

Shan moaned, “I knew this was a bad idea!”

Steve calmly said, “Pull it together man. Don’t worry about what you should have done. Worry about what you should do. As your bike drops Lisa off you need to land and hook yourself to the cable so that you’ll be able to cable down to the medical center. You don’t want to be landing a hoverbike in the center’s parking lot.”

While Mary had been listening to all this she’d reached up and helped Ell land. Unsnapping Ell’s cable she helped her into the back of the car. Doing so, she felt Ell’s belly tighten. Speaking directly to Ell without the need of their AIs she said, “I’m not sure what labor feels like, but I’ll bet that’s it. How far along are you?”

“Thirty seven weeks.” Ell grunted.

Amy’s voice came over Mary’s shoulder, “Good. Even if the baby comes tonight, the baby should be OK at thirty seven weeks. Let’s get Ell lying down across the back seat.”

Steve opened the driver’s door and said, “Amy, get in. Let’s get moving.”

Mary watched the car pull away as downdrafts signaled the landing of three hoverbikes, one with a helmeted man aboard. She walked to him and put a hand on his shoulder, “Hey Shan, don’t panic.” She crouched and grabbed the D-ring that hung from the bottom of the hoverbike, lifting it up and handing it to Shan. “Ell needs you now.”

“I know,” he sighed, “and per Steve’s advice I’m not going to say, ‘should have,’ anymore.”

“Alright. I’m gonna suggest you fly along above the car instead of just going directly to the med center. Then if they have to stop, you’ll be there.”

“Good idea, thanks.”

Mary saw that Lisa had already mounted a hoverbike. She walked to hers and lifted the saddle. The helmet in the compartment fit, though a little loosely. Mary got on, made sure that the cable was spooled up so that only a little hung free and then lifted into the air. Man, I love flying these things!

Before Mary could wonder where to go, Steve’s voice came through her implant. “Mary, Lisa, in the rush at the car we didn’t give you the new clothes Ell had for you. Worse, you don’t have HUDs because they’re wrapped up in your clothes. Try to find this car by looking for headlights below you. There shouldn’t be much traffic this time of night and so if you can pick us out heading east by a little bit north we can pause and set your clothes out for you.”

Mary looked down at the landscape below. She didn’t see all that many headlights but she noticed flashing red and blue lights here and there. “Steve, I see flashing lights. They may be putting up roadblocks. You might want to stop and let us pick Amy up with a hoverbike.” She paused, “Even though you’re a long way from USP Lee, they might be looking for you too. Maybe Shan should be driving?”

Allan spoke directly to Mary. “I can guide you to a position over their car because I have GPS locations on both of you.”

Allan had evidently linked them all into one big conversation because next Mary heard Ell say, “Steve, take these.”

Down in the car Steve said, “Clippers?”

“Yeah,” Ell grunted, “quickest possible disguise. Shave your head and get rid of that big mustache of yours. Amy, there’s a bundle of clothes under your car seat. In the middle is your HUD, some skin bronzer and a wig. Get into them.”

Steve stopped the car so Amy could set clothes bundles out on the side of the road for Mary and Lisa to pick up. Then he let the car’s AI take over the driving. Amy had said she felt pretty sure Ell was in labor, rather than having something seriously wrong with her. Though he worried about what the early labor meant, it would probably be safer not to speed at night, especially with the cops looking for people fleeing Alderson. Lifting the clippers, he worried about all the clippings, wondering if someone looking into the vehicle would see all the loose hair and recognize that he’d just cut his hair. To his surprise, when he turned the clippers on a whooshing sound came from them. Looking down at them in the lights of the dash, he saw an oval port right behind the clipper head. Sure enough, when he applied them to his head, the cut hair seemed to get sucked away. He lowered the visor and looked at himself in the lit mirror on the back of it as he cut away his hair until he looked much like he had as a basic recruit. Next, the mustache disappeared. He had to admit it did radically change his appearance, but it looked a little ratty because the clippers didn’t cut it close enough. He turned to look at Ell, forcing his eyes to move quickly past Amy, still struggling to pull on a pair of jeans in the tight confines of her car seat. “Ell, how are you doing?” he asked.

Digging in the pocket of her oversized windbreaker type jacket Ell said, “Not too bad right now. I’m between contractions.” She pulled something out of the pocket and held it out to him. “Here.”

Steve took the object and looked at it. “An electric razor?” He snorted, “How much stuff are you hauling with you?”

“Ports, Steve. Ports. Remember them? I’ve got a big one in my pocket. Gimme those clippers and I’ll put them back through so we won’t have them if anyone searches us.”

Steve frowned as he handed her the clippers, “Who’s passing the stuff to you?”

“A waldo,” she grunted.

Worriedly Steve raised the Norelco type razor to his head and started running it around. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Amy bent forward putting on her shoes.

As Steve finished with the razor and felt his scalp and face, Mary’s voice said, “Roadblock ahead.” Steve’s eyes came to the front. Red and blue flashing lights blocked the road ahead.

Steve turned to Amy, “Amy, roadblock ahead. Get your prison clothes under the seat and the wig on your head. Leave the shoes for now. Then lower your seat back and hang over Ell like you’re concerned about her, not like you’re trying to avoid their seeing your face. Ell, you make a lot of noise about how bad you’re hurting. Childbirth makes cops nervous. Pull up your shirt so they can see that that’s your actual tummy, not a pillow.”

The car began to slow. Amy had her visor down, adjusting the blond wig and tucking strands of hair in under it. She flipped up the visor and reclined the seat, turning to lean back over Ell in the back seat. She reached out and put a hand on Ell’s tummy, gently rubbing. “How’re you holding up?” she asked quietly.

Ell handed her a couple of cotton balls and grunted, “I’m OK. Tuck these between your cheeks and your lower molars.”

The car pulled to a stop. A patrolman stepped up to each side of the car and Steve rolled down the window. “What’s going on officer? We’ve got to get to the hospital, we’re having a baby!” Ell let out a piteous moan.

The patrolman said, “Breakout at the women’s prison down the road. I’m going to have to see the women’s faces, then you can be on your way.”

Dammit! We should have stopped and put Amy out of the car for Mary to pick up! Steve thought, but his emotions didn’t show. “Yes sir,” he said, “but please hurry.”

The patrolman opened the back door on the passenger side and leaned in to shine his light on the supposedly pregnant woman’s face, frozen in a straining rictus. He glanced up at his HUD to compare her face to the pictures of the three escaped women. She didn’t look anything like them. Suddenly she grunted and reached for her crotch. He glanced down. There was a spreading stain in her pants.

The blond woman hovering over the pregnant lady from the front seat yelled, “Oh my God! Her waters broke! You’ve got to let us go now!”

The patrolman glanced at the tanned blond woman, but he already knew that none of the escapees were blond. “OK. Get on your way. Hope the baby’s OK.” He thumped the top of the car as he closed the door. It pulled away, probably driven on manual since its tires threw a couple of little stones at him. At first he was a little bit angry, but then he thought to himself, I guess I’d push it on manual too, if my wife were having a baby and moaning like that.

Steve worriedly asked, “Is her water breaking an actual emergency?”

“No,” Amy snorted. “It does mean that they won’t want to stop her labor. Ell needs to deliver soon because once the water’s broken infection can set in.” She shrugged, “It may not be an emergency but it was guaranteed to make that guy nervous, ‘cause you know how you men don’t like dealing with the mysteries of childbirth.”

***

Finton’s AI told him he had a call from Wang. “Wang! Did you get her?”

A frustrated sounding Wang’s voice said, “No sir. She came in through the roof, Tased myself and Vinson and pulled all three women out through the hole.”

Feeling a cramp in his gut, Finton said, “What? Through the roof? How? Are you saying that she brought in a chopper?”

“Sir, I don’t know. They Tased me. The women were nice enough to lower me to the floor so I didn’t smash my face. By the time I got control of my muscles back and rolled over, I was in plasticuffs, there was a huge hole in the roof and the women were gone!”

“Christ!” Finton cursed, this must be exactly what York felt like as his career slid down the crapper.

Chapter Ten

Dr. Rebecca Porter studied patient Gardon. Something seemed a little off somehow. Not with the pregnancy, she seemed healthy and her dates of thirty seven weeks seemed reasonable. The records from Gardon’s OB down in North Carolina were all in order.  She wouldn’t be the first mother Rebecca had delivered who’d been surprised by early labor while on a trip.

No, Rebecca just thought something about the woman didn’t look typical for a woman of Mexican heritage. Of course, Mexicans came in all different shapes and colors and ranged from the indigenous phenotype to the Caucasian appearance with all combinations in between. It just seemed that Gardon had an unusual combination of darker indigenous skin but many Caucasian features. An unusual way to divide the features up, but she supposed not impossible. I might not have noticed if it weren’t for my medical degree and an interest in those types of things.

Rebecca shrugged, Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s dilated and it’s time to get her into the delivery room.

Rebecca and the nurse positioned Gardon, knees up on the delivery bed and Rebecca lifted the covers. It shouldn’t be long now. Rebecca stared. The woman had a couple of streaks of pale pink skin in her perineum! Suddenly remembering her earlier thoughts about how the woman looked atypical for her Mexican heritage, Rebecca’s eyes flashed to the woman’s face, then to the husband sitting by her holding her hand. Once again, dark skin but features that seemed Caucasian. His black hair, cut in a crew-cut didn’t look as stiff as typical Mexican hair.

These people are in disguise! Why? Rebecca’s eyes flashed back and forth from one to the other as she continued speaking soothingly to the woman. Glancing back down at her perineum she noticed a couple of fine reddish hairs in the area of skin that the woman had failed to get the skin coloring agent on.

Rebecca looked back up at the woman. Her eyes narrowed, damn! This is Ell Donsaii!

The baby came then, all in a rush. Just as pale skinned as you might expect Ell Donsaii’s baby to be if she had the baby with someone as light skinned as that man probably was.

Rebecca didn’t even wonder what to do. As the child started crying lustily, Rebecca clamped and cut the cord then handed the baby to the nurse. Julie swaddled it. Rebecca saw Julie stare for a moment at the baby’s pale skin, then glance apprehensively at the parents. Rebecca knew Julie expected an angry confrontation between husband and wife over the baby’s skin color.

As Julie stepped over to weigh, measure and footprint the little boy, Rebecca leaned up close to the parents. “Dr. Donsaii, you have a problem,” she whispered urgently, noting that Donsaii’s exhausted eyes widened. “That white baby did not come from parents as dark skinned as you two are currently pretending to be. If you want to maintain your disguise, like I’m sure you do,” Rebecca turned to look into the man’s eyes, darkened by contacts Rebecca surmised, “you sir, need to pitch a fit and leave ‘because your wife was obviously fooling around.’ If you do that, all anyone will remember is that your wife was fooling around and you were angry. If you stay here and are not pissed off, people are going to wonder how you came to have that white baby and why you aren’t mad about it. Then someone else besides me is going to figure out just who you are.” Rebecca took a deep breath. “I will never give you away. I, like everyone else on this planet including our President, owe you my life.”

The couple, who’d been staring wide eyed at Rebecca, glanced at one another. Donsaii nodded minutely at her man and squeezed his hand. He glanced across the room at Julie, who still had her back turned, then he bent and kissed Donsaii’s hand. Standing back up he said in a Latin accent, “Puta! That gringo baby isn’t mine! Who were you screwing?”

In a tremulous voice, probably not difficult after the exhaustion of labor, Donsaii said, “No one! I swear!”

A tear running down his cheek the man sadly said disgustedly, “Adios Elsa,” and slammed out the door.

Julie turned to watch him leave, a sad look on her face. She’d worked in delivery for years and would have seen such dramas before. Rebecca hoped she’d focus on the drama and not consider other possibilities. Rebecca leaned up to console Donsaii, “I’m sorry. I know it’s rough going through that right now.” More quietly she said, “I’ve got to tell you that your skin coloration down below is incomplete so you don’t want anyone you don’t trust helping care for you down there. I’m going to deliver the placenta and then cover you up, but if the nurses offer to wash you up later, you should turn it down.”

Donsaii nodded wearily.

“Is there anyone else out in the waiting room who you’d like to come in and sit with you?”

Donsaii croaked out, “Amelia.”

Steve and Amy looked up in consternation as Shan stormed out through the waiting room without speaking to them. Steve got up to follow him, but then they heard Shan whispering over their AIs. He sounded pretty distressed, “Amy, Steve. We failed to consider how the baby’s white skin would look to the people in the hospital when Ell and I are both bronzed up with dark skin.” He croaked out a sad little laugh, “So… I’m pretending to be incensed that Elsa was fooling around on me and gave me a white baby. But that leaves Ell in there alone. Amy, I mean, Amelia, I’m hoping you’ll go sit with her.” After a pause Shan continued, “Vicente, maybe you should come after me to ‘calm me down’?” He sighed, “Lord knows I kinda need it.”

Steve and Amy looked at each other a moment, then Amy turned to go into the delivery area as Steve headed after Shan.

A nurse opened the door of the waiting room as Amy approached it. She said, “Amelia?”

Amy said, “Here.”

The nurse said, “Ms. Gardon is hoping you’ll sit with her?

As Amy washed and gowned up she could see people glancing at her. The little drama that had just gone down had likely drawn their attention. When she had finished a nurse took her in and she sat down to take Ell’s hand.

“Amelia,” the pleasant looking black OB said calmly while she worked, “Elsa’s baby is healthy but there’s been a little drama because he’s white.” The doctor glanced over at the nurse whose back was turned, then she winked at Amy. “Elsa’s husband was very upset and left just when she needs a lot of support. I’m hoping you can be her friend in this time of great need?”

Amy nodded, wondering about the wink. Did the doctor know?

***

Acting FBI Director Sheila Rhodes closed her eyes in frustration as she stood outside the Oval Office. It had only been a few days since Stockton had fired Phillips and put her in charge. Simultaneously sad for her old friend Mason Phillips and excited to be provided this opportunity, she’d been looking forward to this meeting with Stockton. As a woman Sheila felt some kinship with the President, though she’d always expected that a woman president would be much more pleasant than the men who’d held that position, not such a hard-nosed bitch.

Now Sheila was about to have her first meeting with the aforesaid hardhearted Chief Executive and she had to deliver bad news.

The door opened and an aide waved Sheila in. Stockton stood and came around her desk, something Sheila had heard boded well. “Sheila!” she said, putting out her hand to shake, “It’s going to be good working with you! Phillips didn’t seem to get my priorities.”

Sheila thought that by ‘priorities,’ Stockton meant her fixation on Donsaii that Phillips had told Sheila about. Sheila stepped forward and took Stockton’s hand. “Yes Ma’am.”

Ebulliently Stockton said, “So, tell me what your plans are for capturing Donsaii. I’d especially know what kind of trap you have set around Donsaii’s erstwhile employees.” She washed her hands together, “Unless I miss my bet, Donsaii won’t be able to resist trying to get them out. That little girl is under the mistaken impression that she can do anything, you know.” Stockton had been pouring herself a coffee. Now she looked over and saw the expression on Sheila’s face. “What?” Stockton’s eyes narrowed, “What’s that little bitch done now?”

When Stockton’s full coffee cup exploded against the wall a couple of Secret Service agents burst into the office, weapons in their hands. Wondering if she was about to be fired in her first meeting, Sheila didn’t see their initial looks of concern quickly fading into bland disapproval.

***

Ell sat in her room, beatifically nursing little Zage. He let go and she held him back on her knees to stare into his face. Flooded with love she asked Allan to contact Shan, “Hey hubby. I thought you’d like to look at your son a little more.”

Shan’s voice cracked, “I… I wish I could be there with you.”

“I’m supposed to get out this afternoon.” She wiped at the corner of an eye, “Then you can hold him to your heart’s content.”

Ell signed off with Shan when a knock on the door frame signaled the arrival of Amy. Dr. Porter, the OB, stood behind her. Amy held Zage while Porter checked Ell over. Her eyebrows rose, “You seem to be in good shape. If your AI will accept it, mine will send you a set of instructions for taking care of yourself after delivery.”

Ell said, “OK.”

“By the way your tummy has tightened back up much more quickly than other women’s.” She winked at Ell. “Though I suppose, prior to your pregnancy you might have been in better condition than most of my patients, eh?”

Ell gave a little shrug, “I suppose that might be Ma’am.” Quietly she said, “I would like to say how much I appreciate your keeping my secret for me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Porter smiled sadly, “I’m just sorry that you have to hide. I’m a lot more liberal than most and I did vote for Edith Stockton, but what she’s been doing to you is just plain wrong.” Porter paused and her throat worked a moment, then she rasped hoarsely, “You have my utmost respect and gratitude, not just for what you did in deflecting the comet, but also for what your inventions have been doing to improve the lives of people everywhere. I plan to keep your secret until Stockton comes to her senses.” She sniffed and wiped at the corner of her eye, “It has been my honor to care for you and this will be a memory I will treasure for the rest of my life.” She paused and then gave an embarrassed smile, “I feel terribly selfish for asking this, but someday, when you’re no longer a wanted woman, I’d be so proud to be able to tell my friends that I have an autograph proving that I delivered your baby?”

“Oh, my goodness, I’d be delighted,” Ell said. “Just one issue. I may not be raising little Zage as Ell Donsaii but under an alias so he doesn’t get dragged into my messy public life. Could you take just an ordinary autograph?”

Porter smiled, “I guess, considering what’s been happening to ‘Ell Donsaii’ recently, I can understand that tactic. Sure, I’d be thrilled to have an ordinary autograph.”

“Do you have a pen and paper?”

“I’ll have to go find one.”

***

“Hey there Grandma,” Ell said to Kristen.

“Hey, kiddo, you sound tired. You OK?”

“Like you told me a few times, labor takes it out of you.”

“Oh! Did the baby come?”

“Mmm hmm, yesterday, the 21st.”

“Oh, September 21st was my Grandmother’s birthday!”

“I didn’t know. That’s nice.”

“What did you name him?”

“Zage. Spelled Z-A-G-E, like it sounds, Gage with a Z.”

“When can I see my Grandson?” Kristen asked wistfully. “And my daughter who I haven’t seen in forever?”

“Well, I’m thinking we could all converge on the houses at Lake Royale tomorrow?”

“Gram and I are on our way! We’ll shop for food.”

Ell laughed, “OK, see you soon.”

Kristen and Ell’s Gram first drove to the shopping mall in New Bern where Kristen changed in the bathroom and Gram changed in one of the dressing rooms of a store. In wigs and completely different styles of clothing they headed out the other side of the mall. As they stepped out, a car pulled up that Kristen had rented in one of the identities that Ell had set up for her. They got in and were immediately on their way. They changed cars and clothing again at an outlet mall in Smithfield. This time the car was one Kristen owned under one of her aliases. They left that mall going west but made a U-turn to go back to I-95, both of them watching to see if anyone else made a U-turn to stay with them.

Close to Lake Royale, a nice lake with vacation homes around it, Kristen and Gram stopped and bought groceries. When they arrived at the home Ell owned under one of her many aliases a vacation service had already opened it and readied it for occupancy.

That evening Ell, Shan, Steve and Amy arrived with little Zage. Mary, Barrett, Dan, Lisa and Randy took the house across the street and they all began to relax into freedom. After dark they all got together in the larger house for dinner. After eating they moved into the living room to have their dessert and began to talk about their recent experiences.

After a recounting of everyone’s prison tales Kristen said, “It’s so wonderful to see all of you again, but I’ve got to ask. What’s the plan from here?”

Everyone looked at Ell but she shrugged and threw the question back to them. “What ideas do the rest of you have?”

“We should all move to Europe or Central America, get a country there to give us asylum so we can live without hiding.”

Steve shook his head, “While Stockton’s in power, I don’t think we’ll be able to live openly anywhere. If she still feels Ell’s a threat, I think she’d send a clandestine team to ‘bring us to justice.’”

Dan asked, “I confess I don’t follow politics all that closely. What’re the chances she’ll lose the next election?”

“Pretty unpredictable, but even if that happens, we’ve still got to figure out what to do for the next three years.”

Ell said, “You guys should be aware that my legal teams feel there’s a pretty good chance that the Blaustein bill will be overturned. Several North Carolina legislators have started work on a bill to rescind it. Even if they can’t get it through now, if the midterm elections change the composition of congress they may be able to get it through then.” She shrugged, “So we may not have to wait until the next presidential election.”

Steve said, “I hate to be the voice of negativity, but Stockton may continue to consider Ell to be a menace, even if the Blaustein bill is reversed.”

Ell said, “Personally, I was planning to live most of my life anonymously rather than as Ell Donsaii anyway. I’ve even gotten pretty good at it. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of you need to get dragged into my trouble. You’ve all worked for me for a long time and may want a change in your life?” She grinned at Barrett and Mary, sitting next to each other as had been happening more and more over the years, “For instance Mary may want to make an honest man out of you big B?”

The big man actually blushed and looked at the floor a moment, then he turned to Mary and got down on one knee, “Hey, Mar’, would you marry me?”

Mary threw her arms around his neck, “Of course, you big lunk.”

Randy elbowed him from the other side and stage whispered, “Hey, big lunk, you’re supposed to have a ring when you ask that question.”

Barrett leaned back from Mary to look into her eyes, “I’ve had a ring for months Mar’, waiting for the perfect moment. Then the FBI came knocking and I’ve been regretting that I put it off for so long. I’ll sneak back into the old house and get it as soon as we get back there.” He frowned, “Unless the bastards took it,” he said darkly.

Lisa started clapping and everyone else joined in. Then she turned to Ell and said, “I think I speak for everyone when I say we’d like to stay with you. Until Stockton takes her price off our heads, we can’t very well go out and get other jobs anyway.”

“Well,” Ell said, “after my escape I started buying real estate in large quantities, all over the States and in some foreign countries as well. So we have a lot of places we could move to. My current plan is to move to a defunct farm I bought down southeast of Pittsboro. I bought some houses that were for sale nearby too, so there would be places for you guys to live. One of them would be a nice little house for newlyweds,” she winked at Barrett and Mary. We could put tunnels between them again. The farmhouse is huge and I plan to outfit some of the rooms so I can keep doing D5R type research. Shan wants to keep doing math research,” she grinned at him, “but all he needs is a place to stare off into space.”

Shan turned his palms up theatrically and said, “I get no respect!”

Ell sighed, “The biggest problem that I see, is what to do about Amy’s kids and your connections to your own families. Teenagers usually don’t want to leave their friends when they’re in high school.”

Amy said, “Well, I’ve talked to them about it already. You’re right, they don’t want to move, but they know we can’t stay in the Chapel Hill district and they’ve made their peace with it. They’re going to tell their friends that they’ve got to go live with relatives until I get out.” She shrugged, “I think they’re pretty embarrassed, not too surprisingly, to have a mom in prison and I think that secretly they’ll be happy to have a fresh start.”

“With new names and all?”

“Yeah,” Amy snorted, “I think, believe it or not, that they’re thinking it’ll be an adventure.”

The others opined that they could deal with their families, communicating over the net. “It sure is nice that someone already set us up with an untraceable means of talking to them,” Randy said.

***

Emma looked up as someone approached her table. A fairly tall, slender Latin woman, she looked elegant. To Emma’s surprise the woman pulled out a chair and sat. Emma’s eyes widened as the woman leaned toward her and held out her hand, “Hello Emma, I’m Elsa Gardon,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

Emma shut her mouth, “Didn’t you just have a baby?”

Ell tossed her head, “A couple of weeks ago.”

“You know, you’re supposed to have a tummy still!”

“Um, yeah, I seem to have been pretty lucky there.” Ell had the grace to look a little embarrassed about it.

“I don’t suppose you got any stretch marks either?”

Ell gave a minute shake of her head, then flashed a smile, “Let’s talk about your wedding girl!”

***

Bridget walked down to the Quantum Biomed area at D5R. Roger and Ryan had their heads together. “Hey, Roger, you’re getting calls from Stell Simsworth but your AI is rejecting them.”

He looked up and frowned, “Who the heck is Stell Simsworth?”

Bridget rolled her eyes, “She’s that blind singing prodigy from Asheville that’s been all over the news lately. Don’t you keep up with your pop culture?”

“Oh! The girl that sings ‘Forgiveness’?”

“Yep,” Bridget grinned, “That’s the one.”

“Do you know why she’s calling?”

“She wants you to hook her optic nerves up to cameras. Seems she and her family have recently come into some money.”

Roger closed his eyes, “My God!”

“Come on Rog’, I know you and Ryan can do it!”

Ryan had drawn back, “Come on, Bridg’, what if something goes wrong?”

Bridget raised an eyebrow, “You worried she might go blind?”

“No, but the optic nerve is right under the brain. Not a place to be screwin’ around at all.”

Roger turned to look musingly at Ryan, “I know it’s different, but it is a nerve and it should be possible to hook one of your neurotrodes to it, shouldn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, but I figured we’d be doing that after we had a lot more experience with neurotrodes in the extremities. Besides the optic nerve is significantly different from peripheral nerves. It’s more like an extension of the brain.”

Roger grinned at him, “You’ve been telling me how we’re going to be hooking neurotrodes directly to the brain someday.”

“Someday, yeah. But not today!”

“Maybe it’s time to talk to an ophthalmologist about the possibilities?”

Bridget grinned at them, “I’ll let Stell know that you guys are working on it…”

***

Brazil’s President Goncalves turned to her aide, “Has Donsaii agreed to appear here at the G-20 yet?”

“She says she expects to be there but that she can’t be certain. She feels that it will be quite dangerous. She’s quite concerned that the American security detail will attempt to capture her.”

“Despite our promise to protect her?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“So, when will she confirm?”

“She says she plans to be there but may have to cancel if word gets out or if there appears to be a threat when she arrives.”

“But we need to make arrangements for a secure hotel room for her as well as transport to the hotel and from the hotel to the conference center.”

“She says she’ll take care of that herself.”

“She won’t be able to get in!”

“That’s what I said,” the aide shrugged, “She said not to worry about it. She did have me port her a pass however.”

***

Ell pursed her lips as she looked across a small shallow valley at the clustered buildings of the conference center outside of Rio where the G-20 was to be held. From the net she had good data about the conference center as it had existed two years ago. However, since then the actual building where the meeting would be held had been custom constructed just for the conference. Allan hadn’t been able to get access to plans for the new building. She glanced out from under her light enhancing HUD at the real world.

Two AM and very dark out, time to go.

With a command to Allan she lifted off the ground on a thin graphene cable and began swinging across the little valley to the conference center.

Two hundred meters above the conference center she looked down at the flat roof using infrared to spot the guards scattered around the periphery. None were near the little stair shack near the center of the roof. She started spooling down toward it.

Landing lightly beside the door to the stair she glanced around once more, then leaned against the door and slid a fine flat graphend wire in beside the bolt of the latch. As soon as it was beyond the end of the bolt the graphene balloon on the end of the wire inflated. Ell pulled back on the wire and balloon, pulling the bolt and open back as she did so.

Releasing the cable to shoot back into the sky, Ell quietly opened the door and started down the stairs. Exploring the building’s interior she found that she’d been correct. Comfortable that they had prevented ingress, the security people didn’t have many people wandering inside the building. She shed the coverall she’d been wearing, revealing a uniform that almost matched what she’d seen the guards wearing.

Ell explored the building, carefully inspecting the podium where they expected her to speak in the morning. She wondered just how bad her fear of public speaking would afflict her then. The large room with its expansive circle of desks populated by visiting dignitaries would be much more frightening in the morning she knew.

The podium stood on a framework stage three feet above the main floor. Curtains hung behind it. Ell found a gap in the curtains and hopped down off of the stand.

Ell crouched and moved under the stand itself. Her HUD projected infrared from a small light and using its IR cameras Ell examined the layout under there. She used the singleport in her index finger to cut an opening in the carpet and fold it back. Next she cut a slightly smaller opening in the concrete. She slanted the cut inward at forty-five degrees so that the piece would stand back in the hole without falling through. Ell pulled her single port tool out of the port inside her uniform jacket and used it to undercut the opening she’d outlined in the flooring. Next she single ported a graphene balloon through into the space beneath the door she’d just cut in the concrete. Inflating the balloon lifted the door up so she could grasp the edge of the heavy concrete door and tilt it up next to the rug she’d folded back earlier.

Ell pulled her rolled up twelve inch singleport out of the port inside her jacket, straightened it out and started tunneling stairs down into the bedrock beneath the conference center.

Once she had a nice chamber beneath the concrete door in the floor she climbed back up and drilled some one centimeter holes into the concrete of the door and out into the surrounding concrete of the floor, taking care to match them up. She’d had Gary make her some one centimeter diameter by six centimeter long graphene balloons. She gently inflated them, put adhesive on their ends and slid them into the holes in the door. She deflated them so they withdrew into the door, dropped the door into place and reinflated them to twenty atmospheres, forming “bolts” that pushed out of the door and into the floor, solidly locking the door into place. She carefully glued a balloon into place that would lift the door for her when she wanted it open. Ell climbed out of the opening and closed the door again, then glued the carpet in place along the edges so when the door dropped into place it was hard to see the defect in the carpet.

Satisfied with the camouflage of the door, she deflated the bolts, inflated the door lifter balloon, lifted the cover, dropped down into the tunnel and dropped the door shut, reinflating the bolts. Even, without being in the zone, she did it in only a few seconds.

Satisfied, Ell climbed back down to the bottom of her stairs and started cutting a tunnel out from under the convention center. Eventually she encountered the concrete of a storm sewer main. Careful tunneling exposed the wall of the sewer main where Ell cut another small concrete door. This one opened out away from the sewer. A carefully positioned graphene balloon held it shut and when it was deflated, let it fall open.

By then it was seven in the morning so Ell returned to the conference center. Before she climbed out, she changed her clothes for fresh ones delivered through the port inside her jacket. Ell carefully checked for any observers; then climbed out from under the stage in her uniform. She didn’t have a proper badge for the security uniform so she wore her guest badge and took the tactic of rushing out of the curtained area behind the stage as if on an urgent mission, trusting that no one would stop her. She immediately turned into the bathroom outside the big conference room, slipped into a stall and began her transformation.

Taking off the uniform jacket, she peeled the large flexible two way port off the inside of the left front of the jacket and stuck it to the wall of the stall. She pulled a flexible mirror out of it and stuck it to the wall next to it. She removed her wig, blouse and slacks, putting them through the port to the waldo. He passed her out some large wet wipe type cloths treated to remove her bronzer. Once she’d removed the bronzer from all areas that would be exposed, her waldo passed her a nice, though androgynous green blouse, and black slacks. She’d decided to forgo her trademark pearls.

Ell had on her graphene underwear and over it a sports bra. The bra had lacers built into it with the laces passed through a port. Her waldo snugged the laces flattening her pregnancy enlarged breasts. Around her stomach she had an inflatable section that would fill in her slender waist to create a more androgynous shape. She put the shirt on over it and finding the shirt to be a little snug, deflated her waist a bit. Then she pulled on the slacks, tucking the shirt into their elastic waist band and belt.

The waldo passed her a clip on tie which didn’t match her outfit very well and she put it on. She’d picked the ill matching tie as something she thought a man might choose. The waldo also passed her a reddish moustache and goatee combination. She peeled the back off of the adhesive and, studying herself in the mirror, carefully applied it.

Watching in the mirror she slowly inflated the graphene balloons inside her cheeks, not trying to achieve the appearance of one of her aliases, but just a slightly more masculine look. The balloons behind her ears tilted them slightly forward.

She studied her image in the mirror. She didn’t look as masculine as she had wanted, but she thought she would pass casual inspection. Most importantly, except for her green eyes and reddish blond hair, she didn’t look like Ell Donsaii.

After a final check of her neck, wrists, and ankles for remaining smudges of bronzer, she put the mirror back through the port and took the port down off the wall, sliding it into her shirt and sticking it to the inflated balloon around her waist.

Her HUD showed that her eight o’clock appearance on the conference schedule was in fifteen minutes. Quickly checking to be sure the bathroom was empty, Ell stepped out of the stall and then through the door into the hallway beyond.

There was a security station at the entrance to the main conference room. She pulled her conference ID placard off its lanyard and handed it to the Brazilian guard, leaning close enough to whisper a Portuguese phrase Allan had given her, “Please pass the word to President Goncalves that I have arrived.”

He looked at her, puzzled, then down at her placard. His eyebrows went up as he saw the name “Ell Donsaii.” When he glanced back up at her, Ell winked. He blinked a couple of times, then grinned and waved her through the entrance.

Ell stopped just inside the big room and stood next to a large trash container. To be sure President Goncalves was aware that Ell was present, she had Allan send her a message over the net as well.

Goncalves stood and walked toward the podium, glancing around as if looking for someone. Ell bent down near the opening of the trash can. Her hands swept across her face and neck pulling off the facial hair and clip on tie. As she stood back up, unbuttoning her collar, all of her facial prosthetics and her belly deflated while the laces on her bra relaxed, transforming her from a slightly pudgy and androgynous guy to a slender and very attractive young woman. Small balloons popped the big square “man’s” type heels off her shoes, leaving her in shoes with narrow heels more appropriate for a woman. She kicked the big heels under the trash can.

When Goncalves looked her way again Ell gave her a small wave, seeing a startled expression of surprise as Goncalves suddenly saw Ell in a location she had checked only moments before.

Goncalves turned to the microphone and welcomed the guests back to the conference. “Now,” she said, “I have invited a special guest to give us a brief presentation which I believe will address important changes to our world and our economies in the next decades. She is listed on your program as a surprise guest. This is not because of any desire of mine to startle you with a bombshell revelation, but because she is subject to arrest in her home country. For the purposes of this conference I have extended her the protection of the Brazilian government as we cannot see any reason why Dr. Donsaii, the woman who saved our world from Comet Hearth-Daster, should be considered to be a danger.” Goncalves extended a hand toward Ell, “Dr. Donsaii?”

As Ell walked nervously toward the podium, Stockton shot to her feet, “I protest! This woman is a wanted criminal! I must demand that you place her under arrest and immediately remand her into our custody!”

Goncalves turned back to the microphone. “President Stockton, I remind you that you are at present a guest in the sovereign state of Brazil. This woman has broken none of our laws and is also here as our guest. We would be quite pleased were she to apply for permanent citizenship here. In any case, please listen to her presentation as it will certainly help all of us to understand the impact that D5R’s technology will have on our world.”

Truculently, Stockton remained standing, glaring as Ell approached the podium, then turning to whisper vehemently to her aides and security team. Finally she settled her bulk back into her chair but did not relax. Instead she remained upright, leaning forward on her elbows and glowering at Ell.

The representatives of the member nations at the conference glanced back and forth from Donsaii to Stockton. Ranging from bemused to wondering, most of them could not fathom why the two women should be at such odds. However, eventually they all turned their attention to Donsaii.

Regis Fuller, Prime Minister of Australia wondered whether they might be able to entice the young woman with an offer of asylum in his country. Donsaii stood silently for a moment as if nervous. Fuller marveled a moment at the fact that this young woman, wearing only a blouse and slacks, rather than the suits or formal garb of the other participants, and whether actually nervous or not, had such an elegant and commanding presence that the room seemed to be holding its breath as it waited for her to speak.

Donsaii took a deep breath and began, “Ladies and gentlemen, I would first like to thank President Goncalves for the invitation to speak about the effects that I believe D5R’s new technologies may have on your economies and the economy of our world in the future.” She paused.

“Second, I must address the proverbial elephant in the room, President Stockton’s declaration of my person to be a menace to my country, and to the world in general. This declaration formed the basis of my arrest and imprisonment as well as my continued presence on the ‘Most Wanted’ list in my home country.

“President Stockton,” Ell nodded at her chief executive, “is correct in that the technologies which allowed us to reach the stars with the Tau Ceti probe are extremely dangerous and can be correctly characterized as a menace. She and I simply disagree on the means by which these technologies should be restricted. She feels that such technology falls under the purview of the government. I feel that once more than one person understands the bizarre principles involved, it will no longer be a secret and that this technology must remain a secret to prevent great harm. So, I hope that you can understand that, although she and I disagree strongly on the means by which this technology must be restricted, that we are in complete agreement regarding the end goal. I wish to assure you that, even though I have refused to submit myself to imprisonment because I do not feel it actually furthers her goal of limiting this technology, President Stockton has my respect for the determination with which she has been working to keep our country and the world safe.

“Now, I will speak briefly regarding how I anticipate that certain of D5R’s technologies will impact our world in the future. Beginning with ports, I expect that they will continue to lower the cost of transportation of raw materials and finished goods from one location to another. This will equalize the cost of goods and the value of resources around the world. As an example a farmer in a remote location will be able to sell his exotic but short shelf-life foodstuffs to markets far away. He will earn more and those markets will have access to interesting foods that were previously inaccessible. That farmer will then be able to use the proceeds of his sales to purchase products that would never have been affordable in the past because of the costs and difficulty of transporting them to his location. Ports have, of course, caused economic disturbance as jobs are lost in the transportation industries, but they will also tremendously diminish the cost and the pollution resulting from moving goods. As you know, people cannot pass through ports but even the transportation of people has and will continue to become more economical and less polluting as vehicles are powered directly by driveshafts rather than by the burning of hydrocarbons.

“Port delivered solar power should continue to diminish our reliance on coal and petroleum as well as making heating cheap and non-polluting for everyone. It will allow us to use desalination to relieve freshwater shortages. At present, cooling your home heats our planet, but deep space cooling does not. As we burn less and less carbon, decreased global warming should diminish the costs of weather related problems.

“Pollutants that are created can be easily stored off of our planet as has already begun to happen with radioactive waste. Holding the pollutants in those sites will allow their recovery should we someday need the molecules contained in them. I envision the day when each home will have a “trash port” through which garbage is sent, not to landfills, but to asteroids. The United States alone produces a half a cubic kilometer of municipal solid waste or garbage per year which is a lot. But the asteroid Juno has a surface area on the order of 200,000 square kilometers, so it would take a thousand years for that garbage to cover Juno to a depth of five meters. This should give us some time to work on alternatives.

“Access to raw materials in our solar system will result in diminished damage to Earth’s ecosystem. Certainly the asteroids will provide cheaper and less destructive access to the mining of metals, but we are also beginning to harvest hydrocarbons from the lakes of Titan. I can conceive that one day we’ll be pumping water from the oceans of Europa or claiming carbon from the atmosphere of Venus. Waldoes will allow us to do this without human risk and will provide employment for waldo drivers who work all over the solar system from the comfort of earth, doing many other things that were heretofore too dangerous for people. This may include the exploration of worlds in other solar systems. I must point out that waldoes can provide the ultimate in ‘work from home’ programs and can be adapted to allow many of the disabled to become productive members of society. Although the D5R subsidiary is the most advanced in the harvesting of space resources, ILX and several other corporations are starting to get into the business and I must tell you that at least one man has now incorporated himself as an asteroid prospector with the intent to find his ‘mother lode’ and harvest it himself in the best tradition of the erstwhile miners of the old West.

“In the medical fields, most of you are already aware of how ports are improving artificial limbs by leaps and bounds. Ports are also showing promise in the field of artificial organs, supporting failing hearts, acting as an artificial pancreas for diabetics and should soon serve to replace dialysis for failed kidneys. We believe that oxygenation of blood outside the body will soon help individuals whose lungs are failing.

“Finally, a new subdivision of D5R called Allosci, has been formed to exploit the possibilities of carbon allotropes. Many of you are aware that graphene cabling is being spun out at D5R’s habitat in low earth orbit. Graphene provides us with cables over a hundred times as strong as steel. You probably are not aware that some similar technology makes it quite easy to form diamond and more importantly a composite of graphene and diamond we call graphend. Graphend will certainly allow the construction of structures that have been impossible to imagine until now. To whet your appetite I will pass around this two millimeter rod which has a diamond center and a graphend surface. You can each try to bend or break it. Don’t worry, you won’t be able to damage it.” She passed it to the Brazilian delegation at her right.

“Or as a flight of fancy, you might consider man’s long lived dream of a car that can fly. This has become plausible with AI control and port-shaft power but we still have the clumsy issue of where to put the wings when we’re done flying.” She lifted out a model of a car, “This little car has inflatable graphene wings. If they are pressurized to hundreds of pounds of pressure…” she paused as wings suddenly extended themselves outward from the roof to either side, “and the car is propelled forward by a compressed air jet…” With a hiss the car skimmed forward off of her hand, dipped a little, then lifted back up to fly around the room. “As you can see, our dream might come true.” The little car-plane circled the room and then landed out in the empty center area between the large circle of desks. “I’m sure that with a little thought many of you will have ideas for graphene balloon type objects that can be rapidly blown up into rigid structures.”

The young woman flashed a brilliant smile at her audience, then said, “I would stay to answer questions, however, my AI tells me that President Stockton has mobilized almost every member of the American delegation towards my arrest as I leave this chamber.” She nodded at both of the exits where a number of men in suits were jostling with guards in Brazilian uniforms. “President Goncalves,” she nodded to the Brazilian, “I appreciate your offer of protection; however I would prefer not to put your government and my own at odds, so I shall simply leave before the people in the hall become violent.”

Before Fuller had time to wonder how she thought she would leave when both exits were jammed with American Secret Service, she stepped backward and vanished, a small ripple in the curtain behind the stage the only sign of her disappearance.

People stood in consternation, trying to see where she’d gone. Several of the Secret Service men finally shouldered their way through the entrances and rushed the stage, leaping off the back of it where she appeared to have gone. Later Fuller heard that they looked under the stage and behind the curtains but saw no one. Many people in the room took this disappearance as evidence that Donsaii did have means to port people, but was simply not sharing it. Perhaps it was part of the dangerous technology she said she was suppressing?

Goncalves returned to the podium and banged her gavel. “President Stockton, will you have your men return to their stations, or must I have them arrested?”

Muscles twitched at Stockton’s jaw a moment, then she spoke to her AI. Moments later the agents reappeared from behind the curtains and left the room trailed by the Brazilians who had been trying to stop them.

Goncalves turned back to the room, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure we are all grateful to Dr. Donsaii for the insights she has just provided to us. We all need to take account of these technologies and the effects they will have on our economies and our world. While many of us are no doubt worried about the ripples their introduction will bring to our economies,” she chuckled, “perhaps tsunamis—I’m sure none of us want to deny the world their benefits.

Goncalves, looked around the room, “I have an announcement. While Dr. Donsaii spoke to us, one of my aides sent me a notification that the Nobel Peace Prize has just been announced. It is being awarded to Ell Donsaii for her roles in stopping Comet Hearth Daster, as well as the roles of her technology in relieving the drought in Ethiopia this summer.” She paused to look at Stockton, “There is no doubt that the awarding of this prize is also intended as a message to the United States. A gentle reminder of just how much the rest of this world values this young woman.” Goncalves smiled broadly back and forth at the stunned attendees. “As you know, Dr. Donsaii already has a Nobel prize in physics. I hope you will join me in applauding this additional well-deserved honor, even if she herself is no longer present to hear it.” As Goncalves began to clap the room rose to its feet to join her in a standing ovation.

With the exception of Edith Stockton and her delegation…

Epilogue

Grandmother Emmerit studied her grandson, glad that he’d gotten that wild hair of his in control for his wedding. He looked quite handsome in his tuxedo. She smiled, her son, Roger’s father, was acting as best man and he looked pretty good too.

The music started and everyone turned to watch the bridesmaids enter. The first two entered without any excitement but when the maid of honor entered a sudden susurrus of excitement swept the church. Grandmother Emmerit felt at a loss. What had everyone so excited? Finally she nudged her daughter in law, “What’s going on?”

“Emma’s maid of honor is Ell Donsaii. It was going to be a secret with her wearing a disguise, but she’s shown up as herself. I hope it doesn’t take too much away from Emma’s day.”

“Roger’s old girlfriend the gymnast girl?”

Her daughter in law gave her a little grin, “Yep, the gymnast girl. She’s wanted, so she won’t be able to stay for the reception, but Emma wanted her to be here as herself for the wedding.”

Wanted? Grandmother Emmerit thought, What for? It seems pretty rude not to reschedule whatever she was wanted for in favor of her friend’s wedding.

The matriarch considered asking, but bridesmaids in place, the music changed and Emma appeared at the back of the church.

She looked stunning…

The End

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 plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially 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.

“Wanted” asks what might happen if you utilized the properties of ports to shear between molecules on a dimensional level, cutting through objects instantly. Such technologies (disruptors) have been explored previously in science fiction but it’s hard to ignore the tremendous destructive potential such equipment would provide the wielder. With no defense, they would have tremendous potential for evil.

Graphene’s tremendous tensile strength has been a feature in previous Ell stories, but here we consider what an inflated graphene structure might be like. Not bouncy like a balloon, it isn’t very stretchy. Think of a basketball or a car tire, but way harder. With hundreds or thousands of pounds of pressure inside you would have a very rigid structure. A rigid structure that could be deflated down to a tiny size because of the thinness of its graphene wall.

Wouldn’t ports be wonderful tools for fighting fires?

Even better, wouldn’t it be great to be able to put radioactive, industrial, household and other waste somewhere far away?

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Allen Dietz, and Elliot Hamilton, each of whom significantly improved this story.

Table of Contents

- Author’s Note
- Preprologue
- Prologue
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Epilogue