Author: Laurence E. Dahners
Date: 2013-11-30T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Thriller
Description: "Defiant" is the ninth in a series of near future SciFi/Thrillers whose young heroine Ell Donsaii has a nerve mutation which has made her a genius as well as an athletic phenomenon. In "Defiant," she, her husband Shan Kinrais, and their friend Gary Pace begin working on commercialization of the carbon allotrope technology they learned about in "Allotropes." Also, new uses, both beneficial and dangerous are being found for her ports. These wormholes aren't big enough to send people through, yet they make possible technologies that have created huge changes in our world. Those changes have resul
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Defiant

An Ell Donsaii story # 9

By

Laurence E Dahners

Copyright 2013 Laurence E Dahners

Kindle Edition

Author’s Note

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

“Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)”

“Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2)”

“Lieutenant (an Ell Donsaii story #3)”

“Rocket (an Ell Donsaii story #4)”

“Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5)”

“Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6)”

“Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7)” and

“Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8)”

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

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

Preprologue

Allan Donsaii was an unusually gifted quarterback. He was widely recognized to be 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, he wasn’t drafted because the pro teams felt he was too small.

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

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

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

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

Much more rapidly…

Prologue

New York— Senator Edith Blaustein (R- NY) with the support of Francis Ementhal, renowned astrophysicist from the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at NYU, have submitted a bill aimed directly at Ell Donsaii. This legislation would require Dr. Donsaii to turn over all methods and equipment used in their exploration of the third planet of the star Tau Ceti.

Ementhal says that the methods used to send probes to the stars represent a technological leap forward that must be made available to the entire human race. He says it also “borders on the insane that a girl, only twenty-four years of age, is acting as de facto ambassador for the human race in our initial interactions with the other inhabitants of our Universe.” He proposes that a new national committee would be put in charge of alien contact.

Interestingly, Dr. Daniel Hage, Ementhal’s own Department Chair at NYU is vehemently opposes to this proposed legislation…

Kant Fladwami entered the Oval Office and took the seat indicated by President Flood. Attorney General Aaron Blythe and Secretary of Defense Amundsen, a holdover from the previous administration, sat in the other chairs. Flood turned to Fladwami, “Kant, in our conversations you’ve recommended that we not pressure Donsaii to release her interstellar tech to Ementhal’s proposed committee of eminent scientists. So far I’ve agreed with you, but now that Ementhal has got Blaustein taking a bill to Congress we’re going to have to do more than ‘just say no.’ I wanted to have you review your rationale with me again. Aaron will hopefully apprise me of the legal ramifications.” He waved at Amundsen, “And I’d like Mark’s opinion too. He’s known Donsaii a lot longer than either of us, and after all, he’s the one that would be responsible for defending us if she does bring the Huns from outer space down on us.”

Kant took a deep breath and glanced at Amundsen. “Well, the issues are tremendously complex. I take Ementhal’s point that encounters with possibly inimical alien races carry tremendous risk, not just for the United States, but for the human race in general. Where he and I differ is in regards to the question of who best should curate these endeavors and risks. Ementhal contends that a committee of brilliant scientists—to which, I would point out, he has had to add politicians in order to get the support of Blaustein and Congress…” Kant shrugged, “In any case, a committee… of hopefully brilliant people. He feels such a committee is needed to avoid the possibility of a faux pas in our interactions with an alien race.” Fladwami looked from the President to Amundsen and sighed, “Gentlemen, I do not trust committees. In the face of a need for urgent decision, they are often extraordinarily clumsy. I suspect that in such endeavors secrecy may sometimes be necessary, and that such a committee could not be relied upon to maintain that secrecy. Personally, I would prefer to rely on one brilliant person; a person already awarded the Medal of Honor and the Medal of Freedom for exemplary service to our country. I trust Ell Donsaii, whereas no matter how such a committee might be formed, I will never be able to fully trust it.”

Amundsen opened his mouth to speak but Fladwami put up a hand to forestall him. He said, “One more point, Mark. I don’t think that Donsaii is willing to turn the equipment or the methods over to such a committee. She won’t trust them any more than I do. Trying to force her to release that tech might backfire in the worst way.”

“Backfire?” Amundsen said.

“Backfire,” Fladwami said emphatically. “Donsaii has singlehandedly advanced technology and created wealth at a faster pace than any other individual in history.”

“Wait a minute,” Blythe interjected, “all I hear about is how she’s destroying the economy.”

“Well,” Fladwami chuckled, “she’s certainly disturbed the economy. With so much change there will, of course, be people losing their jobs. Railroads took jobs from drovers, electricity took jobs from lamp salesmen, and the internet destroyed newspapers. We don’t have milkmen anymore either. Now Donsaii’s PGR chips are turning the telecomm industry upside down and her ports are revolutionizing transportation. But… they’re letting us do things better… and cheaper… so the people who do have jobs can buy things cheaper. The ‘woe is me’ people aren’t pointing out that industry is booming as more and more uses are found for this new technology. Actually, people are being hired in droves. Sure, some people have lost jobs, often jobs they’ve held for a long time and that they treasure, but unemployment is actually dropping. We should also recognize that the burgeoning exports of her technology have recently given the U.S. a positive balance of trade for the first time in a long time.”

Flood interrupted, “This discussion of the economy is interesting, but doesn’t have much bearing on the question of whether or not we should be letting one person control our ‘first contact’ with other intelligent races out there.”

Fladwami quietly but emphatically said, “It is relevant if we piss off the goose that’s been laying the golden eggs by trying to force her do something she feels is unethical.”

Blythe raised his eyebrows, “Unethical? Why would she feel it’s unethical?”

Fladwami snorted, “Speaking to me, she’s likened giving that committee control of first contact, to handing a gun to a three year old.”

Blythe stared, “But you don’t give a gun to a psycho either! How can we leave said gun in the control of a single individual!”

“You haven’t met this individual have you?”

“Well, no but… any individual might flake out.”

“So can an entire committee, or even an entire country under the sway of a charismatic leader. Look at Nazi Germany. There are plenty of other examples.”

President Flood cleared his throat, “I propose that we invite said young lady up for a discussion of the issues. I want to hear directly from her the rationale for not wanting a committee to be in charge and discuss other options she may feel are reasonable… Besides, I need to congratulate her before the nation for what she just did in the Olympics.”

“You can say that again…”

***

“Ms. Donsaii, Ms. Donsaii!” the reporter in the press pool waved his hand.

Ell acknowledged him.

“We’re all aware that none of the medical or drug testing done on you has found any banned substances, but how do you explain your ability to perform at a level so much higher than even the world’s most elite athletes,” he shrugged, “like those who have attended and competed at these Olympics?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.” Ell grinned at him, “I can assure you that I haven’t found some magic, undetectable drug that lets me run fast. My parents were both very athletic, but so were the parents of many of the athletes at these Olympics. My leading hypothesis is that somehow my nervous and musculoskeletal systems, by the luck of the draw, have every one of their gene selections fall at the extreme end of choices that give up endurance for speed.” She laughed, “I assure you I’m a terrible endurance athlete. I’d never be chosen for anyone’s long, or even their middle distance track team.” She pointed to another reporter.

“How does it feel to have proven Michael Fentis wrong after all those times he said you couldn’t actually have run that fast?”

Ell gave a wistful look, “Kinda sad, actually. Mr. Fentis is an amazing sprinter who rightfully took great pride in his accomplishments. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that I was petty and prideful enough to set out to prove him wrong.”

Startled glances among the reporters there showed just how few had anticipated that answer…

***

An enormous crush of reporters and paparazzi waited outside the exits from the Track and Field facilities. Each had their own reasons for choosing the exit they believed that Donsaii would leave through, though some were members of teams that had multiple exits covered. Aware of her propensity to wear ball caps and hoodies to cover her signature strawberry blond hair, every light skinned person wearing such was subjected to intense scrutiny.

No one noticed the slender dark-skinned girl with the spiky black hair and beaky nose that slipped from one of the smaller exits and looked curiously around at the AV-equipped crowd. She crossed the street, hopping on a bus before it made its turn to head back out toward the hotels. Taking a seat, she leaned her head against the window and was gone.

Salah boarded the bus away from the Olympic venues and nearly sat next to another man before he saw the girl. She had on a snug t-shirt and jeans. With a smile he slid into the seat next to her, “Hello,” he said, gazing at her breasts and noticing the odd design on the front of her shirt. It had a red circle with a slash through it, over a hand. “What’s the meaning of your shirt?” he asked, sliding a hand down between their legs so it rested against her thigh. A nice firm thigh he noticed with some delight.

Her hand followed his down between their legs and onto his hand. “It means,” she said, “keep your hands to yourself.” She grasped his index finger and started bending it backward,

Salah reached over with his other hand and grabbed at her wrist, “Hey! What are you doing?!” The girl was astonishingly strong!

Despite his grip she continued to turn his finger back until it really hurt. Trying to take the stress off of it, he slid off the seat and crouched to his knees.

Looking at him with icy green eyes, she said, “If I let go, will you keep your hands to yourself from now on?”

“Achhh!” Humiliated and embarrassed, Salah ground out, “Yes! Yes!”

She let go and he shook his hand out with some relief, but also growing anger. She’d brought it on herself, after all, dressing like a sleazy tart! Tight shirt and pants, spiky hair, colored contacts! How did she have the gall to disrespect him for acting in a fashion she’d as much as asked for? The bus bumped along, stopping here and there. Salah’s temper rose. Inside he fumed with a desire for revenge. Then she taunted him by cheerfully, as if nothing had happened between them, getting up and saying, “This is my stop.”

As her legs separated to step past his knees into the aisle, Salah couldn’t resist.

He shot his hand up between them…

Before his hand reached her crotch, something struck him in the cheek. People on the bus turned to stare at the whipcrack sound.

Something had hit him, hard! Salah at first thought another passenger had knocked into his head with some large piece of rigid luggage.

But then, leaving no doubt about who had delivered the blow, the girl leaned down and growled, “I told you to keep your hands to yourself!” Confused and woozy, Salah groped for the glasses which had flown off his face.

People stared at Salah while the girl got off the bus without further incident. His equilibrium recovered, but he had a difficult time explaining his massively bruised face, black eye and broken glasses to his parents when he got home.

Chapter One

Delhi, India—As the Track and Field events of these Olympics conclude, all that anyone can talk about is the complete destruction of the world records in the sprint distances by Ell Donsaii. She is now not just the women’s record holder in the three sprint distances and the long jump, but she has broken the men’s records as well. She has accomplished this astonishing feat without braggadocio, instead constantly praising her competitors for their accomplishments, no matter how meager those accomplishments now seem. People have begun asking, “Could this woman perform at an unbelievable level in other sports if she wished?

As Ell walked the last part of the route to her hotel Allan said, “You have a call from Dr. Kant Fladwami.”

“Put him on… Dr. Fladwami, what can I do for you?”

“The President has asked me to arrange a meeting. He’d like to both congratulate you on the Olympics and speak to you about alien contact. When will you be back here in the States?”

“Um, I’m planning a little vacation over here before I return next week. Do you need me to call that off?”

“No, no, that’d be fine. Could you come by the week after next?”

“Sure.”

***

The door banged open and Ell bounded into the hotel room, dressed in her “Ellen” get up. “Shan!” she shouted gleefully, leaping onto the bed and throwing her arms around him.

“What held you up?” Shan asked hugging her back.

“Coach Black caught me. Turns out I was supposed to be ‘making myself available to the press’ after my last event of each day of the Olympics rather than immediately sneaking off in disguise. So I sat for a press conference and answered a lot of predictable questions with predictable answers.” She raised an eyebrow, “But, now we can get out of here!”

“Tired of India already?”

“Yup. The men here are really crude. I got groped again today.”

“Damn!” Shan grimaced, feeling like he should have been there to protect her, though he suspected she could protect herself better than he could. “Did he get another dose of your pepper spray?”

Ell frowned, “No, he caught me by surprise and I slapped him before I thought to spray him… I feel pretty bad about it.”

Shan snorted, “You think a slap was worse than being pepper sprayed?”

She winced, “Yeah. I hit him pretty hard.”

Shan shrugged, still doubtful. Changing the subject he said, “So where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go? We’ve got four more days before we have to be in Venice to catch our plane back to the US.”

“Greece?”

“Oooohh! The islands?”

Shan shrugged, “Sure.”

“Allan,” Ell said to her AI (Artificial Intelligence), “Check us out of this hotel. Tell the pilots we’re on our way to the airport and want to fly to a Greek island.”

“Which island?” Allan asked.

“One with an airport. We don’t care much which one. Tell them to surprise us.” She turned to Shan, “Is that OK with you?”

Shan nodded.

“Steve,” Ell said so that Allan would connect her to her security detail. “We’re heading to the airport. You guys ready enough that we could head downstairs now?”

***

Shan lifted his head off the sheets and peered out the window at the gleaming white buildings of Santorini. He stretched and got up, padding to the window. The sun, rising behind him, lit the scattered, brilliantly blue domes that topped some of the buildings. Straight out the window was an infinity pool, and beyond that the cliff dropped down into the caldera of the ancient Thera volcano on which Santorini perched. The sapphire waters of the Aegean filled the entire bowl of the volcano except for the small island, Nea Kameni, out in the middle.

Shaking his head over the beautiful scenery, he turned to head into the next room. Ell lay relaxed on the couch, studying a bizarre graph on the large wall screen. “Hey girl, jetlag isn’t kicking my ass so bad this time. Think I’m toughening up?”

She smiled brilliantly up at him. “Hey, yourself. The time zone only changed two hours, plus jetlag isn’t as bad going west as it is going east. I suspect you’re just as weak as you’ve always been.”

Shan frowned, “You know, your constant belittling of my jetlag tolerance is probably gonna turn me into a eunuch.”

“Hah!” She leapt up from the couch and took him by the hand, pulling him back toward the bedroom. Tossing him a crooked smile over her shoulder, she said, “Well then, honeymoon boy, we’d better exercise your manhood while it’s still functional.”

***

Ell lay, head on Shan’s shoulder, running a finger gently over his chest. Shan said, “So what did you have graphed on the screen in the other room?”

“Oh I’m using Mathematica to display what we know about the conditions for formation of the various carbon allotropes. It just seems to me that a good graph would help us understand it better. If we understood it, we might be able to move away from following a recipe that the sigmas told us created a particular allotrope to being able to say, ‘this particular set of conditions should optimally synthesize… say diamond.’”

“Really? Can I look at that? The pattern you had up looks like a…” He paused at her upraised hand.

Ell’s eyes had widened before she put up her halting hand, “Of course! Come in and look. I’ve been stymied! Don’t tell me what pattern you’re seeing, I don’t want to influence you. I’ll just tell you what’s being graphed and then let you play with it while I make a breakfast to restore your strength.”

Ell came back in the living room of their little villa carrying a small tray loaded with sliced toasted bagels slathered in butter. A tub of cream cheese was in her other hand. “What do you think? Does it fit the pattern you thought it did?”

Shan stared at the plate she had in her hands with widened eyes. “Was once the day when, seeing that, I would have thought you’d invited some people over for breakfast… But, I’ll bet you’re planning to eat all but one of those bagels by yourself aren’t you?”

Ell blushed faintly, “Hey, I have been getting a lot of exercise the past few days you know?”

Shan barked a laugh, “You know you’d eat all of that even if you hadn’t just been kicking ass in the Olympics!”

“Not so! I made myself an extra bagel ‘cause of all that extra exercise.”

Shan shook his head and picked up half a bagel. “I should just be glad I’m not the one having to keep you in food.” He scooped up some cream cheese and put a dollop on one side. He took a large bite and leaned back expansively, stretching his arms on the back of the couch and chewing contentedly.

“Hey!” Ell poked him in the side. “I made you these fine bagels; you can’t just sit there chewing your cud. You owe me your thoughts on the graph.”

Shan lifted a chin towards the wall screen, “Read ‘em and weep, my little lady. Read ‘em and weep. Then I think you should put more cream cheese on my bagel, I’m kinda tired from all that work.”

Ell’s head snapped around and she focused on the screen. A three dimensional graph that looked somewhat like an undulating landscape  had some of the sigma’s specified conditions near some sharp peaks and other sigma specifications near some of the deep valleys. “My God Shan,” she hissed, “That’s gorgeous! I’ve been assuming that the sigma’s specifications were optimal, but you’re thinking I couldn’t get them to fit because they aren’t actually the best conditions, right? You think if we adjusted the conditions to fall on the peaks of this plot we’d get even better formation of those particular allotropes?”

“That’s what I think,” he waved a negligent hand. “However, I am but a humble theoretical mathematician. Merely a simple soul, schooled in the use of this modest computational engine.”

Ell snorted, “Humble!” Picking up the tub of cream cheese she spread some on a bagel and, taking a big bite, dropped back against the couch to stare at the display. “As soon as I finish this meager breakfast, I’m gonna have to take you out and demonstrate my admiration.”

“I thought you just demonstrated that in the other room?”

***

When Gary arrived at D5R in the morning, his AI told him he had a message from Ell that had arrived the night before. He was to pick up a PGR chip from Sheila that would link him directly to Ell’s AI so she could send him a confidential message.

Sheila handed him the chip, telling him that Ell had said he should keep that particular chip for future restricted communications.

“OK,” he replied, pulling off his headband and socketing the chip in place as he headed for one of the little conference rooms. He had initially planned to just go out into the main research room where he usually worked and watch it on his HUD. With all the cloak and dagger over the chip though, he decided he ought to watch it in a private room, at least ‘til he knew what it was.

Once connected securely, Ell’s AI delivered a brief recorded message on which Ell said, “Gary, I’ve been working with Shan Kinrais from the Math Department at UNC to plot out the conditions for formation of the various allotropes. He’s made a real breakthrough. See the attached graphic plot. We believe the plot diagrams the conditions where you will get the best formation of each different allotrope. Of note, please look at the two neighboring peaks at the upper right. You’ll see that, in this region, conditions for graphene and diamond are very close to one another except for a small difference in temperature. If this works out to be true, we believe that you should be able to stitch layers of graphene together with tetrahedral diamond bonds. What we call ‘graphend.’ You just apply a bit more heat with a micro laser beam at each point where you want to bond the sheets to one another. Lots of cross bonds for a material that you want to be stiff in bending, very few bonds for materials loaded mostly in tension but that you don’t want flaking apart.”

Gary had opened the graph and his eye had already tracked to a graphene synthesis point that had conditions similar to what he was using to make graphene out at the space habitat. Could the conditions at the peak provide even cleaner or more rapid synthesis? Idly he wondered when Ell and Shan had found the time to collaborate. Ell had been competing in the Olympics and last he had heard Shan was on his honeymoon. Online he guessed.

Then his brain caught up to what she’d said about stitching together layers of graphene and he felt prickles in his scalp…

***

Shan walked out of the little kitchenette in their villa with a Zeos Pilsner in one hand. Ell stood at the window overlooking the caldera with her arms stretched out high and wide. He walked over and put his arms around her.

Turning, she snuggled in to his embrace, tucking her head against his shoulder.

Shan thought that the moment was close to perfect. All seemed to be right with their world.

After a moment she leaned her head back and said, “Hey, feel like going to a deserted beach?”

“Sure, but I already checked, the nice beaches on Santorini are all crowded.”

“I was thinking maybe we’d go to one of the little deserted islands near here.”

“Hah! Those islands look close on the map but they’re actually fifteen to twenty miles from here. If we hired a local boat it’d take a couple hours to get there and a couple more to come back. I’m not sure it’s worth it?”

“Why don’t we fly?”

“Deserted islands don’t have airports!”

“Helicopter?”

“Hmm, I know they have a chopper that takes people on tours of the island. Are you thinking we could charter it?”

“Nope,” Ell raised an eyebrow. “But we could take the little ultralight quadcopter we brought in the Gulfstream.”

Shan’s eyes widened, “What kind of helicopter would fit into that little jet?”

Ell winked at him. “A little one.”

An hour later Shan found himself beside a fairly deserted road, holding a small backpack with five gyro sandwiches and two collapsible cups. Ell and Steve were arguing about whether it was safe for her to take the little helicopter up. Nearby were a couple of SUVs Steve had rented for the security team.

Shan stared at the device Ell had pulled out of one of the SUVs. It had been in five pieces which she had snapped together. However, even after assembly, Ell had carried the entire thing by herself suggesting it wasn’t very heavy. Almost every part of it looked like it was made out of carbon fiber. It had a couple of large ducted fans, front and back, with smaller ones on each side, mounted a little closer to the back. She set it on its side, and snapped down three spindly little legs with wheels. The legs had all been folded up against the saddle which bridged from the front fan to the back one. Once she’d clicked the legs down, she flipped it up onto the wheels.

The whole time Ell worked on the copter, Steve kept up a constant harangue about how dangerous this was, how it was probably against Greek law and that he couldn’t believe she would consider taking her new husband up in it. “You told me,” Steve said, “that Shan wouldn’t even approve of you flying these ‘copters, much less taking him with you!”

Ell turned to him, hands on her hips. “Steve,” she grinned, “my mother doesn’t nag this much! Take it as a given that I’m going to go somewhere on this chopper. Shan’s a big boy, he can decide for himself whether he wants to go or not.” She turned to Shan, “I’m gonna take it up for a little ride to make sure everything’s working. That way you can see how it works and decide if you want to go for a ride too, OK?”

Shan nodded numbly. He’d always pictured himself as the daredevil of his family. He’d be the one who would have to talk his wife into doing exciting stuff. But a little helicopter she’d designed herself and that the guys in the D5R machine shop built for her? Could his new wife be completely out of her mind?

Ell went over to the SUV and pulled on some coverall type pants and a jacket then turned to Barrett, “Toss me my brain bucket.”

Barrett actually handed her the helmet and she pulled it on, right over her HUD. She pushed the little ‘copter around to the other side of the SUV so the spectators would be protected from any accident. Straddling the seat she twisted the throttle a little then lifted and pulled back on the handlebars while looking at the rotors in the front duct. There were two rotors inside the duct and they began slowly counter rotating. She gradually sped them up; apparently feeling for vibration which would suggest something was out of balance. Then she pushed the handlebars forward while looking back over her shoulder at the back fan. It spun up smoothly as well. Centering the handlebars front to back she lifted and all four fans spun up. The two side ducts had single rotors in them, turning clockwise on the right and counterclockwise on the left. She twisted the throttle a little more and air began blowing out much harder. The lightweight craft lifted off the ground before it had thrown up very much dust.

Staying close to the ground, Ell flew it off about a hundred yards away, then lifted into the air about twenty feet. She made some little circles and figure eights, then flew back over closer to the SUV and landed. As the rotors spun down, she lifted her visor, grinned at Shan and said, “You ready to go out to an island?”

Shan looked over at Steve, “have you tried this out?”

Steve rolled his eyes and shook his head.

Shan frowned at Ell, “Are you sure it can lift both of us?”

“Yup,” she patted the frame. “High strength carbon fiber. It’ll be even lighter when we can make it out of graphend, but for now this is pretty good stuff. The motors back in my barn that’re driving the fans put out a total of 500 horsepower so it’s actually way overpowered.”

“What happens if the rotors come apart, do we have ‘chutes?”

“If the rotors come apart our biggest problem would be shrapnel but that should be contained in the ducts. Fragments could fly out above or below the ducts, but that’s one of the reasons there are screens top and bottom over the ducts, though the top ones also keep the fans from sucking stuff in. So, the rotor shouldn’t hit us, but we would go down, so we won’t fly very high. We’d fall right into the Aegean out there. Water’s pretty warm, about 75oF so we’ll be OK for quite a while. We’ll just call Steve to rent a boat and come out after us.”

“Do we wear life vests?”

Ell slapped her jacket, “This thing is flotation Kevlar so you ain’t goin’ down unless you take it off.”

Shan looked over at Steve who shook his head in frustration, then back at Ell who beamed unrepentantly.

She said, “You gonna be a fuddy duddy, or you gonna climb on the bitch seat and live a little?”

Shan shook his head woefully, “I’ll bet I’m gonna regret this. You got a helmet and Kevlar suit for me?”

Ell pointed at the SUV, but when Shan turned Barrett was already standing behind him with a helmet and suit his size. A few minutes after that Shan was sitting on the back seat behind Ell. There were a couple of hand grips and Ell’s slender waist to hold onto. “What, no seat belt?”

“I thought about it, but it seems like you’d want to be able to bail out. Motorcycles don’t have seat belts either. So grab hold and let’s go for a ride.” She turned her head and leaned back to look at him, “Or you could sit this one out.” She reached out and adjusted the mounting for the handlebars so they weren’t so close to her.

Shan sighed, “Have you ever flown this thing before today?”

“Flew version one, which was more like a helicopter, about twenty times. This quadcopter version is number two. I’ve been up in it a couple times before that little run I just made to check it out.” Excitedly she started pointing out its features. “The front and rear ducted fans counter rotate to eliminate gyroscopic effects and each duct has a 175 horsepower engine powering the fans through ports. The two smaller 75 horse ducts pivot.” She pushed and pulled on the handlebars to show them pivoting front to back. When they’re straight down they help lift and tilt us side to side. Pivot them back and they push us forward so we can fly faster than a typical helicopter. Pivot them forward and they become our brakes to slow us down. The ‘copter has a pretty high powered AI controlling all the fans so if I pass out and let go of the handlebars it will just slowly lower itself down to the ground and land in an empty space. Driving it is pretty easy. The twist throttle supplies a general level of power. Lift the handlebars and it goes up. Lower them and it drops. Turn them left or right to go those directions, and tilt them to ‘bank’ it. Push the handlebars forward to go forward and pull them back to slow down or reverse. The AI controls it all by speeding and slowing the fans and pivoting the two side ducts.

“Oh hell,” Shan sighed, “I guess I can’t drag this out any longer. Take me up and let’s check out the beaches.”

“You’ve got a ported snorkel in that zippered upper left front pocket… just in case we fall in the water.” The rotors started spinning up as Shan closed his visor. When the wheels got light Ell pushed on the handlebars to tilt the ‘copter slightly forward. With a little more lift on the handlebars the hoverbike lifted off the ground and began skimming forward, over the road, across the beach, and out towards the Aegean.

Ell lifted them a little higher and they sailed out over the tops of the waves at an altitude of about five feet.

Shan found it breathtaking, a lot like his first ride on a motorcycle. But better!

Once he felt comfortable, Ell lifted to about ten feet and made some exhilarating “S” turns, then turned up the speed as they headed northeast from Santorini. Despite the wind noise outside, with his HUD inside the helmet and noise cancellation from his AI he could still talk to Ell fairly easily. “How do we find an island out here?”

“Well, Allan’s leading me to Anydros by GPS but…” she lifted the handlebars and they rose to about thirty feet where they could easily see a little island that had actually just been coming up over the horizon. “There it is.” Then she dropped back down to just above the water.

Skimming along just above the water made it seem like they were going a lot faster. “How fast are we going?” Shan asked.

“Only about eighty. We could go faster, but if we crash at those speeds, even water will hit us pretty hard. It isn’t that far, so we should be there in about ten more minutes, even at this speed.”

As they arrived at Anydros, Ell curved around the south end and swept up the eastern coast of the mile long island. She turned in at a small cove with a beach on the far side and coasted in for a landing just beyond the sand. Flipping up her visor, she turned to Shan, eyes dancing. “Was that great or what?” She leapt off the seat and pulled off her helmet and her “Raquel” wig.

Shan dismounted and pulled off his helmet too, unable to keep the delight out of his eyes. “Yeah! That was great! When do I get to fly it?”

Peeling off her Kevlar suit Ell said, “Hmm, the first time, I think you should fly it from the back seat with your arms around me. That way I can help if you start getting out of control.” She lifted an eyebrow, “I like having your arms around me.” She started unbuttoning her shirt.

Thinking that she’d have a bikini under her clothes, Shan’s eyes widened when he saw she didn’t. “No swim suit?”

Ell raised her eyebrows, “Who needs a suit? This island is deserted! She plucked her snorkel and some goggles out of the pocket on her Kevlar suit, then loped gracefully across the sand into the waves.

Shan stared admiringly after her for a moment, then started digging for his own snorkel.

After playing in the waves a while and snorkeling under them to look at the sea life, they walked back out of the sea. Ell spun joyously around, swinging her arms and laughing. “This is beautiful!”

Shan nodded, “You are indeed.”

“No, you doofus,” Ell beamed at him, “I meant the island and the sea and the beach and being alone on it with you.”

“Well, that too.” Shan grinned at her. “I’m feeling hungry, how ‘bout we get around those gyros you put in my backpack?”

“Great idea!” Ell said, patting her flat stomach and turning to trot that way.

Shan dug out the sandwiches and the two collapsible cups, then felt around in the empty backpack. “Hey, did you put in any drinks? All that’s in this backpack are the gyros and a couple of empty cups.”

She patted his stomach, “Maybe we need to drink some of this here six-pack?’

Shan snorted, “We could get pretty thirsty out here with nothin’ but saltwater for 20 miles.”

She held out her hand, “Well, let me see one of those cups.”

Shan handed her one of the collapsible cups and she popped it open and turned her back to him. He stared, wondering what she thought she was doing, but then he heard the distinctive sound of beer pouring. She’s naked! Where is beer coming from? Shan peered over her shoulder to see beer pouring into the cup from a spot in space about two inches in front of her belly button. It stopped for a moment, then resumed pouring from a spot just closer to her than it had been coming from, then paused again and began pouring from a little farther away. He snorted, “You’re using that single-ended port you put behind your belly button—for beer?”

Ell grinned at him, “Don’t you go acting all hoity-toity on me. I might just pour this beer of yours out in the sand.”

“Who’s pouring that beer in there for you? It must be what, six in the morning back in North Carolina?”

“Yep, you’re gonna need to thank Amy for gettin’ up so early, just to satisfy your thirst for alcoholic beverages.”

“Hah! You’re not going to have her pour you a drink?”

“Well, of course. As long as she’s already had to get up to pour one for you, pouring one for me too doesn’t seem like too much additional trouble does it?”

Shan laughed.

She held his beer out to him and plucked the other cup out of his hand. A moment later Coke started pouring into her cup.

They sat peacefully on a large smooth boulder at the water’s edge. Waves lapped at their feet while they ate their gyros. Shan sipped at his beer, looking out over the sea, glancing at the beautiful woman at his side. He thought about how, if someone had told him a few years earlier he might be doing this today, he would never have believed.

Ell turned to him and said, “You ready to try flying our little hoverbike yourself?”

“Yeah!”

Ell used her port to fill their cups with fresh water several times so they could splash the salt water off. Once the sun had dried them off, they put their clothes on and packed their trash back in the backpack. Shan straddled the hoverbike and Ell got on in front of him. Ell said, “I suggest you spool up the fans, staying short of where they’d lift us off. Then try moving the handlebars around to get the feel of what they do. In flight the AI should keep you from flipping the bike over or doing anything really dumb, but if you want to feel like you’re flying it, it’s good to have an idea what’s going to happen when you do things with the controller.”

Shan twisted the throttle grip a little and checked to make sure all the fans were turning. Tilting the handlebars side to side made the bike strain to tilt against its wheels. He pulled back and pushed forward and then leveled it. He lifted the handle bars to hear the fans all spin up, straining to lift off but unable to rise at the low throttle setting.

“All right, give it a little more throttle. “

Shan did and it lifted smoothly off the ground. “I didn’t think it would be so steady.”

“Trust me,” Ell laughed, “without the AI, it wouldn’t be. Give it more throttle, but lower the handlebars. It’ll be even steadier with lots of power available, but the AI reducing the power because the handlebars indicate you aren’t trying to lift very high.”

Shan gradually gave it more throttle while lowering the bars to keep the hoverbike about three to five feet off the ground.

“All right, take it down into the cove and let’s have you practice some circles and figure eights.”

“Why not right here?” Shan asked, though he did start skimming the hoverbike down across the beach to the water.

“If you wreck it here, you’ll land on something hard. I’d rather we bashed our delicate heads on the water.”

Out over the water, Ell had Shan practice banking to match the tightness of his turns so bike didn’t skid around the curve. For amusement, he did make a couple of turns without banking at all which—as long as he didn’t push forward on the handlebars and activate the pusher fans on the sides—had the effect of simply spinning the hoverbike while it continued coasting mostly in the same direction.

“That was fun!” Shan laughed after a while. “Shall we head back to Santorini?”

“Sure.”

Shan curved out and around the south end of the island, turning toward Santorini. “What the hell is that?”

A cloud of dirty yellow brown smoke hung over the island.

“Allan,” Ell said, “What’s happened at Santorini?”

“There has been a small eruption of the Thera volcano at Santorini with new lava flows emanating from the Nea Kameni island in the middle of the caldera. At present it does not appear to threaten the surrounding caldera islands. The only danger at present appears to be to a group of tourists who were hiking the small crater on Nea Kameni. They have been trapped between a pair of lava flows. Tour helicopters are attempting to pick them up at present, but there is not sufficient space for the helicopters to land.”

“Oh my God!” Ell exclaimed, taking the controls. “Let’s see if we can help!” She cranked the throttle grip wide open and smoothly pushed the handlebars forward and slightly up. As they leaned forward to decrease wind resistance, the hoverbike rose to about twenty feet and rocketed forward, quickly reaching two hundred miles per hour. At that speed they reached Santorini in about six minutes, Ell lifting the handlebars so that they rose over the northeastern rim of the caldera. Once they crossed the rim she dropped down toward the little island out in the middle of the huge caldera. Clouds of sulfurous smoke were billowing out of the crater in its center. Saying to Shan, “Use your snorkel!” Ell fumbled hers out of her pocket and up into the helmet.

They slid in over the island. East of the little crater at the center of Nea Kameni they could see about twenty people isolated between a couple of lava flows. A helicopter hovered over them, but because of the slope it couldn’t get close enough for any of the people to actually board it. Finally, while Ell and Shan watched, a man leapt up and grabbed one of the landing skids. The small helicopter sank for a moment under his added weight but then lifted back up and carried him to safety about a hundred yards away. They’d saved one, but it was very obvious that only individuals with a high level of physical fitness could be rescued in that manner.

Once the helicopter set the man down, it pulled away and flew toward the main island, presumably to get a rescue sling.

Ell swung off to one side and brought the hoverbike down on a fairly flat area. She hopped off and turned away from the trapped people down. Suddenly an eight foot length of 1” nylon rope shot out from just in front of her abdomen. She grabbed the front end, but let the trailing end fall. Then another and another shot out, until she had five ropes. Then a small bundle of black thread popped out. She tied loops into the five pieces of rope, then wrapped one end of the thread around the knots so that all five loops formed a bundle at the knots. The other end of the black thread she tied around the saddle of the hoverbike. Shan had been watching the people trapped in the lava flow, trying to think of a solution for rescuing them. He looked down at what she was doing. Opening his mouth to speak clumsily around the snorkel he asked, “What’s that for?”

“It’s one of Gary’s graphene cables. The only way I could get a hundred yards of cable through the port during the three seconds a one way port will stay open. You’re going to fly the hoverbike straight up and lift me over to get some of those people. I’ll give you directions.”

Staring wide eyed at the heavy thread she’d tied to the hoverbike, Shan said, “I know graphene’s strong, but that stuff isn’t even a millimeter in diameter!”

“Ten thousand pound test. It won’t be our failure point… I’m going to run out to the side to pull the graphene cable out straight. If a loop of it were to get sucked into the intake of the hoverbike’s fans, that would be a disaster.” She picked up the five loops of rope and trotted away.

Shan’s eyebrows rose while he imagined what would happen to the fans if ten thousand pound test thread got wound into them. He glanced back over at the trapped people. One of them was throwing up, whether from anxiety or from the sulfurous fumes Shan didn’t know. Shan looked back at Ell, “Shouldn’t you be flying this while I give you guidance in dangling the ropes to them? You’ve got the flying experience.”

“You’ll do fine. The AI’ll help. I’m going to ride over to them on the cable, then help them get into the ropes. My gymnastics might come in handy…OK,” Ell said, tugging on the cable, “take the bike up slow.”

Shan gently twisted the throttle and lifted the bars. The bike lifted slowly and Ell started walking back toward him as the cable started reeling her in.

“You can go up a little faster… OK, slow now.” Ell pulled one of the one inch rope loops over her head and put her arms out over it so it went behind her back and came out under her armpits in front. She bent her knees and a moment later the cable lifted her and the other loops off the ground. Shan wasn’t going perfectly straight up so she dragged her feet to keep from swinging like a pendulum. “OK, I’m off the ground. Lift a little more and move south toward the people… OK, slow, slower, reverse a little. Drop down five feet now.”

Shrinking away from the heat of the lava, Aki Nishikawa blinked his watering eyes and coughed as he watched the bizarre craft land. It looked a little like a big motorcycle with huge front and back wheels turned on their sides. Or like a saddle suspended between two Frisbees. One of the riders hopped off and began fooling around with some ropes. Aki looked back toward the caldera islands, hoping to see a real helicopter coming back. When he turned back to look at the Frisbee craft again, it had lifted into the air and the man who’d gotten off was quite a ways away from it, still holding his ropes. A moment later he began trotting back toward where the Frisbee craft had been sitting.  Aki wondered why the man had gotten off, but then the guy just lifted off the ground.

Aki blinked vigorously but couldn’t see how the guy could be flying up into the air like that. Glancing up, he saw the Frisbee craft straight up above him, as if it were pulling the guy up, but there wasn’t anything connecting the craft to the man. The guy had on a motorcycle helmet and suit and one of the ropes looped under one arm behind his back and back up under the other armpit. The rope was tight and appeared to be lifting him, but whatever was lifting the rope wasn’t in evidence. It did seem to point up toward the hovering Frisbee craft though. The guy was swinging toward Aki’s group! Could this be a rescue attempt? It looked like the guy might swing right by and Aki reached out to catch him.

Then he started to drop.

Chikushō! He’s going to land in the lava!

Instead the guy reached up overhead, grasped the ropes as high as he could reach and kipped up in an amazing gymnastic display, turning upside down to lift his feet up and over the lava. He righted himself and dropped nimbly back to the ground right next to Aki.

Aki grabbed at the guy to steady him, but he didn’t seem to need it.

A girl’s muffled voice issued from the helmet! “OK, drop a couple of feet to loosen the cable then hold steady there. Allan’s going to have the hoverbike’s AI help you maintain that position using GPS.” The young woman in the motorcycle garb flipped up her visor, reached in the opening to take a mouthpiece out of her mouth, and then shouted out at the tour group, “OK! We can fly you to safety four at a time. Step up and loop your arms in the ropes like I have mine. We’ll come back for more.”

No one answered because few understood. Aki translated the woman’s English into Japanese for the group and several stepped forward. A mother held out her crying child to the woman. The kid only looked to be about three to four years old. The young woman appeared to be startled, but did take the little girl from her mother. She asked Aki to have the four people who’d taken ropes stand back to back with her.

Coughing some more, Aki desperately wanted to take a rope for himself but decided that the women should go first. Besides, I should stay to translate. He swallowed as the ropes came tight on the group. He could hear the whine of fans above where the Frisbee craft hung above them and even though it was fifty meters up he could see the sulfurous fumes blowing away from its downdraft. The girl and the four people lifted slowly into the air, still without Aki being able to see what was attaching them to the hoverbike or otherwise could be lifting them. They swung across the lava flow and over to what looked like a safe area about a hundred and fifty meters away. The people dropped out of their ropes and one of them took the child from the young woman.

Moments later the young woman rose back off the ground and swung back over to Aki’s group. Landing again she flipped up her visor and shouted, “Ready for four more!”

As Aki looked on, the woman made three more trips back and forth, ferrying four people each trip. Finally Aki and two others were all that was left. As the young woman landed to pick them up, the fumes overcame the old man standing next to Aki. As the fellow began to collapse he staggered toward the lava flow. Aki reached out, knowing he would be too late. The old man is going to be horribly burned!

Instead, the girl in the motorcycle helmet leapt after the old man. Moving with what seemed to be impossible quickness she caught him and dragged him back. She looped a rope twice around the old man’s chest and turned back to Aki.

“Get your rope on! We’ve got to go! Now!”

Aki saw that the third man had his rope on so Aki quickly stepped into a loop and put his arms over the rope.

The girl put her arms around the old man and said, “Up!”

The rope snugged up and cut into Aki’s armpits, but with the tremendous relief of his narrow escape washing over him, he hardly noticed the discomfort. The ropes carried them several hundred meters before setting them down, apparently to get them completely clear of the fumes. As they landed, the woman laid the old man out on his back, pulled off her helmet and leaned down over his face. Pinching the old man’s nose, she closed her lips over his and gave him a couple of breaths. She looked up, glanced at the other people she’d rescued and then over toward the main Santorini island. Her eyes narrowed. She said, “Allan, try to contact the helicopter that’s coming this way from the big island and vector it to us. Tell them we have an older man who isn’t breathing, though I can feel a pulse.” She gave the old man a couple more breaths then looked up at Aki. “Do you know anything about medicine or CPR?”

Aki shook his head numbly. He sat down, not feeling very well himself. The girl gave the old man another couple of breaths. Aki saw that the third man of their little, last to be rescued, group was already sitting down. Aki and the third man were both breathing as hard as if they’d been running. Aki thought to himself that the volcanic gas had to be fairly toxic. He hoped it was mostly carbon dioxide that was making them sick, but thought sulfur likely had something to do with it…

After a little time Aki felt better and took a turn giving the old man a few breaths. The other people from their Japanese tour group arrived where they were, apparently having walked over from where they’d been set down. An older woman sank to her knees beside the old man, tears streaming down her face.

Large gusts heralded the landing of the helicopter. The old man had begun breathing on his own but still looked very sick. To Aki’s amazement, the girl picked him up like a child and placed him in one of the seats of the small helicopter. She reclined the seat fully into the one behind it. One person from the tour group claimed to be a doctor and got in with the old man. The old man’s wife got in too. This filled the small helicopter so it lifted off, presumably for a clinic on the main island.

Aki absently noted the attractiveness of the young brunette woman when she turned back to him. “Ask the group if any of them are feeling sick?”

He asked around and turned back to her. “They all feel a little bit ill.”

“Do they feel they can walk down to the shore and the boat that brought you here, or would they rather we lifted them with the ropes? I know being lifted by the ropes is painful.”

Aki frowned, “Yes it is, why don’t you have proper harnesses?”

She shrugged, “We aren’t a rescue group. We’re just here on vacation like you.”

His eyes widened. Why would they even have ropes? “Oh. Let me talk to them.” He turned to the group and spoke to them. Most of them had found riding in the rope slings to be frightening and uncomfortable, so they wanted to walk. He turned back to the young woman, “We’ll walk, but will you stand by in case something else happens with the volcano?”

“Sure.”

“May I get your name?”

She gave a little grimace and shook her head. “Sorry, I wouldn’t want word getting out. I’m not supposed to be here on Santorini.”

Aki and his tour group picked their way back to the path, and from there down to the harbor. They felt better and better as they got farther from the concentrated volcanic fumes. The tour boat which had dropped them off had pulled out to sea when the eruption started, but it pulled back in to pick them up. Once Aki was on board he looked around for their rescuers. He saw the two people on the hoverbike lift off with a wave and skim away to the north going faster and faster until they disappeared over the horizon. He wondered, who were those people?

It was only later that he began to wonder what had connected the ropes to the hoverbike and why they had had all that rope…

Shan said, “Why are we going this direction? Don’t we need to get back to Santorini?”

“Yeah,” Ell chuckled, “but Steve was right. We don’t have a license for this thing, so I’d rather we didn’t have too many people asking us questions. Once we’re beyond the horizon we’ll circle around and come back in from the east. Hopefully we can sneak up to the beach and get the bike into the back of the SUV while everyone’s attention is focused on the volcano. Maybe no one will notice us and send the law after us.”

Steve stood, hands on his hips and watched as the hoverbike slid up the beach to the road where they’d parked the two SUVs. As Ell unlocked the catches, he and his team pulled the four ducted fans off the hoverbike body and slid them into the back of the empty SUV. They all piled into the other SUV and pulled away.

Ell said, “Hey, sorry to put you on the spot like that.”

Steve snorted and glanced back at her with a little grin. “You are not. You’re just as proud as any other juvenile delinquent who just got away with something.”

Ell squirmed delightedly in her seat and said, “Yeah, you’re right! It was awesome, right Shan?”

“Pretty damn cool, if I do say so myself, Ma’am.” He stretched his arms up and back, “I’m proud to be an ace hoverbike pilot and not gonna let anyone tell me that I needed an AI to keep me from flippin’ it.”

Chapter Two

London—The London Metal Exchange reports that futures have begun to drop for gold, cobalt, osmium, tungsten and the platinum group metals. This is apparently in response to initial deliveries of these metals by ET Resources, a company that has begun mining an asteroid using the ports developed by D5R. The amounts of these metals actually delivered by ET Resources so far is apparently small, so the price drops have been attributed to a panicked overreaction…

Athens—Japanese tourists were trapped between a pair of lava flows at the recent low grade eruption at Thera/Santorini. They report being rescued by a woman using some kind of high tech flying saucer. This is corroborated by the pilot of a helicopter that picked up one of the party who’d fallen ill. Said Aieneas Solon, who stated he saw the craft from a distance of about 10 meters while waiting for the ailing man to be loaded onto his helicopter, “The machine appeared to have ducted rotor disks front and back and a pair of smaller rotors to the sides. It was an odd form of ‘quadcopter.’” Solon said he’d done several searches of online aircraft markets looking for such a craft without finding anything even similar. Some claim the witnesses must have been delusional from effects of the volcanic fumes…

***

Unpacking from their trip, Ell looked up when Shan called from the other room. “Hey, we got an interesting bit of snail mail while we were gone.”

Ell leaned into the door frame, “Well, what is it?”

“We’ve been invited to a neighborhood pot luck party next weekend at the house of our next door neighbors.”

“The Sparlocks?”

Shan looked around at her in surprise, “Yeah, you know them?”

“Well of course I know them,” Ell frowned, “they’re our neighbors.”

Shan snorted, “That isn’t an ‘of course!’  How did you meet them?”

Ell grinned, “She came over with some cookies to introduce herself a while back.” She raised an eyebrow, “Good cookies too. She talked about a block party when she visited and said she might invite the neighbor,” Ell tossed her head in the direction of her little farm house, “from the little farm out back.”

Shan guffawed, “She’s going to invite you as Raquel and as Ell? Now that’s a complication of your two identities I didn’t anticipate!”

Ell sniffed, “Not a problem, I’ll just have to leave early as Raquel and come late as Ell.”

Shan laughed, shaking his head in bemusement, “‘Not a problem.’ Sure.”

“Reminds me, I’d better get over to the farm and see if I have any important snail mail there,” she raised an eyebrow, “like an invite to the aforesaid block party.”

“OK,” Shan said, turning back to tossing out their junk mail.

Ell headed down to the basement and tripped the catch that opened the hidden door to the tunnel. She stepped into the little changing room there and pulled off her “Raquel” wig. She scrubbed off her skin bronzers with one of the disposable wipes and put on some “Ell typical” clothes. Looking like Ell, she stepped back into the tunnel. Ignoring the waiting golf cart in favor of a little exercise, she jogged through the tunnel to her farm house.

Climbing the stairs out of the basement, she called, “Bridget?”

A moment later Bridget appeared, wide eyed, in the door to the kitchen. “How did you get past us and down into the basement?” With a hand out in front of her she pointed a finger back over her shoulder and mouthed, “Ryan!”

Clapping an embarrassed hand over her mouth Ell shrugged elaborately, mouthed “Oops,” then said in a normal tone, “Oh sorry, I came in the side door a while back. I’ve been down in the basement putting away a couple of things I bought on my vacation.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, “I guess I should have Allan check to see if we have visitors before I burst up out of the basement, huh?”

Stepping into the kitchen she made a show of being surprised when she saw Ryan. She glanced smilingly back and forth from Bridget to Ryan and then raised an eyebrow, “Mister Keller, what are you doing here?”

He grinned back at her. “Someone told me that Bridget thought I was cute, so I’ve been playing the cards I’ve been dealt.”

“Humpf, I leave on a little vacation for a couple of weeks and all kinds of things start happening behind my back.” She frowned at him, “You’d better not be trying to make off with my roommate.”

“We were going to go over to his place.” Bridget put her hands on her hips and mock glared at Ryan, “But if the EPA visited that toxic waste dump he lives in they’d send in some hazmat teams to clean it out.” She turned back to Ell and shrugged, “So we came here instead.”

“Yeah, I’ve…” Ell, about to comment on the way Ryan kept house, realized just in time that she, as Ell, shouldn’t have such knowledge, “been in a house like that once,” she finished lamely. “I’ve got to do some unpacking, don’t you guys do anything I wouldn’t approve of.”

Ell withdrew, picking up the mail that Bridget had stacked up for her on her way up to her room. Once there she quickly sorted through it, wondering at the volume of junk mail that still arrived. She kept thinking that advertisers would soon give up on bulk mail for delivery of their messages, but it didn’t seem likely to happen too soon. In the midst of the junk she did find two envelopes that looked like they might be personal in nature.

The first was indeed an invitation to the neighborhood block party at the Sparlock’s house.

The second, to her amazement, was a brief note on crisp white card stock. “To the world’s best sprinter,” was all it said. It was signed, “Michael Fentis.”

Ell stared at it for a moment, her eyes misting over. She could hardly imagine the agony signing such an autograph would bring a proud man like Fentis. Especially to the woman he had hated and who had broken the world records he justifiably took such pride in. “Sorry…” she whispered quietly into the ether.

She went to the window and stared unseeingly out over her little farm. Eventually she returned to her desk and replied to the Sparlock’s invitation. She sat a while then pulled out a small blank card. “Mr. Fentis, Thank you for the autograph. I will treasure it.” For a bit longer she contemplated including an apology, but it felt like that would add insult to injury. Finally she signed it, “With the greatest of respect, Ell Donsaii.”

She sat a while longer, wondering if she should have responded differently, or could somehow ease his pain more. Finally she shrugged and sealed the envelopes. She headed downstairs and back to her new home with Shan.

Opening the stair from the basement Ell stepped around the corner and found Shan holding the blue Mattioli painting up against the narrow wall at the end of their couch. He looked back over his shoulder at her, “What do you think?”

Ell tilted her head, “It needs more light.”

“Yeah, but there’s no good place to plug one in over here.”

Ell grinned, “Hmmm, Mebbe Ah could get me one o’ them thar new-fangled port plug ins from down whea’ Ah work?”

Shan snorted and set the painting down. He reached up and bumped the side of his head with the heel of his palm as if adjusting it. “Dang! Someday I’ll get used to this. I guess we can put a light wherever we want, huh?”

Ell grinned at him, “Yup.” She pointed up over the couch, “I’m thinking we could stick a little spotlight on the ceiling there?”

***

Viveka turned to look delightedly at the new printer she’d bought. Her very own! She put in a sheet of her new fluorescent sticky labels in it. A minute later it printed out a sheet of round sticky dots that each said in fine print, “I groped a woman today.”

With a subtle smile she cut the sheet into sets of four dots and slipped them into her pocket. Time to go to school.

***

Ell walked into the D5R conference room a little early. Already there, Vivian signaled and Ell sat next to her. “What’s up?”

Vivian looked like she’d bitten into something sour. “I don’t want to bring this up to the entire group, but something worrisome went down last night in New York.”

Ell closed her eyes, “The coffee shop across Broadway from City Hall?”

“You’ve already heard?”

“Just that there was an explosion there last night.”

“Yeah,” Vivian sighed.  “Warren Newton, our FBI contact, says it was a propane explosion. No sources of propane known to be in the building. Not even a natural gas pipeline to that shop. Warren has flagged it as suspicious for port terrorism. Flammable gas, near a government building, explosion at night. He’s got his people on the scene looking for a port or fragments of a port.” Vivian waved to some of the other people who’d just entered, but then focused back on Ell. “If it was a port, we’ve got to figure out how they bypassed our safety measures. We aren’t selling that many ports that will transport flammables anymore and the ones we do sell for planes etcetera are supposed to be mounted on the plane at the factory and almost impossible to uninstall.” She shook her head sadly, “We put in safeguards, some S.O.B. figures his way around them… it’s the way of the world.”

Ell gave a forlorn little shrug, “Maybe it’ll turn out to be unrelated to ports. It’s pretty worrisome though. Let me know when Newton gives you an update?”

“Sure.”

Ell looked around the table. Most of the D5R subdivisions’ representatives were there by then. She focused on Braun, “So Rob, why don’t you start us off? A little news birdy tells me that ET Resources is sending shock waves through the futures market for high end metals?”

Braun gave a little laugh. “Yeah, so far completely unjustified. We put ten kilograms of platinum on the market and when they found out where it came from the price of platinum dropped 15%! For God’s sake, the world’s annual production is close to two hundred tons.”

Ell smiled, “So, the mining operations are working better now?”

“We really haven’t been doing all that great so far. We processed about two hundred metric tons of asteroid to produce those ten kilos of platinum. Two hundred tons sounds like a lot, but some of the mining trucks they use here on earth carry more than two hundred tons in a single load. Here on earth they need to move that much ore because a lot of earth ore is only 0.5 parts per million platinum. Our asteroid is averaging 50 parts per million so the company processing the ore thinks it’s amazing stuff. And, really, our asteroid wouldn’t even be called ore here. It’s almost all metal like some of the meteorites that land on earth. So, from that same two hundred tons of asteroid we also produced forty tons of nickel, 150 tons of iron, substantial chromium, and sixteen kilos of other platinum group metals. Now, that much metal is worth about three million dollars, however, separating and delivering it has significant costs that cut into the profits. So those methods were going to take a looong time to get us out of the red considering the substantial startup costs we’ve had. We’ve really needed a better method to break the asteroid down to portable fragments.”

Ell said, “And are you having any luck?”

“Oh yeah! We’re trying out a new method. We expect it’ll be much better. We’ve got this new engineer. AJ Richards? He and Carter DeWitt, our head waldo driver, broke our asteroid in half. Here, let me put up some video.” He mumbled a moment to his AI and the screens in the room popped up with a deep space image. “Here, you’ll see that the waldoes have pulled all our mining equipment off of 2021 MG12. Here’s the blast.”

A puff of material shot out from around the narrow part of the slightly dumbbell shaped asteroid. It separated into two roughly equal pieces that floated slowly away from each other.

“We’ve sped up the video.” The two pieces floated away from each other at a faster pace, then began pivoting so that the freshly broken ends that had been facing one another now faced outward. They bounced back toward one another a little, obviously tethered to one another with something unseen.

Ell said, “You have a graphene cable that we just can’t see holding the two fragments together?”

“Got it in one! The video’s going much faster now but you can see that they had some small rocket engines mounted on the two pieces. First they kept the pieces from recoiling back to crash into one another. Now they’re using those engines to spin the fragments slowly around one another.

“In this next segment they’re suspending some ‘catcher cones’ over the outer ends of the fragments. Braun pointed to some big four sided conical structures that looked like they’d been welded together using typical waldo space welding techniques. So, now our mining waldoes melt chunks off the asteroids that fall into the cones.”

Brian’s eyebrows went up, “How are you ‘melting chunks’ off of it?”

“We have parabolic mirrors set up closer to the sun. We focus a mirror’s light on a port. With the focal point right on the port, the beam can pass through a pretty small port. Exiting the port, the light passes through a big sapphire lens that turns the now spreading light into a beam. Waldoes out at the asteroid point the port-lens combo at a piece of the asteroid and use the beams to melt areas until they’ve cut a chunk loose. Because of the low spin rate the pieces fall very slowly down into the steel cones.” Braun waved his hands around pointing to different features on a diagram that had popped up on the screens. “Inside the cones we first have a ‘catcher screen’ that stops any fragments that are too big so the waldoes can cut them down further. The ones that are small enough to go through the screen fall into a series of ‘hollow ports’ as we call them. They’re huge obliquely oriented ports that have holes in their disks so that the chunks can fall into the port even when it’s turned off. The AI turns the hollow port on for a microsecond at a time, which even though they’re large ports, doesn’t take much power because the port’s consuming energy for such a short time period. It does take a very large supply cable though. When the port goes on and off, it cuts right through the fragment. So, it chops the chunks of asteroid into thin wafers. The wafers slide a little farther into the cone and a big port with the opposite obliquity chops the wafers into little rods. They fall a little farther to a third port that cuts the rods into little chunks. Then we port the little chunks back to earth through a smaller port.”

A murmur of surprise rose in the room. Ell said, “Earth?”

“Yeah. It’s easier to separate the various metals from one another here on earth where we have gravity to help with gradient separation. We just contract it out. Then we port some of the iron, as steel, back up to our orbital factory at the habitat. Out there we’re rolling steel plates to build stuff out of. We’re also experimenting with foamed metals in our space manufacturing.”

“Foamed metals?”

Braun grinned, “We blow air bubbles into molten metal to make light but strong honeycombed material. Here on earth the bubbles tend to rise to the upper side but that isn’t a problem in the weightless conditions out at the habitat.”

“Any problems with these new methods?”

“Breaking or cutting reasonably sized pieces off the asteroid is the biggest one. It takes a pretty skilled operator running the waldo that points the beam. But also, the fragments can jam up at various stages. Right now we have to send in a waldo to unjam them. Since the centrifugal forces on them are very low they aren’t hard to unjam, but we’re hoping to figure out a way around those man hours. This AJ guy is pretty damn smart. Or maybe ‘smart’ isn’t the best word for it; he just has a knack for seeing simple solutions to complex problems. Anyway, I’m confident he’ll have a solution pretty soon. Earth crushers have a kind of funnel with walls that squeeze inward every so often to smash the fragments. That’d work with rocky asteroids, but not so well with this metallic asteroid material which deforms instead of breaking.”

Vivian frowned, “Why not just melt it completely and let the molten metal pour through a port?”

“We tried that on a small scale. It’s pretty hard to keep the molten metal from splattering on the port and ruining it. If you protect the port with ceramic it reduces the size of the port. Even if you use a big port, out there in deep space enough of the heat radiates off a narrow stream of molten metal that it hardens and we kept getting clogs. We’re doing better using the beam to melt chunks loose. They’re hot in places on their surface when they come loose, but they cool as they slowly fall toward the port. Cutting them up into little chunks with hollow ports works amazingly well.”

Brian said, “Maybe you could put a helical stirring device in the cone to loosen the jams?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s one of the ideas AJ’s working on.”

Ell looked around the table, “I know you guys are in the red on the asteroid operations, but it sounds like you should be on your way into the black pretty soon?”

Rob grinned, “Yeah, early results with the new method suggest we’ll be processing hundreds of tons a day pretty soon. And, the overall ET Resource division is in the black already. Rent on microgravity space in the habitat is pretty lucrative. Someone also had this crazy idea that we could harvest natural gas out of the methane lakes on Titan. The price of natural gas isn’t all that high since more and more power generation is coming from the heat differential out in space, but our costs for harvest and delivery are really low. At the very least it’s been lowering our own rocket launching costs when we use our own hydrocarbons.” He shrugged, “Even with prices low we’re making some money selling them too… and you know it also feels really great providing the world with hydrocarbons for manufacturing. Hydrocarbons that don’t come from our own environment.”

Ell lifted an eyebrow, “And, how are you guys doing financially on the aforesaid space heating, cooling and electrical generation division?”

“Oh yeah, we’re way in the black there too. We can’t build hookups fast enough to meet demand for new connections. The D5R investors that gave us our startup are going to be very, very happy.”

Ell grinned, “That makes it easier for me to meet with them. Can you send me a financial summary?”

Rob nodded and Ell turned to the Portal Tech group, “How are things going with you guys?”

Fred spoke for them. “We continue ramping up production according to our negotiations with the President. They’ve liberalized our output again from the original restrictions.” He grinned, “The administration is caught between the people who think we’re unspeakable and appalling because we disturbed the status quo and those who can’t wait to get more portals for this or that wonderful new device. The progressives have been barking the loudest lately...”

***

Kant Fladwami met Ell at the entrance to the White House and guided her to a photo op with President Flood. Ellen Denis, the presidential press secretary met them and her eyes widened. Ell wore a bold blue blouse and black slacks with low heels. Though simple, on her slender frame it looked stunning. “Uh, you brought your medals?”

“I brought one. I thought wearing all eleven sounded gauche.”

“Oh, OK,” Denis’ mind stumbled over the fact that wearing all eleven was exactly what she had had in mind. “Can we just slip it on then?”

Ell lifted her hand, revealing the medal with its red ribbon wrapped around it. She unwound the ribbon and draped it around her neck. Moments later the president arrived. Several photographers and videographers accompanied President Flood in order to record his congratulations. Denis couldn’t help but feel that the young woman had upstaged her president with her bold color choice and stunning good looks.

Nothing could be done about that though.

When the photos were done, Fladwami guided Ell to the Oval Office. President Flood beat them there, having exited while a few additional photos of Ell were obtained.

Once in his office Fladwami introduced her to Attorney General Blythe. “I believe you’ve already met Secretary Amundsen?”

“Yes sir,” Ell said, nodding to the Secretary then turning her attention to the President, eyebrows slightly lifted to indicate she was at his disposal.

Flood glanced at Blythe, then back to Ell. “As I’m sure you’re aware, Blaustein and Ementhal have brought a bill before Congress demanding access to the technology you’ve used to reach the stars, as well as control over the methods in that tech.”

“Yes sir,” she said appearing attentive but otherwise unreactive.

“Dr. Fladwami,” the president said, waving a hand in Kant’s direction, “tells me you do not approve of the concept of placing a committee in charge of this technology.”

“No sir.”

“I’m hoping you’ll tell me why?”

“I don’t believe it would be safe.”

“That’s the same argument they make. They don’t believe that one person can be trusted with such delicate negotiations.”

“I understand sir.”

Flood snorted at the short answers she’d been giving. “Can you explain the dangers that you believe would be imposed by turning this over to a committee. Do you believe there truly are dangers to the human race out there?”

Ell blinked, then began, “There are two dangers in turning control of contact and the apparatus over to a committee. First, the one ended ports represent an incredibly dangerous technology. With a one ended port I could deliver toxins into your body from across the room—despite intervening barriers. I could deliver an atomic weapon instantly across an ocean. This technology must be kept secret because it isn’t safe in the hands of the public. I don’t trust any committee to keep a secret. Second, I have no doubt that Dr. Ementhal intends to be on the committee, if not its leader. He is a pompous buffoon, a bully and lacks credibility.”

“Wait just a minute!” Blythe interjected. “Ementhal has a PhD in Astrophysics.”

Donsaii simply and quietly said, “Undeserved.”

“What!?”

“I’ve reviewed his work. Some of his data is inconsistent, suggesting it may have been fabricated. Several of his most important works have failed replication by others. Personally, I believe that, rather than earning it, he has ‘politicked’ his way to the upper ranks of the scientific establishment.”

Fladwami stared at her, “You’re confident of these accusations? Are you going to file a complaint?”

“Yes, and, no. But that man should not be placed in charge of anything of importance.”

Blythe had opened his mouth to interrupt again, but Donsaii put up her hand to halt him, “Please let me respond to the second part of President Flood’s question.” She turned to Flood, “There are definitely dangers ‘out there,’ Mr. President. Around Sigma Draconis…”

The eyes of all four men widened and Blythe interrupted again, “Do you mean to tell me you’ve reached another star without telling us?!”

Ell sighed and turned to Blythe, “We have missions that have reached Alpha Centauri, Barnard’s Star, Epsilon Eridani and 40 Eridani A. We found primitive life at Alpha Centauri, probably not multicellular. Dead worlds at Epsilon Eridani and 40 Eridani A and only asteroids at Barnard’s star.” She turned to the President, “As I was about to explain, we’ve also reached Sigma Draconis …”

The President waved to her to proceed.

“At Sigma Draconis we found a “ringworld.’ A ringworld is a ring shaped megastructure which spins to provide simulated gravity on the inner surface of the ring. This particular ring had a diameter of 20,000 kilometers and a width of 5,000. Its sole purpose seems to be to act as a farm to supply their grossly overpopulated homeworld. This, gentlemen, was an engineering program of unbelievable magnitude. To give perspective, our largest engineering project is the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System and its total roadway of 76,000 kilometers would only take you around the ringworld’s circumference 1.2 times.”

The men in the Oval Office glanced at one another in dismay. The President asked, “And are they inimical?”

“Perhaps not through intent, however they are desperate to get to the stars because they have run out of resources with which to continue expanding their population in the Sigma Draconis system. If they could get here, I believe that they would immediately set out to extract the carbon dioxide from Venus’ atmosphere and hydrocarbons from the Jovian moons. They need such resources in order to build themselves another ringworld farm.”

Flood frowned, “CO_2?”

“Essentially anything with carbon. That’s what they built the ringworld out of.”

Blythe said, “Wouldn’t they rather have asteroids or planets with metal cores to make steel out of?”

“Carbon nanotubes or graphene are hundreds of times stronger than steel.”

Blythe looked doubtful, but rather than arguing the point asked, “Why wouldn’t they just invade Earth?”

“Our gravity is too high and our atmosphere is too thin. They couldn’t live or farm here so they wouldn’t be interested in our real estate. However, I don’t believe that they could essentially dismantle major portions of the planets of our solar system without causing us significant harm.”

“What’s to keep them from coming here?” Blythe asked.

“They don’t know how to build single-ended ports.”

“They can build standard double-ended ports?”

Donsaii nodded, “That’s how they’ve plundered their own system.”

Blythe blinked, “But even I can figure out that they could just send a regular rocket here carrying one end of a two-ended port! Once it got here they’d be able to port whatever they wanted back and forth.”

Ell started at him a moment as if nonplussed, then said patiently, “Interstellar distances are immense beyond all reckoning. Standard ports are limited to a speed of twenty two kilometers per second. At that speed it would take 245,000 years to get here from Sigma Draconis. The Sigmas might be able to find a way to get their ports to go faster or could use staged ports to go faster, but traveling through space at high speeds over such an enormous distance, eventually they’d hit some debris or just wear away the outer skin of their ship on space dust. Even if we discount the extremely long time frame over which such a mission must be supported, traveling that far at those speeds is essentially physically impossible. They would certainly sustain an expedition destroying meteor puncture or encounter some other failure point. We really don’t have to worry about them arriving here—unless they figure out how to make single-ended ports.” She shrugged, “Or some other method to travel without crossing the intervening space.”

Flood laughed, “So, a quarter of a million years huh? I guess you’re saying that that would be after the end of my term?”

“Yes sir,” she said seriously, then grinned, “barring some shenanigans on your part of course.”

He shook his head, “If you believe the polls, I’m going to have a hard enough time just getting re-elected to a second term.” He winked at her, “You should consider endorsing me. My opponent, the redoubtable Senator Stockton from California, is a vocal supporter of Blaustein and Ementhal’s bill.”

“Perhaps I should,” she said expressionlessly, “However, I prefer not to get involved in politics.”

The President shrugged, “OK, back to business, tell us about the aliens you found at Sigma Draconis.”

Ell described Sigwald’s excursions on the ringworld, the flying aliens, their ability to join their minds to increase their intelligence, and Sigwald’s destruction at the end to prevent accession of his ports by the sigmas. By the time she described the flight past their homeworld with its wall to wall population, the president had been forced to reschedule the meeting following theirs. Her audience looked like they’d been subjected to sensory overload.

President Flood pinched his nose wearily, “But you feel like we’re safe from them at present?”

Ell grimaced, “I wish I could tell you I’m sure. I’m very disturbed by their apparent ability to generate a genius level intellect by combining large numbers of individuals’ minds in their clades. They now know that interstellar travel is possible, we have to hope that they do not consider that it might be achieved through single-ended ports. If they trip to that concept, I have to believe that one of their genius-level clade assemblies could figure out how to do it, though it does involve an enormous intuitive leap.”

“Do we have any way to tell if they are building single-ports?”

“No sir. Our rocket is still there monitoring their system. If they undertook the building of another megastructure, which would suggest that they had reached another solar system and begun raiding it for resources, we would recognize that. But if our solar system was the first one they reached…”

“What if they find the rocket?” Blythe asked.

“That rocket’s a very small needle in the very large haystack of their solar system. However, if they did find it, we should be able to crash it into something at a high velocity and destroy it.” She shrugged, “My intent is to port some observational devices to their system through the existing rocket. Those devices will be packed with thermite and appropriate igniters so that they could be melted down even if they were picked up. Then I can fly that existing rocket into their sun to eliminate it as a concern.”

Blythe said doubtfully, “And what adverse event do you imagine might have resulted if Sigwald had been run by Dr. Ementhal’s committee?”

“I see a lot of failure points. An ill-advised answer that allowed the sigmas to recognize the possibility that single-ended ports exist. Dithering at the time that the sigmas were removing the two-ended port from Sigwald, possibly allowing them to make off with that port and use it somehow to send ports through it to our system. Other negotiations that tipped them off to technology we don’t want them to have. This of course does not even consider the tremendous danger that someone on the committee could accidentally, or even intentionally, release single-port technology here on earth.”

Fladwami said, “Uh, you told me that the single-ports wouldn’t be dangerous because they are only capable of opening at distances of less than 5 mm or greater than one AU.”

Ell grimaced, “I did say that. I’m sorry but that was not true. At the time I thought it might be safe to release some single-ports of the controlled types you just mentioned. I’ve since concluded that the risks that someone might reverse engineer the single-ports outweighs their benefits.” She sighed, “At present I’m intending that I be the only one to make or use them. I expect that someday, someone else will figure out how to make single-ended ports. Hopefully that person will show similar restraint.”

Fladwami couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re not going to release this technology at all?!”

Donsaii simply shook her head.

Flood narrowed his eyes. “I’m not a techno geek but I’m not sure that any of us have the right to suppress technology.”

“That’s as may be sir. I do have the ability.”

Flood rocked back, “You mean just because you own the technology?”

“Because I’m the only one who knows how to do it,” she said quietly.

“But what about the people who’ve built them for you?”

“I’ve had help building parts of them, for instance the power supply, but no one else actually understands how they work or could reproduce the necessary circuits.”

The four men glanced at one another, Amundsen grinning at the others. He said, “I told you to expect astonishing things from this young lady.”

Flood finally said, “So, you’re saying that even if Congress passed the Blaustein bill requiring you to divulge the technology, you simply would not comply?”

Looking miserably unhappy but very determined, Donsaii said, “That is correct sir.”

For a moment Flood looked like he might explode. Fladwami knew from experience that he had a hard time keeping his temper when he thought his underlings were insubordinate. Fladwami worried that Flood might feel that her proposed refusal to comply with Congress represented a form of defiance. However, Flood took a long breath, blew it out and then said, “OK, well, we’ll have to see how things go.” He looked around at his advisors, “Personally I think I should formally oppose this bill before Congress. How do you feel?”

Blythe said, “I’m ambivalent, but will support whatever you decide.”

Fladwami twisted his lips a moment, then said, “I have a strong dislike for Dr. Ementhal. I hope that has not clouded my judgment, but I wouldn’t want him in charge of a situation like the one at Sigma Draconis either.”

Flood turned to Amundsen, who grinned, “I would, and have, already trusted this young woman with my country, my life and the lives of my children. Therefore I agree with her, we should oppose the Blaustein bill. The important question of what to do next won’t come until Dr. Donsaii is no longer around, which hopefully won’t be for a long, long time…”

***

Ell’s AI said, “You’ve got a call from Vivian.”

“Connect me to her… Hey Vivian, what’s up?”

Vivian sighed, “Warren Newton got back to me. They found a port… well, actually the remains of a port, at that coffee shop that blew up in Manhattan.”

“Could it have been unrelated?”

“You mean, like just a port that was there for some other reason? Seems pretty unlikely. They found it relatively undamaged because it was behind a cabinet where the bomber dropped it. It had been glued into the end of a piece of PVC pipe… we’re not sure why.”

“Maybe to keep the opening from getting blocked when they dropped it back there?”

Ell could hear the shrug in Vivian’s voice, “Yeah, could be. The pipe had some holes drilled in its sides. But Ell, here’s the real problem. It was an electrical port… you know, one of the ones designed only for wires. Those ports are all coated with that compound that dissolves in organic compounds to break the circuit and shut the port down. The bastards shouldn’t have been able to send very much propane through that kind of port without disrupting the circuit!”

“Wait, propane is a gas, how can it dissolve anything?”

“Well, when you’ve got straight propane pouring through the port, the concentration is so high that it penetrates this compound and softens it enough for the wires to move.”

After a long pause, Ell said slowly, “What if they slid a long tube through the port and put the propane through the tube? Then there wouldn’t be all that much propane near the port or in contact with the…”

“Shit!” Vivian swore resignedly. “Yeah, that’s probably what they did. The PVC pipe was to keep them from being blocked from passing the tube. Dammit! We didn’t find such a tube, but they probably pulled it back out right before they sent in the spark to blow the building.”

Ell sighed, “We need a different method to make sure they aren’t putting flammables through the port.”

“Yeah,” Vivian said, “I’m fresh out of ideas though.”

“Let me think about it.”

***

Ell’s Ford Focus dropped her off in front of the Sparlock’s house and she went up to knock at the door. Ruth opened the door and her eyes flashed wide to see Ell standing there. “Oh!” she clapped her hand to her chest, “Ms. Donsaii… I mean Dr. Donsaii!”

Ell gave her a crooked smile, “Please call me Ell, and thank you so much for the invitation! I brought a dessert… where should I put it?”

“Oh! Thank you. Right over here.” Ruth gave Ell a hug and took the pie from her, noting with a mild sense of superiority that the pie looked store bought. She carried it over to the dining room table where the food was being set up, speaking back over her shoulder, “We’re so glad you could come. Everyone told me you’d be far too busy.”

“Well, knowing your neighbors is important. Do you have these get togethers frequently?”

“No, this is our first one, but I think we should have them every so often so we can all get to know one another.” Setting down the pie, she guided Ell out the back door, “Jack!”

One of a group of four men outside on the patio turned and looked at Ruth.

“Ell, this is my husband Jack.” Ruth turned back to Jack, “You remember that Dr. Donsaii lives on the farm out back?”

Two of the men standing with Jack looked as startled as he did. A moment later, realizing that he should, Barrett from Ell’s security detail raised his eyebrows in surprise too.

Ell stepped over to them and shook their hands, “Call me Ell.”

Even though she’d hired one of the neighborhood teenagers to keep an eye on the little kids, playing the hostess kept Ruth busy. Even so, she managed to keep an eye on her famous guest. Donsaii might have brought a store bought pie, but she didn’t act the least bit uppity. She talked to people easily. Ruth found it irritating the way the men’s eyes followed Donsaii around, but the girl was just wearing jeans, flip flops and a loose t-shirt. It wasn’t as if she’d purposefully dressed sexily to draw the men’s eyes.

Ruth approached the little group of people the young woman was with; somehow expecting that Donsaii would be holding forth on some topic.

Instead Mary Fenster was telling everyone about how her new dog had chewed her expensive furniture! Donsaii listened with no indication of boredom. When Mary finished her story Ruth felt sure that the conversation would turn to their famous guest. Instead Jake Stelbecht started his own story about a difficult to house train beagle.

When Donsaii finally said something, it was in response to a direct question from Bill Newkirk, “So, Ms. Donsaii, how do you feel now that you’re the fastest human on the planet?”

Donsaii actually winced at the question. “No different than I did a few weeks ago Bill.” Then instead of expounding on her answer she asked a question about the story Stephanie Jones had been telling just before Bill asked his question. This successfully turned the conversation away from Donsaii herself.

Ruth was just noticing that her next door neighbor Raquel, the one who had given her the idea to have the party hadn’t arrived yet, when Ell came up. “Yes Ell?”

“Thank you so much for having me over. I’ve just had a call from work and there’s a problem I’ve got to go in for.”

“But we’re just about to eat! Can’t you just stay a few more minutes to eat some of your neighbors’ food?”

Ell winked, “Maybe I could just take a stack of cookies with me?”

Ruth bundled some cookies up in a napkin and saw her to the door where Ell gave her a hug before leaving. When she returned to her guests she felt no surprise to hear them describing Donsaii in glowing terms. “Such a nice young woman.”

“Not at all stuck up like I expected.”

“Couldn’t even get her to talk about herself.”

“Wouldn’t even know she had a gold medal if I hadn’t seen it in the news.”

“A lot of fun to talk to.” This last surprised Ruth because she’d hardly heard Donsaii say anything. She hid a grin when she realized the truth of the statement. Talk to, indeed. The young woman had been a great listener, and after all, almost everyone secretly preferred to speak themselves rather than listen to anyone else.

“Hey Ruth, sorry we’re late.”

Ruth turned to find Raquel behind her with a fruit salad. She arched an eyebrow, “I’ll say you’re sorry. Donsaii was here!”

“Oh! Did I miss her?”

“Completely!” Ruth raised an eyebrow, “Next time you won’t be fashionably late to one of my parties?”

“Oh, I’m sorry I missed her,” She shrugged, “but I work for D5R, so I do see her out there sometimes.” Raquel indicated a handsome man with tousled blond hair standing beside her. “This is my husband, Shan.”

Wow! Ruth thought, that’s a good looking man! “Hello Shan.” She gave him a little hug. Turning to Raquel she said, “You didn’t tell me you work with Donsaii!”

“Oh! I don’t really work with her. I work at the same place and run into her occasionally. I get sent here and there by the company so I don’t even spend all that much time out there at the local facility. And, Donsaii herself isn’t there all the time. Besides, we don’t work on the same things, so we don’t actually see each other very much.”

Ruth thought Raquel seemed a little defensive. I’ll bet if I asked Ell, she wouldn’t even know who Raquel is. “Well she seemed very nice.” She lowered her voice, “The men certainly enjoyed looking at her if you know what I mean.”

Raquel said, “She is kinda cute.”

Now that’s an understatement, Ruth thought to herself, I’ll bet Raquel’s a little jealous, but then, who wouldn’t be? “Well the food’s served; let’s get you guys some plates.”

Chapter Three

“Ah, September in Carolina,” Steve sighed, leaning back in his chair.

Ell had sponsored a barbecue for her security team at the farm. Perfect weather had graced them. A caterer had delivered pulled pork and chopped beef brisket with big buns to load it onto. Potato salad, green salad, beans and some peach cobbler to finish it off with. A cooler full of a variety of beer provided a mellow atmosphere. The team’s members were taking turns trying out the hoverbike, staying low over the field out in the middle of the farm so that the trees would hide them from view of the road.

Barrett got up and headed out for his turn on the bike, leaving Ell and Steve alone on the porch for a bit. Quietly Ell said, “Steve?”

Steve lifted his head and turned her way, “Yeah?”

“I’d like to have an unrecorded conversation. Can you pop the chip out of your headset?”

He said nothing, just pulled off his headband, popped out the chip and raised an eyebrow.

“You know about the Blaustein bill before Congress?”

His eyes narrowed, “Uh huh?”

“Even if it passes, I don’t think I could release that technology.”

“Couldn’t… or wouldn’t?”

“Wouldn’t, I guess.”

“Because?”

“It’s a horrific weapon. Remember when we rescued Vivian, you used it that night?”

“I thought that might be how we did that. I was using a one ended port to shoot two ended ports into that trailer and you put gas through them?”

“Uh huh.”

“And if anyone could get their hands on them?”

“No one would be safe… Poisonous gas could be squirted into your house from a block away.”

His eyes widened, “And?”

Ell described some other horrific scenarios.

“And you don’t think that if you explained to the government just how dangerous it is that they’d back off their demands?”

“Oh, I don’t think they want the public to have it either. But they want it for themselves… and once they have it, it’ll leak… someday… it’ll leak.”

He let his head sink back against the back of his chair and closed his eyes as he considered the implications. “But… if the bill passes, then not releasing the tech would be what… against the law, I guess?”

“Uh huh.”

“Aw crap! And here I promised myself to always stay on the right side of the law.”

“Yeah, I kinda thought so. I don’t want you to do anything illegal.”

“There’s illegal… and then there’s immoral.” He sighed, “I agree with you that letting that kind of tech go is immoral and nothing’s secret when more than one person knows it.” He turned to look her in the eye. “To me, ‘moral’ is more important than ‘legal.’”

“Thanks,” she said, “Though I still don’t want you to do anything illegal.”

Steve snorted, “Why’d you bring it up then?”

“Uh, well, if I get thrown in prison…”

“Bite your tongue.”

“You know it could happen. Anyway, I want to make sure my people—your team—are getting paid.”

He quirked his mouth, “If you’re in prison, you’ll hardly need a security team on the outside.”

“But I might only be in the clink for a little while. I’d like you to be able to keep the team together.”

He leaned his head back again and stared sightlessly at the ceiling of the porch, “So how are you going to pay the team from prison?”

“Advance you funds now for future services.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll put some money in your account. We’ll call it a ‘bonus’ but you and I’ll know it’s to keep you going for a few years if I do get sent up the river. You’d keep the team on pay. They could disperse, even take other jobs, but would need to stay in shape and be available to reassemble when I needed them again if they wanted to keep drawing that pay.”

“Jeez, Ell, that’d be millions of dollars.”

“Yeah… lots of millions. It’s even conceivable I might ask you to give me some money back in certain situations. Say the government confiscates everything I have? So I’d want to be sure you had a big surplus.”

“How can you trust me with that kind of money?” he asked wonderingly.

Quietly she said, “I trust you with my life, Steve… every day.” She shrugged, “I believe you’re one of the most trustworthy people I know.”

He sighed, “I hope I’m worthy of such trust.”

“You are. I’ll make a deposit in your account.”

***

Going down the hall at D5R, Ell heard Gary call her. He stood in the door of what she thought of as the “dangerous reaction room.” Heading his way she said, “What’s up?”

“Got something to show you.”

She stepped inside, looking around, “Why are you working in here? Doing something that might explode?”

He shrugged, “Methane. And this room already has vacuum and a hood to work in. Just easier to set up in here. No one else was using it.”

“So what are you doing?”

“Testing your pressure, temperature, charge, molecular and ionization conditions for creating the various allotropes.”

“Oh! Cool! What are you finding?”

He shook his head mournfully.

“The plot doesn’t work?” she said, looking broken hearted.

“No, it’s just that you’re taking all the fun out of it for an old style experimental chemist like myself.”

“It does work?!”

“Yeah, it makes better graphene than my personal recipe that I worked on for so long. Breaks my heart.”

“What about other allotropes?” Ell asked excitedly.

“Yeah.” Gary said, sounding like someone had shot his dog.

“Diamond?”

“Yeah.”

“Lonsdaleite?”

He nodded. “Makes them at incredible rates too.”

“And you think this is a bad thing because?”

“My life’s work, and you figured it out on a weekend lark.”

“Hah!” She grinned at him. “We figured it out. You, and I, and Shan Kinrais.” She shrugged, “and, we had a little secret outside help.” She smiled broadly, “This is going to be so cool!”

“Yeah,” he grinned back at her, “it is. Very, very cool.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Wanna see my first product?”

“Of course!” Ell said, looking excitedly around for something that might be the product he spoke of.

He picked up a square black rod about a quarter inch in diameter and twelve inches long. “Well, I needed a substrate to build my graphend on so I started with one of these graphite rods. I just rotated it in the test chamber under the specified conditions. I didn’t have the laser setup you mentioned to stitch layers of graphene together. Instead, first I used graphene conditions; then shifted the conditions to diamond, then back to graphene. After I let it cycle it back and forth a while I had this rod here.” He held up a rod, much like the first one but slightly glossier.

Gary held the plain rod out to her, “Wanna break this one?”

Ell took it and snapped it in half like a piece of chalk. She raised an eyebrow, “Not very strong.”

“Nope. Should have taken less than a half pound of bending force, bending it the way you did.” He grinned, “Pretty typical for plain graphite. Wanna try that with this one?” He held out the glossy one.

Ell took it and tried to bend it. Then got a real grip on it and tried hard to break it. “Ouch!” she said, rubbing her fingers and staring at the undamaged rod. “So how strong is it?”

“Well, of course, it depends on how many layers of diamond and graphene I lay down on them, but the first two I made broke at 350 and at 525 pounds.”

“So I could mount the two ends of this rod on something and stand on it without breaking it?”

“You and I both, probably. And I cheated and let the final diamond run go kinda long so you probably can’t scratch or damage it either.”

Ell stared at the rod for a while, “Wow!” she whispered. “I’ve been thinking about how we could coat things with diamond to make them damage resistant… but really, coating them like this makes them way stronger too, huh?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled, “I was thinking about coating my car and got to thinking about… you know in the old days before AI control of cars, when there were lots of wrecks?”

“Yeah?”

“Cars were designed to ‘crumple’ to absorb the impacts. I guess they still are to some extent. You surely wouldn’t have wanted your car made out of this stuff back then.”

She looked distant for a moment, then shrugged, “Well, you could design a car made out of this stuff with shock absorption built into the frame.”

“Yeah, I suppose they still chould. Not our problem though.” He grinned, “We just deliver the product, sir. Up to the engineers how they use it.”

“OK, Gar’,” Ell said leaning back on the bench. “It’s time for us to start talking to patent attorneys. But here’s something to consider?”

“Oh crap,” he said bemused. “What are you going to hit me with now?”

Eyes twinkling, Ell said, “Imagine a big chamber… Inside you establish conditions to rapidly lay down lonsdaleite in certain areas, then graphend.” She grinned at him, “Like a 3D printer. Then, in some areas, you lay down graphene to conduct electricity, with diamond around it for insulation. The electricity goes to a motor that has graphene around it to the conduct heat away. You lay down a little amorphous carbon between parts you don’t want to be stuck together.”

The stunned expression on Gary’s face was priceless. His feet slowly slid out from under where he leaned against the bench and he descended until he was sitting on the floor. “Holy shit!” he whispered.

“Yeah.” Ell said, one eyebrow up, “Chew on that. I’ll set us up a meeting with my favorite patent guys.” As she left the room Gary still sat sprawled on the floor, eyes still focused unseeingly in the distance.

Down the hall, Ell stepped into Wilson Daster’s office. “Got a moment to talk?”

He leaned back in his seat and raised an eyebrow, “With the boss? Sure.”

Ell rolled her eyes. “I’m hoping we’re friends first, boss-employee second.”

Wilson grinned and straightened back up, “Yeah, I think we are too. How can I help you?”

Ell drummed her fingers a moment, thinking how to say it. Deciding honesty was the best course she sighed, “I need a really smart accountant to help me diddle the books.”

Daster’s eyebrows ascended in surprise.

“And, if you don’t want to do it, I’m out of here. No problem. I can figure another way.”

Daster stared at her a moment, then to Ell’s dismay his eyes brimmed with tears. Hoarsely he said, “Ell Donsaii… I… we all owe you our lives. I’d do just about anything for you… short of killing someone, I guess. I was only startled that someone with as much money as you’ve got would need me to diddle the books. But, you don’t even need to tell me why or what for. I’ve spent most of my professional life catching people who fool with the books, I can probably figure out how to hide some transactions.”

“OK, thanks.” Ell said, a little catch in her voice too. “What I want to do is buy some of the waldoes that have legs. I’d pay for it with my own funds, but I just don’t want to have the purchase show up on the books.”

He narrowed his eyes, “You need a controller for it too?”

She looked off into the distance, then shrugged, “I probably should have one of those too, yeah.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, I’d like the company to buy two hundred kilograms of gold and transfer it to me.”

Wilson blinked, “That’s, uh, in the range of eleven to twelve million dollars?”

Ell nodded, “Closer to thirteen.”

“I might be able to help a lot more if I knew why? Don’t feel you have to tell me to get me to do it. I just think if I understood, I could do a better job.”

She sighed, “I think the Blaustein bill is going to pass.”

“Ah,” Wilson said, leaning back again, staring at the ceiling. “And you don’t plan to comply.” He made it a statement, rather than a question. “So, you’ll be in violation of the law.” He looked back at her, “Are you thinking you’re going to go into hiding?”

Ell nodded, “Something like that.”

“You know that changing identities without the government’s help is almost impossible in the digital age?”

“Yeah…”

“And living the kind of life you’re used to is almost impossible off the grid?”

“I know. It’ll be a mess. Hopefully none of this is going to be needed, I just believe in being prepared.”

Wilson shrugged, “Let me work on it a bit, should have you a solution by tomorrow.”

***

Shelly’s eyebrows rose at her new purchase order, 400,000 gold balls, 3.67 mm in diameter. Holy crap, 12.8 million dollars! What in the world is D5R going to do with those?

***

Ed Winslow of U-Haul sent a rental truck to an address he recognized as being the little farm that belonged to Ell Donsaii. Even though the truck had been rented on-line in the name of a Bridget Spaulding, he made a quick decision to deliver the truck himself. Autumn leaves were blowing on a crisp fall day. To his disappointment, a brunette woman named Amy met him. He’d really only rode out to the farm on the hope that maybe he’d get to meet Donsaii himself. “We’re trying to provide excellent service and make sure we’re filling our customers’ needs,” he said. “Let me show you the pads and the hand truck.” He took Amy around back and opened up the truck, pulling out the ramp. “Anything else you need?”

“Nope, thanks.”

She had a twinkle in her eye. He figured she saw right through him.

When Ed checked the truck’s location that night it was still at the farm.

The next morning it was in Asheville at a motel.

The night after that it stayed in a hotel parking lot in Nashville.

Then another motel, this time in Memphis. The day after that it was back in his lot and the bill was paid in full. He shrugged, Damn! Not as interesting as I’d hoped.

When James Bannerman returned to his Asheville motel at two in the morning he was surprised to see a Ryder rental truck pulled up, back to back with a U-Haul truck. Even in his drunken state James found this curious enough to walk over and peer into the gap between the two trucks. In inebriated astonishment, he saw a humanoid robot carrying a big box from the U-Haul into the Ryder. Just how drunk am I?

In the early morning, James got up to pee out some of his beer. He had a terrible hangover and vague recollection of something weird going on with rental trucks in the parking lot. He took a couple of aspirin then peered outside. There weren’t any rental trucks in the lot at all. He checked the time. Six o’clock in the morning. He shrugged, must have dreamed that thing with the robot, he decided. He headed back to bed.

Retired miner Joe Spall met the Ryder rental truck out at the road. When he heaved his short body up into the passenger seat he found an odd woman behind the wheel. Beaky nose, black spiky moussed hair, dark skin, but surprisingly enough, green eyes. Her upper body looked slender, but as his eyes glanced over her, he saw she had kind of a big butt and thick thighs. He closed the truck door and said, “I hope you aren’t thinking you can park this entire truck in the tunnel? This was a one man mine. You couldn’t even get this thing into the opening.”

In a strong New York accent she said, “No sir, but I’ve looked up the size of the cars you used to carry your ore. Everything we want to put in the tunnel is considerably smaller than that.”

“Well then,” he frowned, “Next question. Why in the world do you want to put something in an abandoned mine shaft anyway?”

“It’s a scientific experiment. It’s incredibly important that the experiment be undisturbed. A mine shaft is quiet, with stable temperatures. With it being abandoned, we’re hoping there won’t even be any visitors. That’s why we’re willing to pay so much for your help.”

“OK,” he waved up the road, “Drive up that way.”

Since it was off the standard GPS maps, she manually drove the truck up the narrow mine road. Joe walked the woman down into the mine and showed her the small branch tunnel he’d prepared for her per her directions. The walls had been covered with waterproof shotcrete. Once that had set, they’d been sealed with a spray-on waterproof plastic to make sure water didn’t get in, then finished with even more shotcrete. The woman spent a lot more time than Joe had expected inspecting it, after which she proclaimed it satisfactory. She drove him back down to his pickup, then said she was just going park her truck up at the mine entrance overnight. She’d sleep in the truck and start in the morning if he didn’t mind.

The next morning at eight, Spall arrived back in the mine to find the woman already out in the tunnel hard at work. She’d built a concrete block wall that blocked off the deeper part of the tunnel and set up the experiment just in front of it. Her device seemed to consist solely of a large box with a few lights in it. There were glassy windows through which the woman said measurements would be taken using lasers and cameras. By the time Joe arrived she’d already laid a first course of concrete block across the opening that joined the little side tunnel to the main shaft. She was starting on the second course. Instead of mortar, she was gluing them together with caulking guns full of some quick setting epoxy. By the time she got to the end of the course, the beginning was already solid.

Joe carried a few blocks over to her. They were a lot lighter than standard concrete block, but seemed strong and hard. “I’ve never seen this method for putting up block.”

“Yeah, it isn’t popular because it’s very expensive. But it’s fast, and time is money in my business. I’d like to see you put the shotcrete over it before I leave. Do you mind getting set up for it?”

Shaking his head, Joe headed out to bring in his shotcrete setup. When he got back, she’d finished the main courses of blocks and was breaking pieces off and gluing them in the gaps where the blocks hadn’t fit well to the rough, rounded walls of the tunnel.

No wires came out. “How are you going to power your experiment and get your results out?”

“The experimental setup has some of those new ports in it. They supply power and send us the results.”

She packed up her stuff while he sprayed the shotcrete over her wall. This left the tunnel looking like it had never even had a little side tunnel there. When he was done she said, “One more thing. I’d like to set up another instrument back down the main tunnel a ways.” She pulled another big box out of the back of the truck. It also had lights and lenses just like the one hidden in the side tunnel. It was surprisingly light and though he carried one side, she could obviously have carried the whole thing herself—like she must have carried the one into the side tunnel. They took it pretty far down the main tunnel where she used some more of the caulking gun glue to stick it to the floor at a wide spot where it would be out of the way.

As she got back in her truck she said, “Hey, Mr. Spall?”

He lifted his chin to indicate she should continue.

“If anyone comes out here asking what we installed?”

He nodded.

“We don’t mind you telling them about this instrument in the main tunnel, but we’d sure appreciate it if you didn’t tell them about the one in the blocked off side tunnel? There’ll be another payment, same as the first one, if no one finds about that side tunnel instrument for at least five years.”

She put out her hand and Joe shook on it with her. The payment to keep his mouth shut reminded him a little of the deal he’d made with that Ell Donsaii woman about the tunnels under her farm. The odd little woman drove away while he pondered it, but eventually he forgot all about the similarity.

Joe never thought to wonder if there might be something behind that first block wall. The wall she’d built on the far side of the instrument before he arrived that morning. There was a quite a bit of space back there. If he’d dug his way back there to look, he’d have found a brand new rack containing a supercomputer. He’d also have found a waldo in that space, ready to retrieve any of a very large number of items found on shelves in the tunnel. Items that could be put through ports. There were other ports in the tunnel where the waldo could take deliveries of additional products. Deliveries that could then be sent out through a certain set of ports. One port connected to the port hidden behind a certain young woman’s umbilicus. That port could be rotated on a ring so that it would fit under a number of other devices and ports so that other materials could be dispensed through it. For instance, a large funnel full of small gold balls could send its contents through that port. Or the waldo could put things through the port, including larger ports, already rolled up and ready to be inserted.

***

Neeti Sandhu set down the basket full of her family’s laundry and began sorting the clothing into piles. As she tossed one of her husband’s shirts onto the pile of whites she noticed a spot of color. A round spot. With trembling hands Neeti picked the shirt back up and saw her fears confirmed.

It was one of those little dots she’d heard of. The ones that young women had taken to sticking to men’s backs. The ones that said, “I groped a woman today.” Like the dot on her finger said.

Sayed, she thought with disgust, you are just the animal I have always feared you might be. Yelling at me because you imagine I look at another man, but now I find out that you are fondling other women.

At first Neeti had been pleased with the marriage her family had arranged for her. Sayed had seemed solicitous and caring. She had even felt like she loved him. But then he had gradually become arrogant and demanding. Now they had a marriage of sullen association, which she kept to for the love of her two children.

Later that evening as they got into bed Sayed reached over and began tugging at her nightgown, his usual clumsy prelude to sex. Neeti rolled toward him and held up the finger with the accusatory dot on it. “No Sayed! This was on your shirt…” She rolled away from him, tugging her nightgown back down and curling in on herself.  “You disgust me.”

***

Shan woke in the middle of the night and heard voices in the other room. Quietly he got up and made his way out to find Ell sitting at their dining room table talking in a low voice to an AI’s artificial persona on a screen. He blinked, they were speaking Spanish!

“Hey, Raquel… I didn’t know you spoke Spanish?”

She put her hand over her mouth, looking embarrassed, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to wake you up! I didn’t think we were speaking that loudly.”

“You weren’t, I had to go to the bathroom and heard the voices so I came out to see what was happening.” He frowned, “Why are you speaking Spanish?”

“Oh. This is a training program. I’m learning Spanish, but I’ve got a long way to go.”

Shan frowned, “Why?”

“Um, in case I take a vacation in Latin America someday?”

“Really? Why do I get the feeling that you’re up to something?” He grinned, “Why not just use your AI to translate?”

Ell shrugged and grinned at him, “Maybe I just need something to keep me occupied while you’re dead to the world in the middle of the night.”

“Hah! There you go, putting me down for my mortal weaknesses. Not all of us can be invincible goddesses like you.”

Ell grinned crookedly at him, getting up and starting his way, “Maybe I should take advantage of this period of unusual wakefulness?” She arched an eyebrow. “You up to fulfilling your husbandly duty?”

“Hah, I thought you’d never ask…”

***

Allan spoke in Ell’s ear, “You have a call from Presidential Science advisor Fladwami.”

“Put him on… Dr. Fladwami, how can I help you?”

“Hmm, it’s more a matter of how we might help each other… I have learned, slowly I admit, that this job involves compromise. Last night I was thinking about your reluctance to allow Dr. Ementhal’s committee to control interstellar exploration for fear of how the committee might handle encounters with aliens.”

“Yes?”

“I got to thinking. What if you allowed other scientists to control some of the rockets that arrived in dead systems? Or even in the Alpha Centauri system, where the world is alive but where you don’t believe there is any multicellular life? Those with true scientific interests would jump at the opportunity to explore such systems and worlds.”

“Oh, that is a great idea! We’re not really doing much with the exploration of the dead systems that we already have rockets in. We really should let other scientists who have interest take over the study of those. There is probably a lot to be learned. I’ll want to look a little more carefully at Alpha Centauri to be completely confident that nothing bad could happen there, but then we could go ahead.” Ell paused a moment. “Would the President, or at least his office, like to make the announcement? It might provide some PR support for him in the election. While I don’t want to do an endorsement, I don’t want Senator Stockton to win. Not just because she supports the Blaustein bill, though that has some bearing. My main objection is that she seems to be a technophobe. Well that, and I just don’t think she’s a very nice person.”

Fladwami sighed, “Yes she’s certainly a technophobe. Unfortunately, many of our citizens are so apprehensive about the new technological changes that are rolling over us.  I’m afraid she may actually win the next election because of her anti-tech stance.”

Ell sighed, “Change is hard. Thank you for not blaming all the changes on me, but I know it’s a problem. Slowing the release has helped, but the reality is that businesses have gone under and people have lost jobs as a direct result of the technology we’ve released. The fact that new businesses and resultant jobs have been created isn’t much comfort to those who are struggling to find a new job.”

Fladwami said, “You are absolutely correct. There is good evidence that there’s been much more benefit than harm to the economy from your tech advances. I’ve been trying to get the President to beat that drum on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, his political advisors have been telling him to stay away from any suggestions he’s supporting the changes that have raised so much anxiety amongst the voters. They want him to focus on how he’s negotiated the slow release.”

Ell laughed, “It doesn’t sound to me like an endorsement from me would be the best thing for him anymore.”

“No, you’re right. The politicos would have loved an endorsement right after the Olympics when the public was ecstatic about your wins. Popular opinion is surprisingly fickle however. They’ve already forgotten your triumphs and gotten back to worrying about their jobs.”

Ell chuckled, “Well tell the politicos to milk this access to the other solar systems for all it’s worth then.”

“I must warn you that I don’t think this will deflect Ementhal. He’s in it for the glory of controlling contact with other intelligent species. But it may help a lot to assuage other scientists who actually do want the opportunity to learn what’s out there.”

“Oh, I agree, nothing will satisfy Ementhal. But I’m a big supporter of science and would love for others to make use of this resource. In fact, I can just pop through a number of rockets for different scientists to use to explore those systems. They won’t even have to share the ‘resource’ of the single rocket that’s currently in the system.”

Fladwami said, “Wait, I hope there isn’t any chance they could figure out the one ended ports while you’re sending the new rockets out there? I’ve actually come around to your viewpoint that such tech should be suppressed.”

“Oh, no. A one ended port sent the first rocket out there. Everything from there on out is all two ended ports. There’s still some danger though…”

“Really?” Fladwami asked with some concern.

“Well, for instance, take Alpha Centauri. Supposing one of the teams somehow ported some of the biota back here and it proved virulent or toxic. Or, it just took over like kudzu. I don’t think we’ll give the investigators control over the first rocket we put in the system, only new ones which we’ll send through the port on the first one. The new ones won’t have any ports except the ones that control their rockets and we’ll control those rocket fuel ports with our own AI. Our AI will fly the rocket wherever they ask to go, they just won’t be able to send or retrieve material through any of the ports. They’ll have to get all their data back by PGR.”

“Really? They can’t even get a few specimens back for analysis?”

“I don’t think it’s worth the risk. We know now that DNA seems to be an omnipresent molecule. Somewhere out there might be DNA that codes for a seriously destructive life form. If you’re a fan science fiction you’ve probably heard of ‘von Neumann machines?’ Robots that go to another world and disassemble it to make more copies of themselves?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think of DNA as a von Neumann machine. It shows up in a system and starts harvesting molecules, building cellular machinery and making more copies of itself. I don’t want to take any chance that we might import some destructive DNA to remake our system in its own image. Since we’ve started sending probes to other stars, we’ve sterilized everything we send out to protect those systems from our own DNA, and we haven’t let anything return from those extra-solar systems. I don’t want to let other scientists bring anything back either.”

“Mmm,” Fladwami mused, “I agree, at least until we know more. Perhaps you would let them send analytical instruments through to those other systems to examine specimens and materials in their native systems?”

“Sure, as long as the instruments could be sterilized before sending them.”

“How much should I tell interested scientists it will cost them to purchase one of your rockets with which they could examine other systems?”

“Assuming they submit a reasonable plan for what they’re going to do, we’ll provide a basic rocket with video cameras and a manipulator arm, gratis. However, we’ll charge them for the fuel to fly it from place to place, which can be pretty expensive.”

“That’s very generous!”

Ell chuckled, “I’ll bet they don’t see it that way for very long. Soon enough they’ll start complaining and asking for more.”

Fladwami laughed, “Well, of course you’re right, they are human beings after all.”

***

“Shan?” Ell called, “Dinner’s ready.”

Shan, who’d been immersed in the graphics for carbon allotrope optimization looked up. “Huh? Oh, I’ll be right there.” A few minutes later he seated himself at the little breakfast bar in their kitchen and looked at the hamburger Ell had prepared for him.

A little apprehensively, he picked it up and bit into it.

As he’d feared… it was awful. Salty with a sensation that the meat had been burnt on the outside but was still raw in the middle.

Ell had been watching him and had just taken a bite herself. She stopped with a mouthful and her eyebrows rose while her eyes crossed to look at the black and red surface of the hamburger patty that had just been exposed by her bite. Her eyes glanced up at Shan again as she chewed once, then she opened her mouth, leaned forward and “acked” the mouthful of hamburger back onto the plate. She set down the rest of the hamburger next to it. Picking up her napkin, she coughed and spit to get the remainder of the food out of her mouth.

Shan, picked up his napkin and spat his bite into it. Wiping his lips he took a sip of his water and turned to grin at Ell.

“What are you smiling about?” Ell asked plaintively. “This has got to be the vilest hamburger I’ve ever had!”

“I’m just glad that there’s something that I’m better at than you are. Of course,” he laughed delightedly, “I wouldn’t even have to be a mediocre cook to be better than you. You’ve got to be the worst cook I’ve ever known!”

Blushing, she said, “I know… I know. I think I’d better take some lessons.”

Shan laughed, “I don’t think you should learn to cook—unless you want to—you should learn to order out. I,” he put his hand on his chest, “on the other hand, like to cook. So I’ll cook on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, when I have my slow days at work. You can order out on Mondays and Wednesdays.”

“Aren’t you going to be embarrassed to be married to a woman who ‘can’t even boil water’?”

Looking Ell seriously in the eye, Shan said “I could never be embarrassed by you.” Taking his plate to the garbage he snorted, “I could, however, be embarrassed by your cooking.”

Putting her head down on the counter Ell said in a small voice, “You should be… it’s consistently awful.”

Shan leaned down and put an arm around her, “Just remember I love you, raw-burnt-disgusting hamburgers and all.”

“OK,” she sighed, “I’m having Allan order pizza again. At least it’s really fast.” Shan had started to turn away when she said, “I do need to talk to you about something else?”

Shan turned back, “What’s up? Besides my grumbling stomach.”

“I don’t know how much you’ve been following this Blaustein bill?”

He shrugged, “A little, that’s the one that’s trying to make you turn over access to Tau Ceti and Sigma Draconis right?”

“They don’t even know about the sigmas, but, yeah. And, they want access to the one ended ports.”

“Oh,” Shan frowned. “That’d be scary dangerous.”

“Yeah, so, if that happens, I expect I’ll be in violation of the law.”

Shan drew back, “Are you saying that you intend to defy them?”

“I’m saying that there is no way that I’m turning access to the teecees or the sigmas over to any committee and no way in hell that they’re getting access to single ended ports.”

Shan grinned, “Am I gonna be married to a jailbird?”

“Well, no.”

“What are you gonna do, hire a bunch of lawyers to tie them in knots?”

Ell shrugged, “I guess, but if they’ve passed a law specifically aimed at me, I imagine we’d have to go to the Supreme Court to argue my case. I don’t intend to sit around in jail waiting for a legal team to spring me someday.”

Shan frowned, “What are you going to do?”

“Flee.”

“You’re kidding! Are you thinking some other country will grant you asylum?”

Ell raised her eyebrows. “Well I hadn’t really thought of that. I suppose they might, just to get access to some of the tech?”

“Probably.”

“But then I’d be stuck there. Unable to leave that country, worried about black ops people coming in after me.” Ell stared off into the distance for a bit, then said, “No. I’ve been thinking that I’d just go into hiding in some other country for a while. Someplace that isn’t as far along in digital ID systems yet, where I could establish a new identity and live in peace until any court cases got decided.”

“Holy crap Raquel, I’d never see you then!”

With a wry expression, “You wouldn’t see me in jail either.”

“You don’t think you could just roll over and let them have what they want?”

“I’d hate myself forever if I let that particular pack of idiots loose with single-ports.”

“Surely they aren’t all idiots?”

“Well, no. But if Ementhal is in charge, I predict he’ll manage to surround himself with like-minded fools.”

Shan grinned, “So, could I follow you into exile?”

Ell tilted her head slightly, “Well it might come to that. The reason I brought this up is that I want to be sure we have a secure method of communication.”

“I thought your chips were secure?”

“Yes, but right now they go from your AI to an exchange. Then the exchange sends it back out to me. That provides a site where the government can ‘wiretap’ our conversations.”

Shan’s eyebrows rose, “Do they do that?”

Ell shrugged, “I don’t know, but they could. I don’t want to leave that as a possibility.”

“But as far as they know, you and I are only acquaintances.”

Ell snorted, “That wouldn’t stand up to any serious investigation. Especially since the government itself helped me establish this Blandon identity. It might take a while for the right hand to figure out that the left hand set me up with other identities, but once it did, my ‘secret identities’ wouldn’t be secret from them at all.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I want to hide some chips that you could use. They would serve as direct connections from you to me with no intervening exchange between us.” She pulled out a stack of ten chips.

“Where would I hide them?”

“Well, I’ve got these little lead boxes you can put some of them in. Then you drop the box in one of those cans of paint in the basement. They sink to the bottom and they’re pretty unlikely to be found unless the FBI decides to paint our basement. You can hide the others in places you think of. Bury some in the yard, tape others up under the toe kick space and to the backs of drawers of some of the cabinets. If the FBI searches they’d likely find some of them, but probably not all of them.”

“If I try to reach you on one of them, how are you going to know which chip on your end to listen to?”

“Oh… I bought by own exchange board from PGR comm. I’ve hidden it away with all the mated chips loaded up on it. I’ll be able to pick it up no matter which chip you use. I’ve also got these ports that I’d like you to hide away in case we need to send things to one another.” Ell set out three 1.5 centimeter ports on the table.

Shan shrugged, “OK, I’ll hide these… but I vote for getting out on bail and tying them up legally until they’re sick of your lawyers.”

Ell grinned, “Me too.” The doorbell rang and Ell winked, “That’d be the pizza I’m cookin’ for dinner tonight.”

***

Washington— The White House announced today that it has negotiated an agreement whereby Ell Donsaii would grant access to small rockets with which other scientists could explore some of the solar systems her interstellar probes have reached. This access will not include the Tau Ceti system for fear that some injury could come to the native inhabitants of TC3. It would, however, include the ability to remotely explore Barnard’s Star, Epsilon Eridani, 40 Eridani A and Alpha Centauri. The worlds at Epsilon Eridani and 40 Eridani A do not appear to support life, while only asteroids have been found around Barnard’s star. However, primitive life has been discovered at a planet circling Alpha Centauri A. The life there does not appear to be multicellular, but is green suggesting chlorophyll photosynthesis. Some have speculated that humans might be able to live on that planet if the atmosphere turns out to be satisfactory…

Vivian asked her AI to call Ell. “Ell?”

A moment later Ell’s voice came on the connection. “Hey Vivian, how can I help you?”

“Warren says we have another suspicious event for port terrorism, this time inside a government building.”

“Crap!” Ell sighed. “I was afraid that first one wouldn’t be a one off. What happened this time?”

“Manhattan again. Kerosene in the Jacob Javitz Federal Building. Near the center of the conflagration there was a wastebasket with an electrical port in it. We think someone tossed the port into the trash. Then late at night they pushed a tube through the port and up and out of the wastebasket so that the kerosene went onto the floor outside the basket. That way none of the kerosene would get on the port to deactivate it.”

Ell said, “Wait…”

Not hearing Ell, Vivian continued, “Ell, I’m worrying myself sick. I’ve been going through the net looking for ways to detect fluid flows through tubes. It can be done with ultrasonic transducers, but that’d be difficult through the walls of a tube.”

Ell distractedly said, “Just a sec…” but not very loud.

Vivian said, “With a complex apparatus, we could try inducing electromagnetic fields that could detect flow, but of course, if these ports are supposed to conduct electricity...”

Forcefully this time, Ell said, “Vivian, stop! Let me think a minute… it’s on the tip of my brain…” Vivian stopped speaking. Silence reigned for a minute, then Ell suddenly exclaimed, “Oh! Yeah!”

“What?”

“Remember that the port has to supply power to make up the potential energy difference when transferring material to a higher altitude, or extract some power when material flows through to a lower level?”

With a sense of dawning excitement, Vivian said, “And that doesn’t happen when we’re just pushing electrons through wires, first because the electrons are low mass and second because flow one way through the port is balanced by the return flow on the other side of the circuit!”

“So, if a port is designed for wires it shouldn’t require any more or less energy than that required to keep it open,” Ell said, “and if it does, we know that something is flowing through it that shouldn’t be and the portal center should shut that port down.”

“Well…” Vivian paused, “when they first feed the wire through it there’d be a little draw. But, you’re right, if that draw was to be sustained, we could pick that up and close that port!” She got a distant look, “Then, if they bring them in for repair because they stopped working, we can turn their info over to the FBI?”

“Yeah. But don’t arrest them immediately when they file a complaint. If they think the FBI caught them some other way, it won’t tip off other terrorists…”

Vivian said, “I guess, if they sent from a port at exactly the same altitude, so there wasn’t any potential energy from a loss or gain in height they might still slip by us…”

“Won’t happen very often. Even if they realize that they need to have them at the same altitude, it would take significant effort and careful surveying to place the two ends at exactly the same elevation. Also it’s unlikely that they’d know about the energy draw.”

Vivian breathed a sigh of relief, “I am so glad we decided to build the ‘portal centers’ to power and monitor all the ports ourselves instead of just letting every Joe do it for himself.”

“You’ve got that right.”

***

“Wilson?” Ell said, stopping at Daster’s door. “Is it OK if I come in for a bit?”

Looking away from his screens, Wilson said, “Sure, what can I do for you?”

“I’m back to worrying about what’ll happen if I get too crosswise of the Blaustein bill.”

Daster nodded.

“I don’t want D5R to shut down, or for its employees to get laid off just because I’m in legal trouble.”

Daster raised an eyebrow, “Speaking as one of those employees, that’d be nice.”

“I’m hoping that, as just about the only person around here who actually understands the real financial situation, you could meet with the legal team and figure out how to keep that from being a problem. What I’m expecting is that I’d need to transfer some cash into some kind of a reserve fund here at D5R that would allow it to keep going for 5-10 years without additional funding. But we need to be sure that it’s legally set up so that the government couldn’t intervene to claim those funds. Well, at least not without passing even more laws aimed specifically at me.”

Wilson narrowed his eyes in consideration. “I don’t know all that much about the legal tactics and I’m not sure the counsel you have now is expert either. I assume it would be OK to hire some help?”

“Sure, just make it happen… if you can.”

Chapter Four

Omaha—Presidential Candidate Edith Stockton lost her temper at a “town meeting” here in Nebraska last night. She had responded to several questions about the economy, declaiming her views on the too rapid release of PGR and portal technology. She had just described those technologies devastating effects on several established companies and the resultant loss of jobs. Her temper broke when audience member Norman Kamas questioned her regarding the societal benefits of the new technology and whether new jobs had not been created by novel industries based on those technologies. In her choleric response, Senator Stockton angrily unleashed several profanities at him.

Later Stockton apologized, excusing her behavior as an example of how strongly she feels about the issues. Others, however, have noted that she is easily angered, shoots from the hip, and is slow to reverse course when she is proven wrong…

Ell entered the little conference room for their regular D5R meeting. Almost everyone was already there and having little conversations of their own. Ell spoke to Fred Marsden for a couple of minutes. When Braun arrived she looked around the table and then said, “Thanks for coming everyone. I’ve asked Vivian to bring you up to speed about a recent terrorist incident.”

Vivian explained the two incidents in New York and their realization that they could monitor wire ports for fluid flows to prevent such in the future. “We’re hoping that this, combined with the limitations on the ports that are designed for fluid flows, will reduce the incidence of terrorist events in the future. We’re very lucky that both of these incidents occurred at night when people were not in the buildings. Of course it would have been pretty difficult to release a large quantity of flammable gas or liquid into a populated building because people would have smelled them, but we figure these terrorists were going to graduate pretty soon to setting them off just as people arrived to work in the mornings.”

After a pause she said, “We’ve also had another idea. Instead of selling ports that wires can be passed through, we’ll start selling ports that already have a jack and socket mechanism built into them. When they’re turned on, the jack would automatically extend itself through the port into the socket to make the connection. That way the port wouldn’t have to be held open all the time. The customer could just hook up to terminals on each end of the port and the jack mechanism obstructing the port would make it impossible to pass other items through the port.”

Braun waved a finger, “I know you’ve got volatile sensors in ports made to transfer water, or air like the snorkels we all got, but what’s to keep terrorists from passing a tube through them?

“Well we do still have a problem with ones we manufactured some time ago, but the new ones have screens on them to prevent that. Remove the screen and the port doesn’t work anymore.”

Braun nodded.

Vivian continued, “If they figure out that they can do it, we might just ‘recall’ all the old air and water ones that don’t have screens. After a bit we’d disable the ones that hadn’t been returned.”

When their turn came, the ET Resources group reported that their new asteroid mining procedure was working great. Ben said, “We’re doing five hundred tons a week now and still scaling up.”

“So that’s what? Six million dollars worth of metal?”

“Yeah, sale price, but there’s the costs of mining, separation and then costs for transport. It isn’t all profit.”

“Transport costs? I thought you were using portals?”

“Well yeah, but it does cost something to hold a big port open and send metal through it.”

“Good,” Fred laughed, “as long as you aren’t paying to truck the stuff!” He frowned, “How long will your down time be when you’ve used this one up and have to move to a different asteroid?”

Rob grinned, “Now that we broke it in half, the two pieces are each about five hundred meters in average diameter. That’s an estimated 490 million metric tons apiece. They should last us for a little while, in fact at the 10,000 tons a week we’re shooting for it would last almost 270 years.”

A chuckle ran around the table.

Ell said, “At our next meeting I’m going to be inviting another player. Gary Pace, who most of you have already met, is doing some cool things with carbon allotropes. So we’re going to form a third subdivision of D5R under him. It’ll be called ‘Allosci,’ short for Allotrope Science.”

“He’s the guy spinning the graphene out at the habitat, right?”

Ell nodded.

Fred asked with some excitement, “Is he going to build a space elevator? I’ve been waiting for one of those my whole life!”

Ell blinked a couple of times, then began slowly, “Even though we now have the ability to make a material strong enough to build and elevator, there are a lot of problems with such a megastructure that would remain. First, hugely expensive to build. Second, a freaking nightmare to get permission to build it from the country where it’s attached. Third, remember that storms, meteoroids and satellites would eventually hit it and do some damage. Even if it were built with redundant strands, when a strand broke, the shock wave would travel through the broken strand at the speed of sound in the material. That shock wave would be followed by fiber fragments travelling at over a kilometer per second and doing their own damage. So, even with redundant construction, it might fail. Fourth, probable protests and lawsuits from the rest of the countries at the equator where, if it broke completely, the falling parts would land. Remember that a space elevator would be longer than the circumference of the earth so, if it broke at the right altitude, it would wrap itself all the way around the earth as it fell. Made out of graphene, it wouldn’t weigh enough to do much damage. It would only be on the order of kilograms per kilometer but, we’d still have protests and lawsuits over the danger of it falling. Finally, an elevator’s main benefit would be the ability to move material out to space at low cost.” She looked around the table, “We can already move material to orbit with ports and move people to orbit with non-polluting, port fed, oxygen-hydrogen rockets. Admittedly, we’re using oxygen-hydrocarbon rockets at present but the total amount of CO_2 being released is still rapidly diminishing because of our other technologies, so CO_2 isn’t as much of an issue as it used to be.”

She glanced at everyone again, then shrugged, “I don’t see a reason to build a space elevator anymore.”

Several of the people at the table initially looked stunned, but a dawning comprehension of the issues swept over them and several of them laughed. Fred snorted, “So you’re saying I’ve contributed to shooting my own dream in the foot?”

Ell nodded solemnly. People began shifting in their seats preparatory to leaving the meeting. She said, “One more item?” When they’d settled she said, “I’m sure some of you’ve been giving this some thought already, but I thought we should discuss what might happen if the Blaustein bill passes?”

“And you had to turn over the interstellar tech, you mean?” Ben Stavos asked with a frown.

“Yeah... I’ve decided that I can’t do that. First of all, I don’t believe that it’s safe for a committee led by Dr. Ementhal to be in charge of first contact with any intelligent alien races. Second, I feel it would be unethical to turn one ended ports over, they have too much potential for devastating harm.” She shrugged disconsolately, “So, if it comes to that, I’ll be in violation of the law and may get arrested.”

“Why protest by refusing the turn it over? They’ll just take it anyway.”

Ell shook her head, “I’ve destroyed all the existing one ended ports and erased all the design data. They’d have to figure it out themselves,” she sighed, “which someone will probably eventually do. But it took some surprising serendipity to come up with the one ended version. Even though I thought of one ended ports first, the electronics are very, very bizarrely different, and much more difficult than the two-ended ports. So I’m hoping it will be a long, long time before anyone else comes up with them.”

There’d been several indrawn breaths when Ell said she’d destroyed the information but Ben said slowly, “I’ve always believe in free dissemination of scientific information so I never thought I’d be saying this, but I agree. I’ve thought about the one ended ports a lot since they first were mentioned and the kinds of horrible things that could be done with them is just frightening to contemplate. However, I would think that you could just explain that to the government and they’d agree. Once they understand, I bet they’ll retract their fangs on Blaustein.”

Ell sighed, “I hope so too. However, what I wanted to tell you is that, even if I’m in the pokey, I’m arranging for things to go on as usual here at D5R. Our investors have said they’ll continue supporting research and development at Quantum Research. Portal Tech and ET Resources are pretty much self-supporting so it shouldn’t have any great bearing on how things go with them but our investors will backstop them if there are problems. Even if I’m in jail, you’ll still be able to communicate with me.” She grinned, “It isn’t like they can confiscate my phone and AI anymore,” she tapped meaningfully on the implant under her ear.

***

Shan offered Ell one of his potato chips, but she shook her head. “What? Are you suddenly too health conscious for a potato chip?”

She shook her head ruefully, “No, it’s just that my mouth’s too sore.”

He frowned, “Why is your mouth sore?”

“Well I’ve been backing up my implanted comm system. I’ve been meaning to tell you anyway. I’ve put some more ports just under the tissue surface in the roof of my mouth and inside my ear canals.”

“What was wrong with the ones you had?

“Well, they only connect to one other port each. So if someone were to destroy my AI and the port attached to him, then I wouldn’t be able to communicate any more through that port. I decided I needed some spares.”

Shan tilted his head, “A backup comm port isn’t going to help if they dismantle your AI. You wouldn’t have an AI to communicate with.”

Ell shrugged, “I’ve backed Allan up too. I bought more hardware and hid copies of him in several locations that all cross connect to keep each other updated. Someone trying to cut me off would have to find and disable all of them.” Apologetically she said, “I’ve even connected myself to your AI so that if they found all of mine, I could use yours in a pinch. That connection is through a microphone port in my little finger and speaker port in my thumb though, so I’d have to hold my hand up to my head to use those.”

Shan looked at her measuringly for a moment, then said, “Jeez, you’re really worried about this aren’t you?”

Ell snickered, “Yeah, I’ve probably really overdone it. I’ve buried connection ports several places on the farm and out in the countryside. I’ve hidden devices in multiple locations that can deliver materials to my implanted single-ended ports. I’ve set up systems to restock the materials automatically and, if necessary, for you or Amy or Emma to restock them for me. Sometimes I think I’m excessively paranoid.”

“When are you doing all this?!”

“After you go to sleep. You know I don’t need as much beauty rest as you do.”

Shan winked at her, “Only ‘cause you have beauty to spare…”

***

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina—D5R announced today that, through President Flood’s negotiations, they had awarded control over a rocket in the Alpha Centauri solar system to Dr. Leo Jans of JPL. D5R is the parent company for Portal Technologies. D5R delivered the rockets to Tau Ceti which have allowed us to learn about the teecees who live on the third planet of that system. Dr. Jans says that, even though life on the planet circling Alpha Centauri appears to be unicellular, we have a lot to learn from it. One of the first questions will be whether it is DNA-based like the teecees and ourselves. Jans also wants to confirm whether chlorophyll is responsible for the green color of much of the life there and determine the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. He says it is far too early to speculate on whether Alpha Centauri might be suitable for human settlement.

Of note, D5R appears to be thumbing its nose at Dr. Francis Ementhal and the Blaustein bill he helped to sponsor. The bill was designed to force Ell Donsaii and D5R to turn over all control of their apparatus for interstellar exploration to a committee headed by Ementhal. By turning over control of the rocket in the Alpha Centauri system to Jans prior to passage of the bill, D5R seems to be doing somewhat of an end run…

***

Ell had a free morning, so she took a virtual tour of what was new in the company by looking out through some of the waldoes that belonged to ET Resources. ETR had recently finished a new waldo control center with hundreds of controller setups and room to expand with more. She considered going over there to look at the center, but it was just so much easier to log in to different waldoes using the controller she already had in her office.

For the most part she simply watched through the virtual eyes of waldoes being run by other operators. She observed for a while as the low earth orbit waldoes finished positioning another weightless module to be attached to the habitat. So far they had three of the large weightless modules chained together. At the junctions between each pair were hubs around which pairs of living modules swung on 250 meter long tubes, producing 0.3 gravities of acceleration to maintain the inhabitants’ health.

Deciding she had nothing to contribute there, she moved on to the asteroid mining program. There she watched ETR’s waldoes cutting chunks off the asteroid that slowly fell into the big funnels. The chunks fed into the “chopper,” as they called AJ’s series of big ports that cut the chunks up into tiny fragments so that they could be economically ported back to earth. A couple of waldoes stayed pretty busy breaking jams with long poles they stuck in through holes in the funnels. No easy way to prevent the jams occurred to Ell. At least they were easy to unjam in the low pseudogravity.

From there she moved on to watch a couple of waldoes that were unloading observation and surface radar systems out of one of D5R’s space planes. They were attaching the systems to a geostationary frame that would stabilize their orbits so they could be treated like one huge satellite. The array of radar antennae could act like one enormous radar array, allowing very precise imaging of Earth’s surface. Each satellite had its own set of heating and cooling tubes that would maintain them at an optimal temperature even out exposed in space. With ported electricity they no longer needed the huge solar panels that had decorated previous satellites. Once they had deployed these satellites, Ell knew that the waldoes would go on to their main job nowadays, which was to shepherd old telecomm satellites. Almost completely replaced by PGR technology, the old satellites had become “space junk” to be removed before they collided with something important. The teams would attach a few port fueled rockets and an AI would slowly transform their orbits until they wound up at D5R’s habitat system where there were plans to begin reclaiming and recycling materials out of them. They contained a lot of exotic and expensive metals that were anticipated to make the cleanup profitable.

Next Ell tapped into one of the waldoes that ETR had landed on the moon and leased to NASA. As opposed to the waldoes in space, which only had jets on their lower half, these had legs so they could walk around. They also had jets strong enough to fly them from location to location in the weak lunar gravity. As she looked out through the waldo’s eyes, she realized that it must be near one of the poles. Long shadows stretched out from the rim of the shallow crater the waldo was walking through. Actually, bounding would be a more accurate description of the waldo’s mode of progress in the low gravity.

Suddenly a voice came over the waldo’s link, “Hello! I see I’ve picked up a hitchhiker in my little trek across Amundsen crater. Who’s there?”

Ell’s eyes widened, Phil! “Well, Lieutenant Zabrisk, this is your old girlfriend stalking you. You doing anything on the moon besides just walkin’ from place to place?”

“Ell?”

“Got it in one.”

“How did you find me?”

“Lucky accident. I’ve just been logging in to see what D5R’s waldoes are doing. I happened to hook in to your data feed when I wanted to see what you NASA boys were doing on the moon. How’d you know I was watching?”

“Oh, we have an open feed for the public and quite a few people log on to watch what we’re doing. We get a notification if someone is ‘eyes on’ so we can talk to them if we’re not busy. Good PR.”

“You get married yet?”

“Uh, next month. Would you like to come? I’m not very smart about whether it’s OK to invite old girlfriends to your wedding.”

“Hah! I think that’s pretty frowned upon. But…” Ell had a little catch in her voice, “I wish you well, even if you did break my heart.”

“Oh, don’t you say that. If there’s even a chance you’d marry me…”

Ell interrupted him, “Don’t go saying something you’ll regret.” She sighed,
“Better if we don’t spend too much time wondering about what might have been. Tell me what you’re doing. Surely they don’t have you highly trained astronauts just walking waldoes on the moon?”

“Well… not usually. You know, you screwed the moon up for me too.”

“What, just because you’re here as a waldo instead of in person?”

“No, I always dreamed that I was going to help colonize it. Then we’d mine the moon for various exotic metals, Helium 3 for fusion reactors and water for colonization. We were going to build a mass driver to launch the stuff we mined into orbit and it would be so cool. Then, some damn woman came along with these ports that make it cheaper to get water from earth, metal from asteroids and power from space. We don’t need any of those vaunted moon resources I was going to dig for, so there isn’t any reason to build my colony. The space habitats someone’s building mean that we probably don’t even need the real estate to solve overcrowding on Earth. Who wants to just sit around on the moon doing nothing?”

“So what are you doing?”

“Well, we’re exploring. Seeing if there actually might still be something on the moon worth doing now that the mining idea is a bust.”

“Really? And you’re going to learn that leaping across Amundsen crater?”

“No.” Phil sounded embarrassed, “I fell and broke one of the lifting rocket nozzles on this waldo so the only way to get it to the pole where I’m supposed to be sampling the lunar ice is to walk.”

“Oh, that’s rich. So all those accusations you were making against me a minute ago were merely an attempt to distract me from the fact that you’ve been breaking our waldoes?”

“Um… yes Ma’am,” he said contritely…

***

Washington DC— President Flood has conceded the election to Senator Edith Stockton. Though the presidential race was relatively close, President-Elect Stockton’s Democratic Party has also achieved a substantial majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate. This unusual loss by an incumbent president is being attributed to uncertainty among working class Americans over the new PGR and port technologies. These technologies have resulted in extensive upheavals in the business world as some former economic powerhouses have been shuttered and new industries have exploded onto the scene. Many voters apparently felt that Flood did not do enough to diminish the economic disruptions wrought by these changes.

Though the market penetration of these technologies is limited as of yet, almost everyone can see the writing on the wall and fear is rampant. New industries based on this science are replacing existing plants that are being closed; however, workers’ anxieties regarding the changes have been enormous. Retraining for new jobs is expensive and personnel that get the new jobs often complain that they aren’t being paid as well as they were by their previous employer.

Recognizing the depth of popular concern over the new tech, Stockton took what many felt to be a politically risky tactic by criticizing Ell Donsaii, the genius responsible for discovering the principles involved. Though she’s well-loved and highly respected, many seem to feel that she also should have done something to keep their lives from being overturned.

Despite the apprehension over their effects on employment, demand for the products of these new technologies is at an all-time high…

Shan opened the door to his parent’s home and called out, “Happy Thanksgiving. Your guest of honor is here.”

In response, Shan’s dad Malcolm called, “Ell, welcome ye guest of honor!”

As Shan came around the corner into the family room, he placed a hand on his chest, “Oh, I’m hurt! The prodigal son returns and his family welcomes his wife instead?”

Malcolm raised an eyebrow, “Shouldn’t have married such a pretty girl then.” He gave Ell a little hug. Morgan and Lane had risen from their spots on the couch and they came forward to greet Shan and Ell as well.

Shan looked seriously at his father, “Hey Dad?”

Malcolm turned from watching his family greeting each other, “Hmm?”

“Uh, I never call Raquel, Ell, unless I meet her in her role as Ell somewhere in public. Don’t want to get a bad habit that leads me to say the wrong name someday somewhere.”

Shan’s sisters and mother had also turned to listen and his mother said, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” She turned to smile at Ell, “Well, Raquel, come on in. I’ve got some hot chocolate brewed up for you.” She winked, “And you must congratulate Ms. Donsaii on her recent Olympic wins for us…”

At dinner Malcolm turned to Ell, “What are the results of the new election going to mean for your company?”

Ell looked at him, “You mean, because Stockton won after bashing the new tech in general and Donsaii in particular toward the end of her campaign?”

Malcolm nodded.

Ell shrugged, “I don’t think the election will affect D5R and its subsidiaries very much. We’ve already been slowing the release of the tech per an agreement with the government. They may ask us to slow it further, but I don’t think they—or anyone really—wants us to stop production.” She grinned and, rubbing her hands together, said in a low voice, “We’ve got ‘em addicted to the new technology.”

Shan said, “We’re more worried about the Blaustein bill. Ell Donsaii may soon be a criminal.”

They drew back in surprise, “What, why?”

“That bill is targeted specifically at her.” Shan subtly patted Ell on the arm. “She’s one of very few citizens who’ve ever had a congressional bill aimed directly at them as an individual… But, anyway, it demands that she turn over contact with intelligent alien races and the technology for visiting other stars to the Ementhal committee. Ell doesn’t think that’s ethical or safe.”

They discussed Ell’s concerns and her intent to refuse to comply with the new Blaustein law. No one had any brilliant solutions.

After the conversation had made its way around to several other subjects, Morgan turned to Shan and Ell, saying, “Hey, I’m going to be in Chapel Hill Saturday. You guys want to go out to dinner?”

“Sure.” Ell’s eyebrows bobbed, “You want to go to the Velos concert that night?”

Morgan grinned, “Velos is the band a certain someone likes to dance to, right?”

Ell rolled her eyes, “A little bit, yeah.”

“Well I’d surely like to see that!”

“That isn’t going to happen. I’ll be there as Raquel with my new husband. No crazy dancing. But the music’ll be good.”

“I’m up for it.”

***

Elsa Fuentes looked around the schoolyard. She didn’t see her friend Gloria who she usually ate with. Her eye caught on someone squatting by herself over against the side of one of the buildings. It looked like it might be Gloria, so Elsa headed that way. As she got closer, she saw that it was Gloria, “¿Qué estás haciendo aquí sola (What are you doing here by yourself)?”

Gloria didn’t say anything, but a little jerking motion told Elsa her friend was sobbing. “What’s the matter?” Elsa asked worriedly.

Gloria rolled a knuckle in the corner of her eye, “My father was laid off from his job,” she said with a little sob.

Elsa didn’t really understand what a job was, but she knew they were important and hard to get. She knew that, if your parents didn’t have jobs, your family would be very poor and often hungry. Her eyes widened as they darted over and around Gloria. Her friend didn’t have a little paper bag like she usually brought lunch in. Elsa squatted beside her, “Let’s share our lunch.”

“I don’t have a lunch to share with you,” Gloria whispered.

“Well then, we’ll just have to share my lunch.” At a sob from her friend, Elsa said, “It’s OK, my mama always packs more than I can eat anyway.” She handed half of her ham and bean sandwich to Gloria.

***

With most of the students at home for the Thanksgiving weekend, Chapel Hill was quiet as Ell, Shan and Morgan enjoyed a nice dinner at Waquet, a new restaurant on West Franklin Street. After their meal they walked the few blocks to Vic’s where, despite the long line of hopefuls, they got in with three of the four tickets Ell had purchased right after they came out several months ago. Velos had become much too big a name for a small venue like Vic’s, but continued playing there occasionally; partly because of Gordon and Vic’s friendship and partly because, like many other bands, they liked playing there in order to get the excellent live recordings that Vic produced for them. The fact that big names were anxious to play and record there had allowed Vic to charge exorbitantly for admissions and he was doing very well indeed. He’d long ago reimbursed Ell for the investment her “crazy aunt” had made in his club.

Morgan looked around, “Wow, I was expecting a concert hall. This is more like a big bar.”

Shan said, “Yeah, but the owner is a fanatic about acoustics. Notice that, even though the place is packed, the noise isn’t overwhelming. When the band starts to play, you’ll find that the sound is a lot cleaner than what you’d hear in a big echoing auditorium.”

As they got themselves some drinks and wandered back out into the crowded main area of the bar the sound of a violin started sawing gently into the air. Morgan turned to Ell, “I don’t remember violin on any of Velos music?”

Ell shrugged and looked puzzled, having not heard violin in any of Velos music either.

To their amazement a spotlight slowly faded in to highlight Gordon sitting on top of the big speaker stack at the right side of the stage. He had his side turned to the crowd and was playing the violin that they were listening to. Moments later a roll on the drums brought in the rest of the band and Gordon leapt down off the speakers into the crowd. Someone held a microphone in front of him and his gravelly voice began a song. Ell excitedly realized it was a new song that Velos hadn’t uploaded to the net yet.

Morgan turned to ask Ell if she’d heard the song before and found herself looking at a guy who had moved in between herself and Ell. He looked familiar, though she didn’t recognize him at first. Her eyes widened as she recognized AJ from their ski trip last winter. “AJ?”

He grinned at her. Then Ell peeked around him at Morgan, eyes twinkling.

Surprised that, despite the loud music, he could still understand her she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Uh, I got a job at D5R.”

Morgan glanced around, “Is your dirtball friend around here? Uh… what was his name? Jordan?”

AJ winced, “Yeah, Jordan is correct. Just like your sister figured out, he never had a job at D5R. I’m not sure where he is.”

“And you did have a job at D5R?”

“Not back then. I applied just before I graduated. Actually, I called up a friend of mine.” He cast a thumb back over his shoulder at the grinning Ell, “Raquel hooked me up with the HR department.”

“Wow!” Morgan gave Ell a puzzled look. “What made you decide to come out here?”

Ell leaned back around AJ, “He’s stalking a girl.”

Morgan’s eyes widened, “You moved here because of me? I don’t even live here!”

AJ shrugged ruefully, “I figured I had a better chance of running into you here than in Colorado. At least I’m in your home state. Besides, D5R is a pretty cool place to work and I’ve got Raquel to help arrange for me run into you occasionally.”

Morgan turned back to watch the stage a moment, mind working furiously. It all seemed a little surreal. She did feel a little like she’d been stalked, but she had really liked AJ. It seemed unreal that someone would take a job all the way across the country in the mere hope of meeting a girl he hardly knew and hadn’t parted on the best of terms with.

Trying to decide if she should feel stalked or flattered she glanced at AJ again. She did like him, she thought… It had been Jordan she couldn’t stand.

When Velos finished their concert, the four friends headed to the Carolina Coffee Shop “for dessert.” Morgan had loved Velos’ music which sounded even better in the excellent acoustics of Vic’s place. To her surprise, people had danced and Morgan had really enjoyed dancing with AJ. She’d taken a turn dancing with her brother who, as always, was superb.

Watching Shan and Ell dancing was really something though. They didn’t perform any of the amazing feats that Ell did when she danced alone, but… there was something elegant and graceful about the way they did everything so perfectly. Out of the corner of her eye Morgan saw other people watching them; she suspected those people also wondered just what seemed so entrancing about the way this particular couple danced.

As they sat in a booth at the Carolina Coffee shop Morgan turned to AJ, “So, do you see Raquel out at work very much?”

He turned to look at Ell, “Uh, no. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her out at D5R proper.” Frowning at Ell he said, “I asked about it once and someone told me you mostly go to other places as Donsaii’s representative? The D5R island and the Portal Tech facilities, etcetera. Is that right?”

Ell’s eyes twinkled, “Yeah, I’m here and there. I’ve even gotten to go up to the habitat a couple of times myself.”

Morgan got a devious look, “So, AJ, do you ever see Donsaii herself?”

AJ shook his head, “Not really. I’ve seen her from a distance a couple of times, but I’ve never talked to her.”

Since AJ had his eyes fixed on Morgan, Ell shot Morgan a look and gave a quick shake of her head. “Everyone at D5R is really impressed with AJ though,” Ell said, touching his elbow. “He’s the new whiz kid. They say he’s really turned their asteroid mining operation around.”

As they chattered on, Morgan watched in amazement as Ell ate two helpings of blackberry cobbler. With ice cream! The conversation was pleasant and Morgan realized when they got up to leave that she was looking forward to seeing AJ again. She decided that AJ stalking her to North Carolina might be weird… but it was pretty sweet.

***

Presidential Science Advisor Fladwami spoke to his AI, “See if you can connect me to Donsaii.”

A moment later her voice came on. “Dr. Fladwami, I truly am sorry President Flood lost the election. How can I help?”

“Actually, I’m calling to warn you of bad news. The Blaustein bill just got pushed through. President Flood asked me to let you know that he isn’t going to veto it. He apologizes, but it would be a pointless waste of his political capital when it’s obvious that Congress would just pass it again in January when Stockton would sign it. He doesn’t intend to enforce Blaustein either, but of course he will be out of office in January.”

“I appreciate his doing what he can.”

“There’s more. President-elect Stockton was over for a transition meeting. It would appear that she has somewhat of a burr under her saddle about you. President Flood tried to speak to her about what you had to offer and why he thought the Blaustein bill was a mistake, but she didn’t want to hear it.”

“Hmmm, I’ve been worrying about the likelihood of that. A brief search of her campaign speeches brings up my name with some pretty unflattering verbiage.”

“For a final bit of bad news, Stockton has chosen Elton Costella for her science advisor. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Costella is one of Ementhal’s cronies and I’m sure that Ementhal is the one who recommended him to her.”

“Oh, that’s sad. Costella’s an idiot…”

***

Papa had lost his job too! In the midday Mexican sun, Elsa Fuentes crouched silently by the corner of her house. Elsa’s mother had sent her out to play when Elsa’s father unexpectedly came home in the late morning. Elsa could tell something was wrong, so instead of going to Gloria’s house she had doubled back to listen.

Despite the warm sunshine, Elsa’s shoulders shivered uncontrollably with fear of this disaster she didn’t really understand.

Mama’s voice said, “No se puede Felipe ayudarle a conseguir un trabajo en su fábrica (Can’t Felipe help you get a job at his plant)?”

“No one can help me get a job Lucia! They’re all worried about their own jobs. El Norte is our only hope.”

“But, Enrique! The border is dangerous! Even trying to cross is very hard, then if we are caught I’ve heard that they may do terrible things to us!”

In a quiet voice Papa said, “We cannot go Lucia. It is very expensive. We don’t have enough money for all of us. I must go alone. When I have a job, I will send money. When I have sent enough, then maybe you and Elsa can come after.”

“I don’t want to stay here without you! There has to be a job here somewhere. Let me talk to my cousins…

***

New Delhi, India—A second woman was beaten to death in the Nagar Market. Again, the beating appears to have been in response to her application of an adhesive dot to the back of a man’s shirt. The dots say, “I groped a woman” and women all around the city have been applying them in protest against the loathsome practice. Men returning home or to their workplaces with such dots attached to them have been at the least embarrassed and sometimes humiliated in front of their wives and families. Some men who had female employers have lost their jobs.

Some men are calling the dots a form of terrorism. Many, of course, claim that they groped no one. They say their lives have been ruined by the random application of a dot by a woman who hates all men…

A tear slowly tracked down Viveka’s cheek as she read the news. She had only printed a few sets of the dots and given most of them away. She had been horrified when she heard one of her friends saying that she had just applied them to random men, “because all men had groped a woman at some time.” Viveka had vowed not to print anymore, hoping that the entire idea of the dots would fade away and no one would ever associate the phenomenon with her.

However, it would seem that thousands of young women had access to printers. Stores had sold out of printer paper with sticky dots and other women were printing them by the thousands. Viveka hadn’t been groped for days now, suggesting that her campaign had made some men nervous about the practice. However, she felt appalled by the human cost that had accrued as some women indiscriminately placed them and then men began lashing out against women seen carrying or applying the dots.

Viveka closed her eyes and sighed. Saying a little prayer she swore to herself that she would learn from this. She would work to help others. She would protect herself, but not set out to inflame others to reprisal in her stead.

She couldn’t help but think that there must be something better she could do. She had always been good at solving problems, unfortunately this wasn’t one of the engineering problems that she excelled at. She shook her head, social problems had always been difficult for her and this one was… unbelievably problematic …

***

Leo Jans and his research team watched in fascination. The display from their rocket’s camera showed the surface of Aycee. They’d been calling the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B “Aycee” following D5R’s naming of Tau Ceti’s third planet “Teecee.” Aycee represented the only real planet in the binary star system, at least that their search of the system with the nice camera on the rocket had discovered. Without telescopic imaging they could easily have missed small or distant planets. Aycee’s orbit, at 120 million kilometers, placed it closer to B than earth was to the sun, however B was only about 40% as luminous as Sol. Alpha Centauri A, on the other hand, was about 50% brighter than the sun, but relatively far away. Leo assumed that any planets which may have formed farther from either of the stars had either plunged into one of the two stars, or been flung away into deep space. Where any closer planets might be wasn’t clear, but AC1’s orbit probably wasn’t very stable either. The fact that it may not have been in this particular orbit for very long was thought to be a likely reason why it didn’t have more advanced life forms. In addition to orbital instability, Aycee likely got pelted regularly with comets and asteroids disturbed by the dance of the two stellar heavyweights.

All in all, Aycee lacked stable hospitality for advanced life forms. Alpha A was much brighter than Alpha B and the distance between A and B was about the same as the distance between the sun and Neptune. So temperatures would be higher when Aycee was between Alpha A and B in its orbit and lower when it was on the far side from A. Intermittent bombardment from space would change temperatures by modifying atmospheric opacity and density. Leo suspected that just about when life had adapted to one set of conditions, it crashed when the conditions changed radically. At present, the planet was in the part of its orbit that was bringing it in between A and B. So, it was hot, with average temperatures of 54oC (129oF) near the equator and 3oC near the poles. Water covered about 80% of its surface. Green water. The skies were cloudy and the land wet. Green covered almost every surface above the waterline too.

Donsaii appeared to have been right in her conclusion that Aycee lacked multicellular life. Unicellular organisms would be better able to survive and rapidly evolve to adapt to the frequent changes in conditions, so Leo suspected that if multicellular forms had evolved, that they had been wiped out. “Well,” he said to the team in general, “shall we go down?”

A general susurrus of agreement was punctuated, as he’d expected, by a vehement “no” from Abel Jones who constantly argued for a more careful survey of the AB solar system. Jones repeatedly demanded that they look for other planetary and sub planetary bodies even though most of the team wanted to survey Aycee itself, feeling the scientific payoff would be higher there.

Leo looked back over his shoulder at Abel who took a breath preparatory to launching into his reasons. Before Abel got started, Leo put up a forestalling hand. “I know Abel, I know. But right now we only have one rocket, and an entire solar system to investigate. We’re going to follow Sutton’s law... Noggin,” Leo said to his AI, “ask D5R to take the rocket down to land near the southern coast of that land mass that extends down from the north pole.” He glanced at the temperature chart, “Shoot for a latitude of about 70o.” The chart said average temperatures would be about 20oC or 68oF at that latitude. Leo wouldn’t admit it to his team, but he secretly wanted to look at a location where humans might be able to live—even if we had no way to get there at present.

“‘Sutton’s Law?’” Lin Mi queried.

“Willie Sutton was a bank robber, who when asked ‘why he robbed banks’ is reputed, though he later denied it, to have said, ‘that’s where the money is.’ I think this planet is more interesting than the rest of the system, even though the system is pretty interesting in its own right.”

As they watched, the rocket turned itself to a retro position, fired its engine and began dropping toward the planet. Because it would take several hours to get down they broke for a long lunch.

When Leo and his team returned, they saw a rocky green shore rising toward the camera on the bottom of the rocket. The murky green water turned briefly white as the waves broke on the lumpy shore. Out the side cameras they could see reddish brown breaking splotchily through the green on the north sides of the rocks where less light struck.

Argument broke out over where to land, especially in view of the rough lumpy surface with a serious lack of nice flat landing places. Then Abel Jones said, “Look, over to the right. There’s a flat spot next to that large boulder.”

He was correct and Leo had Noggin ask D5R to land the rocket there. “Abel, for a moment there it almost sounded like you cared about the mission down here on Aycee?”

“Just didn’t want you wrecking my rocket,” Abel growled, “before we got any real science done back out there in the system.”

Lin Mi broke in, “Look at the numbers!”

They all turned to look at the screen which displayed, “Gravity 0.78, 1.8 atmospheres pressure, nitrogen 67%, oxygen 31%, carbon dioxide 1.3%.”

Leo gave a little fist pump, “We could live there!”

Abel frowned, “That’s a lot of CO_2.”

Lin Mi shrugged, “Yes, enough to stimulate respiration some. But tolerable.”

Leo said, “Let’s scrape up a little of the green stuff for that DNA and chlorophyll assay.”

“I don’t know why we care. We can’t get there.” Abel said in a grouchy tone.

Leo shook his head, then began directing his AI to extend the manipulator arm out of the rocket to take the test sample.

***

Gary stepped into the small conference room at D5R and found Ell sitting there with a blond man in his forties. She stood and said, “Gary, this is Aaron Miller, a patent attorney I’ve worked with on a couple of other things.” Turning to Miller she indicated Gary and said, “Gary Pace, carbon genius.”

Miller said, “I hear you can make graphene?”

Ell arched an eyebrow, “Among other things.” She turned to Gary, “Have you finished my knife yet?”

He nodded and pulled out a knife handle with a grayish semitransparent blade sticking out of it. The blade was long and slender, looking more like a stiletto or ice pick. He leaned back and reached into his pants pocket, pulling out an oak dowel which he set on the table next to the knife.

Ell picked up the knife and the dowel, easily shaving a sliver off the dowel to demonstrate its sharpness. Then she cut hard into it to notch out a little wedge of wood. “It looks so dainty! Would I be able to break it?”

“I don’t think so. It’s solid graphend with a diamond edge. I haven’t broken one in the Instron yet, but it should take close to six hundred pounds to break it in three point bending.”

Miller’s eyebrows were up. “So we’re patenting some kind of super knife?”

Ell could hear the subtext of; I flew down from Boston for a knife? She grinned at him, “Not exactly…”

***

Reginald Simmins, PhD turned to his new secretary and said, “Put me through to Donsaii.”

Alice stared at him for a moment, thinking that he must have been speaking to his AI and just happening to be looking at her.

But then he said, “Alice?”

What a pompous ass, Alice thought to herself. Then she asked her own AI to put through a call to Dr. Donsaii for him.

A few moments later Allan spoke in Ell’s ear, “You have a call from a Dr. Axel Simmins’ secretary, asking to establish a connection to Dr. Simmins. She states that he is a member of the State Department, though I don’t find him on the public list of State Department personnel.”

“Put him through… Dr. Simmins?”

“Hello Dr. Donsaii,” a woman’s voice said. “Let me connect you to Dr. Simmins.”

Simmins said, “Ms. Donsaii, I’m calling on behalf of the Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs. I realize that it has been quite a while since the Blaustein bill passed, but it has taken some time for the Committee to be fully funded and established. I’m pleased to report that we are finally ready to undertake our responsibilities. I personally have been assigned to work with you on the transfer of the technology for the one way ports and any existing links to other solar systems that you may have already established. I’m hoping to arrange a time for you to deliver the tech to us, as well as to establish its value so that the Government may reimburse you for the transfer.” He paused, evidently waiting for a response, “Ms. Donsaii?”

“Yes?”

“Is there a time that is convenient for the transfer?”

“No.”

“Uh… would it be better if I came down to North Carolina?”

“No.”

“I… don’t understand… how will we arrange the transfer?”

“Dr. Simmins, has no one told you that I do not intend to transfer the technology, nor control of any of the established ports to the Ementhal Committee?”

“Uh… it’s not the Ementhal Committee. It’s the Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs.”

“Dr. Ementhal is not the chairman of the committee?”

“Well, yes. But, the committee isn’t named after him.”

“Dr. Simmins, it doesn’t really matter what the committee is named. Dr. Ementhal is in charge of it, which would be a serious problem if I intended to transfer the tech to a committee. However, since I have decided that I will not transfer the tech to anyone, committee or individual, it no longer matter who heads up the committee.”

“But,” Simmins paused, the continued peevishly, “Ms. Donsaii… the Blaustein bill has been passed into law. You must turn over control.”

“I don’t believe I do, Dr. Simmins.” She cut the connection.

Simmins stared at Alice in astonishment. “She hung up on me!”

Alice blandly said, “She has a PhD.”

“Huh?”

“She has a PhD. You referred to her as ‘Ms.’ throughout your conversation.”

“Oh,” he waved a deprecating hand, “That was an honorary degree.”

“No sir. She was awarded a full PhD ‘for work accomplished’ at NC State.” Alice tilted her head, “She got a Nobel prize for the theory underlying the work she did at NC State. Many think she’ll get another Nobel for the ports that she worked out while she was a student at NC State, I would think a doctorate to be well deserv...” Alice trailed off since Simmins’ had already started off down the hall to Ementhal’s new office.

***

Vivian knocked on the frame of Ell’s open door. “Hey Ell, you look like you just bit something sour.”

“Mmm. Been talking to one of the twits in our government.” She put up a hand, “Sorry, most of them are good people trying to do a good job… but some…” She shook her head, “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, I’ve got good news,” she smiled, “and it relates to one of our government’s employees doing his job well. As you know, we’ve shut down a few wire ports that have drawn more current than they should on the presumption that someone might be pumping fluid through them. As hoped, the people leasing the ports returned them for replacements on their lease. Two sets were actually drawing extra current because they were defective. The third set was from Hoboken New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan. One of our friends from the FBI dressed up as a FedEx delivery man and took the replacement pair to the man who requested it.” Vivian raised an eyebrow, “Turns out this guy’s home computer spends a lot of time linked to Jihadist websites. Over the first three hours after he received the pair, it began intermittently drawing current, presumably because he was testing it. The next afternoon, he stopped by the General Services Federal building in Manhattan and dropped one end of the pair into a potted plant!”

“What happened to the guy?”

“Oh, he’s in custody…”

Chapter Five

President-Elect Edith Stockton looked up as her assistant shepherded Francis Ementhal and Stockton’s science advisor Elton Costella into the transition facility where she was awaiting her move into the White House. She shook out her shoulders, trying to relieve the tension from another meeting with that idiot Flood. The man kept trying to give her advice on how to run the country. You’d think the man didn’t understand that he’d lost the election. “Yes, gentlemen?”

Appearing appalled, Costella began, “Donsaii apparently intends to ignore the Blaustein bill! One of Dr. Ementhal’s people called her to arrange the transition of the equipment and any extant extra-solar connections to the Committee for Extraterrestrial Affairs. She actually refused! Even after being reminded that the bill had been passed into law!”

Stockton narrowed her eyes, “I’ve never liked that little bitch, nor her ‘holier than thou’ attitude. Too pure and prissy for me.” Stockton curled her lip, “I’ll bet if we had the FBI do a little digging we’d find out things aren’t quite as picture-perfect as she makes them out to be.” Stockton paused and leaned back in her chair. Musingly she said, “So, she actually said she intended to break the law?”

Costella shrugged, “She said she didn’t intend to transfer the tech to ‘anyone, committee or individual.’ If that’s not breaking the law, I don’t know what is.”

“So we’ve asked nicely and have a record of her saying she doesn’t intend to comply?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

Stockton rubbed her chin, “Much as she pisses me off, she’s enormously popular. Why should we actually care if she controls the access to any ETs?”

This time Ementhal spoke in his resonant baritone, leaning forward to convey the importance of his words. “Madam President, let me propose a scenario. Imagine that the next aliens we encounter are not primitives like we’ve found at Tau Ceti, but instead much more technologically advanced than we are. Further, suppose that Ms. Donsaii, ineptly managing said encounter, angers these advanced peoples and they decide to withhold trade, or to hold back technological advances or largess. In which case you could be seen as the President who failed to negotiate favorable terms for your people. Or… suppose they are so angry that they decide to attack us here on Earth.”

Ementhal leaned back, “In some scenarios you could be the last President of these United States, Ma’am.”

Stockton tilted her head. Though she didn’t like Donsaii, it also pissed her off when men didn’t give women their due. “I thought Donsaii had a doctorate?”

Ementhal shrugged, “Unearned. It was more of an honorary degree, even though the NCSU claims it’s a full doctorate.”

Stockton said, “Why do you assume these ETs will be inimical?”

“Oh, I don’t. But, imagine another scenario. We contact an advanced species with astonishing wisdom to offer. This would probably be the most significant encounter in the history of mankind. Who do you want to be in charge of such a great and historical congress, a loose cannon named Donsaii… or the Stockton administration?”

Stockton narrowed her eyes again, recognizing that Ementhal was stroking her ego with one line and playing her fears with the other. But, the man had a good point. “OK, so how do you propose we deal with this?”

“Like we do any other lawbreaker. Have her arrested. Confiscate the equipment.”

Stockton looked at him pensively, then said, “Is it her… or is it this D5R company that we should be going after?”

“Honestly Ma’am, behind all the smoke and mirrors what you’re looking at is just an extraordinarily lucky girl who happened to stumble onto a few principles that allowed her to access the fifth dimension. That prodigious turn of fortune allowed her to design the PGR chips and open the dimensional ports.

“D5R is simply a company founded, probably by a small group of the superrich, to monetize her two serendipitous inventions. Angering D5R’s owners may be politically unwise and shouldn’t be necessary. Those owners have gone to extreme lengths to keep their identities unknown, the kind of lengths than only very savvy, very wealthy individuals can pull off.

“Now, what your administration actually wants is to gain control of the ‘one ended ports’ that allow interstellar exploration and which apparently can also be weaponized. Contact with the primitives at Tau Ceti can be left to the current scientific team. You just want to be sure, first of all, that your team manages all contact with advanced races. Secondly, your department of defense absolutely must control any weaponization of the single-ended ports.

“I’ve investigated and apparently D5R has nothing to do with the one ended ports, that’s entirely a side project of Donsaii’s. So you don’t need to do anything with D5R in general, simply gain control of Ell Donsaii.” Ementhal chuckled, “I predict that Donsaii, who has led the life of a spoiled child, will break almost immediately upon being confronted with jail time.”

Stockton chewed a lip a minute then turned to Costella. “OK, talk to Raul Stenner. He’s going to be my Attorney General. Let’s make sure we aren’t going to step in some kind of legal dogshit when we arrest the little twit.”

***

Jacob Bensen stood a little ways inside the door of his home, welcoming guests to the Math Department’s annual Christmas party. Their previous chairman had also had a Christmas party for the department, but had held it in one of the department’s conference rooms. Jacob felt that the personal touch of having the function in his home served to bring his colleagues together in a more convivial and social atmosphere. He felt that it cemented associations beyond work and led to friendly relationships which could genuinely improve interactions the rest of the year. “Shan!” He said, “Welcome to your first Christmas party with the department. The first of many I hope! This must be your new bride?”

“Yes, this is Raquel,” Shan said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Thanks for being so understanding about my not teaching the second session of summer school. Our honeymoon was wonderful.”

Jacob turned to Raquel and took her hand. “Oh my!” He winked at Shan, “I would have taken the entire summer if I’d just married such a beautiful young woman.”

Raquel gave Jacob a smile, and lowered her voice, “Well, I had to keep Shan’s nose to the grindstone the first part of the summer.” She raised an eyebrow. “He has to support me in style after all.”

Jacob laughed, thumped Shan on the shoulder and moved on to his next guest.

Later that evening, Jacob saw that Kinrais’ new wife had been cornered by the department blowhard, Milton Agrits. Knowing Agrits, Jacob suspected that the girl was being subjected to an explanation of Agrits’ work on the new Delphine splays. Milton never seemed to grasp that non mathematicians had absolutely no interest in his theories. Without a basis for understanding, an explanation of the studies that were his pride and joy could be mind numbing, no matter how fascinating Agrits thought it was.

Taking pity on the girl, Jacob decided that she desperately needed to be introduced to someone else. He glanced around, perhaps he could introduce her to his wife? If only he could remember the young lady’s name! He headed that way nonetheless. Arriving on scene, he touched the young lady’s arm, “Ms. Kinrais?” he said. Agrits paused in his description and the woman turned to Jacob, raising her eyebrows. “I was hoping to introduce you to my wife?” He turned to Agrits, “If you don’t mind Milton?”

Agrits shrugged, probably a little miffed. The young lady said, “Oh, that would be nice. Just one second.” She turned back to Agrits, “I think you should try transforming a few of the Delphine splays using Egol’s marginal calculation. I have a feeling that they might condense.” She turned back to Jacob, “Where is your wife, Dr. Benson?”

Startled to hear some esoteric math terms coming from one of his faculty’s wives, Jacob glanced at Ms. Kinrais as he took her by the elbow to guide her across the room. Thinking she must have just humorously tossed some words she’d heard Shan using at Agrits, Jacob expected her to be laughing at her own little joke. She looked perfectly serious though, so Jacob glanced back at Agrits.

Agrits looked like someone had poured cold water down his spine. A perfect combination of startlement, shock and dismay.

Jacob said, “What did you do to poor Milton?”

She glanced back at Agrits as well, then, looking chagrined, said, “Oops.” She looked back at him a moment longer as if considering, then turned back to Jacob. “Shan and I have a little joke going. Whenever he’s having trouble with one of his ideas, I tell him he should ‘try Egol’s marginal calculation,’ something he told me solved one of his early problems once.” She blinked, “I’m afraid that Dr. Agrits might not have understood that I was joking.” She glanced back at Agrits again, “Do you think I should go back and apologize?”

Jacob also looked back at Agrits who had dropped onto the couch and was speaking rapidly to his AI while staring up at his HUD. Bemusedly Jacob wondered if Agrits actually was trying Egol’s calculation? Surely not. He turned back to the young woman, “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary.” He lowered his voice, “Actually I was only trying to rescue you from Milton. He can go on and on about math without ever recognizing a total lack of interest in his audience.” Jacob tilted his head, “However, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve forgotten your first name which will cause me to utterly fail in my mission to introduce you to my wife?”

“Oh!” The young woman grinned at him. “That was very nice of you. My name’s Raquel.” She glanced back over at Agrits, “I do hope I haven’t hurt Dr. Agrits’ feelings.”

“It looks like he’s off in his own little world. Probably, your suggesting Egol’s to him has him trying that and five other things.” Jacob chuckled ruefully, “We’ll be lucky if we can pry him back off the couch at the end of the party.”

Jacob’s wife Simone looked away from her conversation with Tatiana, one of the department’s new grad students, a question in her eyes. “Yes?”

Jacob said, “Hey Simone, I wanted to introduce Raquel Kinrais to you.” He gestured at Simone and Tatiana. “Raquel this is my wife Simone and Tatiana Nicente, one of our new grad students.” He leaned forward and said conspiratorially, “I’ve just rescued her from Milton Agrits who’d been expounding his new work to her.”

Simone looked sympathetically at Raquel, “Oh, I’ve been there, sorry.” Then she glanced past Raquel and said, “Oh-oh. Here he comes.”

Jacob barely had time to turn when Milton arrived, slightly red in the face and looking highly irritated. “How did you know?!” he said, loudly enough that several people turned their way.

Blushing, Raquel quietly said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s a running joke between Shan and myself. I guess it wasn’t funny?”

“Joke?” Agrits drew his head back. “What joke?”

Shan had just stepped over and asked, “What’s happening?”

Raquel took Shan’s arm and smiled up at him. “You know how, when you’re having trouble with one of your math problems, I always tell you to ‘try Egol’s marginal calculation?’” She smiled tentatively at Agrits. “Shan used Egol’s once and it worked, so I always tell him to try it again. It’s good for a laugh between us. I just said it without thinking and should have realized that it wouldn’t seem like a joke to you.”

Agrits turned to stare at Shan, “This is true?”

Shan had had a blank look, but then he glanced at Raquel who was staring earnestly up at him. Apparently recognizing something in her eyes, he turned to Agrits and nodded, looking just a bit poleaxed. “Yep, good old Egol’s, always good for a laugh.”

Agrits said, “Well, it worked this time too. It condensed every one of the Delphine splays that I tried it on!”

“Really?” Raquel said with a delighted clap of her hands. She leaned toward Agrits and said conspiratorially, “Are you going to list me as a co-author on the paper?”

“But you don’t even understand it!” Agrits said, looking appalled.

She touched him on the arm, “I was just kidding. Sorry, I make way too many jokes.”

Jacob grinned, “I think you should put her in the acknowledgments at the end of the paper though.”

Looking bemused, Agrits shrugged, “Well, that does seem fair.”

The little group of people broke up then, but Jacob was just behind Kinrais when Shan leaned down to his wife and whispered, “Egol’s?”

Raquel whispered back, “Later.”

For a moment Jacob had the impression that Shan hadn’t heard of Egol’s calculation, which after all was pretty obscure. Jacob had heard of it, but didn’t really know anything about it. He shrugged, they must just be carrying on their little joke in some fashion.

***

Shelly Williams’ eyebrows rose. Another purchase order for 400,000 gold balls, 3.67 mm in diameter. The order included another one of those waldoes and a scads of ports of all different sizes—all to be issued to Ell Donsaii for some hush-hush project of hers. Shelly wondered if anyone was overseeing Donsaii’s expenditures. The company’s backers might be pretty upset to find out it was issuing kilograms of gold to its CEO.

After pondering it a bit, she decided that her job description didn’t include tattling on the CEO who, after all, she liked a lot.

***

Enrique Fuentes trudged in the fifth position behind the coyote. Lucia had insisted he not leave for El Norte until after Christmas, but money had been running low so he had headed north as soon as the celebrations were winding down.

The coyote had charged Enrique 27,000 pesos ($2,100) to guide him across the border into Texas, a fortune to the Fuentes family. At first Enrique had thought to refuse, but Enrique really had no idea how to cross the border by himself. He was glad that he hadn’t let Lucia talk him into staying home even longer; he wouldn’t have had enough money left to pay the fee. The western part of Texas north of Ojinaga was desert. The coyote, who wouldn’t give his name, had promised to guide Enrique and the others across the desert to a highway where the coyote’s American friend would pick them up in a truck and take them to Midland Texas.

Before they left, the coyote had been full of promises. He’d teach them important phrases in English. He’d get them water and food. He’d get them backpacks to carry their things in. In the United States, his partner would help them get ID chips.

Once he had amassed a group and collected their money, the coyote’s helpfulness had dropped off precipitously. Enrique had learned the English words for bathroom, water, food, and a few others but he had already known some of them. He thought that he’d need a lot more English than that, and resented time spent sitting around without the coyote teaching them anything. “Getting them backpacks, food and water,” turned out to mean that he would take them to a store where they could buy the items with their own money. Though infuriated, Enrique had to admit the coyote had never promised to pay for the items. He now worried that there would be costs associated with getting the ID chip.

That evening a truck had picked up Enrique and the other eighteen people that the coyote had contracted to take across. They’d ridden south and east over kilometers of rough dirt roads to reach a spot a near the location of their proposed Rio Bravo crossing.

After walking to the river, the coyote had told them all to take off their shoes and pants to wade the river. At first the three women in the group had refused, but the man had laughed at them, “It will be cold later tonight. Don’t complain to me when you’re wet and freezing cold.” Eventually the women had given in and all of them, even the coyote, had waded across the river in their underpants holding their belongings over their heads.

Then had begun the long trek through the desert, almost all of it in the bottom of washes. In the Chihuahuan desert, the January day had been warm—in the 70s—but the nights were cold and this one hit 38. Enrique was very glad that his pants weren’t wet. His jacket, which he’d thought very warm back home, didn’t seem like enough. All the twists and turns in the dimly moonlit night had him thoroughly lost. He hoped the other migrants between himself and the coyote were keeping a close eye on the man. If the coyote deserted them out here in this wasteland they could easily die trying to find their way back to civilization, to say nothing of losing the money they’d given the man.

When they stopped for a break with the wall of an arroyo blocking the chilly breeze the coyote squatted next to Rosa, the prettiest of the three girls with them. “Hey Rosita, how would you like some of your fee back?”

Rosa swallowed and stared at the ground between her feet. She shook her head convulsively, but said nothing.

Horrified, Enrique thought of stories he’d heard of girls being raped during the trek to El Norte. Was that about to happen here? Would he have the courage to say or do something, or would he just leave Rosa to her fate? How could he ask Lucia to try to cross the border with Elsa after this?

However, the coyote just laughed and stood, saying, “Time to get moving again amigos.”

The next morning, exhausted, they arrived within sight of a paved road. In the distance Enrique saw a sign by the road that said “Hwy169.”

The coyote said, “You wait here until the truck comes for you. It’ll stop down there by those little trees.”

Concerned Enrique turned, “You said you’d stay until they picked us up!” With relief he saw that the other migrants were upset as well. Many of them shouted something of the same nature.

The coyote raised his hands, “OK, OK, it’s not part of the deal, but I’ll stay with you until Jorge picks you up.”

“And you tell him about the ID chips too!”

The coyote rolled his eyes but nodded.

They all settled in to wait.

Later in the day the temperatures rose and they sat in the shade of the small scrubby trees up the hill from the road. After a few hours the coyote got up, dusted his hands and walked away.

Enrique got up and followed him.

The coyote glanced back at him and shook his head, “Tengo que hacer pis (I have to piss).”

Enrique shrugged but continued to follow him.

“You like boys?” the coyote asked.

“No, but I don’t want you to leave us.” Enrique glanced around and saw with some relief that one of the other men had also gotten up and followed from a little farther back.

It was nearly dark before the truck arrived to pick them up. The man wouldn’t let them on the truck until he received his money. The coyote tried to get the migrants to pay but finally acknowledged that he’d said that this part of the trip would be covered by the initial payment. As the coyote paid Jorge, Enrique felt great relief that they hadn’t let the coyote leave them.

One of the other migrants insisted that the coyote discuss with Jorge the ID chips he’d promised. Sure enough, Jorge demanded more money for the chips. Once again the migrants turned as a group on the coyote and were able to insist that he give Jorge the money for the chips.

***

At two in the morning, Ell slowly opened the door from the tunnels into Amy’s basement. She stepped inside with an old gallon can of paint and walked slowly over to where Amy had several other cans of paint on a shelf. She set it down where she’d gotten it several nights before. It weighed the same as it had before Ell took it away, but under a couple of inches of paint was false bottom and beneath that, a set of ports she hoped that she’d never need to ask Amy to use.

Ell left as quietly as she’d entered; then took the tunnel to one of the houses her security team stayed in.

The team didn’t have any paint, but they did have a stack of emergency gear. Ell carefully lifted some big cans of Sterno out of their box. She picked up the Sterno can she’d brought. She’d cut the bottom out of it and put some ports under a false bottom. There was still some Sterno in the top of the can above the false bottom, so it would smell right and even burn for a little while should anyone attempt to use it. By hand she weighed the false can in comparison to the others and decided it felt the same, just like her scale had said. She put the can into the very bottom of the box and then patiently stacked the real Sterno cans back into the box on top of the fake one.

***

Elsa came home from school to find her mother smiling and happy for a change. “Ha llamado Papa (Did Papa call)?” she asked excitedly.

Lucia picked Elsa up and swung her joyfully around. “Yes, Papa called. His Uncle Tomas who lives in Texas got him a job building houses. Papa sent money!”

Later, while they ate their supper Lucia said dreamily, “Someday, Elsa. Someday we’ll go to join your Papa in Texas.”

“But, Mama, won’t it be dangerous?”

Lucia got a sad look, “Yes… it will.” Then she looked up at Elsa longing evident in her eyes, “But we need to be with Papa, don’t we?”

Elsa nodded, wide eyed. Just the thought of the trip frightened her. She’d never been away from this town, but… she loved her Papa, she could do it to be with him.

***

Ell sat down with the D5R leadership meeting. “So what’s happening folks?” she asked glancing around. Fred looked like the proverbial cat with a canary so she pointed at him, “Fred?”

Fred skimmed a large hockey puck shape down to her. It had Amazon’s familiar logo on top. “Want anything from Amazon?”

Ell stared at it, “Nooo…” she breathed.

“Yes!” He grinned, “Pick it up and hold it over your hand.”

Ell did so.

Fred said, “Deliver,” and a second later a cylinder labeled ‘Colgate’ dropped into her hand. Fred smiled, “Ahh, a tube of my favorite toothpaste.”

Ell turned the puck over, “So this is what? A four inch port?”

“Yup, they’ve determined that a huge chunk of their inventory will fit through a four inch port. The fulfillment guys at their warehouse stack your goods in a pipe with your port at the bottom of it. Once all your items are in it they send you a notification and you say to ‘deliver.’ The items pop them through one at a time. They’re pushing their manufacturers to package as many items as they can into canisters that’ll fit through that type of port. They’ll have a larger size eight inch port for people who expect to order big stuff.”

“And the power to run the port, even though it’s high, has got to be less than delivering by truck.”

“Yep. About twenty five kilowatts, but only for the second it takes for the product to drop through the port. That’s only about 0.007 kilowatt hours! The energy cost shipping by truck is way, way higher. You’d have to order huge quantities of stuff before it even compared to cost of the lights in your house. They figure in a few years trucks will only be delivering really big, oddly shaped stuff. Of course, you’d need to get the other end of the port delivered to you by truck before you could start accepting portal deliveries.” He skimmed another puck down to her, this one labeled Coca Cola.

Ell picked it up. “Do they really think that people will want to have their Coke delivered separately?”

“No, but, imagine if, instead of a big vending machine in our break room, we had one of these attached to the wall. You tell the puck you want a diet coke. Your AI gives it your payment info and once the puck senses your hand under it, bang, an ice cold Coke drops into your hand.”

“Oh,” Ell put her fingers to her lips in mild consternation, “these going to kill local stores aren’t they?”

Fred gave a sad little shrug, “Unless they can find a different way to compete, yeah. You might figure that they’d compete on products you’d want to hold in your hand and look at before you buy, but Amazon is setting up to be able to send you sample products to look at and return, then send you the ‘new in package’ version if you decide you do want it.” He made a little grimace, “That won’t work very well for grocery products like produce, but even there they plan to let you look at the actual product you want to buy on video before it goes out to you.”

“Oh man, that’ll be hard on the Mom and Pop stores!”

Fred shrugged, “Or, it’ll be an opportunity. Remember, Mom and Pop stores are already in trouble, but they can sell through Amazon already. Also, FedEx and UPS plan to offer puck type delivery services so if you find a unique product offered by a Mom and Pop store that doesn’t want to work with Amazon, you can order it delivered by UPS.”

“That’s assuming you have a UPS puck. But you’re right, soon your local Mom and Pop could soon be selling to someone in Turkey!”

Rob laughed, “And everyone’s going to be making their products so they’ll fit through a 4” port!”

Vivian grinned, “And we’re going to be selling a lot more ports.”

When it came time for a report from ET Resources, the only really new item was that Hilton hotels had begun bidding to use one of the living modules at the Habitat as a space tourism facility. At least initially it would be quite expensive, but Hilton had sent up an exploratory team who’d decided that enough wealthy people would be willing to pay for a vacation up there to make it worthwhile. Hilton would want a stationary hub module with windows so people could look out at the view. They intended to eventually purchase a large weightless module as well so guests could enjoy some zero-G sports and games. “They also claim to have a billionaire with heart failure who wants to live up there more or less permanently. There’ll be less stress on his heart.”

Roger lifted a hand. “He might want to check into some of our new medical tech then. One of the heart surgeons at UNC wants to install a ventricular booster around peoples’ hearts. One of the big problems with artificial hearts has been that there was no way to get power into the pump without the danger of infection traveling in along the power wires. Well, that’s solved by the ports and people are back to frantically working on port enabled artificial hearts. However, having your blood go through a mechanical device damages red blood cells and risks clots. It would be much better to just provide a booster squeeze to a weak heart, letting the blood circulate through the patient’s own natural tissue and valves. This doc has a design using a synthetic bag around the heart that contains a bladder. Fluid goes through several ports to expand the bladder. When the bladder expands inside the bag, it pushes against the heart, squeezing it to provide a boost. Maybe your billionaire could live down here after all?”

***

Allan, Ell’s AI, said, “You have a call from Presidential Science Advisor Elton Costella.”

Ell closed her eyes and sighed. Pressing her fingers over her eyes where a headache had suddenly appeared, she said, “Put him through… Dr. Costella?

“Yes Ms. Donsaii. My predecessor, Kant Fladwami said I should talk to you every so often so as to be apprised of any new wrenches you may be throwing into the economic workings of our country?”

Ell forced a chuckle. “That’s probably reasonable. For right now though, we don’t have any revolutionary new technology in the works. You may be aware though that some major e-tailers and shippers are planning to use ports to distribute products?”

“Yes, I’d heard that, but shipping a few small items through ports isn’t going to have much effect on the economy.”

Ell pondered explaining just how many things could be packaged to fit through a 4” port if they needed to be and how such shipments might affect retailing in the country. However, her read of Costella said that he would have already made up his mind and would be angered by any attempt to explain his error. After a moment she only said, “Perhaps.”

Costella said, “I’d like to invite you up to the White House for a briefing with myself and the President regarding the future of your technology. When would you be able to come up?”

“I’ll be available at the President’s convenience.”

“Next Friday at 4 PM then.”

“OK,” Ell said and sank back in her chair with a morbid sense of impending doom.

***

Arriving at the White House, Ell presented her ID. The guard leaned down and looked at her, then looked up at his HUD. “Uh, Ms. Donsaii, it’s an honor… uh, but we don’t have you on the list for admission today?”

Somehow, Ell didn’t feel surprised. “Would you be able to check with the Presidential Science Advisor, Elton Costella? He’s the one that issued me the invitation.”

“Um, I’ll try to reach his assistant. Sorry, but he already has a pretty strong reputation for not liking to be bothered directly.” The earnest young man stepped back into his station and began speaking to the screen there. Twenty minutes passed. The guard had Ell park off to one side so other visitors could pass. Several times, when there were breaks in his duties, he stepped over and apologized for the delay.

Eventually he responded to a chime at his screen and stepped back to his shack. Moments later he stepped back out, jaw working in anger. Nonetheless he spoke politely to Ell, “Um, Yes Ma’am, they say to send you on up.” He motioned her onward.

When Ell walked up to the actual entrance, a dark haired woman in her late thirties stormed up, “I don’t know what’s wrong with those idiots at the gate. Come on. We’re gonna be late.” She turned and walked rapidly away without waiting for Ell’s acknowledgement.

Ell sighed and followed. It soon became evident that they weren’t heading for the Oval Office where Ell had met with presidents in the past. Ell wondered where they might be going but simply followed. Eventually they arrived at an office labeled “Presidential Science Advisor.”

As soon as the woman crossed the threshold Ell heard Costella’s voice bark at her, “Jesus, Nancy! Where the hell have you been?”

“Those morons they have at the gate just can’t think for themselves. They want permission before they’ll let anyone in.”

“Did you find Donsaii or not?”

The woman turned exasperatedly to see Ell just to one side and out of view of the door. She reached out for Ell’s elbow, evidently intending to pull Ell into the doorway and make her visible. Ell subtly shifted her arm to dodge the woman’s hand.

“Come here!” the woman hissed.

Ell tilted her head skeptically, “Do you ever speak politely to anyone?”

The woman rolled her eyes and turned back to Costella, “She’s right here.”

“Christ! Well let’s go.” Costella stormed out of the office, glaring at Ell, “You’re late and Stockton’s gonna be pissed!” The little man stalked rapidly off down the hall.

Ell didn’t move.

Costella’s assistant hissed, “Go! You’re gonna make it worse!”

Costella turned angrily and stormed back their way, “What’s your problem?”

Ell smiled sweetly and said, “I was on time. Your office failed to notify the gate that I was coming.”

“Those Nazis at the gate…” he began,

He stopped when Ell tilted her head, “Are just doing the job assigned to them. To the letter… correctly. They’re supposed to keep you and the President safe.”

Costella glared at her a moment, then turned and motioned down the hall, “Right this way Ms. Donsaii, preferably before the President has a stroke?”

Ell was amused to see that they walked most of the way back through the White House to finish up fairly close to where she’d entered. When they arrived, Costella tersely announced himself. Despite being late, they were made to wait. As opposed to Ell’s previous visits, no one offered any refreshments. In fact, no one even offered her a chair. She’d expected the outcome of an encounter with this president to be unpleasant, but she hadn’t expected it to be so unpleasant before they even met.

Ell assumed that the President’s previous appointment had run over but when the door to the Oval Office opened no one exited. Instead a young man appeared, anxiously and urgently waving them in.

As they walked in Stockton didn’t rise. Instead she leaned back in her chair, drumming angrily on the Oval Office’s Resolute desk with her pen. “So, Ms. Donsaii. Too good to arrive on time for an appointment with your president?”

“No Ma’am.” Ell said quietly, standing at attention even though in civilian clothing. As she’d been trained back in her Academy days, she fixed her eyes on a point above and behind the head of the woman she considered to be her Commander in Chief.

“No?” Stockton asked dangerously.

Without moving her eyes Ell said emotionlessly, “No Ma’am. I arrived thirty minutes early, but the guards at the gate didn’t have me on their list.”

“And you’re claiming it took them thirty five minutes to figure that out?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty what?”

“It took twenty minutes for the guard to get permission to allow me to enter.”

Somewhat triumphantly Stockton said, “Well, with ten minutes, you should still have been here in plenty of time.”

Still without inflection Ell said, “Instead I was guided across the White House to the office of your Science Advisor, then walked back across the White House to your office in his company.”

In her peripheral vision, Ell saw Stockton’s eyes flash angrily over to Costella, but they quickly tracked back to Ell. Stockton said, “All that aside, what’s this crap I hear about your refusal to turn over the equipment for the ET missions?”

“You’ve heard correctly, Ma’am.”

“So, you’re in flagrant disregard of the law?”

“I would not characterize it in that manner.”

Stockton snorted, “How would you characterize it? That you’re better than all of our other citizens who do have to obey our country’s laws?”

“No Ma’am. I would characterize it as a moral refusal to obey an ill-considered law that I have concluded would place the people of our country and our world in an unreasonable amount of danger.”

“I understand that you are still on reserve status and subject to being called up to active duty?”

“That is correct Ma’am.”

“Then I hereby call you back to duty.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Well, aren’t you supposed to salute or something? I am your Commander in Chief.”

“No Ma’am, I am in civilian dress and inside a building. A salute is not normally rendered in this situation. I will, however, render one if you so desire.”

Stockton snorted, “A barracks lawyer? Never mind, I don’t need a goddamn salute… I do need you to follow military orders and turn that stuff over to Ementhal’s committee.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. I believe that to be an unlawful order.”

“Unlawful!”

“Yes Ma’am. It needlessly endangers the lives of civilians.”

“Leaving you in control of our contacts with the little green men is what endangers our people! That’s why I’m ordering you to turn those contact gadgets over.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am, I respectfully disagree. Leaving aside the question of whether any committee could be trusted to keep a secret like this, there would remain the problem of the people who have been assigned to the Ementhal committee. Many of them are individuals who should not be trusted with such a sensitive task.”

“And just what are you basing this bullshit on?!”

“I have carefully reviewed the public records of the members of the committee. Many of them can be demonstrated to be dishonest people of little achievement.”

“What?! Those individuals were appointed by the Congress of the United States!”

“Yes Ma’am. That, however, does not alter the facts regarding the nature of those people.”

“You little twit!” Stockton raised her voice as she heaved her rather large frame to its feet and turned to the Secret Service men in the room. “You,” she said, pointing at one of them.

“Ma’am?” the more senior appearing of the young men said. Ell was not at all surprised that Stockton didn’t know the names of the people on her security detail, even after being under their protection for some time. After a moment’s consideration, she realized that they likely had been with her ever since she’d become a candidate for the office of President.

“Arrest this woman.” Stockton said, pointing at Ell.

Seeming taken aback, the man asked, “On what grounds?” Nonetheless he stepped toward Ell.

“Breaking the law, for Christ sake! Haven’t you been listening? Call the Attorney General, he’ll think of something.”

Ell said, “Madame President, I urge you to reconsider. Arresting me will not change my mind regarding the danger of this technology falling into the hands of others, but it could become a significant black mark on your record.”

The secret serviceman took Ell’s hand and pulled it behind her back where he clicked a handcuff on it. Stockton stepped around the desk and pulled off Ell’s headband. She made a show of removing the PGR chip while Ell’s other wrist was being cuffed. Then Stockton leaned in close to Ell’s face, curled her lip and hissed, “I’ll just bet you change your mind after some time in solitary…”

The secret service agent took Ell out into the hall and turned her over to a member of the Uniformed Service Division. As he did so he whispered, “Sorry.”

“That’s OK, you’re just doing your job. Keep it up.”

As she was marched away, he watched after her, a frog in his throat. He noticed other people staring, appalled to see Ell Donsaii, the darling of their country, in cuffs. Even with her arms cuffed behind her back, the slender young woman in the black pantsuit with a crimson blouse had an astonishing presence, drawing their eyes. She even nodded pleasantly to them. With a sigh he stepped back into the office with the President, jaw working with frustration.

The President, he could hear, was speaking to her Attorney General about what to do with Donsaii.

***

Jennifer Oakey looked up as her boss Dan Short called her name.

“Jen, you aren’t going to guess who we’re checking in.”

“A congressman?”

Dan barked a laugh, “Admittedly they’re all crooks, but no.”

“A congresswoman?”

“Ell Donsaii!”

“No shit? What’d she do?”

“Pissed off the President, from what I hear.”

Jen snorted, “Well, that shows bad judgment. I certainly wouldn’t want to get crosswise of that woman!”

“Which one?”

“Stockton. She strikes me as the vengeful type. Donsaii might crush you but only if you deserved it.”

Dan turned his head, “Here she is now. You’re going to in-process her.”

“Me?”

“Yeah Mel’s got the duty, but she’s too inexperienced. With a VIP like this I don’t want anything getting screwed up. Mel can back you up while you’re doing it.”

Jen grinned at him and raised an eyebrow, “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

Dan raised an eyebrow in return and said, “Don’t I just wish.”

Twenty minutes later, with Mel standing well behind her, Jen watched Donsaii gracefully changing out of her black pantsuit and into the orange prison coverall, Jen thought to herself that Dan would indeed “have wished.” Jennifer had long admired Donsaii’s beautiful face with its smooth, elegant and symmetrical features. The brilliant green eyes didn’t hurt either. But she was almost agape watching her change clothes. Jen had never seen such a slender, graceful female body. Hetero though Jen might be, she had to admire the loveliness of the woman changing clothes in front of her. She almost snorted aloud when Donsaii put on the industrial strength underwear the facility supplied—the ugly bra and granny panties looked great on the woman. Same for the shapeless coverall.

The woman would probably look stunning in a gunnysack, Jen thought.

Throughout the procedure, Donsaii was pleasant and polite, thanking Jen for keeping her clothes folded, not appearing at all discomfited by her nudity. As opposed to most of the women Jennifer processed into the facility, women for whom Jen typically had no respect, Jen found herself admiring Donsaii. Initially for her beauty and flawless physique, but then more and more for the graceful and courteous manner in which Donsaii conducted herself. By the time Jen had finished boxing up Donsaii’s possessions and got her to sign for them Jen found herself saying, “I’m terribly sorry about this Ms. Donsaii. I hope they work out whatever happened pronto and get you back out of here.”

Donsaii flashed a brilliant smile at her, “Well thank you, Ms. Oakey. I certainly hope so as well.”

Finished with the in-processing, Jen and Mel walked Donsaii down to the isolation holding cell where to her surprise Donsaii thanked her for her courtesy. Jen had never put anyone in a cell that had spoken to her so politely. Especially when they were put in the solitary cell which had only a little grated window in its door. Six by ten feet and furnished only with a toilet bowl, a showerhead, a sink and a thinly padded narrow cot, it was pretty disheartening to look at, much less to live in.

Jen shook her head bemusedly as she headed back out front. Before she returned to her desk, she stopped a moment and pondered. She turned to check the video surveillance of Donsaii’s cell, telling the guard watching the cameras that she wanted to make sure the young woman wasn’t doing anything wrong. Inside, she realized that she felt some kind of a bond with Donsaii and wanted to make sure the young woman was OK.

With some dismay, Jen saw that Donsaii had gotten onto her cot and pulled the blankets up over her head. That wasn’t too unusual for inmates. Many did it when they’d become depressed over their apparently hopeless situation.

But, it usually took a long time for them to get miserable enough to hide under the covers, so it didn’t often occur at the temporary holding facility where Jen worked.

***

Shan had just arrived back at their house when his AI said, “You have a call from Raquel.”

“I’ll take it… Hey Raquel, how’d the meeting with Stockton go?”

“Pretty grim.” Ell said, just above a whisper, “I’ve been arrested.”

“Arrested!”

“Yeah, right now I’m in a holding cell but I’m pretty sure they’ll be taking me somewhere else.”

“My God! I’m on my way up to DC!”

“Don’t! You couldn’t do anything to help up here. As soon as we hang up I’ll be contacting the legal team I’ve put on retainer to deal with these Blaustein bill issues. They’re the people who might be able to do something. If you came up here it would only serve to immediately blow my Raquel identity, though my other identities won’t last very long if they start going through my life with a fine toothed comb.”

Shan closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, “Come on. There must be something I can do!”

“Yeah, take care of yourself. Tell everyone Raquel’s gone on a business trip. Start figuring out what you’re going to do if and when they figure out you’re married to a criminal. Especially, start asking yourself what you’re going to do if we can’t resolve this legal crisis and I decide I have to move to a different country.”

“What! Surely you don’t think they’ll just let you go if they don’t get what they want?”

“No, but I might just leave without their permission. Oops, gotta go.”

With the connection abruptly cut, Shan sat back to wonder how she thought she’d be able to get out of whatever prison they were holding her in?

***

There’d been a knock on the door of her cell that caused her to cut her connection with Shan. Ell pulled the blankets off her head and sat up. Looking in at her through the bars Officer Oakey said, “Ms. Donsaii, are you OK?”

Surprised at the concern she heard in the officer’s voice Ell said, “Yes Ma’am.” She couldn’t very well tell them she had just been using her implants to contact her husband, so instead she said, “Just thinking about my situation. It’s easier for me to concentrate if I cover my head.” She shrugged, “Weird, I know.” Thinking that to deflect suspicion she should request to communicate in the normal fashion, she said, “Am I allowed a phone call?”

Oakey looked truly remorseful, “The Attorney General’s office called and said to hold you incommunicado for now. It’s a common misconception that you have a legal right to a phone call. Some states do give you that right, but it isn’t a Federal right and we’re a Federal facility. Sorry. Keep your chin up, I’m sure that whatever put you in here is just some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Thanks for your concern. I’ll do my best to keep my spirits up, but I would like to think for a while. I assume it’s OK if I turtle up under the blanket again?”

“Sure.” The officer turned and left.

Lying back down, Ell rolled on her side, pulled the blanket back up over her head and said, “Allan, send me a camera and projection port through my abdominal port, five centimeters out.” She tugged the coverall tight against her tummy and looked down. It took a minute for a waldo in one of her hidden storerooms to pick the AV port she’d requested and drop it through the one ended port hidden under the skin beneath her belly button. It popped out into the air under the blanket and fell to the sheets. It was actually a pair of ports, back to back. One side had the lens for a projector that could project a video image such as would normally be displayed on her HUD. The other side was a camera that Allan could use to see what was going on in her environment. Ell picked it up and said, “Project my AV recording from the time I arrived at the White House gate through the end of my meeting with the President.”

Ell pointed the port at the sheets a little ways in front of her eyes and a moment later Allan began projecting the recording her HUD had made of her White House experience onto the sheet. She watched it through, then said, “Clip off the part before I arrive at the guard house.” Ell paused thinking, then said, “Leave in the audio part from when the President removed my headband and on up to right after the point where she said, ‘I’ll bet you change your mind after some time in solitary,’ then cut it off there. Now, insert a time clock in the lower left corner of the video image. Next, let me see the first and the last minutes of what you’ve got...” After that had been projected on the sheets for her she said, “OK, Allan, distribute that to the news outlets along with the material I prepared on the Ementhal committee.”

Ell thought for a couple of minutes, then said, “Connect me to Art Jenkins.”

A minute later she heard Jenkins’ voice, “Dr. Donsaii? What can I do for you?”

“Hey Art, my fears have panned out and I’ve been arrested.”

Jenkins said, “Why are you whispering?”

“I haven’t been allowed a phone call yet. The Attorney General has ordered that I be held incommunicado. So I’m using some of my… special technology to talk to you anyway.”

Jenkins barked a laugh, “That’s rich. OK let’s talk about what you’ve been accused of…”

Chapter Six

Breaking News—On the orders of President Stockton, Ell Donsaii has been arrested today at the White House. This was apparently due to her noncompliance with the Blaustein bill which passed into law last fall. That bill was specifically drafted to require Donsaii to turn over all contact equipment and all future contact with alien civilizations—such as the Teecees or any future encounters—to the Ementhal committee.

Neither the White House nor other governmental sources have made an announcement regarding her arrest as of yet. Our information on it comes from a release of the AV recording of Dr. Donsaii’s arrest made available by Donsaii’s AI. That AV record shows Donsaii’s HUD being personally removed from Donsaii’s head by President Stockton. Donsaii’s recording of the incident has been released in spite the loss of her connection to her AI. We speculate that this might have been on instructions she had left to that effect prior to the removal of her HUD.

You may wonder about President Stockton’s accusation that Donsaii was late to their meeting. However, as Donsaii says in the recording—available here—of her confrontation with President Stockton in the Oval Office, the AV recording and its time stamp confirms that Donsaii did arrive on time to the White House. She was, as she claimed, only late for her meeting with the President because she was held up at the gate and then taken back and forth across the White House by White House staff.

Many have expressed outrage at the rude manner with which Stockton treated Donsaii in their encounter—probably not expecting that an AV record of the events could ever see the light of day. “Whether she broke the law or not, the woman who saved our entire world from that comet deserves to be treated with respect,” said Roger Nesbitt of Silver Springs, Maryland…

Donsaii makes reference to the dangers of turning alien contact over to the Ementhal committee. The basis of that danger is not entirely clear, but certainly it would appear that she does not think much of the members of the committee. Although this information has not been back checked as yet, appended to the recording of Dr. Donsaii’s White House encounter is an extremely detailed analysis of eight of the twelve individuals on the Ementhal committee. This information, supposedly all publicly available, appears damning. It begins with Ementhal himself; calling into question the work he did to obtain his PhD. Donsaii has put forth evidence suggesting that Ementhal may have fabricated his results…

Stockton stormed around her office. Secret Service agent Will Argant no longer felt surprise at the woman’s temper and vitriol. When he’d first been assigned to her during the campaign, he’d arrived with the preconception that women were calmer and more pleasant than men. Certainly she almost always showed a calm face to the world. In the debates she had used a lot of biting words and been described as “bitchy,” but the world in general had no idea how the woman behaved in private. So far she’d thrown her pen and a paperweight across the room. The paperweight had splintered some of the paneling. The loud bang had resulted in a couple of his fellow agents bursting into the room looking for a weapon, only to be told, “Get the hell out!”

Now she’d fixed her ire on her Attorney General, Raul Stenner, and secondarily on the rest of the people in the room. “So, any ideas on how she got that goddamned video out? I personally removed the AI chip from her HUD.”

Stenner raised his hands helplessly indicating he had no idea.

Stockton turned, her eyes tracking around the room, “Anybody? How did that go out?”

When Stockton’s eyes paused on Will he shrugged. Recognizing that her grasp of technical issues was poor he said, “The chip you removed wasn’t actually the AI. It was only the PGR chip which communicates with her AI. It doesn’t store anything, so all the AV record had already left her HUD and gone to her AI. She likely keeps the AI itself in a secure location.” From a slight widening of her eyes as he spoke, he saw Stockton comprehending her mistake.

Will felt little surprise, however, when she pretended she had actually known the chip’s function. Stockton said, “I know that, Agent. But how did she tell her AI to send the record out to the press?”

Will shrugged again, “The newsies are speculating that she left instructions for it to do so with her AI before her meeting with you.”

“Oh, come on, she couldn’t have had any idea I intended to arrest her!” Stockton swept the room again with her gaze, “Anyone have any reasonable ideas?” Stockton turned to focus her attention back on Will, “Besides the likely possibility that the Secret Service has completely failed in my assignment to hold that dainty little redheaded bitch in a cell and not to let anyone to talk to her?”

Will clenched his jaw on a number of retorts, but said nothing.

Stockton turned back to Stenner and said, “I want your office to investigate this. When they find out who let Donsaii talk, throw the book at them!”

***

Raul Stenner looked up from his desk when his assistant poked his head in. “Have you got us an investigative team lined up?” Personally Raul thought that Donsaii had gotten the word out through some technological trick. Technology was her thing after all, but he knew he’d better carry out the investigation that Stockton had ordered no matter what his suspicions were.

However, his assistant shook his head, “Sorry, boss. Still working on that, but I thought I’d better let you know we have a lawyer named Arthur Jenkins filing for Donsaii’s release.”

“You’re shittin’ me! Who’s paying him?”

“I don’t know, but whoever it is, they’re rich. This guy must have a veritable army of legal assistants churning out paper on his behalf.”

“Well we’ll just drag our feet ‘til they all get tired.”

“Not sure that’s a good idea. Jenkins is all over the news using the star-power of his client to bring attention to the case. Public opinion could go south pretty fast over the people’s expectations regarding the ‘right to a speedy trial.’ He’s beating that drum pretty hard.”

“Christ…” Stenner sighed, closing his eyes and massaging his temples.

***

Roger’s AI said, “You have a call from Ell Donsaii.”

Elated to think that Ell must have been released, Roger said, “Put her through! Ell how are you? When did you get out?”

With a quiet tone, Ell said, “They haven’t let me out, Roger. I just wanted to talk to you about keeping things going at D5R while I’m gone.”

“Dammit!” there was a moment’s pause, “How are you able to call me?”

“Using the ports you imbedded for me.”

“Oh, yeah,” Roger said, sounding a little embarrassed. “Is that why it sounds like you might be whispering?”

“Yeah,” Ell chuckled, “I’ve got my head under my blankets right now, trying to keep them from knowing what I’m doing.”

“Aw man, this sucks! Any word on when you’ll get out?”

“Well my legal team thinks that it’ll be hard for them to keep holding me without bail. On the other hand the President really doesn’t like me, she might just stand up to the heat for quite a while… Which brings me to the reason for this call.”

“What’s up?”

“Well, even though I can communicate with you at present we have to consider the possibility that I might not be able to do so in the future. So, I’m appointing you acting CEO until my return. Wilson Daster will manage the financial issues and communicate with the investors but you’ll be in operational charge. I’d still like to have you talk things over with me if you can before you make any major decisions, but we need someone on the ground there, ready to run things if I’m not.”

“Jeez, Ell!” Roger said on a long exhalation, “I don’t really feel like I know anything about running a company.”

Ell giggled, “Neither do I Rog’, I just kinda make it up as I go along. But the investors really give us a lot of leeway. They aren’t interested in fast profits. They figure if we just keep pushing out cool new technology, the money issues will take care of themselves in the long run.”

Roger snorted, “I’m not sure we can push out new technology without our pet genius ‘in residence.’”

“Don’t sell yourself short, and especially don’t sell your team short. You’ve got great people working with you. Keep holding our regular D5R team meetings in my absence. Send me AV recordings of the meetings. Don’t forget I’ll still be here thinking,” Ell laughed, “I don’t have much else to do. We might not be able to have all that many real time conversations, but you send me messages about what’s happening and I’ll send you back some suggestions and ideas.”

“Don’t you think we should have a CEO with business education and experience?”

“Well, if we were running a business, yes. But our investors think of this as a technological research facility. They’re willing to bet they can make money with major advances in invented technology rather than sharp business practices. So far they’ve been right.”

Roger exhaled, “OK, hopefully if I screw it up, they’ll just bust me back to physicist, not fire me.”

Ell laughed, “Try not to worry too much. Running the place is like herding cats, true, but fortunately most of the cats we’ve got want to go in pretty cool directions.”

***

Ell contacted Art Jenkins, “Hey Art, how go the pleas you’ve been submitting on my behalf? Are you going to be able to get me out of this hole?”

“Dr. Donsaii…”

“Ell, please.”

“Sorry, Ell… I feel terrible about them having you in solitary. I’ve been protesting it as cruel and unusual, but our legal system is pretty good at dragging things out. I am confident that eventually I should get enough traction to get you out on bail, but it could be weeks still, the way these things work.”

“OK, keep doing what you can. Hire any help you need?”

“Are you sure? I’m already spending money like it’s water.”

“Yeah,” Ell laughed, “My freedom is pretty important to me. Spend what you need, I won’t be broke for quite a while yet.”

***

President Stockton turned to Stenner, her Attorney General. “Raul, how’s Donsaii doing? Any sign she’s gonna break down and turn that stuff over? Then we could just let her go and defuse all this heat her lawyers have brought.”

“Well, I don’t know. She apparently spends a lot of her time doing some of her amazing dances in her little cell. She looks like she’s happily dancing to music even though she doesn’t have any audio gear. But she also lies on her bunk with the blankets pulled up over her head much of the time. That often means an inmate is depressed… a lot of them go crazy in solitary confinement you know?”

“I don’t give a damn whether she goes off the deep end. All she needs to do to get out of there is turn that ET stuff over.”

“Aren’t you a little concerned about what she published about the committee?”

“What do you mean?” Stockton said dangerously.

“That a lot of the people on that committee… are dishonest and… well, not very qualified. The opposition is having a field day and calling for a full investigation into all the members of the committee. They’re even hinting that criminal charges may be forthcoming.”

Stockton narrowed her eyes, “That’s not for them or her to decide. That’s a Congressional decision. Congress made it; she needs to live with it.”

Stenner shrugged unhappily, “Another issue is that huge crowds have shown up to protest outside the holding facility we’ve got Donsaii in. They’re giving you a lot of bad press.”

“I’m tough enough to take some bad press in order to do the right thing.”

“That’s not all; she’s got an entire cadre of lawyers making filings on her behalf.”

Stockton frowned, “I thought we were court martialing her for disobeying a direct order? Doesn’t she have to use a military lawyer?”

“Well, no. She can hire a civilian lawyer for a military case if she has the funds, which she apparently does. And those lawyers are claiming that your order had nothing to do with…” Stenner looked up as he recited from memory, “‘with accomplishing a military mission, or safeguarding or promoting the morale, discipline and usefulness of members of a command.’ Honestly, we’d probably be better off trying it in civilian court.” He sighed, “And they’re claiming it was an illegal order for her to turn her private property over to the government. The fifth amendment says, ‘nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.’”

“Compensate her for it.”

“She says it’s worth a hundred trillion dollars.”

“Bullshit! Reasonable compensation.”

“And they’re submitting habeas corpus filings demanding her right to have her imprisonment reviewed by a judge.”

“Goddammit Stenner, stop quoting the law at me. You’re my Attorney General. You’re supposed to figure out how we can get around this legal crap, not to tell me what a problem it is!”

Stenner took a deep breath, “Edith, it is a problem. By law we are going to have to let her have her imprisonment reviewed, and if that happens in an open courtroom, her hot shot lawyers and personal charisma are going to result in even more bad press.”

“What if we declare her a danger to the country? Then hold her under executive authority to protect the people… Move her somewhere else so they won’t have a place to protest.”

Stenner frowned, “Like Guantanamo?”

Stockton’s eyebrows went up, “Yeah! Great idea. Like Guantanamo. Like a terrorist.”

“But you campaigned on shutting Guantanamo down!”

“I campaigned on stopping maltreatment of the prisoners there. Not on letting any terrorists out of that hole.”

“I’ll remind you that solitary confinement is considered torture by many.”

Stockton snorted, “Not by me.” She shrugged, “Personally, I don’t care if Gitmo does torture terrorists, but I’m willing to go along with my overly sentimental supporters on that one.”

“And I’ll also remind you that this nation awarded Donsaii the Medal of Honor for her actions against terrorists. She’s immensely popular—sending her to Guantanamo would be a highly polarizing move.”

Stockton leaned forward, “Let me put it this way, I consider Donsaii’s retention of the one ended ports, and the ability to contact aliens to herself alone, to be an act of terrorism. I don’t intend to torture her, but I do intend to keep her somewhere where she can’t be a danger to this country. No one needs to know where we’re keeping her.”

Stenner sighed, “That could be a hard secret to keep.” At Stockton’s indrawn breath, he quickly put his hands up and said, “OK, OK. I’ll work on moving her and trying to come up with legal justification for it.”

Stockton leaned back, “What did we find searching her place and D5R?”

“Warrants have been issued. Supposed to happen tomorrow. What are you hoping they’ll find?”

Stockton drew her head back in surprise, then spoke as if to an idiot child, “Her AI with the plans for one ended ports. One ended ports themselves. All the records of her interactions with the Teecees and the connections to any other systems she’s got her little rockets visiting.”

***

Washington D.C.—Ell Donsaii continues to be held incommunicado, apparently in a Federal holding facility here in D.C. Despite her supposed incommunicado status, word has gotten out and the facility reputed to be holding her has been surrounded by protestors. Numerous requests to interview her have been denied and the government refuses to confirm or deny her location. President Stockton called her a “menace to public safety” earlier today. Legal experts have speculated that this may be the beginning of an effort to remove her disposition from judicial review…

Ell said, “Allan, call Shan… Hey hubby, I’ve got some news.”

Shan came on, “From the lack of joy in your voice, it doesn’t sound like the news is that you’re being released?”

“Well, no. But maybe there should be some joy in my voice… I’ve missed my period.”

“What! Oh my God!” Shan paused a moment, “So, you’re pregnant? For sure? I have to admit, I don’t know how regular your periods are.”

“They’ve always been pretty regular. I suppose gettin’ thrown in the slammer might have stressed me enough to make me skip one but I’ve been feeling a little nauseated too.”

“So are you going to have them test you?”

“Well, I was hoping you’d send me a test strip. You know, one of those things you pee on?”

“Oh, through your port?”

“Yeah, I’d rather keep it our little secret for now.”

“OK, I’m heading out to the drugstore right now.”

Thirty minutes later Shan had delivered the test strip through the port to Ell and then, mind spinning, sat waiting for the result.

“Shan?”

“Yes?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh my God!” Shan threw himself back in his chair. Sounding agonized, “What are we going to do?”

“Have a baby?”

“Well, yes, of course. But I hadn’t exactly pictured our baby being born in the slammer!”

“Yeah,” Ell said sadly, “neither had I.”

“Are we doing absolutely everything we can to get you out?”

“Well… I could just leave. But I wanted to try to let the legal system work like it should. I’d much rather be free because the system freed me, instead of free, but a fugitive.”

“Just leave? What the hell do you mean?”

“Escape. I can think of several ways to do it. I’ll bet you could too, if you were in here with me and gave it some thought.”

“Are you saying you do want me to come up there?”

“No, no, I just meant, if you were in my situation you’d be able to see ways to get out of here yourself.”

“If you did escape, where would you go? I mean, I sure hope it’s somewhere I can join you!”

“Well, not much point in escaping to the USA. Too many digital records. It would be almost impossible to establish a new identity here without government help. I’d need to go to a country where they still depend on paper records, establish an identity there, then immigrate back here if that seemed like the best option.”

“A third world country? Most of them don’t speak English.”

“English is pretty common in Africa. But I speak Spanish.”

“You do not! I heard you taking lessons.”

“Exactly.”

“You didn’t sound like you were all that far along.”

“That was quite a while ago Señor.”

“You’re claiming you’ve already learned Spanish?”

“Si. Aprendo muy rápido (I learn quickly).”

Shan rolled his eyes, what couldn’t the woman do…? Ah, yes, cook. “So, are you planning to escape now that you’re pregnant?”

“Not right away, so I’d like you to get me some prenatal vitamins. The diet here isn’t the greatest. Drop one through the port to me every morning. I’ll read up on being pregnant, see if I need anything else.”

***

Bridget was making a lasagna dinner for Ryan. The doorbell rang and she checked the time on her HUD, he’s early! Bridget wiped her hands and walked to the front door of farmhouse where she lived with Ell. Inside she wondered if she should be having her boyfriend over to Ell’s house while Ell herself was in prison. She’d had a little heart to heart with herself over it earlier and decided that the joy she derived from her relationship with Ryan didn’t take anything away from Ell. If there was something she could be doing for Ell, she’d be doing it. Since she could do nothing, she’d just as well enjoy her own life. She pulled open the door with a big smile on her face, “Hey...” she trailed off.

Two men in suits stood there.

Bridget frowned, assuming they were LDS or Jehovah’s Witnesses. “What do you want?” She needed to get these people out of here quickly.

“Bridget Spaulding?” the one closest to the door said.

“Yes…” Bridget said uncertainly.

“FBI,” he said proffering an ID. “You live here with Ell Donsaii, correct?”

Bridget nodded feeling cold inside.

The other man held out a paper, “We have a warrant to search these premises.”

She frowned, “On paper?”

He shrugged, “Warrants and a lot of other legal documents still get printed out. Your AI can search the courthouse records for the electronic version if you want.”

Bridget had had her AI contact the local FBI office to confirm that these men were, in fact, from the FBI. Then she’d indeed had her AI search the court records in Hillsborough for the warrant. It was real as well.

Finally, to their great annoyance, she began carefully reading through the warrant. Before she finished it her AI spoke into her ear, “Ell Donsaii requests that you try not to act like you’re getting a call. She would like to speak to you and suggests that you cough once if you are willing to take the call.”

Bridget coughed.

Ell’s voice came in her ear. “Bridget, try not to let on that you are hearing from me because I’m supposed to be being held incommunicado here in some kind of holding cell in DC. I’m using my implants to contact you. If you understand, please cough once.”

Bridget coughed again.

“Thanks. Allan tells me that the FBI is there at our house with a search warrant. It sounds like you’ve been delaying them, but inevitably they will get in and conduct their search so I’d recommend you just let them go ahead. They won’t find anything there that will cause me any problems. I am hoping they won’t find the tunnels though, so please don’t do anything to point them out. I don’t think that legally you have to help them find anything. Please leave this connection open so I can keep speaking to you without needing to get permission to do so.”

“OK,” Bridget said, speaking to both Ell and the FBI. She looked up at the two men, “It looks like this is a real warrant. Come on in.”

One of them turned and waved. Bridget belatedly realized there was a van in the driveway. It disgorged seven more men, most of them carrying equipment of some type or another. Four of them turned toward the outbuildings. Bridget said, “Wait a minute. Your warrant is to search Donsaii’s home. It doesn’t say anything about the barn or shed or other buildings.”

The agent stared out at the other buildings, jaw working a moment, then looked down at his warrant. Looking back up, he called to the other men, “Hey, we aren’t searching the out buildings. Come help us with the house.”

Ryan drove up then and parked beside the van. He came up to the porch, questions written all over his face.

Bridget said, “The FBI is here searching the house for ‘materials related to the exploration of other solar systems.’ Let me pack up what I’ve been cooking and we can go out to dinner while they do their thing.”

One of the FBI men turned and said, “I’m sorry Ms. Spaulding. We need you to stay on the premises in case we have questions for you.”

Bridget raised an eyebrow, “Can my boyfriend and I eat the dinner I’ve been cooking then?”

“Uh,” the man looked across the room at the older agent who nodded at him. “Sure, Ma’am. Go ahead.”

While Bridget and Ryan ate their lasagna the agents tromped through the house. It was hard to enjoy their meal with both of them listening to try to get some idea what the FBI men might be doing. Bridget pointed a fork up the stairs, “I hope they aren’t messing up all my stuff.”

In her ear Ell said, “They didn’t spend very long in your room, but my AI doesn’t have any cameras in your room so I don’t know what they actually did in there.” Ell laughed, “I should have hidden all my secrets in your room. In my room, they’re taking everything out, even all my clothes, looking through each thing one by one and then putting it back. At least they’re being fairly neat about it. Thank God they aren’t ‘tossing’ the rooms like you see in the movies.”

Bridget looked up as one of the men came down the stairs carrying a large racked AI and started out the door. She got up, “Hey!” she said, starting his way, “Where are you going with that?”

“This is Ms. Donsaii’s AI. We’re confiscating it as evidence.”

In Bridget’s ear Ell said, “Keep protesting, but don’t worry, it’s only a copy of my AI. A ‘decoy’ so to speak.”

Bridget said, “I protest! You’re stealing her property!” She frowned, “and how would her AI help you anyway?”

“We’re tasked with discovering how she sends missions to other stars. Records, plans and other documentation of how she did it will be on this AI. Even if there aren’t any plans, we’ll be able to go through her AV history and find the images and audio of her building and sending the missions. Therefore, it is evidence. Computers have been evidence in criminal cases ever since computers existed.”

As the man walked across the driveway to the van, smoke began pouring out of the AI’s rack. He dropped it and stepped back, staring at it in consternation. The driver got out of the van and brought a fire extinguisher which he used to hose down the AI.

In Bridget’s ear Ell whispered, “Don’t worry. It’s just a little thermite disk on the memory core. It shouldn’t get hot enough to set anything on fire outside the case of the AI.”

The FBI man was cursing loudly and soon several others came out of the house to watch the AI smolder. The senior one stepped out on the porch and narrowed his eyes. He looked at Bridget. “Did you know that thing was booby trapped?” he asked angrily.

“No sir. I didn’t even know her AI was upstairs,” Bridget said innocently.

“Where did you think she kept it?”

Bridget shrugged, “Never thought about it. D5R bought it for her, I guess I would have assumed it stayed at work.”

“Goddammit!” the man swore tonelessly under his breath. Then raising his voice, “OK, OK, let’s get back in here and search the rest of this place. Anything else we decide to confiscate, we open it up and check for booby traps before we move it!”

Finishing dinner, Bridget and Ryan sat and talked for a while, then watched a movie. Meanwhile the agents methodically went through the house, climbing into the attic, checking each room, upstairs, ground floor and finally into the basement. Bridget had a hard time concentrating on the movie with an ear cocked for signs that the men had found their way into the tunnels.

When the men left Bridget was partly relieved and partly upset to hear one say to another, “Hopefully they had better luck with the search out where she works.”

As soon as they were gone, Bridget turned into Ryan’s arms and buried her head in his shoulder. “Bastards!” she sniffed. “Contact Ell… Ell, I’m hoping you can still hear me without that AI that went up in smoke?”

“Yup, reading you loud and clear. That AI really was just a decoy so it had nothing to do with my connection to you.”

“So it was what? Just a case? Not a real computer?”

“Oh no, it was a fully functioning AI. I’ve even used it for a few things. But mostly it was there for them to find and me to destroy so they would think they’d gotten my AI and stop looking.”

“You used a high end AI like that as a decoy?” Bridget said doubtfully.

“Well, yeah. It was important they stop looking for the real one.”

“Hey, when the FBI guys left they said something about another team searching D5R.”

Ell said, “Yeah, our legal team met them and insisted that they only search the exact locations specified in the warrant. The only specific location on their warrant was my office, so they were only allowed to go through that one site. Kind of like you did to them with the outbuildings at the farm, thanks for that by the way. They didn’t find anything in my office ‘cause I’ve never had anything much in there.”

Bridget sighed, “Wow, you’ve really been thinking ahead on this haven’t you?”

“Well, I’ve been afraid something like this was going to happen for months now. Thanks for standing your ground at the house for me. By the way, they didn’t find their way out of the basement and into the tunnels. I was thinking they would have some kind of sonar or something to look for hidden compartments that would show them the tunnel entrance, but I guess this team wasn’t that sophisticated.”

Bridget sighed, “They were still pretty intimidating. I’m sure glad you called when you did.”

Ell said, “Oops, gotta go,” and broke the connection.

***

Ell had broken the connection when she heard the bolts in the door to her cell clank open. She put the port that had been projecting images from Allan in her mouth and swallowed as she pulled the blankets off her head and looked up at the door. She blinked several times as if she’d been asleep. A guard stood there, with another one several feet behind him. “Up an’ at ‘em Donsaii,” he said, “The big Kahunas want to talk to you.”

Tom had been instructed to put Ell in handcuffs and take her to the interrogation room. Normally contemptuous of his charges, his attitude gradually changed beginning from the moment he first confronted Donsaii in person.

Somehow, even after spending days in in the Spartan isolation cell with no amenities other than a sliver of soap, a tiny tube of toothpaste, a short floppy toothbrush, one towel, two sheets and one blanket, the young woman still looked gorgeous. No makeup, no shampoo, no conditioner, terrible food, a shapeless jumpsuit, and floppy sandals—she nonetheless looked amazing as she stood gracefully and said, “Thank you, officer Gaddy.”

When Tom lifted the cuffs she presented her wrists without complaint. Once he’d applied the cuffs he found himself saying, “This way, Ma’am,” as he motioned out the door to the left. Ma’am? I’ve never called a prisoner Ma’am before! Walking behind her to interrogation he couldn’t help but admire the supple way she walked. He blinked. He’d admired this woman for years now, why had he expected to lose all respect for her just because she and the President were having a tiff?

He opened the interrogation room and motioned her in. It was populated with a table and three chairs. Two of the chairs were occupied, one by an overweight man in a cheap, too tight suit, the other by an uptight looking woman in a severely tailored and expensive looking gray suit with a cream blouse.

“Sit her there,” the woman said, pointing to the remaining chair. Tom found himself mildly offended by the woman’s treatment of Donsaii as a thing to be placed in a location, rather than as a human being who deserved to be treated respectfully. Even thinking it, he realized with some shame that he often treated prisoners disrespectfully himself.

As Tom and his partner took positions against the walls, Donsaii seated herself in the chair and looked expectantly from the woman to the man. Somehow, without saying a word, and despite her prisoner’s garb, Donsaii’s had taken possession of the room through an imposing charisma. The other two now seemed to be the interlopers.

Apparently feeling at a psychological disadvantage, the woman stood and leaned over toward Donsaii. Curling her lip she said, “So, has spending time in this hole convinced you that you might want to reconsider your response to your President?”

Smiling pleasantly Donsaii said, “Excuse me, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced?”

“I know who you are Donsaii. You can call me Ms. Noonan. I’m from the AG’s office.”

“Would that be the Attorney General?”

“Yes. Now, are you ready to talk?”

“Sure.”

Looking a little surprised, Noonan said, “Go ahead.”

A little mischievously Donsaii said, “I don’t like it here in your jail.”

“Well, I should hope not. That’s the point after all. But, if you’re wanting out, all you have to do is agree to disclose the methods and turn over the equipment you’re using for your interstellar explorations.”

Donsaii, raised her eyebrows, “Ah, but I’m afraid I can’t do that, it would be an immoral act.”

“I heard you fed that line of crap to the President too. Go ahead, tell me what’s so immoral about it?”

Donsaii tilted her head, “The technology required to explore the stars requires a one ended port. Sitting here with a one ended port I could open a passage into your body and inject a toxin. If it were slow acting, you might die weeks later without ever figuring who’d killed you. I don’t think that kind of technology should be turned loose on our world. We have enough trouble with people killing each other without making it easy.”

“You mean, if I had a port inside of me, say some kind of medical device, you could connect to it?”

Donsaii shook her head, “No that would be a ‘two ended port’ like people are already using. A one ended port doesn’t require a port on the other end. That’s how it can deliver a rocket to another star.”

Tom Gaddy felt his eyebrows crawling up his forehead in horror at the thought of people running around with such a device.

Noonan appeared to be a little shell-shocked as well as she considered the implications.

Donsaii continued, “You could drop Molotov cocktails on your neighbor’s house or bombs on other countries with no one being able to tell where they came from or being capable of stopping you from doing so.”

Noonan swallowed and shook herself, “All the more reason to turn this over to your government for safekeeping then.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Noonan, turning something over to a government doesn’t keep it a secret. I’m not at all confident my own government wouldn’t use these devices in a malignant fashion. I prefer the current situation much better.”

“Current situation?”

“At present, I’ve destroyed all the existing one ended ports and I’m the only person who knows how to make them.”

Noonan stared at her several long moments as if considering, then she said, “Well then, I must inform you that President Stockton has, by executive order, declared you a national menace. As a danger to society, our country and the world, she’s ordered you held without trial or recourse, at Guantanamo.”

“Guantanamo? I thought it had been closed?”

“Nope, we’re still holding some terrorists there. We consider you to be a terrorist as well, holding your country hostage to the dangers represented by your one ended ports.” Noonan stood, “You’ll be moved to that location shortly. I’d recommend that you reconsider,” she curled a lip, “it turns out you aren’t above the law after all.”

Donsaii said, “I thought the President had placed me on active duty and was holding me on ‘failure to obey an order.’”

Noonan shook her head, “The President reconsidered. You are not on active duty. You are a civilian who is failing to comply with the law. However, if that was all it was, you could be out on bail. As a menace being rendered safe by executive order, we are not constrained to follow those niceties.”

Donsaii looked sad and she shook her head. “Sorry. I’m afraid this represents a terrible solution that we’ll all regret.”

Tom Gaddy’s mind whirled as he took Donsaii back to her cell. Everything about this whole situation seemed… wrong, but try as he might, he couldn’t think of a solution. He decided to talk to his supervisor about it in the morning.

Ell had finished reading about executive orders and Guantanamo. She’d been studying maps of Cuba and the Caribbean. She’d designated several locations on the Cuban map to Allan when she heard the bolts on her cell door shoot again. She noted that the time displayed by her projector was 1:30 AM. She whispered to Allan to turn off the projection and put the video projection port in her mouth. Pulling the covers back off her head, she saw the door rolling open. Four armed men waited outside the door this time.

Ell swallowed the port.

One of the men came in and gruffly said, “Put out your wrists.”

Ell did so and the man closed another pair of the all too familiar handcuffs over them. The man knelt and put another set of padded cuffs on her ankles that had a short chain between them. “Where are we going?” Ell asked.

The man only shook his head, then he grasped her arm and pulled her to her feet.

Ell, shuffling because of the ankle chains, made her way out of the cell. “Turn left,” he said.

They exited the building into an alley. A van with barred windows waited. The gruff man helped her into the van then got into the front. He turned to watch her through a steel grating. Another man drove. Ell assumed the other two of the four men that had come to pick her up got in the black car that had been parked behind the van, but she couldn’t know for sure.

As they drove, Allan updated her on her position from her implanted GPS antenna. “It looks likely that they are taking you to Andrews Air Force Base.”

“OK Allan, I’ve decided to go ahead and escape.” Ell said quietly. She paused to ponder the ramifications of her decision. I’ll be in flagrant disregard of the law, not just Stockton’s executive order. I’ll be an escaped prisoner under pursuit… by all the resources of the United States government.

However, she didn’t want to find herself in a prison from which she perhaps could not escape. “Wake up Amy and give her my apologies for ruining her sleep. Ask her to open the barn door and put a t-shirt, jeans, socks and running shoes in the compartment under the saddle of the new hoverbike. The one that has the winch and the low radar profile. Then fly the hoverbike out of there and down to Guantanamo in Cuba. If it gets there before I do, or before I give any other directions, have it land at point A of the locations I chose before they picked me up… Oh and have Amy put a water bottle and as many granola bars in the compartment as will fit under the clothes.”

Ell thought another minute then said, “I’ll need a small lightweight backpack too, so ask Amy to put in one of those.” She considered, “There might not be room for granola bars, they’re the lowest priority of the items I’ve listed.”

Allan informed Ell that they had indeed arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. The van drove out to the tarmac and the four men opened the back. At their direction Ell shuffled over to a small cargo plane of a type she didn’t recognize. The back of the craft was filled with boxes. They loaded Ell into an uncomfortable seat near the front. One of the men sat beside her and another behind her. The other two didn’t board the plane, presumably they returned to the vehicles from whence they came.

Three in the morning arrived and Ell slept as best she could in the uncomfortable seat. She woke up again when they took off at about 4AM. She felt a strong desire to talk to Shan about her decision, but the guard sitting right next to her made that pretty difficult. Eventually she drifted back off to sleep.

As the sun rose outside the plane’s windows, the guards broke out some rat packs and they ate breakfast. About an hour after they’d finished eating and the guards had disposed of the trash, the plane touched down on the airfield at Guantanamo.

The guards took her off the plane and were met by men in camo fatigues. The senior of the three men meeting them was a very large Petty Officer Second Class. He stared down at Ell for a minute, then smirked, saying, “My, my, looks like someone’s not as high and mighty as they used to be.”

He reached for Ell’s arm, but the hand of the gruff guard who’d picked her up in DC shot out to grab the PO by the wrist. A moment passed with the two men staring at each other, then the guard said in his gravelly voice, “She saved our entire world. She may be in trouble now, but she still deserves respect.”

The Petty Officer eyed her; then barked a laugh, “But what has she done for us lately, huh? I hear she may be bringin’ the little green men down on us. In any case,” he sketched an insolent bow, “here’s your respect. Now, get your ass over to the truck.”

The PO grabbed Ell by the arm, evidently intending to drag her to the truck. He looked surprised when, despite the ankle cuffs, she skipped along beside him as fast as he walked. They loaded her into the back of a truck with a large boxy back end that had been outfitted as a kind of rolling transport cell. Divided by a thick steel partition into left and right compartments, it had tiny windows covered with steel gratings and a hard bench down each side. They put her in the right side. As the only prisoner Ell promptly laid out full length on the bench and pretended to sleep while facing the wall.

Since the airfield was across Guantanamo bay from the detention center, Ell had wondered if they would take a ferry or perhaps she’d be loaded in a helicopter. The question was answered when the prison truck started an old internal combustion engine and drove only a short bumpy distance. After it stopped, it continued moving uneasily as the ferry beneath it shifted on the waves.

Other than the creaking of the ferry on the waves it was quiet, so while she was alone in the back of the van Ell put in a call to Shan to let him know where she was and that she planned to escape.

“Where are you going to go?”

“I was thinking that I’d go to the Habitat. It’d be hard for them to reach me there, but they’d know where I was and would focus on D5R as a place to apply leverage. Instead I think I’m going to go into hiding. Mexico, probably. Then cross the border into the States as an illegal alien and establish a new identity that way.”

“Why go to the border, then cross back? Just set yourself up in the US as an immigrant, without ever leaving.”

“Well, I’m down here near Mexico and have to come back from there anyway. I figure I’d just as well hire help from people who normally help people cross over and get IDs set up.”

“Some of those people aren’t very nice.”

There was a long pause. “You’re probably right. But if they aren’t nice to me, they probably aren’t nice to a lot of people and maybe someone should teach them a lesson.”

“Uh, that’d be fine, unless they hurt you before you teach them their lesson.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “but, whatever I do, it’s going to be kind of risky.”

“Even if all that works, when you get up here to the States, aren’t they going to figure out who you really are from fingerprints and DNA?”

“I printed myself some fake fingerprints that I can apply if they arrest me or if I need prints for a job. If they arrest me and take DNA with a buccal swab from the mouth I have a mixture of several other peoples’ DNA that I can port into my mouth from the port on the back of my tooth. That should result in rejection of the specimen for being corrupt, but because it takes a while to process it, I should be gone before they figure out the specimen has a problem.”

“Jeez, you’ve really been giving this some thought.”

“Well, yeah,” Ell sighed, sadly, “I’d rather have been thinking about more productive things.”

“Do you want me to come join you somewhere?”

“No, I’m thinking it would be good for one of us to be legal, at least for now. Maybe, once I’m back in the states, I’ll head back up to North Carolina. You could hire me to clean house?”

“Hah! You’re not a very good maid, you know?”

“Hey, first you criticize my cooking, now my cleaning?!”

“I loooove you.” Shan said in a sing song voice.

“Hah! I gotta go. Gotta see if I can get loose from here before they start torturing me for my secrets.”

“Good luck my love, play it as safe as you can and call if you think of anything I can do to help.”

“OK.”

Next Ell put in a call to her Mom. Her mother had been pretty upset about her being in prison so Ell didn’t tell her yet about her pregnancy or plans to escape, or even that she was at Guantanamo Bay.

***

Shan mused to himself that he was in an unreasonably good mood for a man whose pregnant wife was in prison. He pondered this for a moment, then realized that he simply had no doubt that his wife would succeed at her jail break and illegal immigration back into the United States.

However, he still worried about how the baby would tolerate all this stress.

Chapter Seven

Pulling a sheet of OSB sheathing, Enrique Fuentes stepped from rafter to rafter as he crossed the roof.  He hated walking up so high on rafters, but the older men claimed it was always the “new guy’s job.” His ribs still hurt from falling last week, striking his chest on the rafters he was falling between. However, by sprawling, he had kept from falling through the rafters to the ground. He hadn’t fallen any farther than chest deep between the boards, but it had hurt nearly as badly as it had frightened him. The other workers had complimented him on his reactions. The compliments would have felt better if his chest hadn’t been hurting so badly.

He turned to make sure he wasn’t too close to the edge.

His foot slipped.

He dropped the OSB and stretched out his body as before, not wanting to slip between the rafters, but he was at the hip of the roof. His body landed on the down-sloping rafters of the hip and started to skid!

Scrabbling with his hands he slowed the rush of his upper body toward the edge… but he couldn’t stop it.

Feeling as if he were in a slow motion dream, Enrique slid off the edge and plunged toward the ground below.

***

After her mother disconnected, Ell said, “Allan. Where is the hoverbike at present?”

“It arrived at location A about twenty minutes ago.”

“Really?” Ell said, knowing it was a stupid question to ask an AI, but she was surprised. “I thought the cargo plane would be much faster than the hoverbike.”

“Really,” the AI said tonelessly. It was merely answering a question with a fact, but the resultant dry delivery made the AI seem sarcastic. “It is correct that the plane is faster, but the plane had further to go and there was a delay before you took off. In addition, without a passenger to add weight and wind resistance and complain about buffeting, I was able to fly the hoverbike at over four hundred miles per hour.”

For a moment Ell had the sense that her AI was also teasing her about her intolerance of wind buffeting at high speeds on her hoverbike flights. She shook her head; AI’s had no sense of humor. Even attempts to program humor into them fell flat. Allan must just be reciting the reasons the hoverbike hadn’t been up to those speeds in the past. “OK,” she said, “let me know when this prison van is one and a half miles from its closest approach to the hoverbike at location A.”

Eventually, the sound of the ferry’s motors reached her and Ell felt it pull away from the dock. The heaving of the deck and van, though still mild, became significantly more than it had been at the dock. Allan confirmed that the ferry had pulled away from the dock and was in transit across the bay.

Ell examined her handcuffs. They were typical metal cuffs with two curved metal pieces called the “double strands” connected at a hinge to a curved “single strand” that had teeth on it. Those teeth ratcheted in and locked into the double strand, adjusting to a size to fit the person’s wrist. She moved over into the darkest corner of the dimly lit back of the truck. Turning into the corner to shield the view of any cameras with her body she turned on the small one ended port in the end of her right index finger so that it would open about six millimeters from the tip of her finger. She set it to open and close at 200 Hz (times per second). The small sparks of light that resulted when a port opened produced a small blue glowing area about a quarter inch beyond the tip of her finger. Because the port was opening about thirty millimeters from the port itself with most openings plus or minus 5% in distance, it made a glowing spot about three millimeters wide. Ell twisted her wrists around so that the glowing spot immersed itself into the metal of the left cuff’s “single strand.” Moving her finger slowly back and forth at a 45 degree angle to the strand caused the ports that were forming and collapsing to cut hundreds of 3.2 millimeter diameter breaks in the metal. Because they formed and collapsed at slightly different depths, a single pass of her finger didn’t completely cut the strand. But after a few seconds of moving her finger back and forth she could see a lacy slot appear in the metal. She stopped when it looked like just a tiny sliver of metal still held the cuff closed. She didn’t want the cuffs falling off while the guards might notice and she was pretty sure she could break that last little bit with a twist of her wrists.

She rotated her wrists around and, using the port in her left index finger, did the same to the handcuff on the right wrist, then pulled her feet up onto the bench in front of her and cut 99% of the single strands of each of the ankle cuffs as well.

The rocking motion diminished as the ferry docked. A short while later she heard the truck’s engine start and it bumped its way off the ferry and onto the road. Ell said, “Allan, load midazolam for my right finger and Taser darts for my left finger.”

After a brief pause Allan said, “Loaded.”

Ell held onto the grating on the small window at the front of the truck’s prisoner box. She could peer out over the roof of the cab to the engine compartment. The truck rolled through the buildings of the naval base. She recognized various buildings from her study of the satellite maps of the area. Ell set her one ended port at twelve inches. As soon as the truck turned right and started off across the low scrubby hills toward where the detention center was located, she moved back to sit on the bench just over the right rear wheel well. She pointed her index finger at where she estimated the outer sidewall of the tire would be spinning down there below her. She turned the port on at 200 Hz and began slowly waving her finger to move the other end of the port around, hopefully cutting holes into the sidewall of the tire as it spun past. The truck rolled on and on, unaffected as Ell waved the port slowly in and out and then adjusted the distance to eighteen inches.

Eventually, wondering if the port had broken down, Ell had Allan change the port to six millimeters again and looked at the tip of her finger in the shade of her hand. She could still see a fuzzy blue glow. She pointed it back down at the wheel well again and waved it slowly farther in and out.

Suddenly, she realized that the truck likely had dual rear wheels. Even if the outer one had deflated, the inner one might carry the current light load easily. She waved it slowly even farther toward the middle of the truck. Still nothing happened! Just before she was about to try the other finger, she heard a sudden bang. The truck lurched to that side and began to slow.

Even in the back of the truck, Ell could hear the Petty Officer cursing as the truck coasted to a stop. The three men got out of the front. Standing to look out the side window she saw them walking back to look at the tire. “God dammit!” The Petty Officer swore tonelessly. “Jackson, get on the horn back to dispatch. Have them send a cage car and a regular car out here to pick us up. Tell the motor pool their damn truck blew out both back right tires.”

The truck shifted as if someone had climbed onto the back bumper. Ell sat down quickly. As she’d suspected, the Petty Officer peered into the small window at the back and looked at her for a minute. His eyes disappeared from the window and the truck moved again as the large man got down.

Ell stood and peered out at them again. After carefully estimating their distance she pointed her finger through the wall of the truck at the Petty Officer’s thigh and said to Allan, “Midazolam, eight milligrams, seven feet six inches… fire.” The PO broke off from his banter with the other two guards to look down at his thigh with a puzzled look, then reached down to rub it. He went back to his conversation without further evidence of the injection though.

Ell pointed at the second man. He wasn’t as big so she said, “Midazolam , five milligrams, six feet, fire.” This time she saw a drop of fluid appear in the air just short of his thigh and fall into the dust at his feet. She said, “Midazolam, same dose, six feet three inches, fire.” The man slapped at his thigh as if he thought a bug had stung him, but didn’t look away from the PO’s story.

Ell dosed the third guard with the short acting tranquilizer, then turned to the latch on the door of the truck. She’d looked at it when they’d put her in the truck and it consisted of a deadbolt thrown by a large lever on the outside. The lever fit into a slot on the outside of the truck and looked as if it were gripped by an electronically controlled servo. First Ell extended her cutting port into the door where she thought the deadbolt was and moved it around a while, occasionally shaking the door.

One of the guards came over and in a slurred manner said, “Hey! Shtop messin’ wit da door!”

Ell ignored him and kept shaking the door and stirring her port about in the area of the deadbolt with her port. After about a minute she was rewarded with a clank and increased travel as she shook the door. Although she could barely see the large lever through the bottom of the grated window, the fact that she could see it at all made the work of cutting it much faster. A little more jiggling and the door swung open.

By then all three guards looked very bleary. Sitting on their buttocks in the shade of the truck, they gazed up at her unsteadily. To her dismay, the Petty Officer leaned back and pulled out his service weapon. He pointed it clumsily in her direction and said, “How’d you ge’ tha’ door op’n?”

Ell shrugged her shoulders and, trying to look harmless, held up her wrists to display her handcuffs.

He said, “Move back from tha’ door. I’ll lock i’ righ’ thish time.”

When he put the hand with the gun down on the ground to help heave himself unsteadily to his feet, Ell shot him with a Taser dart from her left finger. She twisted her wrists to break the remaining bits of metal holding the cuffs closed and then reached down to break the last strands of her ankle cuffs as well. The right one still had too much metal in the gap so she had to run her port through it a little bit more.

Getting out of the truck, Ell checked the PO, rolling him onto his side and worrying about whether being Tasered while tranquilized might do significantly more harm than either one alone. The PO seemed to be unconscious but still breathing well. She studied the other two men who just looked as if they were absolutely blotto drunk. One laid out supine and snored; the other leaned forward, head between his knees. That one swayed unsteadily from side to side.

“Allan, bring the hoverbike to this location,” Ell said, distractedly, still watching the three men and worrying about whether she might have given them too large a dose of the drug. About a minute later a whirring announced the arrival of the unloaded hoverbike. The fans didn’t have to run very fast to keep it aloft with nothing but the carbon fiber frame to lift. Ell picked up the broken hand and ankle cuffs, saying “Set the bike down on the road just behind the truck.”

The hoverbike settled to the road about twenty feet away with only a little dusting of blown dirt. Safety protocols kept Allan from landing it closer because he was flying it entirely on GPS and accuracy was plus or minus six feet. In the silence, Ell could faintly hear a car coming. Giving up on watching over the three men, she trotted to the hoverbike and quickly rode it to the top of the rise just east of the road, still looking back to keep a worried eye on the three men. She settled the bike into an open area between the scrubby little trees that populated the ridge and stepped back out to peer at the men through some brushy cover. A car rolled up from the direction of the base, the same direction the truck had come from. A uniformed man got out, obviously curious about what had happened to leave a prison transport truck stopped at the side of the road with the door open and three men lying in the shade behind it. The moment he realized the men were incapacitated became obvious. He crouched, drew a weapon and scanned the area for threats. Then he went to check more carefully on the men.

As soon as Ell felt confident that the man would look after the three guards she walked back to the hoverbike. She had Allan spool up the fans just enough to lift it eighteen inches off the ground and pushed it through the trees and a little ways down the other side of the ridge. Climbing on, she lifted off and slid down into the little valley on the other side. Staying low, she followed that valley as it meandered northeast. She came to two roads where she stopped, checking both directions, then sliding quickly past the roads when there wasn’t traffic. Eventually she came to an open, relatively flat area. She surveyed it carefully and, seeing no one, raced across it low and quick.

On the other side of the open area, she lifted up over a fence and Allan spoke, “You have now entered Cuban territory.” Ell flew a ways further. She found a tree that was significantly larger than the rest of the ones dotting the low hills and parked the hovercraft in its shade.

Opening the large compartment under the saddle of the hoverbike, Ell pulled out her jeans and t-shirt. Pulling off the orange coverall, she put them on, then the socks and shoes. After laying out the coverall next to the bike and hiding the remains of her cuffs deep in under a bush, she got out a granola bar and a cup. She filled the cup with Coke dispensed from her umbilical port and took a deep drink. Ahh, she thought, savoring the drink she’d been denied while in the jail. She sat down to think. She wanted to wait for dark before she left Cuba, so she had quite a while.

***

Lieutenant Milner looked around again, carefully and slowly turning a full 360 degrees so his AI could make a video record of his surroundings. “What the hell is going on here?” he muttered to himself. He’d already called in a situation report to the Camp. He eyed the three drunken sailors again and then made a circuit of the truck. The only apparent damage to the truck was to the rear wheels and the back door for the right side prisoners’ compartment.

He’d stood on the back bumper to peer into the left prisoner’s compartment through the tiny window. It was empty. Its door was solidly locked and undamaged.

The tires on the right rear wheels appeared to be completely shredded! He’d seen blowouts before and knew the tires could be ripped up, but the outer tire that he could easily see looked like someone had held a chain saw to it while it was spinning.

The deadbolt and the locking lever for the back door were both broken in a most bizarre manner. The broken surfaces were very rough, something like a cheese grater or a rasp.

So, broken latches, open prisoners’ compartment, no prisoners, destroyed tire and drunk guards. Milner could imagine the guards getting drunk on duty. Hard to conceive, considering the punishment it would engender, but it had been done before. He could believe that drunk sailors would run their vehicle off the road and destroy the tire in some spectacular manner. But without any other damage to the truck?

He could imagine how the drinking and the tires had happened, but he couldn’t, absolutely could not, come up with a plausible explanation for what had happened to the latch on the truck!

Milner’s AI said, “You have a call from Admiral Whitt.”

Shit! Ice seized Milner’s gut. No lieutenant looked forward to talking to an admiral. “I’ll take it… Admiral Whitt, this is Lieutenant Milner speaking, sir.”

The Admiral grunted, “Milner, what the hell is going on out there?”

“Sir, I came up on one of the prison transport trucks stopped on the roadside between the base and the detention camp…” He paused to see of the Admiral would question him. Since the Admiral didn’t prompt him, he continued. “Sir, the guards are intoxicated and the right back tires of the vehicle are blown out. The prisoner’s compartment is open and, if there were prisoners in it, they are not to be seen at present.”

“God dammit! Does it look like the truck wrecked?”

“No sir.”

“Find that prisoner! It’s a woman. This takes absolute priority. She can’t have gone far. Look for tracks. We’ll have tracking dogs out there soon so don’t disturb any scent that might be present in the compartment.”

“A woman sir?”

“Yes, even though everyone thinks it isn’t true, we have had a few women in detention here at the camp in the past. This one is…” the Admiral sighed, “I’d just as well tell you, it’s Ell Donsaii. The Commander in Chief herself has an interest in this… prisoner, so you can figure… if we don’t find her, the fecal matter’s gonna be pouring onto the rotary impeller.”

“Yes sir,” Milner said. The Admiral cut the connection with Milner already scanning his surroundings. He had no idea how to track anyone, but he guessed he’d better try. He squatted down to talk to the one guard that wasn’t completely laid out and snoring. “Seaman!” He lowered his head to look at the man’s nametag, then pushed up on the seaman’s shoulder to bring the nametag into view. “Jackson! Seaman Jackson!” Milner shook Jackson’s arm. “Seaman!” he barked again.

Jackson looked blearily up at Milner.

“Jackson, what happened here?”

Jackson’s head swiveled unsteadily, “Uh… tire blew out.”

Milner thought about asking how the seaman got so drunk, but decided not to waste a question. “What happened to the prisoner?”

Jackson’s head tipped back and he stared at the open cell on the back of the truck for a minute. Then his head drooped forward again. He mumbled, “Dunno,” then pitched over on his side and closed his eyes.

Milner rubbed his chin. Jackson’s breath didn’t smell of alcohol. What kind of booze could get you that drunk without a telltale odor?

A tow truck and another prisoner transport vehicle arrived. They were staffed by seamen and a Petty Officer 1st class. Milner wondered if he could turn this problem over to them. After a moment he decided the admiral probably wouldn’t like that.

Taking charge of the situation he said, “Towing this truck will have to take second place to recovering the prisoner. She’s escaped and the Admiral...” Milner had been about to say has a bug up his ass but suddenly realized that people may be examining his AV record later. “Admiral Whitt has designated her recovery as priority one.” Realizing that he had no idea how to go about tracking a prisoner, he turned to the Petty Officer, “PO, you have suggestions for carrying out this mission?”

“Yes sir. We call for UAVs to give us ‘eyes in the sky’ and dogs to track scent. Meanwhile we spread out looking for tracks.” He eyed the back of the truck, “No one gets in there and disturbs the scent.”

“The Admiral said he’s sending dogs, you get on the horn for UAVs. The rest of you, spread out, look for tracks.” Milner turned back to the drunken guards. He shook the Petty Officer, “PO! PO!”

The PO’s eyes opened, “Whaaa’?”

“What happened to your prisoner?” Milner barked at him.

“Wha’ pris’ner?” His head drooped back.

Milner shook his head disgustedly and looked up as the van with the canine unit arrived.

Admiral Whitt arrived at the scene of the escape and the Commander who’d assumed command of the site from Milner trotted over to his vehicle.

“Any luck?” Whitt asked.

The Commander shook his head disgustedly, “No sir. Sorry. The dogs can’t track her any farther than twenty feet down the road,” he pointed back toward the base. “The UAVs,” he pointed up into the air where three small UAVs could be seen circling, “don’t see anyone for as far as we’ve calculated even Ell Donsaii could have run in the time elapsed. We’ll have the UAVs keep watch after dark when infrared will let them look for someone hiding and not moving, but I’m afraid she got a ride with someone.”

Whitt frowned, “Got a ride? Who would pick someone up in a prison coverall, with wrist and ankle cuffs on?”

“Sir, I surely don’t know, but how else could the scent trail end right there?” he said, pointing at the spot on the road, twenty feet behind the truck, where the dogs had repeatedly circled, noses to the ground but with no trail to follow any further. “Either a car picked her up, or she grew wings and flew. I’ve checked with the Naval Air Station and they assure me a helicopter didn’t come in and get her. Radar would have gone crazy the way they watch for Cuban overflights.”

“Have they taken the dogs on a bigger circle around the area, to see if somehow she broke the scent trail somehow but they could pick her up farther away?”

“Yes sir. There are a couple of dogs out there now, making a circle at about a half mile.”

“OK, put out a general alert through the AIs of all Base personnel so they’ll be on the lookout. Tell them it’s Donsaii so she doesn’t fool anyone with some kind of ‘good girl’ act. All boats and aircraft leaving Gitmo are to be searched by the canines that have her scent. Close down the Cuba border. I want swimming to be her only possible means of egress.” He grimaced, “And bring me those drunken sailors that let her get away.”

“Uh, sir, the three guards have had their alcohol levels taken. They weren’t drunk. In fact, their alcohol levels were zero. And they already appear to be completely sober. The medics tell me they must have been drugged with a short acting tranquilizer. Blood levels for those will take longer to come back. None of them even remember driving off the ferry, but the medics say it’s fairly common for there to be recent memory loss with those types of drugs.”

“Drugged! How in all the holy hells could that even happen? How do you get short acting drugs into sailors while they’re driving a truck?” He developed a thoughtful look, “Unless they were partying?”

The Commander shook his head. “I don’t know sir. We’ve checked the cab of the truck for needles and the men for needle tracks. No joy.” He held up a hand, “Just a sec’ sir, call from the medics.” He wandered a few steps away, then returned. “The tox screen shows benzos in the blood of all three sailors.” He shrugged, “Relatives of Valium, some are very short acting and could explain what we’ve seen. Hard to know how all three sailors would have gotten dosed with those drugs, either self-administered or how someone could have drugged them. The doc has rechecked for evidence they might have been shot with trank darts and found no puncture marks. There weren’t any drink or food containers in the truck that might have been drugged.”

Whitt pinched the bridge of his nose, “OK, let’s say she had accomplices here at Guantanamo and they somehow blew out the tires of the truck, then drugged our men when they got out to assess the damage.” The Admiral shrugged to indicate he didn’t think either of those things were plausible, “Even granting those two items, how did they get her out of the transport truck?”

The Commander held out the broken pieces of the latches for Whitt to examine, “Cut them somehow Admiral. How,” he shrugged, “we have no idea.”

Whitt stared at the rough surfaces. What could cut metal and leave a jagged surface like that?

***

Washington D.C.—The crowds of protestors around the building that allegedly housed Ell Donsaii’s holding cell now say she’s been moved to another location. With no announcement from the government regarding her location it is not clear how the protestors became aware of the move. The protestors say she has been relocated to the notorious Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba, long a site where terrorists and a few other extraordinarily dangerous prisoners have been held without trial. The relocation, if true, may be a sign that President Stockton wishes to hold Donsaii using her Executive powers, not trusting that the courts will find Donsaii’s imprisonment to be legal…

Unaware of the consternation back at her escape site and in her homeland, Ell was kneeling to check over the hoverbike. If she was going to fly it over the Caribbean that night, she wanted to make sure it was in good shape. She looked for damage to any of the fans and gently spun them to make sure they didn’t wobble at all. After pondering a moment, she said, “Allan, have Amy hang a six foot rope with a couple handholds off the other hoverbike. Then, you fly it down to Jamaica. Land it somewhere isolated. If this hoverbike craps out and drops me in the drink, I’ll want a spare one nearby to pick me up.”

Ell very carefully turned the bike up on its side, using her prison coverall as padding to protect the sharp edges at its periphery and the radar absorption coating. Those two features resulted in the hoverbike’s extremely low radar profile and it wouldn’t take much damage to them to raise the radar cross section a lot.

With the bike on its side, she pulled on the lifting harness that was tucked up under the back end frame of the bike.  A command to Allan paid out the carbon fiber line from the winch to the harness. She pulled out fifty feet, then she had Allan reel it back in, pulling against it to be sure it would still work against resistance.

While she had the bike up on its side she had Allan issue her four more of the little videoports through her umbilical port. They were the ones she’d had made up in anticipation of the loss of her AI headband and had been using under the blankets while she was in jail. Allan sent her a tube of quick epoxy and she stuck the tiny ports to the hoverbike, front and back, top and bottom, to give Allan “eyes” with which to better fly the hoverbike. Allan’s having to land the bike on GPS alone when it came for her a little while ago had been an obvious drawback.

Next she had Allan send her a tube of skin bronzer and she set about turning herself a different color. Doing her back she realized she had a problem. She wanted to be fully covered but, without a mirror, couldn’t see her back to make sure she’d covered every spot. She considered the problem then had Allan send her a three centimeter port, rolled up to fit through her fifteen millimeter umbilical port. It still wasn’t large enough so she had him send her a 7.5 centimeter (three inch) port through that one. Allan had the waldo that was hidden in the tunnel in West Virginia deliver her a folded AI head band. It came through the big port and she put it on. Standing in front of the hoverbike so that the videoport she’d stuck to the bike could see her back, she looked at the image in the headband and finished applying the bronzer. Then she used the same method to make sure her face was evenly brown. Rubbing the bronzer through her hair to darken her scalp darkened her hair some, but then she had Allan send her a black mousse to fully darken her hair. She studied her image. She looked like a darker version of Ell. But, she still looked like Ell.

She didn’t want to put a prosthesis on the bridge of her nose like she’d done in the past because they required makeup so she had Allan send her a couple of stents to put inside her nostrils to widen them. They made her look moderately different; she hoped it would be enough. She sent herself some cheek fillers to put in between her gums and cheek when she was about to encounter other people, but there was no need to wear them right now.

Next she put in a couple of cheap looking earrings whose front and back glass beads were actually videoports. They enabled Allan to see what she saw, as well as what was behind her. Then a cheap looking silver necklace that actually had a tiny retinal projector port in its glass pendant. Even though she couldn’t just glance up and get images immediately like she could with a HUD, in a pinch she’d be able to hold it up and see video or stills that Allan had sent her.

For now though, it was good to have a headband with a HUD. She settled down to catch up with what had been happening in the world while she’d been in jail with limited access. She reviewed the vid of the last D5R meeting Roger had recorded for her and felt gratified to see that most of their projects, unencumbered by her absence, were proceeding well.

***

Stockton looked up as her Attorney General stepped into her office. Her Secret Service agent Will Argant was surprised to see her smile because her normal expression was so dour. She pasted on a pleasant look for the public or she’d probably never have been elected, but when doing business out of the public eye, stern and harsh expressions dominated.

“Hey, Raul, how’ they hangin’?” she said cheerfully. Then taking in Stenner’s gloomy expression, she said, “Don’t be bringin’ me down today. Things have been going well. I don’t want to be hearing about any petty-ass legal problems.”

“Sorry Ma’am. It’s about Donsaii.”

Stockton frowned, “I thought this executive order thing was bulletproof? Has someone figured some bullshit legal way to give us trouble with it?”

“No Ma’am.” He took a deep breath, “She escaped while in route to Gitmo.”

Even though he maintained his traditionally expressionless Secret Service demeanor, Will’s heart leapt.

Stockton also stayed expressionless for a moment, then she exploded up out of her chair, cursing and throwing things like she so often did when angry. When she wound down she leaned forward, arms braced on the desk. In a dangerous tone said, “Who’s the stupid SOB that let this happen? ‘Cause I want them up on charges… ASAP!”

“Unknown Ma’am. Her guards were drugged and…”

“Drugged! Intoxicated on duty? Or drugged by an accomplice?”

The AG shrugged, “They think drugged by an accomplice. But no one knows how she could have arranged to have an accomplice there at Guantanamo.”

Stockton shook her head, “You said, ‘in transit.’ I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened.”

When Stenner finished telling the President the improbable story she said, “So she’s still there on Guantanamo somewhere?”

“Well, they’re pretty confident no helicopter could have picked her up and no boats have left the area. However, if she escaped their cordon or had an accomplice with a car, she might have crossed over into Cuba proper … She could make good friends there by licensing her port technology to them… And, it’d be a big blow to our economy.”

Stockton sat down suddenly. It looked as if she had never considered what it might mean if Donsaii took her tech elsewhere. After staring down at her desk for a moment she raised her eyes to Stenner. “Hasn’t she…” she cleared her throat, “hasn’t she licensed all her tech to American companies already?”

Stenner shrugged, “Maybe? I’ll try to find out. But what if she thinks of more… other… stuff? Personally? I think we should invite her back.”

Stockton’s eyes narrowed, “There is no way I’m gonna be kowtowing to that little bitch. You tell those bastards at Gitmo to find her or it’s gonna be their ass!”

***

On Friday night her mother let Elsa hold the prepaid cell phone that her Papa bought for them so he could talk to his family.  He usually called before eight PM so Elsa worried when she saw that the clock had passed eight thirty.

Then it rang! Excitedly, Elsa pushed the button, “Papa!”

A man’s voice spoke, but not her papa’s. “No, Elsa. Let me talk to your mother.”

Trembling, Elsa held the phone out to her mother. She thought it must be the dreaded “Border Patrol” that people spoke so fearfully of.

Her mother was frightened as well; Elsa could see it in her eyes.

Lucia timorously said, “Hello?” then, “Tomas!”

Elsa’s heart leapt. Papa’s uncle calling couldn’t be bad. But then Lucia’s face fell and tears brimmed in her eyes.

It took a while for Elsa to understand. At first she’d thought her father had died. He’d fallen off a roof she knew, though it took a while for Elsa’s stricken mother to even explain that. It seemed that his only serious injury was a broken leg. The Americano doctors had already done surgery to repair the leg, putting a rod inside the bone. Papa would be able to walk soon, but it would be months before he could go back to construction work. Tomas wanted to know if Lucia could send money for Papa’s rent until Enrique could get back to work. Tomas said he would buy Enrique’s food.

The rent money would be a frighteningly large amount.

At first hysterical, Lucia had calmed, then asked Tomas to keep the phone turned on so she could call him back. Then Elsa and Lucia had waited for Grandmother to get home from her evening job at a restaurant.

Grandmother had outlived two husbands and one child so she had a certain stoicism in the face of tragedy. Still the old woman seemed to shrink even further in on herself when she heard about Enrique. When Lucia asked her what to do, Grandmother shrugged hopelessly and said, “Go on. Go on living, it’s all anyone can do.”

In the morning, Lucia announced that she was going to go to El Norte herself to care for her husband. Frightened that she would be left behind, Elsa clung to her, “How will we get there Mama?”

“You can’t go. I’ll ask your Grandmother to take care of you while I’m gone.”

“No! I want to go too!”

Though Elsa and Lucia argued about it, the argument came to naught when Grandmother got up from her bed and refused to even consider taking care of Elsa. She didn’t think Lucia should go to America, and she wouldn’t help her go by caring for her child.

Lucia stormed out of the house. Elsa tried to follow Mama but Grandmother caught Elsa by the arm and told her to let her mother have “some time to cry.”

Lucia didn’t come home until it was time for Grandmother to go work her Saturday evening shift at the restaurant. Lucia spoke calmly to Grandmother before she left but as soon as Grandmother had gone she turned to Elsa and said, “Do you still want to go to El Norte?”

***

Night fell and Ell thought about having something to eat. She really wanted some pizza or a hamburger. “Allan, get me Shan… Shan, I have a craving.”

Shan’s voice came over her new headband. He was laughing, “You only just found out you’re pregnant and you’re already hassling your husband about cravings?”

Ell tried to sound pouty. “Yes. And a loving husband would be trying to take care of his poor, on the lam wife.”

“On the lam? Did you escape then?”

Ell said, a little flat, “Yeah.”

“Yeah! How can you make it sound so, ‘of course’?”

“Well, I had a lot of advantages. My guards are probably in pretty deep shit.”

“How can you be worrying about them?”

“They were just following orders. I’ve really left them in the lurch.”

Shan laughed, “You’ve got to be the first prison escapee who was ever worried about her guards getting in trouble over her escape.”

Ell chuckled, “I’ll bet there’s been someone else, sometime in history. Are you gonna order me some pizza or not?”

“Oh! You were serious! How would I get pizza to you?”

“I’ve ported myself a bigger port. I’ll port a six inch port through that. You can port me slices through your six inch port that goes to my waldo and he’ll pass them to me. We’ll have dinner together.”

“OK, I’m ordering now. Pepperoni and black olive?”

“Yeah! From Amante.”

“OK, I’ll call you back when I get it?”

“Order it, then call me back, I’m hoping you’ll send me some more stuff.”

Once Shan disconnected, Ell told Allan to have the waldo send her a fifteen centimeter (six inch) port through the 7.5 centimeter port she already had. Then she accessed one of the online aliases she’d set up and ordered some things delivered by port from Amazon. When she first heard of the Amazon ports months ago, she’d used a big port to send an Amazon port to the waldo hidden in the West Virginia tunnel. Setting up an online Amazon ordering alias hadn’t been difficult because a lot of people used them to order embarrassing medical items and sex paraphernalia.

You could use an untraceable cash chip to fund your Amazon alias in hundred dollars units and put more money into the alias account when it ran low. That way embarrassing charges didn’t show up on your home account for your spouse or others to ask about.

Ell had funded her Amazon alias with $25,000. She trusted Amazon and the funds then were effectively hidden away at Amazon. There they could serve as another resource if and when she had to go into hiding. Ell used that fund to buy some fine metallized Mylar tinsel, a pair of scissors and twenty 10cc syringes.

When they arrived she had the waldo send them to her through the big port. She used the scissors to cut the ends off of the syringes so that she just had a piston and an open ended tube. Then she pulled the plungers back and set them in her helmet open ends up. Cutting the tinsel into pieces somewhere between one and four centimeters long, she loosely stuffed the tinsel into one of the open syringes. She passed that syringe back through the port to the waldo. She had Allan use the waldo to line the syringe up at the other end of her one ended umbilical port. Allan had gotten quite good at using the waldo to deliver things through the one ended port, but using a syringe would take some practice. Ell used her HUD to watch the waldo and offer suggestions to Allan on doing it. Once the waldo had lined up the syringe on the port once, he would be able to quickly do it over and over. Eventually, Allan had it lined up and Ell set her umbilical port for twenty meters. Twisting around on her seat to point the umbilical port into the sea breeze just above the trees she had the waldo slowly push the plunger on the syringe. As she’d hoped, a puff of the tinsel appeared over the trees, floating away from the end of the port’s opening in the breeze.

Shan called then, “Hey there lady, I’ve got some pizza. Ready for a slice?”

“Oh yeah! Wrap it in some aluminum foil so it doesn’t get the waldo’s hand all messy.”

A moment later a slice of pizza wrapped into a burrito like shape by the aluminum foil slid through the port. “Oh man! You wouldn’t believe how great that smells after eating crappy food for so long!”

She and Shan sat eating, Shan passing her slice after slice. “What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Coke, of course,” Ell said with an embarrassed laugh.

“I should have known. Delivered through the port in your tummy? I’ll bet you were going through Coke withdrawal there in prison, huh?”

“Oh yeah!” Ell snorted at herself. “That first hit of Coke when I got free was awesome.”

Ell and Shan talked about what had been going on in Shan’s life. He’d only had to fend off a few questions about her whereabouts, using the excuse that she was travelling for D5R which had worked well enough so far. They were both astonished that, despite the FBI searching her home and work, and questioning a lot of people, they hadn’t tumbled to the idea that she used more than one identity. They’d both assumed that someone would let it slip, even though the FBI wasn’t questioning them on that particular topic. Either no question had come close enough to bring it up, or her friends that knew had managed to keep the secret close to their vests.

After Ell passed the foil back to be disposed of, Shan hung up. Ell filled the rest of the syringes with tinsel and had the waldo pass the used one back for a refill so that the waldo had a set of twenty ready to go.

Another search on Amazon turned up a small 28 gauge flare pistol. At fourteen millimeters in diameter, the flares would just go through Ell’s fifteen millimeter umbilical port. Amazon didn’t have the flare pistol packaged to fit through the standard four inch Amazon port yet, which made Ell glad that she’d outfitted the tunnel with one of the larger eight inch Amazon ports too. Deliveries for the eight inch port took longer to process, so she was glad she’d thought of the flares quite a few hours before she planned to leave for Mexico.

Just before midnight the flare pistol arrived in the tunnel and the waldo passed it through to Ell. Ell unpackaged it and the flares, a task very difficult for a waldo being operated by an AI. Then she spent time coaching Allan to use the waldo to load a cartridge into the flare gun and hold the pistol up to the waldo’s end of her umbilical port. She didn’t have him actually fire a flare, not wanting to set one off where she was and really hoping to not have to need one at all. Having prepared as well as she could, Ell stretched out on her coverall and took a nap until three in the morning.

When her AI woke her, Ell opened the compartment under the seat and pulled out the dark gray Kevlar flotation suit and her helmet. After looking about the area to be sure she hadn’t left anything, she put them on and got on the hoverbike. Spinning up the fans and giving it plenty of throttle, she lifted the handlebars until the bike lifted about five feet above the low scrub. Turning southeast she pushed the bars forward and the hoverbike slid toward the beach and then along it, moving east. She followed the rocky shore until Allan told her she was fifteen miles from the radar installations at the Guantanamo Naval Air Station. At that point she was below the horizon from Guantanamo so she turned south and moved out over the sea, staying only feet above the wave tops on this calm night. She curved around toward the west, staying fifteen miles from Guantanamo. She kept her speed low, knowing that military radar typically used AIs to filter out slow moving returns so they didn’t get notified of every bird, wave and bit of flotsam. In fact, if radar wasn’t filtered the operator would be presented with so many reflections he or she wouldn’t be able to make sense of the morass of data. Current radar systems relied heavily on AI computations to weed out the returns that didn’t meet specified criteria. If you were looking for missiles you filtered out things that weren’t going really fast. If you were looking for boats, you looked for things moving slowly. Aircraft would be somewhere in between. Ell, going twenty knots right on the deck hopefully looked like a fast boat, not an airplane. The stealth features of the hoverbike meant that any radar reflections off the skirts of the fans were angled up into the sky. They would get some reflections off Ell and her Kevlar suit but the suit also had some radar absorption properties. So any return they got should be weak, more like a big bird than a small aircraft, another reason to keep her speed to something a pelican could make.

Ell was getting bored at these low speeds though. When she reached a point directly south of Guantanamo and her heading was directly west, Ell started to feel pretty safe and she raised her speed…

***

Above Guantanamo one of the Naval Station’s venerable old Hawkeye AEWs circled. Its altitude allowed it to look far beyond the horizon that limited the air station’s ground based radar. Admiral Whitt had it up watching for any evidence of someone flying in to retrieve Donsaii. Or, taking her away. Ensign Nolling looked over the radar operators’ shoulders at the screens displaying data filtered by their AIs. He didn’t really hope to see anything they missed. Instead, he hoped to learn more about what to look for in the future by seeing their reactions to what came up on the screens. Nolling wasn’t afraid to ask questions, but when he saw a small return out over the Caribbean, he first waited to see if the operator would comment. The return the AI had displayed was on a bearing of 175, or almost due south. It was just a few feet over the water. When the operator didn’t say anything, Nolling asked, “Hey PO, what was that return? A bird or something?”

The operator had his AI scroll back to it and said. “We’ve got the AI filtering out things moving as slowly as birds. Got to be going over forty knots to show up. But, that was probably radar clutter from several different wave actions that spoofed the AI’s algorithms into thinking something was moving faster than that. The AI should reject wave clutter but it gets fooled pretty often… Damn…”

The PO had cursed because the AI had now put down another return just west of the first one. It had connected the two with a dotted line and a velocity flag for 130 knots, much too fast for a bird or a boat.

Nolling asked, “Could that be two wave action spoofs, just coincidentally linked, PO?”

“Might be, sir. But the AI thinks they’re the same object. It isn’t coming toward or moving away from Gitmo though. It’s headed pretty much due west.”

Nolling had the AI train the Hawkeye’s new infrared camera on the radar bearing. His hopes for a coup were dashed when nothing appeared on infrared, but then as he watched a little longer he decided that he might actually be seeing a faint signal that was a little bit warmer than the waves. The LT looked over his shoulder a minute and said, “Nolling, if that’s real, it’s a big, really fast bird. It ain’t hot enough on infrared to have an engine and its radar cross section ain’t big enough to be a plane.”

“Could it be a stealthed airframe sir? Don’t they tend to flicker in and out of view like that when one of their surfaces happens to line up so it reflects something back?”

“When we build stealthed airframes, Ensign, we fly them faster than 130 knots. Besides if it were ours, its IFF transponder would have told us that by now.”

“A drug runner that somehow stealthed his plane?”

“Drug runners don’t fly west to Mexico.”

Nolling didn’t have an answer for that, although he still had a feeling they were missing something.

Then the PO said, “Sirs, we have more of those weak returns on the track that the AI has designated as a possible. Same vector, same speed, a little further along. It’s looking more real.”

“Call it in,” the LT sighed after a moment. “They said to call in anything that seemed out of the ordinary. I think the Admiral wants the flyboys to get some practice.”

Sure enough, once they’d called it in and sent the data, the Air Station scrambled a couple of its fast movers to go out and have a look.

Chapter Eight

Without a way to detect the fact that she was being painted by radar, Ell remained unaware of the military jets homing in on her trajectory until the first one overflew her position. It came in from behind her at a slow overtake in order to give its pilot and cameras longer to eyeball whatever object they were chasing.

Captain Sam “Shaker” Thompson expected to find that they were chasing some fool in an ultralight. An idiot that didn’t even have a radio evidently, since they’d been unable to contact him on any band. Such a gossamer winged airframe with an exposed pilot and small engine could give a radar cross section nearly as small as they were seeing. The intermittent nature of the return, he expected, would be explained by some kind of angular cover over the engine that only reflected radar at certain angles. Then the pilot himself would produce the weak return they were getting the rest of the time.

That begged the question of what the idiot thought he was doing out here. Shaker had never heard of an ultralight that could make 130 knots and there was no chance he could get from Cuba to Mexico with the fuel load an ultralight could carry. Shaker extended his flaps and slowed further as he came up on the target, keeping his eyes peeled. He stayed a couple hundred feet up, not wanting the wake turbulence from his overflight to knock whatever kind of lightweight low flyer it was into the sea. That was assuming the flyer was an innocent which, of course, it might not be.

But, he didn’t see anything! He switched to infrared and all he saw was something the size of a human, an insulated human at that. Where were the engines? If only the moon was up. With light amplification he only saw waves… wait… as he got closer he could see there was some kind of object there. It looked something like a couple of small flying saucers, one in front of the other… Then it disappeared under his nose as he flew over. He pulled up and to the right on his stick as he fed in throttle, “Mover,” he said to his wingman, “make a pass. I didn’t see much. Whatever it is, it ain’t no ultralight. It’s painted dark and it hardly shows up on infrared. I have no idea what’s powering it. I’ll move up to overwatch.” As he circled around he said, “Uh, and, Mover, be advised that it looks like a couple of flyin’ saucers, one in front of the other.”

Moses “Mover” Malone shook his head. Shaker had been his partner for several years now and Moses would trust him with his life, but sometimes Shaker’s imagination could get out of control. He lowered his landing gear to turn on his landing lights, illuminating the sea in front of him.

Ell’s initial awareness of the first jet to thunder overhead had come from the glow of its engines as it passed. However, just after she’d looked up in consternation at the glowing jets, the wake turbulence struck. Because Shaker had passed over at about a hundred feet it didn’t knock her around too badly, but she was grateful for the AI which stabilized the hoverbike against the sudden oscillations. “Allan, how could they have found me? I should have been below the horizon from any of their radar installations, right?”

“That would be correct for ground based radar. They may have airborne radar surveillance craft aloft.”

Idiot! Ell thought to herself. You were in the Air Force and you didn’t think of an AEW! She considered. The slopes of the flat surfaces on the periphery of the hoverbike tilted back 20 degrees. She did a little trigonometry. If the AEW was over Guantanamo, at fifteen miles out, the hoverbike would reflect a signal back to an airborne radar flying at 28,830 feet… well 29,172 if you figured in the curvature of the earth. If an AEW was flying anywhere around 30K they ought to get intermittent returns off the flat panels of the radar skirt as flight turbulence rocked the hoverbike a little and the angle of return lined up to hit the AEW.

Ell turned to see what the jet was going to do next and saw another jet coming up on her six. Of course, they would have a flight of two! This one was brightly lit. Stifling her impulse to turn sharply out of his path she told herself, they aren’t going to shoot yet. They’re still trying to figure out what they’re looking at. She figured that they must have been bombarding her with radioed orders to turn to Guantanamo and land, though she had no radio to hear them with. She could probably expect them to start shepherding her in that direction pretty soon.

Closing her eyes to think, Ell pushed up the hoverbike’s speed, running quickly up to two hundred knots. Control wasn’t as good at that speed so she lifted to about fifteen feet above the waves. She had Allan give her a feed from the upper rear camera on the hoverbike and saw the jet stop closing for a minute when her speed went up. Speaking to Allan to tersely give instructions, she watched the jet in her HUD. It must have had her painted pretty well with its targeting radar since it quickly brought its speed up and began closing once again. Ell turned a little to the right and the jet matched her. It dropped a little lower in the air and Ell suspected that the irritated pilot intended to give her a taste of some real wake turbulence on this pass. Something to convince her to cooperate without having to shoot any bullets at her. Ell pulled up to twenty feet above the waves in order to put more a little cushion between herself and the sea for the bouncing around she expected they were going to give her.

As the jet’s lights seemed to be about to illuminate her, Ell slid to the right in an effort to degrade any images it might obtain of the hoverbike. Then as it passed above, Ell turned left and banked hard to slow way down. Consulting with Allan she turned until the back end of the hoverbike was aimed directly at Guantanamo. The angular point at the back of the bike shouldn’t provide any radar return to the AEW. Well, except what the AEW could bring off of her body but the Kevlar suit’s radar absorption materials should reduce that somewhat. She leaned forward in her seat so that her back would bounce most of any radar reflection high into the sky.

Now she just had to shake the jets. Twisting in her seat on the bike to face the direction she’d been going she had the waldo push some of the tinsel from a syringe out through her umbilical port. Per her instructions a minute ago, Allan was setting the distance of the one ended port so that it would dispense her bastardized tinsel “chaff” at the distance she should have reached if she’d continued traveling at 200 knots.

Ell checked her speed. She was going about fifteen knots now. Even if the jets picked her up there was an excellent chance that their radars’ AIs would reject her as a seabird… well, unless they reset the AIs to look for surface boats…

Ell watched as the second jet turned and rose, evidently circling back to make another pass. The first jet sped up to make its second pass. It forged ahead, evidently fooled into believing she was still up ahead of her current location. Either not having seen her turn and thinking she must be up there, or hopefully taken in by the chaff appearing where they expected her to be? Unfortunately, she had no idea how much of the Mylar tinsel it would take to reproduce a radar return of the same cross section as that returned by the hover bike.

Ell twisted in her seat again and had the waldo dispense some more chaff. She had it push an entire syringe in one location, then split the next syringe into several small pushes, scattering what returns they created about. Then another whole syringe. She aimed them somewhat to the left of her original line of flight. Gratifyingly, she saw the jet bank somewhat to its left. They must be following the radar returns, the dark gray of the hovercraft and her suit would be pretty hard to see on this dim night after all.

Now she just needed to convince them she’d wrecked… Could a flare fool them? Or would it take something more?

While trying to think of something better, she put some more chaff out there, this time to the right, then a minute later to the left, as if she were banking back and forth trying to lose the jets.

Not having thought of anything better, Ell had the waldo fire five of the flares through the port as quickly as it could. This turned out to be very rapidly indeed as Ell watched a cluster of brilliant red spots burst into view out in the distance and drop to the sea. Unfortunately, to Ell it looked like a fireworks display rather than a wreck. She wished she could have put some thermite or other explosive through the port. The waldo did have some thermite available to it in the tunnel, but the thermite would have to be lit before it went through the port if it was going to be burning when it landed in the water. A brief vision of the burning thermite destroying the port, yet leaving a tiny sliver of thermite burning in her abdominal wall had convinced Ell not to try that particular strategy. She made a mental note that she needed some kind of remote igniter system for the thermite.

Shaker swore. He’d never gotten another visual on the strange craft and it had somehow modified its own radar return. Neither he nor Mover had been able to pick it up at all over some significant stretches and the boys back in the Hawkeye had reported the same. But then it suddenly appeared again as an even brighter flash on radar. It was as if it had somehow stored up all the radar waves hitting it while he and Mover couldn’t see it, and then had let all that pent-up signal go at once. It appeared with a strong return, then disappeared, then reappeared with a small return. It was swerving back and forth faster than Shaker could believe. Just when Shaker was thinking he’d never get eyeballs back on it again, it wiped out spectacularly, shooting hot stars that overloaded his infrared imaging. A minute later nothing remained. No radar signals, no aircraft, only five little hot spots of burning material floating on the waves. The hot spots looked kind of like flares he mused. But, why would someone shoot off flares while they were wrecking?

Maybe they were flares? Trying to make it look like the craft had wrecked? Maybe the guy’d been shooting low chaff to either side of his track? Such chaff, falling quickly into the water, might have resulted in the jinking, bright returns on radar that immediately disappeared? Shaker watched his radar carefully, searching for another return up ahead, no matter how faint. He even had his AI accept speeds down to that of a boat and up to that of a missile. Nothing appeared…

Shaker called back to base, requesting a helicopter fitted for search and rescue. He doubted anyone could have survived the crash of such a tiny craft at two hundred knots, but they had to look. He and Mover continued circling the crash site, watching for survivors, or the saucers sneaking away, but seeing nothing… just as he’d feared.

Now almost forty knots southwest of Mover and Shaker, Ell watched Jamaica’s northern shores rise up above the horizon in her HUD. She was flying the hoverbike tilted a little to the side to travel the direction she wanted despite keeping the bike’s pointy back end aimed at the AEW presumably circling above Guantanamo. About the time the search and rescue chopper started circling the site of the “wreck” she coasted in over the shoreline and lifted up into an uninhabited area of the hills behind the beach at Montego Bay. The sun was rising out of the sea as Ell whispered in to make a landing.

Ell brought the hoverbike down on an overgrown road a little way from the moderately traveled road it intersected. The scrubby vegetation on the road was eighteen to twenty-four inches high. That was good because it indicated that no one came out into the area. It was bad because the tops of the bushes would be noticeably broken and flattened by her landing. She lifted the hoverbike a little higher and looked over the side at the swaying plants. Confirming a flat spot under the growth, she leapt off the bike and lightly to the ground. Without her weight, the hoverbike bounced upward momentarily, then stabilized. Speaking to Allan, Ell had him lower the bike back down and move over until she could grab it by the saddle. Holding it up she had Allan stop the fans. Turning the bike up on its side she slid it into the gap between two trees. Some leaves covered it nicely.

Proud of how nicely she’d concealed it, Ell started to pick her way through the growth to the main road. But then she stopped and looked back at the hiding place for the hoverbike. After a moment she shook her head and walked back to it. On its side between the two trees it couldn’t take off. If for some reason she needed the bike to come for her, instead of her returning for it… having it on its side would be a big problem.

She pulled the bike out and carried it to a slight dip in the overgrown road. Leaning it on its side against a tree, she tromped down the grasses and plants then set the hoverbike down right side up on the flattened plants. She looked down into the big fans to make sure no stems were sticking up into the blades. Fairly confident that they were clear she had Allan spin them up very gently to confirm it.

Ell started back down to the bigger road again, cussing the stickers catching at her jeans.

***

Viveka read the news about Donsaii with dismay. With Donsaii imprisoned what would happen to the offer of employment Donsaii had made to Viveka? Viveka’s spirits, so high for a while had plummeted. First her “groping dot” tragedy, now this. She desperately wanted to contact D5R to ask if she still had a job upon completing her degree. Unfortunately she realized that the only contact address she had was for Donsaii herself.

Viveka had set herself to learn all she could about carbon macromolecule synthesis. Would all that effort be wasted? Would she even be able to get a job as a woman in India where men still dominated engineering?

She looked up public contact info for D5R and started to initiate a contact, but then sat back. She decided to let a month pass. Maybe Donsaii would have been released by then. Or maybe Viveka was only rationalizing a delay in getting the bad news?

***

Jarel looked up as a young woman came in and seated herself at the counter. Not someone he’d seen in his little restaurant before. He wondered if she might be a lost tourist. Her skin was fairly dark but her features weren’t Jamaican. With short, straight black hair, she might be Latina but didn’t look right for that either. Perhaps she was Indian? He took her a menu and his fresh pot of coffee. Setting down the menu, he turned over the cup waiting on the counter and made to fill it.

The young woman put her hand over the cup, shaking her head and saying, “I’d prefer a Coke, but first, will you take American dollars?”

She had a Latin American accent. So, Jarel thought, not from India after all. She must be Central American but living in the States if she wants to spend dollars. His eyebrows rose, “Sure.”

She slid out a twenty dollar bill.

Jarel’s eyebrows rose, “Cash?”

She nodded.

The girl was very pretty Jarel observed. “Americans always want pay electronic. I take electronic, no problem.”

“I’d prefer to pay cash.” She held the twenty dollar bill out to him.

Jarel took the bill and stared at it. It had actually been years since he’d seen one. His fellow Jamaicans still used cash quite a bit, but even they were going more and more to electronic money. This bill looked much the same as the American twenties he remembered from years gone by, but he wondered how he would convert it. He supposed the bank would know what to do with it, but what if it was a fake? He looked back at her, “You don’ have no Jamaican money mon?”

She shook her head. “But you can have that twenty for…” she glanced down at the menu, “three of your egg sandwiches and a Coke.”

Jarel considered. Three egg sandwiches and a Coke would be fourteen American. Not worth it, considering the trouble and the possibility that the bill might be counterfeit. He shook his head slowly and regretfully.

She pulled out another twenty. “They’re good bills. I’m in a bind. Forty dollars American for three egg sandwiches and a Coke?”

Jarel looked the two bills over carefully. They really did look like real money. One was more worn than the other. He checked and the serial numbers were different. He shrugged, “OK. You got a deal, but,” he winked and grinned, “they not good, I come lookin’ for you.”

When Jarel brought the pretty lady her sandwiches he expected her to leave or call in some friends from outside, but to his amazement she wolfed down two of the big sandwiches by herself. She did ask for a bag for the third.

When Jarel brought the bag she touched his arm, “I still need money. Do you know someone who would give me a good deal for gold?”

“You sellin’ you jewelry mon?”

She shrugged and nodded. “You know someone?”

“You try CashWiz in Montego Bay? It not too far.”

“Not too far,” turned out to be several miles further into town. She’d already walked three miles in from the hillside where she’d parked the hoverbike and was tired of walking. She considered trying to negotiate with a taxi to take one of her twenties. The bills had been hard enough to get. The bank had looked at her like she’d grown extra eyes at the mere thought of someone wanting not just a few, but thousands of the twenties. You’d have thought that she’d out and out told them she was running drugs.

The difficulty in getting cash had suggested that there might be difficulty spending it, which was indeed proving to be a problem. That was when she’d decided to buy the gold as an untraceable, multinational form of currency. It also represented something she could stock in some of her hideouts as a reserve. She’d been worrying about how spendable the gold would turn out to be as well and thought she ought to try converting some of it for local currency to see how well that worked.

Having decided that negotiating with a taxi over using dollars would be harder than walking, Ell made her way to CashWiz on foot. After all, she couldn’t leave Jamaica until dark anyway, so no great hurry.

Joel looked up when the door opened. A pretty young woman entered, glanced briefly around and immediately approached him. So, not interested in buying anything. Probably another desperate person selling trinkets from their past. His eyes swept over her, looking for evidence of a drug habit, but she looked very healthy. Probably an addicted gambler from the casino. They got quite a few of those in the pawn shop, sure that the next throw would put them back on top, sometimes bragging about how they’d be back to get their jewels shortly. Not that they ever did return…

“I’ve got some gold…” she said uncertainly.

Unsurprised, Joel shrugged, “Let’s see it.”

To his surprise she didn’t bring out necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings or any of the usual items. Items that gamblers always claimed were worth far more than they turned out to be. When he told them what he would actually pay for their items, they usually stormed out of his shop—cursing him for trying to cheat them. But, the truly addicted would be back, sheepishly accepting what he’d offered.

This girl though, she put her hand out and opened it to display… he counted, twenty small gold beads.

Joel picked one up expecting it to be a light shell bead meant to be strung for a necklace. Not expecting its weight, he didn’t grasp it hard enough and it slipped from his fingers to the countertop. It fell hard onto the counter with a loud clack. His brows drew together. Could it be solid gold? He looked up at her, “What kin’ of…” jewelry, he’d been about to say, but solid gold balls weren’t used in any jewelry he knew of. He changed tacks, “Are ‘dey pure?”

She nodded. “99.9%,” she said, rather than the more common, “24 carat.”

He narrowed his eyes and lifted his chin, “How you come to have little gold BBs?”

She shrugged, “An Uncle left them to me.”

He weighed one in his hand. It was surprisingly heavy but he simply doubted it could really be gold. “I test them?”

She nodded.

Joel pulled out a small digital scale and set a weighing dish on it. Pushing the tare button, he put the ball in his hand in the dish. He motioned to the dish and the girl put the other nineteen balls in the dish. To his surprise the scale registered almost exactly ten grams. 10.01 to be exact. Eyebrows up he said, “Each one, half a gram?”

She nodded.

Joel picked up the tare dish and stepped to a scale which had a weighing dish submerged in water. Zeroing it he carefully poured the small gold balls into the dish. Submerged in the water, they weighed 0.518 grams less than they had in air, indicating the total volume of the balls was 0.518 cubic centimeters. Joel’s AI told him that ten grams divided by 0.518 ccs equaled 19.3 grams per cc, the correct density for 24 carat gold.

He scratched his chin. The balls were more like bullion than jewelry. The little balls could be gold filled, and if they had tungsten centers their density would be 19.25 grams per cc, close enough to gold that he couldn’t tell it with the accuracy of his equipment. He could try to test for paramagnetism, but that was a pain. Unlike jewelry, the balls’ value didn’t depend on their shape. He looked up at the girl, “Can I crush one of them?”

She blinked, “Sure. Why?”

He shrugged, picking up a pliers. “See if filled wit’ tungsten.” He put a random ball in the jaws of the wire cutter part of the pliers and squeezed, easily cutting the soft gold ball in half. Both halves were gold all the way through. “Couldn’t do that with tungsten” he said. He gazed at the little balls again for a moment. “I gi’ you 45,000 Jamaican for ‘dem.”

She tilted her head, “Ten grams of gold should be worth five hundred thirty American, or 57,250 Jamaican.”

“You right, but I mus’ make a profit.”

She narrowed her eyes, “Twenty percent?”

Surprised at how quickly she’d done the calculations, Joel shrugged. She couldn’t cash in her gold anywhere else and these gamblers always gave in.

The girl shrugged in return, “OK, I need cash.”

Joel’s eyebrows went up again, “I don’ t’ink I got dat’ much cash.” He scratched his chin again, “One minute, I check.”

While he was gone, Ell put her hand under her shirt and had a cash chip delivered to her palm from her umbilical port.

Joel returned a few minutes later, “I only got 28,000 Jamaican.”

She tilted her head, “Twelve balls.”

Joel spoke to his AI and had it run the numbers, then grinned, “27,000 Jamaican.”

She rolled her eyes, but nodded.

He lifted his chin, “Why not take t’ res’ electronic?”

She shrugged, “OK, put it on this cash chip?”

“Why not your bank accoun’? You draw intres’ den.”

“I don’t have a bank account.”

“So? Set one up. The bank is just two doors down ‘der,” he waved vaguely down the street.

“I lost my papers, so I don’t have any ID.”

Joel looked at her out of the corner of his eyes, then said quietly, “I have a frien’… help you get you ID back.”

She looked at him as if considering it for a moment, then shook her head no. She took the bills Joel counted out to her. She watched as he put the rest of the money on the cash chip and made sure it confirmed the transfer. Then she left without looking back.

Having quit the last crappy job he’d had a couple of weeks ago Marcus slouched at the corner where he’d been selling dime bags of weed.  Sales were weak in the morning and so when the pretty young woman had walked past he really had nothing better to do. Stepping out behind her, he followed her for a couple of blocks toward the downtown area of Montego Bay. At first he’d had some vague idea of trying to strike up a conversation. She was very attractive. She’d probably tell him to go to hell, but… if you didn’t even throw the dice you never won.

Then she’d turned into the pawnshop. Musing, he’d leaned against the building across the way and watched her dicker with Joel, the owner of the pawnshop. Joel was a hard man. Marcus had never made a satisfactory deal with the man. However, if the girl was getting some jewelry out of hock, the gold she’d be carrying would make her an excellent target. Marcus’ heart rose when the girl was done. Instead of her giving Joel money, Joel gave her some. Marcus saw her fold up a wad of bills and put them in her pocket.

Cash! The fact that everyone used e-money was making petty theft difficult because, even if you did make someone transfer you some money, they’d just have the bank cancel the transaction and take it back once you were out of sight. Taking jewelry could be lucrative, but fencing it could be difficult. But, cash, that was a different deal! He leaned away from the wall and followed the girl into town.

After a block or two Marcus felt dismay. The girl was heading for the casinos! Someone who’d pawned their jewelry to get cash and then went to a casino would soon be broke. Lackadaisically considering a number of options, Marcus had felt no urgency before, but now he realized that he needed to separate the girl from her cash before she wasted it. He began walking faster and palmed his switchblade.

The street she was on was a little wide open for his liking, but they got even wider as they approached the casinos. Realizing she was about to pass a narrow alley, he rose onto his toes and ran a few steps to close the distance. Before he could force her into the alley though, she ducked into it on her own. Because she’d done it quickly, Marcus had the impression she was about to start running. He turned the corner leaning into a full sprint.

The alley was empty! He skidded to a halt. A woman’s voice came from behind him, “You looking for me?”

Marcus turned and found, to his astonishment, the girl was just standing there, in a nook just around the corner, looking at him. She stepped fearlessly out toward him. Maybe she’s a whore and thinks I’m a trick? If so, she’s in for an ugly surprise. He pulled the switch and the blade popped out of his hand. Raising it casually in her direction he lifted his chin and said, “Gi’ me dat money.” His eyes dropped to her right front pocket to indicate that he knew where she had the bills.

Instead of the widening of the eyes he’d expected, they narrowed. Stepping back she said, “You should get a job instead, you really don’t want to do this. You’ll be very sorry.”

“Gi’ me dat money!” he growled starting to close the distance between them.

Instead of backing away, she stepped closer.

A sudden flicker of motion and Marcus felt a stunningly hard thump against his wrist.

With surprise he realized that his blade had just flown across the alley to his left.

Just as the pain from his wrist arrived, her foot shot up to strike hard in his crotch.

As Marcus crouched down in agony she leaned forward and patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “You really should get an honest job,” she advised. Moaning, Marcus slowly sagged to his knees then put his left hand on the pavement for balance, cradling his injured right wrist against his stomach. Lifting his head, through his tears he watched the girl disappear blithely around the corner.

Glancing blearily over at his knife, Marcus saw that it had broken its blade when it struck the wall. “Shit!” he said in disgust.

Ell walked through the casino. She watched a couple of the games and paused for a moment to watch people getting chips. A man brought a stack of chips to the window and turned them in. To her relief the lady in the cage counted him out some bills.

When the man had left, Ell approached and said, “Will you take a cash chip?”

The woman said, “Sure. Put it here.” She indicated a square on the counter where the nearfield electronics for cash chip transfers must be imbedded. “How much you want to take out?”

Ell said “One thousand, American.”

Picking up a small numpad, the woman keyed in the figure and turned the display so Ell could see that it had been correctly entered.  Ell stroked her finger over the ID sensor on the cash chip and its display also lit, showing “$1,000.00.” Ell hit the little “approve” button on the chip.

The woman’s display lit green and she turned to pick up several stacks of chips. When she pushed them through to Ell, Ell had to ask her the relative value of the various types.

Ell had no desire to gamble so she used a chip to buy a drink at the bar and watched until the lady in the cash cage got her break. Ell returned to the cage. “I’d like to cash these chips. Can you give me pesos?”

The lady shrugged, “Mexican, yes. Colombian, no.”

“Mexican please.”

With a wad of dollars in one pocket and a wad of pesos in another, Ell headed for the beach.

Ell ate her third egg sandwich for a mid-morning snack. Lunch and dinner she bought on the beach while watching some energetic beach volleyball. One of the guys flirted with her and tried to get her to play on his team, but as a married, pregnant lady, she passed.

It was tempting though. It had been a lot of years since she’d played and looked like a lot of fun.

Later that night she had Allan bring the hoverbike down to the beach. Once Allan told her it was overhead, she checked both ways and had Allan bring it down to land on a deserted sidewalk. Taking out and putting on her Kevlar suit she climbed aboard. Once up in the air about twenty feet, she slid out over the sea and put on her helmet. She had Allan bring the older hoverbike out of its hiding place to follow a couple of miles behind her and set out on a four hundred mile flight to the Mexican coast north of Cancun.

Before morning Ell landed near Merida at the northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula, hiding her hoverbikes in the brush of some overgrown lots. She hiked in to have breakfast and spent the day exploring the city and practicing her Spanish with real Latin American speakers.

The next night she lifted off again for Matamoros on the Gulf coast of Mexico, across the border from the Texas city of Brownsville.

In Matamoros she parked the hoverbikes in an overgrown lot that actually was in the city a ways rather than out at the border. In the morning she found a restaurant in a poor neighborhood and set out to exercise her Spanish. “I want to cross the border to America,” she said in Spanish to the woman who brought her food.

The woman stared at her suspiciously then shrugged. “It is very difficult nowadays.” She turned to go back to the kitchen.

“Do you know someone who can help?” Ell said to her retreating back. “I can pay.”

The woman hesitated a moment, then continued to the kitchen.

As Ell ate she wondered about this plan of hers. I can fly across the border! Why not just cross the border; then try to solve the ID problem? The sticking point was that she had no idea how to find someone to help with an ID in America. She couldn’t just google it after all.

Ell could work up an ID chip. A chip that would provide her a name, birthdate, and provide pictures and fingerprints and DNA information as well as an address. The problem would be that computers that checked ID chips then looked in databases to confirm that an individual with those characteristics actually existed. Somehow, illegal aliens were connected to people able to enter such data into the system so that when a chip was read, and checked against a database the database would confirm the existence of the individual. Ell had no idea how they did that little bit of magic, so she needed help.

She somehow felt that it would be much easier to find people who arranged IDs by getting in touch with a “coyote.” Coyote was the Mexican term for someone who made a living helping migrants cross the border. They often had a significant organization that worked together to transport people and get them IDs. Ell thought she could find those people starting in Mexico just by asking around, but wasn’t sure how she’d go about finding just the ID piece starting in the States.

Besides, it was difficult to do anything in America without ID.

Ell ate her chorizo con huevos while pondering other ways to look for a coyote here in Mexico. She’d nearly finished when a burly Mexican seated himself in the other side of her booth.

He stared at her for a moment then said, “He oído que quiere ir a Estados Unidos (I hear you want to go to America).”

Ell nodded.

“And you’ll pay for information?”

Ell nodded again.

“A hundred pesos.”

It wasn’t much. Ell reached into her pocket and pulled out her fold of Mexican money. Holding it below the table top she thumbed through to peel out a hundred peso note and push it across the table to him.

He shook his head. “You don’t want to cross near Matamoros. The patrol, it’s very bad here. When I cross, I first take the bus to Ojinaga.” He lifted his chin, “It’s a long ride, but it is easier to cross there in the desert. There is a coyote there, ‘Tecate.’ Ask around for him, he’s the best. What’s your name?”

For a second Ell panicked, having a mental block on the Spanish name she’d chosen for herself, then it came to her. “Elsa Gardon.”

The man said, “Tell Tecate that Hector in Matamoros sent you; I’ll send him a message so he’ll be expecting you.” Hector flashed a smile, then got up and headed back into the kitchen area.

Since she didn’t want to fly until nightfall, Ell wandered around Matamoros. She asked several others and repeatedly received the advice that she shouldn’t try to cross the border in that region. Surprised that no one used small boats to bypass the border out in the Gulf, she asked about it. Apparently, small boats were found easily by the Border Patrol using radar. All of them were stopped and searched.

More importantly than the recommendation to go elsewhere, no one suggested a coyote or a way to get ID in Matamoros.

That evening she climbed on the hoverbike for a flight to Ojinaga.

***

Walking the streets of Ojinaga the next day, Ell saw a group of young Mexicans who looked like they might be trying to cross the border. They had backpacks, durable shoes and jackets tied around their waists, though the days were warm enough. Ell smiled at a young woman with the group, “I’m trying to cross the border. Do you know a coyote called Tecate?”

The girl’s eyes widened but she shook her head no.

The young man next to her said, “Ask at the Pemex.” He pointed with his chin.

The girl glanced at the man, then back at Ell. She shook her head again, using only a tiny motion, as if she didn’t want people to see.

Ell’s eyes narrowed as she tried to parse the meaning of this strange conversation. She had a feeling that the young woman was trying to warn her, or perhaps divert business away from Tecate? She looked back and forth at the two for a moment, then shrugged, turned and started toward the Pemex sign a few blocks away.

The Pemex proved to be a gas station, selling gasoline, diesel, natural gas, hydrogen and fast charges for automobiles. Even in Mexico, which hadn’t been converting to ports at anything like the rate it had been happening in the U.S., the station had the look of despair you might expect of an industry on its way out.

Ell found saw a group of people that looked like they might be waiting to cross the border sitting outside the Pemex. They also had backpacks, jackets and sturdy clothing. Deciding that she’d better get a jacket, Ell entered the convenience store part of the station. Sure enough they had backpacks and jackets for sale inside. Already having a backpack, Ell got a jacket, a water bottle and three burritos to put in the backpack. Going back outside eating one of the burritos, she looked over the group. It had seven women and two men.

And a pretty little girl Ell realized… The child surprised Ell at first, but after a moment’s thought she realized that, of course, families must sometimes cross with their children. Even though the two men sat far from the child, she wondered if one of the men was the girl’s father.

The little girl had been staring at Ell so Ell smiled and said, “Hola.”

The girl’s eyes dropped, but she did mumble, “Hola,” in return.

Ell spoke to the group in general, “I’m looking for a coyote named Tecate. Are you waiting for him?”

Several of them nodded, though Ell got the impression they weren’t happy about it. She wondered about what was going on. Wasn’t Tecate a good coyote like Hector had told her? If he didn’t have a good reputation, why were these people going with him, rather than with a different coyote?

Ell glanced around, most of the little group were sitting on the ground leaning back against the Pemex building. The biggest space was next to the little girl so Ell sat down next to her. Smiling at her, she said “My name’s Elsa Gardon, what’s yours?”

The girl smiled shyly back at Ell, but hugged the arm of the woman she sat next to and said nothing. The woman smiled at Ell over her head, “Her name is Elsa too. Elsa Fuentes.”

As Ell took another bite of her burrito, the little girl turned her face up to her mother, “Mama, I’m hungry!” she said plaintively.

Her mother hugged her closer. “I know Elsa, but I don’t think I have enough money to pay Tecate. We’ve got to wait until he comes and I find out how much it’s going to cost to go to El Norte.”

Ell’s mouthful of burrito suddenly lost its taste as she realized the desperation that this mother and child must feel. She glanced at the other people in the group and wondered how many of them might also be hungry. Pulling her backpack around and placing it between her knees, she reached in and pulled out one of her other burritos. “I’ve got an extra burrito,” she said, holding it out to little Elsa.

The girl turned to look questioningly up at her mother.

A tear welled up in the young mother’s eye, “Go ahead Elsa,” she said to her daughter. She looked up at Ell, “Muchas gracias,” she said, sounding a little choked. “My name is Lucia.”

Elsa turned and shyly took the burrito. “Gracias,” she said, twisting the burrito in half and passing one half to her mother.

They wolfed the burrito down as if they hadn’t eaten for quite a while. Ell asked, “Where are you from?”

Lucia said, “San Pedro. It is far to the south.” She glanced at Ell, “Well maybe not for you. Where are you from?”

“Nicaragua. It is farther I think, no?” Ell didn’t want to appear to be too knowledgeable.

“Oh yes. San Pedro is in Mexico.”

“Where do you hope to go?”

Little Elsa said, “We’re going to Abilene, Texas… My papa’s hurt and we’re going there to take care of him.”

Ell glanced back up at Lucia who nodded, eyes brimming with tears once again.

While Ell tried to think what to say a reedy man’s voice said, “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Tecate. Do all of you want to go to El Norte?”

The group gathered around Tecate, who Ell instinctively disliked. When he told them that he wanted 30,000 pesos to take them across the border Ell heard Lucia gasp beside her.

Lucia said, “I came here to the Pemex because I heard you were cheaper! I talked to another coyote who only charges 23,000!”

Tecate laughed, “That’d be Roberto.” He tsked, “Roberto’s no good. His last group and the group three crossings before that, they were both caught by the Border Patrol.” He paused and looked around the group, “Roberto himself always gets away though.” Tecate chuckled “23,000 is far too much for a trip with someone whose migrants get caught much of the time.”

Lucia plaintively said, “But we don’t have 30,000!”

Tecate turned to her, “Chica, if you’re part of a ‘we,’ you’d need 60,000 pesos.”

“No! The other is Elsa!” Lucia put an arm around her daughter, “Just a little girl, I’ll carry her, she doesn’t count.”

Tecate snorted, “A child! They’re slow. I charge more, not less for children.”

“Nooo,” Lucia moaned. “I’ll carry her. She won’t slow us down. Please! I have to get to my husband in Abilene. He’s been hurt and we’re going there to take care of him. Please?” Lucia plucked at Tecate’s sleeve, “I’ll pay you back…”

The pleading in Lucia’s eyes tugged at Ell’s heartstrings.

Tecate said, “I can reduce your fees,” he looked around at the group, then back to Lucia, “by 10,000 pesos, but you must work for my bosses in Texas for a month when you get to Texas. Two months for 20,000 pesos.”

One of the other women said, “I can make much more than 10,000 pesos a month in America. Let me pay you back instead.” She dropped her eyes, “I don’t want to work for the syndicate.”

The migrants began trying to wheedle for different deals from Tecate, though he stood resolutely shaking his head. An icy sensation prickled down Ell’s back as she listened distantly. She’d heard of coyotes who exploited their transportees. Some collected the migrants money then simply lost them somewhere in the desert. Such migrants frequently died. Some migrants were promised far more help than they received for the money they paid. Some were forced into a form of debt servitude, assessed additional charges by their employers which resulted in their falling farther and farther in debt. Women could find themselves forced into prostitution.

Ell turned to walk away, thinking that she should find a different coyote. But then she saw little Elsa staring at her. Elsa looked frightened as she clung to her distraught mother.

After a long pause, Ell returned to the group and listened while Lucia bargained away her freedom…

***

Bouncing along in the back of a pickup, heading for their crossing of the Rio Grande about forty minutes outside of Ojinaga, Ell wondered sadly whether Lucia had any idea how many months of servitude it would actually take to pay off her debt to Tecate. Ell had paid the full 30,000 pesos for her own border crossing and tried to think of a way to pay for Elsa and Lucia’s crossing without leaving everyone wondering just why she was crossing to El Norte when she had so much money.

Ell had developed a healthy dislike of Tecate and by extension, of Hector from Matamoros who had referred her to him. She suspected that Hector hoped to get some kind of kickback from Tecate. She also had a sick feeling that the high proportion of young women in Tecate’s group had something to do with an underground sex industry that he provided workers for.

Would Lucia have agreed to four months working for Tecate if she’d thought that there was a possibility that she might be working as a prostitute? Ell doubted it, but feared that the unworldly young mother was naive enough that such a possibility had not occurred to her.

Little Elsa touched Ell’s arm. When Ell looked down at her, Elsa held out her water bottle. Feeling a little misty, Ell accepted the gift even though she had a full water bottle in her own backpack. The child, becoming comfortable around Ell, had begun chattering to Ell about her life in San Pedro and her papa’s fall off a roof in Abilene. Ell now knew how “Papa’s” leg had been broken so he couldn’t work, even though he’d had surgery to repair it. How Elsa’s mother worried about how to support her father and how they would pay for the surgery.

Lucia had been told that Papa’s employer had insurance that had paid for the surgery but she didn’t really believe it.

The little girl’s world overflowed with worry, yet she often smiled and always offered to share what she had with Ell, which left Ell feeling pretty choked up. And I think I’ve got it tough. She snorted, most people would think that being on the lam from the government after escaping prison was a pretty big problem but then again…

***

Tecate tried to keep the smile off his face as he told his migrants that he recommended they take off their pants to wade the river. He pulled off his own to set an example, feeling goose bumps appear in the cool air and dreading the cold kiss of the river but acting brave about it. The two men in the group took off their pants immediately. After a few minutes of dithering the women began taking theirs off too. The moonlight let him appreciate the show. The taller of the two women accompanying the little girl had beautiful legs he noticed. Too bad she wouldn’t be in debt on the other side. Even with her short hair, her exotic good looks constantly drew his eye. Selling her contract to Señor
Ruiz would have been delightful. He would have enjoyed visiting her once she began working in Ruiz’s brothel.

Pants off, the group made their way down to the water, little shrieks telling him that the water was just as cold as it always was in February. When the little girl gasped at the cold, the tall woman gave her backpack to the short woman and put the girl on her back for the wade across.

Once they were on the other side Tecate barked at the group. “No! Don’t put your pants or shoes on yet! I know it’s cold but you’ll appreciate it later if we walk a bit to dry off. There’s a rocky area where you can put your shoes on without getting them so dirty.” He set off and the migrants followed.

At the flat rocky area he said, “Rub your legs and feet off with your hands, then dust off your hands before you get dressed. You don’t want to walk as far as we have to go with grit in your shoes.” While he dressed he positioned himself to watch the tall woman putting her pants back on. Admiring her, he wondered if he could somehow still put her into debt and sell that debt to Ruiz.

Tecate set a punishing pace on a path through the desert’s sagebrush and ocotillo. Certainly Ell found it difficult. Ell had had thoughts of carrying Elsa when the girl got tired, but hadn’t considered her own lack of stamina in the face of extended exercise. It wasn’t bad enough to make her throw up or pass out like had happened when she had to run long distances back in her Academy days, it just had her close enough to the edge that she knew she couldn’t take on anything else.

Ell wasn’t the only one on the edge of exhaustion. When Tecate called one of his infrequent rest breaks, many of the women’s faces appeared drawn. Little Elsa flopped down and almost immediately fell asleep.

One of the women asked if they could go slower.

Tecate snorted, “We aren’t going fast! I’ve slowed down because we have so many women, but we have a deadline to make because the trucks expect to pick us up at a certain time. If I have to call them and ask them to come at a later time they will charge us more. Can you pay the extra 6,500 pesos?”

The woman shook her head and Tecate got up, saying, “Time to go, time to go. We don’t want to be late!”

Ell glanced at the exhausted looking Elsa and lifted her chin at Tecate, “I’ll pay the 6,500 pesos. Let us rest a little longer and then let us go a little slower.”

If Tecate looked astonished, it was because he was. He’d used this ploy many times in the past and never had anyone offer to pay money to slow down before. He had had a few women go a little deeper into debt bondage later in the trek when they were totally exhausted. He shrugged. It didn’t actually cost him more, it was just a ploy to get more money—and it had just worked. The next payoff would come when they started to get thirsty and he could sell them water. He would have to “take them out of his way” to the water Felix always stashed for him. He could charge them both for the detour and the water.

Chapter Nine

Breaking news—Although unofficial, rumors swirling out of the Guantanamo Naval facility in Cuba allege that Ell Donsaii has escaped from the prison there! Many of the rumors state that she never actually arrived, escaping somewhere in route to the prison grounds, however an absolute beehive of activity there at Guantanamo Bay suggests that she escaped somewhere in the close vicinity. Will we be seeing Donsaii’s face on wanted posters?

Stockton closed her eyes, seething. I am surrounded by incompetents! Opening them she lifted a finger and hissed through a jaw she could barely unclench, “So, we don’t know how she escaped,” she lifted another finger, “how her guards got stoned,” another finger, “where she went,” another finger, “why we can’t find her,” the flat hand slammed down on her desk, “or, who’s responsible?”

Stockton had kept Amundsen on as Secretary of Defense. He’d started as Teller’s Secretary, then stayed on as that fool Flood’s Secretary. So he’d been brought in by Stockton’s own party and as she set up her Cabinet she had wanted to keep someone as evidence that she wasn’t just handing out political plums. Keeping someone who’d come into office with her party in the first place had seemed a good way to do it. That the man had been universally held in high regard had cemented her decision.

Now she had her doubts.

Amundsen seemed unperturbed by her tirade. “If you had asked I would have strongly advised you against the steps you have been taking in regards to Donsaii. In addition to being, in my opinion, smarter and more innovative than anyone else who has ever existed on this planet, Dr. Donsaii is highly ethical, moral and a very good person to have on our side. Making an enemy of her was a serious mistake.”

Stockton took a breath to interrupt the idiot but he held up a palm to stop her and continued, “You should not be surprised that a genius of her caliber was able to find a way to escape from common holding methods such as are used to hold ordinary criminals.”

Stockton raised a trembling finger to point it at Amundsen, “Tell your deputy that, as of this minute he is the acting Secretary.” With a snarl, “Get out of my sight.”

***

Ell’s eyes narrowed. She’d finished the last of the water in the two bottles Tecate had told them all to bring quite a while ago. Two liters of water wasn’t a lot for trekking all night. Tecate told them they walked at night to keep warm and avoid the Border Patrol, but it left them worn out. Now the fifteen women and two men were sprawled about, sleeping in the relatively warm, late morning sunshine. Tecate said they’d meet the trucks that night but that they still had quite a ways to walk.

In his instructions before they left Ojinaga, he’d told them to pack two liters of water and a breakfast burrito. Since it was nearly noon the next day Ell suspected that all the women were out of both water and food. They would have to go without eating lunch or dinner in addition to being very thirsty. Not fatal, but certainly unpleasant.

Empty water bottles and other discarded items littered the area, suggesting that this was a location where Tecate’s migrants usually stopped. Evidently Tecate took a longer route than other coyotes, because Lucia said her husband Enrique had only hiked overnight, not part of the next day like they were doing. Ell put her empty water bottles in her back pack then held the back pack to her stomach. Peering down into the open top of the backpack she used her umbilical port to fill the two bottles, then looking around at the sleeping camp, she pulled out the full bottles and stashed them under a nearby bush. Getting up she took her empty backpack and filled it with empty bottles from a nearby cluster.

While filling those bottles and stashing them under the same bush, Ell asked Allan to find a brand of granola bar that was sold in Mexico. Once he’d determined that Clif bars were sold in many stores near the border she had him check Amazon. Sure enough, they had Clif bars wrapped in pairs to fit through their four inch sales port. Having filled seventeen water bottles and stacked them under the bush as if someone had hidden them there, Ell had her waldo deliver her ten pairs of granola bars. She would have liked to have gotten more but figured that was as many as she could plausibly claim to have had in her back pack all along.

Tecate woke the migrants. With satisfaction he saw many of them trying to get a few more drops out of the last of their bottles.

Sure enough one of them asked, “Where can we get water?”

“I only brought enough for me. I can’t carry water for all of you. I told you to be careful.”

“Two liters isn’t enough for a long hike like this!”

Tecate shrugged, “If you knew that, why didn’t you bring more?”

“You didn’t tell us it was so far or that it would be more than twenty four hours before we could get water.”

“Well, there is a place where we can get water, but it’s out of our way, can you pay for the detour? It would be an extra 6,500 pesos. You could split it amongst yourselves.”

“You said you’d take care of us!” one of the women spluttered.

But then the tall woman, looking at Tecate like he were some kind of bug she’d found on her shoe, said, “Don’t worry, I found a stash of water over under that bush.” She waved a negligent hand and the women turned that way.

Tecate’s eyes widened as he looked over where she had pointed. All he saw was what looked like just another pile of empty bottles.

However the women moved that way in a herd and began exclaiming as they passed full water bottles out amongst themselves. What puta had put water there?

Before he could wonder if he could still get them to pay extra for food, the tall bitch started passing out granola bars to the migrants. Only one each admittedly, but it would doubtless keep them from getting hungry enough to pay him any more money.

She might have nice legs, but Tecate had begun to hate her. As they started to hike again, Tecate considered ways to put her back in her place.

When night had fallen Tecate told the lead migrant to keep walking and he waited as the group walked past him. They were on a little dirt road, no more than two ruts worn by trucks on the local ranch. When the tall girl came by he called her aside, “What’s your name?”

“Elsa.”

“Elsa, we’re going to take a break a little ways farther. I need someone to stay back here and warn us if any vehicles come down this little road. Can you whistle like a bird?”

She stared at him suspiciously for a moment, then pursed her lips and let out a low “tooowheep.”

“Yes, good. If someone comes, do that three times, pause then do it again. Then walk up beside the road on the left. That way you will run into the rest of us. We’ll have hidden to the left of the road.”

Ell stood watching Tecate and the rest of the women move away up the road, wondering what he was about. If a truck drove up this road at night they would hear it and see its headlights long before it got there. He certainly didn’t need someone watching for approaching vehicles on a quiet night like this, so there must be some other reason he’d asked her to wait. She had Allan lift the hoverbike off from its hiding place in Ojinaga and send it her way. Once it had crossed the border a couple of miles she had it lift up to two thousand feet and asked Allan to switch the cameras over to infrared.

Tecate chuckled to himself, proud of the plan he’d hatched. He guided the migrants off the right side of the road and up a shallow gully. The tall, stupid woman he’d left behind would soon be lost in the desert. She’d given him his last problem with the rest of the migrants.

He’d come back and look for her once he’d dropped the others off. If he couldn’t find her, nothing lost, he already had her 30,000 pesos. If he found her he would refuse to help her find her way back to civilization unless she agreed to a contract with Señor
Ruiz. He got a little thrill out of that thought. Having that particularly good looking woman contracted to Ruiz would be quite a win even without the bonus Ruiz would give him for bringing her in.

Allan spoke in Ell’s ear, saying that the hoverbike was approaching the area. As the crow flies they’d only walked about twenty miles from Ojinaga. So, at 120 miles an hour it hadn’t taken the hoverbike long to reach them. She dug in her backpack and got out her headband, slipping it on so she could see what the hoverbike saw in the HUD.

Suddenly a young girl’s voice said, “What’s that?”

Ell spun. Elsa sat on a rock behind her, partly hidden by a bush. “Elsa! What are you doing here? Where’s your mother?”

Elsa slipped down off the rock and stepped over to Ell. “I was nearby when the man told you to wait and watch for cars. I told Mama I’d stay and keep you company.”

Ell snorted quietly to herself. Putting an arm around Elsa’s shoulders, she glanced up at her HUD. As she’d feared she saw two red dots representing herself and Elsa. The eighteen other dots representing the fifteen women and two men migrants, plus Tecate were already about a mile and a half away. Ell shook her head in disgust, the dots were still moving. Tecate hadn’t taken a break like he’d said. They would have to be moving steadily to have made a mile and a half in the thirty minutes since Tecate asked her to wait. The road was faintly visible on the infrared from heat it absorbed during the day and because it made a track through the ghostly desert scrub. The migrants were off the road to the right, not the left as Tecate had told her. It was obvious that Tecate was trying to lose Ell in the desert, probably because he found her troublesome. She suspected losing someone out here wasn’t hard to do with individuals who didn’t have her technological advantages. She wondered how many other souls Tecate had “lost” in the desert and how many of them might have died out here.

“Do you have an AI?” Elsa said wonderingly.

Ell squatted down next to the girl she’d come to admire. “Yes, yes I do. Can you keep it a secret?”

Wide eyed, Elsa nodded solemnly. Fortunately the little girl didn’t ponder the low likelihood that someone who could afford an AI would need to become a migrant.

Ell stood and started walking down the road after the group. “We need to go.”

Elsa started walking beside her.

“What do you think of Señor Tecate?” Ell asked.

“I think he’s a bad man. Mama hates him.”

Ell nodded solemnly back at the girl. “He didn’t ask me to stay back here because he wanted me to watch for trucks. He wanted me to get lost back here. And now you’ve accidentally been caught in the trap he set for me.”

Elsa stared up at Ell with wide eyes. She looked frightened but seemed to trust Ell to take care of her. “Will we catch up to them before they finish their break?”

“They didn’t take a break so they’re already a long way ahead of us. They also went a different direction than Tecate told me they would go.”

The faint moonlight was enough for Ell to see a tear form and track down Elsa’s face. “Your AI tells you this?”

Ell nodded.

“Can it help us find them?”

Ell nodded, “Yes, but they’re far ahead of us. It will be hard to catch up to them so we’ll have to walk fast. Can you do that?”

Elsa bobbed her head resolutely.

Ell had thought that they would readily catch up to the group once Tecate actually gave the other migrants a real break. But then she realized that she had no idea where the group had left the road, if you could even call the two ruts a road. She’d watched for footprints going off to the right but, wherever they had left the faint dirt tracks, Ell hadn’t seen them. Her HUD showed the other migrants pretty far off to the right now though and she was sure she must have missed their trail. She turned off, intending to simply use her HUD to walk directly toward the group’s infrared signature but the ground was crusty away from a trail where people or animals had walked before. Their feet broke through the crust into softer material, making walking into hard work. In addition, they kept encountering thickets of scrub brush that they had to detour around. Crap, she thought, Allan could tell her where to go, but not how to get there.

Paused in frustration Ell heard Elsa plaintively say from behind her, “Are we getting lost?”

Ell stopped and stood, irritated and considering her options. Finally she turned and went down on one knee beside Elsa. “I have another secret. Can you keep this secret for me too?”

Elsa nodded with great seriousness.

Ell spoke to Allan under her breath, telling him to unspool the graphene cable, sending down the lifting harness from the underside of the hoverbike. She stood and turned Elsa so Ell stood behind the girl. Looking up into the sky she watched for the flashing of the LEDs on the harness. When it came into view it was slightly northwest of her location, presumably due to the light breeze Ell could feel. Ell looked down and said, “I’m going to cover your eyes a moment, OK?”

Elsa nodded and Ell put her hands over the girl’s eyes, continuing to whisper to Allan, guiding the harness into place. “OK hold the altitude. Move a little more east, slow, slow. Got it,” Ell said, reaching up to snatch the harness with one hand. “Give me three feet of slack.”

To Elsa, Ell said, “Stand very still and keep your eyes closed.” Elsa nodded so Ell moved back from the girl a moment and shook out the harness. She stepped into the thigh straps, shrugged the harness over her shoulders, then closed the chest buckle.

Kneeling next Elsa, Ell said, “Um, we’re going to fly a little bit, is that OK?”

“Fly?” Elsa said, sounding both apprehensive and excited.

“Not very high. Just a little bit off the ground, OK?”

Elsa nodded. She wondered if perhaps her new friend was a little bit loco. On the other hand, somehow she trusted the bigger Elsa implicitly.

Señora Gardon turned Elsa to face her and said, “Jump up and hold onto me.”

Elsa noticed that Señora Gardon had straps on her chest that she hadn’t had before. They looked vaguely like military gear. Elsa jumped up, throwing her arms around the woman’s neck and her legs about her waist. Elsa noticed that she had to jump quite a bit higher than she had to when she jumped up on her mama. Though, she didn’t jump up on her mam very often any more, she was getting too big.

Señora Gardon put her arms around Elsa and mumbled to herself as if she were praying. To Elsa’s great astonishment, without the woman moving her legs, Señora Gardon gradually tilted forward—tilting Elsa backward so that she found herself clinging more fiercely—then they slowly lifted off the ground until they were a little higher than the surrounding bushes.

Soon they were sailing through the air. It felt something like swinging on a swing, though the swing would have to have been huge! Elsa felt her heart thumping in her chest, though she wasn’t sure whether it was excitement or fear. This must be what it’s like to be a bird, she thought.

They sailed along for about five minutes. By then Elsa’s fear had dissolved and her excitement had her looking around in amazement. They began to slow and with Señora Gardon whispering more of her prayers they gradually stopped and lowered to the ground in an open area.

Señora Gardon helped Elsa jump down to the ground, then quietly said, “Remember Elsa, you promised not to tell anyone we flew, not even your mama, OK?”

Almost shaking with excitement Elsa nodded. Señora Gardon took her hand and, glancing up at her HUD guided her around a couple of bushes and onto a path.

Worried about her daughter Lucia had stopped and let the other migrants pass her. When the last of them had passed she hadn’t seen either her daughter or Elsa Gardon. With a sensation of mild panic she scrambled and jogged past the others to the front of the line. She reached Tecate without seeing her daughter. “Tecate! Tecate, my daughter Elsa, she’s not with us! I can’t find Elsa Gardon either!”

Tecate didn’t stop walking, “I told you not to bring a child! It isn’t my job to babysit your children out here! You were supposed to keep an eye on her.”

“You told Elsa Gardon to watch out behind us, Elsa stayed with her! But you were supposed to stop for a break… and you didn’t.” Lucia trailed off, suspicion flooding through her.

Tecate gritted his teeth. “Gardon” must be the name of the tall woman. He thought, if that idiot child really stayed with Gardon it could screw everything up. Women could be unbelievably sentimental about children and the entire group might revolt. Over his shoulder he said, “OK, we’ll stop in a minute. Then you can go back and look for them, but it’s not my fault if they’ve gotten themselves lost. I told all of you that you needed to stay close…”

With a thump, Tecate had run into someone standing in the path.

Gardon!

She stood in the path, feet apart, arms akimbo, wearing some kind of harness that she hadn’t had on before. He realized uneasily that she was actually taller than his own 170 centimeters. The child stood behind her to the left. How had they, not just caught up, but passed everyone to get out in front? The woman’s eyes tracked him like someone aiming a weapon. Tecate stepped back and reached behind him for the pistol in the holster on his belt.

She said in a quiet but angry tone, “You left us… you hoped we’d get lost.”

Tecate snarled, “I did hope you’d get lost,” he pulled out the Ruger, “you’ve been nothing but trou…”

Tecate stared wide eyed. The woman had moved suddenly, fast, like a striking snake. There’d been a hard thump against his wrist and now Gardon had the pistol in her own hand. Even in the dim light of the moon he could see the safety was now off and the bore of the weapon faced him as a single, untrembling black circle. His hand and wrist began to ache. His heart pounded and he found that it had become difficult to breathe while staring into the barrel of his own gun.

She ground out, “I’ve been no trouble at all. I’ve helped you take care of these people who’ve trusted their lives to you. A trust you haven’t justified… You’re done trying to screw these poor people out of more money.” She held her hand out.

“Wh-what do you want?” he said, staring at her outstretched hand.

“Give me your backpack.”

“No,” he protested weakly.

The barrel of the gun shifted slightly and she fired it. Tecate felt a tug of air as the bullet flashed past his head. There was a burst of warmth in his pants as he lost a small squirt of urine from his bladder. “Give it to me,” she said again, though she sounded a little distant after the gun had gone off so close to him.

Tecate shrugged out of his backpack. Knees watery, he handed it over.

She took it and motioned him back with the gun, “Lucia,” she said to the mother, now clinging to her child. “Go through that and find his money.” She handed the bag over.

The trembling young mother knelt, opened the bag and went through it, quickly finding Tecate’s stash, a combination of pesos and dollars.

Gardon turned to the rest of the migrants, “We’re taking our break here while we figure out what to do with Tecate and his attempts to get you to pay more and more. Sit down and rest.” She turned, “Count the money please Lucia, let’s make sure he still has it all.” Then she turned back to the main group, “I know that most of you weren’t able to pay Tecate the full 30,000 pesos he demanded. So you signed agreements to work for his syndicate for various periods to make up the difference. You should know that it is likely they will have penalties and costs that will put you farther into debt while you work for them. This practice is often known as ‘debt slavery.’” A hiss of indrawn breath greeted this information. “Worse, some of you women will find yourselves expected to work as prostitutes.”

Angry exclamations greeted this information. Tecate slowly backed away, reluctant to leave his money, but thinking that once they realized they were lost without him, they’d welcome him back on his own terms.

One of the women saw him sidling though and pointed, “He’s trying to leave.”

Gardon turned and Tecate found himself once again gazing at the barrel of his own gun. He wondered momentarily if he could run, but, no, she moved too fast! From the narrow profile of the pistol he had no doubt that if she pulled the trigger, he would not survive. He raised his hands and slowly walked back their way.

Gardon said, “This is the way it’s going to be Tecate. First, you’re not getting any more money from this group. You’re going to take us in to the city and get us ID like you promised…”

Tecate protested, “But ID will cost more…”

Gardon cut him off, “You didn’t tell us that in Ojinaga, so you’ll pay for that out of the money you’ve already been paid. And you won’t sell labor contracts on anyone. Understand?”

“You can’t do this. The syndicate will…”

“Tecate,” the woman interrupted, pointing a finger at him, “your job is to figure out how to keep the syndicate from giving this group any trouble…”

***

The many roommates with whom he shared his small apartment were out at a local bar frequented by migrants. Enrique tried the number of the phone he’d bought for Lucia in Mexico again. It was Friday night and Lucia was supposed to turn the phone on every Friday night so he could talk to her. He hadn’t been able to get through last Friday either. He had finally called a friend of his Uncle Tomas in San Pedro. The friend had heard that Lucia had left San Pedro with Elsa but didn’t know more. Enrique had been agonizing over what to do. It was bad enough to be hurt and worried about how to pay his share of the rent, without worrying about what had happened to his little family.

Why would they have left San Pedro? Hopefully Tomas’s friend just had been mixed up on his information.

He heard a knock at the door. Probably one of his roommates, drunk and lost their key. Picking up his cane he limped to the door. He felt amazed that, having broken his leg only a few weeks ago, he could already walk a few steps on it, even without the cane. The Americano doctors had put a metal rod inside of it that was as strong as the bone was before it broke. They told him that the more he walked on it, the faster it would heal.

Leaning on the cane, he opened the door. “Papa!” Elsa shrieked, bouncing into the room like a pinball. She stopped, suddenly shy, “Can I hug you? Or will it hurt your leg?”

Enrique knelt on his good knee and threw his arms around his daughter. Lucia stepped to him and knelt to hug him as well. A tall, very pretty woman still stood in the hall. He looked into Lucia’s eyes and said, “How?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Lucia said, “and we wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for Elsa Gardon, here…”

Epilogue

Shan Kinrais drove slowly up the steep driveway to the Wildberry Lodge. It was a bed and breakfast in Leicester North Carolina, near Asheville. He’d never been there, but his dad’s business had been doing very well. His dad had rented three rooms for the week that coincided with spring break for UNC. The whole family was going to be up there because Morgan and Lane had spring break at the same time. Shan felt pretty depressed to be going on vacation without Ell, but she’d urged him go.

“You need to get your mind off of our troubles,” Ell had told him from Texas. “I’m hoping to get back to North Carolina before summer so we won’t be apart all that much longer.”

Shan had agreed to go, agreeing that being there with his family would be good for him. It might get him out of the funk he’d been in, moping around the house alone. He’d been going through the motions, teaching his classes. Writing up the paper on carbon chemistry that would bear Ell’s and Gary’s names. He’d met with Gary a couple of times. In addition to working on the paper, they’d had a good bitch session about Stockton’s short sightedness.

Gary was doing amazing things with carbon synthesis. He hadn’t replicated one of the sigma’s carbon allotrope printers but was working out ways to add coatings of lonsdaleite, graphene, graphend and diamond to conventionally manufactured structures. He envisioned casting Styrofoam wings and bodies for airplanes, coating them with graphend that was itself coated with lonsdaleite, then dissolving the Styrofoam out of them, or just leaving the Styrofoam in them.

Shan checked in to the lodge and found to his surprise that his dad had reserved the largest “Blackberry” suite for him. It had a separate sitting room, a fireplace and a hot tub. He frowned, this was far too large for him alone. Especially with his parents sharing the Gooseberry and Morgan and Lane sharing the Blueberry. Both were smaller rooms than the Blackberry suite. He decided to insist that his parents take the big suite, but he had to go to the bathroom first.

He stepped into the Blackberry’s bathroom. The light switch 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 hot tub.

Startled he said, “Oh! Sorry!” Stepping back 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.

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

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.

“Defiant” asks what kind of aircraft you might build if the engines that drove them could be housed somewhere else. The reduced weight and the lack of a need to carry fuel would significantly liberate the design characteristics.

Isn’t DNA a type of Von Neumann machine, with human DNA a very successful example?

How might terrorists use ports? How might they be stopped?

What might one do with single-ended ports? Could they represent a technology which should be suppressed?

It begins to ask what we might do with the products of graphene, lonsdaleite and diamond synthesis if we learned how to create them rapidly and in quantity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Elene Trull, Nora Dahners, Kerry McIntyre, Allen Dietz and Kat Lind, each of whom significantly improved this story.