Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9)

by Dahners, Laurence

  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 bl
ue 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?”