Comet! Read online

  Comet!

  An Ell Donsaii story #5

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2012 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)” and “Rocket (an Ell Donsaii story #4).” I have minimized repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the earlier books in order to provide a better reading experience for those of you who are reading the series.

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

  Preprologue

  Allan Donsaii was an unusually gifted quarterback. He was widely recognized to be startling strong and was 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 was never 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 kidded them that they were only marrying so that they could start their own sports dynasty.

  Their daughter Ell did have 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

  Getting ready to go to work on Monday, John wondered what things would be like at D5R today? Working on Ben’s team they’d kinda finished up an entire series of projects on Friday. The rockets to the asteroid and to Mars. He supposed they’d be directing the small rockets to travel around, harvesting more specimens and porting them back. He was afraid that things would be kind of a zoo out at D5R after the NASA announcement of what they’d been doing yesterday morning

  John had received a bunch of contacts from news media Sunday afternoon and he even answered some questions for a pretty reporter who’d shown up on his doorstep. D5R had been completely shut down Sunday though. Sheila had sent out a message asking everyone to stay away, even if they had projects they wanted to work on. John figured there would be about a thousand reporters waiting in the parking lot at D5R this morning with questions about exactly what they’d been doing at the facility. It seemed unlikely that any work would get done. His AI spoke in his ear. “You have a call from Sheila at D5R.”

  “Put her on.”

  Sheila’s recorded voice said, “Hello, please be aware that D5R’s facility has been staked out by the media. As it seems likely that the press will impede any work to be done today, the investors have decided to let things cool down for a few days before resuming D5R’s normal activity. Therefore they are granting everyone at D5R four days off with pay.”

  John’s eyebrows rose. He loved working for this company!

  “Of course you may do whatever you like with your time off, but D5R would like to invite you to a celebration of your accomplishments. It will be held on the private island in the Bahamas where D5R’s first orbital flights and the flight to the Space Station originated. If you’d like to go, meet us at the RDU airport for a charter flight no later than 9AM with your overnight kit and a swim suit. You’ll be back Tuesday afternoon. Significant others are welcome. Please don’t let the media know about this! Hope you decide to come along!”

  John spun in place pumping his fist. He really loved working for this company! Over his shoulder he shouted to his girlfriend, “Debbie, you’re not gonna believe this!”

  Phil floated in the Space Station’s main module, gazing down at the world as it rotated beneath him. He shook his head gently in amazement that he was actually in space this far ahead of the schedule he’d been expecting with NASA. He’d been worried that he might be one of the people who stayed sick for days in space and it was a huge relief to feel great. He loved being weightless!

  With a “whumpf” something big struck him from behind and he flailed a hand out to the grab bar to keep from hitting the wall. Ell’s voice came over his shoulder as she wrapped arms and legs around him giggling, “It sure is easy to sneak up on someone in this place. Didn’t hear my footsteps did ya?” She gave him a peck on the cheek then shoved off.

  When Phil turned to look her way she was spinning like a dervish in the middle of the module while slowly drifting toward the door. “No I didn’t!” he raised an eyebrow, “I’m thinking there might not have been any footsteps?” Holding the grab bar he shook his head again. The astronauts who’d been here in the station for a while were pretty coordinated at moving around in the weightless environment but Phil was still struggling to push himself accurately from one location to another without missing.

  Ell on the other hand? Almost every move she made involved spins and flips like she’d done back in her gymnastics days. The astronauts in the station had initially been startled and tried to catch her, thinking she’d pushed off badly. She effortlessly dodged their stretching hands. By now they’d gotten used to her apparently reckless movements and begun watching in simple appreciation of the amazing athleticism involved in flipping across a module to arrive perfectly at whatever destination she’d shot for.

  Ell grinned, “Well that view’s pretty nice, I agree. But your chariot back home is about ready to go so you’d better shake a leg.” She grabbed the handle next to the module’s door and eeled out toward the airlock.

  As he followed, Phil mused that his view of her was pretty amazing too.

  “Amelia,” D5R’s Lear Jet that they’d modified into a spacecraft coasted in to land on the island at 11:50AM on Monday. The edge of the runway was crowded with people and more were streaming over from the big patio at the mansion. Quite a few were already in swim wear and walking up from the beach. As soon as Amelia had stopped and powered down, the crowd surged out around the ladder as it folded out of the door.

  To delighted cheers, Emil Taussan was first to appear in the door. He looked weak from long overstaying his tour in the weightlessness of the Space Station. He’d eagerly taken Ell up on her offer to get back down to earth. Anya Stolchya and Jim Sasson came next. Though they weren’t as well known, cheers still rose. Chuck had stayed on the station but Zeke Potter and Phil came next and were cheered soundly even though the crowd didn’t really know who they were at all. Then Rob Braun and Ell appeared in the door to thunderous cheers and applause. A festive atmosphere surged as the crowd made its way back over to the big patio where the island staff had laid out an enormous buffet.

  A couple of hours later Ell walked Phil and the other four astronauts out to the unmodified Lear Jet for their flight back to Houston. After she’d shaken hands with the three others she gave Phil a big hug and said, “Hey, ya big lunk. I’m glad you got to space a little early. I’d think there are going to be a lot more flights in years to come. You might be up there so much you’ll get tired of it
!” She leaned back and was surprised to see his eyes glistening.

  Phil pulled her to him so she wouldn’t see his tears, “Hey yourself,” he said around the frog in his throat. “Thanks… from, from the bottom of my heart! I’ll expect a visit from my favorite ‘googly eyed girl’ sometime soon.”

  “You bet!” Ell said and Phil let go, turned and climbed the stairs into the little jet.

  Over on the patio Roger watched Ell saying goodbye to Phil with a crushing sense of loss. It seemed inconceivable that he could compete with the handsome ex-Olympic wrestler for her affection. Handsome, and an astronaut in training, Phil seemed to hold all the cards. Roger shook his head mournfully and turned back to the cooler to get himself another Guinness.

  Reggae music gently throbbed over the patio at the big house as the sun set over the sea. Ell was excited to see the people from D5R getting along so well. A big group was dancing. One of the local staff brought out a broom for a limbo contest and Ell gleefully joined in, purposefully losing to Sheila with the stick still at what seemed to her a surprisingly high level.

  Sheila danced around excitedly, “I beat an Olympic athlete!”

  Ell held Sheila’s hand high and mugged for peoples’ recordings. She looked around for Roger, hoping to dance with him. At length she found him in a big chair overlooking the sea, asleep with an empty Guinness by his hand. She started to wake him, then with dismay noticed four more empty bottles under the chair. I’ve never seen Roger drunk! she thought, I wonder what’s gotten into him?

  In the morning Ell made her way back out to the patio where an island breakfast buffet was laid out. Ell saw Sheila checking it over, “Hey Sheila, great job setting all this up!”

  Sheila smiled, “Evelyn, the lady that watches the houses on the island, has a lot of experience setting up parties for the rich folks that used to own the island. Pretty much all I have to do is give her some idea what you want and she brings in people and supplies from nearby islands to set stuff up.”

  Ell filled a plate as she spoke, “Well she sounds great, but you’re doing a terrific job of lining up exactly what I want with very little effort on my part. It’s like you can read my mind!” Ell narrowed her eyes, “You can’t can you?”

  Sheila laughed, “You’re just an open book!” She frowned down at Ell’s plate, “How many people are you feeding with that?!”

  “Just me and my tapeworm.” Ell said, looking around. She saw Ben Stavos and Robert Braun sitting at the edge of the patio and headed that way. “Hey, guys. Can I sit with you? Or are you talking about really serious stuff? You look like you’re discussing world affairs.”

  “Yeah, yeah, please sit down! We are talking serious stuff, but it’s stuff we want to talk to you about.”

  Ell raised a questioning eyebrow as she sat.

  Ben said, “D5R has agreed to license its tech to other space launch companies right?”

  “Yeah, President Teller put on some pressure and the majority shareholders agreed to do so.” Ell felt weird talking about “majority shareholders” when she herself owned 96% of the company. The only other shareholders were the employees who each got some shares when they were hired. But, she was determined to maintain the fiction that she was just a working girl with a few royalties from her patent for the PGR chips. She desperately wanted to keep anyone from finding out that the royalties amounted to billions of dollars per year for fear that everyone would start treating her differently. She’d had a long talk with Steve from her security team about how the team should fade into the background so most people wouldn’t even realize that she had guards following her around. She smiled at Ben and Rob, “You guys should be in line to get some kind of income stream from the licensing when it happens.”

  Braun waved his hand dismissively. “The fees will be nice, but Ben and I want to found our own company and buy a license ourselves.”

  “Really?! Cool! What’s your company going to do?”

  “Cool,” Ben thought, it isn’t so hard to remember this genius is just a teenager when she says something like that! “Rob and I want to capture an asteroid and bring it back to earth orbit for mining. We’re really hoping that the investors who funded D5R might be willing to provide start up funding. Could you set us up a meeting?”

  Ell’s eyebrows rose, but she held up a finger for a pause because her mouth was full.

  Rob looked at her heaped plate and wondered if she really thought she could eat all of that? He glanced at Ben, wondering what the chances were that the D5R investors would fund them. They seemed pretty loose with their cash, flying all the D5R employees to the island like this and giving them days off just so they could avoid hassles with the press.

  Ell swallowed, “That’s great! What kind of asteroid are you going after?”

  Rob said, “That depends. At first we were thinking of a comet or icy asteroid to supply orbital habitats. But with ports it’s cheaper to bring water and air up to orbit from Earth itself. So now we’re thinking we’d like a metal rich asteroid. One of those should be loaded with precious metals that would improve the return on the investment. And the iron could be used to build space habitat.” He shrugged, “To tell the truth we’d probably take any asteroid that didn’t mass too much and had a trajectory that could easily be modified to put it into Earth orbit.”

  Ben put in, “No matter what the main content of the asteroid is, it’s thought that most of them will have plenty of metals in them. First thing is to send little rockets out there prospecting the ones that could be reasonably captured with minimum delta V and find out what they do have in them.”

  Eyes wide, Ell swallowed, “Space miners! I like it. So you’d bring the precious metals back down here to sell and keep the cheaper stuff in space to build habitat?”

  The guys nodded.

  “Are you going to build habitat yourself or turn the materials over to someone else?”

  Braun said, “I’d like to do it all! But I think first we’ve got to go after the raw materials. If that produces good cash flow, and no one else was building habitat, we’d start on that next.”

  Ell pointed a fork at them, “Aren’t you going to get hassled by the folks who think you might miscalculate and run that asteroid into the Earth? Extinction of the human race would be a pretty big ‘my bad!’”

  Braun shrugged, “There’s always a lot of short sighted people out there. We’ll have to deal with it as we go along. We’ll need some PR people to help convince them that the benefits are worth the risk.”

  Ell grinned her trademark crooked smile back and forth at them, “Those ‘short sighted people’ might be thinking that they’re taking the risks and you’re collecting the benefits?”

  Indignantly Braun said, “The entire planet will benefit from the availability of those kinds of resources!”

  Ell winked, “Might be hard for them to see that nebulous benefit?”

  Ben exclaimed, “You’re the last person I would have thought wouldn’t see the huge upside to this!”

  Ell grinned again, “Oh, don’t worry; I’m on your side. I’m just pointing out that you might have a real uphill battle with the ‘people’ and the ‘powers that be.’”

  Rob sighed and tilted his head back to stare at the clear sky overhead, “Yeah, we know it’s a problem. But I think if we get ahead of public opinion with a good PR company, we can control it.”

  “Or?” Ell said, raising her eyebrows.

  “Or what?”

  “Or, you might just use Ben’s macromanipulators to do your mining in situ, then send that asteroid back here through a port a little bit at a time?”

  Ben squinched his eyes shut, then slapped his forehead. “Oh Jeez! I can’t believe we’ve been so focused on details like how to stop rotation and apply thrust that we forgot to step back and ask if there was an easier way!”

  Braun said, “My God! We could just port the better ores out of the asteroid, to the orbit we want, without the risks of moving the whole thing!”
/>   Ell said, “There will still be substantial challenges to building a robotic miner that can remove material from your asteroid in sizes that it can send home through a port. Especially if it’s going to continue mining for months and years. But I think it will still be easier to do that than move the entire asteroid. And you shouldn’t meet so much political back pressure.”

  Excitedly Ben said, “Yeah, but that’s the kind of stuff we already have skills for. Do you think D5R’s investors would be interested?”

  Ell grinned, “I do. If you guys will do a little prototyping and prospecting and get me a business plan to show them, I’m pretty sure they’ll go for it. Depends on how much money you think you’ll need of course.”

  “Thanks!” the two men said at the same time, then bent their heads together to begin some enthusiastic planning.

  Ell had almost finished eating when Vivian showed up with a big mug of coffee and a bagel. “Ell, have you talked to Fred yet?”

  “Nope. What about?”

  “Well, he and I and Brian are wanting to float an idea past you and see if you think D5R’s investors might be interested?”

  Ell glanced at Ben and Rob to see if they’d noticed that they had competition for “D5R’s” investors but they were so intent on their own conversation that she doubted they’d notice anything quieter than a gunshot. She turned back to Viv and saw that she was waving Fred and Brian over.

  Sitting down next to Viv, Fred said, “What does she think?”

  “I haven’t talked to her yet. I was just asking her if you’d waved our spark of genius in front of her yet.”

  Ell said, “Well, come on! You’ve got me all curious now?”

  Viv said, “We want to form a company to make the ports that everyone else will use when they license from D5R. The three of us each know different parts of the port fabrication elephant. We think we could be really competitive.”