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  Vivian cast her eyes to the right and left. It didn’t seem that the men had heard the faint sound of the port under her ear. Ell was using the implanted one, presumably because it would be even harder for others to hear. She coughed gently.

  Ell said, “We’re going to get you a weapon. I’ve done this too, so I know it works. We’re going to push a small Taser dart into your mouth through the tooth port. Normally it’s fired from a Taser gun and the firing activates the dart by striking the back of the dart. We’ve modified them so that just pushing hard on the back with your fingernail will activate them. We’ll push the darts into your mouth, back end first, so try not to press hard on the back end with a tooth or something.”

  Vivian felt her eyebrows rising involuntarily at the thought of having an active Taser dart in her mouth. She considered coughing twice to indicate her unwillingness to participate, but then thought about how helpless she felt at present. She coughed once instead.

  Ell said, “OK, click your teeth together twice when you’re ready for us to send you a dart.”

  With her mouth suddenly dry and her heart thumping, Vivian clicked her teeth twice. A moment later she felt something protruding from the back of her tooth and sliding over her tongue. It seemed very long! She was just wondering if it was going to gag her when Ell said, “OK, that’s almost the whole thing. Remember the end by your front teeth is sharp. Sniff when you’re ready for Roger to let go of that end.”

  Vivian sniffed and the dart fell free into her mouth. She carefully spit it into her hand and felt it with her fingers. It felt like it was about an inch and a half long and an eighth of an inch in diameter.

  Ell’s voice said, “When you’re ready to use it, push on the back end with something firm like your fingernail. You should feel something click. Then stick it into your opponent. Only throw it in desperation. It’s not very aerodynamic without the little fins on its base and probably wouldn’t hit business end first… Do you want another one?”

  Vivian coughed once and another dart slowly pushed itself into her mouth.

  She lay tensely on her back with a dart in each hand, thumbs on their bases, ready to stab them into the men on either side of her.

  ***

  Steve stared at Ell, “Come on! There’s nothing you could do over at that house that one of us couldn’t do!”

  Ell shrugged, “You’re right, any of you could do the task as well as I could. But the technology is secret.”

  He drew his head back, “And using this device, we’d discern the secret?”

  She tilted her head, considering. She grinned, “OK, you’ve got me there. I suppose you could use it without understanding the secret, but I want it to be you, not one of the others.”

  Steve nodded.

  “OK. When the helicopter passes, you run along the back of the house, touching this to the wall and pulling the trigger every couple of feet. You should be about twelve inches above the foundation so that you’ll be above the floor level inside. Try to pull the trigger in time with the chopper blades’ whop-whop-whop.”

  “And what’s going to happen?”

  “Why,” she grinned again, “nothing, so far as you can tell.”

  “OK,” he rolled his eyes, “but why are we doing it?”

  “Well, after a bit, everyone inside is going to be unconscious, or close to it, then we just go in and drag them out.”

  “Whatever this is won’t affect us?”

  “No, not if you guys breathe through these.” Ell reached into her backpack and pulled out some snorkel mouthpieces.

  Steve took one and looked at it. There was no tube going up from the mouthpiece like a snorkel would have. He put the mouthpiece in his mouth and, sure enough, could breathe through it even though it had no visible opening. “I assume it has a port in it?”

  Ell nodded. “I’d like you to have every available man there at the house, so I’ll drive the car.”

  Steve sighed and his shoulders drooped, “It sure is hard to keep you out of harm’s way.”

  She snorted, “Driving by on the road out here isn’t going to put me in danger.”

  Ten minutes later Steve spoke in Ell’s earphone, “Ready.”

  “Amy,” Ell said, “As soon as Steve shoots the ports, open them up.” The gun-like device in Steve’s hand actually contained a one ended port Ell had set at twelve inches. Rolled up double ended ports would be shot through it into the house, unroll and come live on Amy’s display for her to open them. The other ends of the ports were in a pressurized tank filled with a nitrous-halothane-oxygen mixture. Forcing powerful anesthetics into the house under pressure made Ell nervous, even though the mixture contained enough oxygen that in theory it couldn’t suffocate anyone. However, if they got too deep under the anesthetics, the respiratory suppression might still asphyxiate someone. The problem would be to find the sweet spot when the people inside were dopey or asleep without being too far under.

  Winding down all the windows on Randy’s car, Ell had Allan feed a helicopter soundtrack into Randy’s very impressive car sound system. Telling Allan to use her earpieces to dampen the sound she gradually turned the stereo up a Ke san>

  ***

  Vivian coughed once; then inhaled hard through the little port behind her tooth, trying to fill her lungs. The men had stirred at the sound of the helicopter approaching. Joe even sat up and looked around. Once the chopper went by and faded into the distance he laid back down with a sigh. Vivian fingered the darts in her hands, making sure the pointy ends were still outward. Then she concentrated on breathing only through her tooth.

  Suddenly Joe sat up, “What’s that smell?”

  Vivian tensed and pushed on the back of the dart in her left hand with her thumbnail. She felt a little click.

  Joe leaned over away from the bed and said, “Lights on.” As the lights in the room brightened, he picked something up off the floor and held it up.

  Vivian recognized one of the ports that could be rolled up and shoved through a smaller port.

  Joe cursed and took in a breath as if he were about to shout a warning.

  Vivian stabbed him with the dart.

  Joe convulsed, falling off the bed and onto the floor.

  The man on the other side of her was sitting up. Vivian thumbed the back of the other dart. When he leaned up over her to look at Joe on the floor, Vivian stuck the second dart into his thigh.

  He thrashed once and fell on top of her. Vivian shoved him off, pulled a deep breath in through the port and opened her lips to speak, “Lights off. Roger, give me another dart.”

  With relief she immediately felt another dart begin to push in over her tongue. She plucked it out, took another deep breath and said, “Another dart.”

  The car stopped at the side of the road and Ell ran toward the house. “Vivian, what’s happening in there?”

  “The smell tipped them off. I Tasered the two in the room with me. I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the house.”

  Ell said, “Steve, we need to get in the house now!”

  Avral/Abe woke at a loud thump from the back bedroom. He sniffed. Something sweet was in the air. Holding his breath, he staggered to his feet and headed toward the bedroom with Varka Kom as in in it. He felt drunk and happy. Someone had gassed the place! From his euphoric feeling he realized they must be using nitrous oxide. Stepping into the bedroom with Varka he saw her lying on the bed, apparently unconscious. Golan/Joe was on the floor beside the bed. Probably the “thump” that awakened him. Shimon lay unconscious beside Varka on the bed.

  Steve put the snorkel mouthpiece in and kicked the door, surprised when it slammed open easily. The lock had obviously been broken when the kidnappers entered. He could see a dangling piece of the duct tape that had been holding it shut. To his dismay, just as he was about to dive through the door someone inside started shooting wildly. Holes appeared around the door frame. He couldn’t shoot back, he didn’t know where Vivian was!

  Holding his
Taser pistol at the ready, Steve stepped to the side of the door.

  Randy kicked in the back door of the house and Barrett dove low into the kitchen. A man staggered into the kitchen and fired a gun wildly toward the open back door. Barrett shot him with his Taser.

  To Steve’s astonishment, a man simply fell out the front door at his feet. He dragged him to the side and spoke to Mary, “Check and cuff him.”

  She nodded and knelt beside the man as Steve dove through the doorway.

  Vivian watched through slitted eyes as Abe stumbled into the room with a gun in hand. He stepped to the window and used the butt of the gun to hammer the glass out of it. Then he leaned out the broken window and took a couple of deep breaths. He turned toward her and grabbed her wrist.

  Playing dead, Vivian thumbed the back of the dart in her other hand. When Abe pulled her up and toward the window she stabbed him with the dart. He flailed to the floor. Vivian staggered against the wall as he fell past her.

  For a moment she considered trying to climb out the window, but people were shooting guns in the other room. Playing dead seemed to be working pretty well for her so she dropped back onto the bed and whispered, “Roger, another dart please.” A moment later she felt it pushing into her mouth.

  Abe moaned and Vivian peered over the edge of the bed at him. The other two guys had gone under from the gas once they were Tasered, but Abe had had a couple of clean breaths. When he started to rise, she stabbed him with another dart and said, “Roger, another dart.”

  A shadow darkened the doorway and she tensed. He pulled something out of his mouth. “Vivian?” It was Steve’s voice.

  Vivian stood up and started toward him.

  Ell appeared at the other end of the hall saying, “Amy, shut down the ports. Vivian, get outside. Steve, we’ve got to get these men out of here and away from the gas before one of them dies on us.”

  Vivian went down the hall and saw Mary and Barrett cutting the family free of their cuffs. She grabbed the smaller of the two teenagers by the wrists and started dragging him toward the front door, surprised at how heavy he was. Once she had KOncmaller him on the patio she lowered his arms slowly so his head wouldn’t bump down too hard. She leaned close. Happily she could tell the boy was breathing. She looked up as Steve dropped Abe off his shoulder and laid him down next to the boy.

  To Vivian’s utter astonishment Ell came out the door next with the big burly “Joe” in a fireman’s carry. Vivian’s eyes widened as she lowered him to the ground next to the others. Mary dragged out the other teenager and Jason came out with the husband. The men went back in to get more unconscious people and Mary knelt beside Vivian, checking the victims and applying plasticuffs to those who weren’t part of the family.

  Ell brought another one out over her shoulders, dropped him to the ground and immediately leaned down to give him a couple of breaths. She sat up and examined him a moment, then gave him two more. He shuddered and took a deep gasping breath on his own. She watched him take a couple more breaths, then asked Mary to cuff him too. She headed back in the house.

  Vivian stood shakily and then went back in the house and looked around. All the people seemed to have been moved outside. Ell was opening all the windows and picking ports up off the floor and stuffing them in her backpack.

  Red and blue flashing lights reflecting in through the windows signaled that the police had arrived.

  Back outside, Vivian took a deep breath. She sure hoped they hadn’t hurt Char.

  Ell came up to her, “Hey, Viv. I’m so sorry about this. Your friend Chardet is OK. How are you holding up?”

  Vivian threw her arms around the young woman and squeezed so hard she shook. “I’ll be OK Ell… thanks!”

  Avral rose back into consciousness on a hard surface. He felt vaguely nauseated and found that his wrists and ankles had been cuffed together. Slowly he turned his head to the side. He saw the cheap house they’d been staying in. Red and blue lights flashed off its windows and walls.

  He saw Donsaii’s slender form flit from one location to another, then approach Varka who threw her arms around the girl.

  Dammit! He rolled his head to stare sightlessly up at the sky. Going after Varka instead of Donsaii was like going after a wolverine’s cubs without first taking out the mother!

  He resolved to give Menahim a piece of his mind the next time he saw him. He had a sinking feeling that that would be a long time from now though.

  Chapter Six

  Gary leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. The results of his testing on the graphene he’d spun during his time riding the D5R spaceplane out to orbit continued to astonish him.

  Graphene’s properties had been eval NOncmaconuated years ago now by testing tiny specimens. Its tensile strength of over 100 gigapascals, or 14,500,000 pounds per square inch, made it the strongest material known to man. The problem had been that no one could make much of it. Well that wasn’t true; graphite after all was full of graphene. But no one had succeeded in making unbroken sheets of it that were very long without significant flaws that compromised the theoretical strength. But, out in microgravity, with a controlled atmosphere in the chamber, his spinner had spun out kilometers of nearly perfect graphene.

  The problem he had was at the edges of the spun strip. The middle of the three inch wide band he’d spun was nearly perfect and microtesting showed it easily exceeded the expected strength figures. But the edge had a lot of irregularities and when tested as a complete specimen, tears started in them. Those flaws made it significantly weaker.

  He wondered if Ell would let him go up into orbit again. He could try to make much wider ribbons, or fold over the edges and somehow trim them before they left the chamber. Or maybe he could make graphene as a tube that didn’t have an edge? A carbon macrotube so to speak.

  After thinking and drawing feverishly for hours Gary thought he had a workable plan. Finally he asked his AI to try to connect him to Ell.

  His heart lifted when she said, “Hi Gar’,” sounding happy to hear from him.

  “Uh, hi. I wanted to thank you for lifting me and my project out to space.”

  “Really?” she chuckled, “I heard you spent the first hour barfing. I didn’t think you’d be all that grateful.”

  Embarrassed he said, “Well yeah, sorry about that.”

  She laughed, “I puked my guts up on my first trip too. Did your experiment work out?”

  Feeling a little better to hear that she’d also been space sick, Gary launched into an enthusiastic description of the graphene ribbon he’d been able to make.

  “So two nanometers thick and 75mm wide?” she asked.

  “Yeah. The two nanometers is very consistent but the width varies from 70 to 75mm.”

  “Have you tensile tested it?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of hard to grip the ends. If you pull on the ribbon it tends to rip across from one side to the other. I’ve been twisting it into a thread, which is problematic because the resulting threads are hard to see, then I grip them and then they frequently just slip out of the grip because they lay in flaws in the grip metal. But, if they don’t slip, they break at three to four pounds… uh that’d be…”

  “Thirteen to eighteen Newtons, so you’re up around a hundred gigapascals?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Gary said, surprised that she could get her AI to calculate that for her so quickly.

  “Wow! That’s great! ption of ="+0">Thousands of researchers have worked unsuccessfully on the large scale production of graphene for decades and now you’ve done it on your first shot! We need that stuff for what we’re doing in space. Do you think you could scale up to huge quantities?”

  “Um, I hope so. Uh, if I can get a grant to build some modified versions of my current spinner, would you be willing to let me take them up in your space plane again?”

  “Absolutely. But you don’t need to apply for a grant. Just get the modifications made and send us the bill.”

  “Really?!
We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars.”

  “No problem. We really need high tensile strength materials and you’re way ahead of the pack. In fact, we’d be happy to have you work at D5R here full time if being in an academic setting isn’t all that important to you.”

  Gary’s eyes goggled, “I... I’m honored to be offered the job… but I do want to keep doing research… so I’d probably better stick with academics.”

  “Research is what we do. D5R stands for ‘Dimension Five Research’ after all. We’d want you to join our ‘Quantum Research’ subdivision if you came. We start scientists like you at $150K and have great benefits including your retaining 50% of your intellectual property. You know if you perfect the large scale synthesis of graphene while working for us, you should find it pretty easy to get back into academics in Materials Engineering if you wanted. Universities should be jumping at the chance to have you on their faculties.”

  “That’d be awesome!” He said excitedly. “I need to check into what my contract says here at Clemson. I’ll get started on the spinner modifications and talk to my department head right away.”

  “Uh, Gary?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You should be worried about what will happen to your existing intellectual property rights if you come to work for us?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Do I need a lawyer?”

  “Not for us, we’ll grant that the graphene spinning tech is something you brought into your relationship with us so we have no claim on any royalties for your existing methods. But you need to write down exactly what your current tech is because I’ll bet Clemson will feel it has a claim on that.”

  “Oh.”

  “And if you figure out a completely different way to make it after you start working with us, you’ll want to be able to show that you aren’t using what you brought with you from Clemson.”