Comet! Page 14

  In the girl’s bathroom Emma turned to Bridget, “Do you have an audio video record of him hitting you?”

  Bridget shook her head, “He always acts sickly sweet right up to the moment he unplugs my AI.” She sniffed and pulled a paper towel out of the dispenser to wipe her nose.

  Ell wandered to the back of the bathroom. “Barrett? Are you outside Top of the Hill?”

  Allan patched the question through to Barrett. A moment later Ell heard Barrett in her earpiece, “Yes. Do you need me?”

  “No, but can you look around outside for this guy?” Ell had Allan send Barrett a snippet of video of Sam.

  “Can do. Is he a threat?”

  “Well, not to us. But he’s a threat to his girlfriend and Emma’s trying to help her get out of her situation with him.”

  “OK.”

  As Ell walked back over to Emma and Bridget, Emma looked up and said, “Ell, can Bridget wear your jacket?”

  Ell blinked, “Sure.” She pulled it off.

  Bridget said, “I appreciate your helping but I really don’t think you guys should get involved. You’re gonna regret it.”

  Emma held out her hand, “Gimme your jacket girl.”

  Bridget shrugged out of it. Emma turned it inside out and handed it to Ell. Bridget stared, “Why don’t I wear my jacket inside out?”

  Emma said, “Because he’s gonna look closely at people your height and wonder about the one with the weird jacket. He’s not going to look at the tall girl with the weird jacket.” She folded the sleeves back on Ell’s jacket to expose the tiny Bridget’s hands.

  As Ell put Bridget’s jacket on, Bridget sniffed and tremblingly grinned, “Not even the tall girl with the weird jacket that has short sleeves?”

  Ell grinned as she looked down at her wrists extending well beyond the sleeves.

  Bridget glanced up at Ell’s face, then stared. “Oh my God! You’re Ell Donsaii!”

  Ell nodded somberly, “Last time I checked.”

  Bridget looked back and forth between them. “Thank you.” She whispered.

  Emma cleared her throat, “OK, next. Your hair.” Emma held up a tube of dark red lipstick.

  Bridget frowned at it.

  Emma said, “Take off your headband.”

  When Bridget had done so Emma started running the lipstick through her pale blond hair.

  Bridget watching in the mirror, giggled as dark reddish streaks appeared in her hair. “You’re making a terrible mess!”

  Emma raised her eyebrows momentarily, “You’re right, better take off Ell’s jacket.”

  Bridget blinked a moment, then took off the jacket and handed it back to Ell. Ell started to take Bridget’s back off too.

  “No, no. I just don’t want you to get lipstick all over Ell’s jacket. Here run your fingers through your hair to get the lumps and streaks out.” Bridget and Emma started running their hands through Bridget’s hair and smearing the lipstick through it. Bridget pulled out a comb and ran it through her hair. When they were done it looked like someone had done a particularly bad job of dying her hair red.

  Bridget posed in the mirror, chin up, then said, “Oh, I like it,” in a facetious tone.

  Emma said, “Well you do look different.” She held out the lipstick and said, “Here put some on your lips too.”

  Barrett’s voice came in Ell’s ear, “I’ve been around the building twice without seeing him but there are a lot of dark corners.”

  Ell thanked Barrett and asked him to have the two security team members who’d been inside go outside also.

  Once Bridget’s lips were heavily colored, Emma put a spot of lipstick on each cheek and smeared it around as a blusher. They washed their hands.

  Bridget turned her head side to side in the mirror and giggled, “You’re a terrible makeup artist. I look like a clown!”

  Emma frowned, “As long as you look different. Put the jacket back on.” She knelt at Bridget’s feet and rolled her pants legs under to make them look like they were Capri length. “OK, I’ll have my car meet us at the back door.”

  As the three girls entered the club again, Ell stepped over the hostess desk saying she wanted to buy a bottle of the souvenir Top of the Hill barbeque sauce. She whispered through her AI to her security team that they were going out the back door.

  “Damn,” Barrett said, “I don’t actually know which of the doors around this hodge podge of a building is the back door. We’ll do our best to watch them all.”

  Emma frowned at Ell for her trivial side trip, but when they went down the back stairs they had to stop part way down to wait for Emma’s car anyway. Once Emma’s AI said the car was pulling up out back they went down the stairs, hoping to duck quickly into the car.

  Emma went first, Bridget just behind and Ell at the end. Emma turned toward her car about twenty feet away and they had taken a few steps when Sam stepped out of the shadows. He grabbed Bridget’s wrist saying triumphantly, “I thought you bitches would come out this way… Bridget and I are going home now, right Bridg?” He reached behind her and unplugged her AI headband.

  Emma had turned to stare truculently at him. Ell said, “You know, unplugging her AI won’t help this time. Our AIs are recording this too.”

  “But Bridget wants to go with me don’t you?” Sam’s eyes bored into Bridget’s. “What the hell did you do with your makeup?” he suddenly exclaimed. His lip curled, “Are you trying to look like even more of a slut than usual?!”

  Emma said, “She has a right to look however she wants!”

  Ell could see his grip on Bridget’s arm tighten as he said, “Tell them you want to go with me Bridget.”

  Bridget’s head shook side to side momentarily then she bent her knees and moaned as he squeezed harder on her wrist. “Yes,” she whispered, “I’ll go with you.”

  Ell said fiercely, “I won’t accept that. Not unless you let go and step back 10 feet.”

  He snarled, “And just what are you going to do about it?’”

  Despite trying to remain calm Ell had slipped a little into the zone. In a tone cold as ice, Ell said, “You, don’t, even, want, to, find, out.” Randy had appeared about 20 feet back, looking uncertain about whether he should intervene. Ell shook her head minutely at him.

  Sam dropped Bridget’s wrist and stepped back, “Tell them,” he hissed at Bridget, “that you want to come with me!”

  Rubbing her wrist Bridget stepped farther from him, shaking her head, eyes on the ground.

  Stepping back toward the wall Sam’s left hand lifted his jacket and his right darted for his waistband.

  Ell’s hand went into her purse and pulled out the bottle of barbeque sauce. Her hand cocked back.

  The gun came out of Sam’s waistband to point at Bridget. In an agonized tone he said, “If you aren’t with me, you aren’t going to be with…” His hand exploded.

  Sinking to his knees, grasping his right wrist with his left, Sam squealed, then said plaintively, “Jesus! What happened?”

  Emma stepped forward, also wondering what had just happened. Did the gun misfire or blow up or something? She saw an enormous spray of blood on the ground between Sam’s hand and her own feet. Her brow furrowed, does a hand have that much blood in it? And why is it spread out toward my feet? Her toes hit something. She looked down and saw it was the bloody gun by her foot. Noting absently that it didn’t seem distorted by the explosion Emma bent to pick it up. It smells like barbeque? Everything smells like barbecue! It’s that bottle of barbecue Ell bought upstairs! What?!

  Emma watched as Ell stepped forward shrugging out of Bridget’s jacket and wrapping it around Sam’s hand. Sam was staring at her. He said, “Ell Donsaii?”

  Ell nodded curtly. “Sorry about your hand, but you were going to shoot her weren’t you?”

  Sam nodded dumbly.

  The police arrived, downloaded everyone’s AI records of the events and took Sam to the hospital to be evaluated.

  While the police were busy with the
others, Emma reviewed her own video. It showed Ell’s arm blur right before Sam’s hand disappeared in an explosion of barbecue sauce. When Emma played it back in slow motion Ell’s hand appeared out of her purse, cocked back and flashed forward in just a few highly blurred frames. A single frame caught the fuzzy bottle of sauce on its way to hit the gun. She shook her head in amazement.

  Emma went to Bridget who sat on the curb sobbing quietly. “Hey kid, you’re better off without him.”

  Bridget gulped and nodded. “Thank you. What… what, happened to Sam’s hand?”

  “Ell threw a bottle of barbecue sauce at it.”

  “My God! What if she’d missed?!”

  Emma chuckled, “I don’t think she misses very often. But if she had, I guess we wouldn’t have been any worse off. He was going to kill you, then himself, you know?”

  Bridget nodded, bright eyes straying to Ell, still talking quietly to one of the policemen. She sobbed.

  “Buck up now, life’s about to get better.”

  “I don’t have anyplace to stay,” she took a gasping breath, “I… I was living with Sam.”

  Ell had just walked up, “You can stay with me.”

  “Oh no! I couldn’t do that! You’ve already done so much for me!”

  “Sure you can. I live all by myself in a big old farmhouse. Plenty of room. Once you get back on your feet you can move back out. Let’s go get your stuff from Sam’s place.”

  Ell heard Steve’s voice in her earpiece, “You’re picking up another stray? Good thing you can afford it.”

  Ell chuckled, “Go back to bed Steve,” she told the head of her security detail, “Everything’s in control.”

  Chapter Eight

  Candela scrabbled in his pocket for his Tums. Victoria had just come into his office to triumphantly announce that the patchwork of software that ran the guidance package for the mission had failed its initial testing. She almost gleefully pointed out that the failure point had been the commercial sectors he’d told her to use for it instead of expensive programming resources. Head throbbing, he stared at her, wondering how she could possibly be happy to be right about something that might spell the end of the human race? He fumbled the Tums into lips suddenly thick as he noticed that Victoria had developed at purple halo. Now she was turning sideways?

  Victoria put a hand over her mouth and stepped forward as Candela leaned sideways, slid down in his chair and flopped onto the floor. “Call 911!” she screamed at her AI.

  ***

  Gordon’s agent called, “I don’t know what happened to you guys at the show in Raleigh but that show and every one after that have been generating a huge amount of ‘buzz.’ Your next three shows are sold out already and after that I’m moving you to bigger venues. You think you could get that Donsaii girl to drop in again?”

  Gordon laughed, “I surely wish! Oh my God, she’s so amazing! Not just the incredible way she dances but she is even more beautiful in person than she’s ever looked in the news or on the vids.

  “However, I think the ‘buzz’ is actually related to some advice we got on our sound.”

  “Yeah, I caught part of one of your shows last week and you do sound a lot better, what did you do?”

  “Hah! Trade secret. Don’t want it to get out to the competition, not even just the acts you manage.”

  “Really?! Come on!”

  “Really. But I will see about getting an invite to Donsaii for the show in Greensboro. I have no idea whether she’ll accept.”

  ***

  Ell stepped into the little conference room in the D5R building. She was having one of her regular meetings with the two “spin off” companies. Fred and Brian were already in the room and Vivian came in just behind her. “So, how are things going so far for Portal Tech?”

  Fred tilted his head and said, “Other than for the fact that the government is trying to regulate us out of business?”

  Ell said, “Try not to worry too much about that. We’ve got to expect to be regulated, it’s the American way. Just fill out flawless applications and submit them. I have no doubt that Secretary Bayless is trying to put us out of business and will find pretexts to withhold our approvals but two things to keep in mind. One, our investors have assured me they’ll keep you afloat until the approvals do come through, however long it takes. Two, now that Senator Flood has been elected to the Presidency on a platform of ‘less government interference with private enterprise’ we can expect that whoever he appoints to his cabinet will likely be disposed toward getting you approved.

  “Think of this as an opportunity to get ahead of the manufacturing curve so that you have plenty of inventory ready for sale when you are actually approved.” She looked around at them, “So how are things going otherwise?”

  “We think pretty well so far. We’ve got a building nearby that seems pretty good for manufacturing. We’ve got some urgent orders from NASA. So urgent that they look like they’re about to pee their pants. I imagine they’re gonna be pretty freaked when we tell them that we aren’t allowed to sell them any ports. We’ve had some pretty good ideas regarding the challenge you gave us to keep the ports from being used as weapons or for terrorism.”

  Ell frowned, “Urgent orders from NASA itself? Not the commercial space launch industry?”

  “Well, yeah. All the launch vendors are clamoring for ports. But NASA itself has specified a set of ports for ILX as being extremely high priority and demanded that we fill those first before addressing any of the other vendor requests. They have some project that they feel is extremely urgent.”

  Ell raised her eyebrows, “What is it?”

  “They’re not telling us.”

  “Hmmm,” Ell shrugged, “OK. Can you tell me a little about your plans for avoiding port weaponizing and terrorism?”

  “Well right now we’re planning that the ports be lease only. We can enforce that by building the ‘far’ port that’s powered by a fuel cell so that the tiny ports that supply the fuel cell get their hydrogen and oxygen from our tanks. If we don’t like what they’re doing we cut off the fuel cell and the port dies.”

  Ell nodded. “And how do you know if they’re doing something you don’t like?”

  “We’re putting a tiny GPS chip in them so we know if they’re moving too fast or going to locations that they weren’t purchased for. Tiny microphones embedded in the ports are listened to by one of the AIs, checking for terrorist keywords. The computer can cut the fuel cell off to a level where the port closes but isn’t destroyed until a human can decide whether to destroy a port for good. The ports have tiny ports embedded in them that can be used to spectrographically sample the material being transferred through the port to be sure it matches the purpose the ports were leased for.”

  Ell’s eyebrows lifted, “Those sound pretty good. Aren’t you concerned that it’ll get difficult to manage when there are millions of ports out there?”

  Vivian quirked a lip ruefully, “Yeah, we’re worried. Fortunately the profit margin over non portal technologies should be large enough to allow us to compete successfully even with those add ons and the computer maintenance costs. We’re more worried about government regulation and unauthorized copies of the ports. The good news on that front is that we hired some pretty smart fellows to try to reverse engineer the ports and they haven’t been successful. Apparently the Dexin is just as frustrating as it’s supposed to be.”

  “Cool! What about your finances…”

  The meeting went on for a while longer, Ell pleased that their “burn rate” for the initial cash infusion she’d provided looked reasonable to her. She mused that she really didn’t have the kind of business education that would let her judge it very well. Perhaps she needed to hire some expertise in money management?

  While Ell was waiting to meet with the ET Resources group Allan spoke in her ear, “I have identified three small rocky planets around Tau Ceti. Two are significantly closer to the star than the “habitable zone” where water should
be liquid. Best estimates would be that they will be much too hot for life, at least as we know it. There is a large gap, perhaps with asteroids then a third planet. The third is at the very outer edge of the habitable zone and is smaller than Mars. It is likely that most water there will be ice but that some may be liquid. It appears white in the telescope, compatible with its being mostly ice.”

  “Great! Plot the rocket’s trajectory to intersect that third planet.”

  A few of the ET Resource folks had arrived when Roger came in to whisper, “Hey, it turns out that if you wrap titanium mesh around your finger, kind of like a Faraday cage, that it doesn’t hurt so much to stick your finger through a port!”

  Ell’s eyes widened, “You’re still experimenting on your poor finger?”

  Roger shrugged, “No one else has volunteered to let me use their finger. Dr. Bynewicz is submitting an amendment to her protocol to let her try sending mice through ports in titanium mesh cages.

  “I’ve also got a theory that if your nerves pass through the port quickly they aren’t depolarized as much.” He tilted his head, “Well depolarization is kind of a binary event, either it happens or it doesn’t. But my theory is that if the port is passing down the axon of the nerve slowly, the nerve can have multiple depolarization events. Whereas, if the port passes quickly, the neuron may only be able respond with a single depolarization event?” He lifted an eyebrow, “It sure hurts a lot more if I slide my pinky in slowly than if I shove it in and jerk it out quickly anyway.”

  Ell laughed, “You’re nuts…but I like you that way. You think we’ll actually be able to send a person through a port someday?”

  Roger shrugged, “I’m thinking yes. But I don’t think it’s going to be something anyone wants to do very often.”

  Braun stuck his head in the door, “You ready to meet?”

  “Sure.”

  Ben came in with him, and poured a handful of pebbles out on the table. Ell raised an eyebrow and leaned forward to look at them.

  Braun said, “These are ‘prospecting samples’ from our first ‘metal rich’ asteroid, 2019 UB40. It’s one of the ‘Aten’ group of near earth asteroids. 2021 MG12, the one that we prospected first, actually turned out to be a ‘carbonaceous’ type, mostly containing materials that are easier to get here on earth. As we hoped 2019 is metal. Mostly iron and nickel but the samples also have a lot of cobalt, indium and palladium. Not as much platinum as we had hoped but enough that the platinum alone will bring us a profit based on our expected costs.”