Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) (2 page)

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!”