Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) (8 page)

“No one would be safe… Poisonous gas could be squirted into your house from a block away.”

His eyes widened, “And?”

Ell described some other horrific scenarios.

“And you don’t think that if you explained to the government just how dangerous it is that they’d back off their demands?”

“Oh, I don’t think they want the public to have it either. But they want it for themselves… and once they have it, it’ll leak… someday… it’ll leak.”

He let his head sink back against the back of his chair and closed his eyes as he considered the implications. “But… if the bill passes, then not releasing the tech would be what… against the law, I guess?”

“Uh huh.”

“Aw crap! And here I promised myself to always stay on the right side of the law.”

“Yeah, I kinda thought so. I don’t want you to do anything illegal.”

“There’s illegal… and then there’s immoral.” He sighed, “I agree with you that letting that kind of tech go is immoral and nothing’s secret when more than one person knows it.” He turned to look her in the eye. “To me, ‘moral’ is more important than ‘legal.’”

“Thanks,” she said, “Though I still don’t want you to do anything illegal.”

Steve snorted, “Why’d you bring it up then?”

“Uh, well, if I get thrown in prison…”

“Bite your tongue.”

“You
know
it could happen. Anyway, I want to make sure my people—your team—are getting paid.”

He quirked his mouth, “If you’re in prison, you’ll hardly need a security team on the outside.”

“But I might only be in the clink for a little while. I’d like you to be able to keep the team together.”

He leaned his head back again and stared sightlessly at the ceiling of the porch, “So how are you going to pay the team from prison?”

“Advance you funds now for future services.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll put some money in your account. We’ll
call
it a ‘bonus’ but you and I’ll know it’s to keep you going for a few years if I do get sent up the river. You’d keep the team on pay. They could disperse, even take other jobs, but would need to stay in shape and be available to reassemble when I needed them again if they wanted to keep drawing that pay.”

“Jeez, Ell, that’d be
millions
of dollars.”

“Yeah… lots of millions. It’s even conceivable I might ask you to give me some money back in certain situations. Say the government confiscates everything I have? So I’d want to be sure you had a
big
surplus.”

“How can you trust me with that kind of money?” he asked wonderingly.

Quietly she said, “I trust you with my life, Steve… every day.” She shrugged, “I believe you’re one of the most trustworthy people I know.”

He sighed, “I hope I’m worthy of such trust.”

“You are. I’ll make a deposit in your account.”

***

Going down the hall at D5R, Ell heard Gary call her. He stood in the door of what she thought of as the “dangerous reaction room.” Heading his way she said, “What’s up?”

“Got something to show you.”

She stepped inside, looking around, “Why are you working in here? Doing something that might explode?”

He shrugged, “Methane. And this room already has vacuum and a hood to work in. Just easier to set up in here. No one else was using it.”

“So what are you doing?”

“Testing your pressure, temperature, charge, molecular and ionization conditions for creating the various allotropes.”

“Oh! Cool! What are you finding?”

He shook his head mournfully.

“The plot doesn’t work?” she said, looking broken hearted.

“No, it’s just that you’re taking all the fun out of it for an old style experimental chemist like myself.”

“It does work?!”

“Yeah, it makes better graphene than my personal recipe that I worked on for so long. Breaks my heart.”

“What about other allotropes?” Ell asked excitedly.

“Yeah.” Gary said, sounding like someone had shot his dog.

“Diamond?”

“Yeah.”

“Lonsdaleite?”

He nodded. “Makes them at incredible rates too.”

“And you think this is a bad thing because?”

“My life’s work, and you figured it out on a weekend lark.”

“Hah!” She grinned at him. “
We
figured it out. You, and I, and Shan Kinrais.” She shrugged, “and, we had a little secret outside help.” She smiled broadly, “This is going to be so cool!”

“Yeah,” he grinned back at her, “it is. Very, very cool.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Wanna see my first product?”

“Of course!” Ell said, looking excitedly around for something that might
be
the product he spoke of.

He picked up a square black rod about a quarter inch in diameter and twelve inches long. “Well, I needed a substrate to build my graphend on so I started with one of these graphite rods. I just rotated it in the test chamber under the specified conditions. I didn’t have the laser setup you mentioned to stitch layers of graphene together. Instead, first I used graphene conditions; then shifted the conditions to diamond, then back to graphene. After I let it cycle it back and forth a while I had this rod here.” He held up a rod, much like the first one but slightly glossier.

Gary held the plain rod out to her, “Wanna break this one?”

Ell took it and snapped it in half like a piece of chalk. She raised an eyebrow, “Not very strong.”

“Nope. Should have taken less than a half pound of bending force, bending it the way you did.” He grinned, “Pretty typical for plain graphite. Wanna try that with this one?” He held out the glossy one.

Ell took it and tried to bend it. Then got a real grip on it and tried hard to break it. “Ouch!” she said, rubbing her fingers and staring at the undamaged rod. “So how strong is it?”

“Well, of course, it depends on how many layers of diamond and graphene I lay down on them, but the first two I made broke at 350 and at 525 pounds.”

“So I could mount the two ends of this rod on something and stand on it without breaking it?”

“You and I both, probably. And I cheated and let the final diamond run go kinda long so you probably can’t scratch or damage it either.”

Ell stared at the rod for a while, “Wow!” she whispered. “I’ve been thinking about how we could coat things with diamond to make them damage resistant… but really, coating them like this makes them
way
stronger too, huh?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled, “I was thinking about coating my car and got to thinking about… you know in the old days before AI control of cars, when there were lots of wrecks?”

“Yeah?”

“Cars were designed to ‘crumple’ to absorb the impacts. I guess they still are to some extent. You surely wouldn’t have wanted your car made out of this stuff back then.”

She looked distant for a moment, then shrugged, “Well, you
could
design a car made out of this stuff with shock absorption built into the frame.”

“Yeah, I suppose they still chould. Not our problem though.” He grinned, “We just deliver the product, sir. Up to the engineers how they use it.”

“OK, Gar’,” Ell said leaning back on the bench. “It’s time for us to start talking to patent attorneys. But here’s something to consider?”

“Oh crap,” he said bemused. “What are you going to hit me with now?”

Eyes twinkling, Ell said, “Imagine a big chamber… Inside you establish conditions to rapidly lay down lonsdaleite in certain areas, then graphend.” She grinned at him, “Like a 3D printer. Then, in some areas, you lay down graphene to conduct electricity, with diamond around it for insulation. The electricity goes to a motor that has graphene around it to the conduct heat away. You lay down a little amorphous carbon between parts you don’t want to be stuck together.”

The stunned expression on Gary’s face was priceless. His feet slowly slid out from under where he leaned against the bench and he descended until he was sitting on the floor. “Holy shit!” he whispered.

“Yeah.” Ell said, one eyebrow up, “Chew on that. I’ll set us up a meeting with my favorite patent guys.” As she left the room Gary still sat sprawled on the floor, eyes still focused unseeingly in the distance.

Down the hall, Ell stepped into Wilson Daster’s office. “Got a moment to talk?”

He leaned back in his seat and raised an eyebrow, “With the boss? Sure.”

Ell rolled her eyes. “I’m hoping we’re friends first, boss-employee second.”

Wilson grinned and straightened back up, “Yeah, I think we are too. How can I help you?”

Ell drummed her fingers a moment, thinking how to say it. Deciding honesty was the best course she sighed, “I need a really smart accountant to help me diddle the books.”

Daster’s eyebrows ascended in surprise.

“And, if you don’t want to do it, I’m out of here. No problem. I can figure another way.”

Daster stared at her a moment, then to Ell’s dismay his eyes brimmed with tears. Hoarsely he said, “Ell Donsaii… I… we
all
owe you our lives. I’d do just about anything for you… short of killing someone, I guess. I was only startled that someone with as much money as you’ve got would
need
me to diddle the books. But, you don’t even need to tell me why or what for. I’ve spent most of my professional life catching people who fool with the books, I can probably figure out how to hide some transactions.”

“OK, thanks.” Ell said, a little catch in her voice too. “What I want to do is buy some of the waldoes that have legs. I’d pay for it with my own funds, but I just don’t want to have the purchase show up on the books.”

He narrowed his eyes, “You need a controller for it too?”

She looked off into the distance, then shrugged, “I probably should have one of those too, yeah.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, I’d like the company to buy two hundred kilograms of gold and transfer it to me.”

Wilson blinked, “That’s, uh, in the range of eleven to twelve million dollars?”

Ell nodded, “Closer to thirteen.”

“I might be able to help a lot more if I knew why? Don’t feel you
have
to tell me to get me to do it. I just think if I understood, I could do a better job.”

She sighed, “I think the Blaustein bill is going to pass.”

“Ah,” Wilson said, leaning back again, staring at the ceiling. “And you don’t plan to comply.” He made it a statement, rather than a question. “So, you’ll be in violation of the law.” He looked back at her, “Are you thinking you’re going to go into hiding?”

Ell nodded, “Something like that.”

“You know that changing identities without the government’s help is almost impossible in the digital age?”

“Yeah…”

“And living the kind of life you’re used to is almost impossible off the grid?”

“I know. It’ll be a mess. Hopefully none of this is going to be needed, I just believe in being prepared.”

Wilson shrugged, “Let me work on it a bit, should have you a solution by tomorrow.”

***

Shelly’s eyebrows rose at her new purchase order,
400,000
gold balls, 3.67 mm in diameter. Holy crap, 12.8 million dollars! What in the world is D5R going to do with those?

***

Ed Winslow of U-Haul sent a rental truck to an address he recognized as being the little farm that belonged to Ell Donsaii. Even though the truck had been rented on-line in the name of a Bridget Spaulding, he made a quick decision to deliver the truck himself. Autumn leaves were blowing on a crisp fall day. To his disappointment, a brunette woman named Amy met him. He’d really only rode out to the farm on the hope that maybe he’d get to meet Donsaii himself. “We’re trying to provide excellent service and make sure we’re filling our customers’ needs,” he said. “Let me show you the pads and the hand truck.” He took Amy around back and opened up the truck, pulling out the ramp. “Anything else you need?”

“Nope, thanks.”

She had a twinkle in her eye. He figured she saw right through him.

When Ed checked the truck’s location that night it was still at the farm.

The next morning it was in Asheville at a motel.

The night after that it stayed in a hotel parking lot in Nashville.

Then another motel, this time in Memphis. The day after that it was back in his lot and the bill was paid in full. He shrugged,
Damn! Not as interesting as I’d hoped.

When James Bannerman returned to his Asheville motel at two in the morning he was surprised to see a Ryder rental truck pulled up, back to back with a U-Haul truck. Even in his drunken state James found this curious enough to walk over and peer into the gap between the two trucks. In inebriated astonishment, he saw a humanoid robot carrying a big box from the U-Haul into the Ryder.
Just how drunk am I?

In the early morning, James got up to pee out some of his beer. He had a terrible hangover and vague recollection of something weird going on with rental trucks in the parking lot. He took a couple of aspirin then peered outside. There weren’t any rental trucks in the lot at all. He checked the time. Six o’clock in the morning. He shrugged,
must have dreamed that thing with the robot,
he decided. He headed back to bed.

Retired miner Joe Spall met the Ryder rental truck out at the road. When he heaved his short body up into the passenger seat he found an odd woman behind the wheel. Beaky nose, black spiky moussed hair, dark skin, but surprisingly enough, green eyes. Her upper body looked slender, but as his eyes glanced over her, he saw she had kind of a big butt and thick thighs. He closed the truck door and said, “I hope you aren’t thinking you can park this entire truck in the tunnel? This was a one man mine. You couldn’t even get this thing into the opening.”

In a strong New York accent she said, “No sir, but I’ve looked up the size of the cars you used to carry your ore. Everything we want to put in the tunnel is considerably smaller than that.”

“Well then,” he frowned, “Next question. Why in the world do you want to put something in an abandoned mine shaft anyway?”