Hoyt said, “What do you want to do?”
“Achieve peace and prosperity for all,” Donsaii laughed, “but since that isn’t likely to happen tonight, I’m planning to distract the FBI boys long enough to at least hand you a secure PGR chip. Then we could use that to communicate with. If you’d open the window a little?”
Hoyt turned to look at the window. Donsaii was outside of it! She was apparently braced on the ledge below, clinging to the frame above. Donsaii grinned at her. Mary walked to the window and twisted the latch. She bent down and tried to lift the sash but it was stuck.
Donsaii reached in her pocket and pulled out a large suction cup which she attached to the glass on the outside. She pulled upward as well but the window didn’t budge, suggesting that it had been screwed shut.
Donsaii tilted her head, then said, “OK, we’ll have to go with plan B. This might break the glass, so step back and turn your eyes away.”
When Hoyt stepped back and turned around, she saw a shiny gray membrane in the stub of hallway that went out to the main hallway. She blinked at it as if what she saw might be due to a floater in her eye. Unnoticed behind her, Ell ran her finger tip around the periphery of the glass in the window.
Behind her Donsaii whispered, “There we go.”
When Mary turned to look, Donsaii was leaning in the window, holding the entire pane of glass from the window suspended from the suction cup. She lowered the pane to the floor; then popped off the suction cup and climbed in through the window herself. Putting her suction cup back in her pocket, she stopped and stepped on the glass, breaking it into many pieces.
Downstairs in the dining room, York had chewed a nail as he watched the many screens his tech team had mounted on the table and the walls. He’d wondered why Donsaii was late. If she’d been scared away, someone would come down on him for how much had been spent on an unsuccessful operation, even though he hadn’t been the one to authorize the expenditures.
Then one of his team said, “Sir, a car has turned into the driveway.”
Finally! York had thought, looking at the indicated screen and seeing a small late model Suzuki bumping down the drive. In the enhanced night vision camera observing the car, it was hard to make out details, but the single passenger had moderately long, light colored hair. “Is that her? Goddammit, who’s got eyes on?”
“Sir, our AI has back checked the license plate. It’s a rental car, picked up in Roanoke day before yesterday by an Imelda Takros.”
“Alias? Or did she get someone else to rent it for her? Find out.” York spoke to his AI, “Connect me to the entire team… OK everyone, stay focused. She’s coming up the driveway. Stick to the plan, do not screw this up.”
The Suzuki pulled up and stopped next to Hoyt’s car in the small parking area in front of the house. Then it just sat there!
What the hell is going on? York wondered. Has she been spooked? “Team, she’s just sitting there. We’re not sure what she’s waiting for, but for God’s sake, don’t spook her. Stay the hell out of sight!”
His tech team in the dining room practically quivered with the tension of watching the car and waiting for Donsaii to get out. Or do something!
Long minutes went by as York became more and more frustrated. Finally he said, “Dammit, how long has she been parked?”
“Four and a half minutes, sir.”
York gritted his teeth. “OK, inner perimeter creep in around the parking area. Outer perimeter move closer. Remote the spike strips out onto the driveway so she can’t drive away. Fire up the helicopters and get them in the air, ready to pop up over the farm and light the area. If she spooks and moves, rush the car.”
The infrared camera on the eaves of the house showed his people creeping in towards the parking area. York’s eyes flashed back and forth between the two displays, wondering when Donsaii would react…
Finally, he had people in sprinter’s stances all around the parking area, ready to charge. She still hadn’t reacted, so he stood. “I’m going to go out and arrest her in person.”
He walked through the foyer and opened the front door. Still no reaction from the car. He crossed the porch and descended the steps. As he neared the car he suddenly realized that Donsaii hadn’t even shifted position since the car parked. “Shit!” He stepped to the car and leaned down for a look without touching. It’s a dummy! He reached for the door handle, then stopped with a frisson of danger. Could she have booby-trapped the car? Stepping back and peeking down to the floorboards of the back seat and he stopped to curse continuously for about ten seconds, “OK team, this thing in the car is a dummy. John, you should have been able to tell that with your telescopic sight, dammit!” He paused, then, “In case this damn thing’s booby trapped, nobody touch it until we get a waldo out here. And, just in case it contains a bomb, everyone back away to your original positions. Keep your damn eyes peeled.”
“Er, sir,” came over his earphones.
“What?” he said irritably.
“Uh, Donsaii’s in the room with Hoyt.”
“What!?” he said, turning, pounding up the steps and flinging open the door. Moments later he skidded into the dining room and looked at the screen everyone else was staring at. Sure enough, Hoyt and Donsaii stood next to one another. They were either speaking in whispers or they’d found a way to block the audio pickups in the room. Hoyt’s guards weren’t visible. “Upstairs team, crash the master bedroom! Downstairs team, get up the stairs! Inner and outer perimeters, move in and shift around to concentrate toward the southwest corner in case she goes out the window!” He turned on his technical team, “How the hell did she get in there?”
“Running the vid back,” one of them said.
“The door’s blocked!” Blackwood, one of the agents detailed to stay with Hoyt said.
“Where’s Blackwood?” York asked, hoping Donsaii hadn’t locked him up in a closet or something equally embarrassing to the Bureau.
Several of his tech team pointed to a screen showing the upstairs hallway. Blackwood and the other agent from that room were leaning hard on the door.
York looked at the vid from the master bedroom. He could see the door! It kind of looked like there was a sheet of gray plastic over it but nothing substantial! “Blackwood! Kick that door down! There’s nothing on the other side!”
“I’ve tried!”
On the screen Blackwood stepped back and kicked hard at the door. A lightweight inner door, it had splintered in several locations where Blackwood had kicked it already. “Just kick a big hole in it and crawl through!”
At that moment, several of the broken areas that Blackwood had previously kicked coalesced. But then they bulged outward towards the main hall. Blackwood cursed and bent down, poking at something. He said, “There’s some kind of membrane on the other side pushing towards us. It’s gray but fairly transparent. I can’t budge it!”
“For Christ’s sake, punch a hole in it!”
“I’m trying! My knife just skids off!”
“Shoot it!”
“You’re sure sir? You said no weapons.”
“Don’t aim into the room you idiot! Shoot it at a glancing angle parallel to the door. All you need to do is break the membrane.”
Someone called down from upstairs, “There’s another membrane blocking the hall at the top of the stairs!”
“Christ! I’m gonna have to go upstairs and have a look.”
They heard Blackwood’s gun fire upstairs. With a splintering sound and a puff of gypsum the bullet burst through the ceiling and into one of the monitor screens. With a few sparks that monitor went dark.
“Goddammit Blackwood! We’re down below you. Shoot sideways not downwards!”
“Uh, sorry Boss.” York heard in his earphones as he turned the corner and ran up the stairs. Blackwood’s gun fired again.
“What! That first shot didn’t break it?”
“Um, no sir. Nor the second.”
York had come up behind his five agent
s who were stymied by the bubble at the top of the stairs. “Let me by!” Several of them stepped back and to the side. There was something bulging out at him. Faintly gray yet translucent enough that he could faintly see into the hall above. He pushed on it. It felt hard like a car tire. What the hell? He pulled out a multitool he always carried with him, folded out its blade and stabbed hard into the membrane. It felt like he’d stabbed a hardwood post. Well, it might deflect a glancing bullet like Blackwood’s shot, but it isn’t going to deflect a straight on shot! York pulled out his nine millimeter and pointed it square at the ballooning membrane from about six inches away. The fact that the membrane was bulging above him let him aim up toward the ceiling of the hallway where the bullet wouldn’t hit anyone after it burst through.
York barely registered one of his team saying, “Nooo!!” before he pulled the trigger.
Then he was falling back down the stairs. Someone had hammered the front of his left shoulder. The blow caught him by surprise as he resisted the recoil if his weapon with his right arm. He twisted around off a little off balance, then missed the step behind him. The agents below him on the stairs caught him and carried him down to the floor of the foyer below. “What happened?” he asked in confusion, feeling the bones in his shoulder grate as they laid him down. It started to hurt, bad.
One of the agents said, “Your bullet bounced back and hit you.”
“It didn’t break that, that, whatever the hell it is?” he said with astonishment.
The man just shook his head. As he cut York’s jacket and shirt, he said, “Eppo, call 911. We need an ambulance!”
One of the techy girls popped out of the dining room and said, “Donsaii’s gone.”
York gasped, “Have the people outside stop her!”
“No, I mean gone. Like way out of reach.”
When Hoyt had turned around and found Donsaii stepping on the glass of the window, breaking it into many pieces on the carpet she had wondered why. Then Donsaii pulled a pair of pliers out of the pocket of her jacket and used it to break more pieces out of the frame of the window, all while talking to Mary. “Sorry this has worked out so poorly, but I think you’ve underestimated the lengths to which President Stockton is willing to go in order to capture me.” Donsaii reached into her pocket again and pulled out a chip. “Here, if you use this PGR chip, slotted directly into the socket in your HUD headset, you’ll have a direct connection to me that no one can listen in on.”
Gaping at Donsaii’s matter of fact attitude about the entire business, Mary said, “H-how did you get in here?”
Donsaii blinked, “Through the window here.”
“No, I know that! But… how?”
Still breaking fragments out of the window with the pliers, Donsaii grinned at her, “Well, you know, I’m kinda good at gymnastics?”
“You couldn’t have jumped up to this window! It’s got to be over twenty feet!”
“Well,” Donsaii shrugged, “it’s not really important how I got here is it?” She smiled brightly, “What matters is whether we can come to some kind of agreement. Obviously, I’d like to be off the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. I’d like to get back to doing what I do, which I for one, think is fun and important. I think it would be to our country and world’s advantage to continue to explore our part of the galaxy. It seems to me that we should be able to negotiate a way for those things to happen.”
Hoyt shook her head to clear it, “I, uh, think so too. Can you tell me what your sticking points, um,” she turned to glance over her shoulder at the door, “are?” She tilted her head and frowned, “If they’re AV monitoring this room why aren’t my guards coming back in here? Especially if they actually are wanting to capture you like you think?”
“Um, I’ve provided them a distraction. My car just pulled up out front so I think they’re all focused on what’s about to happen out there.” Donsaii shrugged, “Besides, I’ve blocked the door, so when they want in, they won’t be able to open it.”
Hoyt turned and looked, “The door’s not blocked!”
“Actually, it is. Anyway, my sticking points are first, that I’m not turning over the tech for reaching the stars to anyone. It’s far too dangerous. Second, I am only willing to provide scientists access to other solar systems after I’ve determined that nothing resides there that could be dangerous to us.” She shrugged, “On the other hand, if we do meet an advanced race that seems peaceful and non-threatening, I’m happy to have someone else undertake the politics and diplomacy of the meeting.”
The door had started thumping and cracks had appeared in it. Now it bulged out away from them, toward the hall. Obviously not listening to Donsaii, Hoyt said, “It is blocked! By what?”
They heard a gunshot. Hoyt squeaked, then said, “Oh God! What are they shooting at?”
Ell said, “I think they’re just trying to get in. I’d better leave before someone gets hurt.”
Hoyt turned.
Donsaii had crouched just behind the window frame.
“What should I do?” Hoyt asked plaintively.
“I recommend that you step over into the corner of the room, out of the line of fire to this window.” Then Donsaii leapt through the frame and swung away into the distance, looking for all the world like Spiderman swinging away on one of his web strands.
Behind Hoyt, the graphene balloon rapidly deflated to a bump on the port that had inflated it. Then the quantum entangled particles painted on the outer circumference of the port disk activated, opening another port. Allan applied suction to that port and the balloon and the port that inflated it were sucked through, leaving nothing but the quantum entangled buckyballs of the outer port which broke apart without their support and floated to the floor as a puff of black dust. The same thing happened with the AV balloon and the 2.5 meter balloons out in the hallway.
Agents ran into the room, Tasers in hand, staring wildly about. Hoyt, standing in the corner as she’d been told, slipped her new PGR chip into her pocket and took a deep breath. “What the hell just happened here!?” she barked at the agents.
Ell had never detached her graphene cable but had had Allan move the hoverbike about 500 feet south of the house, so when she leapt out the window, she was in fact swinging through the air like a huge pendulum on the graphene cable. Though she shouldn’t have hit the ground through the entire arc of a 12,000 foot pendulum, about a hundred feet from the house she had Allan start reeling her in and began rising into the sky. She hoped that if they had been able to track her, her apparent “glide, then rising flight” out the window would further confuse her intended captors as to her abilities. She really didn’t want them to know how she did what she did, thus the removal of her balloons from the safe house. She figured that the longer they kept guessing about her abilities, the longer she’d be able to stay free.
She had Allan turn right just over a rise. After moving off her initial line of flight, Allan set her down on a rise where she could see the farmhouse. She felt no surprise to see two helicopters with spotlights circling over the farmhouse and one “in pursuit” down the track she’d left the house on. After a few more minutes, Hoyt’s car backed away from the house and started down the driveway.
Just after starting down the driveway Hoyt’s car slowed and then pulled to the side. At first Ell didn’t know that this was because it had run over the “spike strips” the FBI had put out to prevent Ell from driving away, but when she zoomed in she glimpsed the spike strip system retracting.
At a command Ell’s car backed out and started out the driveway itself. From the number of agents that started running after the car, Ell assumed that its departure was causing much consternation amongst the FBI. At first Ell intended to rendezvous with the car and remove the dummy but when a helicopter turned to start following the car she gave up on that. The cheap Styrofoam dummy wasn’t worth the effort. It wouldn’t tell the FBI anything except that her DNA had, in fact, been in the car and on the dummy’s clothing.
In
fact the car didn’t go very far down the road before it pulled over and stopped. Ell assumed that the FBI had contacted the rental car company and invoked a halt.
To Ell’s dismay, an ambulance pulled into the driveway indicating that someone had been hurt. One of her drones got close enough to hear Mary Hoyt yelling at the agents about her spiked tires. From the vituperative conversation they were having, it certainly didn’t sound like Hoyt had been party to the attempt to arrest Ell.
Her translucent graphend hoverbike landed beside her and Ell climbed on.
Time to head home.
***
J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington D.C.—Mason Phillips, Director of the FBI has just announced a reward of up to two million dollars for information leading to the apprehension of Ell Donsaii. This reward, in combination with the thousands of women sporting the “Donsaii look” as advocated by her fan Sylvie Hatchell, is sure to swamp the FBI with sighting reports…
As Cody walked out of the dressing rooms of the Las Vegas show that he and Connie worked at, Connie turned to him and musingly said, “Cody, what was that girl’s name? You know, the one that danced so well with you at Tres Locos a few years back.”
Distractedly Cody said, “‘Raquel,’ but, remember, that was actually Ell Donsaii.”
“Oh, yeah.” Connie said with a sly smile that Cody didn’t see.
***
Bure, France—Long one of the heaviest users of nuclear energy, France has a large accumulation of radioactive waste stored in an underground site at Bure. Today the facility announced their first trial transfer of a quantity of vitrified radioactive waste to the asteroid Juno. This was done with the assistance of American company ET Resources, one of the subsidiaries of D5R.
Though there have been a few complaints about our “contamination” of asteroid resources, most are in agreement that transfer of radioactive waste to an asteroid is far better than our current retention of such materials here on earth, whether in underground bunkers or in storage at nuclear power plants.
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