Shan heard the tones of the sigma’s language go back and forth a moment or two, then Allan said, “He says he will power up the port and send something through it from there to wherever Sigwald came from.”
Shan closed his eyes at this confirmation of a nightmare come true.
Emma said, “What did Keldap say he was sending through the port?”
“I don’t know the word he used as of yet.”
“Oh God!” Shan whispered.
“No shit!” Emma breathed.
As Keldap lifted the port free Ell’s voice came on, “Hey guys, what’s so urgent?”
“Keldap’s cut that port loose from Sigwald’s chest. He thinks he can open it and send something through the port from his end back to our solar system.”
Ell said, “Allan, shoot the port in Keldap’s manipulator with Sigwald’s laser on high power—now.”
Shan’s eyes widened in startlement when the fragment of Sigwald that Keldap was walking away with suddenly coruscated into a brilliant white light, sparks flying everywhere. As Keldap lifted away from it with a few violent wing beats, the chest port fell to the ground looking like a roman candle, spraying brilliant flashes, sparkles and arcs. “Holy shit!” Shan breathed, “What just happened?”
He could almost hear the shrug in Ell’s voice as she said, “I had Sigwald made out of magnesium. It’s light and strong but exceedingly flammable. I’ve been worrying that he might accidentally catch on fire in that atmosphere with a high partial pressure of oxygen, but I wanted to be sure we could destroy him if we needed to.” She sighed, “I guess we need to. I can’t think of any way to salvage this situation. Can you guys?”
Epilogue
From the inside of their TS Querlak sensed with dismay the frenzied anger ripping through the Delnitch clade. They regarded the injury of their member Keldap as disrespectful and Delnitch never tolerated disrespect. There were a few members of the TS who, like Querlak, were pushing for calm, but an overwhelming consensus of rage and vengeance dominated.
The TS tamped down Keldap’s pain and turned him to stalk back over to Sigwald. “What did you do?! My manipulator is burnt!” Keldap waved the injured manipulator that had been carrying the port.
After a typical pause Sigwald said. “I sorry. But you make problems my body first. You make hole in my thorax.”
In as threatening a tone as possible the TS had Keldap say, “I will do much worse than make a hole…”
Suddenly knowledge flooded the TS from one of the chemists in its makeup. Sigwald is made of element twelve. What just happened was the magnesium in that piece of its chest wall oxidizing-burning! Before angering Sigwald further, he should be put in a vacuum.
Sigwald raised his head and looked down at his feet. Suddenly one foot, and a moment later the other, burst into the same brilliant white inferno that the chest wall fragment had. Then a spot on Sigwald’s chest also ignited. Before the chemist’s knowledge could flood the TS and warn against it, the majority dominated TS used Keldap’s knowledge of the shop to pick up a bucket of drinking water. Keldap heaved the water onto Sigwald. The conflagration exploded as the water hit it—the burning magnesium extracting the oxygen from the H2O to continue burning. This freed the water’s hydrogen to flare out, burning fiercely with oxygen in the air.
Despair rose like a gorge in Querlak’s throat as she used the TS to look out through Keldap’s eye at the smoldering remains of Sigwald. Very little other than piles of white ash—presumably magnesium oxide—remained. A few twisted lumps of other materials, aluminum, iron, copper lay amongst the ashes. The fire had been so hot that it even ignited the graphene straps and the graphend of the wall behind Sigwald. The pile really left nothing to study, much less communicate with or try to learn from.
“There,” she thought, “lie the ashes of my people’s future, destroyed by a rush to extract results from another people, rather than work in cooperation with them.”
Despair poured through her.
Her clade should never have bound itself to Delnitch…
***
As the Sigma Draconis rocket coasted past the sigmas’ home world, Ell gazed out of its camera at an astonishing world. The dark side completely covered with lights, the day side inundated with constructed habitat. An uninspiringly monotonous world, packed with a horrifyingly overpopulated race. A race of beings who grew their food on a drearily uninteresting ringworld. An engineering triumph without art. No more than a banal farm, harvesting joyless survival.
Pondering the sigmas Ell felt great sadness for their lost potential, yet tremendous relief that they would not soon be loose on the galaxy.
The End
Hope you liked the book!
If so, please give it a positive review on Amazon.
Try the next in the series, to be published someday soon.
Author’s Afterword
This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I have always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically possible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the Ell Donsaii stories asks at least one such question.
“Allotropes” continues asking what kinds of cool things we could do with even small wormholes or “ports.” I’ll guarantee that a personal cooling shirt would be a big seller in August here in North Carolina. Ported weapons installed internally to your body could be constantly available and devastating in effect. Sending power through a ported drive shaft could actually make mankind’s dream of a personal flying machine viable (though it would still be dangerous, you’d need “Ell speed” reflexes to control it safely.)
What if an alien race had an even greater drive to reproduce than our own? Wouldn’t they wipe out all other species in their continuous hunger for more food and habitat? Some of you may feel the human race is well on its way down this path, but at least we’re making some efforts to control our own reproduction and protect other species.
Finally what if we could learn to form the allotropes of carbon where and when we want?
-Carbon forms more compounds than all the other elements combined.
-There are many different allotropes of pure carbon: from amorphous carbon, to graphene, to diamond, to lonsdaleite, to the fullerenes like buckyballs and nanotubes.
-Graphene really does have tensile strength in the range of one hundred times greater than that of steel. It is an excellent electrical conductor, with some evidence suggesting it may be much better than copper (currently our best conductor).
-Diamond is an excellent electrical insulator, yet conducts heat five times better than silver (the best metallic heat conductor). And, graphene conducts heat even better than diamond does! Diamond’s compressive strength is estimated at over 400 gigapascals while steel is in the range of 100-400 megapascals (1000 times less).
- According to theoretical calculations lonsdaleite really is much harder than diamond.
-Both graphene and diamond can be semiconductors in certain orientations or upon doping.
What if, instead of our current 3D printers, making mostly nonfunctional “models” out of single materials (mostly plastic) we had a ‘printer’ that laid down the various allotropes of carbon, utilizing the magnificent properties of the various forms of our sixth element to create devices that can do things we haven’t even dreamed of yet…
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Kerry McIntyre, Allen Dietz and Kat Lind, each of whom significantly improved this story.
k with friends
Allotropes Page 21
