Transporter (an Ell Donsaii story #16), page 1
Transporter
An Ell Donsaii story #16
Laurence E Dahners
Copyright 2020
Laurence E Dahners
Kindle Edition
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only
Author’s Note
This book is the sixteenth in the series, the “Ell Donsaii stories.”
Though this book can “stand alone” it’ll be much easier to understand if read as part of the series including
“Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)”
“Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2)”
“Lieutenant (an Ell Donsaii story #3)”
“Rocket (an Ell Donsaii story #4)”
“Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5)”
“Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6)”
“Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7)”
“Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8)”
“Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9)”
“Wanted (an Ell Donsaii story #10)”
“Rescue (an Ell Donsaii story #11)”
“Impact (an Ell Donsaii story #12)”
“DNA (an Ell Donsaii story #13)”
“Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14)” and
“Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15)”
I’ve minimized the repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the earlier books in order to provide a better reading experience for those of you who are reading the series.
Other Books and Series
by Laurence E Dahners
Series
The Hyllis Family series
The Vaz series
The Bonesetter series
The Blindspot series
The Proton Field series
The Stasis Stories
Single books (not in series)
The Transmuter’s Daughter
Six Bits
Shy Kids Can Make Friends Too
For the most up to date information go to
Laurence E Dahners website
Or his Amazon Author page
Table of Contents
Preprologue
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Epilogue
Author’s Afterword
Preprologue
Ell’s father, Allan Donsaii, was an unusually gifted quarterback. Startlingly strong, and a phenomenally accurate passer, during his college career he finished two full seasons without any interceptions and two games with 100 percent completions. Unfortunately, he wasn’t big enough to get drafted by the pros.
Extraordinarily quick, Ell’s mother, Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and rarely played a game without a steal.
Allan and Kristen dated more and more seriously through college, marrying at the end of their senior year. Their friends teased them that they’d only married in order to start their own sports dynasty.
Their daughter Ell got Kristen’s quickness, magnified by Allan’s surprising strength and highly accurate coordination.
She also has a new mutation that affects the myelin sheaths of her nerves. This mutation produces nerve transmission speeds nearly double those of normal neurons. With faster nerve impulse transmission, she has far quicker reflexes. Yet her new type of myelin sheath is also thinner, allowing more axons, and therefore more neurons, to be packed into the same sized skull. These two factors result in a brain with more neurons, though it isn’t larger, and a faster processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller, faster CPU architecture.
Most importantly, under the influence of adrenaline in a fight or flight situation, her nerves transmit even more rapidly than their normally remarkable speed.
Much more rapidly…
Author’s note
For those of you just finishing Terraform, An Ell Donsaii story #15, to avoid confusion, please be aware there are significant temporal overlaps between some events at the end of #15 and some of the events at the beginning of this book (#16).
Prologue
Emma looked up and saw Roger returning to the Quantum Biomed area. He looked a little dazed. “What happened to you?” she asked. “Stick your head in a port or something?” this last being a little in-joke about the confused post-seizure state that afflicted animals or people who passed through ports.
His eyes focused on her. “You’re closer to right than you might imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I got a video call from Ell. She said she’d gotten to wondering whether the neural effects of passing through a port were related to the port’s edge effects.”
“Say what?” Emma responded, not following what he’d said.
“You know, ‘edge effects.’ It refers to how flow rates near the edge of the port are limited compared to what can be achieved out in the middle. It’s why we can transfer atmosphere to Mars much more rapidly through a large port of the same cross-sectional area as a group of many small ports that have the same area. Flow rates are much slower within a few centimeters of the periphery of the port. A four-centimeter port has limited flow rates everywhere, but a one-meter port has high flow rates out in the middle with limited rates only near the edges.
“Oh,” Emma said. She’d been told that and had been excited about how it allowed higher flows with atmosphere transfers but hadn’t thought much more about it. It’d kind of faded from her working memory. “So, what’s the deal with neural effects versus edge effects?”
“So, Ell had Portal Tech send her a thirty-centimeter (12”) port and tried sticking her finger through it.”
“Wait, you’ve done that, right? You told me it hurt like hell.”
“Yeah,” Roger said with a shudder, “I stuck my finger through a bunch of small ports back when I was trying to find a way to port animals from one place to another. Trying to prevent the pain, I stuck that poor finger through with it covered by various metallic and nonmetallic meshes and cylinders. Nothing worked. The pain’s so bad it’s hard to make yourself do it again when you get a new idea to test. Our theory’s that passage through a port activates the nerve, sending pain messages up to the brain, though not actually doing any damage. However, if the brain itself goes through the port, all the induced messages cause a seizure and the seizure does do some damage.”
Emma gave him a puzzled look. “But I thought those new anesthetics you’ve been using prevented the seizures?”
“They do, though there’s probably a bit of mental cloudiness for a short period afterward. It’s hard to tell which effects are from the anesthetic and which ones come from passing through a port.”
“Okay. So what’s all this have to do with Ell sticking her finger through a 30 cm port?”
“She said there wasn’t any excruciating pain. The finger only tingled a little bit.”
Emma’s eyes widened, “Her guess was right?!”
Roger gave a disgusted snort. “As so many of her guesses are.”
“And I’ll bet you just stuck your finger through a 30 cm port, right?”
He gave a dismissive wave, “Did that last week. She’s right, only a little tingle.”
“Okay, so why were you looking dazed today?”
“Today, Dr. Bynewicz and I put a mouse through the middle of a 30 cm port. No seizure. It looked a little startled when it went through, but otherwise seemed completely fine.”
“Oh… Wow!” She closed her eyes for a moment, “So what’s the plan now? What’s all this mean?”
“Put through some bigger animals. Record EEGs on them as they go through. Send some primates. If they seem fine, then we’ll need to try it with a human volunteer.”
“Wait, didn’t you already bring an astronaut back from Mars through a big port?”
Roger nodded, “But that port was barely big enough to pass his shoulders with his arms up over his head.” Emma opened her mouth to speak but Roger held up a finger to get her to wait. “Admittedly the rim of the port was at least four cm from his head, i.e. his central nervous system, but we also had him under a general anesthetic. Maybe it wasn’t the anesthetic that kept him from seizing and having post porting cognitive issues. It’s possible that if we’d sent him through without the anesthetic, the only problem would’ve been the excruciating pain he’d have felt in the parts of him that were close to the periphery of the port.”
“You think this is gonna work?” Emma asked.
Roger shrugged with a distant look on his face, “Maybe not. But, if it does? It’s hard to imagine all the implications, isn’t it? A 1.5-meter port would give you plenty of clearance around a few humans or for one in a wheelchair. It’d require seven-megawatts of power to hold it open, which is a lot, but, as you know, the asteroid mining team worked out systems for powering ports quickly up and down over very brief periods. Ell points out that if we open a 1.5-meter port and pass it over a human being in less than a second, it’ll only consume about two kilowatt-hours of power. A kilowatt-hour only costs about 10-20 cents.”
“Less than a second?!” Emma said, alarmed.
“I’ll admit it sounds scary. If the power cut off before it had quite passed from the person’s head to their toes, it’d cut them off above the ankles.”
“No shit Sherlock!”
Roger said, “I was a little freaked out myself. But Ell proposes that if you’re a ‘transportee,’ which is what she’s calling someone who gets ported from one place to another, you’d stand in a 1.3-meter (50”) cylinder. I picture it kind of like a small, circular elevator. Once you’re inside and the door’s closed so you can’t twitch, move or otherwise get close to the edges of the 1.5-meter port, the port opens and falls down over the person and that inner cylinder. Since a falling object descends 2.4 meters (7.9’) in 0.7 seconds, it’ll travel plenty far enough in a second. It can’t start passing down over you until the port’s open because your 1.3-meter cylinder blocks it from traveling. The port’s power stays on until it hits an off-switch below the inch thick pedestal you’re standing on. This guarantees it’s passed all the way down below your feet before the port closes…” Roger paused a moment, then finished, “And, voila, you’re in France.”
“Or,” Emma whispered, “on Mars…”
***
Rob Shannon wearily climbed onto the little Turkish bus, actually just a big van. I’m getting way too old for this, he thought.
It’d been a long, long flight to India. Then, after a stop at the embassy to lock up his US passport and switch to his Indian one, he’d had another long flight to Turkey. He’d obtained an Indian visa to Turkey in Ankara and then suffered through a miserable nineteen-hour bus ride from Ankara to the Turkish town of Dogubayazit, near the Iranian border. Noah’s Ark was supposed to have landed on Mount Ararat near Dogubayazit, but Rob didn’t have the energy to do more than stare at the Mount from a distance.
He’d spent the night in a Dogubayazit hotel. It’d been cheap. For the price, it wasn’t bad, but it was, in reality, terrible—it was just that the price was very low. There were nice hotels, but he was playing the part of a down-on-his-luck Indian merchant touring Iran to look for good deals. He couldn’t be seen spending the money to stay anywhere upscale.
The van would provide him with a forty-five-minute ride to the actual border.
Assuming he crossed the border successfully, he’d hopefully be able to use his fluency in Farsi to negotiate another miserable 1300 km bus ride to Isfahan, the third-largest city in Iran, about 400 km south of Tehran.
Then he’d spend weeks in Isfahan, walking about the city, talking to merchants and “trying to negotiate trade deals” while most of his mission would be carried out by the sophisticated gear in his backpack—a backpack that was supposedly full of trade goods from India but only contained a few samples. His job was to carry the backpack from place to place. As he moved around, his handlers back home at the CIA would suck large quantities of air and dust through ports on his shoes and the backpack’s surface to measure isotopes. The “water bottles” on the backpack were actually ultra-sophisticated, highly-sensitive neutron detectors and the backpack’s walls were lined with a new crystal that was extremely sensitive to gamma emissions. All that information would be correlated to location with readings from GPS. Once the people back home had a good map of the radiation levels in the city—which was known to have been one of the locations of the Iranians’ “experimental” reactors and other facilities for producing nuclear fuel—then the truly hard and dangerous part of the mission would begin.
HUMINT (human intelligence) had led the CIA to believe that actual nuclear weapons were stockpiled somewhere in the city. Confirming that “SNMs,” or special nuclear materials, such as refined uranium or plutonium were present would be harder. It would require hitting such a stockpile with a pulse of neutrons—easily fired through a port—and then detecting the responding pulse of neutrons emitted by the SNMs when the pulse of neutrons induced a small amount of fission in the warheads.
To do that he’d have to set down the backpack in front of the suspected location of the weapons. It’d send the pulse of neutrons and detect the responding neutrons.
He couldn’t just drop the backpack and leave. He needed to stay close enough to make sure no one stole it. Or worse, that the guards who’d be watching the building didn’t remove the backpack as a possible bomb.
Cameras would’ve probably observed him setting down the backpack and followed him as he departed.
Detectors inside the building would probably react to both his and the bomb’s pulses of neutrons and set off alarms.
Then the fecal matter would hit the rotary impeller.
And I can’t run like I once could.
Crap!
***
“Mom,” Zage said as he settled in for a long flight in D5R’s jet. “Which of the Greek isles are we going to? I’ve just now realized there’re about 6,000 of them.”
“Oh, sorry,” Ell said distractedly. “There may be 6,000 islands but only 227 are inhabited. However, we’ve decided to go to the Caribbean instead. Specifically, the Dominican Republic. It’s closer to home in case we need to be physically present for some reason.”
Trying not to sound whiny, Zage said, “There’s not going to be much to do, is there?”
“Beaches, snorkeling, subtropical forest, the whole world accessible through Osprey. Think of it as a time to relax. Get away from it all. You don’t have to be accomplishing something every minute you’re awake you know?”
Zage snorted, “When’s the last time you relaxed?”
Ell was focused on something Allan was displaying in her contacts. She said, “Um, sorry. I set a bad example don’t I?”
Shaking his head, Zage had Osprey pull up the latest protein folding queries that’d been submitted to Gordito.
It didn’t take long to deal with the protein folding. Partly because there weren’t very many that day, but mostly because Zage and Osprey had gotten so good at figuring them out. Being on the airplane he couldn’t go to the lab so he wondered what to do. Malaria, he thought. Someone had mentioned that it killed more than a million people a year. There was a vaccine, but it was expensive and minimally effective, so very few people got the shots.
“Osprey,” he said, “pull up the genome for plasmodium.” Plasmodium, malaria’s causative agent, was a parasite rather than a virus like smallpox. He wondered whether the tricks he’d used before were going to work on it or whether he’d have to come up with a different strategy.
***
Jacob Benson looked up at his wife, “Simone! Did you see who Shan Kinrais is actually married to?”
Simone gave him a thoughtful look, “It isn’t that nice Raquel?”
“No! It turns out his Raquel was Ell Donsaii in disguise! That’s how Kinrais has written so many papers with her, they live together!”
Simone developed a sly smile, “Then it probably wasn’t just a funny accident when she suggested Egol’s marginal calculation to Milton Agrits, was it?”
Stunned, Jacob leaned back in his chair and let out a guffaw. “Hell no!” He looked at his wife, “That’s so rich! Milton was pissed that a joking, offhand suggestion from a faculty spouse condensed his Delphine splays, not knowing he’d just been helped by one of the world’s premier mathematicians!”
Simone gave him a puzzled look, “Who else is that good?”
Jacob blinked, “What do you mean?”
“You called Donsaii ‘one of the world’s premier mathematicians.’ Is there anyone as good as she is?”
“Well, that’s pretty subjective…”
“So, who would you put in her class?”
“Well…” he sighed, “I guess no one.”
“So,” Simone smiled sweetly, “Milton got help from the world’s best mathematician, right?”
Jacob sighed again, “Yes, dear.”
***
Vanessa appeared in Dr. Turner’s doorway. “Have you heard the latest?”
“About Zage?”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said on a long exhalation, disappointed she wouldn’t be the one to tell Turner. “Can you believe it?”
