Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) (20 page)

“You mean, if I had a port inside of me, say some kind of medical device, you could connect to it?”

Donsaii shook her head, “No that would be a ‘two ended port’ like people are already using. A one ended port doesn’t require a port on the other end. That’s how it can deliver a rocket to another star.”

Tom Gaddy felt his eyebrows crawling up his forehead in horror at the thought of people running around with such a device.

Noonan appeared to be a little shell-shocked as well as she considered the implications.

Donsaii continued, “You could drop Molotov cocktails on your neighbor’s house or bombs on other countries with
no one
being able to tell where they came from or being capable of stopping you from doing so.”

Noonan swallowed and shook herself, “All the more reason to turn this over to your government for safekeeping then.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Noonan, turning something over to a government doesn’t keep it a secret. I’m not at all confident my own government wouldn’t use these devices in a malignant fashion. I prefer the current situation much better.”

“Current situation?”

“At present, I’ve destroyed all the existing one ended ports and I’m the
only
person who knows how to make them.”

Noonan stared at her several long moments as if considering, then she said, “Well then, I must inform you that President Stockton has, by executive order, declared you a national menace. As a danger to society, our country and the world, she’s ordered you held without trial or recourse, at Guantanamo.”

“Guantanamo? I thought it had been closed?”

“Nope, we’re still holding some terrorists there. We consider you to be a terrorist as well, holding your country hostage to the dangers represented by your one ended ports.” Noonan stood, “You’ll be moved to that location shortly. I’d recommend that you reconsider,” she curled a lip, “it turns out you aren’t above the law after all.”

Donsaii said, “I thought the President had placed me on active duty and was holding me on ‘failure to obey an order.’”

Noonan shook her head, “The President reconsidered. You are
not
on active duty. You are a civilian who is failing to comply with the law. However, if that was all it was, you could be out on bail. As a menace being rendered safe by executive order, we are not constrained to follow those niceties.”

Donsaii looked sad and she shook her head. “Sorry. I’m afraid this represents a
terrible
solution that we’ll
all
regret.”

Tom Gaddy’s mind whirled as he took Donsaii back to her cell. Everything about this whole situation seemed… wrong, but try as he might, he couldn’t think of a solution. He decided to talk to his supervisor about it in the morning.

Ell had finished reading about executive orders and Guantanamo. She’d been studying maps of Cuba and the Caribbean. She’d designated several locations on the Cuban map to Allan when she heard the bolts on her cell door shoot again. She noted that the time displayed by her projector was 1:30 AM. She whispered to Allan to turn off the projection and put the video projection port in her mouth. Pulling the covers back off her head, she saw the door rolling open. Four armed men waited outside the door this time.

Ell swallowed the port.

One of the men came in and gruffly said, “Put out your wrists.”

Ell did so and the man closed another pair of the all too familiar handcuffs over them. The man knelt and put another set of padded cuffs on her ankles that had a short chain between them. “Where are we going?” Ell asked.

The man only shook his head, then he grasped her arm and pulled her to her feet.

Ell, shuffling because of the ankle chains, made her way out of the cell. “Turn left,” he said.

They exited the building into an alley. A van with barred windows waited. The gruff man helped her into the van then got into the front. He turned to watch her through a steel grating. Another man drove. Ell assumed the other two of the four men that had come to pick her up got in the black car that had been parked behind the van, but she couldn’t know for sure.

As they drove, Allan updated her on her position from her implanted GPS antenna. “It looks likely that they are taking you to Andrews Air Force Base.”

“OK Allan, I’ve decided to go ahead and escape.” Ell said quietly. She paused to ponder the ramifications of her decision.
I’ll be in flagrant disregard of the law, not just Stockton’s executive order. I’ll be an escaped prisoner under pursuit… by all the resources of the United States government.

However, she didn’t want to find herself in a prison from which she perhaps could not escape
.
“Wake up Amy and give her my apologies for ruining her sleep. Ask her to open the barn door and put a t-shirt, jeans, socks and running shoes in the compartment under the saddle of the new hoverbike. The one that has the winch and the low radar profile. Then fly the hoverbike out of there and down to Guantanamo in Cuba. If it gets there before I do, or before I give any other directions, have it land at point A of the locations I chose before they picked me up… Oh and have Amy put a water bottle and as many granola bars in the compartment as will fit under the clothes.”

Ell thought another minute then said, “I’ll need a small lightweight backpack too, so ask Amy to put in one of those.” She considered, “There might not be room for granola bars, they’re the lowest priority of the items I’ve listed.”

Allan informed Ell that they had indeed arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. The van drove out to the tarmac and the four men opened the back. At their direction Ell shuffled over to a small cargo plane of a type she didn’t recognize. The back of the craft was filled with boxes. They loaded Ell into an uncomfortable seat near the front. One of the men sat beside her and another behind her. The other two didn’t board the plane, presumably they returned to the vehicles from whence they came.

Three in the morning arrived and Ell slept as best she could in the uncomfortable seat. She woke up again when they took off at about 4AM. She felt a strong desire to talk to Shan about her decision, but the guard sitting right next to her made that pretty difficult. Eventually she drifted back off to sleep.

As the sun rose outside the plane’s windows, the guards broke out some rat packs and they ate breakfast. About an hour after they’d finished eating and the guards had disposed of the trash, the plane touched down on the airfield at Guantanamo.

The guards took her off the plane and were met by men in camo fatigues. The senior of the three men meeting them was a very large Petty Officer Second Class. He stared down at Ell for a minute, then smirked, saying, “My, my, looks like someone’s not as high and mighty as they used to be.”

He reached for Ell’s arm, but the hand of the gruff guard who’d picked her up in DC shot out to grab the PO by the wrist. A moment passed with the two men staring at each other, then the guard said in his gravelly voice, “She saved our
entire
world. She may be in trouble now, but she
still
deserves respect.”

The Petty Officer eyed her; then barked a laugh, “But what has she done for us lately, huh? I hear she may be bringin’ the little green men down on us. In any case,” he sketched an insolent bow, “here’s your respect. Now, get your ass over to the truck.”

The PO grabbed Ell by the arm, evidently intending to drag her to the truck. He looked surprised when, despite the ankle cuffs, she skipped along beside him as fast as he walked. They loaded her into the back of a truck with a large boxy back end that had been outfitted as a kind of rolling transport cell. Divided by a thick steel partition into left and right compartments, it had tiny windows covered with steel gratings and a hard bench down each side. They put her in the right side. As the only prisoner Ell promptly laid out full length on the bench and pretended to sleep while facing the wall.

Since the airfield was across Guantanamo bay from the detention center, Ell had wondered if they would take a ferry or perhaps she’d be loaded in a helicopter. The question was answered when the prison truck started an old internal combustion engine and drove only a short bumpy distance. After it stopped, it continued moving uneasily as the ferry beneath it shifted on the waves.

Other than the creaking of the ferry on the waves it was quiet, so while she was alone in the back of the van Ell put in a call to Shan to let him know where she was and that she planned to escape.

“Where are you going to go?”

“I was thinking that I’d go to the Habitat. It’d be hard for them to reach me there, but they’d know where I was and would focus on D5R as a place to apply leverage. Instead I think I’m going to go into hiding. Mexico, probably. Then cross the border into the States as an illegal alien and establish a new identity that way.”

“Why go to the border, then cross back? Just set yourself up in the US as an immigrant, without ever leaving.”

“Well, I’m down here near Mexico and have to come back from there anyway. I figure I’d just as well hire help from people who normally help people cross over and get IDs set up.”

“Some of those people aren’t very nice.”

There was a long pause. “You’re probably right. But if they aren’t nice to me, they probably aren’t nice to a lot of people and maybe someone should teach them a lesson.”

“Uh, that’d be fine, unless they hurt you before you teach them their lesson.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “but, whatever I do, it’s
going
to be kind of risky.”

“Even if all that works, when you get up here to the States, aren’t they going to figure out who you really are from fingerprints and DNA?”

“I printed myself some fake fingerprints that I can apply if they arrest me or if I need prints for a job. If they arrest me and take DNA with a buccal swab from the mouth I have a mixture of several other peoples’ DNA that I can port into my mouth from the port on the back of my tooth. That should result in rejection of the specimen for being corrupt, but because it takes a while to process it, I should be gone before they figure out the specimen has a problem.”

“Jeez, you’ve really been giving this some thought.”

“Well, yeah,” Ell sighed, sadly, “I’d rather have been thinking about more productive things.”

“Do you want me to come join you somewhere?”

“No, I’m thinking it would be good for one of us to be legal, at least for now. Maybe, once I’m back in the states, I’ll head back up to North Carolina. You could hire me to clean house?”

“Hah! You’re not a very good maid, you know?”

“Hey, first you criticize my cooking, now my cleaning?!”

“I loooove you.” Shan said in a sing song voice.

“Hah! I gotta go. Gotta see if I can get loose from here before they start torturing me for my secrets.”

“Good luck my love, play it as safe as you can and call if you think of anything I can do to help.”

“OK.”

Next Ell put in a call to her Mom. Her mother had been pretty upset about her being in prison so Ell didn’t tell her yet about her pregnancy or plans to escape, or even that she was at Guantanamo Bay.

***

Shan mused to himself that he was in an unreasonably good mood for a man whose pregnant wife was in prison. He pondered this for a moment, then realized that he simply had no doubt that
his
wife would succeed at her jail break and illegal immigration back into the United States.

However, he still worried about how the baby would tolerate all this stress.

Chapter Seven

Pulling a sheet of OSB sheathing, Enrique Fuentes stepped from rafter to rafter as he crossed the roof.  He hated walking up so high on rafters, but the older men claimed it was always the “new guy’s job.” His ribs still hurt from falling last week, striking his chest on the rafters he was falling between. However, by sprawling, he had kept from falling through the rafters to the ground. He hadn’t fallen any farther than chest deep between the boards, but it had hurt nearly as badly as it had frightened him. The other workers had complimented him on his reactions. The compliments would have felt better if his chest hadn’t been hurting so badly.

He turned to make sure he wasn’t too close to the edge.

His foot slipped.

He dropped the OSB and stretched out his body as before, not wanting to slip between the rafters, but he was at the hip of the roof. His body landed on the down-sloping rafters of the hip and started to skid!

Scrabbling with his hands he slowed the rush of his upper body toward the edge… but he couldn’t stop it.

Feeling as if he were in a slow motion dream, Enrique slid off the edge and plunged toward the ground below.

***

After her mother disconnected, Ell said, “Allan. Where is the hoverbike at present?”

“It arrived at location A about twenty minutes ago.”

“Really?” Ell said, knowing it was a stupid question to ask an AI, but she was surprised. “I thought the cargo plane would be much faster than the hoverbike.”

“Really,” the AI said tonelessly. It was merely answering a question with a fact, but the resultant dry delivery made the AI seem sarcastic. “It is correct that the plane is faster, but the plane had further to go and there was a delay before you took off. In addition, without a passenger to add weight and wind resistance and complain about buffeting, I was able to fly the hoverbike at over four hundred miles per hour.”

For a moment Ell had the sense that her AI was also teasing her about her intolerance of wind buffeting at high speeds on her hoverbike flights. She shook her head; AI’s had no sense of humor. Even attempts to program humor into them fell flat. Allan must just be reciting the reasons the hoverbike hadn’t been up to those speeds in the past. “OK,” she said, “let me know when this prison van is one and a half miles from its closest approach to the hoverbike at location A.”

Eventually, the sound of the ferry’s motors reached her and Ell felt it pull away from the dock. The heaving of the deck and van, though still mild, became significantly more than it had been at the dock. Allan confirmed that the ferry had pulled away from the dock and was in transit across the bay.