Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) by Laurence Dahners Read Free Book Online

think?”
    Ell tilted her head, “It needs more light.”
    “Yeah, but there’s no good place to plug one in over here.”
    Ell grinned, “Hmmm, Mebbe Ah could get me one o’ them thar new-fangled port plug ins from down whea’ Ah work?”
    Shan snorted and set the painting down. He reached up and bumped the side of his head with the heel of his palm as if adjusting it. “Dang! Someday I’ll get used to this. I guess we can put a light wherever we want, huh?”
    Ell grinned at him, “Yup.” She pointed up over the couch, “I’m thinking we could stick a little spotlight on the ceiling there?”
     
    ***
     
    Viveka turned to look delightedly at the new printer she’d bought. Her very own! She put in a sheet of her new fluorescent sticky labels in it. A minute later it printed out a sheet of round sticky dots that each said in fine print, “I groped a woman today.”
    With a subtle smile she cut the sheet into sets of four dots and slipped them into her pocket. Time to go to school.
     
    ***
     
    Ell walked into the D5R conference room a little early. Already there, Vivian signaled and Ell sat next to her. “What’s up?”
    Vivian looked like she’d bitten into something sour. “I don’t want to bring this up to the entire group, but something worrisome went down last night in New York.”
    Ell closed her eyes, “The coffee shop across Broadway from City Hall?”
    “You’ve already heard?”
    “Just that there was an explosion there last night.”
    “Yeah,” Vivian sighed.  “Warren Newton, our FBI contact, says it was a propane explosion. No sources of propane known to be in the building. Not even a natural gas pipeline to that shop. Warren has flagged it as suspicious for port terrorism. Flammable gas, near a government building, explosion at night. He’s got his people on the scene looking for a port or fragments of a port.” Vivian waved to some of the other people who’d just entered, but then focused back on Ell. “If it was a port, we’ve got to figure out how they bypassed our safety measures. We aren’t selling that many ports that will transport flammables anymore and the ones we do sell for planes etcetera are supposed to be mounted on the plane at the factory and almost impossible to uninstall.” She shook her head sadly, “We put in safeguards, some S.O.B. figures his way around them… it’s the way of the world.”
    Ell gave a forlorn little shrug, “Maybe it’ll turn out to be unrelated to ports. It’s pretty worrisome though. Let me know when Newton gives you an update?”
    “Sure.”
    Ell looked around the table. Most of the D5R subdivisions’ representatives were there by then. She focused on Braun, “So Rob, why don’t you start us off? A little news birdy tells me that ET Resources is sending shock waves through the futures market for high end metals?”
    Braun gave a little laugh. “Yeah, so far completely unjustified. We put ten kilograms of platinum on the market and when they found out where it came from the price of platinum dropped 15%! For God’s sake, the world’s annual production is close to two hundred tons.”
    Ell smiled, “So, the mining operations are working better now?”
    “We really haven’t been doing all that great so far. We processed about two hundred metric tons of asteroid to produce those ten kilos of platinum. Two hundred tons sounds like a lot, but some of the mining trucks they use here on earth carry more than two hundred tons in a single load. Here on earth they need to move that much ore because a lot of earth ore is only 0.5 parts per million platinum. Our asteroid is averaging 50 parts per million so the company processing the ore thinks it’s amazing stuff. And, really, our asteroid wouldn’t even be called ore here. It’s almost all metal like some of the meteorites that land on earth. So, from that same two hundred tons of asteroid we also produced forty tons of nickel, 150 tons of iron, substantial chromium, and