Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8) (25 page)

“Start deceleration.”
Shan said. After a long pause he mused, “I wonder if we could ‘Brer Rabbit’ Keldap by begging him
not
to do something that we know would destroy Sigwald, or at least ruin Sigwald’s ports? If we asked him
not
to do it, and then he did it to spite Sigwald, perhaps we could get what we want.”

“Sounds good, but I don’t know what to ask him
not
to do. I mean, we could ask him not to melt Sigwald down to slag but I doubt he’d be fooled by that. We’d need to ask him not to do something that sounded painful but not destructive… I don’t know what that’d be?”

Neither of them said anything, each thinking furiously. Then Emma said, “
Wait, Allan, how high powered is Sigwald’s laser? Could we use it to destroy that tool Keldap is using on Sigwald? Or even to shoot Keldap? Or, wait, even better! Could it cut the graphene straps that are holding Sigwald?”

“The actual laser is out at Ell’s farm and is quite large. The beam is all that is sent through to Sigwald. There is no doubt that
the laser could destroy Keldap’s tool if the tool was stationary. But it would have to be trained on the tool for a few minutes to achieve enough heat to burn through. So if Keldap moves the tool, the laser wouldn’t burn deeply enough to do much damage. Having not trained a laser on a sigma’s flesh it is hard to know how fast it would injure Keldap. Graphene has an extremely high thermal conductivity and depending on the particular molecular structure of the straps it may be very difficult to burn through them.”

Shan snorted to himself, feeling like Allan had provided a list of not very useful information. Keldap still held the tool in his manipulator
but he seemed jittery. Keldap danced from one location to another and the tool moved around so much there would be no way to train the laser on it for long. Suddenly Keldap left the area, heading back into the main part of the repair shed. Shan said, “Allan, quick! Try burning through a graphene strap.”

Sigwald’s field of view moved as he looked down at his own body and the straps immobilizing it. A red glow appeared on one of the straps but nothing happened. After a moment Allan said, “It would appear that these straps are indeed graphene
that has a very high thermal conductivity. Infrared imaging shows that the entire strap is getting hot but the temperature at the spot the laser is striking is not even close to high enough to oxidize the carbon.”

“Crap!” Shan glanced down from his HUD as the crowd noise around him began to rise. The 4X400 race was on. For a moment he wondered if he should keep working on the Keldap issue and miss the race. He glanced up at his HUD and saw that Keldap hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone.
Guiltily he said, “Emma, if you get any ideas, let me know. The relay’s started and I’m going to watch.”

“OK,” Emma sighed, “I’m not having any strokes of genius right now.”

Team USA’s first leg had left them in 3
rd
place. The second leg had now merged from the separate staggered lanes the race had started in. Shan watched with dismay as two more runners passed the US on the backstretch leaving Seychelle Eventide to take the baton in 5
th
place. He’d known that the team was weak in the 400 but had thought it would be better than this. Seychelle passed one runner and tried for another but got blocked out and then was stuck running just outside the South African runner around the back turn. She faded without pulling back up to 3
rd
place and passed the baton to Ell in 4
th
. The baton pass lost them another spot back to 5th because they were excessively careful, having not had much practice with it.

Then Ell began to fly.

Goosebumps ran down Shan’s spine as his new wife stayed out in the second lane on the first turn. Despite her outside lane position she began passing the other runners. She started the back stretch in first place… pulling away.

On his feet Shan screamed incoherently. Without seeming to strain Ell widened the distance on the other runners to twenty, thirty, then forty meters as she made the back turn. She finished the race 50 meters ahead of the second place team from the Bahamas.

The crowd thundered and the announcers seemed speechless. After a moment the board popped up a time of 2:49.58 with a little “WR” symbol beside it to designate it as a world record. Shan knew that the men’s world record was 2:51… He shook his head. He really hadn’t had any idea what Ell was capable of when he’d asked her to ‘put Fentis in his place.’”

Shan watched the other three Team USA runners swarm Ell. They were bouncing up and down and Ell leapt up and down with them. He felt happy seeing her enjoy the victory. He’d had the feeling after her other wins that she looked just a little embarrassed by her easy wins. Admittedly, the way she blew the other runners away did make the Olympics seem like a high school track meet which just happened to have one world class runner competing in it. Ell joined the others in holding up the flag and graciously accepted the congratulations of runners from other teams.

Out on the field t
hings wound down very slowly because the women’s 4X400 was the last track and field event so there was no need to clear the arena. Athletes from other events including men started wandering out to shake her hand. They didn’t seem to be jealous or angry—more awestruck in Shan’s impression.

E
ventually Shan glanced up at his HUD remembering that momentous events might be occurring on Sigma Draconis. Keldap’s eye hovered close in Sigwald’s field of vision. Keldap had a glassy bubble over the eye to protect it and seemed to be doing something on Sigwald’s chest though Shan couldn’t see what. “Allan, what’s he doing?”

“He appears to be trying to remove the large port from Sigwald’s chest.”

Shan’s heart sank, “Oh crap! Where does that port go?”

“To the spectroscop
ic station in the solar orbital station. That’s where we analyzed the fragment of the rimwall to determine it was made of carbon.”

Shan wondered if it would actually be possible to open the port from that end. He knew that it couldn’t be done here
on earth with Ell’s ports. They could only be turned on and off from the primary end. But these guys were aliens! They didn’t seem to be as advanced as he’d expected when he’d first heard that they had a ringworld with the incredible engineering effort that entailed. Obviously they were light years ahead of the human race in regards to structural carbon manufacturing and engineering. Yet they seemed to be far behind in computing? Though, he shivered over Ell’s thought that they might not need computers if they could simply merge enormous numbers of their organic brains to allow them to function as some kind of organic supercomputers.

What if Keldap had merged to become some kind of organic super genius and derived a method to open
Sigwald’s port from his end? “Allan, let me know the moment that Ell puts on her headband.” Shan got up. “Ask Keldap what he’s doing.” Shan started down the stairs toward the lowest level, wondering if there might be some way he could get Ell’s attention?

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 H
2
O 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
.

H
er 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.