Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) Read Free Page B

at her while he tried to process this. Could she possibly be telling the truth? Of course she is, I’ve seen what she did with the comet. There probably isn’t anything she can’t do if she puts her mind to it. After a moment he said brilliantly, “Uh, OK.”
    “I’m telling you this so you’ll understand that you’re actually working for me, not some nebulous ‘board.’ I want you to examine all the financial arrangements and expenditures , etcetera , for D5R and its sub companies. I even want you to examine my personal finances and the outcomes of my charitable donations. Because I believe in incentives, you get 10% of any misappropriated monies that are recovered.”
    Daster sank back in his chair. “Just how much money are the PGR chips paying you?”
    “You’re going to be seeing all of those figures yourself pretty soon. But, it’s a minimum of 2.1 billion dollars per year.”
    My God, no wonder she can afford to finance D5R!
     
    ***
     
    Bridget met Professor Norris at D5Rs entry. “Hello, Dr. Norris. You’re here for a tour and to meet with Ms. Donsaii?”
    “Yes please, I would greatly appreciate that. Will Ms. Donovan be with us?”
    Bridget tried not to go cross eyed over Norris’ reference to Ell’s alter ego. Ell had set her down last night and explained the Belle Donovan alter ego , asking her to play the part of Belle’s “friend” that worked at D5R . As such she would take him on a tour and introduce him to Ell as “Ell.” Brightly, she said, “Nope, Belle doesn’t work here, though she does know Ms. Donsaii. I work here though and she asked m e to take you around and introduce you to Ms. Donsaii, if that’s OK?”
    “Sure.”
    Bridget didn’t take him to the admin offices, instead taking him directly to the big research room. “This area is where the Portal Tech group is working at pres ent. They’ve moved most of the actual manufacturing of ports to a separate facility but they still do research and design processes here.”
    “Portal Tech?”
    “Ye s, it’s an offshoot of D5R that’s undertaking the actual manufacture of the ports. The ports will then be licensed to other companies for use. Portal Tech has an exclusive license to manufacture and lease ports, though President Teller’s commission negotiated for anyone to be able to use ports. The commission also extended the patent on the port so that their release could be slowed in order to slow the economic upheavals that will result as the ports come into use.”
    Norris narrowed his eyes. “Can you explain that? What kind of upheavals?”
    Norris wound up sitting down, shaking his head as Bridget explained how ports would someday replace pipes and wires and tankers , etcetera. He’d heard how ports supplied the space station and flew little rockets but had failed to consider the more mundane things they could do. Bridget took him to a central area of the big room where a group of men were cursing at a machine that intermittently clanged. “This is the current home base for ‘ ET Resource s . ’ They’re mining an asteroid, though it doesn’t sound like this is a very good day for them.”
    Norris looked at the screen the men were swearing at. Everything was lit in the sharply demarcated fashion one expected of a picture from space where no air diffused the light. One window appeared to be looking out over a field of rubble that had an empty conveyor belt running out over it. The belt was moving slowly out away from the field of view. Another view seemed to show the underside of the belt running back in to converge on paired belts. Rocks were stuck to the underside of the belt as if it were magnetic but when they hit the paired belts at the near end they were scraped off by a plate and pinched between the paired belts. “What’s going wrong?” he asked.
    “Well , it is surprisingly hard to move material, like the broken rock there, around in a weightless , airless environment. They need to feed it into a