Invasion (an Ell Donsaii story #18, page 1
Invasion
An Ell Donsaii story #18
Laurence E Dahners
Copyright 2023
Laurence E Dahners
Kindle Edition
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only
Author’s Note
This book is the eighteenth 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)
Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15)
Transporter (an Ell Donsaii story #16) and
Twins (an Ell Donsaii story #17)
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 Ell Donsaii series
The Vaz series
The Bonesetter series
The Blindspot series (which interweaves with the Time Flow series)
The Proton Field series
The Hyllis family series
The Time Flow series
Single books (not in series)
The Transmuter’s Daughter
Six Bits (a collection of short-length stories, some of which interweave with the Time Flow series)
Shy Kids Can Make Friends Too
The Little Redheaded Boy and His Flying Saucer
For the most up-to-date information, go to:
Laurence E Dahners website
Or the Amazon Author page
Table of Contents
Other Books and Series
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
Acknowledgments
Other Books and Series
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 …
And, now it turns out, that mutated gene is dominant.
Prologue
Ell stood in the water watching her twins play in the surf. They’d never been to a beach before, so getting down to the sea had been at the top of their list on this, their second day in the Dominican Republic.
Ell’s husband, Shan, was teaching a class at UNC, and her son, Zage, had some things he wanted to do in his lab, so Ell had the girls to herself—if you didn’t count the members of her security team, scattered semi-unobtrusively about the sand and in the water.
The twins’ adoptive mother, Gloria, had taken Susana—the sister the twins had themselves adopted—into town to “get some clothes and other supplies.”
Ell suspected it was more in the way of retail therapy meant as a salve for all the transitions and dislocations Gloria and Susana had been through recently. And, of course, since they’d arrived with only a small suitcase each, they could use some more clothing and toiletries.
A small body bumped Ell’s calf, so she plunged her hands into the water and pulled up a wriggling, shrieking body. The mid-length auburn hair told her she had Caii.
Caii lifted her goggles to give Ell a surprised look, “You’re quick!”
“I should be,” Ell said with a raised eyebrow. “I’m related to you.”
“But, but, you’re so old!” Caii said with twinkling eyes.
“I, am, not, old!” Ell exclaimed as she whirled the girl around and tossed her far out into the deeper water. Even though this was the twins’ first experience with swimming, they’d taken to it like fish. Plunging Caii into water over her head didn’t worry Ell at all.
Raii popped up out of the water beside Ell, shrieking, “Me, me, me!”
Ell snatched the crewcut twin, checked Caii’s position, then tossed Raii out so she landed a couple of meters from her sister. They may be far more mature than they should be, Ell thought, but they do still enjoy the delights of childhood.
The girls found this so exciting that the entire throwing evolution was repeated several times. Ell tired of the game, so the next time Caii arrived back at her side, she said, “Hey, there’s a little reef out there with some pretty fish. You want to snorkel it a little?”
Raii had popped up beside them, “Snorkel?”
Without thinking about it, Ell sub-vocally asked her AI, Allan, to send her a child-sized snorkel, then held out her hand to catch it when it popped through the one-ended port behind her belly button. These snorkels had been modified and folded to fit through Ell’s fifteen-millimeter retro-umbilical port so she’d have them available if an emergency occurred where people needed air. They’d work fine for this.
Ell was unfolding the snorkel and explaining what it was when a wide-eyed Caii asked, “How did you do that?!”
“Um …” Ell said, hesitating because she never let strangers know about her implanted one-ended ports. She blinked, reminding herself that these girls were her daughters. If I can’t trust them, who can I trust? she thought. Nonetheless, they needed to start learning about all the secrets they’d need to keep. She said, “It’s an important secret. Will you keep it for me?”
The twins nodded in their eerily simultaneous fashion.
“I have a thing called a ‘one-ended port’ behind my belly button. When I’m not wearing clothing with built-in ports, it can still deliver small things like this to me.”
They tilted their heads simultaneously and to the same angle. Raii said, “One-ended port? We haven’t heard about those.”
“Normal ports have two ‘ends’ that define where they come from and where they go,” Ell said. “A one-ended port has only one defined end. It can send stuff to places that aren’t defined by another port device. Instead, you point the single-ended port in the direction you want something to be sent, then energize the port so it creates a temporary opening a certain distance away. Most people don’t know this is possible.”
“Why’s it a secret?”
“One-ended ports are extremely dangerous. Bad people could port poison into someone or do a lot of other terrible things. I don’t want the rest of the world to have such ports because some people would do awful things with them.”
“What if they steal one and reverse engineer it?” Caii asked.
“We’re doing two things to keep that from happening,” Ell said, surprised the girls knew what reverse engineering was, and embarrassed that she’d called murderers “bad people” when the twins’ vocabulary seemed far beyond such terminology. “First, all ports are designed so it’s almost impossible to take them apart without destroying them. Second, the only people in the world who have the one-ended ones are me, Shan, and my children.”
“We have them?!” Raii asked, wide-eyed.
“No, I didn’t want to put them in when you were babies, back before you were kidnapped. Well, I did want to because they’d have made you safer but I worried because you didn’t have much fatty tissue beneath your skin to implant a port into. Believe me, I cursed myself for that decision for the entire four years you were missing.”
“Why? We would’ve been too young to use them.”
“But if you’d had them, I could’ve popped GPS locators through them and found you in no time. I’d like to set you up with one-ended ports as soon as you’re comfortable with the idea.”
“Why wouldn’t we be comfortable with it?”
Ell shrugged. “Because it hurts a little. Plus, you don’t know me very well yet. I’d be able to send stuff through such a port without your permission. So, it’s something you’ll need to be able to trust me with.”
With symmetrical head turns, the twins glanced at one another, then looked back at Ell. Caii said, “Can we start with HUD contacts and earpieces?”
Ell nodded. “Contacts are no problem. Rather than earbuds, I’d prefer to implant tiny ports into the soft tissues of your ear canals. That way no one would be able to see them. If a bad actor looked in your ears to remove your earbuds, they wouldn’t see anything, not even a scar. If they didn’t know they were there, they wouldn’t be able to take them away from you and you’d still be able to communicate with your AI and us. Most importantly, you’d still be able to call us for help.”
“Where are you going to put the microphone for us to call you through? If it’s part of the ear port, it seems like we’d have to talk loudly to be heard.”
“We can hear pretty well through ear ports but I’d also glue ports to the back of some of your teeth. Through them, your AI’d be able to hear even the softest whispers—something we call subvocalization. You’d read a few passages in your softest whisper and your AI would learn to understand what you’re saying even though you’d be speaking so quietly no one could hear you.”
Caii frowned in thought. “It sounds as if you’re talking about putting more than one port on our teeth?”
Ell nodded. “When we go snorkeling here in a minute, I won’t have to use a snorkel because I’ll be able to breathe through the ports on the backs of twelve of my teeth.”
“Really?!” Raii asked, both twins looking incredulous.
Ell nodded again, “I’d be hard to drown.” She shrugged, “Or to starve because my AI could send a food paste through the ports if I needed it. Admittedly, I get a drink through the ports a lot more often than I do food or air.”
Caii glanced at Raii, then repeated her earlier query, “Can we start with HUD contacts and earpieces? We’re assuming it hurts to have something implanted in our ears, right?”
Ell laughed. “Sure. Contacts and eyepieces it is. Just so you know, I can port in some anesthetic before I put in the implants, but even that hurts a little.” She held her hand in front of her tummy, “Do you want to watch the second snorkel come through my one-ended port?”
“Yes!” they said excitedly, leaning their heads in close to her hand.
“Not too close,” Ell said warningly. “The one-ended port isn’t as accurate as I’d like. We don’t want the snorkel appearing inside your cheek or something.”
Once they’d backed off a few inches, Allan sent the folded snorkel through. The port wasn’t visible from Ell’s angle looking down on it, so the snorkel just seemed to slide out of nothingness and fall into Ell’s waiting hand.
The twins exclaimed delightedly.
Ell unfolded it and said, “I gave the first one to you, didn’t I, Raii? This one goes to Caii?”
The twins looked at one another and engaged in a brief burst of their personal language. Raii looked up at Ell and said, “You keep calling us ‘Caii’ and ‘Raii.’ Are you just shortening Luciah and Mariah to give us nicknames?”
“Oh, no. Sorry. Caii and Raii are your real names. They’re the names you’ll find on your original birth certificates from Virginia. All of us have additional names we use when we’re in disguise and those usually sound something like our real names so we’re more likely to notice it when people talk to us. For instance, my real name’s Ell Donsaii, but when I’m done up with darker skin, brown hair, and wider nostrils, I go by Elsa Gardon. Your dad is Shannon Kinrais though he usually goes by Shan. When he’s done up with darker skin and hair—which you haven’t seen yet, he goes by Daniel Reyes.”
The twins studied her a moment, then Caii said, “So that’s why you guys pronounce my name ‘Lu-sigh-ah’ instead of ‘Lu-see-ah?’ Because my real name is Caii?’”
Ell nodded. “Yeah. Your last names are Kinrais, because of Shan, but I saddled you with the double ‘i’ from my last name when we came up with your first names.” She shrugged, “We can change your names if you want?”
“No,” Caii said thoughtfully. She looked up at Ell, then, saying, “I think mine’s way cool,” she threw her arms around Ell’s waist. A moment later, Raii said, “Me too,” and Ell had four arms around her.
Ell bent and clumsily reached down around them to give the twins an upside-down hug.
When the hug broke up, Ell wiped her eyes and said, “Who’s ready to snorkel?”
With shrieks, they headed out into the water. Ell had to call them back to explain the snorkels and their depth limit of four and a half meters, or 15 feet.
“Why can’t we go deeper than that?” Caii asked.
“It’s because, as you go deeper underwater, the pressure goes up so fast that if you try to breathe through an ordinary tube snorkel that’s longer than a foot—or a third of a meter, your muscles aren’t strong enough to inflate your lungs against the water pressure squeezing the outside of your chest.” She glanced at the girls, thinking the concept would require more explanation.
Raii nodded, “It’s obvious now that you said it.” She kept her eyes expectantly on Ell, waiting for further explanation.
Ell nodded at the snorkel in Raii’s hand and said, “That snorkel will keep feeding you air at a pressure high enough to let you to inflate your lungs down to 4.5 meters but not any deeper. If you try to go deeper than that, the air pressure from the snorkel won’t be high enough to let you suck air in against the water pressure outside your chest.”
“You set that limit on these snorkels to keep untrained people from going down to dangerous depths, right?” Caii said.
Ell nodded, wondering how girls their age had so immediately grasped the mechanics of it, without needing any more explanation. And knew about the dangers of diving at great depths. She wanted to ask, but thought, I’ll find out in time. Better to let it come naturally.
That done, the three of them had a blast snorkeling the reef and admiring the fish. Ell wanted to make them jealous of the way she could talk to them through the ports on her teeth even when she was under. Unfortunately, without earbuds or ear ports, they didn’t have a way to hear her.
***
Over lunch, Ell turned to the twins and said, “Have you attended preschool yet?
They blinked at her a moment, then shook their heads. Raii said, “But we have been studying at the Khan Academy.”
Seeming to assume Ell wouldn’t know about it, Caii said, “It’s an internet school that’s supported by D5R and Gordito.”
“Oh, great!” Ell said, thinking she’d need to tell Zage he’d helped his sisters when he’d had Gordito fund the Academy. “How far along are you?”
“Um,” Raii said, “At the Academy, as soon as you know a subject well enough you can test out of it.”
Ell nodded. “I work at D5R so I’m familiar with Khan Academy.”
Raii cleared her throat and diffidently said. “We’re done with all but one of the classes in eleventh grade,” She shrugged, “All this recent craziness set us back a little, but we think we’ll be done with twelfth grade by Christmas.”
“Oh ….” Ell said, thinking, They’re way ahead, the same as Zage was. “Um, do you have thoughts about what you want to do next? College? Art school?”
The twins spoke to one another in their own language for a moment, then Caii said, “We’re not sure. Maybe we could take some art classes. We’re not sure what we could learn in class that we can’t figure out watching tutorials on the net but maybe we should give it a try. We were thinking business school for an MBA might be good if we’re going to support ourselves with our art. Hopefully, we’d learn how to better market our work and make a business out of it.”
