The other had to do with perfect counterfeits of foreign currencies that enabled us to control their inflation rates. We made a lot of money off those programs as well. From here on, we simply followed the CIA's lead and referred to all of these efforts with the encompassing and nebulous title 'the diamond factory.'
The fact that we enabled the Clemons's facility to become a viable business and no longer a drain on budget improved Tatiana's and my situation with the W-squared crew tremendously.
I was even given that long-overdue security clearance. Of course, Tatiana wasn't. She was not an American citizen—and there was always that isolated abductee issue. I was still thinking about that. On the other hand, only I could really keep anything from her and it appeared as though the W-squared group realized this. They made us both honorary members of the W-squared team and treated Tatiana as a cleared and accessed member. In fact, General Clemons pulled some strings and had an 'interim' clearance issued to Tatiana with Clemons as the responsible party. But I needed to deal with the security implications of the isolated abductee issue somehow. I wasn't sure how yet; in fact I wasn't even sure why she was isolated and what that meant. As far as Mike and I could figure, for some reason out of the millions of humans that have been abducted by the Grays in the past, a couple hundred thousand of them were different somehow. The Grays had taken some sort of precautions so as to not let these 'isolated abductees,' as I had been calling them, gain access and control of any of their SuperAgent systems. We still had no idea why.
After I had Mike check out everybody in the town for abductee status, we found that there were none—no abductees period, not just isolated ones. We guessed that it was due to the extreme psychological screening that these folks went through in order to get these high-level security clearances. Perhaps the quirky effects on the personality that the tracking implants have would cause one to be a suspicious security risk. Hey, maybe that was another reason for me not getting cleared earlier. I was moody and nuts for a long time—and perhaps even a bit paranoid on occasion.
Tatiana and I spent the third week explaining our story in great detail. The group had no idea what the aliens looked like. When we explained that they were the classic UFO nut description of little Grays they were amazed and surprised. They were beginning to consider some of the UFO conspiracy theories more seriously. I hadn't told them that human abductees had zero possibility of recalling the abduction yet.
It also turned out that the two light years away in what Tatiana and I thought was deep space wasn't deep space at all for these folks. They had been out as far as eighty light years. Mike had told me this once before, but it really didn't ring true until I saw the pictures of some of the planets these humans had been to. We had a meeting in a special room near the general's office and discussed what was happening.
'In that meeting at CIA Headquarters, Dr. Daniels, you made mention of something that interested me. You said to the CIA guy that if he had told you about 'this' sooner that you would be further along by now. What did you mean by that?' I asked Dr. Daniels, the male, as I leaned back in my chair. I noted to myself that for a conference room on the Moon, it had plush furniture.
'Oh, yeah. Call me Jim, will ya? Anybody who had their hand in my chest and brings me back to life gets the privilege of calling me Jim.' He grinned at me and nodded. 'Anyway, we had just found out about the aliens about a year before you came along. We discovered them because we had detected their gravitational signatures. We shot one of them down with a warp missile and it crashed into Neptune. The ship made a huge splash and was apparently disabled. When we went in to take a look the ship was empty. I mean, we got to the ship just a minute or two after it impacted the planet and nothing. No alien bodies. Nothing. But we did manage to dig out their computer system. The one you saw pictures of.'
'Okay, Jim, but what had you not been told?' Tatiana interjected.
Anson interrupted, 'Y'all ain't gonna believe this but the damned CIA and the Strategic Space command had radar data of alien spacecraft spanning back more than forty or fifty years. The spacecraft seemed to disappear about twenty-five years ago. The DOD and CIA just thought that they had left. Of course, all the knowledge of these radar tracks is way above Top Secret and my guess is they haven't told us the complete story yet.' He paused to let that sink in a little bit. It didn't really matter, as I knew that the aliens had been around a lot longer. I hadn't sprung that on them yet.
Anson Clemons continued, 'We figured out that they never really left and that they just started cloaking their ships from the EM spectrum. I guess the aliens figured out that we knew they were there. But you can't cloak gravity since it is just a shape. Hellfire, we managed to start detecting them in no time.'
'Yeah, and the damned things were everywhere,' 'Becca added. 'The first day we got the detector working there were no less than seven hits! We thought our system was wrong.'
'So I sent out all four of our ships to investigate,' General Clemons continued our briefing. 'One of those ships was lost with all hands. We still aren't sure what happened to them. We've studied the ship we shot down at Neptune, which was much smaller than the one you two liberated. We didn't even seem to dent it. So we aren't quite sure why it stayed down.' Tabitha shrugged her shoulders and pushed a lock of red hair down over the light scar on her forehead.
'I can answer some of your questions about the aliens, I think,' I suggested. 'As you may have discovered by now, the alien ship doesn't use a warp drive. It uses . . . well, uh . . . something a lot different and that is much much faster. But since they are not inside a warp bubble they are not in a region of flat space where gravity and inertia seems normal. So the Grays' ships use some sort of inertial dampeners. When you guys shot us with your warp missile we pulled over seven positive and negative g-forces fluctuating randomly for more than three minutes. It would have probably killed normal people. The inertial dampeners were taxed to more than one hundred and ten percent. My guess is that a smaller ship couldn't handle the forces as well. Also, that sudden stop at Neptune probably was way more than even the system on the bigger ships could handle. And the little Grays are tough, but not any tougher than we are; I would guess less, actually. I killed the first two pretty easily. I don't think they could take the gees that Tatiana and I pulled.'
'Wait a minute,' Anne Marie said. 'That doesn't explain where the bodies were.'
'No, I'm not sure about that, let me think about it for a bit.'
