just missed a few things here and there. It wasn't that much different from Clemons's warp field coil and projectable warp fields.
Tatiana leaned forward in her chair and winked at me as she adjusted a lock of dark curls that dangled in her face. The lock seemed to annoy her and not go where she wanted to. Then the lock simply vanished and her hairline seemed to adjust itself for the missing lock almost instantly. She giggled a bit to herself when she noticed that I caught what she was doing.
If a ship the size of the Phoenix were caught between high warp impacts, it would crush the ship and the degenerate matter pressure of the hull material could not withstand the compression forces. Mikhail's voice resounded in my mind for a second or two.
Warp missiles could destroy the Gray ships. So we could at least defend ourselves. We needed more warp ships and more warp missiles.
Tatiana spent the next hour or so going over the dynamics and quantum mechanics of the degenerate matter hull materials and how the ships are made of materials like a white dwarf or a neutron star. The material was made of closely packed fermions that were squeezed in as close to each other as Pauli's exclusion principle would allow. But Pauli's exclusion isn't an infinite force and when squeezed tight enough the material will collapse even further. The only thing more compacted than a degenerate matter star would be a black hole. It was unclear even to Tatiana's enhanced mind if the squeeze play would cause the alien ships to collapse further into a pseudo- or mini- black hole or if forces would become imbalanced and the ships would explode with the force of a small supernova. It was decided to try the attack as far away from our solar system as possible.
We discussed the attack possibilities further and hashed it out to a viable plan. Then we changed the subject a bit toward the why and what of the Grays' plan. Nobody on the W-squared team had any information and Tatiana and I were the only data points they had encountered. So, obviously, they had a million questions, most of which we had never really bothered to ask Mike or Mikhail about.
We tag-teamed the answers. While one of us would answer the previous question and in so doing stall long enough, the other would be asking Mike or Mikhail the answer to the next question. Tatiana had finally asked me a few days before why we were not telling the W-squared group about the SuperAgent's mental and physical presence with us. I told her that I wasn't ready to give them up for study just yet. We had never really talked about it before, but Tatiana saw that I wasn't ready to let the cat out of the bag about Mike, so she kept her mouth shut about Mikhail. As far as the others knew, the nanomachines were under our direct control and not controlled via the SuperAgents stored in our abdomens. I had made a replica SuperAgent back on the ship before anybody became suspicious that we had removed the original.
You might think that I was being covert or subversive or just plain untrustworthy. There might have been some of that but there was something more that I couldn't put my finger on. I felt at home with the lunar crowd. They seemed to be super individuals. Of course, they had tried to kill both Tatiana and me earlier, but they thought we were aliens. Still, that must've been causing me to have some subconscious trepidations about trusting them. I was also afraid that there was going to be a need to have the power that Mike enabled me with in the coming future. And besides, I found Mike, reprogrammed him, and in a sense gave birth to his new personality and sentience, so I felt responsible for him. He had also become a part of me in more than just the physical way. I could tell that Tatiana felt the same way about Mikhail. No, we were not giving up Mike and Mikhail anytime soon.
Tatiana and I worked out techniques to make it look like we were thinking about things rather than communicating them. Occasionally, I would have Mike act like the alien ship's SuperAgent and answer questions over the speakers in the automaton voice that he had when I first found him.
'It would appear as though the Grays have been around for thousands of years,' Tatiana told them.
'Yeah, I did an analysis and it appears that the abductions seem to increase during periods where there are wars.' I showed them the graphics that Mike and I had put together back a few weeks ago. There was more about the isolated abductees but I couldn't tell them with Tatiana in the room. Not yet, not until I knew what it was all about. Don't get me wrong. I trusted Tatiana with my life and . . . I loved . . . Lazarus was the only other creature that I had loved nearly as much . . . poor Laz, I miss you, buddy. But there was something about this isolated abductees thing that spooked me and I couldn't put my finger on it. What would happen if the isolated abductee discovered what they were? I didn't know, so I couldn't take any chances.
The most important point remained that the Grays had been here for a long time. And from the data I had gathered via Mike, they had abducted scores of people.
* * *
Tatiana and were hanging out at the Luna Grill by the lake drinking Russian cognac—I didn't really like the stuff but Tatiana wanted me to try it. Besides, I planned to wash it down with a few beers afterward.
