The Quantum Connection

'Detonate the bomb,' I said.

'Okay, Steven. It is done.'

'That's it?' Jim asked.

'What did you expect, Jim? I mean, we have to be at least a light year or more away by now.' Anson slugged him on the shoulder. 'Hold on a minute. Tabitha, we are on board!' he said over the ships intercom.

'Yeehaw!' Tabitha let out a Texan hoot. I just knew that if she had had a cowgirl hat she would have slapped her knee with it, whirled it about in the air, and then tossed it. 'Well, get up here. Y'all need to see this.'

We rushed up to the bridge just in time to see the Lumpeya City star system dwindle out of range of the sensors of the Phoenix. 'Becca was fiddling with one of the display panels.

'Check this out,' she said. 'Michelle was able to hack into a system on the moon of Lumpeya City and got this image just a few seconds ago. Okay, run it Michelle.'

'Okay, Rebecca,' Michelle said.

An image of Lumpeya City with a resolution of about five kilometers per pixel appeared on the screen. A second or two of the image played through and then the screen went totally white, the image saturation compensated, and then the planet came back into view but this time with a giant mushroom cloud larger than the entire continent of North America. We only realized this because 'Becca zoomed out to a planet-sized view. Most of the mountain continent was totally destroyed. Lumpeya City was no more and the ocean was rolling in where the mountains once stood. The dust filled the sky and would soon blacken out the sun of the red devil's homeworld. That was fitting, I thought. It serves the pricks right for toying with us. I laughed and felt good about it.

'We were under some pretty hefty fire until that thing went off,' Tabitha said. 'Then all of our pursuers just dropped off and left us alone.'

'What now?' Jim asked.

'Well, first I want to let Tatiana out of her cage,' I said.

'Consider it done, son.' Anson went and toggled a switch on a panel in front of Tabitha. Then into the intercom he said, 'Tatiana Montana, please report to the bridge. Your husband is lost without you.'

Tabitha punched Anson in the back. 'Y'all don't get too cocky. We just smoked a lot of big red devils and one rather important little Gray. I would imagine their friends are gonna get pretty pissed at us when they figure out what happened.'

Tatiana burst through the bridge door. 'What's going on?'

I held up the picophage controller and waved it at her. 'You're all mine now, baby!'

CHAPTER 28

We spent a few minutes resting and thinking about our next move. Tabitha was right; the Grays would be pissed at us and would soon be coming for us. The question was, how long would it take for the Grays to figure out what had happened? If we assumed that Prawmitoos got a message off to the Grays, then they would be preparing for us. We had a secret weapon that neither the Grays nor the Lumpeyins could reproduce. Mike, Tatiana and I had figured out how to send matter in super-miniature warp bubbles over the universal Infrastructure from one SuperAgent to another. Even if one of the aliens that saw us vanish into thin air survived the explosion at Lumpeya City—which sounds impossible—it wouldn't have understood what happened to us. To the alien it would appear that we just vanished and there would be no way of them knowing that we used the YIT connection to travel. We all decided that this was the single most important information that the human race now had and it should be the most guarded secret in the history of mankind. Think about it. If hostile aliens knew how to approach us by quantum connecting through our SuperAgents then they could zip in and out of our society at will—assuming we place these SuperAgents rampantly throughout our civilization. Complete armies could travel through the YIT by using a warp bubble that was large on the inside and small enough on the outside to travel through the Infrastructure.

This was exactly what we planned to do—warp armies through the YIT and take the fight to the Grays. We needed to get closer to home first, but our present location was a good twelve days from Earth at maximum warp velocity and that could be too late if the Grays decided to immediately eradicate Earth. We couldn't quantum connect to Earth because there were no SuperAgents there. We only had Mike and Michelle available and had used up the last bit of the rare alien materials needed to build SuperAgents on Michelle, so we couldn't just make another one. We needed to get to Earth faster than maximum warp allowed, so we had to find a SuperAgent close to home to surf the YIT to.

'Mike, can you find where there are Phoenix-class Gray ships as close to Earth as possible?' Jim said.

'Yes, Jim. There are seven Gray ships in the outer part of the Sol System now and there are nineteen Gray vessels dispersed evenly about the quarantine zone's edge.'

'Then we should take the ones at Earth first,' Tabitha said.

'Michelle, can you fly the Phoenix back to Earth's Moon without us?' 'Becca asked.

'Of course I can, Rebecca,' Michelle answered.

'What's our plan for taking the ships?' Anson asked.

'It will be easy, Anson,' Tatiana said. 'Steven and I beat them as normal humans with no warp armor or anything like that. We only had a couple of machine guns each.'

'I helped a little,' Mike said.

'Of course you did, sweetheart. I'm sorry and I didn't mean to forget you, Mike,' Tatiana said.

'So, how about this? We armor up, zip into the operating room of one of the ships and, with the warp bubbles, we run around the ship and squish the blue blood right out of a bunch of little Gray monsters,' I suggested.

'Sounds like a helluva plan to me!' Anson said.