The Quantum Connection

'Okay, let's do it!' Tabitha ordered.

* * *

We loaded up for bear and little Gray aliens. Once, Tatiana couldn't get her gear to sit straight and I had to touch her and let the nanomachines fix it. She told me that she felt naked without Mikhail. I assured her that as soon as we got more SuperAgent material we would remedy the situation.

We also let the gang in on the mind communication through the SuperAgent link. We trusted them all completely now and they didn't seem too sore about the fact that we had kept that from them. They had known Tatiana and I could communicate to each other through the SuperAgents, but we had not told them that anybody could with a simple temple implant. Anson commented that we had learned the secret weapon lesson well and that he was proud of us.

We all told Michelle that we would see her in a few days and then Mike closed the warp bubble around us. The bubble shrunk down and we were riding the quantum connection a third of the way across the galaxy, about thirty thousand light years. We popped out into the abductee operating room of the Gray alien spaceship and there were two catatonic humans lying on floating stretchers. The room we were in was completely white and it was very bright. We settled to the floor quietly and the two Grays working on one of the humans were caught totally unaware.

Tatiana moved so fast that you couldn't see her snapping the necks of the two little monsters. Ick! This brings back some bad memories, huh, Steven?

Yeah, it does. Mike, can you take over the programming of this SuperAgent like I did you? 

Already done, Steven. 

Excellent. Open the doors and let's go squish some Grays! 

How many are there? Tabitha thought.

There are nine more aliens aboard, Mike told us. Then he displayed a map of the spaceship in all of our heads. There were little blinking red dots where the live Grays were.

Okay, just like we planned, three teams. Tatiana and I will take the three on the bridge, I thought to them.

Anson and I will take the three in the aft section! 

'Becca and I will take the other three. Good hunting! 

We split up into three different directions and went about taking the ship. The ship was similar to the Phoenix, minus the humanizing that had been done to it. With the warp armor we all made light work of the Grays on board. It took us about seven seconds to take the ship. The Grays never even knew we were coming.

We went through similar steps and took all seven of the Gray ships in Sol space. We felt an urgency to quickly take as many ships as we could, because who knew how the Grays were going to react when they discovered we had the controller and had blown up one of their nobles.

Once we had liberated all of the vessels Mike generated a replacement for Mikhail, and Tatiana and I zipped back into the little confinement singularity where he was trapped. We replaced him with a dumb SuperAgent and Tatiana picked him up and placed him against her navel. Mikhail quickly dissolved through her skin and placed himself inside her abdomen. I touched her and gave her a crew of nanomachines to make her complete.

Let's get out of here. 

Okay, Steven. Mikhail, it is great to have you back! 

It is great to be back, Tatiana. 

Now, we are all one big happy family again, I said and toggled the warp field back on. The bubble grew opaque. It was the last we would ever see of the little prison the Grays had trapped Tatiana in.

You think Opolawn is enjoying his accommodations? I asked Tatiana.

I hope he hates it! Tatiana said as we popped back into the belly of the commandeered Gray spaceship.

We zipped the new ships back to the Moon and reprogrammed all of the SuperAgents to be more like Mike— that is, to be loyal to humanity and to us in particular. We updated Annie, Al, and Sara on current events and decided that a good plan of action would be to take as many alien ships as we could. So we recruited fifteen of the most trusted members of the military moon colony that we knew. Tabitha reminded them all of their oaths and then we trained them on how to take the Gray ships. Before Michelle returned to the Moon, we had taken thirty-seven Gray ships and were retrofitting them for human use.

We sent out teams every day over the Infrastructure and captured more and more alien ships and technologies. Each of the teams carried one SuperAgent with nanomachine accompaniment and each time they would bring back more and more alien materials and resources. With the Infrastructure and our new means of traveling through it we were rapidly spreading out through the local cluster.

And then the Grays came. Just a few weeks after we had returned from Lumpeya City they came in a fleet of more than a thousand Phoenix-class ships.

Fortunately, we knew about it. We had infected most of the SuperAgents within a thousand-light-year radius of Earth. The Grays were still fairly oblivious to hackers. It seemed that this was a human specialty that was lost on them. Although they made some attempts to set up firewalls, we quickly hacked them down. Tatiana and Mike had overcome the isolated abductee firewall through familiarity and cunning reexamination of instruction definitions. It was like arguing with yourself what the definition of the word is is—you can convince yourself of a lot of things that way. Like I said, the Grays were no good at keeping generations of hackers out of the Infrastructure.

We would ping out through the Infrastructure waiting for 'connection established' or 'denied returns' and then start in with code decryption hacks and backdoor tricks. The only thing missing was dumpster dives. Since we didn't know what the Grays did with their garbage we couldn't go and dig through it. We didn't need to; as I said, the Grays were amateurs at designing firewalls. Once we established a data connection we simply made a quantum