'Yeah, you're right, Tab. And that's just the Gray's nanomachines. Since the Lumpeyins use the miniature warp bubbles in the Dr. Who's phone booth configuration, they could put little SuperAgents in there and control them through the Infrastructure,' 'Becca said.
'Hey! 'Bec, that is probably exactly how those things work. The Infrastructure transceivers in the picophage warp bubbles are probably low-level SuperAgents,' Tatiana said.
'We'll have to consider that. That might give us an edge on stopping that damned picophage ahead of schedule,' Anson said. He was already on another beer.
'I hate to change the subject back to where we were a few minutes ago, but,' Jim said, 'what about the quarantined aliens? They would most likely use radio signals. I'll bet you with the Solar Focus telescope we could pick up their signals.'
'Why would we want to do that, Jim? We can just take the
'Just for the hell of it and to prove that we were right about the SETI folks. Then if we find the signals we could figure out a way to detect them from public radio observatories.' Jim was getting excited.
'Hey, I see where you are going here. If we can point the idiots in the right direction and find a real E.T. signal then we will have shown the public that there are indeed aliens out there. A great start in the informing of the general public process,' Tabitha added.
'Well, that too.' Jim smirked. 'But I was thinking more along the lines of showing those Utopians up. Why can't our team be the one that goes public with the observation? It would show those guys up, big time.'
'Hayul fahr! I like it!' Anson said.
'Honey . . .' 'Becca smiled. 'You're still pissed that you didn't get to go to M.I.T. aren't you?' Rebecca let out an intoxicated giggle.
'Hey, we did the work. We ought to go in the history books somewhere.' Jim sounded a little irked. 'Hell, Anson invented the first warp drive and flew us out to other worlds and enabled us to have a first real defense against would-be alien attackers. Stevie and Tatiana over there stole and redesigned alien technologies that have revolutionized the way that we think about the universe. And all of our efforts combined have enabled us to become one of the most powerful species in the galaxy! Or at least powerful enough to hold off alien invasions.'
That evening we decided to start working on a plan to get radio telescope time at Arecibo. Tabitha and Annie were going to work that through NASA and Air Force channels. Anson, Rebecca, and Jim were going to use the Solar Focus telescope to find radio signals from the various quarantined planets. Tatiana and I first bounced out to each of these systems in the
All said and done it took us about six months to pick the right candidates, detect them from space, determine how to modify the receivers at the large dish in Arecibo, and then to get dish time there. We all took a two-week vacation in Puerto Rico and spent all of that time in the radio telescope facility on top of the mountain. We had everything set up and ready to go in a matter of a couple days because the nanomachines facilitated the equipment upgrade process very quickly. In fact, there were a few times where we had trouble explaining to the facilities officer how we had changed some things so quickly.
We just told him that we had plenty of budget and that we were really good at what we did. He didn't like that response until Annie came around and told him to stop asking questions or she would have him removed from the facility. When the fellow protested that she couldn't have him removed, Annie had him removed just to prove the point. She let him back in two days later after he promised to behave himself. Besides, we had detected one of the quarantined civilizations the day before and we wanted there to be witnesses. We found a whole bunch of communications signals at about thirty-two gigahertz. They were very low power and required state-of-the-art amplifiers, but we could detect them. We also, miraculously, discovered signals around five other star systems. The radio astronomers and SETI folks hanging around the facility couldn't believe what they were seeing.
A week later, when we announced it on the international news channels, the world couldn't believe it. SETI had been at it for so long with no luck that the general public never really expected them to find anything. The announcement was made and we were all interviewed to a great extent. We all made a big point about the fact that we weren't considered part of the typical SETI community. We all got a big laugh out of that and we also all got to offer our opinions as to what types of aliens there might be out there. Here is when we really showed how different we were from the SETI folks.
We made it very obvious that we thought that the possibility that these aliens might come and give us the cure for cancer was ridiculous and it was more likely that they would want to come and eat us, or something equally unpleasant. There were a few heated debates with some of the academic community but Jim and Anson and Tabitha and 'Becca really held their own. They truly were brilliant and it was a good thing that they were on our side. After about three more years of this debate and fun, we had to go back to our real jobs—defending the planet. The damned Grays had finally decided that they would make another attempt at overtaking humanity. But we had been preparing for them all along.
There had been nearly five years with no word from the Grays except for border skirmishes along the edge of the quarantine zone. So we decided we had better spread out as best we could while we could. After all, we figured it would be harder tactically to destroy many worlds as opposed to just one.
We took complete groups of volunteers and all the materials we could muster and warped them through the quantum connection and the Infrastructure to all of the habitable worlds within the quarantine zone. We warped a complement of retrofitted alien spaceships through the Infrastructure to each of the outpost colonies. After all, we could make the inside of the warp bubble pretty much as large as we wanted to. We even warped some closed- down military facilities from Earth through to some of the outpost worlds. We took ghost towns, trailer parks, condemned shopping malls, you name it. We only took things in the middle of the night and even then we were seldom without witnesses. We would either recruit the witnesses or pay them off. We always had construction crews working the place the next morning so nobody was the wiser. Oh, there was some talk on the Internet about it but only on the crackpot sites. After all, there were no such things as UFOs and alien abductions. And there never would be again!
Once we placed a SuperAgent on each of the outpost planets we could quantum connect basically anything between any two SuperAgent locations. Our population and presence in space were growing. Our recruitment program back on Earth was put into high gear and we picked up as many volunteers as possible. With the inflow of technology and the rapid nanomachine production at the 'diamond factory,' we were able to offer high wages to any new volunteers. We had reached nearly forty outpost worlds and now had a fleet of more than a thousand retrofitted spacecraft with superfast quantum fluctuation drives and humanized SuperAgents. It was all kept so 'above Top Secret' and compartmentalized that if you weren't 'in the know' then you weren't 'in the know.'
Our plan was to spread out and build up as big an empire as we possibly could so we could have a better
