"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." Mike, do you have any idea about that?
They were levitated to another ship, Steven.
Oh, I see. Uh, how were they levitated?
The same way you were, with the tractor beam. All of the abductees are taken that way. I will download the information to you. I am surprised you never asked about it before now.
It never dawned on me. Instantly I knew all about the tractor beam mechanism. It basically worked like a projectable gravitational field modification. The idea was very similar to the concepts investigated by Boeing back in the early years of the millennium that were based on the so-called Podkletnov experiment. Nobody had ever been able to show that Podkletnov's work was reproducible, but according to the data Mike had just given me about the Grays' technology Podkletnov was on the verge of something pretty big. He had 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.
Caught me not paying attention, didn't you?
Is this boring you, gorgeous?
Nah, but I don't understand why we keep setting around in meeting after meeting. Why don't we take some of this to the aliens? We know how to knock them down.
How would you suggest we knock them down, Tatiana?
You mean you haven't figured it out?
I guess not.
Well, if the ship colliding with a planet at warp velocity stops them, then what happens to a ship trapped between two warp fields?
A squeeze play?
Why not? Mikhail, what do you think?
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, why don't you explain your idea to the rest of the team here?
Sure, why not?
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 nee
d 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.
Mike, open channel. I told him open channel since I wanted Tatiana to hear. I placed my empty sniffer or cognac glass or whatever the thing was on the table and tried not to make an ugly face as the vile stuff went down. Tatiana just giggled. Are Tatiana and I the only abductees-turned-liberators out of all of the abductees in the past?
Perhaps, Steven, but from the data I have that is inconclusive. The Grays would not know about you and Tatiana. They would only know that they had lost a ship and members of the hive.
I see your point.
Steven, what about that? Tatiana interjected. Why don't we look for missing hive members or ships throughout our history?
Good idea, Tatiana, Mike replied to her. His growing intellect allowed him to distinguish orders from Tatiana that appeared to have no conflict of interest to our health. As long as that didn't occur Mike would accept orders or requests from her now . . . to a point.
Yeah Mike, that is a good idea, I added.
Okay, here is the data. And the number of Gray spacecraft lost in our solar system versus Earth's timeline appeared in our heads.
The pertinent data was simple. The only time Gray ships appeared to have been lost in our history was in the zero and b.c. timeframe, and then the two that were most recently lost. Obviously, the two lost recently were the one that the W-squared team shot down and the one that Tatiana and I took. But five thousand years ago there was a dramatic period of lost Gray ships in our solar system. Integrating the area under the curve on the graph suggests nearly a hundred Gray ships were lost between three thousand twenty-five b.c. and about fifty a.d. and then there were no spacecraft lost between then and the present. That really blows a hole in the Roswell crash theory doesn't it? Nothing seemed to shed light on the alien abduction stories in our popular culture, though.
CHAPTER 17
On several occasions since finding him I had asked Mike to explain to me about the Grays' history and where they came from. He seemed only to have navigational data as to various alien homeworlds (the Grays' homeworld was one he didn't have) and data about the abductees. He explained to me that this was because he didn't know the Grays' mission and that he only flew the ship, ran day-to-day functions, and took care of certain mundane data storage. The Grays were great strategists and didn't really need the SuperAgents involved in their business. Consider a computer on the web, Mike said. The computer is useful, but the goals of the computer's owner are not known to the computer itself.
Using the navigational data in Mike we put together a map of the Milky Way and overlaid upon it territories of various aliens. Anson and Anne Marie and I were discussing this one morning over doughnuts and coffee (I was having a Mountain Dew) and Anson noticed something startling.
"So, let me see if I understand this completely." Anson stroked his thinning hairline and took a swig of his coffee. "The blue area is where we have been and the green is where we have looked. The tiny dot that makes on the galaxy overlay is just that, a dot. The red area here is Gray territory, this yellow area is some other alien, and there are no other aliens in the galaxy?"
"Well, Anson, I'm not sure that's right. The SuperAgent on board the Phoenix just says that the large areas are controlled by the Grays and the Lumpeyins, whoever they are. It doesn't say if they are the only species or not. But it does appear that the Grays and the Lumpeyins have divided the galaxy between them," I explained.
Anne Marie leaned across the table and grabbed a doughnut. "Yeah, I see that, but what about at higher resolutions? Are there other species like us embedded in there?"
"Good question, Annie. Let me ask it." I leaned back in my chair and talked to Mike verbally as I had been doing in front of the W-squared folks. "Mike, do you have data on other species and can you mark them on the graphic display with a black x?"
"Sure, Steven." Mike responded over the intercom we had set up a few days earlier. The image of the painted galaxy on the flat-screen display now had two thousand or so black x's on it.
"Wow!" Annie exclaimed.
"I had no idea!"
"Mike," Anson asked, "can you zoom in on our area and show it at a scale that will show us the boundary between us and the Grays' territory?"
"Yes."
"Look at that; it's a perfect circle around us, two hundred light years in diameter. No wonder we haven't found any aliens yet," Anne Marie pointed out.
"Mike, can you tell me if there are other of these civilizations that have such a perfect boundary about them?" Anson was on to something, but I wasn't sure what.
"Yes, about a quarter of them display such boundaries," Mike replied.
"What? You mean five hundred or so of these spots have a two-hundred-light-year diameter boundary around them?" I asked.
"Yes, Steven, exactly five hundred seventeen," Mike assured me in the automaton voice he used for the intercom.
Anson stroked his chin and then leaned back in his chair. "Mike could you paint these with a bright orange x instead of a black one?
"Yes," Mike said.
The image now displayed was startling. All of the orange x's were deep inside the Grays' red-painted region of the galaxy. What did this mean?
Anson stroked his chin again and ran his fingers through his hair. He picked up his coffee cup but then set it back down before he took a sip from it. "That's it! We are quarantined from the Grays for some reason or other. It could be due to a Prime Directive like in Star Trek or fear or some treaty with these Lumpeyins or, heck, it might even be an actual quarantine. Who knows? The one thing I am sure of is this. The Grays outgun us and outnumber us by a huge portion of the galaxy. Their resources must be immense. So, something is keeping them from conquering us. Maybe it is these Lumpeyins doing it. Somebody had to have been around five thousand years ago with technology that could shoot them down and I'm betting on them."
Then I had an epiphany and opened my private channel with Mike.
Mike, are any of these quarantined planets locations with isolated abductees?
That is a very interesting question, Steven. The answer is yes. All of the planets in the quarantined regions have isolated abductees in them.
Do any of the nonquarantined planets have isolated abd
uctees in them? I held my breath for an eternity during the millisecond it took for Mike to process the data and return with an answer.
No, Steven. Only the planets with quarantines have any of the isolated abductees.
My God, Mike, what does that mean?
I do not have enough data to give you an answer, Steven, sorry.
One thing was certain. It was time to come clean with the W-squared folks and with Tatiana, but in what order? I owed it to Tatiana to talk with her first. Besides, I loved her and I could no longer justify hiding this from her. After lunch I went to find Tatiana. She had been out on a routine patrol with 'Becca and several other soldier types. In the weeks that had followed the battle between us and the W-squared people Tatiana and 'Becca had made amends and had actually become friends. She had also befriended 'Becca's sidekick, Sara Tibbs. Apparently, Sara was an original member of the warp drive development team. Sara and 'Becca were a pair, much like a younger sister/older sister arrangement ('Becca being the oldest).
Tatiana, 'Becca, and Sara had completed a Solar Focus Telescope survey and were now hanging out on the patio of the Luna Grill by the lake. I knew this because several times during the mission Tatiana and I had tested the link between the SuperAgents. We never even had a fuzzy connection or a time lag even with more than six hundred astronomical units separating us. It was cool.
Obviously, the signals were noncausal and we began discussing temporal paradox issues. Soon after heading down the horrid path of temporal mechanics I got a headache and gave up.
What if you traveled toward me at warp speed and I thought to you to turn your vessel to the right? Would I see you travel to the right before I thought the message to you? Could we devise a way to send a message back in time that would be useful? Tatiana asked
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