The Quantum Connection ws-2

by Travis S. Taylor

  Anson and Jim were holding their own with him and my abrupt return caught Opolawn off guard. I hammered him four kilometers straight down through the temple and into the crust of the planet itself. As we passed down through layer after layer of crust and water tables and limestone Opolawn finally stopped the downward momentum and flung me hard sideways a good half of a kilometer through the limestone bed. He shot upward to the surface only to be sandwiched by Anson and Jim.

  I plowed up through the crust and surfaced through the center of the city, causing the large columns to topple in a couple of places. When those thousand-meter columns fell, they really fell!

  "Where are you?" I called out.

  "We're over the river by the landing strip again!" Jim said.

  "And you ain't gonna believe this shit, but the air field is in perfect condition and I think I just saw Prawmitoos trying to make his way across to the little alien ship. Yeeow!!" Anson replied just as Opolawn hammered him.

  "GIVE UP MONKEYS! YOU CANNOT DEFEAT ME!" the alien emperor's voice boomed through the comm.

  "Anson's hit escape velocity, Steven! I need some help here!" Jim said. I could see a mountain a few hundred kilometers off to the east explode as Anson passed through it and continued on spaceward. Opolawn had hit him hard.

  Jim and I tried to squeeze Opolawn several times but to no avail—he was too fast! We actually banged into each other a couple of times a little harder than I would've liked and the sky was filled with window-shattering sonic booms. Then I rushed Opolawn and stopped short with a feint that caused a shock wave to scatter debris in his face. Jim hammered him. Opolawn's larger, more sluggish bubble only moved a few kilometers. But it gave us a millisecond to breathe.

  "I don't think we can force his warp field to overload, Jim!" I said.

  "I think you're right, aaagggh!" Jim splashed and skipped through the ocean and traced out into orbit as he caught the full brunt of a lightning bolt from Opolawn.

  "We have to get out of here, guys!" I yelled over the comm.

  Opolawn and I were chasing each other around in circles until Anson poured up from the ocean and grabbed Opolawn by surprise. With a great sonic boom Anson forced him upward and upward and upward until I could see an explosion on the surface of the moon of Lumpeya City above. An outsider looking in at the battle might have thought that it looked like something from a comic book, like Superman's epic fight against Doomsday, or a video game like the Gladiator Sequence, or an episode of Dragonball Z 3D, but this was no game or comic book and there was no television magic required here. This was a battle of wills and alien technology and good old human stubbornness!

  Jim settled down beside me.

  "What kept you?" I asked.

  "Them!" He pointed at more of Opolawn's fighters bearing in on us. Anson appeared from the top of them taking out several and scattering the rest. Opolawn wouldn't be far behind and we were getting overwhelmed and tired.

  Mike, can you give me an edge on Opolawn somehow?

  I can track him in your mind, Steven, but you aren't fast enough to outmaneuver him. Opolawn's computational skills are quite remarkable. I fear you are not capable of defeating him, Mike warned me.

  Are you? I asked as we started back through the wheel with Opolawn, and now more of his fighters were entering the wheel as well.

  What do you mean, Steven? Mike asked.

  Could you take over my body and take him?

  YES!

  DO IT, MIKE!

  Then it was a whirlwind even faster than I had been experiencing before. I was zigging and zagging and looping and diving and slamming faster than my mind could grasp. Once I noticed that Mike had pushed Anson and Jim to the ground. Jim grounded on the little Gray ship and toppled it over with Prawmitoos inside it. I think Mike did that on purpose.

  Then he dropped below Opolawn and dodged his barrages. Interestingly enough, with each barrage of fire that Opolawn made it forced Jim and Anson to leap and dodge and move closer together with respect to each other. I was moving so fast and the stress was so great that occasionally I thought I heard tears and cracks in my body—but I was feeling no pain. The nanomachines may have been working. I wasn't sure if Mike was using all of his computational powers to fight Opolawn or not. But Mike kept pushing and pushing and pushing. He taunted Opolawn into following him to extreme altitude and then he turned back planetward. We zipped past each other head to head at near light speed. Had we collided I'm not sure the little warp field generator on my belt could've taken the stress. Fortunately, Mike swerved at the last nanosecond.

  Opolawn stopped and reversed course in pursuit of us and he fired off more of his lightning bolts. A blinding barrage of Opolawn's fire flung Jim and Anson skipping back across the landing field and through the hangar doors of the temple. Mike dropped below Opolawn at maximum velocity and I thought I could feel my right hand going through my rear zip pocket, but it all happened in a matter of microseconds so I wasn't too sure about it. Mike dropped me continuously for a full two hundred milliseconds, several tens of kilometers below Opolawn, and shut off the warp field at about five hundred milliseconds before impacting the ground. If I hit the ground—or air—at that velocity I would have been turned to dust, but we were still in space so there was no atmosphere for me to slam into or breathe. But the warp field was only off a microsecond or less.

  Then the freckle-faced soldier Gray's credit card that I had kept all this time turned on and the blue-white light flowed from it as if in slow motion. Mike hit the warp bubble again and I was holding the credit card above my head with the warp field and the beam of light formed as Mike stopped me cold on the surface of the planet just outside the hangar on the bank of the river. A ring of dust and debris was thrown up around me as the blue-white light flowed upward from the credit card and into Opolawn's trajectory. Opolawn was moving way too fast to stop and he flew right into the Gray confinement singularity beam. I stood in an Okinawan Karate Cat stance with my hands above my head, holding the confinement beam with my warp armor's field, and the blue-white light of the Gray confinement singularity surrounded Opolawn and then began to collapse. The blue-white ball of light rapidly vanished and then was gone. Opolawn was now trapped inside the forever-contracting singularity. How long would his warp field hold out—three or four millennia? Who knew, but if he didn't have a SuperAgent in there with him and if he didn't know how to use it he was doomed to be squished when his systems could no longer handle the crushing stress. Eventually, all parts would give out and Opolawn would die!

  Mike let me rest for a second or two while he put the nanomachines to work on me. I still stood in the odd fighting pose at the edge of the river's bank. Then Mike gave my body back to me.

  It's all yours, Steven. We beat him.

  Mike, that sure was a lot like a memory of mine.

  Yes, indeed, Steven. It was your memory and it was a great strategy.

  Did you read my mind?

  You said I could take over your body. Should I not have?

  You did right, Mike. Let's get out of here.

  Steven?

  Yes, Mike, what is it?

  Just one more thing . . . JACKIEZZ WINS!!! The image of little JackieZZ's overemphasized female video likeness flooded my mind.

  "Thank you, JackieZZ, wherever you are!" I said.

  Uh, Steven?

  Yes, Mike?

  We've got company so we'd better go.

  Right, Mike. I rolled over Superman style and flew to the hangar. I rolled over on my back and could see more of the fighters converging on our position. I swooped down and caught Anson and Jim in my warp bubble while Mike shook hands and negotiated with the SuperAgent on the hangar's construction computer. As we started to shrink out and just before the warp bubble went opaque I caught a glimpse of Prawmitoos running into the hangar with the replica Himbroozya controller in his hand and then the bubble went black and we slipped through the quantum connection of the SuperAgent in the Lumpeya City hangar bay.

 
We immediately appeared inside the supply room just outside of Michelle in the Phoenix. I turned the warp bubble off and scanned the room. Jim and Anson were drenched in sweat and I was sure I looked the same. The three of us were exhausted.

  "Did you fellows catch ol' Prawmitoos running after us just as we left?" I asked them.

  "I saw him running across the field toward us just before you picked us up. Why?"

  "Well, uh . . . he had the thing that goes Big Bang in his hands," I said.

  "Then by all means, son, don't disappoint the little bastard. Go ahead and detonate it," Anson said with a huge—as he would put it—shit eatin' grin on his face.

  "Should I? You wouldn't think any less of me would ya?" I laughed. "Mike, can you hear me?"

  "Yes, Steven," Mike's voice came through the supply room speakers.

  "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.

  "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.