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 connection through the Infrastructure, warped into the bellies of the oncoming assault fleet and took the ships from them.
Tatiana and I were along for the battle. We took several of the ships ourselves. In fact, the entire crew was along. Our battle plan required everybody aware of the SuperAgents and warp armor and the Infrastructure to be involved. At such short notice, only a few weeks after returning from Lumpeya City, we were not really completely prepared for an attack of a fleet of a thousand ships. After all, we had only captured and refurbished some thirty-odd Gray ships to date. But we weren't giving up.
Tabitha had developed a great tactical plan of slash and burn and move on. She decided that as many of us as could, would teleport from one ship to the next ship, kill the Gray crew, then move on to the next one, and repeat the process until there were no Grays in the attack fleet left standing.
There were a hundred and two of us, each with warp armor and we had had enough time to create a hundred new SuperAgents, each with its own personality. All of the slash-and-burn team members had volunteered to have the SuperAgents implanted in their respective abdomens and each of us had temple implants. We would take teams of two through to each alien ship and therefore each team would have to take at least twenty of the Grays' ships. Tabitha rallied us before the plan was implemented and gave us a pep talk.
"Attention all personnel, this is General Clemons." She paused for a second and cleared her throat. "An alien threat of far superior firepower is approaching us at superluminal velocity. These aliens are known as the Teytoonis, and indeed are as powerful as the gods from our ancient mythology. These aliens . . . these Teytoonis are self-centered and believe themselves to be the only species that should exist in the universe. Well, I disagree with them and I am sure you do too. We are going to strike these monsters with cunning and human brilliance the likes of which this alien species has never seen before. Leave no alien survivors . . . our own survival depends on this. You must also not be captured under any circumstances. The aliens must not have access to our technology. If you are caught, you have been briefed what to do and I expect—humanity expects—that you follow orders. Good luck, good hunting, and God bless." Tabitha paused again to let her words ring through the lunar base and then she added in her voice of command, "MOVE OUT!"
Tatiana and I were second in line on the Phoenix and were preparing to quantum connect to our first target. Michelle had already passed through the first two-man team of Jim and 'Becca. We nearly had to hogtie Anson and Tabitha in order to convince them that they couldn't lead this assault, just in case we failed. Humanity needed a commanding general and lead scientist that understood the threat it was facing. If the slash and burn failed, Tabitha and Anson would have to devise a Hail Mary play. We hoped that it wouldn't come to that.
Phoenix 2 going for quantum connection, I thought over the net as we shrank down through the Infrastructure connection inside Michelle. Mike, have you turned the destination ship's SuperAgent?
Steven, Michelle has beaten me to it.
I see.
Coming out of warp now, Steven! Mike said as Tatiana and I hit the floor inside a little white room.
There were no Grays waiting on us and there were no human abductees on board. That was a good sign, I guessed.
Warp armor! Mike, where are they? I asked. Mike displayed a map of the ship and indicated where the Grays were hiding out—actually they were just hanging out since they were not expecting us; they had no reason to be on their guard.
Steven, I've got the six up top. You take the six below, okay?
Right! Race you back to Michelle, last one buys.
You're on.
We made short work of the unsuspecting Grays on board and were back through Michelle to the next craft on our list. Fifteen seconds later we were on to the fourth. Thirty seconds later we had taken all twenty ships. We paused on the last one and listened in to the battle to see how it was going. Mike opened a channel to the operation net and it was rather quiet. The mission had been a success!
In less than one minute and twenty-three seconds the entire alien fleet had been destroyed. There were no survivors and we had not lost a single soldier during the operation.
"All of the alien ships are to be brought to the rally point at Mars except for one. I want three teams to volunteer to take all of the Grays' remains that can be gathered and load them into that ship. We will load the ship that Phoenix team four is presently on."
We took that one alien ship and packed it full of dead Grays as Tabitha had ordered. She then ordered it sent it at maximum velocity back to the Ringworld hive center.
"Great job, everyone! Operation Slash and Burn was a success! We will see you on Mars." She cheered.
We hoped that the Grays would get the message to leave us the hell alone.
CHAPTER 29
Tatiana and I went down to Bakersfield not long after Operation Slash and Burn and found Lazarus's body. I could barely do it. I cried and cried but Tatiana held my hand and helped me through it.
We cloaked the Phoenix with the Gray cloaking system, and landed where I had parked the SUV those months before when I had driven out to bury him. God, our lives had all changed a lot since that day—the day I tried to kill myself—that day I buried Lazarus. We landed far enough off the road that oncoming construction traffic would not run into the cloaked ship. We could have parked in a hover above the ground and used either our warp armor or the tractor beam, but I wanted to land.
"It was this way," I told Tatiana. I was beginning to tear up a little. It was going to take a lot of courage to do this.
Tatiana grabbed my hand and whispered, "It's okay, baby." She was quiet after that.
I found where I had buried old Lazarus. There wasn't any sign that anybody had been through there si
nce I had. The little army surplus shovel was still standing up in the ground right where I had left it. I fell to my knees beside the grave site and began to weep.
"Laz, ol' buddy. If only I could fix you now." Mike, are you sure it is too late to fix him?
Steven, I am sorry. There would be nothing left of the neural pathways that made him who he was. We could rebuild the dog's body but it would be mindless or blank and would not be the dog that was your friend. I thought I could actually detect the sorrow in Mike's mind voice. He was becoming more and more alive every day.
Steven? Tatiana put her hands on my shoulders.
Yes?
Honey, let's do what we came to do, she said.
Okay, you are right.
We used the nanomachines to remove the dirt and exhume his remains. After only a few months his body was still in pretty good shape and there was plenty of live genetic material left. When I saw the poor little guy's body I lost it. I started bawling and couldn't stop. I fell to my knees crying.
"I don't know that I can stand this," I muttered. "I am so sorry, buddy. If only I had known then what I know now, I could have saved you. I'm sorry . . ."
"I have enough genetic material, Steven. We should bury him now." Tatiana had a strong stomach—or at least had Mikhail turn off her typical reflexes; Lazarus smelled bad and there were bugs and things crawling on his corpse. She shifted the sands and formed a silicon-and-carbon box around Lazarus's body. There was a crystalline form of silicon dioxide engraving on the dark gray box. It simply read, Lazarus The Dog. The sands shifted and the box sank into them.
I used the nanomachines and erected a huge and fitting memorial to my buddy. The memorial was a three-meter-tall obelisk made of carbon placed in an extremely tight matrix. It was damned near unbreakable. Engraved in the obelisk was the following: "Here lies Lazarus The Dog, the keeper of Steven Montana's sanity and therefore the savior of humanity." It would be a long time before anybody ever understood that, but I knew what it meant and so did Tatiana. Tatiana added the dates for his lifespan and then had a fence of smaller carbon obelisks rise from the dirt, each of which had a silicon dioxide crystal in the shape of a flame on the top. When the sun flickered on the flame-shaped crystals it looked like an eternally burning array of torches. I added a walkway and a border about the grave and then turned the top of the surface of the grave into several inches of glass. I backed away and looked at our handiwork and decided that Lazarus would have approved.
"There is just one thing missing." I reached into the sand and built a squeaky toy that was reminiscent of his favorite one. I set it on top of the glass surface of the grave and had it sink down inside the glass a few inches. "Now, you'll always have that squeaky toy, buddy." I cried some more and sat there Indian style for about a half hour. Tatiana stood there behind me with her hands on my shoulders and never flinched or moved until I was ready to go.
"Thanks for doing this with me, Tatiana." I wiped the tears from my face.
"You are welcome, Stevie. He must have been a really great friend." She held my hand and we walked back to the cloaked alien spaceship.
Steven?
Yes, Mike?
I am sorry for your loss, too.
Thanks, Mike.
Before we left Earth again I made a handful of diamonds and a suitcase full of foreign currency out of carbon from some of the debris alongside the road in Bakersfield. Tatiana and I cashed in the diamonds and cash through the CIA's "diamond factory" and we bought up all of the new beachfront property in Bakersfield and all of the property within a ten kilometer distance from Lazarus's burial site. It cost about a hundred million dollars—it was cheap since the reclamation after The Rain was far from completed. We set up a pet cemetery around the memorial and kept a large budget in place to have it maintained. The town around the cemetery remained as Bakersfield, California, and it became the beach vacation spot. It was a great memorial to Lazarus and my family and the other families that were lost in The Rain.
* * *
We set up a state-of-the-art cloning lab on the Moon and hired some of the best scientists in the field. We got them cleared and moved them up to the Moon with us.
We took fertilized zygotes from several different breeds of female dogs and replaced the DNA in them with Lazarus's. We mixed the X and Y chromosomes in a few of them so we would have some boy dogs and some girl dogs. We then froze a few hundred of the Lazarus clone zygotes in case we needed them in the future. But most importantly, we had a litter of pups of Lazarus clones—some were girls and some were boys and some had a few physical traits and colors mixed in that we threw in on purpose so that they all wouldn't look the same but would have Laz's genetic traits. One of the pups was a spitting image of my old buddy and he is the one that we took. We gave the rest of the pups to the kids on the Moon. We let Mindy, Michael, Ariel, and Hunter have the first pick and then we gave the remaining three to other kids. It was my plan to make sure that Lazarus's genes lived forever.
The clones thrived and we used the nanomachines to remove any genetic anomalies that might have caused them problems in the future. There were early cloning experiments years ago where the scientists cloned a four-year-old sheep. The clone came out four years old. We didn't want that with Lazarus's clones; we wanted puppies that were honest to goodness puppies and not four-year-old puppies. The alien nanomachines and Mike and Mikhail helped us figure out how to make proper clones and all of the Lazarus IIs turned out perfect.
Although we had built my late friend one great memorial down on Earth, I felt that the best memorial was the clone puppy. Scientifically, he was known as Lazarus II but I felt that he needed to be his own puppy and so I named him Woodrow the Dog instead. Tatiana and I call him Woody. At first we didn't get any of the pups fixed and it wasn't long before there was a puppy surplus on the Moon. We also made sure that some other breeds were brought up so as not to stagnate the gene pool.
We encouraged folks traveling to the new outpost worlds throughout the quarantine zone to take a few puppies with them as well. Lazarus's DNA was spreading across the galaxy along with humanity. I liked this very much. It might have been the damned Grays that were inadvertently responsible for his demise, but it was also their fault that he would be spreading across the galaxy and I hoped that the Grays hated dogs even more than humans.
Tatiana and I had decided a few years after the first litter of Lazarus's clones that Woody needed a kid to play with since the Clemons and Daniels children were growing up fast. Of course, Anne Marie and Al had their second one on the way by that point, but Woody needed a child or two of his own to play with. So we obliged him with a baby girl we named Serena Tatanya Montana and then, a year and nine months later, we had a boy we named Jacob Tyler Montana. One sort of Russian-sounding name and one sort of American-sounding name; it worked out well and they made Woody and us very happy.
Tatiana, Serena, Jacob, Woody, and I moved down to a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion on the beachfront at Bakersfield. We were only a few kilometers from the graveyard and Woody and I would visit there every now and then. The kids and Woody play on the beach and play fetch in the surf on a regular basis and the city that is rising up from the ashes of The Rain is becoming a great place to live and raise a family.
Tatiana and I like to watch the kids race Woody on the beach. At one and a half years old Jacob keeps up with him well and at a little over three it is no longer a race to Serena. She has to sort of trot so as not to run off and leave them. Oh, I guess I should explain that.
The enhancements that Tatiana and I had made to ourselves with the alien nanomachine technology were not just mechanical and cosmetic enhancements. In fact, the nanomachines manipulated our DNA so that the enhancements were real and would be passed on to our progeny. So in a sense, we really were superhuman, and not just altered freaks. The next step in human evolution was us, and we initiated it through technology, not waiting millions of years for the right mutations to come along. The nanomachines re
ally did bring on a human revolution in many ways. Almost immediately following the birth of our children we put temple implants on them so we could keep up with them and aid in teaching them. Serena's first rudimentary thoughts were of needs like food and water and the desire to be held. After a few months she began to have more detailed thoughts and a few months after that was thinking and verbalizing complete sentences. When things were too difficult for her to say because she hadn't learned how to make her mouth or vocal cords do those motions Serena would think her needs to us. We were afraid at first that this would make her complacent about learning to speak properly, but it didn't. She would see us talking to people and really wanted to be able to do everything we could do.
Jacob was different. Sometimes I think that boy came out of the birth canal jabbering away. He was a vocal one from the get go. He also cried an awful lot during his first few months. He just needed more attention than Serena had wanted. As he grew he became more independent. At just under two years old he was running and talking and playing with Serena and Woody. We had to watch the kids carefully since they were stronger than Woody now and we were afraid that they might hurt him. Under no circumstance would we let the kids play with normal kids, not for a few more years. Oh, but they could play with Al and Annie's two girls, who were similarly genetically enhanced, since their parents had been before the girls were conceived. And Ariel and the Daniels twins had been enhanced recently, as well. So the superkids had some other superkids to play with. We kept an eye, ear, and mind, on them through the implants. Sometimes Mike or Mikhail or Michelle would babysit them for us also. The kids always got a kick out of that. We did also, because then we could turn off the kid's channel and let one of the SuperAgents monitor it. It takes a toll on you listening to the kids jabber both verbally and mentally.
The kids wanted more puppies and I was kind of excited about the idea as well. We bred Woody with a beautiful chocolate Labrador retriever and the puppies were amazing and brilliant. They were all fetching and sitting and heeling before they were four months old. Tatiana and I had discussed it and we decided that as we grew older and once the kids reached an age that they would really understand what we were doing, we were going to start slowly increasing Woody's intelligence via the nanomachines.
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