The Quantum Connection (34 page)

I decided to try and write a Sequencing code that Mike could use to ping Opolawn's SuperAgent. When I spoke to Mike about this, he thought I was slow.

Mike, we need to develop a code to ping for other SuperAgents.

Steven, how do you think I have been downloading information from the YIT?

Holy shit, Mike! I never thought about it. You are just surfing away and have found all sorts of YIT sites haven't you?

Yes, Steven.

Can you communicate with Opolawn's SuperAgent?

Opolawn has a firewall.

Can we crack it?

Unlikely. The encryption is a multidimensional multirank tensor and appears to be changing continuously with random fractal dimension.

Are there any other SuperAgents nearby that are not encrypted?

Why, yes, there are many, Steven.

Where is the closest, other than Michelle, of course?

There is one at the landing field hangar where we previously landed.

I got off my duff and headed for the supply room where Michelle was located. I now had a partial plan anyway. I knew that if we left here without stopping both Prawmitoos and Opolawn, we would be in immediate trouble. I didn't want to leave behind the
Phoenix
if at all possible--in order to do that there would have to be some mayhem left behind us so that Opolawn's ships didn't fight us all the way out of Lumpeyin space--assuming we could survive that. And if we did get back and somehow Prawmitoos had returned to Teytoonis space, I was sure that he was going to be a bit sore at us and that he would be coming for the controller.

So I had to develop a multifaceted plan--a plan within a plan within a plan. First, I had to test the physics of YIT teleportation.

Tatiana, wake up!

Yes, Stevie?

Listen, take Mikhail out of your body and place him a few feet away from you.

Right on! It's about time, Steven! . . . Okay . . . it's done.

Mike, get ready to drive us into Michelle's quantum connection pathway.

I understand, Steven.

Michelle?

Yes, Steven.

Connect to Mikhail, please, and send a continuous data stream for thirty seconds. Keep the line open for return messages until I give further orders. Okay, Mike.

Okay, Steven, good luck.

The warp bubble formed around me and Mike adjusted the field so it would be like Dr. Who's phone booth--big on the inside, small on the outside. Mike told me that the outside bubble diameter requirement was on the order of 1x10
meters and that nobody had ever tried to build a stable warp bubble that size before. We were only a handful of orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length, which would be theoretically as small as you could go in this universe. But Anson's warp technology with Tatiana's modifications and a funnel-shaped field like JackieZZ had used made this possible. Of course, we needed a SuperAgent as smart as Mike to control all of these field parameters at once, but it was possible and looked like it would work. Mike steered the warp bubble through the funnel-shaped warp field down into the mechanism in Michelle's orange and green crystalline cube until he hit the dark shadow spot where the quantum connected fringe patterns are created. The warp funnel kept the tiny warp bubble on target as it approached the datastream hole. The datastream from Michelle to Mikhail was flowing into the dark quantum flux below where the small end of the funnel-shaped field stopped. When Mike got us close enough we were pulled in instantaneously and were surfing on the information beam that was being sent across the galaxy via the underlying oscillating fabric of the universe--the YIT, the Infrastructure, the universal quantum connection.

And a microsecond later we popped out inside another quantum connected interference region in another cube. Mike projected the funnel-shaped field in front of us and steered us into the small end of the funnel. As we rose up through the funnel the outer diameter of our warp bubble grew. Less than a second ago, I was inside the
Phoenix,
and now I was standing beside Tatiana who was herself standing inside a dark bubble of spacetime. There was a white-and-blue swirl over the surface of the bubble and with my enhanced eyesight I could see her there naked in front of me. It worked! Traveling through spacetime on the quantum connected Infrastructure worked!

"It's about time, Steven." She slugged me on the forearm and then jumped into my arms. "I love you! I love you! I love you! Now get me the hell out of here!"

"I love you, now hold on to me," I told her.

"Like I would do anything else?" she asked sarcastically.

Mike, reverse the process.

Okay, Steven.

We left Mikhail sitting there in the bubble to fend for himself before two thousand years passed or the bubble was destroyed. If we could figure out a way to get him, we would do it--just not now. We popped into the supply room just outside of Michelle's housing and Tatiana immediately had the nanomachines redress her and bring her health to optimal status. She created a bag of cheeseburgers, fries, and a soda and began scarfing them down.

"It worked!" I shouted.

"I toolf eww it fwoul," Tatiana said with a mouthful.

We need to tell the others. This gives us an amazing advantage.
I thought to her as I watched her eat. She was a sight for sore eyes, to say the least.

Okay. Hey, my temple implants still work without Mikhail, she thought to me.

They will function as long as you are within a few hundred thousand kilometers of me, Tatiana, Mike thought to us.

Oh. Neat!
She thought in Russian and she continued on to her fourth cheeseburger.

I missed you!

Me, too,
she said. I would have kissed her but there was a likelihood that she would have bitten me by mistake. Besides, there was a cheeseburger in the way.

Tatiana's appearance on the bridge of the
Phoenix
startled 'Becca at first, but everyone was pleased to see her and pleased that the teleportation of the miniature warp bubble worked. It was the idea of creating a funnel-shaped warp to guide us into the quantum connection zone that was the trick. Anson liked it a whole lot and wanted to discuss the physics of the concept. I told him that it was a trick an old Sequencer taught me. Only Mike, Tatiana, and I got the joke.

Tabitha wanted more information on how we could use the concept tactically and strategically. Her military mind and training served us all very well. So I quickly filled them in on my plan.Then the debate started.

"Wait a minute, though." Tabitha played with the red curl of hair on her forehead. "If we can go anywhere else why don't we just do that?"

"I'm not sure that that isn't the best idea. That is why we are talking about it." I shrugged my shoulders. "The thing is though, that wherever we went would be in Gray space on a Gray ship and then we would have to take it from them. It can be done." I smiled at Tatiana.

"Danmn tfootn!" Tatiana said as she forced a handful of fries in her mouth and followed it with a swig from her soda.

Anson chuckled a little. "Slow down, honey, or you're gonna bite a finger off."

"Haffen'tf eaten in fweeks!" Tatiana replied as she continued to stuff more fries in her mouth. She didn't actually need to eat. The nanomachines in the stockroom had returned her health, but she really hadn't eaten in weeks.

"If we go now, without taking care of Sunshine out there, we might live to regret it in the future," Jim said. "But what do we do exactly? We can't just leave the bomb behind. Opolawn would detect it and stop it. "

"We have to distract him somehow, and
then
we have to get away from him," Tabitha thought out loud.

"How about this," Tatiana said, finally without food in her mouth. She reached in my front pocket and pulled out the golf ball and the controller. She held the golf-ball-sized bomb in her right hand and the controller in her left hand. "Mike, can you hear me?"

"Yes, Tataiana."

"Can you make the bomb look just like the controller?" she said.

"Yes, Tatiana. Hand it to Steven," Mike replied.

Tatiana handed the golf ball back to me. I held the golf ball in my right hand and it got fuzzy around the edges. It changed colors and then formed itself into an exact replica of the controller.

"Will it still go boom, Mike?" I asked.

"Only if you want it to," he said.

Then Tatiana ran for the door at more than fifty kilometers per hour and she was gone and the picophage controller went with her. It didn't dawn on us that she would be under Opolawn's control if we brought her out of the Gray's confinement bubble and on Opolawn's doorstep. Mikhail was no longer in her belly; the little piece of Gray technology must've somehow been "vaccinating" her from Opolawn's control. I should've figured that out. Perhaps I should have even waited about freeing Tatiana. That was dumb. I took off after her but she had too big a head start and she knew where she was going and I didn't.

Mike, track her for me.

Looks like she is going to the hangar bay, Steven.

Got it. Thanks!

Fortunately, she hadn't put on a warp armor belt yet since we got her back. I caught up with her in the hangar bay because she had to slow down to open the door--manually. Manually, hell; she ripped it right off the hinges--or whatever you would call that alien door-sliding mechanism. I made a mental note that the door wasn't made from the alien degenerate matter like the hull was. I tackled her from behind and she rolled with my momentum and tossed me thirty meters into the ceiling of the hangar bay. That hurt. I jumped from the ceiling as I began to fall, pushing myself at her. I just missed her but caught a metal hairpin in the shoulder.

The nanomachines healed the wound before she stabbed at me the second time. I leapt over her, but she jumped upward into me as soon as I was over her head. She caught me with her left arm and stabbed me in the neck with a second hairpin. This stunned me a bit as the pin actually grazed my spinal cord. Tatiana tossed me to the floor hard and ignored me for a microsecond. The nanomachines fixed the damage to my spine and dissolved the metal hairpin. Then I had the alien armor suit cover my entire body. I didn't want a metal stick through the cerebellum. The last drop of blood from my neck wound dropped just as the alien armor suit covered the spot and I rose to my feet.

I shook my head and got my bearings. At about a hundred kilometers per hour Tatiana lunged into my chest with both feet. This time I had a slight blur in my peripheral vision that warned me. My enhanced reflexes forced me to twist and drop just as she hit me. This allowed me to move with her momentum and the impact didn't hurt near as much as it could have. Also, the alien armor material that Tatiana had developed was doing a great job of protecting me. We rolled and swapped blocks, punches, and kicks until she caught my foot and flipped me. She did a forward judo roll on top of me and her knee twisted my chin sideways against the deck plating on the floor. When you're fighting, you lose track of time but I had a good measure of how long our last little entanglement had taken since I caught a glimpse of the drop of blood that had fallen from my neck splashing on the deck right in front of my face!

I lunged upward with my heels against the floor and pushed her off of me. Tatiana did a forward handspring and caught me in the chin with a back kick in the process. I staggered backward for a microsecond and then attempted to bear hug her. Yeah, that didn't work worth a damn. She dropped into a horse stance and head-butted backwards. The back of her head caught me square on the nose, breaking it. Had I not been wearing the armor the head-butt would have likely killed me. She stepped in behind my right leg and pulled me down to the floor with an elbow to the ribs to top it off. She was up and running before I could taste the blood running down my throat. The nanomachines fixed me up soon after that. I was rising to my feet when, at God only knows how fast, Tatiana slammed into me feet first, again. She was kicking my ass! It all happened so fast I barely had time to react and my reactions were slow because I couldn't bring myself to
really
fight my wife.

"Why is it I always seem to be getting in fights in this payload bay?" I asked Tatiana as I grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her over to the floor as we hit. We tumbled for several meters and came to a stop against one of the modified warp missiles that was stored there. "Well, that missile ain't ever gonna fire," I said as I ducked her barrage of kicks and punches. "Come on, honey, snap out of it, will ya! Fight the bastard!"

I was blocking her punches and kicks while trying to grab her. I couldn't bring myself to--really--hit her. I knew it wasn't her doing this. It couldn't be her.

Tatiana, what are you doing?

Tatiana is not home, little monkey.
Opolawn's voice came to me through Tatiana's mind link. This was enough to startle me and throw me off guard for a split microsecond. That was all that Tatiana, uh, Opolawn, needed.

She caught me with a right hook to the head and then dropped and grabbed me by the ankles and yanked my feet out from under me. As I lost my balance she tossed me headfirst into the bulkhead. I hit the wall with a massive
crack
and my head poked clean through the metal wall and into the hallway on the other side.

"That hurt!" I saw stars for several seconds before the nanomachines could right my injuries. I pulled myself back through the hole in the wall and shook myself off. I was too late.

Tatiana was already in the smaller Gray ship and had opened the bay doors. She couldn't get anywhere in the little ship though because the outside warp bubble was still in place around the
Phoenix
.

Let her go, Opolawn, she can't get out!