"How the hell do you know so much about warp coils?" Scott demanded, holding her pistol steady on him.

"Come on, hand it over. I know you're just stalling for time until the nuke detonates," he said, holding his hand out to her, gesturing for her to hand it over.

"You're right!" Scott replied, evidently deciding that he knew too much about the secret operation to play any more games with him. But then, somehow the gun flew out of her hand and ended up on his palm.

"Pretty stupid, really, if you'd bothered to think about it," Trevar said, setting the safety and stepping past the dumbfounded soldier. He slammed the gun on the tool cart with a loud crack before squatting down to pull open the bottom drawer. "Did you even consider the effects that would've happened if we didn't shut down the warp field before this thing went off?"

"Th-the g-gate at-at this end would be destroyed of—did you just use telekinesis on my gun? How is that possible?" she nervously asked.

"For your information, we're more than fifteen hundred light-years from Earth," Trevar said, ignoring her as he looked over the complexity of the device. It was a compact, smooth and relatively small unit. Trevar guessed it was a modern version of the field artillery tactical nuke originally developed in the late '50s or mid '60s. "Do you have any idea of what warp accelerated nucleonic plasma would do from that distance when it got to the other side? I'll tell you: Colorado would be a crater three hundred miles across and a hundred-fifty miles deep."

"Impossible!" Scott protested. "This is only a ten-kiloton device—"

"The tunnel we walked through was more than fifteen hundred light-years long!" Trevar interrupted, glaring up at her. "Yes, the blast would destroy the warp coils at this end, but not before the blast managed to get all the way back to your base! But that's not the worst part. When the gate at this end would be destroyed, the warp tunnel would collapse from the center and the restored space-time fabric would rush toward each end at millions of times the speed of light, which includes ALL that nucleonic plasma that'd be filling the tunnel! Both Colorado AND this place would be big ass holes in the ground, each punching well into the mantle of both planets, thank you! Do you feel like the mass murderer that you've tried to be, yet?"

"Well, this seems simple enough," Trevar said, picking up the five-inch thick artillery shell and setting it up on top of the tool chest. "Looks like one of those small yield devices developed back in the '50s when everyone was still in love with everything nuclear. I'm guessing that it's using a gun-type trigger?"

"But the tunnel's shut down, now! We have to let this go off, now, to protect our end from invasion!" Scott protested. "We can't let this warp coil be functional!" Trevar finished setting up several LED lanterns to provide wide area lighting for the work he was prepping for.

"Excuse you! Do you see anyone from this planet geared up to march on Earth right now?" Trevar demanded, as he began pulling open drawers, looking for the proper screwdrivers. Finding a suitable tool, he got to work on the device. "Just which planet is doing the invading at this moment, hmm?"

"So. You'd still kill maybe thousands, pollute this world for tens of thousands of years, and all for a fuckup that you, yourself, did?" Trevar asked as he made progress on removing the outer casing. Then he looked over the control panel and various exposed wires.

"Shit!" he exclaimed, seeing the counter was less than a minute. "Don't suppose you were given the disarming codes, were you?" he asked, glancing up at her. The glance was enough to tell him the answer.

'Ooooh, this is gonna hurt,' Pardus telepathically sent, looking at the unit as well.

'Any ideas?' Trevar inquired.

'Unfortunately, I didn't get to see them key in the codes,' Pardus said. 'My scans show that it's got a blasting cap to set off the charge of plastique, which drives the plutonium wedge into the main mass. Too deep to reach at the moment. You'd better go after the power supply.'

Trevar turned it over, looking for a way to do that.

'Wait!' Pardus exclaimed. 'There's a large cap on the circuit board that's a backup trigger to the main charge. Take care of it first!'

Trevar saw the capacitor Pardus indicated and used his thumb to snap it to the side, breaking one of the leads before grabbing it and yanked it completely off the circuit board. Then he saw the main power feed and was momentarily puzzled to see it had a large pi-filter arrangement.

"Who the hell designs a rectifier into a device that runs off a fucking battery?!?" Trevar yelled. He decided to just use the screwdriver to help him grab the filter's output wire rather than hunt for a wire cutter—he didn't have the time. With a satisfying yank, he ripped the wire off its soldered post. The nuke shut down with eighteen seconds remaining.

Trevar to a moment to breathe a sigh of relief, then he got busy to dig for the high explosive trigger.

"Wait, you've disarmed it already!" Scott protested.

"No… I've only stopped the countdown," Trevar replied. "Now, I'm going to disarm this thing. An accidental shock, like dropping it, could still set this off."

"So—you know about warp coils and nuclear bombs?" Scott asked, bemused.

"You wanna know why I'm not worried over the fact that we're stranded over fifteen hundred light-years from Earth?" Trevar asked as he worked. "That's because a rescue is already on its way. It should be here in a couple of months or so. So, uh—yeah, I know a little something about warp coils."

"Wh-wh-what?" Scott exclaimed.

"Nukes, on the other hand, are fairly simple," Trevar absently said as he continued to dig through the mechanism. "I hear they were even able to build two or three of them back in the zinc-plated, vacuum tube culture of the 1940s using only stone knives and bear skins."

"H-how…? W-wha-what do you mean there's a rescue on it way here?" Scott demanded. "How did you signal them? I've been watching you the whole time!"

"The same way I was able to yank the gun out of your hand," Trevar replied, glancing at her. "Oh, speaking of which, do me a favor and pull the bullets off their cartridges, will you? And find something in which to melt the lead down with."

"You're telepathic and a telekinetic or something?" Scott asked, incredulously. "And you were able to communicate over such a distance instantly? And how do you even know how far away we are, anyhow?"

"'Or something,'" Trevar replied, grinning at her before tackling the next module to remove from the nuke. "You saw it yourself. How else do you think I did all that?"

"So, you've…somehow…built your own set of warp coils?" Scott asked incredulously.

"Eh-yep," Trevar responded. "Several, in fact. One set of which, is on the ship that's coming to pick us up. And if you ever want to see them work on a ship, you have to be extremely careful about how you build them. They have to be perfectly sized and perfectly aligned within microns of one another so that they don't cause such little problems like temporal conduits, random spatial portals, or worse!"

Trevar was very careful removing the last module and setting it down on the tool box. It contained both the blasting cap and high explosive that was to be used for setting off the nuclear device.

"Hello there!" a voice suddenly called out as Pardus uncloaked.

"OH SHIT!" Scott yelled, instantly grabbing the .45 and firing off several rounds before Trevar reached out and pulled the weapon from her grip.

"Excuse you! We NEED those bullets to disarm this fucking nuke!" he yelled. Then he turned to look at what Scott was still staring at.

"Oh…hello!" Trevar greeted. The large winged black panther looked at them both, with several bullets hovering a couple feet from its head.

"That did not seem like a very friendly greeting," the big cat muttered, looking at the bullets still spinning on their long axis in front of his face.

"Yeah, well sorry about that," Trevar said. "She's not really with me. My name's Trevar."

'By the way, what's with the wings?' Trevar telepathically asked, bypassing their staged role play.

'It's an idea that Panthera came up with,' Pardus silently responded. 'You'll see why in a little bit. Suffice to say, it should help sell the idea that Panthera and I are natives to everyone on this world.'

"My name is Pardus," the winged panther said by way of introduction. "I'm a shadowcat."

"Of course you are!" Trevar said, suddenly laughing.

"I deeply apologize for this one's attack on you," Trevar said, glaring at the lieutenant. "She not used to dealing with creatures from worlds other than her own. I, of course, am a bit more traveled."

"If that is so, then why did she come here?" Pardus asked.

"Partly by accident, and partly because she wanted to explore," Trevar replied. "But unfortunately, she has much to learn as to when it's proper to greet someone and when it's proper to defend against them!"

"Hmmm," Pardus grunted. "Perhaps. But should not the apology come from it?"

"I—I'm v-very sorry about shooting you," Lieutenant Scott stammered. "You just came out of nowhere! You startled me."

"I did say 'hello',"/"He did say 'hello!" Pardus and Trevar simultaneously said.

"Sorry!" Scott squeaked. After a pause, she finally asked, "How is it that you can speak English?"

"I don't know," Pardus replied shrugging his wings. "How is it you're speaking my language? And what is English?"

Scott stared at the panther then glared at Trevar.

"Don't ask me! I just got here!" Trevar snapped at her as he continued working to remove the plutonium trigger. "By the way, can we get those bullets melted down, please? This only makes the second time I've asked."

"You need these?" Pardus asked, levitating the three bullets over to Trevar, who reached out to grab them.

"Thanks," Trevar said, setting the spent bullets into the dish he had picked out to use as a crucible. "We'll need the rest of the clip melted down as well," he said to Scott as he finally removed the plutonium cone and carefully set it down.

"What do you mean?" Scott demanded, astonished that the entirety of their only means of protection was going to be used to disarm the nuke.

"I need all of them to fill the shot chamber with lead so this thing can never go off," Trevar explained, setting the rest of the device on the floor to rest on its base for when it would have the lead poured in.

Scott stared at him incredulously.

"Hey, Lieutenant!" Trevar spoke up after a few seconds of the staring contest and waved his hand in front of her face. "You can keep the gun! Gunpowder's easy to make. Everybody and their dog knows that formula. But a live nuke is overkill, no matter how you look at it!"

"We can't just disarm ourselves!" Scott screamed.

"Oh, too bad I don't have a bowl of munchies," Pardus said, sitting down to observe. "Is this how your species prepare to mate?" Trevar fought to suppress a grin while Scott glared at the cat in shocked fury.

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!" she yelled.