Chapter 3

"I'm sorry," Alicia said quietly as they walked along the dirt path.

"What for?" Jackie asked. "You didn't do anything. Besides, I thought your explanation of hyperbolic acceleration was very ... educational."

"I'm apologizing because you got stuck with me instead of someone you could actually talk to," Alicia explained, her face turning a little pink with embarrassment.

"I can talk to you just fine, Mom," Jackie replied.

"Yeah, right!" Alicia replied, throwing Jackie's attempted friendliness back in her face. "Like I even understood what you just said a minute ago!"

"You mean about hyperbolic acceleration?" Jackie asked, surprised.

"Yeah, that," Alicia confessed, "and anything and everything else that comes out of your mouth. The words you use could knock over a skyscraper!"

"Mom!" Jackie said, actually laughing at her mother's unbecoming, tormented posture. "You!" She laughed again. "I don't know what to say! You have the ability to sway the opinions of the most powerful people just by deciding to. And you're also much better at teleporting than I am."

After another moment, Alicia stopped walking. She seemed to be studying something somewhere ahead of her. After a moment, Jackie realized that Alicia was dream-walking while she was awake; something else Jackie couldn't do yet. After another moment, Alicia raised her arm, feeling around behind her until her hand found Jackie's shoulder.

'Hold on... ' Jackie heard in her mind, then everything went dark.

'We're in one of their warehouses... ' she heard in her mind, again.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the light. They had been in leafy sunlight. Now they were inside a long, narrow building with small slanted windows running along high overhead. The windows were either incredibly dirty, or they'd been lightly painted over at one time. 'One of them? There are more?'

Image of six warehouses, perfectly lined up in a row.

Jackie could see better now. She suppressed a laugh as she saw more cans of Campbell's soup than she could eat in ten lifetimes. "Are we going to take them all?" she gasped aloud.

"Shhhh!" Alicia hissed. 'There are others... '

'Sorry!' Jackie apologized silently with her mind. 'Where are they?'

'You're supposed to be on guard!' Alicia snapped into her daughter's mind. 'Just use what the Praetor taught you!'

'That's more like it, Mom!' Jackie thought back at her. 'You don't whine worth a damn!'

Then Jackie closed her eyes, fearful that she would flub this simple (to anyone else) assignment, and concentrated. She was surprised at how easy it was to expand her awareness through the silent building and locate the two guards in what seemed to be a snack room. There were two other guards nearby, one approaching along the outside of the building and the other at the main entrance.

In addition, she could feel Alicia dream-walking again as an image of the receiving platform on the Phoenix wavered transparently in front of the pair. The platform slowly merged in with the floor beneath several pallets of soup cans, then seemed to be perfectly matched. The pallets, surprising Jackie, suddenly became transparent and now appeared to be on the receiving platform of the 'imaginary' Focal Press. Then the receiving platform faded from view, along with the pallets of soup.

"Holy..." Jackie exclaimed, then remembered the guards and how voices could echo in here. 'So that's how it's done!'

"Let's try another warehouse," suggested Alicia, quietly, "unless you really, really like tomato soup..." They both giggled quietly. Then Alicia placed her hand on her daughter's shoulder and they vanished.

"It looks pretty big when there's nothing around it," Tanya noted, staring up at the massive cyclotron that was part of the 'transporter', as Macario referred to it.

"Yes, I suppose it does," Tabatha replied. "It weighs a couple of tons, I imagine. That's why I wanted some telepathic help transporting this thing to Albuquerque."

"Albuquerque?" Tanya actually squeeked. "I thought it was going, uh ... you know ... up?"

"Well..." Tabatha ducked under an armature and walked around the other side. "It is. But first, it's going to Albuquerque."

"Fine," Tanya said. "You steer, I'll push!"

They both laughed. "Cute, Mom," Tabatha replied.

"It's nice being alone with you, Sweetie," Tanya said quietly. "I never get to acknowledge who you really are in my heart as much as I like to."

Tabatha chuckled and came back around the machine. Smiling at the willowy blonde, she embraced her and sighed wistfully. "Mom! Mom-Mom-Mom-Mom-Mom!"

"Ohhh, Katie..." Tanya whispered, hugging her dead, reborn daughter tightly against her. "I miss you so..."

Tabatha laughed low in her throat – or maybe it was a sob, cut short. "If I could have come back any other way – I would choose to return as your daughter. I lived that whole lifetime not even knowing who I was. By the time I remembered, my body was already ashes."

"I know, Darling," Tanya replied quietly. "The spiders showed you how to return. I should be grateful, I suppose, but it's hard to visualize giant, invisible, telepathic spiders ruling the world. I'm just glad you came back to me."

"Me too, Mom," Tabatha, who was once Katie, replied. She kissed Katie's mother's cheek. "Well, you ready?"

Tabatha went back around to the other side of the Focal Press and leaned up against it with her hands. She closed her eyes and could see her 'mom' doing the same thing. Then she concentrated on the image of their destination – a wide area of concrete flooring inside a mountain chamber similar to the one they were in right now. After a moment, she could feel Tanya concentrating and enhancing the image of their destination. That was as good as Tanya could mind-link. It was sufficient. Both girls and the massive cyclotron vanished.