Chapter 7

The sun was low on the horizon but still shining brightly, the sound of birds and the small creek in the distance was a soothing distraction to Sarah McIntyre. She was lying on her side in bed, slowly brushing out all the tangles in the curly hair of her hip and leg with a soft bristled brush. Keeping her hair short helped but it was a long, slow process anyway. Sarah had been planning on a long relaxing session in a local spa, but she was just too busy to even make an appointment. It was an odd feeling to be completely naked in bed in the middle of an open field, but Sarah had gotten accustomed to it during her short time in Tenkei. She knew it was an illusion, but it was a very good one. Her hotel suite was one of only a few places that she was comfortable in. Another place was the open courtyard under the dome on the surface. The small domes were scattered all over the city and allowed people to look out on the stars, the moon or the Earth, depending on which side of the city they happened to be on. Sarah had never been to any of the domes that looked out onto the Earth. Fortunately the city didn't spin, and the dome in the courtyard never faced that way. Knowing how high above the Earth they were was one thing, but seeing it was different, and she didn't know how she would react.

A soft beep from Sarah's tablet startled her for a moment. She glanced at the caller ID as she retrieved it from the other corner of bed hoping that Todd wanted to meet for dinner. Instead it was Danielle Tanaka from the medical center. Danielle was the technical supervisor monitoring Alice. Sarah and Danielle had talked over lunch several times during her stay in Tenkei. She was extremely smart, and very easy to talk to.

"Hi, Danielle," Sarah said after hitting the accept button. She tried not to sound disappointed.

Danielle's face filled the screen in Sarah's hand. She was a beautiful young Japanese woman, with shoulder length black hair that contrasted nicely with her pale complexion. "Hello, Sarah," said Danielle. "I'm sorry to bother you. I know you were finished for today."

"That's okay. I was still deciding what to do for dinner."

"Well there's a woman here to see you," she explained.

"Did she say who she was?" asked Sarah. She wasn't expecting anyone, and wondered who it could be.

"No, and she asked for you specifically," Danielle continued. "Can I tell her that you're coming in?"

"Aye, I'll be there," Sarah answered. "I'll be a wee bit. Have her wait for me in the office."

"Okay, I'll tell her." Danielle cut the connection as Sarah got up to put some clothes on. Fifteen minutes later Sarah walked through the main doors of the medical center and found Danielle talking to one of the other technicians. She walked over to Sarah when she saw her.

"Is she in the office, Danielle?" asked Sarah.

"Yes, I think she was a bit fascinated by some of the schematics that you had on the monitors."

"Half the people I show them to cannae understand what they are," Sarah said with a bit of a chuckle. She thanked Danielle and headed to the office that she and Todd had been using. Sarah opened the door to find a woman standing over several tablets studying the schematic diagrams for the field generator. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties with long black hair and dressed in a fashionable jumpsuit with a thick black belt round it.

"Hello, I'm Sarah McIntyre," she said to get the woman's attention. "You were looking for me?"

The woman stood up straight and turned to look at Sarah. "Miss McIntyre," she said as she held out her hand, "I'm Maren Kramer. Tetsuo asked me to come and see you." Sarah looked at the woman as they shook hands. She was a few inches taller than Sarah, a little thinner, but her most distinctive feature were her yellow cat's eyes. Then she noticed that the belt was in fact, a tail. She said, "I hope you don't mind me looking over your diagrams."

The design of the field generator was an advanced circuit. There wasn't much chance that she would be able to make any sense of them. "Call me Sarah, and no, I dinnae mind. I can explain what they are if you're interested?" said Sarah with a bit of pride.

"Oh I think I understand the basic idea," Maren answered. "I'm a bit surprised you used superconductors in the power emitters. That would be a bit expensive to build, wouldn't it?"

Sarah was impressed, that was a part that most people wouldn't have noticed. "Aye they're expensive, but it's a prototype. I'm more concerned with it working, than the cost."

Maren smiled before saying, "Yeah, they would have made my thrusters work better when I was first building them. I just couldn't afford them."

"Thrusters, do you mean the Synergy Thrusters?" Synergy Thrusters had been an incredible breakthrough when they had been invented almost twenty years earlier. They were used everywhere for all types of things. Anything that moved and had an energy source powerful enough to run them had been switched over. The air cars that were being created recently had been the most popular, but the military had been using them since they became available. "I thought those were invented by Zoë Johns."

"Maren Zoë Johns, that's my maiden name," she corrected. Sarah had thought that Zoë Johns would have been a lot older. This woman looked to be about the same age as she was. If she invented the Synergy Thrusters she must have been about fifteen or sixteen at the time!

"So what did Tetsuo have in mind?" Sarah asked. "We have the field generator working fine."

"He told me you're having a problem supplying power to it."

"Aye, this thing is a bit of a power hog," she explained. "Do you have an idea to reduce the amount of power it needs?"

"Well no, but I might have another idea," Maren explained as she walked over to the original prototype. "Is this it?" she asked, picking up the large power cable connected to it.

"Aye, we've replaced it with a portable one. But it still needs almost as much energy."

The cable ended with three metal blades that need to be inserted and twisted into a power outlet. Maren looked at the cable for a moment before putting the thumb of each hand on two of the three metal blades and closed her eyes. After only a second or two, the field generator powered up and the ready indicator came on. Maren opened her eyes and asked, "Can you turn it on? I'd like to see how much energy it draws when active."

Sarah quickly turned the generator towards the target sensors and turned it up the fifty percent. After verifying that is was generating the field at the correct level she turned to Maren and said, "That's it running at half power."

"Okay, that's not too bad," she said. "Turn it up to full power for a minute."

Sarah hit a few buttons on top of the generator and then checked the readout from the sensor again. "That's it, full power." After watching for a few seconds, Sarah noticed that the room was starting to get colder, and the light somehow seemed dimmer. Then the unit shut off as the power was cut and the light went back to normal levels. "I've never seen anything like it! How long could you keep that up?"

Maren shuddered slightly from the memory before replying, "Well the longest time was about six weeks with rests in between. But that thing does need a lot of power. I wouldn't want to have to run it for more than a few days."

"We dinnae need days! I think we only need a few hours."

Some time later the two women sat at one of the patio tables at a bistro. The dome lights had dimmed to their normal night time level and the stars could be seen through the glass. Sarah enjoyed her salad while trying not to stare at Maren as she ate her chicken. She hadn't seen a piece of meat that large since leaving the family farm.

"I cannae see how you can eat that?" she finally said as Maren took another bite.

Maren looked at Sarah eating her salad and suddenly realized that she was likely a vegetarian, like her sister. "I'm sorry! I never thought about it. I hope you don't mind me eating meat."

"No, no, I dinnae mean that," she said quickly. "It's just the size of it. It's massive!"

Maren blushed a bit and said, "Oh yeah. Well I was hungry, though my husband Gabe makes a much tastier chicken dish."

Sarah gave Maren a puzzled look before asking, "You're married to Gabe Kramer? As in Chef Kramer, owner of that chain of restaurants?"

Maren smiled with pride and nodded. "Everybody's Place, yeah that's him," she answered. "He'd be here instead of me, but he's back with the kids and busy with work."

"Is that where the energy comes from, are you an electrical elemental?"

"Not really, no. That would be my husband's specialty. But he was too busy so he couldn't come here," she explained. "I convert the energy from other sources. I was converting the heat and light in the room to electricity. That's why I had to stop so soon. It was starting to get cold in there."

"Aye, it was getting chilly," agreed Sarah. "So you'll need another energy source to power our generator?"

"Yeah, but that won't be a problem," Maren explained. "There's a wide range of sources that I can use. Heat and light are just easy to make use of. Though for more power I use something else."

A voice behind Sarah interrupted their conversation, "So this is where you disappeared to." Sarah turned and smiled at Todd as he walked up to their table.

"So you finally came up for air, did ya? Or did ya just get hungry?" Sarah joked. Todd had been working all day trying to understand the difference between the portals Alice generated and those Tetsuo created. The field generator was disrupting the portal she used to draw energy but not the visible portals that she created between locations. If she got access to another powerful energy source, she might be able to create portals again.