Chapter 10

It was the next day and Lisa was back on the Phoenix III, orbiting high above the mountains, with Tabatha and Amber, the bridge officer.

"The army is within about twelve kilometers of where you want to blast," Amber informed the girls. "They should get a really good show."

"Okay, let's do it," Tabatha said.

Lisa vanished from the bridge and both the remaining girls watched the view screen. Within a minute, a bright, tiny dot of pure nuclear energy appeared far below, then was covered over by the expanding gas cloud. As the minutes went by, another appeared near the first, then another. Soon thick white towers rising high into the air blocked the entire pass between the two mountain ranges.

"I'll bet that impressed somebody," Tabatha murmured. "She didn't miss those poor slobs by much..."

Lisa reappeared on the bridge. "Well, that should take care of any military threat."

To the commander, she said, "Mac told me you wanted me and Tabby, here, to try to make a battery for your engine?"

"Yes," Amber said, "Every time the electro-magnetic drive is activated, it depletes the stored charges in conventional batteries. The expanding magnetic field simply sucks them dry, almost instantly. Macario was telling me that you two could possibly make something that wouldn't discharge the instant an electro-magnetic pulse hit it."

"It's possible, I imagine," Tabatha said, thinking about her new shield – the one she got from that Harrah. "I could surround some of Lisa's mind power with a shield and maybe..."

"I think perhaps I can make an external power source that the Praetor could control," Lisa interrupted, "and then you could shield it from the ship's drive."

"That'd be cool," Amber replied. "Let's do it."

'Ember – I'm sending them to you... ' Amber thought to her twin sister at the other end of the ship.

Lisa and Tabatha teleported back to Engineering. It was a half-mile swim in free-fall, otherwise.

"We should try one outside the ship, first," Ember, the Engineering Officer, told them, "especially if we're working with nuclear energy."

"It's not radioactive," Lisa assured her. "Shouldn't be that much of a problem."

"What if the shield doesn't hold?" Ember replied and sent Lisa an image of her precious rosin ship gutted by a nuclear blast. Tabatha almost laughed watching Lisa frown and smile at the same time.

"Let's test the shield first," Lisa said, remembering her only encounter with it when she'd tried to eradicate the mutant spiders.

"Okay," Tabatha replied. Closing her eyes, she created a round sphere of energy outside the hull. "You see that?"

"Yeah," Lisa replied. "I see it." Concentrating harder than normal, she teleported inside it.

'Well, I can get in and out of it, anyway, ' she thought back at Tabatha and Ember. 'Let's try putting some energy in here.' She realized she'd have to fake this part, and shielded her mind from the others.

Dream-walking earthward, she found a rock and teleported it into the sphere where her body was. Realizing she needed two, she teleported a second one up as well. Teleporting outside into naked space, Lisa looked into the sphere. Grasping one rock into her mind, she teleported it into the other. The sphere turned blinding white like a tiny sun, but the shield held, releasing only a fraction of the heat being created inside. Lisa grinned with pleasure as the intense heat from it warmed her freezing body as she floated in the vacuum.

'At least, my hair isn't freezing wet this time... ' she thought to herself, remembering her first, almost virginal attempt to exist in the vacuum of space.

'Can you feel that?' Lisa asked, mentally calling out to Tabatha.

'Wow! That's incredible!' Tabatha exclaimed, completely awestruck. 'I about had an orgasm when you did that! How can you have that much power inside your head and not go insane?'

Lisa didn't respond. She teleported back inside the ship.

"There's no radioactivity coming from the sphere," Ember informed them. "Just heat and light."

"How can you use that to power the ship's drive?" Tabatha wanted to know.

"Shouldn't you be concentrating on holding that shield?" Lisa snapped at Tabatha.

"I don't need to," Tabatha replied haughtily. "It will stay in place so long as there's energy to feed it. Your mind power inside it will probably keep it going for thousands of years. Do you have to keep concentrating on your output?"

"No," Lisa said, covering up her thoughts again. "It's not part of me, now. It's a separate, physical thing."

"Neat!" Tabatha replied, grinning. "So is that shield!"

"Okay," Ember said, sighed with some trepidation. "We have a power source. Any idea how to utilize it? Or get it inside the ship?"