The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Leveling the Field

A handful of hours later found Mordecai grimly pouring over the latest engineering specs for the portal enhancer, one of the Mordecai-designed devices created to assist Avalon in its war against the Brotherhood. The enhancer boosted a psionic's ability to make a teleportal several fold, allowing many that were unable to even form a teleportal to make medium distance jumps and those that could, long distance jumps.

The specs, on standard blueprint paper, were sitting on the angled top of a draftsman's easel, which was located in the small workshop at the back of Camelot's massive underground testing facility. The table was set high enough for a standing person to use it comfortably, even one as tall as Mordecai, granting access and ease of use at the same time.

The reason Mordecai was looking at the enhancer specs was that the latest series of test reports that Beki had handed him the evening before had indicated the enhancer was consistently failing to establish a stable teleportal. Somehow the field generation unit, the device that created the translocation subspace rift, wasn't properly aligning with the earth's magnetic field. That made precision jumps impossible.

No translocation could be made without a set of magnetic coordinates to work with. If this generator continued to fail in the alignment, there would be no way a set of coordinates could be obtained for any sort of pinpoint portal. Frowning, Mordecai pulled out the power plant diagrams and piled them on top of the main blueprint schematics for the enhancer.

Almost immediately he saw the problem. 'Hmmm. The secondary initiator. Looks like the Avalon adaptations to it haven't accounted for magnetic field flux with proper isolating insulation.' From a nearby work bench, littered with parts and pieces of various units, a field generation unit for the enhancer silently rose out of the scattered parts and silently drifted through the air and into Mordecai's hand.

The smallest tendril of psyken opened the unit's face plate and several components floated free, to hang, suspended above the unit as Mordecai turned his meta-senses to the secondary initiator, a complex piece of lone gunmen technology that he had utilized to create the device.

"Paladin, give me a three dimensional display of the field generator, with a detail on the secondary initiator."

"Confirmed, Mordecai." With a flicker of blue light, a holographic, three-dimensional representation of the field generator, blown up to ten times its normal size, appeared just above the top of the table. Mordecai quickly scanned over it before turning his attention back to the unit itself, intent on examining in detail.

But before he could extend his Deepsight into the initiator, a set of rather sensuous thoughts inserted themselves somewhat unexpectedly into his conscious mind. Putting both his hands on the worktable, Mordecai sighed and slowly shook his head. He had managed to push both memories of his delicious few hours with Alex and the horrifying visions of his dream into the back of his mind so he could concentrate on his work. Only to have his concentration shattered by the very woman who had shared his thoughts a handful of hours ago.

Her sexy mental suggestions preceding her, a soft set of lips abruptly kissed Mordecai quite tenderly on the back of his neck to announce Alex's physical presence, her hands sliding over his body to pull him to her, her deliciously firm breasts pressing against his back.

"I didn't like waking and not finding you beside me," she husked softly, affection and desire making her accent a little sharper than usual as she moved away from him following a final kiss on Mordecai's neck and a caressing touch on his shoulders. "You left our bed very early this morning!"

A slight smile touched the big man's lips as he watched her walk sensuously around the worktable, her dark eyes devouring him as a smile of her own played on her lips, her face filled with naked passion as she stared wantonly at him.