Subjugation

By James Galloway (aka Fel)

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Prologue

      Mankind’s first contact with extra-terrestrial life was as dramatic and historical as everyone believed it would be.

      They were called the Faey, and they came to Earth not as messengers of peace, but as conquerors.

      On March 12th, 2005, they arrived in two immense starships and addressed the peoples of Earth via radio transmission, in every major language, that Earth had two weeks to surrender to the Faey Imperium or face war.  They did not use any show of force or destroy anything to prove their might, for the images that Earth telescopes gave of their two vessels was all the show of force anyone needed.  They were two miles long and nearly three quarters of a mile across, two sleekly designed monstrosities that were so massive that when they entered into Earth orbit, they affected the tides.

      The next day, a lone Faey emissary descended from the vessels above to address the United Nations with the Faey demands, and the global news coverage of the arrival of the emissary caused its own confusion.  The Faey representative, a high-ranking military officer, was a breathtakingly lovely human-looking female with light blue skin and pointed ears.  She did not look like a warlike alien, she did not even look particularly dangerous.  But when she addressed the United Nations, in English, it became quite apparent to everyone watching the globally broadcast event that she was every bit the conqueror.  She was arrogant and condescending, and she made it clear immediately that there would be no negotiation.  The Earth had two weeks to surrender unconditionally or face war.  Earth could either surrender or be conquered, but either way, they would become a part of the Faey Imperium.

      Faced with an enemy vastly superior in technology to their own, the nations of Earth met in the United Nations met for two solid weeks and debated furiously, but such a debate had only one ultimate conclusion.  That conclusion was reached March 26th, 2005, when the Secretary General of the United Nations, Vladimir Kosparivic, formally and officially surrendered on behalf of all the nations of Earth.

      Without firing a shot, without killing a single human being, the Faey Imperium conquered Earth.

      And so, Earth became a farming colony under Faey control.  The second major shock that the natives—as the Faey called them—discovered about their conquerors was that there was much more to them than first believed.  The Faey were a telepathic species, and they used that telepathic power to quickly move in and root out all the resistance movements that had sprung up since their arrival.  All Terran governments were dissolved, replaced by a feudalist system where a Faey noble held absolute power over his or her territory.  At first, the humans held hope that their conquerors could somehow be overthrown, but it was a feeble one.  In two months, the Faey Occupational Forces wiped out every band of organized resistance, leaving the humans with nothing but grim resignation of the lot that had been dealt to them.

      The changes were drastic.  Human society was allowed to continue to function, at least after a fashion.  The Faey meant for Earth to be a farming colony, and that was exactly what it became.  All activity on Earth was shifted to farming or offering material or technological support for the farming effort.  The verdant belts of Earth, such as the American mid-west, had every single square inch of their land taken over by farming.  Entire cities were depopulated and razed to make room for farms, and the middle sections of America became nothing but a vast collection of large collective farms.  Every open space became a farm, even inhospitable areas like deserts and tundra, from the northern reaches of Canada and Russia all the way to the southern tips of Africa and South America.  The Faey did not cut down forests to make room for farms, and all small-scale civilization that existed within forested areas was evacuated, letting the regions go back to nature to maintain the planetary ecosystem and sending the inhabitants to work elsewhere.

      Society continued on much as it did before, but all the humans who had had a job that had either been phased out as unnecessary, or had been replaced by Faey, found themselves working on farms.  Every single human who was unemployed suddenly found himself on a farm, and a large segment of the rest of the population also found themselves working on farms, having been assigned there by random lottery that was held every three months.  The rest of the human race continued on much as it had before, manufacturing supplies and equipment needed for the farms, maintaining the infrastructure, rendering services and support to other workers.  Because of this realignment, lawyers, politicians, stock brokers and bankers suddenly found themselves weeding fields, while doctors, construction workers, and the clerks at the local convenience stores found their jobs to be suddenly secure.  For those who avoided being sent to farms, job loyalty became insanely high and performance became fanatically perfect, for being fired or quitting would lead to immediate reassignment to a farm…and once assigned to a farm, a worker was virtually guaranteed to be a farm worker for the rest of his life.

      The Faey did turn out to be not quite so heartless as humans originally first believed.  They installed a great deal of their own technology on the planet to clean up the environment and converted all human cars and trucks to fuel cells of hydrogen, which burned cleanly.  They instituted universal health care for all humans, cured plagues on human kind like AIDS, cancer, and diabetes, and revamped the educational system to start training humans in their technology, so they could maintain the Faey systems themselves.  The Faey took over the roles of police, and their telepathic abilities led to the quick capture of all criminals, which in turn led to a drastic drop in crime.  They did not interfere with the arts or entertainment, allowing music, movies, television, and even the internet to remain for the enjoyment of the citizenry, encouraged careers in the arts and protected the jobs and livelihoods of those already in careers in the arts, even going so far as to not even bother to censor content, allowing people to express any opinion they wished…for everyone knew that the Faey telepathic gifts would destroy any kind of rebellion before it ever had a chance to begin.  Humans were allowed to object to the Faey, even do so publicly, so long as they didn’t actively do anything about it.  But many saw these gestures as nothing more than guaranteeing the health and well-being of their slave work force.

      Human society slowly and begrudgingly accepted this new order, however, for it was impossible to rebel.  Their Faey conquerors were telepathic, and quickly rooted out any attempt to organize resistance and crushed it.  Unable to counter either the vast technological superiority of their conquerors or maintain any kind of organized resistance, humans slowly came to accept that there was nothing that could be done.  But many continued to try, unable to live under the heel of an oppressor.  These mavericks mainly existed within the area formerly known as the United States, which proved to be both one of the most productive regions in terms of farm output, and the most troublesome in terms of defiant troublemakers.  The vast majority of these malcontents were squatters who had escaped from farms or had left their jobs and homes, and moved into the unpopulated forested regions of the eastern and western sides of the continent, areas that had been stripped of human population to allow the areas to return to nature.  In these lawless forest zones, they eked out dangerous and sometimes violent lives living off the land and preying on one another, living stark, almost primitive lives, but living free.  The Faey allowed them to do so, not bothering them so long as they didn’t raid Faey holdings.

      And so things remained for two years, a continuous cycle of the indomitable human spirit seeking to organize and resist, only to have their Faey conquerors move in and destroy the attempt before it got started.

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Chapter 1

      Raista, 9 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox calendar;

      Wednesday, 14 May 2007, Native regional reckoning

      New Orleans, Gamia Province, American Sector

      He hated heat.

      Blowing out his breath, Jason fanned the neck of his tee shirt as he scurried across the campus of Tulane University, lugging a heavy backpack full of assorted things around, just one of the many racing around campus like psychotic ants, trying to get wherever they were going as quickly as possible to escape the withering heat.  Why did it get this hot so early in the year down here?  Back home in Maine, there would still be snow in sheltered, shady pockets on the ground!

      It was almost enough to make him want to be sent to a farm, but with his luck, they’d stick him on one of the rice or sugar plantations they had down here, instead of a nice wheat farm up in New England.  It was just ridiculous.  He looked at his watch and saw that he was going to be nearly a half an hour early, but he didn’t care.  He’d stand out in the hall and wait if only to be in air conditioning.  It had to be nearly a hundred degrees!  For him, that was outrageous, given back home in Portland, it was a news event if the thermometer hit eighty!

      How did these people manage to live down here, anyway?  He was sure that they would have melted by now.

      The overshirt and backpack didn’t help, but he couldn’t help that.  The overshirt, nothing more than a button-up, short sleeve, light blue denim shirt that was worn unbuttoned was a vanity of his.  He’d worn shirts like that for so long that he felt naked if he wasn’t wearing a shirt and an overshirt over it.  The backpack was roasting his back where it was against him, but there wasn’t much he could do but pull it down and switch to the other shoulder.  It was a bit heavy today, but that was because he had today’s project in there in addition to his panel display, the universal computer-like device that all students were issued, that acted as a textbook, notebook, assignment book, and personal computer.  His cell phone (which he was required to carry at all times), earphones, several music and data sticks—crystalline devices that looked like little inch-long pencils made of crystal which stored information—and a few good old fashioned paper notebooks were also in the pack, adding to the weight but not about to be left behind.

      If only Professor Ailan had let him build a smaller model.  His project was for Advanced Plasma Fundamentals, and he had to build a functioning plasma flow model, complete with a plasma power generator, conduit for the plasma to take at least two separate paths, and an ion exchange module at both junctions.  The Faey had microscopic versions of what he had in his pack, a massive dog of a device that weighed nearly thirty pounds, but he had to use the supplies that were available to him.  It was a ridiculously easy project, truth be told, because all a student had to do was get the parts and put them together.  His model had three paths instead of two, because he was the last student to get to the part bin, and had to use the leftovers.  Professor Ailan had kept him at the podium on purpose, he privately suspected, keeping him from being able to get the necessary two-path split exchanger and merge exchanger to build the simplest version of the model.  He managed to get a three-path split exchanger and two two-path merge exchangers, and used those to build a cascading model where the primary conduit was split into three paths, then two merged, then that joined path merged with the last before returning to the PPG.

      Ailan was alright, at least for a Faey.  Jason didn’t like Faey, because they were conquering occupiers.  It was well known that Jason was an objector, a vocal dissident, but he never allowed his opinions to appear to be anything more than opinions, and he also had the highest grade point average among second semester students in the university.  The crux of his attitude towards Ailan dealt with a philosophical position.  Because the Faey had stripped Jason of his freedom and rights, he was opposed to their system.  But individual Faey were just that, individuals, and often voiced the same objections he himself raised.  But since they were Faey, he had a moral obligation to avoid them, and do his best not to like them.  That wasn’t easy when all his instructors were Faey, and Faey like Ailan were friendly, personable, and actually rather funny.  Ailan was a male Faey, which weren’t often seen on Earth.  The Faey was a female-dominated society whose entire core was based on telepathic power.  Females tended to have stronger telepathic abilities, so they had emerged as the dominant gender.  Females and males were the same size and roughly the same strength, but it was that disparity in telepathic might that made all the difference.  Males did have a place in the society, but they were not allowed, by law, to enter into any occupation that was considered overly hazardous or dangerous, outside of serving on the large starships.  Male Faey tended to be scientists, engineers, inventors, doctors, and teachers, while females were just about the only Faey that most people dealt with.  All military Faey were female, including the occupational forces, who served as the new police.  In addition to being military, females were also allowed to enter into any career they could manage to qualify for, and pull enough strings with whichever noble ruled them to manage to get in.

      That was one reason Jason got so aggravated with the Faey system.  It was a feudal bureaucracy, where every Faey was tested to see where they excelled, and allowed to pursue careers within those fields.  The personal choice of the person had nothing to do with these choices, which was why Jason cursed his own role every day.  When the Faey took over Earth, the tested each and every human on the planet, tests of intelligence, reasoning, and aptitude.  Prior education and training had little impact on these tests, and everyone tried their absolute hardest when taking them.  People who scored poorly were sent to farms, and being put on a farm was a fate that every human on Earth who was not already on a farm strove mightily to avoid.  In that regard, the Faey system was a great deal like the military.  But people who had money or connections could get out of that mandatory placement and go wherever they wanted.  They just had to have enough credits or the right lineage.  Nobles never served in the military in any role other than fleet officers or non-combat logistics officers for those who washed out of the academy, because they could buy those positions.  If Jason had had enough money, he could have bribed his placement assessor to get any job he wanted.  Not that it mattered for humans, for virtually all forms of old Earth currency was now worthless except for gold and silver.  Some rich millionaires did manage to have enough gold or silver assets on hand to buy themselves out of working on a farm, but not many.

      The main reason Jason hated his position was because he scored very high on those tests, high enough to be classified as able to comprehend Faey technology.  And because of that, now he was in school to learn their technology.  They didn’t consider that a risk because of their formidable telepathy, which would let them catch him long before he tried to use his education in some kind of harmful manner.  He would be trained in some kind of Faey technology, and then become a part of the Imperium by serving it.  And he hated that.  He’d be serving no matter what job he was doing, even farming, but it seemed so wrong to him to be trained in their technology and then work for them.  It was almost as if he were betraying the American ideals he had held so dear, cooperating with the enemy.

      It was doubly agonizing for him because he was fascinated by their technology.  They used plasma as a power source, and had mastered the science of manipulating space itself for use as propulsion, containing the fusion reactions that supplied plasma to power their systems, communicating over the entire galaxy, and had even learned to use it to breach the spacial boundaries and allow ships to jump through artificial wormholes…the closest thing to teleportation that had been devised so far by any race.  They used plasma for everything, from lighting their homes to the energy of their weapons, and had learned techniques to alter the nature of plasma to make it safe for commercial and residential use.  They used the manipulation of space as propulsion, as a means of travel beyond propulsion, and had even learned a way to form micro-wormholes that allowed communications to pass through, giving their Imperium real-time communications over their vast empire of nearly seventy star systems.  It was all so incredibly fascinating, and yet he felt he was violating his ethics and morals by enjoying his education.  He hated the Faey, and yet was learning to be a productive member of their society.  He hated being nothing more than a slave, yet his was the gilded cage, for they had put him in a place he loved to be.

      Too hot.  He had another half a block to go.  Tulane and another university called Loyola had existed side by side here in the Garden District of New Orleans, but Loyola had been dissolved, its buildings taken over by Tulane to form a single campus.  Not that it was Tulane anymore, it was simply called Tulane because that was the university whose buildings were still standing.  Officially, it was the Basic Technology Academy, Gamia Province.  His next class was all the way on the other side of the campus, in a brand new facility that had been built where the centuries-old Loyola building had once stood.  Scornful of the rich history of that venerable institution, the Faey had razed the building to the ground and in its place built their five-story nightmare of glass and synthetic plastic-like material that was stronger than steel but lighter than aluminum.  It was called the Plasma Dynamics building, or what the students called the “Plaid” due to the checkerboard appearance of glass and dark plastic that formed the front façade of the building, and it was where all lab-oriented Plasma courses were taught.  How did these people deal with it?  And it was only May!

      Two Faey females in that strange form-fitting body armor came across Saint Charles Avenue, their rifles slung over their shoulders.  He wondered how they could even breathe in those things.  They were truly form-fitting, showing off all those lovely curves for which many human men secretly pined.  Faey women were very lovely, all the military women were athletically thin, and most of them were curvy and very appealing.  Jason had a feeling that the tight fit of the armor had something to do with its protective aspects, since it didn’t hinder their movement in any way.  If there was no void space within it, there would be no jostling inside the armor.  He once saw a Faey soldier get hit by an SUV that had to be going about fifty miles an hour back when they first arrived, before they got the hang of crosswalks and realized that traffic wasn‘t just going to stop just because they stepped out into the street.  She got thrown about thirty feet after the impact, then she got up and simply dusted herself off.  The SUV was completely trashed.  The armor was more than just showing off their forms, it was a powerful protective shell that surrounded them.  These two had their helmets off, slung by small cords over the barrels of their rifles.  They were patent Faey, high cheekbones, large, almond-shaped eyes, small, pert little noses, full lips, and that strange bluish skin.  The taller one had gray eyes and auburn red hair cut short, combed over one side of her head, which seemed odd with her blue-hued skin, and the shorter one had blue eyes and hair so blond it was virtually white, short and straight as straw.  Both had black armor, which denoted them not as regular army, but as Marines.  They were the ones that a human had to watch out for, for they were rough, impatient, and tended to hand out very harsh punishments for the most benign of offenses.  They resented their jobs as police, and took it out on the people they policed.  Jason rushed past them, head down, not glancing to either side, his mind carefully neutral, betraying nothing.

      And there it was.  He’d come to be very familiar with that brushing sensation against his mind, the touch of a Faey who was using her telepathy against him.  Jason had a very organized and controlled mind, thanks to his father.  His father had been an Air Force fighter pilot, but resigned after his mother was killed in a car crash to spend more time with him.  His father had been a fanatical practitioner of martial arts, and had taught his son Karate, Aikido, Kendo, and Ninjitsu, which gave him a very structured and strong mind.  He still practiced, but not as much as he had before his father passed away.  That mental training gave him the ability to control his mind, present to the world a repetivitive train of thought which the Faey couldn’t seem to penetrate without being very serious about it, an upper layer of sorts that concealed the true thoughts beneath it.  And they all tried, damn them.  Every single Faey he came into casual contact with probed him within ten seconds of coming close to them.  It was automatic, and he had come to expect it every time he came within twenty feet of a Faey.  Some of those brushings were light, as this one was, some were strong, and sometimes the Faey abandoned tact and literally attacked his mind to break down his defense of repetitive thought and get at the true thoughts beneath.  No matter how light or strong the touch, Jason never failed to feel violated at those touches, violated and offended that they would strip him of the most private of all private domains, his own mind.

      The thought he used against most Faey when he was feeling petty, as he was now, was an image of the Faey involved, stark naked and in a rather provocative pose.  Except for a pair of army boots.  The boots were rather important.  He wasn’t sure which one it was doing it, so he decided to use the redhead.  She was cuter.  He had several stock poses that he used, but given that this one was a but more buxom than the usual Faey, the good old cupping breasts image suited her rather well.

      It was a dangerous game to play with a Marine, but it was worth it.  One had to fight one’s battles where and when one could.  Ruffling a Marine’s feathers would satisfy his sense of necessity.

      From behind, he heard a startled gasp, and then then he felt a second brushing.  That was proceeded immediately by uncontained laughter.

      He knew he had about three seconds to make himself scarce, before that redhead got over her sense of moral outrage and got mad.  He quickened his step as he heard the second one continue laughing, and he managed to get in with a group of other students moving towards the Plaid.

      “Hey!” came a sudden call from behind.  “Come back here!”

      Jason ducked his head and broke out in front of the other students, who had stopped and turned around to see who was being addressed.  They melted out of the way when they saw two Marines, one of them with a dark expression and the other trying her best not to start laughing again.  Jason just barely managed to duck into the Plaid before the Marine spotted him, and he quickly got out of sight.  He felt several more brushings, but instead of presenting an image of a naked Marine, he instead made his mind like smoke, empty and presenting little more to the outside world than a plastic plant would.  He slipped into the broom closet between the bathrooms as he heard the sound of the Marine’s boots on the tiled floor, then controlled his breathing and remained centered on nothingness, surrendering thought to the zen-like state of nothing but silence within and without, the serenity of a meditative mind.

      “I know you’re in here, human!” the Marine boomed in English, and she sounded quite miffed.

      “Calm down, Jyslin,” the other said in a reasonable tone.  “I thought it was funny.”

      “It was funny, Maya, but do you think I’m going to let him get away with that?” she shot back, obviously miffed, because she was still speaking English.  “Oh, no, not until I strip him and put him in a pair of those ridiculous high-heeled shoes the human girls wear.  Now shut up and help me find him.”

      Jason stayed in the closet for several moments as brushing after brushing slid over him, very strong ones, as the two of them used their telepathic gifts to try to find his mind.  He remained serene, allowing them to see nothing but emptiness as his mind worked beneath that misdirecting shell, curious as to why they couldn’t find him.  At that range, with as much power as he could sense in their probes, they should have punched right through his defense and locked right onto him.  He could hear them not ten feet outside the door, for their armored boots clacked on the floor every time they moved.  That close, they should be able to smell him, because he could certainly smell that strange copper-like smell that the strange metal of their armor exuded.

      He heard them chatter at each other in their musical language for a moment, as the redhead’s voice seemed to get agitated, then the blond’s voice got quite serious.  What was the matter with them now?  She thought it was funny.  What had the redhead said that changed her mind?

      He heard their boots clack away, then from the sound of it, they went up the stairs.  He quickly pounced up from his crouch and cracked the door open, and indeed saw them just as they turned and went up the steps, disappearing from sight.

      Quick as a cat, Jason darted from the closet, his sneakers making no sound, and he rushed down the hall, his mind racing.  They couldn’t find him.  Their telepathic power should have found him easily once they got serious about it, but they hadn’t.  Maybe it was the door.  It was made out of metal, and some people on the internet speculated that their telepathy couldn’t pierce through heavy metals, like lead.  If the door had a steel sheet, then maybe that was enough to weaken their probes to the point where it would keep them from finding him.

      It was the only plausible explanation.

      He rushed through the door of his classroom, closing the door behind him and peering through the small window.  Had they heard him?  Did they see him come out of the closet?  He should have waited.

      “Well, so glad you could join us, Mister MacKenzie!” the voice of Professer Ailen boomed across the room, followed up by the laughter of twenty others.

      Jason whirled around and put his back against the door, surprise making his face flush, and found all of them looking at him.  Had he been in the closet that long?  When he zoned out like that, he couldn’t keep track of time.

      “Well, since you wanted to make such an entrance, why don’t you step up and show us your project?”

      He drew a blank.  Project?  What was he talking about?  Oh, his project.  “I have it right here, Professor,” he said, taking his pack off his shoulder and approaching the table which Ailan used as a lectern and a desk.  “Sorry I’m late.”

      “And just who were you hiding from?” he asked with a sly smile.

      “You don’t want to know,” he answered as he put his pack down by his chair, closest to the door, and pulling out his breadbox-sized plasma system.  He felt a brushing from Ailan, and he was careful to keep his mind tightly focused on the project in his hands.  Males didn’t have the raw strength of the females when it came to telepathic ability, but they knew many tricks and subtle nuances that actually made them much more dangerous to him.  Ailan had a policy of not probing his students, but sometimes, like right now, when his curiosity was piqued, he just couldn’t help himself.  The first time Ailan had used his power on Jason, he had used his standard smoke and mirror trick to conceal his thoughts, and he felt Ailan immediately probe around the edges of it, trying to find a way through.  Ailan had known that it was nothing but a defense, that his true thoughts were lurking beneath that misdirection.  No female had ever managed to detect that, at least not that he knew of.  Because of that, Tarrin had to use more crude but no less effective techniques, such as repetitive concentration on a single thought, which drowned out everything else.  Ailan could only see his focus on getting his project set up and running, and for as long as he felt Ailan brushing up against his mind, he could think of nothing else.  But after a few seconds, the tentative brushing stopped, and Tarrin dropped his repetition and got down to the business of checking the seals on his exchangers before powering up his PPG.

      The incident with the Marine was brushed into the back of his mind as he displayed his working three-path plasma system, then sat down and watched as the others displayed theirs.  All of them but one worked perfectly, and that one failed because of a faulty PPG, which wasn’t the student’s fault.  Jason had the luck of being in a class of other smart people, for they had all been shipped into New Orleans to attend this particular school, which had the best instructors.  Jason had already had a year of school up in Boston, but when he aced his final in Basic Plasma Systems, they shipped him here, to Tulane, where the work was more challenging and the washout rate was tripled.  This was the school where they sent the humans that they thought might have a knack for the work, and pushed them hard to see how quickly and completely they could embrace plasma technology.  The Tulane campus was the M.I.T. or Northwestern of the Faey upper level education facilities, where the brightest students were sent.

      No one in this school wanted to wash out.  They all knew that the further they got in this school, the better of a job they qualified for once they were placed, and thus the more money they could make and the more secure they would be in their new careers.  The goal of any student at Tulane was to get at least to pass Advanced Plasma Applications, the benchmark requirement for plasma systems technicians.  Anything above that was good money and solid job security.  Many of them, once they got to that level, slacked off, washed out, and ended up getting placed, but they didn’t care.  They’d reached the promised land, and it didn’t matter what job they got, because it was a safe job.

      After a bit of lecture after the presentations, Professor Ailan glanced at the clock on the far wall and gave a little start.  “Good grief, I’m holding you guys over,” he announced.  “I hope nobody has any classes ten minutes after our class ends, cause you’ll be late.”  He clapped his hands.  “That’s all, people.  Read chapter nine and do the scenario questions for tomorrow.  Remember, we have a test on Thursday.  See you tomorrow.”

      The room was filled with the low buzz of chatter as the students picked up their panel displays and other assorted equipment and started stowing it in packs.  Jason had to close up his spiral and stow that, for he was the only person in the class that took notes on paper in addition to the notes he typed on his panel.  He preferred writing it down, because writing it helped him commit it to memory much better than simply typing it out on a computer.  He finished packing everything up as Ailan started disassembling the projects they did, his hands moving quickly and surely as he unannealed the components from their metal backing, using a little device that caused molecular structures of two different objects to mingle along the border, in effect “welding” them together.  He was using the “separation” mode, which caused to disparate materials to unfuse, sliding it along the base junction where the components were annealed to the backing with a quick and steady hand.  He watched for just a moment, then slung his pack over his shoulder and filed out the door.

      “Not so fast.”

      Jason froze at the sound of that voice, for it was the redheaded Marine!  He whirled around and saw her leaning with her back against the wall near the door, the sole of her left boot flat against the wall, her arms crossed below her breastplate and her head slightly bowed.  Her rifle and helmet were missing, probably being held by that other platinum blonde Marine who wasn’t around.

      He was busted.  He wasn’t going to run away like a coward, but he wasn’t going to blubber like a little girl either.  He drew himself up erect and looked over at her with a neutral expression.

      “You thought that was funny, didn’t you?” she asked, then she chuckled.  “Well, so did I.  You have more backbone than most of these sheep.  But you got it wrong.”

      “What?”

      “We tan, just like you do,” she told him with a strange smile.  “I’m much lighter than that.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said carefully, then he took a step back.

      “Don’t even,” she said quickly, coming off the wall.  “Just because I thought it was funny doesn’t mean you’re getting away with it.

      “There’s nothing in the laws against picturing a Marine naked,” he said bluntly.

      “True, that’s why I’m not hauling your happy ass down to the barracks,” she told him.  “You put me in a pair of boots, so I’m going to put you in a pair of high heels.  For real,” she told him with a wicked little smile.

      Jason got very defensive at that point, his eyes going flat.  “Try it,” he said dangerously.

      “Oh, you think you can take me?” she asked with a laugh, then he felt her brush against his mind.  He focused his thoughts behind a mask of utter blankness, a wall of nothing that would not allow her to find its edges and slip inside.  His sudden defense made her eyes go wide, then she gave him a sudden respectful look.  “That’s quite a trick there, human,” she told him.  “That’s how you got away from us before.  How do you do that?”

      “Practice,” he answered honestly.

      “Well, that’s fairly impressive,” she admitted. “It’s going to make this a little more difficult, but that’s alright.  I live for challenges.”

      “The only way you’re going to get me out of my clothes is over my dead body,” he warned in an ugly tone as several students passed by, giving him wild looks.

      “And not let you enjoy the experience?  I think not,” she winked.  She winked at him!  “I might have to knock you out, but I’ll make sure you wake up to enjoy it.”

      Immediately, Jason balled up his fists.

      She laughed.  “Well, I tell you what, human.  I’ll actually take you on hand to hand.  I won’t even cheat.  If you can beat me, I’ll leave you alone.  If you lose, you walk home wearing nothing but high heels.”

      Jason sized up this Faey.  The armor hid her body, but he knew from experience that Faey soldiers were deceptively strong.  But it was their speed that one had to watch.  They were lithe, graceful, and very fast.  The soldiers were extensively trained for combat, and that included hand to hand.  They were solid opponents, and he had to respect both her speed and her training.  She was expecting him to be like any other human of his size, rather strong, maybe well coordinated, but without any kind of basic training in self defense.  And since she couldn’t probe him, she couldn’t find out that he was in fact very well versed in self defense.  He knew what to expect from her, but she had no idea what to expect from him…or more to the point, she would draw the wrong conclusion.  That gave him all the advantage he needed.

      He could take her.

      “You have a deal,” he said confidently.

      “Come on then,” she told him with an eager smile.

      “Now?”

      “Sure,” she answered, walking past him, towards the outer doors.  “There’s plenty of room outside.”

      That suited him just fine.

      The students on campus realized something was going on when the Faey came out of the building, her partner standing by the door with her helmet and rifle, then backed out onto the grass and crooked a finger tauntingly at a human that came out behind her.  Jason dropped his pack by the sidewalk and ventured out onto the grass, cracking his knuckles and fixing the Faey with a cool stare.  “Want me to take off my armor?” she asked with a teasing smile.

      “No,” he answered in a calm, almost serene manner.  “You’ll need it.”

      That made the Faey laugh delightedly.  “I’m really going to enjoy walking you home, human,” she promised.  She spread her feet and raised her hands in a guard stance.  “Come on then, Rambo,” she taunted.  “Show the big bad Faey what you’re made of.”

      It had to end fast, before she realized he was much more dangerous than he looked, and he knew exactly how to approach her to make that happen.  He skittered in with his fists raised in a boxing stance, then flicked a few ineffective and intentionally clumsy jabs at her unprotected face, baiting her.  She laughed mockingly as she danced back a few steps, evading his erratic blows, then whipped her hand out to grab his arm as it came at her.

      Which was exactly what he wanted.

      With lightning speed, Jason opened his fist and snapped his arm outwards, grabbing her by the wrist.  He stepped in towards her and levered that arm in an Aikido lock, forcing her to move the way he wanted her to move or risk getting a broken arm or dislocated shoulder.  Her armor would not protect her against that.  He jerked her to and fro for several seconds as she gasped in pain and tried to disengage herself from his grip on her even as she surrendered to his force and moved where he bade her.  He got her off balance by making her weave back and forth in ever-widening circuits, until she was all but stumbling around as he moved backwards and to each side, forcing her to come along with him or get her arm broken.  Just as she dipped down to follow a sudden yank on her arm, Jason pivoted and let go of her, spun in a complete circle, and then delivered a wicked spinning roundhouse kick squarely to the side of her pretty little head just as she was rising up from his pull, completely unaware of the incoming attack.  The outside of his foot went satisfyingly numb as it impacted her skull, and the raw power of the blow swept her right out from in front of him.  His foot swung down easily to again stand on the earth, and the Faey Marine crashed to the ground in a boneless heap.

      Jason stood there for a long moment to utter, complete, stunned silence from the growing crowd that came over to see what was going on.  He watched for several seconds, until she groaned and rolled over on her stomach, then shakily started pushing herself up onto her hands and knees.  He thought about saying something to rub it in, but it was best not to tempt fate.  He beat her, he beat her fairly, and something told him that he’d better pick up his pack and be somewhere else by the time she got her senses back.  He turned his back on her without a word, then paced over and picked up his pack.  The blond--what was her name?  Maya?  Maya, that was it.  Maya gave him a look of profound surprise, then she gave him the strangest smile, all cheeky and amused.  She put her free hand to her upper chest and gave him a little bow, some kind of weird Faey custom, he supposed.  He put his hand in his pocket, held onto the strap of his pack with the other, then strolled away as if nothing had happened.

      But as soon as he turned the corner, he ran like hell.

      He knew that there were going to be repercussion for what happened.  He was sure of it.  A human had kicked the piss out of a Faey, and not just any Faey.  A Marine.  It worried him enough to make it hard to study, and that was a very bad thing.

      He leaned back from the desk in his tiny room, putting his hands over his face.  It was a truly spartan affair, with a narrow bed that wasn’t long enough for him in the corner, and a tiny stand with a small television sitting in the other corner.  A small window facing the brick building across the alley was set in the middle of the wall, by the television.  His desk was a the head of his bed, which left just enough room to open the door, which banged up against the bookshelf on the opposite wall, behind the desk, which was why he had little more than a walkway in the middle of his room.  His panel was sitting on the desk on a stand so he could read the screen, like a monitor, displaying video it had taken of his calculus class he took after the fight, a class he didn’t even remember.  At least he had the wherewithal to set the panel to record the class, because he was completely distracted.

      Distracted?  More like mindlessly worried.  Professor Zalda, his aged female Faey calculus teacher, seemed amused by his state, and hadn’t pressed him during class.  He couldn’t remember getting there.  He couldn’t remember a single word spoken during the class.  Hell, he didn’t even remember leaving and walking back to his room, which was two blocks from the campus in a dorm built for the students.  It was all a jumbled blur of worry over what had happened.  In a way, he started thinking that maybe he should have let that Marine strip him and make him walk home naked.  At least then, he wouldn’t be eaten up with an almost panicked fear of what the Marines were going to do to him in payback.

      He knew all about that.  His father had been in the Air Force, so he knew all about how they were going to gang up to pay him back for what he did to one of their own.

      He blew out his breath and looked at the wall over his desk, under the shelf that was mounted to the wall, where a picture of his father was pinned.  He’d been dead for five years now, and in a way, he was glad he didn’t live to see the subjugation.  His father would have invaded a base, stolen a fighter, and got himself killed, or ran off into the forest with the other squatters who were out there now.  He died of cancer, and after he died, a seventeen year old Jason Fox found himself alone in the world.  But instead of going into a foster home, he got emancipation and just kept going, like his father would have wanted him to.  He sold his family house and moved into a dorm when he got a scholarship to play football at the University of Michigan.  He played for two years as a third-string free safety and special teams cover player,  never making it to the starting lineup, but he really didn’t care.  He was there on scholarship, and he used that scholarship to get a free education…which was what he was after.  He majored in electrical engineering, focusing on digital electronics.  He hoped to get a job designing computer hardware somewhere after college, working for a place like Motorola or IBM.  But then the Faey came, and all his plans were tossed out the window.  Because he was in college, he wasn’t shipped off to a farm, allowed to remain in school and continue with his classes until he was tested.

      Not that he did much schooling in that year between their arrival and the day they tested him.  He was stuck in a holding pattern, as was everyone in school, just waiting and going through the motions.  It was a very nervous time, and it gave them enough time to find out from others just what happened in the testing, and what happened if one did poorly.  They tested him, then shipped him to Boston for a year of preliminary--what they called remedial--education, then he had his first semester of plasma courses.  He did so well that they shipped him down here to New Orleans a few months ago to start the semester at Tulane, and so far, he’d been doing rather well.

      Jason chuckled humorlessly as his father’s green eyes laughed from the photograph.  His father had always been so jovial, so light-hearted, so much different from his sober and serious son.  But they did look something alike.  Jason has his father’s straight blond hair, his piercing green eyes, and the same tall frame.  His father was but a half an inch from being too tall to be a fighter pilot.

      There was a knock at his door, which startled him nearly out of his chair.  “Yo, Jason!” a man called, and he sighed in relief when he realized it was Tim.  Tim was one of his students in his only extra-curricular activity, an Aikido class he taught on campus.  He had nine pupils, and so far, they all seemed to be doing rather well.  Jason taught them Aikido and Tai Chi, exercise for the body and the mind to help them deal with the tremendous stress that school put on them.

      “It’s open,” he called, and the door opened immediately.   Tim came in wearing a tank top and a pair of running shorts, and he was coated in sweat.  Tim was a tall, dark-haired, rather handsome broad-shouldered young man that at twenty-two was a year younger than him, but was in the same semester as he was.  They only shared one class, their Physics class, and that was enough for them to strike up a friendship.  It was Tim that talked him into starting an Aikido club, and was one of his most eager pupils.

      “You look like shit,” Tim told him as he came in, unable to close the door because Jason was blocking his entrance into the room.

      “I feel like it,” he grunted, leaning back in the chair and looking up at the ceiling.

      “You realize that you missed the meeting,” he said.  “Since you weren’t there, we just threw each other around for a while then went home.”

      Jason chuckled ruefully.  “Sorry about that, but  I’m a little distracted.  I‘ve had a bad day.”

      “We heard.  Heard that a student kicked the shit out of a blueskin, and everyone in the club knew it was you when you didn‘t show up,” he said with a sudden laugh, using the rather derogatory term humans had of the Faey.  “What happened?”

      “It’s a bit involved,” he answered, then he related the tale to him, telling about how his image of the Faey ultimately led to the challenge, and the short fight afterward.

      Tim laughed.  “I’ll bet she’s kicking herself for not wearing her helmet,” he surmised.

      “Probably,” Jason agreed.  “She never thought I could be any kind of threat.”

      “She broke the first rule,” Tim said sagely, the first thing Jason taught his students.  Never believe that your opponent can’t beat you, because the instant you do believe that, he will beat you.  “So, what happens now?”

      “Now, I walk with one eye over my shoulder and ready to run like hell any time I see black armor,” he answered honestly.  “If she doesn’t do something about it, the other Marines will.  Military people like that don’t let their own get beat up by a native.  They’ll come after me.”

      “They might,” Tim admitted.  “But then again, they could just zap you.”

      “What would that prove?” Jason asked.  “No, they’ll beat me up the old fashioned way.  That way the don‘t feel inferior.”

      “How did you do it?” he asked.

      “I’ve seen Faey soldiers move,” he answered.  “I’m familiar with them, but that Marine had never seen me before, and she just assumed that I was like everyone else, that I had no training.  I had the advantage, and she thought that she did.  She got cocky, and it cost her.”

      “And she got her ass kicked,” Tim laughed.

      “Actually, it was my head,” a voice called from outside the door, which made both of them snap their heads to look, even as Jason’s stomach sank.  He knew that voice.  It was the redheaded Marine, and she had tracked him back to his room!  She was alone, and much to his surprise, she wasn’t wearing her armor.  She was wearing a plain old gray tee shirt with a pocket on the left side and a pair of faded blue jeans tucked into dainty black leather boots, very human clothing.  The only thing about her that looked out of place was her blue skin, pointed ears, and the plasma pistol holstered on her belt.  Even off duty and in civilian clothes, Faey soldiers did not go around unarmed.

      Tim turned absolutely white, backing up against the door and giving the redheaded, blue-skinned woman a strangled look.

      She stepped up to the door, and Jason couldn’t help but stare at her.  She was gorgeous out of her armor!  Her hair was neat and groomed, still combed over the left side of her face and head, and there was no visible sign that she’d been walloped in the head.  No scab, no bruise, no knot.  The armor made her look harsh and intimidating, but in a loose-fitting tee and jeans, she was very feminine, and quite pretty.

      “Well,” she said, glancing at Tim.  “I thought for a moment that there was someone else here, but I think I was mistaken.  It would be a shame if I turned out to be wrong.  After what I thought I heard that other person say, I just might have to do something about his attitude.”

      Tim hugged the wall as he slipped around her, then he fled down the hall shamelessly.  And Jason didn’t blame him one bit.

      Jason watched her as she strode into the room, then leaned her shoulder against the door.  He was totally at a loss here.  He had no idea what to say or do, and fear rose up like bile in his stomach as her stormy gray eyes looked down at him without expression.

      “Well,” she said, with a slow smile creeping into her features.  “I don’t need the Gift to see that you’re quite at a loss.  Didn’t think I’d come here like this, did you?”

      He shook his head mutely, staring at her like she was a cobra about to strike.

      “Calm down,” she said with a wink.  “I’m not here for a rematch, and you don’t have to worry about my squad coming down here to give you a party.  I got whooped fair and square, and I can respect that.  I underestimated you, and I paid for it.  And that’s that.”

      “T-Then why are you here?” he managed to stammer out.

      “Because you interest me,” she said frankly.  “I’ve never met a human male that could beat me in a fight.  There’s that, and there’s also the fact that your mind is closed to me.  I can’t simply look at you and hear every thought in your head.  I don’t know how you do it, but you keep your mind closed so it doesn’t broadcast your thoughts for us to hear.  Only a handful of humans can do that that we know of, humans with highly trained minds.  You’re a mystery, and Faey women just love mysterious males.  They pique our curiosity.”

      Jason got nervous.  He did not like the way this was sounding like it was headed.

      “There’s that, and there’s also how you hid from us,” she continued.  “I’ve never heard of any human that could do that.  Somehow, you blocked our talent when we searched for you, hid your mind from us in a way that made us miss you.  That’s pretty remarkable, since you don’t have any talent yourself.  I want to know how you did it.”

      “I just presented an empty front,” he said quickly.  “Meditation, no thought.  I learned a while ago that if I’m not thinking, then Faey can’t use it to find me.”

      She pursed her lips, then she laughed.  “Well, actually we can, but we don’t bother using those approaches when we’re looking for humans.  It’s easy to just look for thoughts, and since I never dreamed that you could hide your thoughts, I never bothered to look for you any other way.  That’s damned clever.”  She cocked her head at him curiously.  “How do you know how to do that at all?”

      “You damn Faey stick your noses in my head all the time,” he blurted in irritation before he caught himself.  “Every single one I meet tries to probe me with telepathy.  They do it to me so often I’ve even learned how it feels when they do it.  That’s how I knew when to put that image out where you’d see it,” he continued, having no idea why he was telling her, but unable to stop himself.  “Why don’t they ever leave me alone?”

      “It’s because we can’t hear your thoughts passively,” she said after a few seconds of thought.  “If you were any other human, I could stand here and hear every thought that crossed your mind without having to actively touch you.  But I can’t hear what you’re thinking, so I’d have to actively reach out and touch your mind.  If you’re looking for who to blame for why we always probe you, look in your mirror,” she told him with a wink.  “Faey women adore mysteries, and a human with a closed mind is the only mystery we have on this rock.”

      Well, that did explain quite a bit.  He rocked back in his chair and pondered on it briefly.  If she was right, then he was partially to blame for all those Faey who violated the sanctity of his own mind, if only because his thoughts weren’t out where they could hear them.

      “So,” she said, getting his attention again.  “Now that I got the answers to my questions, want to go get some pizza?”

      “What?” he asked in utter surprise.

      “Do you want to go out and get some food?” she repeated.  “I haven’t had anything since breakfast, and I’m starved.  I’m rather fond of pizza.  There’s this place on the West Bank called Mo’s.   It has the best pizza in the city.”
      He was quite honestly startled half out of his wits.  She was asking him out!

      “Well?  Don’t sit there like an idiot,” she grinned.  “I know it’s a shock that I’m asking you out, but it can’t be that much of a shock.”

      “Oh yes it can,” he managed to blurt as he tried to recover his wits.  He hadn’t expected this.  Anger, yes, maybe even spite, but not a date.   What the hell was he going to do to get out of this without getting her pissed off?

      “I, uh, I have too much work to do,” he said, motioning at his panel, which was still showing video of the class he’d sort of lost in the haze after their short fight.  “I have a test tomorrow in calculus, and I’m not ready.  And I have homework in about four different courses, and two tests Friday.  And since I’ve been worrying about what happened between us since it happened, I haven’t been able to concentrate on school since then.”

      She chuckled ruefully.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you like that,” she told him.  “What’s your test in on Friday?”

      “Advanced Plasma Fundamentals,” he answered immediately.

      She made a face.  “I hated that class,” she said.

      He gave her a startled look.

      “You think I want to be a Marine forever?” she said in a challenging tone.  “I’m just going through the mandatory conscription.  Every Faey woman has to do five years in the military.  I’m pretty strong in talent and I’m a good shot, so I was put in the Marines.  But I’ve been taking classes to try to get into engineering on one of the starships, as soon as I serve out my two-year initial assignment.”

      “And if you had money, you could have bought your way into that engineering job,” he said with a growl.

      “I see you understand the nuances of Faey society rather well,” she said in a sarcastic kind of manner.  “I’m a commoner.  I have to work my way where I want to go.  Where did you learn so much about us?”
      He pointed at his panel.  “They don’t censor the old internet, and I‘m not restricted from CivNet,” he answered, referring to the earth-based Faey computer information network, which was connected to the Faey “internet.”  “If you know where to look, you can find all sorts of information.”

      “Ah.”  She looked at the screen, then stepped up and waved her hand in front of the panel’s sensor.  That triggered an automatic reaction which caused the device to project out the keyboard.  Jason still wasn’t used to that thing.   It was a holographic projection that had real substance, an illusion that he could touch, and it acted just like any other keyboard.  It was customizable, so Jason had set his up to mimic a standard human computer keyboard.  She looked at it a moment, then nudged him with her hip to give her space and started typing at the terminal window that popped up over the running video playback.

      “What are you doing?” he demanded as she quickly brought up his calendar, which listed all his due assignments.

      “Just looking for a place where you can squeeze me in,” she answered with a sly smile down at him.

      “Did it ever occur to you that I might not want to go out with you?” he asked acidly.

      “Why not?”

      “You’re a Faey,” he declared in a blunt manner.

      “So?  Faey go out with humans all the time.  You‘re actually an attractive race to us, and I know we‘re attractive to you.  Our physiologies are virtually identical, and we’re even genetically compatible.  Faey and humans are nearly the same race.  There‘s nothing wrong with us going out.  It‘s not like I‘m some kind of scaly alien.”

      “Your government conquered my world and made me a slave,” he told her in a strong manner, which made her stop typing and look down at him.  “My principles won’t let me go out with a Faey.  You’re the enemy.”

      “Oh, you’re one of those,” she said with a chuckle.  “Well, I’m not the government.”

      “You’re a Marine.  You very much are the government.”

      “Hey, I may be a Marine, but that doesn’t mean I like what the Empress does,” he told him.  “I was placed, the same as you.  I’m as much a slave as you are, if you want to look at it that way.  I just do what I’m told, the same as you, and work to try to improve my lot.  You and me, we’re insignificant little cogs in the vast machine.”

      He was surprised that she had such a strong grasp of English.  He was equally surprised at her reasoning, and he often forgot that the Imperium treated the Faey the same way it treated the humans.  She had been placed, just like he had, put in the Marines because that’s where they thought she would do best, and she was working to get out of the Marines and move on to something she wanted to do.  The only way to do that was to show the Imperium that she could do the job through tests, then wait for a position to come open.  Until then, she’d wear her armor and tote around her rifle and play policeman, because she had no other choice.

      But still, she was Faey, a member of the conquering race.  By principle, he couldn’t be friends with her, the same way he kept his distance from Ailan.  Because, just like Ailan, this pushy Faey female was starting to grind down his defenses.  She was smart, sassy, a little pushy, and she had a sense of humor.  Those were attractive qualities in a woman to him.

      “Well, this cog doesn’t mingle with the other cogs,” he told her tartly, pushing her hands away from his keyboard.  It was the first time he had ever touched a Faey skin to skin, and in that touch he felt a strange buzzing behind his eyes.

      “You like me,” she announced with a laugh.  “You object to me out of a philosophical position, not personal preference.  Well, it’s nice to know where I stand.”

      He glared at her, realizing that she had somehow breached his defenses and had looked inside his mind, violating his privacy in the most grievous manner possible.  He jumped to his feet and got nose to nose with her, his anger all over his face, which made her uncertain and nervous.  “Stay out of my head, and get the hell out of my room,” he said in an ominously low voice.

      “Hey, that was your fault,” she told him quickly.  “You touched me, and I wasn’t expecting it.  When we touch, it focuses the talent, makes it easier for us to see deeper into a mind.  When you touched me, I was inside your mind before I realized it.”

      “The one thing I know about your talent is that it takes intent,” he said in a savage hiss.  “Now get out!”

      “Alright, you got me,” she admitted.  “When you touched me, I took a peek.  But that’s because I wanted to see how you really felt about me.  If you didn’t like me, I would have simply left.  But I know that you do like me, Jason Augustus Fox,” she said with a slight little smile.  “I’m sorry I did that.  I didn’t know how much you objected to sharing your thoughts, and I won’t do it again.  So, I’ll go and let you calm down, but don’t think that you’ll never see me again.  I’ll show up around every corner, and I’ll hound you until I get what I want from you.”

      “You think you will,” he growled.

      “I know I will,” she told him easily, holding up three fingers.  “I don’t want anything other than three dates, Jason, three chances to get to know you better and solve the mystery of you.  And I’ll be your worst nightmare until you give in and go out with me,” she promised.  “Our first will be a real date, where we both dress up in nice clothes and go to a nice restaurant, then we go to an opera or a play, something cultured and classy.”

      “There’s no chance in hell that’s going to happen,” he declared.

      “We’ll see,” she said with a narrow-eyed smile.  “You underestimate my resolve.”

      “You underestimate mine.”

      “Well, if you want to make a challenge out of it, then I’ll be happy to oblige you,” she said brightly, turning and taking the two steps necessary to get out the door.  “But I’ll warn you right now, Jason.  I play to win,” she warned, reaching in and grabbing the handle.  “Oh, and I cheat,” she added with a chuckle, then she closed the door.

      Growling several low curses, Jason sat back down in his chair.  If she thought she was going to get him to go out with her, she was totally crazy.  He might have considered it before she stuck her nose in his mind, violated him in the one way he could not stand to be violated.  He spent several minutes trying to compose himself.  He looked at the screen, saw that his calendar was still up, and he saw that she had added a few items to it, next Friday:

16 May 2007, 7:00pm:            Go out with Jyslin Shaddale.

            16 May 2007, 11:15pm           Strip naked and wear high heels.

            16 May 2007, 11:20pm:          Strip Jyslin naked and make her wear combat boots.

            16 May 2007, 11:24pm:          Discover that Faey girls have the same equipment as human girls.

16 May 2007, 11:27pm:          Have mind-shattering, nearly religious sexual experience.

      Despite it all, he blurted out a chuckle after reading those last three lines.  This Jyslin certainly did have a sense of humor.  He may be pissed off at her for her invasion of his mind, but he could appreciate her humor if nothing else.

      And she certainly wasn’t intent on hiding her motives, that was for sure.  He knew some about Faey, but not much about their culture or their society.  He knew how they treated men, but not how they acted in social situations.  Was this bold forwardness a simple part of Faey custom, or was she being intentionally dirty to get his attention?  As far as things went with this particular Faey, anything was possible, of that he was certain.  Jyslin seemed to be a very intelligent woman, much smarter than she seemed, and she was dealing with a human that liked her personally, but objected to what she represented, so that meant that she had to be creative, get his attention, make him think.  And those remarks about getting him bed had certainly done that.

      Jyslin was going to be a problem, he decided.  But it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.  So she was a pushy woman.  He could deal with that.  All he had to do was wait her out until she lost interest, and make her as unwelcome as possible along the way.

      Yes, that would work.  Feeling much calmer, he killed the terminal window without erasing her little joke.  He’d leave that there to remind him.  Then he rewound his calculus lesson and started studying in earnest.

                                    *                      *                      *

      He figured that Jyslin was going to come around every once in a while and tease him, pester him, and then her duties would force her to return to work, more or less leaving him alone.

      He could not have been any more wrong.

      Jyslin and her partner, the blonde, were standing out on the sidewalk when he came out of the building, standing by one of the Faey’s hovercars.  They were sleek devices with no sharp edges, and they skimmed above the surface of the street using spacial resistance drives.  This one was a military model, armored and with flashers on its top, for use in policing the city.

      “Good morning,” she said brightly, coming up off the vehicle, her black armored boots clacking on the sidewalk as she walked towards him.  “Ready for school?”

      “What?” he asked in uncertainty.

      “School,” she said with a wicked smile.  “We don’t want you to get lost along the way, so we’re going to escort you right into your classroom.  And when you’re done there, we’ll make sure you find your next class, and then your next class, and then your next one.  We’ll make sure you have no trouble going anywhere you have to go today.  We’ll be right there behind you every step of the way.  Won’t we, Maya?”

      “Of course,” the blonde answered with a clever little smile.

      “Don’t you have a job?” he asked acidly.

      “You’re our job today,” she said with a nasty smirk.  “You see, we told our watch commander about a certain human who just might get into trouble because of a certain fight he had yesterday.  You know, we wouldn’t want him suffering from harassment from the occupational forces because he beat up a Faey, or gods forbid, retaliation from the Marines because the Faey in question was a Marine.  So the watch commander assigned us to the task of making sure nothing happens to you today.  Tomorrow, a new pair of Marines is going to escort you around, who will make life as unpleasant for you as possible without actively getting in your way.  And another pair the day after that, and another the day after that, and on and on until we report back to her that the threat to you has disappeared.”

      Jason gave her an unholy glare, which she answered with a light, amused smile.  “I told you, Jason.  I cheat.”

      Jason took an aggressive step towards her, then he put his hand in his pocket absently.  “You rushed out before I could tell you something last night, Jyslin.”

      “Oh?  What is that?”

      “I cheat too,” he answered in a cold voice, then he whipped his hand out of his pocket, holding a small cylindrical object.  He pointed it at her and unleashed his secret weapon, a small canister of pepper spray, and she took the full brunt of it right in the face.  She gasped and gave out a hacking sound, flinching away from the small cloud of irritating mist, putting her gauntleted hands to her face.  But the metal of her gloves wouldn’t wipe away the agent, leaving her at its mercy.

      The blonde, Maya, gave him a startled look, but he just gave her an evil smile, put the canister back in his pocket, and strolled towards school as if nothing untoward had happened.

      That stroll turned into a sprint when Jyslin’s outraged voice reached him.  “You’re digging your own grave, human!” she boomed.  “Now you’re going to be wearing a maid’s dress along with those high heels!”  He glanced back to see that Maya had fished a towel or something out of the hovercar for her, and she was wiping the pepper spray off of her face.  Pepper spray wasn’t like mace in that once it was cleaned off, it had no lingering effects.  It was only to distract and incapacitate a moment, long enough for someone to escape from an attacker.

      If she wanted to be an obnoxious little ass, then he’d be happy to meet her on that level, immature stunt for immature stunt.

      He managed to get to school before Jyslin got organized enough to follow him, ducking into the Plaid and looking out the large pane windows to either side of the door nervously.  It was nothing but a delaying tactic, for he was certain that she had a copy of his class schedule and thus could position herself outside the door and wait for him to come out, but it bought him enough time to try to come up with a strategy for losing her after class.

      That wasn’t going to be easy.  He’d used up his pepper spray, and now that she had an idea how ruthless he could be, he wasn’t going to get an easy shot like that on her again.  She’d be much more careful next time.

      He went to his classroom early and sat down.  It was unlocked, as all the classrooms were, mainly because the security system in the classrooms would catch anyone stealing anything.  Every tool and piece of equipment in the classroom had an ID chip that broadcast to a central receiver.  If anyone tried to steal a tool, it would set off an alarm as soon as he stepped out the door.  He pulled out his panel and his notebook and went over yesterday’s notes, and Professor Ailan ambled in a little bit after he arrived.

      “Ah, Jason,” he said amiably.  “You’re here early.”

      “I’m avoiding someone, Professor,” he replied as he made a few refinements to the sketch he’d done of a plasma power generator’s internal working diagram.  Jason had a talent for art, and could draw, illustrate, and paint fairly well, almost good enough to be paid for it.

      “That Marine, eh?” he said, then he chuckled.  “She sent to me to find you yesterday, looking for anyone who came in late.  What’s she after you for?”

      “A date,” he answered truthfully.

      Ailan gave him a look, then laughed heartily.  “My boy, you’ve done absolutely everything wrong,” he told him.

      “What do you mean?”

      “Faey women like mysterious men, and what’s more, they go absolutely wild when mysterious men play hard to get.  You have a closed mind, an oddity among humans, and that makes you very mysterious.  And since you’re obviously trying to get away from her, you’re playing hard to get.  She’s going to come after you ten ways to peel a goran, until her curiosity is satisfied.  The only way you’re going to manage to do that is to just go out with her.  She won’t stop until you do, because Faey women chase Faey men who say no.  It’s a cultural trait.”

      “Then how does a man say no and mean it?” he asked.

      “Men don’t,” he replied honestly, pulling up the chair beside Jason’s and taking a seat.  “Remember, my boy, the women are the dominant gender, and there are customs that go back thousands of years at work here.  Men don’t say no because long ago, we weren’t allowed to say no.  Even though men aren’t owned like they were back then, you have to have noticed that the Faey are not nearly as progressive as humans when it comes to gender equality.”

      Jason nodded, leaning on his hand and listening to Professor Ailan quite attentively.

      “When a man wants to assert himself, he has to do it indirectly.  Just flat out saying no is actually a form of flirtation.  I’m sure the Marine knows you don’t know Faey customs and you’re not flirting, but she can’t help but see it any other way, because I get the feeling she’s attracted to you.”

      “How do you know that?”

      “Because when she broadcast to the instructors in the school, she described you as ‘a handsome human male with blond hair and wearing a blue shirt.’  Faey don’t call men handsome unless they’re attracted.”

      Jason frowned.  So that’s how she found him.  Since all the instructors were Faey, it was a simple matter of using telepathy to contact them and track him down.

      “Is this the same one you got into a fight with yesterday?” he asked with a grin.

      “Does everyone know about that?” he asked tartly.

      “It’s all over the school, my boy,” he laughed.  “I wouldn’t be surprised that it hasn’t gotten all over the city, at least among the Faey.  It’s news when a human can beat up a Marine.  It’s big news when he does it in a matter of seconds and never gets touched in return.”

      He blew out his breath.  “I was just trying to make her leave me alone,” he said in a resigned tone.

      “That’s not how you do it,” he chuckled.

      “Then how do I do it?”

      Ailan laughed.  “It’s not going to be that easy now,” he told him.  “She’s not going to give over on you now, Jason.  You’ll have to go out with her.  You don’t have a choice.”

      “Oh, I certainly have a choice,” he said with narrowed eyes, speaking in a low, calm, yet ominous manner.

      Ailan laughed.  “Well, if I can’t convince you otherwise, I’ll just let you figure it out,” he said, patting Jason on the shoulder amiably.  “I have to get set up for class.  You get your homework done?”

      Jason nodded.

      “Send it to me and I’ll grade it,” he said as he moved down towards his table, where his own panel was sitting.

      It wasn’t long before other students filed in, and Jason’s troubles with Jyslin were forgotten as the class began.  Jason was rather infatuated with plasma technology, and he was always a very diligent student, making copious notes both on his panel, via the odd holographic keyboard, and on his own notebook, taking vidshots of the diagrams that Professor Ailan wrote on the board and uploading images projected onto the air behind him via a holographic imager from his own panel, a three-dimensional object projected from two emitters mounted into the corners of the wall to either side of the whiteboard.  This mixture of human-type technology and Faey holography never ceased to make him curious, but he had to admit that it was effective.  Ailan could project up prepared images and graphics to display, using a laser pointer to point to the areas he discussed, and when he didn’t have a prepared image, he simply took the marker and drew it on the whiteboard.  The images he used could be uploaded into the students’ panels so they could refer to them when they studied, or use the video they had their panels recording—if they bothered—when the Professor drew diagrams, flowcharts, or wrote things on the board.  Holographs didn’t record well in recorded video. They looked distorted and jagged, so it wasn’t as easy as recording the holographs.  Jason was of a habit to record every class and go back and catch highlights of things he didn’t understand, then upload the video of the class onto a stick and keep a copy of it without hogging memory in his panel.

      It seemed like only a minute had passed before Ailan clapped his hands in that manner he did when dismissing class.  “Alright, people, test tomorrow,” he called.  “No homework, study for the test!”  Jason started packing his things when Ailan came over to him and leaned down.  “Oh, and your friend is waiting outside,” he said in a low, conspiratorial whisper.

      “She is, is she?” Jason asked with a narrow-eyed look at the door.  “Professor, can I check out a couple of tools?”

      “Certainly,” he answered.  “What do you want?”

      “A cutter,” he answered as he zipped up his pack.  “One of the good ones.”

      “No problem,” he said, ambling back down to his table as Jason followed him.  He went to a cabinet beside the door and removed a small cutting tool, a small device that severed the molecular bonds in the structure of a material to cut it apart.  It was cutting at a molecular level, and it left an utterly smooth and clean cut in its wake.  He went over to his panel and logged the tool as “checked out” under Jason’s student ID number.  That would prevent the security system from reacting when Jason took it out of the room.

      Jason took the tool in his hand, and saw that it was indeed one of the better ones, able to cut more deeply than the little ones.  It was perfect.  He put his pack on, then flipped the switch on the tool from cut to sew, which allowed it to perform the exact same function as an annealer.  Cutting tools differed a little from annealing tools in that they could do more than simply separate annealed matter, and it would take an annealing tool to separate matter annealed by the cutter without physically cutting the two objects apart.

      It was perfect.

      Jason followed Ailan to the door and waved for him to go first in a grand fashion, then stepped back and put his eyes on the small window in the door as Ailan opened it.  The reflection in the glass showed him that Jyslin was leaning against the wall right by the door.

      Perfect.

      He stepped up to the door, then whipped around it, his arm leading as he zoomed out of the doorway, tool leading.  Jyslin barely had time to react before he was on her, and the edge of the cutting tool found its mark, sliding along her shoulder and upper arm where they were in contact with the wall, merging their molecular structures and causing them to become joined as strongly as any weld.

      She tried to pull away from the wall, but then she found herself stuck.  She put her free hand on the wall behind her, then her foot, and pushed hard, but she was stuck fast.  “What the hell did you do?” she demanded hotly as he closed the door to the classroom easily, then started walking away.

      He held the cutting tool up over his shoulder so she could see it, but didn’t say a word.

      She laughed.  “You clever bastard!” she shouted after him.

      That was the start of an episode that was rehashed by students for years to come, a cunning war of intrigue and wits between Jason and the Marine who was annoying him, as he sought ways to separate himself from her, but she sought to defeat those attempts.  After her partner freed her from the wall with a borrowed annealing tool, the pair of them sought him out and annoyed him through breakfast in the cafeteria, talking loudly and making rude comments, some of them downright embarrassing, some kind of attempt to bait him into doing something which the other students didn’t know.  He stalked off with the two of them following closely behind, to his next class, and they stood outside the door waiting for it to end.

      And they waited long after it was over, and all the other students left.  They looked in almost a half an hour later and found him gone, the window open.

      Much to the surprise of many on campus, they saw Jason climb out of the third floor window and climb down the wall of the building, then walk away as if he’d done nothing any more out of the ordinary than using the door.

      It didn’t take them long to find him afterwards.  After all, they were telepathic, and the Faey instructors and other military Faey on campus would tell them where they last saw him.  They continued to follow him, standing behind him in the library as he read from a few hard paper books—which weren’t used much anymore—and then followed him as he went back to his dorm to get a project due for physics, then returned to campus to attend his next class.  This time, the redhead stood by the door as the blonde waited outside the building, so she could keep an eye on the windows.

      And again, after the class was over, he didn’t come out.

      Several students saw her rush into the room after the last student came out, but he was nowhere to be found.  She grilled the students quite harshly as to where he went, but all of them said he’d been right there not a moment ago, fiddling with his panel, and they were as puzzled about how he managed to disappear as the Faey were.  It was later, when a security worker reviewed the records from the cameras in that room that the truth was revealed.  Jason had used a hastily jerry-rigged holographic emitter from parts from a project device he’d built for his physics class and powered by a PPG taken from a disassembled cutting tool.  He’d taken a shot of the wall of the class, then after class, he rushed up to that wall and activated the hologram, hiding behind a false image of that wall.  To keep it from jiggling or frizzing he had had to hold his panel absolutely still, and he’d managed to do it just long enough for the Marine to rush out of the room and try to find him.  After the Marine left, he disengaged the hologram, put the cutting tool and his project back together, then waltzed out of class without a care in the world.

      The Marine was starting to get just a little bit irritated at that point.  Three separate times the human had walked into a class, then he found a way to leave her behind when it was over, making her scour the campus to find him.  For the fourth and final class of the day, she called in reinforcements.  A squad of ten black armored Marines surrounded the Plaid and lurked on the second floor, where the human was having his physics class, and she stood—nowhere near any wall—right outside the door and looked through the window, making sure he didn’t sneak out.  He was sitting in the back of the class, beyond the scope of her vision.  He seemed utterly indifferent to her presence outside the door, as if he’d already devised his escape from her trap, and many of the students in his class were eager to see the class end.  Word had gotten around that the same Marine that Jason had fought the day before was now following him around, and many speculated that she was going to get even with him, following him around and trying to catch him where nobody else could see.  They wanted to see what was going to happen.

      The class ended, all the students jumped up and rushed towards the door to get out onto the campus green and see what happened when those two came outside, and as soon as the instructor opened the door, the Marine barreled into the room.

      And he was nowhere to be found.

      That startled the students as much as it did the Marine.  They looked all around the room, even in the storage cabinets and closets, but he was gone.  There was no other way out of the room, and no other Marine was reporting in that she’d seen him.  He’d vanished like smoke.

      Growling in frustration, the Marine charged down to the security center for the building and had the human guards replay the video of that room to find out what happened, how he had managed to slip away.  They cued up the video for her, and they watched in as much amazement as she as the cunning and resourcefulness of Jason Fox was displayed on that video monitor for them to see.

      During the physics class, Jason had unobtrusively annealed his chair’s feet to the floor.  Since he was in the very back of the classroom, nobody really noticed him doing it, not even the teacher.  Nobody was looking back at him.  Then it became apparent that Jason was much better with Faey technology than people realized, because he had somehow pumped up the output of his cutting knife beyond its usual capabilities.  Further analysis showed that he had swapped the PPG unit of his cutting knife with the PPG in his project, which was a much more powerful unit, then somehow jerry-rigged the cutting tool’s circuitry to not melt when it was turned on.  When he turned it on, what he got was a cutting tool that could cut nearly four feet deep instead of the maximum of six inches or so that most cutting tools were designed to cut.  He’d turned his cutting tool into a sword, and used it to slice a circular angled hole in the floor around his chair, which was annealed to the section he had cut free.  The cutting tool cut so cleanly that it didn’t make any kind of evidence that it had been used until the cut material was shifted.  Since the hole was angled, the circumference of the bottom narrower than the top, the freed circular plug to which his chair was annealed did not fall through the floor.

      When the class was over, Jason picked up his pack, pulled his chair up, which pulled the plug out of his hole, and then climbed down into it.  He had even set the chair so when he pulled on the edge, the chair and plug fell back into the hole, concealing it and hiding his escape route.

      Some people already knew about this, however, but they didn’t get out of class for an hour after Jason’s class ended.  They were all amazed in the classroom under his own, the same classroom where he had Plasma Fundamentals, when Jason seemingly dropped out of the ceiling, fell nearly fifteen feet, and landed with a roll on the floor.  He then simply stood up, dusted himself off, picked up his backpack, excused himself politely to the teacher, then walked out of the classroom.

      That was only half of his cunning escape.  The Marines inside were only on the second floor, which allowed him to have free run of the first floor.  He managed to slip by the Marines outside by exiting from the building down through the loading dock, and catching a ride with a human campus groundskeeper who was about to drive off in a school truck, riding in the open bed.  They were looking for a blond student on foot.  Jason had went right by them in the back of the groundskeeper’s truck.

      The battle that day clearly went to Jason Fox, but Jyslin Shaddale vowed that the war would be hers.

To:   Title ToC 1 3

Chapter 2

      Karista, 10 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox calendar;

      Thursday, 15 May 2007, Native regional reckoning

      New Orleans, Gamia Province, American Sector

      It wasn’t easy to study, but he managed it somehow.

      All that insanity with Jyslin had completely ruined a day’s studying, and again, if it wasn’t for his habit of recording his classes, he’d be behind.  Getting behind when he had seven classes was not a good thing.  He felt lucky that she didn’t follow him home, but then again, she was probably still in the Plaid trying to find him.  It was only about six, and he knew that when it got dark and curfew kicked in, she’d know where to find him.

      He had that test in Advanced Plasma Fundamentals tomorrow, but he felt ready for it.  They were studying conduits and PPG’s in a little more detail, and anything involving plasma interested him enough to study well ahead.  Plasma conduit was made of crystallized silicon, and it was actually rather pretty.  It looked like hollow tubes of glass, but surprisingly tough, and the high-energy plasma was carried inside.  Silicon conduit could carry any kind of phased plasma, but not plasma in its raw state.  That was the clever little trick the Faey had discovered, which was the only reason they could use plasma as a power source.  They phased the plasma into different states, and when so phased and set up that the individual phases of it opposed one another, it made it safe.  Just like how humans had learned to use three-phase electricity, the Faey used multiple phases of plasma.  But it worked much differently, for they phased plasma into alternate states of material existence, spreading out its energy into many different quantum states.  That was called metaphased plasma, and it was why plasma could flow in a glass tube and not be ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit.  They had other types of phasing techniques, such as interphased, hyperphased, and polarity phased.  Interphased plasma was used to power spatial drives, since metaphased plasma distorted the system.  Hyperphased plasma was only mentioned but not explained, because it was a military application, used to make the plasma torpedoes fired from their battleships.  Polarity phased plasma was very low-energy and worked very well in microscopic applications, and was what powered virtually all very small devices.

      All this plasma was generated by the PPG, the Plasma Power Generator, and it itself was an amazing creation of ingenuity.  He’d read the history of the device, and it showed the boundary from where the Faey were limited to their own star system, the Draconis system on earth charts, and when they were released to conquer and rule other planets.  The PPG was, literally, a miniature sun.  That’s exactly what it was.  The Faey had technology that affected space itself, allowing them to stretch it, pull it, even tear holes in it, and that was the technology that allowed them to build the PPG.  Inside the device was a “bubble” of stretched space, and inside that bubble of stretched space, isolated from the rest of space by the boundaries of its bubble, was a hot nuclear fusion reaction.  Just like the nuclear fusion that took place in stars, that’s what was going on inside a PPG.  Within the bubble were temperatures approaching fifteen thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but because it was in that isolated bubble of manipulated space, the heat and radiation could not escape it.  The bubble was breached in two places so plasma could be drawn out of it, then be fed back into it after it completed its circuit.  A PPG’s size and power rating varied, and that affected its shelf life.  The PPG in the cutter he’d borrowed had a shelf life of about a year.  After a year, the material in the PPG’s bubble would fuse into an iron core, and then the PPG would exhaust itself and stop working.  It had a battery of sorts that kept the bubble intact until the PPG could be serviced, for the iron core of a spent PPG was larger than the PPG itself.  If the bubble broke down, that volume would return to normal space, and make the PPG literally explode as something larger than itself suddenly occupied its fusion chamber.  The device had a couple of very serious cascading safeguards to prevent a bubble breach when the device was fusing, because a breach would cause a cataclysmic fusion-induced explosion that would be about as powerful as five hundred Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs.  The bubble, or core as it was called, could be ejected from the PPG, sent through a micro-wormhole and out into deep space, and the PPG had protocols for doing that if it detected a disastrous breakdown in progress.  It had several other conditional protocols that would lead to a core ejection, such as readings that went over certain limits or a disruption in the bubble integrity.  The PPG could eject the core before a tear in the bubble led to a fusion explosion, but the backlash fed back through the tear and tended to destroy everything within ten feet of a damaged PPG.

      Because of the danger a breached PPG could pose, they were heavily protected in the devices in which they were installed.  They were always surrounded by a metal called vandirium, a Faey alloy that was about a hundred times stronger than titanium, armor to protect against some kind of catastrophic breach.  Faey armor was made out of a variation of vandirium alloy that was even stronger, but was more expensive to produce.

      It was funny that cost should even matter, but it did.  The Faey had a good grasp on molecular-level physics, and that had led to the construction of matter replicators.  But the problem with them was that they could only produce materials in base elements, and they couldn’t replicate any element heavier than the metal Palladium.  Silver, the next element on the table, could not be replicated, nor could gold or many of the metals that the Faey used to construct armor and vessels.  It was even funnier that the human table of the elements was similar to the Faey version.  They had many, many more elements on their table than the human table, different variations of known elements because of the number of neutrons in the nucleus, but it was still organizationally similar.

      That was why they Faey needed Earth for farming, because they couldn’t replicate food.  It was also why silver and gold were valuable to the Faey.  It was also why they didn’t give their occupational forces the real armor that they equipped their soldiers with.  He’d seen some on CivNet somewhere, powered armor with flight packs, integrated weapons in the arms instead of external weapons they had to carry.  That armor was much more expensive, its materials couldn’t be replicated, so they’d equipped their occupational forces with only the weapons and armor they needed to keep the technologically backwards humans in check.  Their weapons, well, those were the real deal.  Faey used tiny bursts of high-energy metaphased plasma as their primary weapon, which exploded on contact with solid matter and also tended to burn through as it penetrated.  The result was like an explosive bullet, which punched into a target then detonated.  Living things shot by a metaphased plasma weapon tended to explode from the inside out when blood vaporized from the heat and that steam applied pressure to the flesh, aggravating the explosive contact the plasma had with a much cooler material.  The result was a charge of metaphased plasma only two millimeters thick could leave a hole nearly a foot across.  It was quite gruesome; even a graze could blow a limb off the body.  What made them very nasty was that the fact that because they existed in multiple quantum states, it allowed most of the energy of the blast to pass through coherent energy shields.  Any plasma state that matched the state of the shield would be stopped, but the remaining energy of the weapon would pass through and hit what it protected.  The Faey employed shields on their warships, but the shields on ships they attacked would be useless.

      CivNet was like the human internet…someone with enough patience could find just about anything.  It was all in Faey, and he didn’t speak or read the language, but his panel could translate everything into English, so it made it legible.  He’d found the technical specs for plasma pistols and rifles on CivNet, as well as the internal technical schematics for a PPG.  Given those, and the materials, he could build his own plasma weapon, and he had this wild idea about secretly building a stockpile of weapons and using them to try to overthrow the Faey, but it was a useless dream, and he knew it.  Faey telepathy would crush any attempt before it got started.  He hadn’t heard anything about it, but he was certain that some other student out there had had the same idea and had tried it, but been found out and stopped before he got off the ground.

      That damn telepathy.  It just kept coming back and coming back and coming back.  Without that, the Faey would not have such an easy time of it here on Earth.  It made them very relaxed about their new vassals, almost arrogantly dismissive of them, because what could they do?  They sent humans to school to learn Faey technology, because what could they do?  They didn’t censor anything, not even the internet, because what could people do?  They could think about revolt and object to the Faey all they wanted, but the instant they tried to do anything about it, the Faey would simply swoop in, use telepathy to root out the plot, and crush it before it could even get started.  And people caught trying to overthrow the system weren’t killed, they were “reprogrammed” by Faey telepathic specialists, turned into good little loyal subjects of her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Dahnai.  Why kill a good asset of the Imperium when you could simply use telepathic reprogramming to make him a lapdog?

      To Jason, death was better.  To be reprogrammed like that, to do what they wanted him to do, but he felt that somehow, deep inside himself, to know what they had done to him…that was the ultimate torture.

      He leaned back in his chair and looked at the clock.  Six fifteen.  Curfew was at nine, when all humans had to be off the streets or have a pass to move about…which were admittedly easy to get.  All you had to do was call the Population Control Center and tell them you had to go out.  You didn’t even have to give a reason.  Tell them you’re going out, they send you a pass through your vidlink that you copy onto paper, and then you go.  The curfew was installed more to rein in gangs of youths that liked to vandalize things more than anything else, and the news said that it’d probably be lifted next month.  Jason couldn’t do that, of course.  He didn’t have a vidlink.  He was a student, and he had a panel, which served as everything, including a vidlink.  He’d download the pass to his panel and print it out from there.  His panel was everything; computer, organizer, vidlink all rolled into one.  Besides, in his tiny, cramped room, he didn’t have the space for a vidlink.  Those things were about the size of an old human personal computer, complete with a hard keyboard, and if he had one on his desk, he wouldn’t have room for anything else.  Vidlinks did about everything a phone and personal computer did, and everyone got one, even farm workers in their little rooms at their farmhouses.  There were still stand-alone cell phones, tied to the same system that ran the vidlinks, itself part of CivNet, but one had to buy a phone, where vidlinks were issued to people free of charge.  It was just one of the little things that humans didn’t grumble too much about when it came to the Faey.

      Bored, he paused studying to surf through CivNet’s news, which was of course biased and inflamed.  There was only one news service, INN, the Imperial News Network, and it was but the mouthpiece of the Empress.  But, he had to admit, they did cover what they considered news rather thoroughly.  They just didn’t openly question her Majesty’s policies or decisions.  He switched over to pan-empire, the real Faey news, where a blond Faey sat behind a desk, wearing a strange white robe, and talked in Faey about the news of the Imperium while three-dimensional holograms showed beside her.  Earth even showed up in these broadcasts from time to time, such as last week, when an earthquake had rocked California.  That made the major news, and they showed holos of Faey and human workers cleaning everything up.

      Nothing he could make out.  They showed images of some other planet somewhere where a storm had done damage to a seaside town-a green ocean, weird, that was-and other images that made little sense to him.  Without the ability to speak Faey, it really would be a string of unconnected pictures, nothing more.

      Wait, here was something.  The Faey were at war with some other race, he knew that, and they were showing images of damage to a battle fleet that must have just returned from combat.  They put up statistics over the images, probably how many were killed, how many of the other side were killed, probably none of it accurate, that sort of thing.  He did remember seeing a picture of one of those people, big bipedal red-scaled reptilian things that looked pretty nasty, and he wondered how they stacked up against the Faey.  He could imagine it now…big reptilian monsters that looked vaguely like guys in Godzilla suits fighting an army of dainty little female elves with big fuckin’ guns.

      Now that was funny.

      Not that it was right to trivialize war, but if they were fighting the Faey, then maybe he should toast them the next time he had a beer with Tim.

      There was no knock at the door.  It opened, and Jyslin came bursting through, again out of her armor.  He glanced at her absently, then went back to watching his panel screen.  Today she had on a black tank-top that showed off her generous chest and a pair of curve-hugging gray shorts, with running shoes on her feet.  Her skin was shiny with sweat; she must have been working out.  He could smell her sweat, and found that it was a strange spicy-musky smell that was oddly appealing.  Damn Faey, even their sweat smelled good.  “Well?” she said hotly.

      “Well what?” he countered evenly, not bothering to look at her again.

      “How did you do it?” she demanded.

      “You think I’m going to tell you that?” he asked with a scoff.  “Please.”

      He expected her to rant at him or shout, but she instead laughed.  “Fair enough,” she said generously, then closed the door behind her.  “I thought you had a test tomorrow.”

      “I do,” he answered.  “I’m taking a break.”

      “Watching the news, huh?” she noted, looking over his shoulder.  “Damn, the skaa did some damage this time.”

      “Skaa?”

      “The reptilians we’re fighting at the moment,” she answered.  “On the other side of the empire.  We’re in a dispute with them over a couple of star systems.  The fighting’s more or less contained to battles inside the disputed territory.  Neither side wants an open war.”

      “Why is that?”

      “Our technology is better, but they’re like uncountable,” she replied. “I think their home planet has something like ten trillion people on it.  They can put an army on a planet fifty times bigger than anyone else and win by sheer force of numbers.”  She looked at him.  “Wait, why are you being nice to me?” she demanded.

      “Because you’re not acting like an asshole,” he answered honestly.

      She laughed.  “Will you go out with me?”

      “No.”

      “Well, what good does it do then?” she asked with a laugh and a wink.  “I didn’t know you speak Faey.”

      “I don’t.  But you can figure some things out if you’re patient enough to try.”

      “Want to learn?” she offered.

      “I don’t have time for language lessons.”

      “Who said I’d teach you the long way?  It’ll take about five minutes.”

      He realized immediately what she meant.  Telepathic instruction.  The Faey didn’t do it to humans in school because of certain ways things worked with their power.  They could use it to implant knowledge, like history or language or something like that, pure data, but not any information that required the use of motor control.  It had to do with the way the brain worked, and it was too complicated for him to understand.  All he knew was that was why the Faey had to teach people things the same way that the humans did.  They couldn’t just “zap” that information into people’s heads-well, they could, but it really wouldn’t do much good, because they couldn’t really use what they were taught without practice, and having the knowledge to do something without having the skill to perform the task was an exceedingly dangerous combination.  To prevent cataclysmic accidents, they didn’t teach any way other than the old-fashioned way.  She could teach him Faey with telepathy, because it was purely a mental activity.  It didn’t require anything other than thinking, and those were the only things that Faey could implant via telepathic instruction.  If she taught him Faey, he’d be able to understand it fine, but he’d have to practice making those sounds to speak it, and practice to learn how to write it or type in it.  Those were motor functions, and they had to be practiced until perfected.

      “No,” he said adamantly.  “I’ll learn it the way I learn everything else.  You’re not putting your hooks in my head, Jyslin.”

      “We’ll see,” she said with a wink.  “I’ll bet you fifty credits you’ll be speaking Faey by next Friday.”

      “Not even.”

      “Easy money for me,” she announced.

      “I never said I’d take the bet.  I don’t gamble.”

      “Be glad you’re not in the military, then,” she laughed.

      “My father was.”

      “Oh?  What did he do?”

      “He was a fighter pilot,” he answered, backing out of the Faey news broadcast and returning to his homework.

      “It must be something to fly one of those hydrocarbon engine planes,” she mused.  “No control at all.  It would be scary.”  She looked at him.  “Almost any pilot with kids teaches the kids to fly.”

      He nodded.  “Got my conditional pilot’s license when I was twelve,” he affirmed.  “Got my unconditional license at sixteen, just a month before my father died.  It made him very happy to see me get it, and about that time, I’d do anything to make my father happy.”

      “He was sick?”

      He nodded.  “Cancer.”

      “It’s too bad we didn’t get here sooner.  We could have cured him.”

      “If you’d have gotten here when he was still alive, you would have had to shoot him out of the sky,” he said bluntly.  “My dad wouldn’t have accepted the subjugation.  He would have fought, no matter what the odds.”

      “Sounds like a spunky fellow.”

      For some reason, Jason took exceptional offense to the word spunky.  “I think it’s time for you to leave,” he said stiffly.

      “Fine, but now I have the plan for our second date,” she told him.  “We’re going flying in one of those prop planes they have sitting out at the lakeside airport.”

      “Keep dreaming.”

      “It’s no dream,” she said, quite seriously.  She grabbed the neckline of her tank top and fanned herself absently.  “I need to go clean up.  I’ll swing by later and see how you’re doing.”

      “Don’t bother,” he said in a growling tone.

      “Then I’ll see you tomorrow after I get off duty,” she said easily, opening the door, stepping through, then turning around and looking at him.  “Then again, I’ll know what’s going on.  Lyn and Bryn will be escorting you tomorrow.  They’ll keep in touch.  See you later,” she said with a wink, then she closed the door.

      “That’s what you think,” he said in a low, dangerous tone, glancing at the little cord sticking out from under his bed.  He already had their little surprise ready and waiting.

      He grumbled a little, still feeling a tad stung by her flippant remark about his beloved father, then got back to studying.

      Lyn and Bryn were willowy raven-haired sisters, identical twins, who had managed to stay together from their conscription on.  They were very patient, clever, and methodical women.  They served as the squad’s logical reasoning, offering cool, sensible advice in stressful situations, and their powerful mental bond, the kind of bond only twins could enjoy, gave them an awesome range of telepathic contact when they were separated.  This strong bond and the insane range it gave them was a useful tactical advantage in combat, allowing for uninterceptible communications between two elements of the squad when they split up.  They were careful, almost timidly cautious women who never blundered into anything without thinking it through, and weren’t the kind of women who fell for stupid, inane little traps.

      Except for today.

      What made it even more embarrassing for them was that they’d been warned about Jason.  They’d been there last night when he vanished from the Plaid, and they were rather impressed with his ability to foil an entire Marine squad.  Jyslin and Maya had specifically warned them that Jason was a very clever and crafty man, and he knew that they were going to be out there waiting for him.  She even went so far as to specifically warn them that he might have a little surprise waiting for them when he left his dorm, something to discourage pursuit.

      But, like most Faey, when they got curious about something, they absolutely had to satisfy that curiosity.  It was a racial trait, very nearly a racial liability, both one of the reasons they were so technologically advanced and a reason they’d gotten into a fair number of wars that could have been avoided if they’d just minded their own business.

      What got their curiosity was a little silver egg that was sitting on the stoop of the dorm’s main entrance.  It was on a little metal stand, obviously put there deliberately, just sitting on the top landing of the steps waiting.  The humans simply stepped around the egg, as if it was supposed to be there, which made it even more unusual.  Lyn and Bryn got out of their hovercar-century old piece of junk, why couldn’t they bring in some modern equipment!-and that little egg immediately got their attention.  It just sat there, unclaimed, untouched, and completely ignored by the humans who stepped around it as they filed out to go to school.

      “What is that?” Lyn asked a short brunette female human as she rushed out, obviously running late.

      “Dunno, there’s a note on the board not to touch it,” she answered quickly and honestly.  “It’s probably an experiment someone’s doing.”

      Lyn let the girl go, and the twin Marines regarded the egg with curiosity.

      Should we? Bryn asked mentally.  They almost never spoke when they communicated with one another.

      It’s probably a trap, Lyn returned.

      We have to go get Jyslin’s beaux anyway.  Let’s just take a look at it as we go by.  We don’t have to touch it.

      We’d best not.  I still say it’s a trap.

      I think so too, but the humans got very close to it and nothing happened.  So long as we don’t get any closer to it than they did, we should be alright.

      Lyn furrowed her brow.  That’s a good point.  Alright, but we don’t touch.

      Lyn and Bryn went up the steps, their boots clacking on the concrete, and stooped over a little to inspect the egg, careful not to get too close to it.  It was a featureless, perfectly smooth egg of a shiny metal, probably refined chromium or hardened mercury.  Their reflections in the egg were distorted by its curvature, making them both look like they had eyes or noses ten times bigger than the rest of their faces.

      “Good morning,” came a steady, almost amused call from the street, by their car.  The turned and looked and saw the human Jyslin had set them on, the student Jason.  How had he gotten out of the building without them seeing it?  There was only one entrance to the dorm!  He was in a simple white tee shirt with no decoration, a blue denim short-sleeved shirt worn unbuttoned over the tee shirt, faded jeans, and ragged old sneakers.  He had his brown backpack slung over one shoulder, and the other hand held a small, featureless little device with a single flashing red button on its face.  With a flick of his thumb, he pressed that button.

      Bedlam!

      Something smashed into them from behind, throwing them forward.  Both of them tried to put their hands up to protect their faces from being planted in the sidewalk, but something grabbed hold of them and prevented them from reaching the bottom of the steps.  Both Lyn and Bryn tried to move, but found that they were stuck fast in something!

      Lyn’s head wasn’t stuck in whatever it was, so she turned and looked behind them.  It was crash foam, a special foam that they used in vehicles that, on trigger from a sensor, erupted out and filled the volume of a vehicle’s cavity, then instantly hardened into a soft solid to restrict the passengers.  The result was a springy, elastic material that absorbed shock and protected the occupants of a crashing vehicle from suffering serious injury, but also stuck fast to anything it was touching as it hardened, as securely as any glue, nearly as securely as molecular annealing.  The foam was supposed to decay five seconds after the vehicle came to a stop, to allow the occupants to get out, but then Lyn remembered that it was decayed by a second device that deployed after the sensors told it that the vehicle was at a rest.

      They were stuck fast, and they’d stay like that until someone brought a foam decay module!

      “Have a nice day,” he told them mildly, putting the little remote in his pocket, then turning and meandering towards school at an easy pace that looked as if he had not a care in the world.

      They sent to each other frantically to make sure that the other was alright, that the foam wasn’t blocking mouth and nose.  Lyn and Bryn both were frozen in the foam with their heads lower to the ground than their feet, and all Bryn could see was the sidewalk just in front of the steps.  The foam had hardened around her neck, and she couldn’t move it more than just a little bit, since fringes of the foam were attached to the lobes of her ears, and if she tried to move too much, she’d rip her ears off.

      Lyn glowered in the direction of the retreating human, then she burst into helpless laughter.  Bryn joined her seconds later.

      What a man!  Jyslin was lucky she found him first!  Lyn and Bryn both were just a little bit jealous at Jyslin’s good fortune!

      Well, do we hang here all morning, or humiliate ourselves and send for help? Bryn asked after she got control of herself.  If I remember right, the foam will dissolve on its own in a few hours.

      I’m not hanging here all morning, Lyn countered.

      Well, it should be fun following him around the rest of the day.

      No, Lyn replied.  He beat us fair, so we leave him alone.  He earned it.

      That he did, Bryn agreed.  I just wonder where he got the foam, she mused.

      I don’t think we want to know.

      You’re probably right, Bryn acceded, then she sputtered aloud and started laughing again.

      For some reason, those two didn’t come back after he glued them to the sidewalk with crash foam, but that suited Jason just fine.

      He took his test that morning and got the highest score in the class, then handed in his physics project after lunch.  It still worked, despite what he did to it, a little sensor that measured flux in the spatial fabric that Professor Umera had everyone build as a lab exercise.  It was nothing more than assembling pre-fabricated pieces, but it was still almost fun to do.

      After lunch there was calculus, then came his second plasma-oriented course of the day, one of four such courses he took this semester, also taught by Ailan.  Advanced Plasma Fundamentals, Introduction to Plasma Dynamics (the physics of plasma, which he had to take in conjunction with his physics class), Theoretical Plasma Systems I, and the lab companion class for Advanced Plasma Fundamentals, the class to which he was going.  The other class was both lecture and lab, but this class was for lab, with only occasional lecture if Ailan didn’t get the lecture finished from the last class.  Those were hard enough, but stack calculus, Imperial History I (ancient Faey history), and Xeno-Psychology I (basically the Faey teaching the humans learning Faey technology how not to insult the Faey when interacting with them).

      After lab, Xeno-Psych was the next class for today, and it was held in the old Tulane building on the far side of campus, twenty minutes after lab let out.  He always took his time walking over there, and as a result, he always got into the classroom about a minute before Professor Tia-the youngest of all his teachers and without doubt the cutest-was ready to start class.  She was a little doll, fairly short for a Faey woman, with hair that was actually blue, a very dark shade of blue that was much darker than her skin, almost midnight blue.  She had the cutest little face, very cherubic and a bit mischievous, with noticeable dimples in her cheeks.  She also had a very raucous sense of humor.  Tia could get downright dirty sometimes, and she loved to tell bawdy jokes during class.  Tia was equal measure of angel and devil wrapped up in one insufferably cute little package.

      “Afternoon,” she called, which was repeated rather unenthusiastically by her students.  “Well, there’s been a little change in plans, people.  They just handed down a curriculum change, and we have to put it into effect.”

      That got everyone’s attention.  They all looked up at her from their panels.

      “Usually we do the language insertion at the start of Xeno II, but they’ve moved that to the beginning of Xeno I, effective today.  Since we’re already halfway through the semester, that means we have to go back and get that out of the way now, before we continue on in our current chapter.

      “Excuse me, Professor, what is an insertion?” a tall, spindly man asked from the back of the classroom.  Jason didn’t know his name.

      “We teach you Faey,” she explained to him.  “Since it’s a language, we can insert it telepathically.  We’ll do that today, and spend the next three weeks practicing pronunciation and writing.  Then we’ll pick up where we left off, and shift the last three chapters we used to do in this semester into Xeno II.”

      Jason’s eyes immediately went flat, and he remembered what Jyslin said last night.  Had she known?  Had she talked to the school and found out about this beforehand?  It seemed so.

      He realized that she’d tried to scam him out of fifty credits!  Geez, how low could she go!

      Then he realized that she didn’t do anything any worse than what he’d already done, and he had to chuckle ruefully.

      The amusement faded when he realized what insertion entailed.  A Faey would put herself in his mind, deeply into his mind, violating his innermost sanctity.  And he had no choice but to allow it, to knuckle under yet again to the Faey Imperium, to be the obedient slave that he was being.  He had no choice.  He couldn’t refuse, or he’d end up on a farm, and that was a fate worse than having a Faey rake her grubby little claws through his mind.

      “Since there are thirty of you and one of me, that means I’m going to have some help.  So, pack up your things and come with me down to the lecture hall, where our assistants are waiting.  After the insertion, you'll be free to go.”

      “Umm, Professor, is this safe?” someone asked.

      “It’s totally painless,” she assured with a dimpled smile.  “There is some dizziness immediately afterward, and after you're over that, we'll tell you to go home and take a nap.  That helps your mind sift through it all and digest it.  If you’re worried about it, Stan, I’ll do it for you myself.  That way you get someone you know and trust.  Would you like that?”

      “Yes ma’am,” he said immediately.

      Jason was extremely unhappy with this, but there was nothing he could do.  He packed his panel in his backpack and joined the others as they went down into the largest classroom in the building, a large auditorium-style room with raised tiers on which desks stood.  It held nearly a hundred people, and lined up along the base of the wall were ten Faey, five of them in the black armor of Marines, the other five in the robes or long-tailed shirts that the professors wore.

      Jason stopped dead in the door.  One of those five Marines was Jyslin!

      She gave him a smug, victorious little smile, then shooed him on as someone nudged him from behind.  Jason stalked into the room and sat down in one of the desks on the lowest tier, and he glared at her murderously.  That bitch.  She had this all set up.  She knew about the change, somehow, and had managed to finagle her way into being one of the telepaths that would perform the insertion.  Marines were much stronger telepaths than the occupational forces that served as the majority of the police and other governing forces, so it was no real shock to see Marines being pressed into service as telepathic inserters.

      "Now, everyone take a seat," Tia called as she came in, then waited as everyone did so.  "Not beside each other.  Leave one desk to either side of you."  She waited as some students moved to spread out.  "These helpers and myself are going to go around and perform the procedure.  Don't worry, all of us have done this before, that's why we're here.  After it's over, don't get out of your seat until I tell you that you can, alright?"  She nodded to the others, and they all fanned out.  Tia went straight to Stan, but Jyslin didn't come to him.  None of the others did either, telling him that Jyslin was saving him for last, and had already warned off all the others from teaching him.

      He sat there and fumed for nearly twenty minutes, not even looking behind him.  She had this all set up.  She'd played him last night, obviously in revenge for what he did to her yesterday afternoon.  He had no idea how she knew, but she did.  There was nothing he could do.  She'd already fixed it so nobody else would teach him, and he couldn't get out of not going through with it.

      This battle went to Jyslin.

      She plopped down in the seat beside him, her armor going clack as she did so, then put her elbow on the desktop and gave him an amused look.

      "Shut up," he growled at her.

      "I told you, I cheat," she told him.

      He gave her a cold stare.

      "I win this time," she said in a teasing tone.  "Now, turn and face me."

      "Why?"

      "Because we do have something to do here," she told him tartly.  "And I pride myself on my work.  When I'm done, you'll be absolutely fluent in Faey.  My mother taught Faey in primary school, so I have a stronger grasp on the language than most everyone else here.  So, turn and face me.  Now."

      He was surprised by the steel in her voice.  He did so, and she put her hands on his desk.  "Put your hands here," she instructed.  "I'm going to put my hands on your face, and then we'll begin.  At first, you're going to feel me brush you, as you call it, then it's going to get much stronger.  The important thing you have to remember is not to fight with me," she said, quite seriously.  "In order for me to do this, I need to contact your long-term memory and put things there.  I promise you I won't do anything other than what I have to do," she said in an earnest voice, her gray eyes very serious.  "I won't look at anything, I promise.  I know how you feel about being probed.  That's one reason why I arranged to be the one to do this.  At least with me, it's someone you know, and someone you won't have any trouble finding and kicking on the other side of her head if you don't like what she did to you," she added with a wink.

      Now that surprised him, quite a bit.  In a way, she was more or less right.  In an odd way, he did feel a little better about the idea of a Faey that he knew doing this.  Because she wouldn't just disappear.  She promised to stop in tonight after she got off duty, and if he was really upset about what she did here and now, he could always punch her in the nose.  That declaration of recognizing the possibility of retaliation actually made him feel somewhat better about the idea of it.  Not that the idea of it didn't set his teeth on edge and make him feel like he was about to be anally probed with a telephone pole, but at least with Jyslin doing it, he could throttle the administrator if it pleased him to do so.

      "Now," she said in a gentle, mollifying, cooing tone, lightly grabbing his hands and setting them on the side of the desk.  "You're going to feel me brush up against you, then press in, like putting your hand into water.  Don't fight me," she warned.  "If you do, it's going to make it very hard, and it might hurt you.  I'll just press in and sit there a minute so you can get used to it.  I won't do anything, I promise, not until I feel you calm down.  Are you ready?"

      "Let's get this over with," he grunted in a low, ominous tone.

      "Close your eyes," she told him.  "It will make it easier.  Concentrate on what's inside, not on what's outside."

      He nodded and closed his eyes, bowing his head slightly.

      "Alright, here we go," she said, reaching out and putting her slender, work-calloused hands on the sides of his face, over his cheeks.

      He instantly felt her brush up against him, and he did his best not to resist that feeling, but it was not easy.  It was an automatic, almost reflexive reaction for him to close up his thoughts when he felt a Faey doing what she was doing.  He felt her feel around the edges of his instinctively raised barrier, and even as he tried to figure out how to allow her through it, she found a weakness in it and punched through.  It was not a pleasant experience to have her breach the boundaries of his mind and invade him like an attacking army, like a disease.  Immediately, he felt her presence inside his own mind, a strange thoughtless presence, like an alien object lodged within the pathways of his thoughts.  He violently reacted to that contact, the first time a Faey had ever breached his defenses and actively entered his mind, so violently that his hands snapped up and closed around her wrists, seeking to rip them away from his face.  But Jyslin's strength surprised him, holding her hands fast against his strength as she rode out his reaction to her, as the hands holding her wrists slowly stopped trying to pull her away.  His reaction was a reflexive one, and as the seconds passed, Jason got less and less resistant to her presence, as he tried to get used to the feel of a presence in his head other than himself.

      See, it wasn't that bad, her thought emanated from that alien presence, and he could hear it clearly within his own mind.  I'll hear what you think, just to warn you.  Oh, you can loosen your grip on my wrists now.  I'd like to keep you from squeezing my hands off.

      Sorry, he thought to himself.

      It's alright, she answered.  I had to literally attack you to get into your mind.  I hope I didn't hurt you.

      It wasn't pleasant, but I think I'm alright, he thought in answer.

      I'll wait a bit, let you get used to the feel of it, she informed him.  When I start, you'll see a dizzyingly fast blur of images, sounds, concepts, and even pure thoughts.  I'm literally going to take everything I know about Faey and put it in your mind, sending it into your long-term memory.  When I'm done, you're going to be a little confused and dazed, but it'll pass.  You won't make much sense of what I'm going to teach you at first, it's going to take your mind a little time to go through it all and piece it together.  I'm going to put everything there, but your brain's going to have to work out how it's going to store it all.

      What do you mean?

      I'll put it where I can, but your brain's going to take it all and move it, rearrange it the way it wants it, she explained.  If it doesn't, you'll never be able to use any of this, and you'll forget it in about a week.  That's why you'll need to go home and take a nap after the dizziness fades.  An hour of sleep gives your brain a chance to rearrange things to its satisfaction without dealing with all the things it has to do when you're awake.

      That made sense, or at least it seemed logical, after a fashion.  Since he really didn't know how it worked, it certainly sounded like it was possible.

      Ready?

      Do I have a choice?

      She seemed highly amused.  Alright, here we go.

      She wasn't lying about what happened next.  An absolute avalanche of alien, bizarre images, sounds, sights, concepts, even pure thought poured into his mind, so fast that he couldn’t' make out anything but a confused cacophony, unable to see the individual parts because they made up a confusing and bewildering whole.  It was like a school of fish, or a waterfall.  He couldn't make out any one part, but he could see the whole.  The problem was, the whole made no sense to him, even though he made no effort to try to make sense of any of it.

      He had no idea how long it took.  It seemed that one minute she was filling his mind with dizzying information, and then she simply stopped.  He felt her presence ghost around the fringes of his memory, coming close but not close enough to make him feel worried, almost as if she were checking her work.  He could feel her drawn to the darker tunnels of his mind, where all those things she wanted to learn about him lurked, but she stayed away from the temptation, keeping her word of not going anywhere or seeing anything he did not want her to be, or see.

      I'm finished, she announced.  I'm going to pull back now.  It might make you a little disoriented for a second or two, but then again, what I put in your mind's going to do that anyway.  Oh, by the way, the next time you imagine me naked, get it right.

      Just before she withdrew from his mind, she shared with him an image, a visual memory, one that almost made him blush.  It was a very, very detailed memory of Jyslin looking at herself in a full length mirror, in what looked like a bedroom behind her.

      Wearing nothing but combat boots.

      It wasn't a dirty pose, or even very provocative, it was just the idea of it.  Had Jyslin got up from that desk and stripped naked right there in front of him, it would have been no different than this.  She showed him her full glory, and the knowing little smile on her face told him that she planned to do it when she stood in front of that mirror and memorized how she looked, just so she could show him.  She stood there, one hip raised sensually, and posed for the mirror, posed for a mental picture she shared with him now, and she was enjoying every second of it, both when she made that memory and now, as she shared it.  He could tell.  And he could only go over that memory with what could be called a fine toothed comb, admiring her ample chest--but not too large--and her sleek, flat belly, and her curvy hips, and her quite splendid legs, and being a male, he could not ignore that neatly trimmed patch of dark red pubic hair which stood out against her soft blue skin.

      But she wasn't done.  Quite deliberately, she turned around and looked over her shoulder, showing him her sleek, willowy, thoroughly sexy back and a marvelous heart-shaped backside, with long, long legs that seemed to go all the way down to China.

      She was absolutely gorgeous, both in face and body.  Jason never thought blue skin could be so damn sexy before that.

      And then she pulled away from him, and he felt that presence of her, that suddenly seemed much less hostile now that she had shared so intimate a memory with him, vanish from within his mind.  She had done everything she said she would do.  She had behaved herself, had kept her promise not to invade his mind any more than what was necessary to do what needed to be done, though he could clearly feel at one point that she had been sorely tempted.  Then, as she broke contact, she gave of herself freely, shared with him something private, intimate, personal, something she did not have to do.

      If she did that to curry his favor, well, it worked.

      Then came the dizziness.  The ceiling traded places with the floor, and he felt himself sway dangerously.  She slid her hands down to his shoulders and steadied him, and his grip on her arms gave him a foundation on which to cling while the earth seemed to bounce around wildly.  "There, now," she said in a low, gentle voice.  "Better?"

      "A little," he said woozily.  "I think I'm getting sick."

      "It'll pass in a second or two," she said, then she giggled like a little girl.  "You're speaking Faey.  It sounds very nice to hear you speak a real language.  English is ugly."

      He wouldn't be able to tell her one way or the other what he was speaking, because his brain felt like it was smothered in day-old mashed potatoes.

      The dizziness did ease, and it did so with amazing speed.  In a matter of a minute or two, he felt stable again.  It was a little hard to think, like he was on medication, but at least he wasn't dizzy anymore.  He blinked and looked around, and saw that he was the last student in the lecture hall, and all the instructors except for Professor Tia were gone.  She must have waited to make sure things went smoothly.  "Is he alright, Sergeant?"

      "He seems to be a bit sensitive," she answered.  "But I think he's alright now."

      "Are you alright to get back to your dorm room, Jason?" she asked him with sincere concern.

      "Yeah, yeah, I think I'll make it alright," he said in a disjointed manner, which made Tia give him an amused look.  "What?"

      "You're speaking Faey," she chuckled.  "You're suffering from a case of mnemonic transposition, where your brain can't figure out if your implanted memory or your natural memory is the one that's supposed to be accessing, so it's sorta jumping back and forth between them to try to make sense of it all.  Don't worry, it's a common enough side-effect for it not to be too much of a surprise.  While you're suffering from it, you're going to jump back and forth between English and Faey, and you won't be able to read anything.  Even English will look like gibberish to you.  So, go back to your room and take a nap, and your brain will straighten everything out.  After a nap, an evening of rest, and a good night's sleep, you'll be just fine."

      "But I have a test tomorrow in Plasma Dynamics," he objected.

      "Postponed," she told him.  "The waiver's already on the schedule.  All homework and tests due tomorrow are pushed back, so you can recover.  No studying tonight, Jason, and that's an order."

      "Yes, ma'am," he nodded.

      "Now go home," she told him.  He stood up, and his legs felt a little weak.  "Woops, I think I'll have a car take you," Tia said quickly.

      "No, I'm alright," he said quickly, getting his legs back under control.  If everyone else walked out of the classroom, then dammit, so would he.

      "I'll make sure he makes it safely," Jyslin offered.

      "I appreciate that," she nodded.  "See you on Monday, Jason.  Enjoy your weekend."

      Jason felt better after taking a few steps, until his strides were confident and long.  Jyslin scurried to keep up with him as he made his way out of the building and onto the sidewalk leading to the dorm, which was the next building over.  It was a walk of only about thirty yards.  Jyslin followed him quietly, into the dorm, up to the third floor, and literally right into his room, closing the door behind her.  "I'm here," he told her.  "You didn't have to follow me into my room."

      "Bed," she commanded, pointing imperiously at the narrow bed hugging the right wall of his cramped dorm room.  "Now!"

      "Don't order me around, woman," he said jerkily, unsure of what language he was speaking.  "Trust me, as muffled as I feel right now, taking a nap is exactly what I intend to do."  He sat down on the edge of the bed and slid his hands over his face in a slow, deliberate manner to try to clear the sand out of his thoughts.  It was so hard to think!

      "Well, I did what I promised," she said with a smile.  "Think you'll trust me a little more now?"

      "A little," he admitted.

      "Want to go out with me?"

      "No," he said immediately.  "No matter how I feel about you, you're a Faey, and I'm a human.  You represent something I protest, so I can't socialize with you.  End of story."

      "So, it's not personal," she pressed.  "If I were human, you'd go out with me."

      "Probably," he admitted again.  "There are a couple of professors I'd be friends with, if it wasn't for the fact that they're Faey."

      "I'll change that," she promised with a wink.  "Remember, a week from today.  You, me, fancy clothes, and a Faey opera.  It's already been set."

      "In your dreams," he scoffed.  "I don't care what you do, Jyslin, I will not go out with you.  Period.  End of story."

      "They're so cute when they think they have a choice," she said in a lilting manner as she opened the door.  "Tomorrow it's Ilia and Sheleese.  This time, try not to make such a mess," she said, then she leaned against the door.  "So, what did you think of my little gift to you?"

      "I think you need to get out in the sun more," he said boldly.

      "I was in your mind when I gave it to you, Jason," she purred.  "I know how you reacted to it.  You think I'm dead sexy.  You like me, and you like me a lot, you're starting to get interested in me, and you want to get to know me better. The only thing standing between us is a stupid point of technical philosophy, and I'm not going to stand for it."

      She gave him a very serious look.  "I'm Faey. I admit it.  But don't hold that against me, Jason.  Don't blame me for what happened to your planet.  I'm stuck here, where I was placed, the same as you are.  What is it your people say?  Oh, yes, I just work here.  And when I come back when I'm off duty, I won't be Sergeant Jyslin of the Imperial Marines, upholding her Imperial Majesty's honor, I'll be Jyslin Shaddale, a single girl trying to get a date with a mysterious, fascinating, handsome boy," she said with a wink.  "You think about that.  And keep thinking about it as you do whatever unholy evil things you're going to do to Ilia and Sheleese tomorrow morning.  I'm dying to see it," she laughed and winked again.

      "I'll make sure it's suitably entertaining," he said dryly.

      "Good.  I'll see you later.  Get some rest, and think about what I might look like out of those boots," she said with a naughty little smile just before she closed the door.

      Confusing woman.  Or was she?  Jason laid down and closed his eyes.  It was hard to think, but not too hard to consider what she said.  In a way, she was right.  She was in the same position as him, and it wasn't her fault.  He was blaming her, and every other Faey, for what happened to Earth, and to him personally.  It really wasn't fair.

      But, on the other hand, she was a Marine.  She was in the military, a direct representative of the power that had conquered them.  And then there was also the telepathy.

      Quite simply, he just couldn't bring himself to trust any Faey because of that overwhelming advantage.  At any time, all Jyslin had to do was put a hand on him and find out everything he was thinking, everything he felt, and violate the utter sanctity and personal domain that was his own mind.  Jason had an intense hatred of that, burned into him after two years of having Faey try to burrow into his thoughts every day, day after day.  Faey telepathy was the only reason nobody had managed a rebellion--not that it would really work, given the formidable Faey weapons and armament--but at least someone could try.

      Part of that was his own self-loathing, he guessed.  If his father could see him now, he'd slap him.  He was cooperating, being a good little slave, because he didn't want to end up on a farm.  Or even worse...being shipped off planet like some humans were, off to work in mines and other equally unpleasant and dangerous places.  His father would have stolen an F-16 and taken on the entire Faey military by himself.

      And now he'd been taught their language.  Just another step down the road of making him an obedient subject of her Imperial Majesty.

      He drifted off to sleep with that image floating in his mind...wearing one of those flowing robe-like upper garments the Faey favored, loose shirts with tails that dropped to their shins and flared sleeves with tails on them themselves nearly a foot long, and those loose-fitting pants, or robe-like skirts that both sexes occasionally wore.  That would have been even worse.  Wearing Faey clothes, speaking the Faey language, and standing in front of the featureless figure sitting on the throne of the Empire, bowing like an obedient lapdog.

      That was a nightmare.

      Jyslin did in fact stop in to see him after work, wearing a red tank top and shorts this time, but not sweaty.  She'd stopped in before her workout, and she didn't stay long.  Only long enough to see how the implantation went.

      Perfectly.  He had a complete and utter command of the Faey language.  Jyslin wasn't joking when she said she knew more about Faey than most, for her vocabulary was immense, and her understanding of the intricate nuances of the musical language was profound.

      He didn't have to study, so he spent most of that afternoon watching INN, which made it more interesting now that he could understand what they were saying.  They talked about a surprising range of topics, covering the important news from many of the seventy-two planets in the Imperium.  An earthquake on Aurile, a hurricane on the ocean planet of Jaxan, an explosion at a metals facility on Denet.  Then they went into the arts phase, and he was surprised that they spent so much time on it.  They tracked the movements of many theater troops, singers, and musicians, telling people where they were headed and when they would perform.  The arts seemed rather important to the Faey for the movements of the performers to be covered by INN.

      Earth even made it into their news.  "The Empire-famous Triellian opera company is making its first visit to the newest addition to the Imperium, Terra," the roguishly handsome news anchorman said in a voice that feigned enthusiasm, which made Jason look at that corner of his screen.  "It's the first visit from a famous performing company for our newest member of the Imperium.  If you’re in that part of the Imperium and would like to make reservations, access Terra’s Civnet.  There are still tickets available at most of their venues.”

      Jason was about to drift back to the other side of his panel, where he was going over tomorrow’s little surprise, when the news distracted him once again.  “For those of us in the Imperium who haven’t heard much about Terra, we here at INN think that your interest in our newest planet might increase.  The Ministry of Agriculture has announced that the newest shipments of Terran food have passed bio inspection, and will be hitting your local markets by the end of the cycle,” he announced.  “In addition to all the more common plants and grains, a new group of Terran-specific products will be made available, as will all the old.  This includes a large crop of the newest food craze among Faey, strawberries,” he said in English.

      “Oh, I know, Deren,” the female anchor said with a laugh.  “I tried some at the unveiling of the new Terran foods last year, and they had to take the plate away from me!”

      “I’m partial to their lobster myself,” he replied.  “In other Terran news, the Ministry of Security has announced that certain areas of the planet have been approved for tourist passes.  If you’re interested in seeing our newest farming planet in action, or you’d like to soak up the local culture and mystique of the indigenous population, contact your nearest travel agent and Ministry of Travel offices.”

      “And here with a report on what you might want to see on Terra is Lini Timira,” the woman called.

      Jason watched as INN ran a report on the “vacation getaways” of Terra, showcasing most of the places that humans liked to visit on Earth.  Hawaii, Alaska, Yellowstone, the Alps, Africa, the Himalayas, they all rated on the natural scenery, and to his surprise, the reporter suggested visits to Paris, London, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Johannesburg, New Delhi, and even New Orleans for people curious about the culture and customs of humans.  The reporter, a sharp-featured woman with dark blue skin-tanned from her travels-and hair the color of mud, made sure to point out that the local population was not telepathic, and virtually none of them spoke Faey, so a certain amount of care and caution when interacting with the natives was required.

      Jason frowned and cut it off, then absently turned on the television, and switched it to the same channel.  He had no idea why he was watching it on his panel when the TV carried the same stations.  He wondered absently if they had stories on Earth every day, or if it was just starting to get into the news because the Imperium was about to allow civilian Faey to visit the planet.  He had no idea, because up until now, all he could really go on were the pictures.

      He wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of the Faey getting so…cozy with Earth or not.  They’d taken it over, and now they were going to have Faey tourists milling around.  Faey developing tastes for Earth food, Faey getting more and more common…it was like the beginning of the end of the fact that Earth was the home of the human race.

      There wasn’t much he could do about it, so he blew out his breath, changed it over to the local station, and went back to his plan.

      It was ready and waiting for when Ilia and Sheleese arrived promptly at seven the next morning.  They’d parked their hovercar on the other side of the street, and came boiling out of it with their helmets on and their rifles on their shoulders.  They were taking no chances with this crafty human, fully intending to march him up and down the street like a new recruit and make him sing bawdy cadence songs.  He’d already outsmarted the squad sergeant, Jyslin, and made a laughing stock out of Lyn and Bryn yesterday by encasing them in crash foam, forcing a mechanic to come down from the motor pool and use a dissolving module to get them out.

      The little battle between Jason and Jyslin was quickly becoming all the talk among the Faey stationed in New Orleans.  The rules were clear; no telepathy, no doing injury.  They were rules that both sides seemed to be following, as well, and Jyslin made sure to warn them not to cheat.  It was a battle of wits, and peeking into his mind and seeing what he was up to was cheating.  If they even could peek into his mind, for she’d warned them that he had amazing, almost phenomenal mental defenses for a mundane human.  She even warned them that he’d know if they tried, which surprised both of them.  A non-telepathic human, sensing it when Faey used their talent?  That was certainly something to talk about!

      At precisely seven thirty, they were ready.  They were entrenched behind their hovercar on the other side of the street, waiting for him to come out.  They weren’t about to get anywhere near him until he was halfway to the campus, which seemed only smart.  This was his home territory, and they had no idea what manner of clever little traps he had waiting for them on that side of the street.

      Seven thirty came and went.  Then seven forty-five.  At five minutes to eight, they started wondering if he was coming out at all, since he had a class at eight o’clock.

      “You think he overslept?” Sheleese asked absently.

      “We should go check,” Ilia replied.  “We don’t want him getting in trouble.  This may be fun, but it’s not worth it if he gets punished for it.”

      “He may not appreciate us barging into his room.”

      “He’ll appreciate being late for school even less.”

      “That’s a good point.”

      Neither of them felt the very light, almost negligible touches on the backs of their armor.  “Good morning, ladies,” a voice addressed them, right behind them!  Both of them whirled around and found him standing immediately behind them, and neither of them heard a thing!  They didn’t even sense the presence of his mind!  By the gods, this human was amazing!

      They stared at him in slack-jawed shock as he lobbed two little things that looked like a coin to each side of them, each of which struck the hovercar and stuck to it with a light thunk.  He reached into his pocket and took out a tiny black box with an illuminated red button on it, shifted it so they could see, then pressed the button with his thumb.

      So fast, so hard, that neither could resist it, they both found themselves suddenly getting yanked down.  Both of them slammed into the side of the hovercar with enough force to make it rock slightly, and both of them found that they were stuck fast by something that was attaching their breastplates to the car, something they couldn’t overwhelm!

      He put the little device back in his pocket, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and then started walking away like he had not a care in the world.  “Have a nice day,” he said absently over his shoulder.

      That should hold them.  Those were quarter-sized devices that were like exclusive magnets, what the Faey used to control raw, magnetically reactive high-energy plasma before it was phased and sent into conduits.  The little devices were self-annealing to whatever they touched, and it took a special tool to demagnetize them, something that Marines didn’t carry around in their pockets.  Until they did, the backs of their breastplates would be stuck to that car until Doomsday.

      Sure, they could take the breastplates off, but he knew for a fact that Marines didn’t wear anything underneath the armor.  So, to get free, they had to strip to the waist.

      It wouldn’t hold them all day, but it would be enough for him to get to his first class.

      He glanced behind himself, and frowned.  One of them was already halfway free of her breastplate, and the other popped the seals of her own and removed the front half, exposing her breasts to all of Audobon Park.  They really were going to do it!  They were going to walk him to class topless!

      As fun as it would be to make them do it, he figured that it would make them short-tempered, so a little discretion was in order here.  Grabbing the strap of his pack, he bolted across the street and onto the campus, fully intending to be in the Plaid before that other one got her breastplate off.  He glanced back and saw that they weren’t trying to follow him.  The first to get free was inspecting the other half of her breastplate, trying to see how he did it.  She rose up and laughed, then gave him a sly grin from across the street.

      You clever little fox! she communicated with him with her mind, a communication laced with wry amusement, strong enough to overwhelm his outer defenses and push the thought through.  It gave him an immediate, splitting headache.  You wait, Jason!  I’ll be outside your class when it’s over, even if I have to stand there naked!

      He staggered slightly, putting a hand to his head.  God, that hurt!  It was like a semi was banging back and forth inside his skull, but the pain eased almost immediately after she finished her mental communication.

      He shook his head to clear out the last of the pain. It hadn’t hurt when Jyslin did it.  Then again, Jyslin had already been inside his mind.  What she did was different, something like forcing her own thoughts into his head as a form of communication.  Sending, that was what they called it, sending thoughts to other people.  It was just one of the tricks the Faey used with their telepathy.

      It had been the first time that a Faey had ever done that to him, and he certainly didn’t want it to happen again.

      He managed to get to the Plaid, and hurried through the classroom door right before Ailan closed it.  Ailan gave him an amused look, and he quickly took his seat and the class began.  He drifted in and out of paying attention as he worried about what those two Marines were going to do, and if they really were going to be standing outside the door topless, or even naked, ready to follow him around and annoy him until his next class.  Were they really that brazen?  Or would it just be another way to play the game, trying to embarrass him by having a pair of topless Faey following him around.  That was what all this was about, after all.  Jyslin was trying to embarrass, annoy, or aggravate him to the point where he would finally cave in and go out with her, if only to make her stop.  The way those two were talking before he nailed them showed that they thought it was tremendous fun, and that, surprisingly, they didn’t want it to cause him any real problems.  That they were willing to brave whatever traps he had laid and make sure he didn’t oversleep, to get him to school on time, did touch him a little bit.  But not enough to make him feel sorry.

      He drifted through most of class, so much so that he didn’t hear Ailan clap and dismiss them.  “You know, there were two Marines sending to try to find you about a half an hour ago,” he said with a chuckle as Jason rather jerkily started packing his things.  “They’re outside the door, waiting for you.”

      “Great,” he growled, reaching into his pack for Plan B.  “Ailan, explain something to me.”

      “Certainly.”

      “Why won’t Jyslin get the hint?” he asked.  “Do I have to break her arm to make her understand?”

      “Yes,” he said, quite seriously.  “You don’t understand Faey very well, Jason.  Remember, the females are the dominant gender.  They chase, men play hard to get.  It’s how we do things.  The more you run from her, the harder she’s going to chase you, because that’s how a man tests a woman to see how serious she is about him.  She doesn’t see you saying no as no, she sees it as ‘impress me with your interest in me more, and I’ll go out with you.’  She won’t stop.  That’s why I told you that it was best just to go out on the date and get it over with.  That’s how you get rid of an unwanted suitor,” he winked.

      “How?”

      “Make it clear during the date that you want nothing to do with her,” he answered.  “You can be blunt about it and tell her not to ask for another when it’s over, or you can be a total ass during the date and make it a bad experience for her.  Just so long as she leaves the date with an understanding of how you feel, that’s all that matters.”

      “Hmm,” he mused.  “Well, I will not go out with her.  I’ll just have to impress her suitably that I’m not interested.  Even if I do have to break her arm.”

      “Good luck,” he chuckled.  “You’ll need it.”

      “Why are the others helping her?” he asked curiously.  “The other Marines.”

      “Because they’re in her squad, and Marines do these kinds of things for each other.  They’re very tight-knit.  They see it as great fun, as would most Faey.  We enjoy little games like these, and that’s what this is to them, Jason.  A game.  A grand and clever game where they’re pitting their skill against yours.  And from what I’ve heard so far, you’re winning,” he chuckled.  “The whole school knows about that crash foam.  Where did you get it?”

      “I took it out of the physics lab,” he answered.

      “What did you do to those two today?”

      “Plasma directional magnets with shock-annealer backings,” he replied, which made Ailan laugh.  “I didn’t count on them taking off their breastplates to get free, though,” he admitted.  “I guess Marines don’t have much modesty.”

      “Faey women aren’t modest like human girls are, Jason,” he answered.  “It’s not considered taboo to go bare-chested in Faey society.  It’s quite common on planets with hot climates, actually, and there are no laws about nudity.  On those hot planets, it wouldn’t be too uncommon to see Faey going about totally naked.  Faey here simply don’t show anything more than what humans do because of human customs.  We don’t want to offend you, so we abide by your customs.”

      “There was my mistake,” he grumbled.  “I didn’t know that.”

      “If you want to embarrass a Faey woman, you don’t make her show it off, you make fun of what she has,” he told him with a conspiratorial wink.

      “Well, that’s handy to know, but it’s not going to help me right now,” he said, hefting the little glass canister in his hand, filled with a dark liquid.  Plan B.  “In fact, it’s going to make this even less effective than I thought it would be.”

      “What is that?” he asked.

      “Something that’s about to get me in a heap of trouble,” he answered honestly.

      “What is it?”

      “You’ll see,” he promised, standing up from his desk and picking up his pack, looking like a man about ready to do war.

      He went to the door and opened it, and found both the Marines standing there waiting for him.  They had managed to get their armor off the hovercar, and had left their helmets and their rifles in the car as well, for they didn’t have them now.  “Well, now,” the taller one with a faint scar on her cheek said with a wolfish smile.  “It’s about time.  We were about to check and see if you managed to walk through a wall.”

      He didn’t even glance at them.  He turned his back to them and started down the hall, then, just as he heard their armor shifting as they moved to follow, he tossed the canister over his shoulder.

      “Catch it!” one of them barked aloud.  He didn’t look, but heard one of them try to grab it, only to have the glass cylinder disintegrate in her hands, unleashing a sudden angry cloud of grayish smoke that smelled like rust mixed with limes.  They coughed raggedly and staggered towards him, then came the sound he was waiting for, the sudden angry hissing of their vandirium alloy armor bubbling and sizzling as the reagent dissolved it.

      Both of them gasped and started to panic as the grayish smoke ate at their armor like acid, then they both seemed to relax when they realized that it was doing them no harm.  The gray cloud was some kind of chemical that only reacted with the metal of their armor, eating it away, but doing nothing to harm anything other than their armor.

      “Have fun finding new clothes,” he said over his shoulder as he walked towards the door, intending to head to the cafeteria for breakfast.

      Much to his surprise, instead of angry cursing or them running after him, they were both laughing.  It was laughter mixed in with the clunking of pieces of destroyed armor hitting the floor, but it was most certainly laughter.  Delighted laughter.

      Faey were too weird, he thought to himself as he turned out of the hall into the building’s atrium and headed for the door.

      Thus came the fatal flaw in this particular plan.

      The two Marines were utterly unaffected by what he thought last night would be a devastatingly effective tactic to make them leave him alone.  They marched into the cafeteria about ten minutes later wearing nothing but their helmets with the visors down, to hide their faces, but not hiding much of anything else.  They were also carrying their rifles, slung behind their right shoulders.  All activity in the cafeteria absolutely stopped when they marched in, followed by fierce whispering and buzzing as the two rifle-toting, naked Faey positioned themselves solidly behind Jason’s chair, to either side of him, and simply waited.

      “Couldn’t find clothes?” he asked in what he hoped sounded like an unruffled manner, though he was privately quite disturbed by this little upping of the ante here.

      “We figured this would embarrass you more,” one of them replied in a low whisper, in Faey, and her words were absolutely dripping with sadistic amusement.

      “I can take it if you can,” he shrugged casually, going back to his breakfast of a ham omelet.  “I’m not the one whose bare ass is going to be fueling human men’s fantasies for the next few weeks.”

      “So long as they don’t know who I am and they can’t see my face, why should I care how much of the rest of me they see?” the other one returned with a chuckle.

      He had no real defense against that particular angle of attack, so he fell silent and went back to his breakfast.

      They followed him all over school all day, stark naked, and drawing absolutely every eye to him.  They decided that just being there was all it took to make him uncomfortable, so they never talked, never annoyed him, never did anything other than follow him everywhere he went-except inside classrooms.  And that meant everywhere.  The two of them nearly caused a riot when they marched right into the men’s bathroom behind him after his second class.

      Jason had no other prepared tricks, and to be honest, their incredibly bold move had put him off kilter, so he did nothing more than go through the motions that day and endure it.  He couldn’t just give up, though, because then they’d know that they found something that got to him, and they’d all start showing up naked every morning to escort him around class.

      Jyslin had to have a long arm, since the professors and other school administration did nothing to intervene.  They just watched from a distance and enjoyed it, like everyone else did.

      So, he did pull tricks to get away from them after each class, but they weren’t up to his usual standard, and they didn’t get him very far from them.  Sneaking out a window on the first floor, hiding in a cabinet and slipping by them as they came in to search for him, and in once case climbing through a large air conditioning duct allowed him to sneak past them, but he didn’t go very fast, and allowed word to get back to them very quickly concerning his location.  In actuality, he didn’t want them to get too far away from him, so he could keep them under control.  Two naked Faey had the potential to cause unmitigated chaos on a campus attended by human students, and he wanted to minimize the potential for multi-car pile-ups, broken noses from walking into streetlamps, and bicycles crashing into pedestrians.  So he steered them away from the largest concentrations of students and didn’t go anywhere near Saint Charles’ Avenue, confining himself to the Plaid, the cafeteria, the library, and the main campus building, using the sidewalks well away from the street.

      One thing was for sure.  The boys on campus were very happy for this odd occurrence.

      After his last class, in a sort of grand finale, the two of them sidled along behind him as he walked back to his dorm, clearing the path in front of him and causing a traffic jam behind them as people stopped to look, then walked along behind to keep looking.  He reached his dorm and went up the steps, then turned around and looked at them.  “Have fun with your sunburn,” he told them as he reached into his pocket and took out the little black remote once more.

      “We’re done here,” the taller one told him with a sly smile, just visible under the mirrored visor.

      “Not quite,” he said, then he pushed the button.

      There was a sudden squeal of metal against concrete, and their hovercar suddenly flipped over on the side of the street, making sparks on the asphalt as the metal ground over it, then vaulted up into the air.  It went up nearly fifty feet, then simply stopped, hanging upside-down in midair.

      “Have a nice walk,” he told them, then turned and went into the dorm.

      To his surprise, to the sudden applause and whistling of the people who had followed them back to the dorm.

      Both the Marines stood there in chagrin and looked at their hovercar, hanging in midair well out of their reach, as the humans around them laughed and clapped and whistled.

      Up until that point, the Marines had been winning, damn it all.  It didn’t take telepathy to see that their counterattack of going around naked all day had him on the ropes.  They were but one more task of walking him home to come away the victor in that day’s skirmish, and he gets them right at the end!  Trust that clever Jason to have the final trick up his sleeve!

      Sheleese laughed.  “Well, not only will the squad be coming to pick us up, but we’ll have to explain how he got us out of our armor,” she told Ilia.

      “How did he do that?” Ilia said aloud, in English no less, staring up at the floating hovercar.

      “I’m sure the techs’ll explain it when they come to get it down,” Sheleese said with a cheeky grin.  “Until then, we’re naked and without a ride back to the barracks.”

      Ilia laughed.  “Jason three, Marines zero,” she admitted.

      “This is starting to get a bit ridiculous,” Sheleese declared.  “The honor of the Corps is at stake here, and he’s playing with us like we’re just babies.”

      “Maybe Yana and Myri will have better luck tomorrow.”

      Sheleese chuckled.  “The way things are going, he’ll have them in dog collars by lunchtime.”

      Ilia giggled girlishly. “What a man,” she announced.

      “Jyslin has all the luck,” Sheleese agreed with a nod.

      Back in his room, he sat down and blew out his breath, looking up at the ceiling.

      What a day!

      Those damn Marines were starting to play dirty.  He was pretty sure that they could tell that their stunt had thrown him off, but on the other side of it, he was positive that his retaliatory stunt got them and got them good.  He took out his panel and brought it up, then had it contact the address of another panel with a few touches on icons on his screen and a few quickly typed commands.  He knew that that panel was now ringing like a phone, waiting for its owner to answer his call.

      Tim’s face appeared on the window holding his call program.  “Hey,” he said.  The view behind him told him that Tim was in his room, which was one floor up from his own.

      “Thanks,” he said.

      Tim laughed.  “I almost got in trouble, but that’s alright.”

      “What happened?”

      “An army chick caught me planting that plasma magnet,” he answered.  “She had me dead to rights, so what could I do?  I told her I was helping you play a trick on the Marines, and she let me go ahead and do it.  I think she doesn’t like Marines,” he chuckled.

      “You can always count on inter-service rivalry,” he answered with a short laugh.

      “I’m surprised it picked up that hovercar.”

      “I’m more surprised that magnetic field density sensor worked,” he answered.  “If it had malfunctioned, they would have had to send a shuttle to retrieve it from orbit.”

      Tim laughed.  “Man, you have any idea how popular you are at school now?” he asked.  “Two blueskins following you around like lost puppies, naked as jaybirds?  That was fantastic!”

      “They were trying to embarrass me.”

      “Think you could convince them to try to embarrass you again tomorrow?”

      Jason chuckled.  “They’ll be back, but two different ones.  And I think if they found out how much the men on campus enjoyed the strip show, they probably won’t do it again.”  He explained how they had come to be naked quickly, and his short chat with Ailan.  “I found out that Faey aren’t too solid on our idea of modesty, but if they find out that the humans think they were funny because they were naked, they won’t do it again.  That’s digging into their pride, and these Marines have a great deal of that.”

      “What are you going to do tomorrow?” he asked eagerly.  “Half the school is already laying bets on what’s going to happen.”

      “I’m not sure yet.  I’ll think of something, though.”  He looked at the box of components laying on his bed, cast-off supplies and things that instructors had given to him to allow him to experiment on his own.  So far, every device he’d built came out of that box of junk, but the pickings were starting to get a bit thin in there.  He’d already used up most of the choice components.  “It may not be very good.  I’m running out of ideas and expendable equipment.”

      “Say the word, and I’ll get anything you want or need,” he said immediately.

      “No, this is personal,” he replied.  “I cheated a little using you to plant that magnet, but I don’t really want to get anyone else involved in this.  I can deal with the Faey.  I don’t want others getting in trouble because of me.”

      “I’m already in it,” he grinned.  “I’m not afraid to be your gopher, Jayce.  And a second pair of trap-laying hands will keep them off balance.  After all, they’re coming at you in pairs, so why not have an extra set of hands?”

      “No, Tim, I’ll handle it myself.”

      “Well, alright.  But everyone’s cheering you on, Jason, so do us proud.”

      Jason was a little surprised at that.  “Why?”

      “Because this little war between you and the Marines makes us all feel better,” he answered.  “Everyone looks at you and sees someone willing to take on the Faey, and so far, you’ve beaten them like red-headed stepchildren.  After all the abuse they’ve put down on us, seeing them get theirs feels very good.”

      Jason said goodbye to him after that and turned on the TV, feeling a little foolish, and suddenly feeling quite dutiful.  If his war with Jyslin made the other students feel better, then he wouldn’t disappoint them.  He had to study, but this had priority.  He went over to the box of parts, rifling through them and seeing what he might be able to come up with.

      He pondered on it a while, and came up with something that would at least get him through tomorrow.  He set that aside and stood up, mentally telling himself that he’d have to get some new parts tomorrow at school.  They went to school six days a week, a highly accelerated schedule, with only one day off.  But, on the other hand, they got two weeks off between semesters.

      It was a long, stressful day, and he felt dirty.  He pulled his clothes off and threw his towel around his waist, then grabbed his shower kit.  A long shower would be perfect just about now.

      The door opened, and Jyslin stepped through, out of her armor, in the black tank top and shorts she wore when she worked out.  She closed it behind him, then burst out laughing before she managed to get it closed all the way.  “Jason!” she wheezed.  “You’re awful!  Wow,” she breathed in admiration as she looked on his bare torso.  Jason practiced martial arts and he used to play football, so he was very well developed.  But because he did play football, he was much, much stronger than he looked.  Jason could bench press nearly four hundred pounds.  His arms were muscular, but they weren't very large.  His arms and body held a deceptive, monstrous strength that shocked most of his students.

      “What?” he asked.

      “Well, I'm looking at a dream, for one," she told him with open admiration.  "But what you did to Sheleese and Ilia was awful!  Throwing that stuff on them that destroyed their armor and making them walk around naked?  That’s vicious!  Hilarious, but vicious!”

      “They decided to do that themselves,” he said defensively, “to embarrass me.”

      “True, but I’m talking about you doing it in the first place!” she said with another burst of laughter.  “I thought you using that chemical spray on me was bad, but this, this is worse!  You’re terrible!” she accused, then she laughed even harder.

      “Why is it so funny if you think it’s so bad?” he asked testily.

      “Faey love jokes,” she said with a wink, “even when they’re pulled on us.  I knew you were smart, but you’re proving to be a cunning little monster.  Tomorrow it’ll be Yana and Myri.  If you can beat them, it’ll be Zora and Mil on Monday, and on Tuesday, if you still haven’t knuckled under, our Company Commander, Lieutenant Lana, is going to take a crack at you.  Wednesday, you’re mine.  And on Wednesday, it’s over.  I guarantee it,” she said with a wink.  “Then it’s our date on Friday.”

      “Keep dreaming.”

      “I am.  Of you in high heels, of you in a maid’s apron and nothing else, of you in a bra and panties, a dog collar, and of course, you covered in sweat and with a totally rapturous look on your face while we squeak the bedsprings.”

      Jason picked up a conduit bridge and threw it at her half-heartedly, which made her slide to the side and chuckle.  “Behave,” she teased him.

      “Out,” he barked, pointing at the door.

      “You’re no fun today,” she taunted.  “Then again, I feel a little jealous that you stared at Sheleese and Ilia all day, and you’ve never actually seen me naked.  Just a memory of it.”  She reached down and grabbed the hem of her shirt meaningfully.  “I’ll take mine off if you take yours off,” she said with a throaty purr.

      “Out,” he repeated sternly.

      “Then again, I have two and you have one.  That’s hardly fair.”  With a quick motion, she whisked off her tank top, exposing her lovely, full breasts for his eyes to enjoy.  “There, that’s more even,” she said with merry eyes, tossing her tank top onto the desk and hooking the waistband of her shorts with her thumbs.  “Now then, do you dare take up the challenge, Jason?” she said with a wicked smile, pulling down on the waistband sensually, letting it ride down lower and lower on her hips, until the upper edge of the dark red hair under those shorts began to peek out over the waistband.  "I want to see you, all of you," she breathed in a husky voice.  "Show me your beautiful body, and I'll show you mine."

      It was all he could do not to swallow and gape at her like a dying fish.  She was evil!  She was baiting him with the one thing he couldn’t easily ignore!

      “OUT!” he thundered, pointing at the door imperiously.

      She pulled up her shorts with a seductive smirk, and half of him bitterly regretted that.  Part of him-most of him-wanted her to go all the way, to take those shorts off and let him see for himself what she’d teased him with yesterday.  But if she took off those shorts and got the towel off of him, got both of them naked, he knew that they were going to end up in that bed.  She left no doubt in his mind that she wanted him, and he had to admit that he wanted her.  And he couldn’t allow that to happen.

      She gave him a victorious, wicked little smile as she pulled her tank top back on, then she opened the door and sauntered through in a very seductive manner, making sure her hips swayed like a boat rocking in a hurricane as she took those three steps out the door.  Then she turned to face him as she grabbed the door.

      “See you on Wednesday.  Wear clean underwear,” she winked.  “You won’t be in them long.”  Then she closed the door.

      Evil, evil woman, he grated to himself.  That stunt of sharing the image of her nude body had caused him to admit to himself that he was attracted to her, both mentally and physically.  And now she was starting to tighten the noose by getting more and more sexual with him, by making statements that he both did and did not want to hear, pulling off her shirt and letting him see what she was offering.  She was right before in that his objection to her was philosophical, not personal.  Truth be told, he rather liked Jyslin, but his pride and his sense of duty to the ideals he held dear would not allow him to associate with her. To get around that, she was using his attraction to her like a cudgel to beat the resistance out of him.  Jyslin was beautiful, she was sexy, and she had a body most human women would kill for.  And the fact that she was more than willing to strip and shove all kinds of exotic parts of her anatomy in his face made it very hard to ignore her.

      But something told him that she wasn't going to push him.  She was teasing him, baiting him, enticing him, but she wouldn't force the issue.  She wanted him to come to her.  That was why she didn't whisk off her shorts, yank off his towel, and use some highly aggressive techniques to try to seduce him.  Had she done that, both he knew and she knew that she would have succeeded.  No sane, healthy, heterosexual male could say no to a woman that gorgeous.  She wanted to hear him say yes, and that meant that she wouldn't push too hard, so hard that her victory might be in doubt because of her own aggressiveness.

      It would be a sweet loss, that was for sure.  He couldn't deny his attraction to her, but at least he'd enjoy the agony of defeat.  But he wasn't going to roll over and die just because he was attracted, because he wanted what she was offering, because he also wanted to maintain his ideals.  A tryst with Jyslin would be a blow to those ideals, fraternizing with the enemy as thoroughly as one could fraternize.

      He'd learn their language, he'd go to their school, but they wouldn't conquer him.  No matter how long he lived.  If he wasn't free in body, he'd be free in spirit, and part of that freedom was the right to say no.

      Shower.  Showering would be good right now.  And he'd better make it a cold one.

      Yana and Myri arrived an hour before class was to start, and they weren't taking any chances.

      This one was as cunning as a tibaxi, and there was no telling what little surprise he had waiting for them outside of that dorm.  After what happened to the others, they both agreed that staying in the hovercar until he came out and trailing him to the campus was the best move possible.  After he got there, they could get out and start following him around, when he was surrounded by the other students and had fewer opportunities to get them.

      It was funny, but on another tack, this was starting to get a little embarrassing.  This little game had leaked out all over New Orleans, and the Army whores were starting to dig on them because they couldn't control a single native.  Marines generally held the Army in contempt, because they were the grunts who didn't have what it took to be a Marine.  Many of them were provisional, the personal troops of whichever noble controlled a sector, where the Marines were Imperial, serving the Empress directly.  The Marines were here in part to make sure that the nobles and their troops did what the Imperium expected of them.  If there were no Marines here, there was no telling what those greedy nobles would try to get away with.

      Nobles always had to be watched.  If they thought they could get away with it, they'd steal the Empire blind, and there had even been instances of nobles breaking away from the Imperium, trying to establish their own empires.  Faey history was rife with civil wars, as much as it was little private wars between nobles who took offense to one another.  Terra was under the control of the house Tarlinne, which was related to the throne by blood.  That was the main reason they were given Terra, because they were very well trusted by the Empress Dahnai.  The house sent a Duchess to rule Terra, Duchess Gwyn Tarlinne, and she had brought in her six children to govern the six continents.  North America was the domain of Baron Olen, the youngest of her six children, and every state of the three major former nations were under the control of a Baronet or Baronen, with Olenas or Olenens controlling the provinces within those states.  Zarinas and Zarinens were minor nobles that watched over cities or interests within those provinces, the lowest rung of the noble hierarchy.

      Nobles.  Sometimes Myri thought that the Imperium would be better off without nobles.

      "Alright, what's the plan?" Yana asked.  Yana was the youngest in the squad, just coming out of boot camp and still looking like a teenager with her relatively flat chest and narrow hips, but she was very smart, and she had awesome talent.  Yana's telepathic powers outstripped just about everyone in the company.  Despite that, she rarely used them, for some odd reason.  Where most Marines sent nearly as often as they spoke, Yana virtually never sent.

      "We wait," Myri answered.  "I'm not getting anywhere near him until we're sure he's not packing a surprise."

      "I thought this was a game to force him out on a date with Jyslin," Yana giggled.  "When did it turn into a war?"

      "The moment that little Army whore said that if they were doing this, they'd have him in a dog collar," she answered bluntly.

      "They don't understand the rules."

      "That doesn't matter.  He's making a fool out of us, and we have to put a stop to it, even if we have to cheat."

      "Where's the fun in that?"

      "It'll be better than hearing those Army bitches ragging on us for the next six cycles," she growled.  Myri was the oldest of the squad, the other squad Sergeant, and she had quite a reputation for a foul mouth.

      Yana was about to say something, but something hit the roof of the hovercar with a thud, and almost immediately, water began pouring down over the windshield and side windows.  They both looked around quickly, and found nobody around.  "Some joker's throwing water balloons," Myri snapped in irritation, sending her mind out to find the little jokester.  In the mood she was in, she felt that a serious chastisement was in order.

      Odd...all she could find were human minds watching on in unsuppressed glee.

      She started getting a little suspicious when the water cascading down the windows stopped, like it was frozen in time.  Myri quickly reached for the door release button and pressed it, then pushed at the door to open it--

      --and found it stuck fast!

      That damned human dropped into sight from the roof of the hovercar, walking down the hood and to the ground with his pack slung over his shoulder.  "Good morning, ladies," he said in a casual manner.  Once on the ground, he turned around and held out a molecular cutter, then used it to carve a neat hole in the hood of their car!

      "Hey, we signed this out!" Yana shouted at him angrily.  "If you mess it up, it's our asses!"

      Nonplussed, the human pulled the freed circle of hood away from the hole and reached his hand inside boldly.  The car was running!  Didn't he realize how dangerous what he was doing was!?  Myri scrambled to turn the car off, but all the lights suddenly went out, and the car dropped to the ground with a clunk, clicking Myri's teeth together from the jarring impact.

      The human pulled his hand out, and in his hand was the phase exchanger that fed power into the car's onboard computer.  Without that exchanger, the car wouldn't do anything.

      Without changing his expression, he put the piece of hood back exactly where it had been and annealed it back together.  Then he took the exchanger and set it on the hood of the car, carefully placing it so they could see it, and it wouldn't slide down the sloped hood and drop to the ground.

      Myri beat her shoulder against the door, but it was stuck fast, almost as if he had annealed the doors.  But it wasn't annealing, it was that water, or whatever it was.  It was unmoving, solid, and it was covering the top of the hovercar, preventing the doors from being opened.

      He'd trapped them in their own car!  And what was worse, he'd disabled it so they couldn't just drive back to the motor pool!

      "Have a nice day," he concluded with two fingers to his forehead in some kind of salute, then he simply walked past the car, past the driver's side door, and started towards the campus.

      Yana looked around wildly, looked at Myri, then burst into laughter.

      Myri glared back over her shoulder, then she chuckled ruefully.  "We didn't even make it out of the car," she sighed in lament.

      Yana laughed a little more, then gave an amused sigh.  "Oooh, my," she breathed.  "Well, what do we do, Sergeant?"

      "Send for help," she said with a rueful chuckle.  "What else can we do?"

      "True.  I think Zora and Mil had better bring a tool bag with them on Monday," she said, then she burst into laughter again.

      "They might need it," Myri agreed, then succumbed to the humor of it herself.  "I just want to know one thing," she said after a moment.

      "What?"

      "How the hell did he get on top of the car without us noticing?"

      "This one's full of surprises," Yana laughed.  "What a man!  Jyslin's got the luck of Zanya!"

      School went in a blur, but at least it was a peaceful one.

      The boys on campus were a little crestfallen that he wasn't going to have two naked Faey following him around, but the applause he got when he came on campus told him that they didn't mind all that much.  Everyone on the street had seen him come out of the second story window of someone else's dorm room and circle wide around, then climb onto a large utility control box and jump over onto their car, which was parked right beside it.  He'd used a little something he'd remembered from physics, adding a compound to the water in the large jug he'd brought with him that caused it to instantly "freeze" and turn into an extremely hard solid, like a super-strong ice. Just like ice, it would "melt," as the chemical broke down, which would allow them to get the doors open in about a half an hour or so.

      They didn't come back until after his last class, Xeno I, where he spent all class practicing spoken Faey.  In that one class he'd managed to get a firm grip on the pronunciations, and he could speak the language surprisingly well.  Jason's mother grew up in France and as a result spoke French in addition to English, so he'd learned French as a child, and it had many similar sounds as Faey.

      After class, he ran home, changed into his sweats, and rushed back to the campus gym, where his class was waiting for him.  He'd missed their last appointment, but not this one.  They bowed to him as he came in, wearing sweats, shorts, whatever they could find that was loose and comfortable.  There were five men and three women in his class, and Tim was one of them.  "Sorry I'm late," he said as he bowed in reply.  "Now, let's stretch, and then we'll begin."

      After stretching, he started them on their exercises.  They were all beginners, so what he was teaching them first was how to fall, how to go to the ground without getting hurt, and how to control their bodies to be able to spring back up immediately.  It was a critical skill in Aikido, protecting them from injury as they practiced the forms, and also giving them a powerful defensive weapon to use in case they were knocked down in a fight.  After that was done, he instructed on the basic forms of wrist-locks, one of the more important ways to lock an opponent and force him to bend to their will.  Aikido was a martial art of gentle persuasion, not an aggressive one, which used an attacker's own body and motion against him to control him and make him unable to do harm.  He was well versed in much more aggressive martial arts, but Aikido had always been his favorite.  Aikido allowed him to protect himself without doing anyone any permanent harm.  It gave him an outlet to deal with braggarts who mistook his mild nature for cowardice.  When a fellow was third string on a college football team, that happened more than he cared to admit.  They didn't understand that he could have easily been first string, but he was more interested in the education than he was the football.

      The familiar rhythms of teaching, of falling back into the Zen-like mental state required to practice the art, they relaxed him a great deal.  It was a welcome break from the stresses of school and the building insanity concerning Jyslin and the Marines.

      After their proscribed hour’s use of the gym, they stretched once more and bowed, just in time, as the pick-up basketball had the gym in fifteen minutes, and the players were already starting to arrive.  The Wednesday class took place out on the campus lawn, since they didn’t have the gym, but the Saturday class they got one hour and fifteen minutes of gym time, from five o’clock to six fifteen.  There was a fifteen minute cushion, then the pick-up games had the gym for the rest of the night.

      “What you doing tonight?” Tim asked as they broke up.

      “Dunno,” he answered, cracking his knuckles.

      “Want to go down to the quarter?” he asked.  “I feel like getting drunk tonight.”

      “That actually sounds like a good idea,” he said with a nod.  “I think I’m in the mood for Patty O’s.”

      “Piano bar?” he asked with a grin.

      “You know it,” he replied.

      “I still can’t believe they tried to get you to work there,” he laughed.

      That much was true.  His mother was a music teacher, and because of that, her son absolutely had to learn how to play the piano.  His very first memories were sitting on his mother’s lap, looking at the keys.  That was the one thing she had given to her son, the skill that defined his relationship with her, just as learning to fly planes had been the defining aspect of his relationship with his father.  His mother had been so gentle, so kind, so beautiful.  It had been a terrible blow to both him and his father when she was killed in an automobile accident, so much so that his father had resigned from the Air Force and taken a job as a flight instructor at a little airstrip in Auburn, so he could be there for his son.  He still played, though he didn’t have a piano now, only a little electronic keyboard that sat on the high shelf over his bed.  But sometimes he felt the urge to play, and that required a real piano.  There was one at a Catholic Church down Saint Charles, and they also had one up at the music shop on Claiborne.  The week he arrived in New Orleans, he stumbled across the bar called Pat O’Brien’s, or Patty O’s to the locals.  It was one in the afternoon on a Tuesday, so the place was pretty empty, and they had this room that they called the Piano Bar, which had two pianos on a stage to entertain the patrons.  On weeknights and weekends, piano players would sit up there and play requests, which were written on napkins and passed up with a tip for the player.  Playing Patty O’s was not an easy gig, for their players were expected to be able to play any request.  Most of their musicians had massive stacks of music books filled with sheet music for a huge number of songs.  Well, he’d been feeling rather depressed because of being shipped to New Orleans, and after he bought a daiquiri, he asked if he could play.  The piano bar was closed and the place was more or less empty, so the managers allowed it.  They were shocked.  Jason grew up with a mother who was a music appreciation teacher, and he had a vast repertoire of songs he could play.  Most didn’t think that a six foot two inch guy built like a football player would be able to play the piano.  Playing the piano always cheered him up, and after he felt better, he bought another daiquiri, and they offered him a job.  They’d just lost a player to the three month random farm allotment lottery, and they were looking for a new one.

      Unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed to work when he was in school.  Then again, he wouldn’t have had time for it anyway.  He didn’t work there, but sometimes when he went down, if they were short-handed that night, they allowed him to come up and play as a “guest musician.”  It wasn’t work, but he was allowed to keep all the tips they sent up when he played requests.  He did that every couple of weeks or so, earning a little extra money on top of the stipend he was paid as a full-time student in the Faey academy.  That was how he could afford some of the parts in his little box, because he could buy them from campus workers looking to make a little extra money on the side.

      “Let’s go get cleaned up, and—“ he started, then he trailed off quickly when six Faey filed into the gym.  They wore the camouflage colors of the armor of regular Army, much like the Battle Dress that the American military wore before it was dissolved.  They were all pattern Faey, with those pretty faces and sleek bodies, accented by that armor.  One of them, he noticed, was carrying a length of chain.

      “Well, if it’s not the human making the Marines look like idiots,” the tallest of them, a woman with raven black hair, announced loudly in English.  “We’re here to restore the honor of the Faey, since the Marines can’t seem to manage it.”

      Jason looked her up and down coldly, steeling his mind against possible attack, starting the exercise that formed the wall of repetitive thought that would protect him from any attempt to invade his mind.

      “We brought you a dog collar,” she said with a vicious smirk, holding up a leather collar.  “We’re going to put you in it and drop you off at the Marine barracks with nothing but this on.  After we have a little fun with you first,” she said with a naked leer.

      Jason brought himself up to his full height and stared at them.  “Faey love games,” he said in a quiet tone.  “How about a little friendly challenge?”

      “Really,” she smirked.

      “Whoever ends up with that dog collar around her neck has to wear it until Monday,” he said.  “The one collared becomes the property of the victor, and has to obey utterly until Monday.  That means she does anything I say until Monday morning, when I go to school.  Oh, and to make it fair, since the Marines aren’t allowed to use their talent, neither are you.  Think the six of you are enough to put that collar around my neck without using your power?”

      “Six against one, and you think you have a chance?” she asked with a laugh.

      “If you think it’s a dead lock you’ll win, then accept,” he urged.

      They looked among themselves for a second, obviously communicating with their telepathic gifts.  “You have a deal,” she said.  “I’m going to enjoy having you as our personal squad mascot.”

      “I’m going to enjoy having a maid,” he said, cracking his knuckles meaningfully.

      Tim moved away and the floor cleared as the six camo-armored Army regulars moved to surround Jason, who spread his feet out a little and kept himself squarely in front of the one holding the collar.  They all started taunting and calling to him, trying to distract and unnerve him, but his eyes remained solidly on the brunette and the collar in her hand.

      The other five came all at once, seeking to overwhelm him by force of numbers and pin him down long enough for the brunette to collar him.  That actually wasn’t a bad idea, but they weren’t ready to face him like that.  He grabbed the one that reached him first and spun her into two rushing from the other side, making them crash to the floor in a tumbled heap of arms and legs, squealing hurting everyone’s ears as their armor screeched against other armor.  He surrendered the defense back to use that move, and the one behind him, the smallest of them all, crashed into him to try to knock him to the ground.  He totally ignored her weight as he slapped aside the reaching hand of the fifth, then grabbed her other hand by the wrist and yanked on it.  She was jerked in the direction he wanted her to go.  With the sixth regular clinging to his back, kicking at him with her armored shins to get him to go down, he wove the one he had a grip on from side to side, not allowing her to regain her footing, exactly what he did to Jyslin, then spun her and crashed her into the heap of other Faey who were still sprawled out on the floor.  A few slapping grabs at his flank got him a handful of armored shin, and he tore her off his back with main force.  She clanged to the floor with her leg still in his grasp, but she took his shirt with her, ripping it off his back.  He snatched the shirt out of her hands and let go of her, then advanced on the brunette quickly, wrapping the ends of a long strip between his hands.  She backed up in surprise and raised both hands to protect herself, then her face hardened, and she attacked him with her telepathic power.

      He’d never been attacked before, not like that, and it was something he never wanted to have happen again.  The full force of her mind smashed against his own like a spear, trying to punch through the wall of repetitive thought he used to protect himself from probes.  It was blindingly painful, like lights exploding behind his eyes, as he struggled with all his might to keep her out of his head, pushing back against that force with every fiber of his being.  He’d been rushing forward when she struck at him with her power, and his momentum carried him right up to her.  He could barely think, barely move, but he had enough presence of mind to lower his shoulder.  She gaped in shock as he managed to resist her attempt to invade and take over his mind with her power just long enough to get close enough to her to do something about it.  His shoulder slammed into her upper chest, and his weight sent her flying.  That impact broke her concentration, and he felt the terrible weight of her mind lift off of him like pulling away a blanket.

      Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs and the pain, he lunged down and snatched the collar out of her hands before she had the presence of mind to roll away from him.  Her eyes looked a little glassy; maybe she hit the back of her head on the gym floor when she fell down.  He was about to reach down and put the collar on her when two Faey jumped on him from behind, one grabbing the hand holding the collar as another wrapped her arms around his neck from behind and tried to tangle his legs up with her own.

      She did pretty well, for he found himself unable to shift his feet.  He yanked in the Faey holding his arm and then grabbed her, and they all fell down to the floor in a pile.  There was a great deal of kicking, thrashing, even some biting taking place in that twisted mound of struggling bodies, but Jason was larger and much stronger than his opponents.  He managed to grab the collar with both hands as the smaller Faey tried to cover his eyes with her hands and the larger one tried to wrest the collar out of his grip.  He rolled over on the Faey on his back, got his weight on her, pinning her to the floor with his shoulders, then pulled the collar out of the other’s hands with a fast snap of his arms.  She tried to roll to her feet, but Jason used the Faey under him as a push-off to power himself up onto his feet in the blink of an eye.  The Faey had her back to him as she tried to roll back and away to get distance, so it was a simple matter to whip that collar over her head, then pull it taut around her neck and close the ends.

      There was a sudden eruption of cheering from the people watching this impromptu battle, after it became clear that the collar ended up snapped around a Faey’s neck.

      “Awww, DAMN!” the Faey snapped in frustration when her hands felt the collar around her neck.  She stayed on her knees, and fixed the brunette with an impressively cold, murderous glare.

      Jason panted, suddenly out of breath and keyed up from the adrenalin, then got himself under control.  He gave that brunette his own icy stare.  She had used her power against him, had cheated, and she should have been the one in the collar.  She was the one he wanted, but he couldn’t risk her doing that again when the other Faey had a grip on him.  If she did, they would have gotten the collar around his neck.

      “Don’t ever do that again,” he hissed at her savagely as he regained his composure.  The one he collared got to her feet and turned around, looking suitably ticked off.  She was a cutie, with a heart-shaped face and pouting lips.  Her hair was dark blond, almost brown, cut very short, and she had large blue eyes.  She crossed her arms and gave him a flat look, then she chuckled.

      “Well, looks like we lost, and I got stuck holding the stick,” she announced in thickly accented English.

      “Strip,” he commanded immediately.  “All of it but the collar.”

      That got a roar of approval from the boys watching on.

      She gave him a dark look, but did start taking off the armor.

      He stalked over and snatched up the chain that was laying on the floor, and waited patiently as the Faey removed her armor, then stood there, her face turning purple in a blush—red blood flushing blue skin—as the boys in the gym whistled and clapped and generally embarrassed her half to death.  He locked the chain to the collar with a smooth motion, then started towards the door, pulling her along.  She followed, her head bowed and throwing dark looks at the brunette for getting her into this.

      She may have thought that he was going to be cruel to her, or abuse her, or take tremendous advantage of her, but she found out that she was wrong.  He did parade her around the campus a little as the students cheered, since it made them feel good, then he went back to his room and took off the chain.  She stood there by the door for a long moment as he sat at his desk.  He felt her mind brush against his, but she pulled away when she found nothing there for her to grasp.

      “Don’t do that,” he said gratingly.  “I don’t appreciate it.”

      “Sorry,” she apologized.  “Most humans don’t even notice it.”  She gave him a long, steady look.  “Well?” she asked in her accented English.

      “Well what?” he asked in Faey.  “Have a seat.”

      “Don’t I have to clean?” she said in Faey, her face bright that she wouldn’t have to chatter at him in English.

      “It’s already clean,” he shrugged.  “You’ll be doing my laundry tomorrow, but for right now I don’t have anything for you to do.  So sit down and watch some TV or something.”

      “That’s all?  You’re not going to humiliate me or make me do dirty jobs?”

      “Do you want to?”

      “Uh, no,” she said quickly.

      “Then sit down and watch TV,” he said mildly.

      “Where do I sleep?”

      “That’s your problem,” he told her.  “The bed’s mine.  You’re on your own.”

      “I’m, I’m not sleeping with you?”

      He gave her a direct stare.

      “Isn’t that part of my punishment?”

      “I don’t consider that much of a punishment,” he said dryly.

      “It is if you do it right,” she winked with a naughty smile.

      “Faey,” he breathed, rolling his eyes.  “Don’t you ever think with your brains?”

      “We’re the dominant gender, human,” she smiled.  “We think with our brains as much as human men think with theirs.  Imagine a human man’s sex drive in a woman as happy to chase dick as human men are to chase pussy, and in a nutshell, you have a Faey.”

      Her forward, graphic language surprised him, but he made the connection quite easily, and she was right.  Imagine a Faey more or less as a human man, and they made sense.  “I wonder how either of us ever manage to get anything done,” he chuckled ruefully.

      “A question for the philosophers,” she chuckled.  “My name is Symone.”

      “Jason,” he returned.  “But don’t take that to mean you’re not going to really hate me come Monday morning.”

      She chuckled.  “I’ll get over it,” she promised.  “So, what would you command of me, Master?” she said with a grin.  “Wash your clothes?  Reorganize your closet?  Do the Moraki Dance of Forbidden Delights?”

      “Keep talking, and you’re going to be chained to the outside of my door,” he said calmly as he turned on his panel.

      “What, you’re celibate?”

      “On the contrary, I find Faey very beautiful and very sexy,” he answered honestly.  “But there’s a principle here that I can’t violate.  If it weren’t for that, you’d be pinned to the bed right now.  You are sexy, Symone, and I’m not dead.  I’d be more than willing to give you that punishment you hinted about if not for that.  I’d chain you outside the door to remove the temptation.”

      “Well, it’s nice to be appreciated, and I do appreciate your candor,” she said with an honest smile.  “I’ll leave you alone, since there’s a matter of principle involved.”  Then she turned on the television.

      He was quite grateful for that.  And over the entire weekend, she was true to her word.  She did not flirt with him or come on to him, not even once.

      Sunday was a very relaxing day, because he had himself a maid.  And he worked her.

      She didn’t sleep very well, because she ended up sleeping in the chair at his desk, with her head and arms laid out on the desk.  He woke her up early and got her to work.  She did his laundry.  She moved all the furniture out of his room and shampooed the thin, worn carpet, then moved it all back in while he and Tim sat on lounge chairs in the hallway and watched.  She cleaned the window, inside and out.  She stood behind his chair obediently as he and Tim sat out on the green lawn between the dorm and the main Tulane building as boys whistled and stared at her, though this didn’t bother her as much as it might a human girl.  Though Jason wasn’t going to rub it in too much, Tim was more than willing to torment Symone by barking at her like a drill instructor, haranguing her whenever she didn’t perform up to his exacting specifications, making her wait on them hand and foot, and once he slapped her on her bare butt as she fetched them beers.

      “I’m going to hurt him,” Symone growled under her breath as Jason sat at his desk, studying for tomorrow’s classes, after Tim went to the bathroom.

      “He likes you,” Jason told her absently.  “He’s been sporting a woody since he got here this morning.”

      “I don’t understand.”

      “English slang,” he said mildly.  “He’s had an erection.  He finds you extremely sexy.”

      “Oh, I noticed that almost immediately,” she winked.  “Why do you think I’ve been sticking my tits in his face every time I serve him?  I have to get back at him somehow.”

      Jason glanced at her, then chuckled.  “He’s actually a pretty good guy, and a good friend.  He’s just enjoying the moment, that’s all.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “A lot of humans resent the subjugation, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

      “Of course.”

      “Well, this is his chance to boss you around.”

      “Ohhh,” she breathed, then she chuckled.  “Well, I guess I can’t fault him for that,” she said with a wink just as he got back.  “Does he speak Faey?”

      “Yes,” Tim answered in Faey, but not pronounced very well.  Tim was still mastering the motor skills required to speak the language.

      “Well then, with your permission, I’m going to the bathroom, Jason,” she asked.

      “Fine.”

      “We’ll see how brave you are on Monday afternoon, Tim,” she said with a taunting smile.  He jumped in shock when she put the palm of her hand against his shirt and pushed her hand down inside the band of his sweat pants.  Tim’s face instantly flushed, and he put his back against the door as the bulge of her hand in his sweatpants moved around.  “Or even better, how brave you are tonight,” she added in a husky tone, brushing up against him as she slid past.  She flicked her tongue out and licked the lobe of his ear as she passed, then disappeared out the door.

      “Oh, shit,” Tim said in a wobbly kind of voice, sitting down at his desk rather hard.

      “She won’t get back at you, Tim.  This is all part of the game for her,” Jason chuckled.  “Being bossed around is part of it.”

      “No, I think she wants me,” he said.

      “Whatever gave you that idea?  Her putting her hand down your pants, or sticking her tongue in your ear?” he asked archly.

      “Man,” he said in a panting tone.  “Was she playing with me, or was she serious?”

      Jason suppressed a smile.  Symone was getting her measure of revenge against Tim already.  She was going to put him into a fever pitch for the rest of the day, he knew she would.  It was what she did tonight that would tell the tale.

      “Probably playing with you,” he answered honestly.  “I wouldn’t take her too seriously.  That, or you’d better go back to your room.”

      “She grabs hold of my dick, and you tell me not to take her seriously?” he asked hotly in reply.

      “It’s your call,” he shrugged.

      He was right about that.  For the entire afternoon, Symone absolutely tortured Tim by flirting with him, flaunting her assets in front of him, and taking all sorts of liberties with him.  It seemed that every time he turned around, she had her hand down his pants, whispering mind-blowing obscenities in his ear.  She got him back in spades for the bossing around he’d done to her earlier in the day, that was for certain.  Tim couldn’t look at her without his face flushing, and eventually, Jason had to take pity on him by kicking Tim out.  Symone looked utterly smug with herself after Tim was banished to his room upstairs, but her smug look vanished when he had her stand outside his door with the chain locked to her collar, wrapped around his doorknob while he took a shower.

      He got back, towel around his waist, and she was still standing there.  “Um, Jason, you think I might go, upstairs?” she asked in a hesitant manner.

      “What’s upstairs?”

      “Tim.”

      “Why don’t you give that poor boy some peace?” he asked.

      “Well, I was kind of going to go up there and keep all those promises I made to him,” she said with a sultry wink.  “You think a girl can do that to a sexy guy all day and not get horny?  There were a couple of times there when I was about to pull his pants down and fuck him right on your floor.”

      He looked at her, then chuckled.  “You would have had to clean it,” he told her.  “I need to study, so do what you want.  Just remember that you’re not done until tomorrow morning.”

      “When do you want me to come back?”

      “Tomorrow morning.  You’re going to help me take care of tomorrow’s Marines.”

      “Oh.  I don’t have a problem with that,” she winked.  “I get to have a hot night with a sexy guy, and I get to rub some Marines’ faces in the dirt.  Thanks.  For a human, you’re not a bad guy.”

      “For a Faey, you’re not a bad girl.”

      “I’m about to be,” she purred as she unhooked the chain from the collar.

      Jason chuckled as she sauntered towards the stairs.  Symone actually was a pretty OK girl.  Faey, but other than that, she was alright.  She had a sense of humor, she was quite candid with him, she’d respected his position, which really impressed him, she had a lot of patience, and she’d been a good sport.  And her torturing of Tim showed that she certainly knew how to play the game.  She was the kind of girl he certainly wouldn’t mind calling friend.

      But then again, she was Faey.  He shouldn’t get too cozy with her.  After all, he liked Jyslin just as much, if not more, but his position wouldn’t allow him to be friends with her either.

      Symone came lilting back to his room at about six in the morning, knocking on his door without considering that she might be waking him up.  He was already up, however, for he was in the habit of rising early.  He was lucky in the fact that he didn’t sleep very much, and didn’t seem to need much sleep.

      She came in behind him as he opened the door for her, then leaned against it sensually and fanned her face with her hand, her eyes bright.  “Where have you humans been all my life?” she said in a thoroughly satisfied tone.  “Your friend Tim is—wow,” she related.  “No Faey man ever made me mewl like one of your cat animals.”

      “I’m glad you had fun,” he said dryly.

      “Fun?  That was more than fun,” she said with a grin.  “I had to take two showers afterward.”

      “Two?”

      “I took one, then when I came back, Tim mussed me.  I had to take another.”

      He chuckled, but said nothing.

      “We’re going out tomorrow night.  I have a few friends in my unit who are free. Want to double?”

      “No thanks,” he said mildly.

      “It’s going to be weird having clothes on around him.  It’s kinda fun for me when he stares at my tits while we’re talking.  It makes me feel wanted and very sexy.”

      “You’ll get used to it.”

      “Trust me, I can get used to feeling sexy all the time,” she said with a throaty chuckle.

      “That’s not what I meant.”

      “I know what you meant,” she laughed.  “So, what do you need me to do to get the Marines?”

      “You’ll find out.”  He paused a moment.  “What makes Tim so much different?”

      “Faey men are always so standoffish,” she complained.  “They make you bend over backwards to get a date with them, then they never tell you where you stand.  They’re always hinting, teasing, leading you on, and just when you think it’s going to get serious, they dump you like yesterday’s garbage.  Tim was honest with me right off, and he really, really wants me, likes me, despite me being Faey.  You have no idea how much I liked that, how much it made me feel wanted.”

      Strange that she’d say something like that to him, but then again, he had the feeling that she’d be much more forthcoming with him, someone she promised not to flirt with, than a Faey man, or maybe even a Faey woman.  “Don’t hurt him,” he warned.

      “I won’t,” she said in a dreamy manner.  “Trust me, Jason.  I’ll be on his arm as long as he wants me.”

      “Be careful.  He might take some heat because he’s going out with a Faey.”

      “Nobody’s going to bother him,” she promised.  “I know how to be discrete.”

      “Is he still asleep?”

      She nodded, then grinned in a dirty manner.  “I wore him out.  But he seemed to take it fairly well.”

      “Take what?”

      “Faey can make love with more than just their bodies,” she told him.  “Faey can join in telepathic communion while making love.  It makes it ten times better.  Sometimes it’s just physical, since both people have to drop their defenses, you know, let the other into their minds, so that takes some trust.  First time lovers, people just having casual sex, they don’t usually do that.  But Tim was alright with letting me join our minds.  He said it gave him a little bit of a headache, but it was the most intense sex he’d ever had,” she said with a bright smile.  “Sex is more fun when you can feel your partner’s pleasure,” she winked.

      “I’ll remember that.”

      “Well, all in all, I’m glad you collared me now,” she laughed.  “I didn’t like the cleaning, but I have a new boyfriend.  That’s a fair tradeoff.”

      “Well, I’m glad you didn’t mind it all that much.”

      “Not at all,” she said with a smile.  “Since I’m going to be going out with your friend, I hope that means we can hang out together, Jason.  I like you.”

      “I like you too, Symone, but I can’t do that,” he said seriously.  “I’m one of those people who object to your presence here.  My principles won’t let me socialize with people I consider to be the enemy.”

      She laughed.  “You’re sitting there talking to a girl who’s been with you for two days, naked as the day she was born, who just screwed your best friend until he was a quivering mass of jelly.  That’s not socializing?”

      He chuckled.  “Well, it does sort of sound like it, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I started hanging out with Faey.”

      “You object to the Imperium, or the people?”

      “The Imperium.”

      “Well, I’m not the Imperium,” she declared.  “I’m Symone Zabelle.  I’m not even Imperial.  I’m a soldier for House Tarlinne.  I serve a noble, not the Imperium.  I’m what you’d call a private soldier, or a mercenary.”

      “Does your noble obey the Empress?”

      “Of course.”

      “Then you’re a part of the Imperium,” he said bluntly.

      “Well, what would it take for you to hang out with me?” she asked.

      “For the Imperium to leave, put everything back the way it was, then come back and ask us to join,” he answered seriously.  “If they’d have asked, we might have agreed.”

      “Well, you certainly don’t want too much,” she laughed.  “Just give it time, Jason.  You’ve seen how the Imperium works.  You’re not a conquered race, you’re a part of the Imperium.  As soon as you get used to it, you’ll be just like everyone else.  You’ll be the equal of a Faey.  You’re not the only alien race that’s a part of the Imperium, you know.  The Menoda have been part of the Imperium for over two hundred years.  They have noble houses and everything.”

      He gave her a serious look.  “We’ll never be the equal of the Faey,” he said grimly.

      She bit her lip, but said nothing.

      “I like you Symone, honestly,” he told her.  “But you’re a Faey, and I’m a human.  It doesn’t matter that you might agree with me.  It doesn’t matter that I like you, or you like me.  The only thing that matters is that your Imperium conquered my world.  Did you think we’d welcome you in?  Did you think that you dissolving all our nations and moving entire populations around and putting half of us on farms wouldn’t matter to us?  Do you think that just because we can’t rebel, it means we all simply accept your order like weak-minded sheep?  Well, it doesn’t.

      “I can’t do anything about the Imperium.  I admit that, and in a way, I accept it.  But it doesn’t mean that I’ll embrace your Imperium, your customs, or even your people.  I’ll go to your school and work for you, but I’ll never enjoy it.  Whether I’m in a lab or a factory or a farm field, it doesn’t matter, because I’ll end up working for you one way or the other.  I can accept that, so I’ll find the place that makes me happiest and stay there.  I can’t fight, but I can resist in my own way, just to show you that we humans are not just conquered slaves.  And I’ll do so until the day I die.  It means absolutely nothing to the Imperium, but it means everything to me.

      “It’s not personal, Symone.  I like you, and you’re not the only Faey I like.  The little war I’m having with the Marines is based on the same issue.  The Marine likes me, and I admit, I like her.  But I won’t go out with her, and I won’t be friends with her, because she represents the government that took my life away from me and made me nothing more than a slave.  I’m sorry if that offends you or hurts your feelings, but it’s the truth.  If circumstances were different, I’d be dating her right now, and you and me would be going out, getting drunk, and having a blast every weekend.  But they’re not that way.  You’re a Faey, I’m a human, and that’s all that it takes in my mind to forever put us on opposite sides of a line.  I’m sorry.”

      She was silent a long moment.  “I can understand that,” she told him sincerely.  “And I respect it.  I’d try to sound impressive and wise, but that’s not very easy when a girl’s standing here naked.”

      He chuckled, and gave her a gentle smile.  “Your jiggling notwithstanding, I’m glad you understand.”

      “I don’t jiggle,” she said primly.  “I undulate.”

      He gave her a surprised look, then burst into laughter.

      Symone was alright.  Too bad she was Faey.

      She did her part against the two Marines that showed up at dawn, who immediately piled out of their patrol hovercar and set up an observation post out in Audobon Park, out in the open, where there was no way he could get at them without being seen.  Her mission was to distract them, and she undertook her mission with great enthusiasm.  The Army hated the Marines, the Marines hated the Navy (what the Faey called their starship military service), and the Navy hated everyone.  That was how the inter-service rivalries worked in the Faey structure.  The Marines were an elite form of combat troop who also served on starships as ship to ship combat troops and ground assault, so the Army resented them.  The Navy looked down their noses at the other two branches of the Faey military, even though they were more than happy to have Marines on board their starships as security.  Private soldiers, like Symone, who served a house instead of the Imperium directly, were considered part of the Army, but more like the old National Guard or Reserves of America’s dissolved army.  They were here because their house was the one who had been given possession of Earth.  Since the Imperium didn’t have enough space available in the Navy, Marines, and the Imperial Army for all the women who served their involuntary conscription, most of them ended up in the private armies of noble houses.

      Symone’s help proved invaluable in getting the two Marines who showed up today.  Her job was to distract, and she certainly managed to absolutely dominate their attention the instant she came out the door.  After all, the last thing those two expected to see was a naked Faey women trudging out the front door of the dorm.  She spotted them quickly and crossed the street, pulling the dog collar off her neck as she came out onto the grass lawn of the park.  She reached them and started chattering at them quickly, talking fast, spinning quite the tale about how her squad lost a bet with Jason, and she ended up in a dog collar as a result.  She asked them for some clothes or a ride back to her barracks, and they agreed.  She let them go first, towards the car, and she lightly placed two tiny devices on the backs of their armor that had been hidden in the palms of her hands.  She gave him a thumbs-up as they took her to his car, then got in it with them and was hurried away.

      Mission accomplished.

      He reached into his pocket and pressed a little red button on his remote, put it back in his pocket, then went to school.

      Those two Marines discovered later, after dropping Symone off at her barracks, that whenever they drove towards the campus, they had sudden fits of terrible itching all over their entire bodies.  The closer they got to the campus, the worse it became.  Zora and Mil couldn’t understand what was happening, but when they realized that retreating made the insane itching ease, they both realized that somehow, some way, Jason had gotten them.  Circling the campus proved that it was the campus that was at the center of this strange effect, and the itching started when they got within about a human mile of it.  It started off very mild, almost kind of nice, like little feathers ghosting over their bodies, but it was all over their entire bodies, and it got worse and worse the closer they approached the campus.

      They parked the hovercar about at the edge of this effect and looked at each other.  “He got us!” Zora said, then she laughed.  “How did he do it?  What did he do?”

      “I don’t know—hey!” Min said.  “That regular was the only one who got close to us!  Do you think she was in on it?”

      “It’s possible, but how could she do anything?  She was naked, and wasn’t carrying anything.”

      “Unless she distracted us while Jason somehow did something,” Min grunted.  “Myri said that you can’t sense him at all, that he can sneak up on just about anyone.  Did you see him?”

      “No, did you?”

      “No.”

      They looked at each other, then burst into laughter.  “Should we go pay a little visit to that regular?” Min asked.

      “Nah, she was just a part of the game,” Zora replied.  “Besides, after being Jason’s pet for a couple of days, I think she suffered enough, don’t you?”

      Jason enjoyed his Monday in peace, but Tuesday morning, at four a.m. sharp, he was awakened by a knock on the door.  He blearily opened it—he got up at five every morning, so this was a little early for him—and found himself staring at a tall, regal-looking Faey with green hair.  Emerald green.  He had never seen that color hair on a Faey before.  Despite it being green, she wore it in the short, comb-over style that many Marines favored, and it was strangely pretty with her blue skin.  She was narrow-faced, almost foxlike in appearance, with large eyes, a long nose, and a narrow, sharp face that looked predatory.  She was rather handsome, and it was apparent that she was older than the other Faey who had tasted defeat at his hands in the days past.  Instead of armor, she wore a dark blue uniform of sorts, with sleek dark blue pants with a red sash, and a sharply pressed blue jacket that had silver buttons along its front.  She had little silver triangles on her lapels, a little starburst design insignia pinned to her left epaulet, and a gold woven rope that was attached to her right, running under her arm.

      “I am Lieutenant Lana,” she announced as if that meant everything in the world.  “And these are yours.”

      She held out his two little sub-sonic induction devices, which had used extreme high-frequency sound to irritate the skin of the two Faey from yesterday.  Their armor conducted the subsonic waves, acting like amplifiers, and they were set to get stronger and stronger the closer they came to his remote.

      “Thanks.  They took me hours to build.  I don’t want to lose them,” he said with a roguish smile as he accepted the two button-sized devices, painted the same hue of black as a Marine’s armor.  “How long did it take them to find them?”

      “Seven hours,” she answered honestly.  “We had to use a scanner to find them.  They were very devious.”

      “Thank you,” he said with a nod.  “So, you’re number six,” he said as he turned and walked from the door, leaving it open.  “At least you’re civil enough to come and introduce yourself.  ‘Hello, I’m Lieutenant Lana, and I’ll be your opposition this morning’,” he said in a voice that a waiter might use to introduce himself.

      She chuckled.  “I’m not here as the opponent.  I’m here as the mediator,” she told him.  “I’m here to put an end to this little war, Jason.  Before I leave, we’ll have an agreement.”

      “What makes you think I’m going to quit?” he asked.  “I’m winning.”

      “Because I have direct orders from my battalion commander to end it,” she told him with steady eyes.  “We all thought it was funny for the first few days, but it’s starting to foment discord between the Corps and the Army regulars, as their little visit to you on Saturday probably proves to you.”

      He nodded.

      “I’m here to head things off before they get ugly.  For you and Jyslin, and also for the Army and the Corps.  So, before I leave here, we’ll have an agreement on the table, and one both sides will agree to honor.  There’s no way you’ll get out of the date, so be prepared to stipulate that condition right now.  But, given how badly you thrashed my Marines, I’m sure you can drag some conditions out of me that will suit you and make them very annoyed,” she winked.

      “Why help me like that?  Aren’t you supposed to be on their side?”

      “Because I believe you deserve it,” she said.  “After all, you’ve stymied my squad for six days now, and that’s no mean feat.  My unit is good.  Very good.  But they’ve met their match in you so far.  You are winning, Jason, and because of that, you should get the lion’s share in the peace agreement.  You will have to concede the main point, but everything else is up for negotiation, and the current conditions favor a strong lean towards your interests.”

      “Well, I appreciate the praise.”

      “It’s more than that,” she said, pointing at the subsonic inducers he set on the desk.  “Those little devices were devious, Jason, and it’s something I’ve never seen before.  I had a tech scan them yesterday, and she thinks that they have some potential uses in military or civilian applications.  She was impressed by the complexity of them, and she didn’t believe me when I told her that a second-semester tech student built them.”

      He wasn’t quite happy about that.  He didn’t build those inducers to be used in war.  They were built as a prank to best a pair of Marines, that’s all.

      “Don’t worry, I had their design patented,” she told him.  “In your name.  You invented them, after all.  I also submitted the design to the Ministry of Technology.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “That means that if the Imperium uses the idea, you get paid for it,” she answered.  “And the submission will get you noticed, Jason.  You need that.  The inducers are just one of three things I’ve never seen before.  I’ve never seen that chemical you sprayed one Sheleese and Ilia that destroyed their armor without hurting them.  I’ve also never seen anyone use a plasma magnet the way you did, with a magnetic field density sensor on it to control its magnetic force to make the hovercar hang in midair the way it did.  Those are brilliant inventions, Jason.  Just brilliant, and it makes it even more impressive when you realize that they’re coming from a second-year tech student with absolutely no background knowledge of Faey technology.  To us, it’s like a primitive caveman stumbling on a pile of tools and material and using them to build a PPG.  If you can attract the attention of the Ministry, there’s a good chance you can get into either black ops or research.  That’s where anyone in school wants to end up.”

      He gave her a long, steady look.  “Why are you helping me?”

      “Because I believe in helping people discover their potential,” she answered.  “It’s my duty as an officer.  I think you have what it takes to be in research, and I’ll do what I can to get you there.”

      He was quiet a long moment, not sure what to say.

      “Alright, so let’s agree right here and now that there’s no way you can avoid going out with Jyslin.  That’s an absolute.”

      “That’s an admission of defeat,” Jason told her.  “That’s what all of this is about.”

      “You’re going to lose this eventually, Jason,” she told him.  “You’d lose tomorrow, I guarantee it.  After you get out of school, Jyslin is planning to arrest you and throw you in a cell full of hand-picked cellmates, and keep you there until you admit defeat or she has to let you go in the morning.  Then she was going to arrest you again that afternoon, and again, and again, until you gave up.”

      Jason’s eyes hardened.  “I thought she was better than that,” he growled.

      “They’re not criminals,” she told him with a grin.  “She was going to put you in a cell with a pack of giruzi.”  Giruzi were massive canines that were indigenous to one of the worlds the Faey owned, which looked like black-pelted dogs who were five feet tall at the shoulder.  Their eyes glowed red from some kind of bioluminescent reaction, and they had the capability to administer powerful electric shocks.  They had bio-electro organs much akin to the shock glands of an electric eel, but they were much more powerful.  A giruzi could unleash a blast of what looked like lightning nearly a hundred feet through open air.  Giruzi used them to hunt prey, one of the most effective hunting evolutionary developments he’d ever seen.  He’d seen them a few times, because sometimes the Marines used them for crowd control, having trained them to use their shocks to stun instead of kill.  Humans might not be too motivated to disperse when faced with a few Faey in armor, but they scattered when a couple of giruzi were brought in to motivate them to be somewhere else.

      Jason frowned, then he chuckled ruefully.  “That’s clever, but it would have backfired.  I’m not afraid of giruzi.”

      “You would be if there’s someone giving them orders to scare you,” she told him with a wink.  “Wouldn’t you prefer losing with dignity, or with an animal that weighs twice what you do chewing your clothes off?”

      “It’ll be on her when my grades go down because I can’t study,” he shrugged.

      “I know, and that’s the other reason why I’ve been ordered to put an end to this,” she said earnestly.  “It’s going to do you permanent harm if we let this go on any longer.  This academy is too demanding for you to be distracted for an extended period of time like this.”

      “I am not going out with Jyslin,” he said adamantly.

      “You will,” she said sternly.  “What we’re here to negotiate is what happens during the date,” she smiled.  “And the possibility of dates taking place after the first.”

      He shouted, he argued, he even threatened, but Lana was absolutely unflappable.  She talked him down from his highly confrontational stance, got him to talk.  She met his posturing with calm logic, talking him down, talking him down, being utterly reasonable at all times.

      She made him see two glaring facts.  First, Jyslin was not going to stop until she won.  She would be an eternal thorn in his side.  And second, that an escalation of the war was going to do real harm to him, and possibly both of them.  Where Jyslin and the other Marines failed, Lana succeeded by making him see reason, and that reasoning was that he should try to get what he could out of a bad situation.

      So, they sat down in the common room and hammered out an agreement.  Jason would go out on one date with Jyslin.  That date would entail exactly one dinner at Copeland’s (Jyslin pays), going to the opera (Jyslin pays), and a nightcap visit to a small bar or restaurant of Jason’s choosing after the opera (Jyslin pays).  After that, Jason had the option to have her take him home, or he could decide to stay out with her and do whatever they pleased.  That was it.  During this date, Jason had to behave in a courteous manner and not cause trouble, and Jyslin would be required to treat him with respect and not grind the fact that she was getting her date in his nose.

      After the date, it was agreed upon that no matter what, Jyslin would not attempt to force him to do anything he did not want to the way she had before.  She could annoy him, harass him, harangue him all she wanted, but she had to do it herself.  She couldn’t bring the squad in on it, and she was absolutely forbidden from interfering with his schoolwork.  Lana made that abundantly clear to him, and it hit him as rather important.  She’d said that some of his little tricks had attracted attention, and now she comes in and admits that someone higher up ordered her to put a stop to it.

      He wondered how high up that order came from.

      “Are we agreed, then?” Lana asked in a reasonable tone, extending her hand across the table in the common room, which was filled with two couches and three large tables were students could sit and study, or watch the large flat-panel plasma screen TV hanging on the wall.

      “I’m not too happy about this, but if it’ll get Jyslin off my back, I’ll agree to it,” he said after a moment.

      “Then I think we have a deal,” she said.  He took her delicate hand and shook it after a moment, sealing the bargain.

      It was the first time that a date had been negotiated at the conference table.  It was also the first date ever officially condoned and ordered to take place by the Imperial Marine Corps.

      And it would take place on Friday.

To:   Title ToC 2 4

Chapter 3

            Raista, 16 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox calendar;

            Wednesday, 21 May 2007, Native regional reckoning

            New Orleans, Gamia Province, American sector

      Symone was absolutely outrageous.

      That was the entire problem he had with her, because she was just so damn likable.

      It was both a part of her quirky charm and the manner in which she defused any kind of possible retaliation against Tim for him going out with a Faey.  She was so bubbly and energetic, and when she was in public, she acted like an absolute airhead.  She gave Tim vapid, adoring stares, and she actually debased herself a little bit by acting with a kind of effervescent silliness when she was around him which made everyone comfortable with her, whether they liked Faey or not.  She was riotously funny, charmingly silly, deceptively vapid, and cunningly adorable.

      She was absolutely impossible not to like.

      The students reacted to her presence surprisingly well, Jason had to admit.  She made it very clear from the outset that she was dating Tim—her big and hunky stud, as she called him—and the way she fawned all over him defused any kind of animosity that humans might have for her.  She acted like a lovestruck ditz, and the students considered her to be harmless.  In private, though, she showed both him and Tim that she was a very smart young lady, and that her affection for Tim was quite sincere.

      In the face of Symone, his personal intent to not socialize with Faey was sorely put to the test.

      She was just so fun.  Tim managed to drag him with them after school on Monday night to go down to the quarter for some drinks, and it was just a matter of minutes before Symone had managed to insinuate herself right into their friendship.  She was a fearless woman with a wicked sense of humor, and she was very funny when she got drunk.  She’d shocked Patty O’s at first, since it was the first time they’d ever seen a Faey out of armor, and one that had come in to drink, no less, but Symone had the entire piano bar eating out of her hand after about half an hour.  She bantered with the waitress, she made jokes with the other patrons, and after they’d called Jason up to have him play the piano, she jumped up on the stage and sang for the spectators.  Symone had a lovely voice, and she was surprisingly familiar with human songs.

      By nine o’clock, curfew, she was roaring drunk, hanging on both of them as they caught a streetcar back to the dorm, and Jason had to keep reminding himself that she was a Faey, because she was a very funny drunk.

      Last night, instead of going out and getting drunk, Tim brought her along as they studied in the common room.  She showed no signs of her indisposition the night before, spending the time reading an old human romance novel.  Jason was a bit surprised she could read English.  After they got ready for their calculus test, she convinced them to bring in a DVD player and show her favorite human movie on the big TV in the common room, Braveheart.

      “That movie’s like ten years old,” Tim told her in surprise.  “How did you find out about it?”

      “I saw a commercial with that lead actor, a clip from the movie, and I had to check it out.  Men in skirts always get my attention,” she winked.

      “It’s called a kilt or a plaid, not a skirt,” Jason told her absently.

      “So that’s where the name you students gave the lab building came from.”

      “Yah,” Tim told her.

      “That Mal Gobson is cute.”

      “Mel Gibson.”

      “Whatever.  Who cares about him now that I got my Tim-Tim?” she said, leaning over the table and giving him a passionate kiss.

      “Tim-Tim?” Jason asked mildly, giving him a sly smile.

      His expression was a bit pained.  “So she has a pet name for me.”

      “Riiight,” he drawled, glancing up from his panel.

      “Don’t make me come over there,” he said with an evil smile.

      “Bring a spatula,” Jason remarked absently.  “You’ll need it to peel yourself off the floor.”

      “Talk Faey,” Symone objected.  “I’m not that good with English, and you need the practice, Tim.  What is a spatula?”

      Tim explained it to her, which made her laugh.  “I remember that fight you had with my squad, Jason.  You’re teaching Tim how to do that?”

      “Well, he might be able to do that in a couple of years,” Jason told her.  “He just started learning.”

      “Where did you learn it?”

      “Well, when I was a kid, my father was stationed in Japan,” he answered.  “When he was there, he got totally fascinated with martial arts.  Unarmed combat,” he explained.  “He used it to keep in shape, because pilots have to be in very good shape to handle the physical stresses of being a fighter pilot.”

      “My sister is in the pilot program,” she nodded.  “Her letters say she was shocked at how much they have to work out.

      “What does she fly?” Tim asked.

      “She flies exomechs,” she answered him.  “Those machines that looked like robots.  Pilots have to fly exomechs for a year or so before they get rated for flying fighters.”

      “I’ve never seen one,” Tim told her.

      With a few keystrokes on his panel’s holographic keyboard, he brought up a good picture of one, then turned the panel around so he could see it.  “Exomech,” Jason told him.  Exomechs were large robotic fighting vehicles, about twelve feet tall, that moved just like a human or a Faey.  He’d read about them on CivNet.  They didn’t really use them here because they didn’t really need to, but he was sure they had some garrisoned somewhere on the planet, or in the starship that was parked in orbit over the planet to provide assistance, in case of some catastrophic accident or major insurrection.  The information he’d gotten on them was surprisingly detailed.  Faey had yet to develop a technology that allowed machines to interface with their telepathic powers, so all their devices were manually controlled.  An exomech would certainly test a pilot’s ability to handle multiple controls simultaneously.  The arms were controlled with braces that attached to the pilot’s arms, and the legs and the exomech’s ability to walk or run were controlled braces that attached to the feet, and a pair of pedals on the floor.  A combination of foot shifts and pushing the pedals, translated by the onboard computer, would give the exomech an utterly humanoid manner of moving.  They were armed with very powerful weapons called MPACs, Metaphased Plasma Auto Cannons, a much more powerful version of the plasma rifles and pistols the Faey employed, which were housed in the forearms of the units.  Exomechs were battlefield weapons, the ultimate expression of the powered personal combat armor Faey soldiers wore into combat, but unlike that powered armor, exomechs were equipped with spatial drives that allowed them to fly.  The Faey’s personal powered armor had magnetic induction units that let it ride on a planet’s magnetic field.  That allowed them to skim along the surface of the ground with extreme speed, and reach an altitude of nearly thirty meters.

      “Holy shit,” Tim breathed, staring at the picture.

      “You keep thinking that what you see the Faey using here is all they have,” Jason told him seriously.  “What they use here is hundred year old surplus junk that they probably had to dust off.”

      Symone nodded.  “Sure enough.  The only current tech they let us use around here are our weapons, well, and the hovercars.  They’re pretty standard just about anywhere in the Imperium.  They converted all our hot plasma and ion guns to metaphased twenty years ago.”

      “Why don’t they give you the good stuff?”

      “They don’t need to,” Symone told him honestly.  “Our hundred-year old armor can stop the most powerful archaic powder gun you have.  You can’t organize because you have no defense against our telepathy, so that old armor is all we need.”  She snorted.  “My House is cheap anyway,” she complained.  “We still have Polymerized Camonite armor when the Imperials have Neutronium.  Trillane worries more about its purse than it does its defense,” she said, then she made a face.  “Why are we sitting here talking about this shit?  Let’s watch the movie!”

      It was hard to say no to Symone, over just about anything.  So, their studying turned into an extended screening of Braveheart, along with nearly the entire second and third floors of the dorm.  Symone’s bubbly, infectious nature had taken hold of everyone watching the movie, and got them all into it much more than they would have been had they been watching it alone.  She had the entire room cheering during the battle scenes.

      But she wasn’t a friend.  And Jason had to keep telling himself that about every ten minutes.

      He caught her again in the morning, as she opened his door without knocking as he sat on his bed and prepared for the coming day with his thirty minutes of meditation, which preceded his morning workout.  It didn’t go very well, for he had another one of those annoying headaches that he’d been suffering from for the last couple of months.  They were never too severe, a dull, aching throb inside his head that tended to come and go over the course of about an hour.  He’d woke up with it, and it was just starting to ease.  But it wasn’t enough to prevent him from meditating; in fact, it was something of an exercise to ignore the pain and continue with his meditation despite it.

      “Hello?  Jason, are you in here—oh,” she said in surprise, putting a hand to her chest when she saw him sitting on the bed.

      “What?” he asked, his eyes opening and regarding her.  She was wearing one of Tim’s football jersey shirts, which hung down to her thighs.  “You slept here last night?”

      “I’m trying to get Tim to move in with me.”

      “You move fast.”

      “I know it’s only been a few days, but I think I love him,” she admitted, scratching her backside absently.  “When he let me join our minds, what I found inside him was beautiful.  I’m not letting him get away from me.  He’s too good a catch.”

      “I can’t argue there.”

      “What were you doing?” she asked.  “I couldn’t even sense you in here.  It was like you turned off your brain.”

      “Meditating,” he answered.  “A mental exercise that helps sharpen the mind.”

      “It was creepy,” she told him.  “I usually get a sense of something from you, even if I can’t hear your thoughts.  But it was like your brain wasn’t there.”

      “I know.  I’ve learned that meditation keeps Faey from finding me with their power.  I’ve had occasion to hide from them here lately.”

      “Heh,” she mused.  “How do you do that, anyway?  Hide your thoughts from me.  I’ve never come across a human that can do that.  It made me almost itch to try to probe you several times when you had me in that collar, but you said no using my talent, and I wasn’t going to cheat.”

      “It’s a mental exercise,” he answered.  “A false front that hides my thoughts.  I’ve had a lot of practice perfecting it,” he growled.  “Faey seem to go nuts that they can’t hear my thoughts, and they always probe me.  I’ve even learned what it feels like when they’re doing it.”

      “You can feel it?” she asked in surprise.

      He nodded.

      “Damn,” she grunted.  “I didn’t think that was possible.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “You shouldn’t be able to feel us using our talent.  No other humans do.”

      “They probably don’t have the same training I do,” he answered.  “Part of what I learned from my father involves knowing your own mind.  Since what Faey do is alien, something not part of my mind, I can sense it when they do it to me.”

      “Huh.  Well, wonders never cease,” she said.  “What time is it?”

      “Around five thirty.”

      “Fuck,” she grunted sourly.  “I have to be at the barracks by six.  I need to get dressed and get my ass over there before I get busted.”

      “You’re not supposed to be here?”

      “They don’t care where I am as long as I show up for duty on time,” she told him.  “I’ve got the campus in my duty rotation today, so I’ll try to show up for lunch with you guys.  But we’re not friends,” she said with a sly smile and a wink.  “I’m going to be there to see Tim.  If you’re there, well, I’ll just have to be nice to you.  Semantics, you know.  Sophistry.  I don’t want to ruin your hypocrisy.”

      Jason chuckled ruefully. “Bitch,” he accused.

      She winked again.  “The bitchiest of all bitches,” she said shamelessly.  “Call me the Bitch Queen.  And be sure to bow.  The Bitch Queen gets bitchy when she doesn’t get the respect she’s due.”

      “Work.  Go,” he commanded.

      “Yes, Master,” she said breathlessly.  She twirled towards the door, then pulled up her shirt to expose her bare buttocks, then slapped herself a couple of times on that rather attractive posterior in taunting reply to his command, then hurried out the door.

      He peeked out of the room and saw her getting ready to go up the stairs.  “Someday you’re going to come into my room and manage to get out without showing me your ass,” he called to her, loud enough to wake up a few people on his floor.

      “Consider yourself lucky,” she shouted in reply.  “I don’t show my ass to just any guy, you know!”

      Several bleary heads poked out of opening doors as Jason chuckled.  “What the hell are you shouting for at five thirty in the fucking morning?” the girl who lived in the room beside him asked crossly.  Her name was Betty, and he didn’t really like her all that much.  She was a primadonna.

      “Symone,” he said, and that was all the explanation he needed.

      She looked towards the stairwell at the end of the hall, then laughed.  “Oh.  Nevermind, then,” she said, then closed her door.

      Oh, yes, the whole dorm was familiar with Symone.  In a way, she was the dorm mascot now.

      The calculus test was surprisingly difficult, but he was pretty sure he managed to pass it with a high mark.  There was a little excitement in the lab, when a PPG suffered a fatal breakdown and ejected its core, which caused the PPG’s case to overheat and catch fire.  Ailan had to douse the fire with an extinguisher, showing a calm reaction to an event that caused some of the students to scream and back away.

      After lab was over, Ailan called him down to the table before he could leave.  “I got a message from the Ministry, and they sent me the design specs for an ultrasonic device that they say you built,” he said.

      “She really did it,” Jason said in surprise.

      “What?”

      “Lana, she said she took scans of something I built to piss off the Marines and sent it to the Ministry of Technology.  I didn’t think anything of it.”

      “Can I see this device you built?” he asked.  “Exactly how does it work?”

      “It’s nothing but a supersonic emitter,” he told him, digging into his pack, for they were still inside it.  “I read about the metal the Faey use in their armor and found out it has an acoustic signature, so I built an emitter that used the armor as a speaker.  I hooked it to a proximity sensor so the sound got stronger they closer they got to me.”  He handed the tiny device to Ailan.

      Ailan was quiet a moment, turning the little black disc over in his supple, long-fingered hand, then he laughed.  “It would feel like ants crawling all over them,” he realized, then he grinned.  “That’s devious!”

      “Lana thought so,” Jason chuckled.

      “May I keep this for a few days?”

      “Sure,” he agreed.

      “I think I need to find more challenging projects for you, if you can build something this small,” he said with a sly smile.

      “The first thing the professor I had in Boston taught us was how to burn circuits in laminar board in Control Systems I,” he answered, referring to the classes that taught moleculartronic theory and application.  “She started with boardwork and worked up.  Tim’s in your class, and from what he told me, you seem to start with major components and work down.”

      “She taught you boardwork right off?” he asked in surprise.

      He nodded.  “She had a class of people who were in engineering before the subjugation,” he explained.  “Since we all had experience with electronic circuitry, she started us off on moleculartronic circuitry.  She taught us so much that I tested out of Control II.  It worked pretty well, actually.  We all learned about trinary a lot faster since we started with how it operated on the board.”

      Moleculartronic technology was the technology they used for their computers and other sophisticated devices.  It used polarity-phased plasma as a power source, like electricity, and behaved remarkably like electronics did.  Molecuartronic circuits were built on boards of laminated titanium, and the alignment of the molucular structure of the board was what channeled plasma flow to the components which were annealed to it.  Moleculartronic components were circuits built of silicon, germanium, titanium, and certain alloys of light metals and annealed to the board, again using the alignment of the molecular structure of the crystallized silicon and crystallized metals to serve as the digital circuit.  It was sort of digital, actually, since they didn’t use “on or off” binary logic like human electronic computers did.  They had a trinary logic system, composed of positive, neutral, and negative, the three states in which a molecule could be aligned.  Memory was a simple matter of setting aside a section of a chip for storing data, or chips that served solely as memory storage devices, where data existed within the molecular alignment of the matter of the device itself.  Every single molecule in the internal structure of a moleculartronic component was a part of the chip’s processing power or memory.  With moleculartronics, a single chip had more processing power than a mainframe.  A single moleculartronic circuit board had the power of a supercomputer.  Jason’s panel, a moleculartronic device, was like carrying around ten Cray supercomputers, and his panel was considered small.  The microprocessor in the device in Ailan’s hand had more computing power than the most sophisticated desktop personal computer any human ever built.

      “I wondered why you weren’t in a logic class this semester,” he chuckled.  “They don’t teach Control III in the spring, so you had no place to go.”

      He nodded.

      “Oh, I meant to ask, how did you do that melting the armor trick?” he asked.

      “That was easy,” he said with a scoff.  “I had chemistry last sememster, Professor.  Vandirium armor reacts with tetrasodium bisulfate and recombines to form gaseous sodium bivandirium sulfate and titanium bisodium oxide.  I just made up a solution mixed in with a little something to make it revert to gas when it came into contact with nitrogen, and put it in a jar.”

      Ailan laughed.  “How did you figure that out?”

      “I didn’t.  My chemistry teacher last semester did that as an experiment.  I just remembered how he did it, that’s all.”

      Ailan gave him a sly look, then chuckled.  “I heard that you made peace with the Marines.  I heard that their post commandant personally ordered arbitration.  You sorta won.”

      “Geez, where do you get all this, Professor?” he asked in surprise.

      “My wife is a major in the Marines,” he revealed.  “She works in the commandant’s office.  From what I heard, Monday, after she heard about that Army unit that tried to put you in that dog collar, the order came down right of the commandant’s office that it stops.  They were going to send in the company commander, but the squad Lieutenant requested permission to do the negotiating.”

      He grunted.  “Well, I had to give in on the date, but I got a guarantee that it stops afterward,” he said.  “I can live with that.”

      “What stops?  You shouldn’t close your mind on the idea of a Faey girlfriend, Jason.  Our races are so similar we’re virtually identical.  We’re not alien aliens,” he said with a sly wink.

      “You’re right,” Jason said evenly, hoisting his pack over his shoulder.  “You’re just conquerors.”

      Ailan said no more.  There was nothing that he could say to that, and allowed Jason to leave unchallenged.

      Despite his adamant stance that he did not socialize with Faey, he ended up with Tim and Symone after his martial arts class.  They ate pizza and studied, which was to say Tim and Jason studied while Symone read another human romance novel.  After that, Tim taught Symone how to play ping-ping in the rec room on the first floor as Jason got a little work done.  Symone was very agile and had good hand-eye coordination, so she quickly became a viable threat to Tim’s ping-pong supremacy.

      “This is bullshit,” Tim laughed after she took a five point lead on him.  “You just learned how to play!”

      “Take your beating like a woman,” she said tauntingly.  “Your serve.”

      “Well, I heard about it, but I had to come see for myself,” Jyslin called from the doorway.  She filed into the room, wearing the tank top and shorts she wore to work out, both black.  “Do you have something nice picked out for Friday, Jason?” she asked with a sultry smile.

      “I’ll be ready,” he said in a calm yet ominous tone.  “I hope you enjoy it.  It’ll be the first and last date we have.”

      “Oh, so this is the one that started all this,” Symone said with a laugh, putting the paddle down.

      “Who are you?” Jyslin asked in Faey.

      “I’m Tim’s babe,” she said with an outrageous grin.

      “The one in the collar,” Jyslin noted dryly.

      “Yup.  Two days hanging around Tim and Jason when you’re naked makes you want to hang around some more,” she said with a malicious grin.  “They rocked me,” she said breathlessly.

      “Symone,” Jason said sharply.

      “Hey, I’m trying to give you a reputation here,” she winked.

      “He already has one,” Jyslin told him with a grin.  “He’s that annoying human who the Marines can’t beat.”

      “We didn’t have much better luck,” Symone laughed in agreement.

      “Well, I got what I want, so I’m not going to rub it in,” she told him.

      “Enjoy it while it lasts,” he said dryly.

      “Oh, I will, believe me,” she told him.  “I got my foot in the door.  All I have to do now is convince you I’m worth hanging around.  Just like her,” he said, pointing at Symone.

      “Oh, I don’t hang out with Jason,” she said with an insincere grin.  “I hang out with Tim.  Jason just happens to be in the same room.  And he’ll stick to that story,” she added with a wink.

      “Semantics,” Jyslin snorted.  “Just admit that all Faey aren’t the Imperium, and we won’t have any trouble, Jason,” she told him.  “You don’t seem to have any problem with her.  Why do you have trouble with me?”

      “She doesn’t want to have a relationship,” he said cooly.

      “Not that I didn’t try at first,” she laughed honestly.  “Well, not a relationship, actually.  More like a wild night in bed.”

      “You never said any such thing,” he snipped in reply.

      “Would you shut up!” she said with a grin.  “I’m trying to make you look studly!”

      “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate it,” Jyslin smiled.  “He wants me to go away.”  She leaned against the doorframe and crossed her arms beneath her breasts.  “He’s not getting it, though.  Friday, he’s going out on a date with me.  One date.  He agreed to behave like a civilized person, and I agreed to be civilized.  We’re going to have a nice, civilized evening.   Dinner, the opera, and an after-opera nightcap.  Since we both agreed to be nice, it gives me one evening to convince him to go out with me again.  I think I can do it.”

      “I think you won’t,” he said cooly.

      “Oh, I think you’re wrong,” she smiled.  “She proves that your vaunted ideals aren’t as set in stone as you pretend.  You take her as an individual, not as a representative of the evil conquering race.  I’m going to prove to you that I’m interested in you.  Not your politics, not your philosophy, not your positions.  And I’m going to teach you that it’s alright to be interested in me.  Not my politics, not my philosophy, not my positions.  I want to be your friend, Jason, and to be honest, I want to be more than that.  You’re an intelligent, fascinating man.  I just have to show you that I’m an intelligent, fascinating woman under my armor.  I’m not the Imperium, Jason.  I’m Jyslin Shaddale.  Until they put the crown on my head, don’t blame me for how they do things.”

      She glanced at Symone, and Jason could feel…something, a fringe of something that passed between them.  Were they using telepathy to communicate?

      He winced slightly as a sharp pain lanced into his head.  The headaches usually didn’t come on so quickly.

      “You alright, Jayce?” Tim asked, putting down the paddle.

      “Just a headache,” he said with a negligent wave of his hand, rubbing his temple.

      “I thought I told you you should go to the doctor,” Tim told him.

      “It’s stress, Tim,” he sighed.  “I used to get them all the time when my father got sick.”

      He felt it ease into that dull ache quickly, which was much more tolerable.  “Do you need some pain killer?” Jyslin asked in concern.

      “I don’t take medicine unless I don’t have any other choice,” he replied.  “It’ll pass in a little while.  I’ll be fine.”

      “Well, alright, but if it bothers you, go to a doctor,” she told him.  “I’m going to go get my workout in.  I’ll pick you up at six on Friday, Jason.  I’ll see you then.”

      After she was gone, Jason and Tim exchanged looks.  He looked to Symone, his eyes curious.  “What was that about?”

      “She just came by to see what I was up to, that’s all,” she grinned.  “After I told her that Tim was my guy, she was alright with it.  Actually, she prefers it.”

      “Why?”

      “She said that any friend of Jason deserves a Faey for a girlfriend,” she winked, then she laughed delightedly.

      “I never heard anything,” Tim protested.

      Symone tapped her head meaningfully.

      “Oh.  I meant to ask you something, Symone,” he prompted.

      “What?”

      “Well, why do your people even speak?” he asked curiously.  “You talk to my mind all the time.  Why don’t all Faey just do that?”

      “Well, first off, because thinking requires a language,” she said, sitting on the ping-pong table.  “Think about it.  If we didn’t have a language, how would we form thoughts?  Pictures?”

      “I never thought of that,” Tim admitted.

      “I know.  It’s something of an abstract concept, isn’t it?” she winked.  “Second, the talent doesn’t start to show up and express itself until around puberty.  We have to teach our children to speak to communicate with us, and for many, it’s a habit that sticks.  Faey talk about as often as they send, but it depends on the Faey.  Some Faey almost never speak.  Some Faey almost never send.  It’s entirely personal.”  She held her hand out before her.  “When I’m with other Faey, I tend to speak more than send, but that’s because I’m not as strong as most other women.  I guess I hide my inadequacy by not making it common knowledge.  But sometimes we do have to speak,” she explained.  “Most Faey women have a telapathic range of about three human miles, on the average.  Most men have a range of about a mile and a half.  I’m not very strong at all,” she admitted.  “Barely stronger than the average man.  I have a range of about two miles.  The strongest have a range of like ten miles.  Some of the strongest men are stronger than I am,” she admitted candidly.  “So, if we want to communicate outside our range, we have to use a communicator.  Since no machine can receive and decipher telepathy, that means we have to use our voices.  Even though we can send, and it is more efficient, we still have a need for our voices and our language.”

      “Wow, I didn’t know that.”

      “Well, now you do,” she smiled.  “But that info isn’t free, honey.  I demand payment.”

      “What?” he asked in surprise.

      She pointed to the floor immediately in front of her.  “Come here and curl my toes,” she told him with a mischievous leer.

      “Oh.  I think I can manage that,” he grinned, then came around the table and tendered up her payment.

      Jason ignored them as they started getting rather involved in their kissing, worrying a little about the upcoming date.  He was worried more about how well he would hold onto his ideals than what kind of trouble Jyslin might give him.  She was too right, and she kept grinding it into him that she was not the Imperium, that she was not directly responsible for his position.  If anything, she was in the same fix as he, for she was stuck in a job she did not want, trying to get where she wanted to go.  The commoner Faey were just as much slaves and thralls to the Empress as the humans; only the nobles were truly free.  And Symone was going to make it even murkier for him.  He did like Symone, and her constant presence these last few days had indeed kind of numbed him to the fact that she was Faey.  Then again, she was just so damned likable that he really didn’t have much of a defense against her.  Nobody did.  Despite the abject hatred that many humans had for Faey, even on campus, none of them hated Symone.

      “Hands out of her pants in the common room,” Jason said without looking up.  He didn’t have to look up to know what that change in the tone of her cooing hum meant.

      “Yes, daddy,” Symone taunted.  “Let’s go up to our room, Tim-Tim,” she purred.  “I’m feeling a tad hot and bothered.”

      “How can I say no to the world’s most beautiful woman?” he returned.

      “Flatterer.  Say it again.”

      Jason tuned them out, and went back to studying.

      Friday.

      It was the day, the day of the date.  But that was going to take place at the end of the day.  The problem was, the day got off to a very weird start that, in Jason’s mind, was something of a bad omen.

      Simply put, when he woke up, he had a message waiting in his panel, sent during the night.  It was from the Ministry of Technology itself, and it reported, in flowery language, that the Empire had bought out his patent for his sonic inducer.

      Not taken, not assumed control over…bought.

      Since it was considered a low-priority technology, the message read, considered for possibilities in hypersonic short-range communications, the rights were purchased for a very modest sum.

      Seventy five thousand credits.

      Seventy five thousand credits.

      For the Ministry of Technology, that was considered a modest sum.

      For Jason, it was an absolutely bloody fucking fortune.

      With that much money, he could buy a hovercar.  Hell, he could buy an older model, used airskimmer, a civilian craft akin to a Cessna.  He could buy a truckload of components and toys and set up a killer workshop, or he could even buy a small house in the city.  It was a monstrous amount of money for someone who received a weekly stipend of fifty credits. A credit’s value was different than the old, unused dollar; a credit was worth about a dollar and a half.  In old American money, it was a sum of nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

      That threw off his entire day, even more so than the worry about the impending date did.  That date was common knowledge all over the campus, even if the circumstances of it were not.  Some thought Jason had finally caved in to the Faey, but not many actually blamed him.  After all, it really was only a matter of time before they finally forced him to obey.  His weeklong battle with the Marines was entertaining, it gave the humans a little hope and some pride in themselves again, and everyone knew that it eventually would end.  He had no concentration in his classes, and he got another one of those stupid headaches during lunch, and it didn’t go away for the rest of his time at school.  Students gave him words of encouragement as they passed, and a surprisingly large concentration of Army regulars and black-armored Marines who were patrolling the campus gave him teasing smiles and offered to make bets on just how thoroughly Jyslin would own him by midnight.

      He was totally disgusted by the end of his last class, which Professor Tia mercifully allowed him to leave from early.  They were practicing Faey pronunciation, and since he sounded virtually fluent, she decided that he didn’t need to hang around and be bored.  He went home and paced nervously in his tiny dorm, then went down to the room’s bathroom and took a shower.  The shower eased the headache quite a bit, and he felt less surly by the time he went back to his room and did some of his homework, still scattered by both the doom of the impending date and the staggering sum of money that was now residing in the brand new account that had been made for him at the Imperial Bank.  The passcodes for the account had been sent to his panel while he was at school, and now he had access to that money.  All it took was a thumbprint at any shop or store, or he could visit a branch bank and withdraw hard currency, which for Faey were small plastic coins encoded with their value.

      He had no idea what to do with that money.  He wasn’t even sure he felt right in spending any of it.  It was money paid to him by the Imperium.  Not only had he not done anything to kick them off Earth, now they were paying him for things that he invented.  He had become a part of the system, even if it was absolutley unintentional, the fault of that meddling Lieutenant Lana.

      But, on the other hand, since it was absolutely unintentional, that meant that the money was a windfall, not pay.  He didn’t submit the inducer.  He didn’t send it off to the Ministry.  Lana did.  That they had paid to buy the rights to the design meant that it was an occasion of good fortune, not a conscious selling out to the Faey.  In that respect, he did have a right to use that money without feeling guiltly about it.

      Not that he really knew what to do with it.

      He glanced at the clock and cursed.  Where was the time going?  It was five o’clock, and Jyslin would be there in an hour.  He did not want to go, but he made a deal, gave his word, and Jason did not break his word.  He changed into the only nice clothes he had, a white long-sleeve dress shirt, the sleeves of which he rolled up past his elbows, since he detested the feel of sleeves on his forearms, a pair of black slacks, and a pair of very old black loafers.  A gray tie with geometric designs done in red and white was around his neck, loosened around the undone top button of the shirt, and over that went a simple black vest that was left unbuttoned.

      He sat back down again and surfed around on CivNet on his panel.  He did have something in mind for that money, and that was an airskimmer.  He didn’t know how to fly one, but he was sure he could figure it out, or pay for lessons.  As long as it was a civilian model, he had every right to buy one.  The idea of an airskimmer appealed to him for one simple reason, and that was the fact that it could fly.  His father had had a Cessna, but Jason had been forced to sell it when the parking fees became more than his part-time job when he went to school in Michigan could support.  Before that, Jason had absolutely loved that plane, and the sense of freedom that came with it.  As long as he could afford the gas, Jason could jump in his Cessna and go just about anywhere.  Before the parking fees overwhelmed him, he was quite popular with some of the other guys because they’d all pile into his plane and fly places during the weekends.  Distance made going somewhere warm and balmy out of the question—a flight to Los Angeles or Florida was a twelve hour journey—but they could go to places like Saint Louis, or Chicago, or Ottowa, somewhere other than the campus of the University of Michigan.  There was such a sense of freedom that came with knowing that, at any time, you could chuck a pack into your plane and go virtually anywhere you wanted.

      Selling that plane had been one of the low points of his life since his father died.  It had been an admission that things couldn’t be the same, a realization that he, like his father, could lose control of his life, and a loss of both a feeling of freedom and one of his father’s most prized possessions, but there had been no helping it.  He’d had a breakdown in Indiana and had to shell out nearly a thousand dollars in repairs, and that had been the death knell that had put him behind.  The bills kept mounting up on him, and he’d been forced to sell his beloved plane or avoid having it chained to the tarmac for non-payment of his parking fees down at the county airport.  If there was any satisfaction in it at all for him, he sold it to a flight school at the airport, who allowed him to borrow it from time to time without charging him for its use.  Old Sam down at the airport understood the jam he was in, and sympathized with him and the pain it caused him to have to sell it.  All he had to pay for was the fuel and the parking fees of the airport where he landed if it wasn’t that one.  They wanted him to come work for them on weekends as a flight instructor, but that required getting certifications that he didn’t have the time to get, because of the demands of school and football.

      The airskimmer wouldn’t be his dad’s old Cessna, but it would be the same thing, the sense of freedom that he’d once had, and it would make him happy.  He’d have to find out where he could keep it, and pay for the parking fees, but he figured he could make enough money between his stipend and the unofficial work he got playing piano down at Patty O’s to cover those fees.  This time, he would not lose his plane.  He’d just have to find an exceeding cheap airskimmer and put back enough money to cover the fees.  He could do some of the maintenance on it himself, since the schematics of an airskimmer were easily obtainable on CivNet, and he’d probably get a maintenance manual with the airskimmer.

      That sense of freedom would mean a great deal to him.  In this damned mouse trap he was in now, it would be one of the very few things that would make him feel free.

      Probably for the first time ever, Jyslin knocked on his door.  Somehow, he just knew it was her.  It opened without him calling, and she stepped inside.  He glanced at her, then looked back when her appearance struck him like a hammer.  She was stunning!  She wore a sleek, elegantly simple gown made of what looked like liquid gold, with threads so fine that he couldn’t see their weaving.  Each thread was burnished, and the effect was a radiant gown of a wondrous golden color that both clashed against and accented her blue skin in an amazing manner, as well as perfectly displaying her sensual, voluptuous hips, slender waist, and her full breasts.  It had two slender straps that attached to the bodice of the moderately low cut neckline and flowed over her shoulders, with a sloped hem that rose to the knee of her left leg yet dipped to the ankle of her right leg.  It didn’t sparkle in the light of his dorm room, it seemed to radiate a warm light that was like an aura that drew every eye to her, drew his eye to the fact that she was a vision of absolute, shockingly feminine beauty.  It was the first time he’d thought of her as feminine.  She was definitely a woman, but never acted feminine.  That gown made her look gorgeous.  She had her hair combed back away from her face, held by a pair of elegantly simple silver barettes over each slender, pointed ear, with a gold chain woven into her auburn hair that ran just above the hairline over her forehead.  She had on a pair of simple diamond (or some clear crystal) earrings, and a single gold chain around her neck with no amulet or pendant, an adornment of elegant simplicity that only heightened his awareness of her exceptional beauty.

      She smiled at his surprised and nearly awed gaze.  “You like?” she asked in Faey, quite demurely, turning this way and that so he could admire her from all angles.  “I bought it this morning.  It cost me a month’s pay, but it was worth it.”

      “You’re beautiful,” he said with utter honesty.  There was no way he could lie to her about that.

      She gave him a wonderful smile.  “Stand up.  Let me see.”  He did so, and she put a finger to her chin as she appraised his appearance.  “Well, you make slouchy look chic, Jason.  I like it.”

      “It’s all I have,” he admitted.

      “Well, it suits you.  The vest is definitely a pefect touch.”  She stepped up and grabbed his tie, tightening it just a little, smiling up into his blue eyes.  “I’m a little early.  I wanted to make sure you weren’t wearing a tutu or something,” she said with a wink.

      “I gave my word.”

      “I’m starting to understand how seriously you take that,” she told him.

      “A month’s pay?” he asked, finally realizing what she’d said.

      “Wasn’t it worth it?” she asked, turning around slowly for him, modelling her gown with a mysterious smile.

      “Jyslin, you shouldn’t have done that,” he said disapprovingly.  “Not for me.”

      “I say you’re worth it.  Prove me wrong,” she said challengingly.

      “You bought a dress that cost you a month’s pay for one date,” he said bluntly.

      “True.  But it was worth every credit for that look you gave me when I came in,” she smiled.  “Don’t worry about me, Jason.  I’m very tight with money, I had plenty held back.  I could afford it.”  She put her hands on his shoulders.  “Now, since you’re ready to go, we might as well get started.  I have a limousine waiting outside for us.”

      “A limo!” he protested.

      “Hush,” she said with a light, amused smile, putting two fingers over his lips.

      “But that’s too expensive!” he said loudly when she moved her hand.

      “I told you, don’t worry about the money,” she told him firmly.  “I haven’t so much as bought a new pair of shoes for a year, Jason.  I have the money.”

      “But—“

      “There is no but,” she said, silencing him again with two fingers to his lips.  “It’s my money, and I can spend it any way I please.  I wanted to look good for you, so I bought the dress.  I wanted us to not worry about driving, so I hired a limo.  Well I also wanted us to get around in style,” she added with a smile.  “I’m not trying to impress you with my vast riches,” she winked.  “I bought the dress and hired the limo because I wanted to, not to impress you.”

      “I don’t like it too much, Jyslin,” he told her honestly.  “You shouldn’t have spent so much money.  I’m not worth that much.”

      She laughed delightedly.  “Jason, hon, I don’t have enough in my bank account to cover what I think you’re worth.”

      Jason flushed slightly, but said nothing more on the subject.  There was little that he could say, or at least say without starting a fight.  He didn’t want her to spend so much on him, invest in him, because he didn’t want to pursue a relationship.  If he had his way, there would be virtually no contact between them after tonight.  If that happened, then she would have spent all that money on the dress, the limo, the dinner, the opera, all of it for nothing.  If he didn’t like Jyslin so much, maybe he would feel differently.  It would be easy to ignore the amount of money she’d shelled out if he didn’t care about how it might put her into a financial bind.

      She slid the hand on his shoulder down his arm, then took a gentle grip on the back of his hand.  “Now, since we’re both ready, why don’t we just go ahead and go on?” she asked.  “If we get to Copeland’s early, we can get our pick of tables.”

      “I, alright,” he said quietly.  He almost didn’t want to go through with this.  Not because he was worried that she was going to be a pain, he was more afraid of spending time with her and giving her that much more time and opportunity to wear down his defenses.

      She smiled slyly.  “Don’t worry about it,” she said with a wink.  “I don’t need extra time.”

      He gave her a hard, flat look.

      She put up her hands.  “I also didn’t need telepathy to see that,” she told him.  “You forget, I know you know when we’re doing that.  Do you think I’m fool enough to ruin this date by doing the one thing you can’t stand?”

      She was right, of course.  Damned Jyslin, she always seemed to be right!

      “Now, come on, Jason,” she said.  “Let’s get started.”

      He wasn’t entirely sure what to expect on this date, and he wasn’t sure about what was going to happen.  They were going to be going to a Faey opera, and that meant that the odds were that there would be many Faey there.  It said much that Jyslin was willing to bring him to a function that would be filled with her own people, where he would have the opportunity to make a fool out of her, humiliate her, in front of more than just her Marine squad.  He hoped that it wasn’t going to be too long.  He had no real interest in opera, and even less interest for a Faey opera, and he didn’t want to be bored stiff.  Before and after that, he knew, Jyslin would want to talk.  Talk over dinner, talk over the nightcap, talk in the limo.  He wasn’t quite sure what she would want to talk about, but he knew it was coming.

      And that was probably the greatest danger.  He couldn’t get too close to her, couldn’t let her get herself too close to him, or she was going to end up like another Symone, a Faey that he liked, and allowed himself to like too much.  They were Faey, they were the enemy, and he should not be socializing with the enemy.  But Symone wasn’t an enemy in his eyes anymore, he had to admit that to himself.  He had gotten to know her, and had accepted her because he felt that she was truly a friend.  She liked him, he liked her.  He could never imagine Symone on the other side of a battlefield, pointing a plasma rifle at him.  He knew that were they actually fighting each other, she would, but he just couldn’t imagine it.  Then again, he really couldn’t imagine Symone pointing a plasma rifle at anyone.  If there was ever a Faey who had been utterly wronged when they assigned jobs to Faey conscripts, it was Symone.  Symone didn’t have the temperament to be a soldier, because she would rather go out and have a beer with the enemy than try to kill him.

      The limo was a stretch one, but not too large.  Jyslin opened the door for him and gave him a sly smile, waving him in, and he couldn’t really say anything.  He didn’t want to prolong this, because he noticed that quite a few people were watching from discrete distances.  Many knew about this date, and he didn’t want to cause a scene.  He wanted to get himself, Jyslin, and the limo out of there.  She got him with him and closed the door, and the black limo pulled away from the curb.

      “So,” she said, leaning against the side of the limo and smiling at him.  “Now comes all that boring conversation.”

      It turned out to be not boring at all, which Jason both cursed and enjoyed.  He didn’t want to get to know her, but he found her to be a fascinating and engaging woman.  He found out that she was born on a Faey mining colony called Rokan IV, which was nothing but a rock orbiting a blue star.  It was enclosed in domes, and her parents were both miners.  It surprised him that Faey actually mined, but he found out from her that Faey did just about every job that humans did.  There were Faey farmers, miners, servants, factory workers, the whole gambit.  They didn’t make their conquered races do all the dirty and dangerous jobs, they did the jobs for which they were qualified.  Faey who weren’t too bright ended up in those kinds of jobs.  But her father was definitely smart, as he was one of the mine’s engineers, while her mother worked as a secretary in the office of the mining company.  She grew up in a sterile world of steel and glass, with no plants, no open air.  She stayed there until she was twelve, and then her father was transferred to an arctic planet called Novira IX.  Because of that, Jyslin now absolutely detested cold weather.  They where there until she reached the official adult age of twenty five, when she was required by Faey law to serve five years in the military.  She’d always been a very strong telepath, and since she couldn’t find any open slots in engineering school, she ended up in the Marines.

      While she grew up, she had what she called a normal childhood.  Her parents loved her, and since she was an only child, they may have spoiled her just a little bit.  She grew up with many friends, and had always been popular in school because she was funny and she was smart.  To Faey, smart kids were as popular in school as attractive humans were in human schools.  Since most Faey were handsome or pretty, physical appearance wasn’t as important to them as it was to humans.  She’d expressed her telepathic powers at a very young age, a sign of her impressive power, and that was also a reason why she was so popular in school.  Telepathic power was the basic measuring stick by which all Faey compared themselves to one another.  While the other kids were only just starting to express, she had already gained a grasp of the basics.

      Telepathy was amazing and formidable to Jason, but it was just normal to Jyslin.  They had courses in high school that taught telepathic skills like a human would have a math or chemistry class, classes that Jyslin took when she was still four years younger than most of the other people in the class.  By the time all her friends were just starting Telepathy I, she had received her certificate proclaiming her to be a competent telepath.  Telepathy was an innate power, but it didn’t come with an innate ability to use it.  There were quite a few skills that a telepath had to learn, skills to protect their own minds and deal with the constant noise of background thoughts that the non-telepathic races gave off.  They had to learn how to send their thoughts to others, or just send as they called it, which was itself an art form more than a skill.  They had to learn the basics of how to defend themselves against a telepathic attack, how to maintain a defense against unwanted intrusion while at the same time allowing others to be able to send to them, which was a delicate skill that took quite a bit of practice to learn.  They also had to learn how to attack other minds.  It seemed odd to Jason that they taught their children how to use their power as a weapon against other Faey, but then he realized that they could use those same attacking techniques against non-telepathic creatures, and they also were simply formally training them in something that they may be required to do later in life in case they ever found themselves in a fight with another Faey.  Humans brawled.  Faey battled on the mindscape of telepathic power.

      She reached her age of majority on that frozen rock, and was conscripted for her mandatory five years of military service.  She’d tried to get into engineering, since she had the grades and had made the scores on the test for it, but that was a non-combat position, and all the slots were bought by nobles and the few rich commoners for their children.  Given that she was such a strong telepath, that made her high on the list for the Marines.  They engaged in ship to ship combat, and those close quarters gave the telepathic Faey a major advantage.  They were also usually the first armed force to hit the ground, just like the American Marines had been.  First in, last out, that was their motto.  They needed powerful telepaths who could find and try to mentally dominate the initial opposition, opposition who probably had anti-telepathy measures in place to try to dampen that advantage if they were expecting the Faey.

      Of course, she wouldn’t tell him what those measures were, and since he’d never found anything like that on CivNet—and he’d looked—it was something he was best off simply dropping.

      She’d went through boot camp on homeworld, where it was warm, and had been a trooper for two years.  She’d been posted on ships for six months, had occupied a disputed planet called Elvar III, one of the two systems that the Faey and the Skaa were fighting over.  She’d only seen one battle, and it was little more than a skirmish between her squad and five Skaa guerillas.  She’d had real armor then, and though the Skaa’s Neutron weaponry was formidable, the Adamantium alloy armor she’d had had protected her from a hit on her left shoulder.  Adamantium was one of the strongest metal alloys known, and it was dreadfully expensive.  As a front-line unit, she’d been issued that armor, and it saved her from having her entire left arm and shoulder surgically replaced with bionics.

      That was one of the few places where he could not fault the Imperium.  When it came to protecting its soldiers, they did not play.

      After a year rotating on and off Elvar III, she was reassigned to Terra.  And here she was.  “I was up in New York for a while, but it was too damned cold,” she told him as the waiter set their food down before them.  She ordered Cajun shrimp, a Copeland’s specialty, and he had blackened steak.  Faey had this thing for seafood, he’d noticed from their television.  They’d gotten a table out on the patio, his favorite place to sit, and they sat there in view of the pedestrians on the sidewalk and the occupants of the cars.  This bothered him a little bit, but when she found out he loved sitting on the patio, she wouldn’t sit anywhere else.  “The squad got reassigned here to New Orleans about two months ago, thank the gods,” she sighed. “If I had to go through one more winter slogging through snow, I was going to scream.”

      “I hate heat,” he grunted.  “I grew up where it’s usually cold.”

      “Oh?  Tell me about it,” she said as she took her first bite.

      He knew he shouldn’t tell her anything, but she had told him about her, and he felt it only fair to reciprocate.  He was born on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic ocean twenty two years ago, en route from Boston to Ramstein Air Force Base, in Germany.  In a way, he’d been born between nations, and his mother always joked that he was one of a very few citizens of the world instead of a nation.  His father was a fighter pilot in the Air Force, and his mother was a music teacher.  He was a true military brat, spending the first two years in Germany, then moving for a year in Korea, then a year in Alaska, then they moved to Japan when he was five.  They were there for four years, the longest they’d ever stayed in one place, and that was where his father had fallen in love with martial arts.  In four short years, his father became a black belt in four different martial arts.  He didn’t see his father much for those four years, but his mother just smiled and told him that he was doing something he loved to do.

      Jason had been there long enough to speak fairly decent Japanese, but it had been so long since he’d used it, he felt he’d probably forgotten it by now.  He could still remember the kanji and the two phonetic writing systems, hiragana and katakana, though.  Strange, sometimes, how memory worked.

      His father was a bit disappointed when they left Japan, going back to America.  In a way, though, it was probably necessary, for their only son could barely speak English.  He’d grown up speaking French to his mother and whatever the local language was for everyone else, speaking a mixture of English and French only with his father.  He’d caught on quickly enough, but getting rid of his accent took nearly three years.  They were stationed in Washington state for two years, then went back to Alaska for another year.

      It was in Alaska, just a couple of weeks after he turned twelve, when his mother was killed in an auto accident.  His father resigned from the Air Force soon afterward and moved them back to the ancestral home, in a little town northwest of Portland, Maine, called Durham.  He started a flight instructor’s school using his Cessna, earned a black belt and the credentials to open his own martial arts school, and Jason had to get used to living in one place.  It wasn’t that bad, actually.  He made friends in school, stayed in one school for more than a couple of years, and everyone spoke the same language.  He started getting interested in electronics about then, but he was determined to get into the Air Force Academy and be a fighter pilot, just like his father, so he buckled down in school and started bringing his grades up to the point where they’d consider him.  He started playing soccer and football, and found out that he was rather good at sports, thanks to all the martial arts instruction that his father gave him.

      Then his father got sick, and eventually died.  Jason was sixteen at the time, and he had no aunts or uncles—both his parents were only children—and all four of his grandparents had already passed away.  Instead of going into a foster family and selling the house, he won his emancipation in court by proving he was mature enough to live on his own.  The inheritance he got wasn’t that much, but it was enough to pay for him to get through high school without having to work, but it wasn’t enough to get him through college.  Luckily for him, though, the University of Michigan offered him a scholarship to play football, which he got because a scout had come to watch a game he played in, but was actually there to scout the quarterback of the opposing team.

      It hadn’t been easy, but Jason sold the house and moved to Michigan.  The money he got from the house was enough to let him buy a car and support him as he went through college without having to work.  He elected for a double major of electronics engineering and computer science, since the scholarship would pay for five years of college and he was more than willing to take summer classes.  He did like to play football, but he didn’t apply himself in football as much as he could have, and as a result ended up as a third-string safety and a special teams cover player.  He was there for the education, not the football.

      “That drove my coaches crazy,” he admitted to her as he picked at his salad.  Jason always ate his salad last, as for him it was the dessert.  “They knew I was better than I played, but since I was always so involved with my classes, I just didn’t have the time to develop my skills.  Coach Dawson always told me that if I’d give him three months, he could make me a starter.  He even told me that I might even be good enough to play in the NFL, but I just wasn’t interested.”

      “It wasn’t right for you to hold back on your team like that,” she said critically.

      “I never held back,” he said bluntly.  “I just didn’t have as much experience as they did.  Coach Dawson said that it was raw physical ability that let me play on their level.  If I’d have had the time to learn the nuances of the game, I could have been a starter.”

      “Did you want to be?”

      “Not really,” he admitted.  “I was there to learn, not to play.”

      “Well, what happened after that?”

      “Nothing,” he said grimly.  “Your ships arrived just when I started my senior year.  That put me in limbo for nearly a year as they tested everyone.  After I was tested, I was sent to Boston, and after one semester, they moved me down here.”

      “And here we are,” she said carefully, obviously seeking to avoid an argument.  “Where is your car at?” she asked curiously.

      “Still in Michigan,” he growled.  “They wouldn’t let me bring it.”

      “Why not?”

      “I have no idea.  I just know that if it hasn’t been towed away, it’s still sitting in the student parking lot of the dorm up in Michigan.”

      “Did they pay you for it?”

      He gave her a flat look.  “You seem to fail to grasp the situation for humans.  When they shipped me to Boston, I had one suitcase full of clothes.  That’s all.  They made me leave everything else behind.  Photo albums of my family, personal heirlooms, all my things, I couldn’t bring any of it.  Only clothes.”

      She frowned.  “That’s not right,” she declared.  “They shouldn’t have done that.”

      “There are all sorts of things that they shouldn’t do, but they did,” he told her.  “A friend of mine in Maine told me that a squad of Faey troopers came to her house, and while one of them asked her questions, the rest ransacked it.  They took everything of value, even the silverware.  Then they told her if she said anything, they’d come back and burn out her brain and make her a vegetable.”

      “Now that’s wrong,” she said hotly.  “Where was this?  Durham?”

      “What does it matter?” he asked.

      “Humans have rights, Jason,” she said with surprising vehemence.  “You’re citizens of the Imperium, and that means even though you’re subject to its rules, it also means that you enjoy its protections.  There are rules against soldiers doing that.  Not even a noble can barge into a person’s house and take everything.”

      “That doesn’t seem to stop them,” he said mildly.  “That kind of thing happens all the time.”

      “This is why the Marines are here,” she said hotly.  “To put a stop to that kind of bullshit.”

      “You need the Marines to keep the nobles in line?” he asked.

      “Nobles do what they want, so long as they stay within the law,” she answered.  “The Marines are here to make sure they’re doing the Empress’ will.  We also make sure they obey her laws.  I think that the Marines up in Maine aren’t doing their jobs very well.  We’ll just have to see about that,” she said in a nasty tone.

      “What can you do?” he scoffed.

      “My aunt is the general in command of all Marines in North America,” she answered.  “How do you think my squad got transferred to New Orleans?  I asked Aunt Lorna for a transfer.  I’ll tell her about this, and she’ll put her foot down on some necks.”

      “Don’t cause trouble for my friend,” he warned.

      “You don’t even have to tell me her name,” she said.  “Aunt Lorna will get to the bottom of it.  And since your friend never said a word, then she’s perfectly safe.”

      “Heh,” he snorted.  “So even among Faey, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

      “Probably even more so,” she agreed.  “The Imperial military is really the only place a commoner can get any real power, because the nobles control everything else.  By law, nobles can’t hold high command positions in the Imperial arm of the military, so most of them don’t even bother enlisting there.  It prevents nasty betrayals if a noble goes rogue, so they can’t have people in positions in the Royal arm of the military to disrupt things.  They have their own private armies and navies, and that’s where they usually end up doing their commanding.  But the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines are commanded by commoners.  That’s how my aunt came to be a General.”

      “Couldn’t she pull strings to get you into engineering?”

      She shrugged.  “She’s been trying,” she answered.  “But I want a Royal Navy position, not a position in some noble’s fleet.  So the competition’s a little tougher.  If I was alright with getting any engineering position, I probably would have found one by now.”

      “Oh.”

      “You’d like my Aunt Lorna.  She’s an old warhorse, but she’s funny,” she smiled.  “She’s up in the command center in Washington, but she said she might come down to see me next month.  I’ll have to introduce you.”

      He said nothing to that.  If he had his way, they wouldn’t be seeing each other again after tonight.

      “Well, I’m done, and so are you, so let’s go ahead and head over to the theater,” she prompted, looking up to find the waiter, then raising her hand and snapping her fingers imperiously.

      He would have preferred avoiding what was coming, but there was no hope of that.  So he simply got into the limo with her, and it started towards downtown.

      “Don’t worry too much about what to do at the theater,” she told him.  “All you have to do is be polite.  That’s all.  You don’t have to act any special way or anything, but there are a few things you have to understand before we go in there,” she told him seriously.

      “As in?”

      “First, remember that among my people, I am the dominant gender,” she winked.  “That means that, if you think in human terms, I’m supposed to do all those things that men do.  I’ll hold the door open for you, I’ll help you get seated, I’ll lead you if we dance, and so on.  When we walk, it’s customary for the man to put his hand on the woman’s forearm or elbow.  Instead of you offering your arm, I’ll be the one offering mine,” she smiled.  “There aren’t any real rules about how men act, but it’s considered good manners for a man to defer if a woman starts to speak.  But I don’t think you’re worried about how cultured they think you are,” she said with a chuckle, then she turned serious.  “But the one thing you can’t do is argue with me in public, alright?  If you don’t like what I ask or suggest, you’re free to let me know, but don’t be combative.  I’m going to be very careful to try to avoid any situations like that, Jason, I promise, but if you start getting offended or don’t like what I’m saying, don’t get bitchy.”

      “Well, there goes my evening,” he said mockingly.

      She laughed.  “I know, it’s just ruined,” she agreed with an outrageous smile.  “When we get there, we’ll have to cross the lobby to get to the auditorium, and there’s going to be Faey there talking.  Faey love to gossip and chitchat, so they always get there very early so they have lots of time for it before the function begins.  I might have to stop once or twice and greet people, since it’s considered good manners to do so if you’re invited.  If we do, you’re not going to understand what’s going on very well, because you’re not going to hear the telepathic side of the conversations.  Sometimes Faey just stop talking and send in the middle of a sentence, or one person is talking while the other is sending, so you only get half of he conversation.  Most often, Faey will speak in the presence of humans, but not all of them will.  Some Faey hold humans in contempt, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

      He nodded without a word.

      “Well then, that’s all you need to know,” she told him, reaching out and putting her hand on his forearm, then patting it.  “We’ll suffer through the opera, then go somewhere and get a drink before we go home.”

      “Remember, I have classes tomorrow,” he reminded her.  “We can’t stay out too late.”

      “Jason, believe me when I say I want to get through the opera and nightcap as quickly as possible,” she said with a slight, dangerous little smile.

      He wasn’t sure he liked that or not.

      They reached the Saenger Theater a few minutes later.  The original Saenger had burned down two years ago, during a riot that erupted when the Faey first arrived, so the Faey had rebuilt it into their idea of a theater.  It was still the same size, but it was a black building with no sharp corners, only rounded ones.  There were a set of doors in the side facing Canal Street, as people passed in front of it on their way to other places.  There were no Faey standing outside, but then again, it was too hot to stand around outside.  The limo pulled up, and Jyslin got out, then reached in and helped him out with a smile.  He got out and closed the door, and she led him in through glass doors that opened of their own volition.  The lobby within was very large, and it was done in soft earth colors. The carpet was a soft maroon red with little white diamonds intersecting in geometric patterns through it, and the walls were panelled in what looked cedar or redwood, some reddish hued wood that gave the walls a warm glow, with no decorations or artwork hanging upon them.  The ceiling was covered with thousands of pieces of stained glass that had very faint lights behind them, making them glow with a riot of color that was quite pretty.  There were three huge crystal chandeliers hanging from that ceiling, each radiating light from hundreds of small lights shaped like candles, refracting and reflecting off the crystal shards hanging among them.  The doors to the auditorium were on the far wall, and unlike a movie theater, there was no concession stand.  There was only a small booth to give information, and humans dressed in red uniforms milled about.

      It was nice, very nice.

      Scattered through the lobby were about a hundred Faey, all dressed in elegant formal wear.  Women wore gowns of every color imaginable, some plain, some almost guady, and all of them had their hair done up elaborately.  Jyslin looked positively plain compared to most of them.  Some were dripping with jewels from their fingers and throats and ears, and as he got a closer look, he saw that the Faey seemed to have no concept of the idea of a high neckline.  Every single dress exposed cleavage to some degree, and a few of them were so deep that more blue-skinned breast was revealed than concealed.  Jyslin’s gown was rather modest compared to most.  The men all wore simple robes of various colors, each of them a similar style, making all the men look strangely similar.  Some men had jewelry and some didn’t, some wore strange flat-topped hats that flared out towards the top and some didn’t, but almost all of them wore simple sashes around the waist.  There were blue ones, red ones, and gold ones, and they had to have some kind of meaning that Jason couldn’t quite fathom.

      There weren’t only Faey in that lobby.  There were a sparse scattering of humans, men in tuxedos, women in tasteful gowns, and a few wearing clothes that were nice, but weren’t utterly formal.  He wondered what they were doing here, at least he had a good excuse to be here.  Something told him that these were the ones who had managed to buy their way into affluence with the Faey regime, the rich and powerful, or those who worked with the nobles as liaisons, helping them understand the nuances of human culture and behavior so as to better keep control.

      The sell-outs.

      His headache flared back into life rather quickly, and he put a finger to his temple and rubbed it as they descended into what he considered to be a pit of vipers.   These weren’t Faey like Symone, and Jyslin.  These were true enemies, he could just feel it.

      They got about halfway across the lobby when Jyslin stopped and detoured to a group of five Faey.  Three were women, two were men, and all of them were rather young.  He recognized the three women.  One was Maya, and the other two women were in Jyslin’s squad.  All three wore very simple, unadorned gowns of soft colors, cream, a soft brown, and subdued blue, and all three were quite low cut.  One of those two he didn’t know was quite familiar to him; she was one of the two whose armor he had destroyed, and who had followed him around naked for the remainder of the day.

      “Jason, you know Maya,” Jyslin introduced as she reached them.  “This is Zora, and this is Sheleese.  This handsome fellow here is Vell, Maya’s husband, and this is Oren, Zora’s husband.”

      “You looked better naked,” Jason told Sheleese bluntly.

      She laughed heartily.  “I thought you’d recognize me, though I figured I might have to pull down my bodice to remind you who I was,” she winked.

      “Sheleese told us all about that,” the Faey man, Vell, told him with a chuckle and an extended hand.  “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Jason.  I think we really need to talk sometime,” he said with a smile.

      “Talk?” Jason asked defensively.

      “That’s all he does,” Maya said with a teasing smile at her husband.  “Talk talk talk talk talk.  My husband dabbles quite a bit in philosophy,” she told Jason.

      “I didn’t think they’d let you bring your husbands here,” Jason said in a little surprise.

      “Why not?” the other man, Oren, challenged.

      “Well, this isn’t exactly friendly territory for Faey.”

      “Of course it is,” he said boldly.

      He didn’t miss Jyslin’s warning look at Oren to back off, and the man cleared his throat.  Jason was about to excuse himself to go to the restroom, but he felt one of them brush up against his mind, finding the false front of repetitive thought that he kept there to prevent them from looking into his mind. Nonplussed, he felt that touch start reaching around the edges of his false thought, trying to find a way through.  He’d already had a headache, and that alien force on his mind only made it worse, turning it into a pounding that he could see behind his eyes.  “If whoever’s doing that doesn’t stop right now, I’m going to punch all five of you in the nose,” he said in a growling tone, putting the palm of his hand to his temple.

      “Vell!” Maya said reproachfully, slapping him on the shoulder.  And she wasn’t gentle.

      “I must say, that’s quite impressive,” Vell said, unphased by his wife’s admonition or Jason’s rather graphic threat.  “It’s the strongest defense I’ve ever seen in a human.  I just had to see if you’d learned how to anchor it to keep someone from worming through the edges.”

      “Vell, I told you not to do that!” Maya said in exasperation.  “I specifically told you that Jason doesn’t like it when we do that!”

      “You expected me to obey you?” he asked with a cheeky smile.

      She gave him a very ugly look.  “We’ll talk about this when we get home,” she said in an icy manner.

      He grew rather contrite very quickly, and gave Jason an apologetic smile.  Then he winked.  I’m sorry if I hurt you, but don’t read anything into what I said to my wife.  I just like to tease her.

      He was surprised that he had heard that inside his mind, for Faey supposedly couldn’t send to humans in the manner in which he had just sent.  They had to get a foothold inside a human’s mind to pass telepathic messages to them, and Vell did not have such a connection to him.  Oddly, though, his headache eased somewhat.

      “Good Azra,” Sheleese said quickly.  “Jason, your nose is bleeding!”

      Jason put a finger to his upper lip, and felt sticky warmth there.  “Huh,” he mused.  “Where is the restroom?  I should clean up.”

      “Just over there,” Jyslin pointed to one of the side walls.

      “I had the same problem when I first came here,” Oren told him.  “It’s something in the air that was making my nose bleed.”

      “I’ll be right back,” he told Jyslin, looking around at them.  They all didn’t look too concerned, but Vell was giving him a surprised, somewhat speculative look.

      Jason decided right then and there that he wasn’t quite so sure about this Vell person.

      “I’ll wait right here for you,” she replied, putting a lingering hand on his shoulder.

      The nosebleed only lasted a moment or two, and had more or less stopped by the time he got to the bathroom.  His headache had eased considerably, though.  It was odd…maybe he’d had some kind of sinus pressure or something, and the nosebleed had eased that pressure.  He’d had sinus problems for a couple of weeks after he came down here, and just as Oren mentioned, he did have nosebleeds during that time. Maybe the heat was starting to get to him, making his sinuses flare up again.  Or it might have been coming out from the heat into the air conditioning of the theater.  That could have done it.

      After cleaning up and using the restroom, he went back out to find Jyslin.  He hoped she’d just take him to their seats.  He moved towards where they were quickly, but someone boldly stepped into his way.  It was a Faey woman, regally tall, even taller than Jyslin.  She wore an elaborate gown of dazzling white and silver, with a frilled ruff along a very deep neckline that showcased an impressively full bosom and clung to her narrow waist and curved hips appealingly.  She had a sharp, attractive face with large green eyes, and her blonde hair was done up in an elaborate weave of locks that ringed her head before spilling down her back in a swaying tail.  Around her neck was a web of small diamonds that fell in a triangle down to the edge of her cleavage, the small jewel at the point of that triangle nestled snugly between the top swells of her breasts.

      “You are the human who gave the Marines all that trouble,” she announced in an arrogant manner that made him immediately dislike her.  “Perhaps they should have taught you your place more effectively.”

      Without even thinking about what he was doing, he drew himself up to his full height and glared down at the woman.  She was tall, but she was nowhere near his height, and he used that size and his larger frame to physically intimidate the slender woman.  “Perhaps your mother should have turned you over her knee more often when you were a child,” he returned.

      What came next was not a brushing, was not a touch, but was more like a lance of power that sought to tear through his defenses and penetrate him to the very core of his mind, to lay bare his every thought and memory, to take from him anything and everything that she pleased, to lay bare his darkest memories, his deepest desires, his greatest fears, to know the utter truth of him.  He reacted quickly to this attack, understanding that he could not directly stand up to her impressive mental power.  So instead of resisting her, he simply withdrew completely from himself, from his own mind, effortlessly descending into an unthinking state that left his mind little but an empty shell.  The trick here, he’d learned, was that the Faey had to have something to grab on to in order to find the rest of his mind.  He let her in, then simply withdrew everything away from her, forcing her to wander around in an empty mist that hid his mind from her power.  She found out quickly that she could put herself as deeply into his mind as she pleased, but there was absolutely nothing there for her to see, nothing for her to touch, and no way she could latch onto his mind and force him to obey her.  His mind was an empty void, and the edges of that void pulled away from her every time she tried to get past it and get herself into his mind.

      It wouldn’t last long, and he knew it.  She was pushing deeper and deeper, starting to push away his deception, starting to reach towards the deepest, most private of his thoughts and memories.  He reacted out of pure desperation, realizing that if he could feel her, if he could sense her presence in his mind, maybe he could do something about it.  He locked in on that sense of her and pushed, and he pushed with absolutely every fiber of his being. He pushed away from the center of his being, driving her before him, forcing the sense of her away from the core of him.  He felt her rock back on her heels—mentally, at least—and push back, but he had too much momentum.  She lost more and more ground, until she was again forced out to the edges of his mind.

      Once he was certain that she was suitably ejected from the recesses of his mind, he put something out there for her to see.  It was an image of her, wearing nothing but leather knee-length boots, being sexually gratified by a jackass.

      She instantly flushed, and her expression turned dark as an outraged snarl marred her attractive face.  She must have been mightily upset and put out of sorts by his brashness, for instead of trying to attack him with her telepathic power again, she reared back a hand and tried to slap him across the face.  That outrage became shock as he whipped a hand up and caught her hand before it reached him, creating a loud smack that caused her hand to instantly stop.  He closed his fingers around her hand quickly and held it absolutely rigid.  The single male Faey who had been accompanying her stared in awed shock as Jason held the woman’s hand absolutely still, as the muscles in her arm flexed and bunched as she tried to pull away from him.  He felt her gather herself to try to overwhelm his mind with her power, but he closed his grip on her fingers, which caused her to gasp in pain.

      Without saying a word, he pulled her hand down from his head with raw physical power, as her arm continued to struggle to resist his strength, until he had her hand down by her waist.  Then he pulled it up and down in a mocking version of a handshake.  Then he leaned in close to her ear.  “If you try that again, I’ll rip off your arm,” he promised in a low tone that conveyed every bit of his own outrage.  He loosened his grip slightly, and she ripped her hand away from him as if she’d stuck it in a fire.

      She glared at him, but her expression slowly softened, until she actually smiled.  Then she laughed.

      Faey!

      “Now I see why you gave them so much trouble,” she said approvingly, shaking her hand before her.  “Enjoy the opera.  Varn,” she said imperiously as she turned and sauntered away.  The male Faey stared at him for a moment, then scurried after her.

      “Why can’t you be more like him?” she demanded in Faey as they merged with the crowd.

      “I can be commanding, dear,” he said in a placating tone.

      What in bloody hell was that about?

      “Are you out of your mind?” Jyslin hissed at him in disbelief as she came up to him, grabbing his arm in a very tight, almost painful grip.  “I told you to stay out of trouble!”

      “She started it,” he said pugnaciously.

      “You dink, you don’t argue with them!” she hissed in a very low tone.  “She’s a noble!”

      “A noble?” he asked.  “She certainly doesn’t look, well, noble.”

      “She’s a Zarina,” she said in hushed tones, hustling him towards the auditorium.  “Zarina Marci Trillane.  She rules what used to be Jefferson, Saint Bernard, and Saint James Parishes.  She’s responsible for the rice and sugar farming that they do down there.”

      “What did she do?” she asked curiously as they went through the doors and into the large theater proper.

      “She tried to invade my mind,” he said stiffly.  “And I mean all the way.  I know how to avoid that, so I did that, then I put an image of her being screwed by a donkey out where she could see it.  That made her try to slap me.”

      “She did, huh?” she asked, pursing her lips.  “How did you avoid it?”

      “The same way I hid from you,” he answered.  “If you can’t find anything to look at, it doesn’t matter how deep you can get into my mind.  After she started pushing in past that, I felt where she was in my mind, and sort of pushed her out.”

      “Pushed her out?” she asked in surprise as they started down a row very far from the stage, almost in the back.  “How could you push her out?”

      “Well, I realized that if I could feel her in my mind, exactly where she was, then I could do something about it,” he said hesitantly.  “I feel it when Faey brush me all the time, and I can always feel it when they try to push past that.  They feel around the edges of my pattern of thought, looking for a way through it.  Well, I could feel exactly where she was, so I just kinda pushed her out.”

      “You pushed her out,” she said combatively as they sat down in the middle of the row, like she didn’t believe him.

      “I’m about to push you out of that chair,” he said in a nasty tone.

      She gave him a dirty look, then blew out her breath.  “Sorry, but you can’t do that,” she told him.

      “You’re wrong, because I did,” he said pugnaciously.  “Maybe you don’t know as much about humans as you thought.”

      She gave him a very long look, and it was serious.  “Maybe…you’re right,” she said in a low, grim tone.  “Maybe we don’t know as much about humans as we thought.  We can’t leave right now, Jason, but when we have a chance to get out of here without attracting attention, we absolutely have to go somewhere very private and very quiet, and have a long talk.”

      “Why not now?”

      “It’ll attract attention,” she said, looking around.  “We don’t want to do that.  Not right now.  Not until Zarina Marci forgets about what happened.  If she stops and thinks about it, you might get into a serious pile of trouble.”  She looked around again.  “We’ll leave after the first intermission.”

      “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded.

      “We’ll talk about it after we get out of here,” she answered in a quiet, professional tone, like a Marine about to walk into a prospective battlefield.  “Until we do, don’t do anything to attract attention to us.  I want Zarina Marci to completely forget about you.”

      “You think she’s going to try to get back at me?”

      “This has nothing to do with that.  Now be still.”

      “You’re creeping me out here, Jyslin,” he said honestly.

      “Don’t make me muzzle you, Jason,” she warned, and he could tell that she wasn’t kidding.

      This sudden change in her attitude, her very demeanor, shocked him.  This was a side of her he’d never seen before, when she was all serious.  But something had spooked her, something about the Zarina, and he didn’t think he wanted to annoy her at the moment.  Not because he was afraid of her, but she seemed honestly upset, and he didn’t want her to worry.  So he fell silent and sat there as other Faey started filing into the auditorium.

      Maya and Vell took the seats to Jyslin’s left, and Zora and her husband, Oren, took the seats to Jason’s right.  Sheleese, who had no date, sat down immediately behind Jyslin.  She leaned over the seat between them, a smile on her face.  “We were looking for you two,” she said.  “We figured you’d dragged him into some dark corner.”

      “Not now,” Jyslin said in a brusque tone, but the look she levelled on Sheleese made her instantly pull back.  “Was the Zarina still in the lobby when you came in?” she asked.

      “I don’t remember seeing her,” Maya answered, her playful smile melting from her face.

      “Sheleese, drift back out into the lobby and see if she’s still there.  Send tight, Marci is very strong with her talent,” Jyslin ordered, in a crisp manner.  “She’s not your usual lazy noble.”

      “She’ll never sense me,” Sheleese grinned, then she got up and sauntered back down the row, towards the aisle.

      “You know her?” Jason asked.

      “I’ve met her a few times,” she answered.  “Her sending is very strong, and that’s an indicator of her power.  She’s not to be sneezed at.  She could easily make it into the Marines.”

      Jason remembered that powerful telepathic ability was a requirement for being a Marine.  If she was strong enough to be a Marine, then she was indeed strong.  Zora, Sheleese, Maya, and Jyslin were probably four of the strongest telepaths in the theater.

      “What’s the angle here, Jys?” Zora asked.

      “Jason and the Zarina had a little encounter,” Jyslin answered.  “I want to get him out of here before she realizes exactly what happened and comes looking for him.  I wanted to wait until the first intermission, but if I can slip him out the door before the opera starts, that’s just as good.  So long as she doesn’t even see him.  She’s probably forgotten what happened, but if she sees him, she’s going to remember.”

      “There are exits by the men’s restroom,” Vell announced.  “A side exit.  It didn’t have an alarm on it.  I think it’s an additional exit for after the performances end, so everyone isn’t bottled up at the front door.”

      “That’s the better tactical choice,” Maya said seriously.  “It’s not more than fifteen shalka from the lobby door to the men’s restroom.”

      A shalka was a Faey unit of measurment that was about fifteen inches long.  Fifteen of them was roughly equivelent to about eighteen feet.

      “Marci is still out there,” Jyslin frowned, putting a finger to her temple.  “Wait, she’s near the women’s restroom.  That’s on the far side, and there are still plenty of people in the lobby.”

      “Screen?” Maya suggested.

      “It should work,” Jyslin agreed.  “Alright everyone, up.  We’re going to sneak Jason out the side door.  I’ll have Sheleese distract the Zarina, and we’ll slide him out of here.”

      Jason was a little confused, and not a little surprised at this commanding tone Jyslin was using.  Then again, she was a squad sergeant, and that meant that she did do a little commanding.  The other Faey obeyed her without question, hinting to him that her authority as a Marine spilled over even into this purely civilian event.  He found him caught up in this sudden military exercise, as gowned and robed Faey hustled him up out of his seat and into the aisle, then against the flow of traffic up to the lobby door.  They hesitated only a second before Jyslin boldly stepped out into the lobby, pulling Jason along with her by the hand.  The other Faey filed out immediately behind him, blocking anyone’s view of him.

      “Duck down a little!” Jyslin hissed.  “By Galla’s moons, she’ll see the top of your head!”

      Jason obediently ducked down just enough to hide his head, which was usually visible over most crowds.  Jason was six feet two inches tall, which was just enough for him to be considered tall.  They hustled him to a large door by the men’s restroom, which had an exit sign clearly mounted above it, in both English and Faey.

      They ended up on Rampart Street, and Jyslin immediately started walking away from Canal Street.  “What’s this all about?” he demanded.

      “I couldn’t leave you in there,” she said.  “I’ll explain in the limo.”

      “We’ll have to call the driver.”

      “I already did.  He’s on the way.”

      “But—nevermind,” he grunted.

      They waited only for a couple of minutes before the limo pulled up by the side of the street.  She made sure he got in first, the got in behind him quickly.  The limo pulled away from the curb, and when it did so, Jyslin blew out her breath in relief, putting her hand to her chest.  “That was almost as nervewracking as a combat patrol,” she admitted.

      “Alright, we’re in the limo.  What’s going on?”

      She looked him right in the eyes.  “Jason, there is no way you should have been able to eject Marci from your mind.  That kind of action requires talent.  But you’re a human, so you don’t have any.”

      He gave her a suspicious look.

      “Hey, I have no idea either,” she told him.  “It must be your training.  It gives you abilities that are this close to talent.”  She held her thumb and forefinger up, the tiniest of margins apart.  “I didn’t want the Zarina to think about what you did.  She’d expect it from a Faey, but not from a human.  If she got curious, she might give you trouble.  Real trouble.  As in hauled down to the detention center and having a Faey tear our your soul kind of trouble.”

      Jason shuddered at the very thought of that.  “I—Thanks,” he said after a moment.

      “Hey, no problem,” she smiled.  “But you owe me now,” she winked.

      “I appreciate your help, but don’t think I’m going to let you hold it over my head,” he warned.

      “I’m not.  But you do owe me the opportunity to change the deal a little.”

      “How so?” he asked warily.

      “Let’s go see a movie,” she said with a bright smile.  “I think I’ll have to go home and change first, but let’s go out to the Palace in Metairie and see a movie.’

      “What’s wrong with that?”

      “It’s a bit too high class for a movie theater,” she said with a light smile.  “What do you say?”

      He debated that for a moment, but really couldn’t find any reason to say no.  He did still owe her a date, and a movie sounded better than that opera any day.  “Alright,” he agreed.

      “Good.  Let me tell the limo driver to take us to my place.  I’ll release him and we’ll take a cab to the movies.”

      He wasn’t too keen on the idea of going to her place, but he couldn’t really say anything.  She did need to change, and it would be rude for him to stand out on the sidewalk and wait for her.

      A little while later, after crossing over onto the West Bank, he found himself in Belle Chasse, where the former naval air station was located.  The limo was allowed onto the base, and Jyslin must have been guiding him with telepathic messages, for he pulled up to one of the houses in the base housing section of the base.  It was a cookie cutter house, a small affair that looked to be two bedrooms, a ranch style house on the corner of two narrow streets.  He hadn’t thought that the Marines would be living in the houses on the old base, but then again, since they were here and empty, why not?

      Jyslin got out and then helped him out, not that he needed help, then leaned into the passenger side window to talk to the driver.  “Just go back the way you came,” she told him.  “Do not wander around.  If you get lost, just park the limo and wait for a patrol car to come, and they’ll show you the way out.”

      “I’ll be fine, miss.  I’ve been on the base before,” the driver answered calmly.

      “Good.  Thank you.”

      “You’re welcome,” he answered as she stepped, back, and the limo pulled away.

      They watched it go.  “Come on, let me show you my house,” she invited.

      They entered through the front door—which wasn’t locked, he noticed—and she turned on the lights to reveal a strangely human living room.  The carpet was a bit worn, gray shag, and she had decorated her living room with two matching large, thick-cushioned sofas that flanked a large glass coffee table, which faced a television.  She had a vidlink console on the wall to the left, and the open area to the right led into a small kitchen filled with aging appliances.  A hallway to the left led down to the two bedrooms, and probably to the bathroom as well, and there was a glass paned door on the far wall that led to the porch and back yard.  Two standing lamps were on the side walls, and she had several works of art hanging on the walls.  They were all abstract, geometric shapes and colors arranged in intriguing patterns, except for one, which was a portrait of a male Faey, nude, reclining on a couch before a waterfall.  The painting was impressionist, the borders enticingly indistinct, the features curiously vague.  Seeking out detail made the portrait nonsensical, but stepping back and taking it all in at once produced a coherent image.

      “You like that one?” she asked as she started taking off her shoes.  “My mother painted it.  It’s my father.”

      “Your mother’s a good artist,” Jason said honestly.

      “She made all these.  She sends me a new one every year,” she said.  “Want one?  I have a few in the other rooms.  I’m starting to run out of places to hang them.”

      “No thanks,” he said.

      “I’ll show them to you,” she declared.  “Come on.”

      Trapped by his manners, he allowed her to take him down the hall, to the first bedroom, which she had converted into a study.  She had a panel computer on a desk in the middle of the room, but a large desktop one, not the portables that the students used, complete with a hard keyboard.  A bookshelf holding several books and boxes of memory sticks was behind the desk, flanked by two floor lamps.  There were six paintings on the walls, all of them abstract geometric paintings.  “This is where I do my correspondence courses,” she told him.  “I’m a student, just like you.”

      She showed him her bedroom next, which was larger than her study.  She had a very large bed dominating the middle of the left wall, a king-size with a large oak headboard holding tiny figurines, books, and little knick-knacks that made the place look strangely homey.  She had a dresser on the far wall, a smaller one on the same wall as the door that had a mirror mounted on it, a large cherrywood chest at the foot of the bed, and a pair of nightstands on either side of the bed.  A wire stand of sorts was in the far corner, by a door that probably led to a bathroom, on which hung her armor.  Her rifle was hanging on pegs on the wall by her armor.  Four paintings were in this room, the one hanging over the bed obviously Jyslin when she was a very young child, wearing a little blue dress and holding a small little animal that looked like a gray-furred fox kit with two tails.  It was not impressionist, it was a painting so carefully done that it looked like a picture.

      “Now that’s good,” he said in sincere appreciation.

      “That’s me,” she smiled.  “When I was six, with our pet vulpar Tunny.”

      “Odd little animal.  I’ve seen an animal with two tails.”

      “Tunny belonged to my grandparents.  When they died, she came to live with us.”

      “She must be old.”

      “She’s nearly fifty.”

      Jason gave her a surprised look as she opened a drawer in the dresser on the same wall as the door.

      “They live about seventy years.  She’s still alive, but she sleeps a lot now.  She’s not as playful as she was when I was a child.”

      “Vulpars are truly lifetime pets,” she told him as she quietly closed the door.  She came up to him and put her hand on his upper arm, sliding it along his forearm, until she had a grip on his wrist.  Then she chuckled ruefully.  “I did not plan this,” she said to him with a slightly contrite smile, but her eyes were sultry, soft, and seductive, the gray of them seeming to glow in the light of the overhead light.

      This was what he was hoping to avoid.  He put a hand on hers and tried to pull it away, but she simply put her other hand on his side, gripping the hand that had grabbed hers to pull it away.  “Jyslin, I’m not interested.”

      “You’re such a liar,” she said with a throaty chuckle.  “Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not interested in me.”

      That was the one thing he could not do, because he was interested in her, and she knew it.  But he would not get involved with a Faey, no matter how much he liked her or how much he was attracted to her.  “I can’t,” he told her.  “I won’t, Jyslin.  You’re a Faey.  You know how I feel about Faey.”

      “I’m not the Imperium, Jason,” she said with gentle adamance.  “I’m just a girl, a girl who wants to be with you.”  She put her hand on his neck, and he grabbed it to pull it away.  “Jason,” she said with a yearning that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and produced an immediate urge within him.  “I’ll make you one more bet, a final challenge,” she said.  “Kiss me.”

      “What?”

      “Kiss me.  If you can kiss me and walk out that door, I’ll never bother you again,” she promised, caressing his side in a manner that made his skin hot beneath his shirt and her fingers.  “But if you kiss me and can’t walk out that door, we spend the night together, and you can’t shut me out after tonight.  You have to give me the chance to be your friend, the same way you let Symone be your friend.”

      He was very worried about the idea of it, but if he didn’t agree, she would just keep trying, and that would sour their relationship to the point where she’d lose any chance at all with him.  Kissing her would give her a chance to try to inflame his passion, and that was why she was offering the challenge.  It was her one and only chance to seduce him.  But the opportunity to get her out of his life was too much to ignore. He didn’t like the idea of it, because he did like her, he did find her very attractive, but she was the ultimate temptation, Eve’s apple, luring him down a road that would compromise his principles and turn him into the willing slave to the Imperium he did not want to become.

      When he didn’t immediately answer, she looped her hand around his neck and pulled him down, then kissed him.  Jason had kissed many girls in his life, but he had never been kissed like that.  She kissed him with such passion, such lingering tenderness, such sweet desire that his resistance against her withered in the face of her ardor.  Before he knew what was happening, he had his arms around her, kissing her back with equal passion, admitting to her and to himself how attracted he was to this beautiful, interesting, sensual, intelligent, funny, and dead sexy woman.  The fact that she was a Faey now meant absolutely nothing.  She was a woman, and only a woman, a woman who wanted him, a woman he wanted in return.

      “Mmm, I knew you’d see things my way,” she purred as he kissed her neck, and as she backed them towards the bed.

      It was his wildest dream, and it was his worst nightmare.

      When Jyslin had jokingly put into his calendar last week that it would be a near-religious experience to make love to her, she was not joking.  There was an intense sensuality about her that he was certain was a racial trait, a powerful awareness of senses, awareness of pleasure, and a strong empathic need to give as well as receive pleasure that made the night with her almost mind-boggling.

      Just the memory of it made him shudder.  It was dawn now, a little later than he usually slept, but then again, he hadn’t had such an incredible night all those other times.  He was on his stomach, and she was splayed half atop him, her arm draped over his back possessively, sleeping with her face pressed up against his shoulder.  It was—there were no words for it.  To call it sensual, erotic, intensely intimate, they would not do what passed between them last night proper justice.  Her touch had been fire, but it was a fire that gave pleasure instead of pain, and she consumed him with it.

      But it was more than the sex.  Halfway into it, when she had him twisted around her finger, she touched his mind.  She didn’t ask to do it, and at that moment, he was utterly incapable of doing anything to stop her.   She seemed so caught up in their lovemaking that it was an automatic response, and it was then that he appreciated her power as a telepath.  She blew through his started defenses like they were dust and joined their minds into a symbiotic union that allowed all their feelings, thoughts, sensations, everything to pass between them.  They had become a single mind in two bodies, and the intensity of their lovemaking before that was like a candle flame held up to a bonfire.  To feel her pleasure in addition to his own, to know immediately what pleased her, what did not, and to feel the overpowering desire she had, an almost uncontrollable attraction to him that had caused her to go to such extremes to get closer to him, they multiplied the intimacy by an order of magnitude.  She made love to him with her body and her mind, and it was an experience that had been seared forever into his memory as the single-most intense night of pleasure he had ever had.  She had dropped all her defenses, joining their minds in an open connection that allowed him to look into her mind, anywhere in her mind, and see whatever he wanted.  He could have learned her most embarrassing secrets, her darkest fantasies, her most treasured dreams, or her most deep-seated desires had he wished to do so, but at that moment he was too busy making love to her to even think to look.

      That, more than anything, was what impressed him, now that he looked back on it.  She had been fearless about it, more than willing to expose the totality of her being to him, to give to him freely everything that she was.  He felt unbelievably honored that she would trust him like that, give him everything in exchange for joining their minds.

      But God, what a night!  He’d never be able to make love to a human woman ever again.  She’d spoiled him, utterly spoiled him, because he knew that no human could ever match what he felt last night unless she was telepathic.

      He yawned and tried to slide out from under her, but she suddenly grabbed hold of him and hooked the leg over the back of his own around the nearest one, wrapping him up and preventing him from going anywhere.  “Mmmm, no you don’t,” she said in a half-awake, dreamy kind of satisfied lassitude.  “I get to keep you until school.”

      “It’s morning,” he told her.

      “Already?  Damn,” she grunted, letting go of him and rolling over on her back.  “How’s your nose?”

      He’d suffered another nosebleed during their lovemaking, causing a rather funny interruption as she tried to stem the flow of blood, but she was so worked up that she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing.

      “It’s alright,” he answered.  “You must have hit it just right.”

      “I didn’t hit it,” she protested.

      “Sometimes it just takes a touch,” he told her.  “A touch the wrong way to get a nose to bleeding again.”

      “Now that might have happened,” she acceded, then she gave a throaty, sensual chuckle.  “I can’t wait for our next date,” she told him, rolling back over and squirming up onto his back, holding him down.  He looked up at her from the corner of his eye, seeing her bright, intimate smile.  “Are you sure you have to go to school?”

      “You can explain why I’m absent to the dean,” he told her.

      “I don’t think snuggling is a valid reason to miss class,” she laughed.  “Well, my sweet one, I think I won our little bet,” she purred in a sultry tone, leaning down and kissing his ear and cheek.  “I don’t think you minded losing,” she breathed in his ear.

      “I’m glad we made love,” he told her honestly.  “But I’m not glad for the situation.  You’re a Faey, and I’m a human.  I just slept with the enemy, and now, if I’m not careful, I’m going to go back on all the promises I made to myself and compromise my principles.”

      “Hate what I stand for all you want, as long as you don’t hate me,” she told him seriously.  “I’m more than capable of separating you from politics, Jason.  At least try to do the same for me.”

      “That’s not easy,” he grunted.

      “You think I’m a zealous patriot?” she asked archly.  “You forget, I’m in armor because I couldn’t get the job I wanted.  I was pushed out by rich nobles who put their children where they wanted to go.  I’m five times more qualified to be a starship engineer than most of them!” she flared.  “I’m a Marine because I’m not a noble!”

      He rolled over on his back, dislodging her, and she immediately climbed back on top of him, putting her elbows down on either side of his shoulders, her hands playing with his hair.  “I don’t care about the Imperium, Jason.  I serve because I have to serve, the same as you.  If I cared about the Imperium, I would have handed you over to Marci last night.  If I cared about the Imperium, your little secret wouldn’t be a secret.”

      “What secret?” he asked in confusion.

      She gave him a sly smile.  “I didn’t seduce you only to share a near-religious experience with you,” she told him.  “I needed to touch your mind and have you let me do it willingly.  I wanted to see if I was right.”

      “Right about what?” he asked suspiciously.

      “Right about this,” she said, tapping him on the forehead.  “If Marci found out about you, the Imperium might have a conniption.  There’s no telling what they’d do to the humans.”

      “What?” he demanded.

      “Think about it, Jason,” she said with a slow, knowing smile.  “Why can you feel it when we touch your mind?  Why is that you can hide yourself from us?  How could you eject Marci out of your mind?  It has nothing to do with your mental discipline or your training.”

      He gave her an impatient look.

      “Jason, you have talent,” she revealed.  “And it’s not weak.  When I joined with your mind, I found it within you, bursting at the seams to be realized.”

      “What?” he asked in shock.

      “You’re a telepath,” she told him evenly.  “And a damn bloody strong one.  You’re as strong as I am, and I’m considered in the top ten percent among Faey.”

      He gaped at her in disbelief.

      “I did help it along,” she admitted shamelessly.  “It was there, but you didn’t know how to use it, and it hadn’t fully formed itself.  I showed it how to fully express, gave you a little nudge.  But it’s there.”

      He was thunderstruck.  All he could do was gape at her in awed disbelief.

      “The headaches, the nosebleeds, they were symptoms of the expression of your talent,” she told him with a smile.  “They weren’t from stress, or sinus problems.  Think about it.  Didn’t they flare up when you were around Faey?”

      He was silent, thinking back…and he realized she was right.  The last few days, there were Faey around him every time the headaches got bad.  And the nosebleed, that started after Vell did whatever it was he did that allowed him to slip past his defenses and pass along a telepathic message.

      “B-But it was too fast—“

      “That’s normal,” she said.  “Telepathy doesn’t slowly develop like you’re thinking it does.  It does develop, but while it does, you can’t feel it, and it doesn’t show up.  It just bursts out when you reach a certain level, which is usually around puberty for a Faey.  For me, it was when I was much younger.  I’ve had talent for almost a long as I can remember.  If you’d been born among Faey, you’d have expressed at about the same time as me.”

      “But, but humans never showed any kind of ability before,” he argued.

      “I know,” she said with pursed lips.  “You told me that Faey always probe you.  Maybe all that telepathic contact jarred it in you.  If I’m right, you’d never had expressed any talent if it weren’t for the fact that we’re here.  It was latent within you, unable for you to touch it, but when we came along and started stimulating that part of your brain with our own power, it started to develop.”

      He was still awestruck, but he had recovered his wits enough to understand what she was saying.  But was she right?  Did he really have telepathic ability?

      “Of course you do,” she said with a slow smile.

      He glared at her.  “How—“

      “I know your mind now, Jason,” she told him.  “And we do happen to be touching at the moment.  Your defenses don’t work on me like this, not anymore.  I can hear your thoughts whenever we touch.  And with some training, you’ll be able to hear mine.”  She touched his face gently.  “But if it bothers you, I won’t do it, I promise.  I can tune you out.”

      “What, what are you going to do?” he asked in worry.

      “Train you,” she smiled.  “I’m not going to turn you in, Jason, don’t be silly.  I don’t care about the Imperium.  I do what I’m told because I have to.  If I can get away with not telling them a word, then I will.  And they can’t catch me,” she winked.  “I’m one of the strongest telepaths on Earth,” she said bluntly, but not in a boasting manner.  She was simply stating fact.  “They can’t pull it out of me by casual scans, because none of the mindbenders on the planet, the Empress’ secret police, are strong enough to breach my defenses without me knowing it.  They’ll never find out from me, and after some education, they’ll never pick it up from you either.

      “I’m supposed to tell them about this, but I’m not.  You’re my friend, and you’re now my lover, and I’m not about to hand you over to them.  I’ll teach you how to control your power, and how to hide the fact that you have power from other Faey  They never have to know.  And as long as we don’t fuck up, they never will.”

      He stared up at her in shock.  She was going to disobey the Imperium, keep him a secret.  She truly wasn’t the Imperium, a loyal subject of the Empress that would do whatever she was told.  The image of her as a cog in their vast machine melted away, and for the first time, he saw her not as an agent of the Empress, but as nothing other than Jyslin Shaddale.

      She gave him a radiant, unbelievably tender smile.  “There, see?  It wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked, sliding her finger along his cheek intimately.  “I told you before, Jason, I’m not interested in the Imperium.  I’m interested in you.  As long as I have you, what could they possibly offer me that’s better?”

      He was touched by her words, by her honest admission.  He put his hand on her cheek, and she leaned against it, smiling down on him with her lovely gray eyes.

      “Oh, if only we had a little more time,” she complained in a longing manner, kissing the palm of his hand, sliding her legs against him sensually.  “But you have to get to school, and I have to get to work.  And I have to take you to school,” she grinned.  “While you’re there, don’t worry too much,” she told him.  “Remember, it takes effort to use.  As long as you don’t try to do anything, nobody’s going to notice.  You might start hearing the thoughts of people around you, and you might overhear it when Faey send to each other.  Those are passive actions, they don’t require effort, and nobody can tell when you’re doing them.”

      “Why could I hear sending?”

      “Jason, sending is nothing but a broadcasted thought that people who are telepathically adept can hear,” she answered.  “It’s what you might call thinking out loud.”

      “I thought that Faey had to allow themselves to hear it.”

      “We do,” she answered.  “We usually tune out the thoughts we hear, but we can leave ourselves open to hear sending, because it’s a little different than just eavesdropping on the surface thoughts of others.”  She patted his hair with a smile.  “You shouldn’t have too much trouble.  The one way you’ve developed your ability is through your ability to defend yourself.  Just keep that up, and no Faey is going to notice anything different about you.  I’ll come over after I’m off duty and start teaching you the other aspects of it.  And you must learn,” she told him seriously.  “You have to get competent with your power and do it fast, Jason.  Right now, when you have the power but haven’t learned how to use it or control it, this is when you’re most vulnerable.  You have got to keep a lid on it and not tip your hand until I can teach you.  After I teach you, no Faey will ever be able to discover your secret.  I’ll even teach you ways to fool them into thinking that they can hear your thoughts, so they don’t probe you all the time.”

      He was still a little scattered, overwhelmed by the thought of it.  If someone had told him that he’d just inherited a million credits, it wouldn’t have registered to him in the slightest.  He had telepathic ability.  He was possessed of the one thing that separated the humans from the Faey, more then the color of their skin or the pointed ears that made them look elfin.  A human had telepathic power, a human now possessed the one weapon against which the human race could not defend against, stand up to.

      The implications were enormous, both personally and in the terms of the human race.  Was he the only one?  Was he some kind of fluke, or were there more humans out there with the same latent potential, which would express after the Faey stimulated it into maturity with their own power?  If that were true, then the human race could stand up to the Faey.  The difference in technology was extreme, but always before it was the fact that the Faey were telepathic which was the one overwhelming factor that the human race could not defeat, which allowed them to crush any kind of rebellion or resistance before it managed to get any kind of start at all.  But if a sizable number of humans were telepathic, and they could somehow learn how to use their power without the Faey—

      That was a pipe dream, and he knew it.  As soon as the Faey realized that humans were showing telepathic ability, they would come down on the human race like a sledgehammer.  They would root them out and deal with them, either with telepathic reprogramming or by killing them.  That was why Jyslin got him out of that theater, because she knew what would happen, and she meant to protect him from them.

      Yet another reason to be impressed with Jyslin, and be receptive to the idea of including her in his life for the immediate future.  She truly was interested in him for who he was, and had demonstrated to his satisfaction that she was not the Imperium.  If anything, she was willing to go against her own people on his behalf.  That was certainly saying something.

      “Let’s get dressed before I start taking advantage of the situation and make us both late,” she said with a leer, reaching down and patting him on the hip.  She got off of him and went to the mirror and slicked her hair over the left side of her head as best she could, then went over to her armor and started by picking up the codpiece, the section most closely compared to a pair of metal shorts.  “Why don’t you wear anything under it?” he asked curiously as she stepped into the piece of armor.

      “Well, we could,” she admitted.  “I could easily wear panties and a bra under the armor, maybe even a pair of skin-hugging shorts or a tank top, and some Faey do wear a bra.  But we can’t take the armor off, and that makes going to the bathroom a tricky proposition when you consider the fact that this is the base on which all the rest of the armor is built,” she said, tapping the codpiece as she slipped it over her hips, the locked its seams closed.  “To get this off, I have to take the armor off my legs and detach it from the stomacher and breastplate, and that takes a while.  I’d pee myself long before I got enough off to go without making a mess.  The crotch of the armor has a locking opening that we use when we have to go to the bathroom,” she told him.  “If I wore panties, it would make getting them out of the way a tricky proposition.  Maya calls it the ‘doorway to heaven’,” Jyslin laughed.  “She once had sex with her husband wearing her armor.  He didn’t appreciate it afterwards, once the bruises started showing up.”

      That was certainly logical.  He nodded in understanding as he sat up.  “Need help?”

      She shook her head.  “A Marine has to be able to get into armor with no help in five minutes.  It’s a drill in basic training.  I can handle it, love.  You need to get dressed.  I have to get you to your dorm room with enough time for you to get ready for your classes.”

      He nodded, climbing out of bed and looking around for his clothes, which were scattered all over the room.  Her dress was thrown on the floor, and he reached down and picked it up, brushing it to get the wrinkles out.  “You should hang this up,” he told her.

      “There are hangers over there,” she said, pointing at the closet as she locked the leg greaves that protected her thighs in place, securing them to the codpiece.  The greaves overlapped the codpiece, forcing her to take them off before she could get the codpiece off.  It really was the base of the armor.  She locked the flexible metal skin that filled the space between the joints to the inside edge of the greaves on her right leg, settling the kneecap protector in place.  “Less time watching me armor up and more time dressing,” she told him with a sly wink.

      “Sorry.  I’ve been curious how it fits together for a while.”

      “Trust me, love, in a month, you’ll know how it fits as well as I do,” she said with another wink.  Jyslin loved to wink, for some reason.  “Dress.”

      He hung up her expensive dress, then started dressing.  He had to gather his clothes from various parts of the room, but he started tending to it quickly, his mind still racing with what he had learned this eventful morning.  About his telepathic gifts, about Jyslin, about everything.  It was all different now, and he needed a little time to sort it out in his mind, figure out what he wanted to do.

      After putting on his vest, he looked and saw that she had all her armor on from the waist down.  She was settling the sollaret boot on her foot, then took up the front half of the stomacher, the piece of armor that was flexible, that was between the breastplate and the codpiece.  She attached it to the breastplate’s bottom edge, hooked the back half to the back of the breastplate, then latched the top buckles on the shoulders of the two breastplate sections together.  Then she picked up the entire assembly and slid it over her head, pushing her head through the opening for her neck.  She settled it on her shoulders easily, then sealed the side seams and then tended to attaching the base of the stomacher to the inside edge of the top of the codpiece.

      “Efficient,” he complemented.

      “I’ve done this a long time, love,” she told him as she reached behind her and locked the back of the stomacher to the inside back edge of the codpiece without looking.  “Let me get the upper greaves on, and we can go.  I can get the bracers and gauntlets on in the car.”

      “What car?”

      “Didn’t you see the Toyota parked in front of the house?” she chuckled.  “That’s my car.”

      “I thought you guys had hovercars.”

      “That’s the Corps’ vehicle,” she answered.  “When we first got here , we weren’t allowed to bring Faey technology vehicles here for our own personal use.  Most of us bought human cars when we got here, and hell, they’re just as good as hovercars, so most of us never bothered to bring in our own personal cars once they lifted the ban.  I have a hovercar, but I had to leave it with my parents.  I know you’ve seen Faey in human cars.”

      “Well, sure, but I never much thought about what it meant.”

      “Well, now you do,” she told him.  “When you see a Faey in a human car, it’s because she’s off duty and she’s about on personal business.”  She locked the two greaves around her right arm,over the flexible metal skin that protected her shoulder and armpit, flexing it a few times, then reaching for the flexible metal skin for her left shoulder.  She quickly got that on, then the greaves, and then she picked up the forearm bracers and gauntlets and swept them into a small bag that was by the stand.  “Alright, we can go,” she said, locking the web belt that held her sidearm around her slender waist, then pulling down her rifle from the wall.

      He nodded and picked up his tie, pulling it over his head.  She handed him her rifle, letting him carry it, trusting him with it as they filed out of her room, then out of her house.  She locked the door with a key on a small silver ring, then tucked it into one of the pouches on her web belt.  “We have a stop to make before we go to your dorm,” she announced.

      That stop was at the guard post for the front gate.  They didn’t get out of her car—which surprised him that she could drive it with that armor, but then again, it showed how flexible the armor was—just pulled up the gate house and rolled down the window.  “I want an entry pass for him,” she called to the gate guard.

      “What kind?” she asked in return.

      “Unconditional,” she replied.  “He’s going to be coming and going from now on.”

      She smiled knowingly.  “Sure.  Hold on a second.  Could you look this way for me, sir?” she asked as she reached into her little cubby and took out a small camera..  She took his picture and stepped in, seating it to a base as she started typing on a holographic keyboard.  “Name?”

      “Jason Fox,” Jyslin answered for him.

      “Thank you.”  She typed a few more seconds, touched the screen a few times, then reached under the shelf and pulled out a small laminated card.  “Here you go,” she told him, handing it to Jyslin.  “Just present that card to the gate guards when you come, honey, and they’ll let you in,” she told him.  “It’ll also let you into the base exchange and the comissary, and all the other places on base.  Don’t lose it.  It’s a ten credit fine to replace it.”

      “I’ll remember that,”Jason said as he looked at it.  It was in Faey, and it said he was a base resident, the “permanent resident guest” of Sergeant Jyslin Shaddale.  A nice, technical term for boyfriend.

      He could live with that title.  He looked over at her and realized that he would very much be comfortable with that title.

      “Permanent resident, eh?” he asked, putting the card in his wallet.

      “Hey, I want you to have all the perks being a Marine’s babe entails,” she said with a wink as they pulled out onto Belle Chase Highway.

      “A Marine’s babe?” he asked archly.

      “You are a babe,” she told him, blowing a kiss at him.  “You’re my babe.”

      “Don’t get me in trouble at school,” he warned.  “Some students are more vocal about their dissent than me.”

      “They’re not going to see me on campus, only when I visit you in the dorm,” she told him.  “They don’t seem to have any problem with Symone.”

      “Symone’s different,” he told her.  “Everyone likes Symone.”

      “Well, they can all like me.”

      He gave her a look, then laughed.  “No,” he told her.  “They all love Symone because she’s charismatic and fun.  Nobody that meets her can possibly not like her.  That’s not you,” he said with a slight smile.

      “I can so be fun,” she said primly.

      “Fun, yes,” he agreed.  “But you don’t have the kind of charisma that Symone does.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Why don’t you come by the dorm tonight and see?” he asked, leaning against the door as they got onto the West Bank Expressway, the elevated expressway that led to the bridge over the Mississippi River, back to the city.

      “I certainly am coming over tonight,” she told him.  “We have to start your education, as quickly as possible.”

      “Then you’ll see.  Everyone is Symone’s friend.  To the people in the dorm, the fact that she’s Faey doesn’t matter.  Everyone loves her, and if anyone gives her any flak, the entire dorm would take turns beating the piss out of the guy.”

      “Wow,” she breathed.

      “I don’t know how the people in the dorm will react to you, but then again, if Symone says you’re alright, then that’s that,” he said seriously.  “An endorsement from Symone should be all it’ll take.”

      “You’ll have to ask her to do that.”

      “She’ll be over after she gets off duty.”

      She drove him back to his dorm on Saint Charles Avenue, on the corner of the Tulane campus, and he watched the traffic go by, lost in thought.  Telepathy.  He had that talent.  He was a human, and now he was expressing the one gift, the single advantage that the Faey had that kept the human race in slavery.  But it wasn’t much, because after all, he was only one man.  It would take an army of telepaths to kick the Faey off Earth, an army equipped with weapons that could make the Faey retreat.  In the end, it was nothing but a dangerous curse that could quite possibly get him killed, should the Faey find out about him.

      It was a strange thought, that he had such a mysterious power, a power he had hated because of what it meant.  But now he had it, and though it changed very little in the grand scheme of things, it changed his life a great deal.  He had to be careful now, always cautious, always vigilent, to keep his dark, deadly secret.  His life depended on it.

      What would it be like to be telepathic?  Well, from what he’d managed to figure out, he’d be able to hear the surface thoughts of the people around him.  Jyslin had talked about that before.  He’d be able to overhear Faey sending to each other, and from the sound of it, Jyslin was going to teach him all the tricks of it, like attacking, defending, and a way to deceive the Faey into not probing him all the time.  That would be nice, a relief to him, but the rest of it…he wasn’t sure how he was going to feel about that.  But one thing was for sure, he’d better learn it.  His life might someday depend on being able to attack and overwhelm a Faey who discovered his secret.

      And on another angle, perhaps buying that airskimmer would be a very good idea.  That way, he always had an escape route.  He could flee up into Tennessee or Kentucky or West Virginia, states which had been completely depopulated of humans…or at least officially.  There were squatters out there, humans who had fled into the uninhabited forest areas rather than accept the Faey order, or to esape being sent to a farm, or to escape after pissing off the Faey.  It was lawless out there, as bad as any Mad Max movie, but that might be preferable to being reprogrammed by the Faey secret police, the Imperial Gestapo as some called them, or perhaps being dissected to find out why a human had somehow gained telepathic powers.

      Yes, that was a good idea.  He’d have to start looking into it.  And perhaps discretely collect up the components he’d need to build a plasma rifle, and build himself his own suit of armor.  If he did have to flee into the wildlands, it might behoove him to go into that chaos armed to the teeth and sporting an overwhelming advantage.

      Just in case.

      He blinked when he saw the dorm, and to his surprise, she went past it, past the campus, going all the way up to where Saint Charles ended, merging with Carrolton.  She pulled over and patted him on the leg.  “I think this is far enough away,” she told him.  “I don’t want them to see you get out of a Faey’s car.  So you avoid any friction.”

      “I appreciate that,” he said as he opened the door.

      “Aat, kiss,” she ordered.

      He chuckled, then leaned over and gave her a lingering kiss.  She actually licked his nose before he pulled away, giving him a wide, bright smile.  “You have a good day at school, love.  I’ll be back as soon as I’m off duty.  Remember, don’t try anything, and if you start hearing voices in your head, don’t panic.  That’s you overhearing the thoughts of those around you.  Just listen.  You’d be surprised what you can learn,” she said with a wink.

      “I’ll be careful.  Now let me out.”

      “Have a good, uneventful day,” she told him seriously.

      “Amen,” he agreed.

To:   Title ToC 3 5

Chapter 4

            Brista, 19 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox calendar;

            Saturday, 24 May 2007, Native regional reckoning

            New Orleans, Gamia Province, American sector

      It was like an entirely different world had been unveiled before him.

      He walked in a kind of half-daze, virutally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of chatter that surrounded him.  It gave him a headache and scattered his concentration, because what he was hearing were the unguarded thoughts of all the people around him.

      It was like hearing their voices in his own mind, just as Jyslin had described it, like thinking thoughts that were not his own in different voices.  Thoughts of school, of home, of the Faey, of stresses from the workload of school, to sex.  He glanced at people as he seemed to figure out whose thoughts belonged to who, sort of getting a sense of direction out of it after about an hour of practice.  Each person was like a beacon of broadcasted thought, as clear to him as if they were saying everything that he was hearing.

      It was damned distracting, so much so that he didn’t hear a single word Professor Ailan said during plasma class.  He was too distracted by the cacophony of thoughts bombarding him from every side.  It was like being in a room surrounded by screaming people.

      At least nobody said much of anything to him when he got back to the dorm.  People did notice that he was dragging his ass back in the morning after, but the fact that he walked back left enough opening for people not to be quite sure what happened.  He didn’t answer any questions, simply changed and got his pack ready for Saturday classes.  It didn’t really hit him until he got out among the other students, close to them, starting as a faint buzzing between his ears, then growing steadily more discernible and louder, until it was at its current level, which was giving him a headache.

      It was both a wondrous and frightening experience, hearing other people think.  It would have made him think he was going insane had Jyslin not warned him of the possibility, had told him what it would feel like.  Luckily for him, she had prepared him for this, so he was able to approach it with some calm reserve, not let it show that something was bothering him.

      He sat there as the sound of it all seemed to drone on, then blur together as if the competing voices were cancelling each other out.  He had his eyes closed, rubbing his temples, when a sudden bang almost startled him out of his chair.  Ailan was standing by his desk, a heavy plasma conduit sleeve resting on his desk from where the Faey had slammed it down.  “I said class is over, Jason,” he said with a smile.  “What’s wrong?”

      “Headache,” he answered, rubbing his temples, closing his eyes again.  “I used to get them when my father was ill.  Stress.”

      “So, last night was the big date,” he said, leaning over the desk.  “How did it go?”

      “About what you’d expect,” he answered.  “Dinner, opera, then she took me home.”

      “Which home?” he prompted with a sly smile.

      Jason gave him a flat look.

      Ailan laughed.  “It’s all the buzz, because you didn’t come back to your dorm last night.  A few people were wondering if you killed her.”

      “She’s quite alive,” he said mildly, wincing as a particularly strong throb jagged through him.  “Truth be told, she convinced me that she’s not at all what I expected her to be.  She hates the Imperium nearly as much as I do, so we have common ground.”

      “I’m not much of a fan of it either, Jason, but we all do what we have to do,” he admitted openly.  “I am Faey, and I believe in the Empress, but I think she should change the way that the bureaucracy does some things.  They’ve become extremely corrupt, and their corruption is making the nobles corrupt, and when noble houses get corrupt, they start thinking of breaking away from the Imperium.  If she doesn’t do something soon, we might have another civil war.  We don’t need that right now, not with this war with the Skaa.”

      “You’re complaining to the wrong man, Professor,” Jason told him.  “I’d be overjoyed if Earth broke away from the Imperium.”

      “Be careful what you wish for,” Ailan said seriously.  “You might find your yoke under a renegade noble ten times worse than subjugation under the Empress.”

      “True,” he admitted.

      “Well, see you during lab,” he said.  “Hope you feel better.”

      He didn’t talk to anyone, mainly because he could hear every thought everyone around him had.  He learned quite a few dirty little secrets during that time, things he would much rather have not known, and found out that being privy to the thoughts of others was not as interesting as some people might have thought.  People would approach him and ask what happened last night, or try to chitchat, but their thoughts told a completely different tale.  Some of them were jealous, some were angry, and few meant what they said when they talked to him.  People who acted one way had thoughts which were quite different from what he knew of them.  It was quite an eye-opening experience.

      And not entirely a good one.

      There was a great deal of trepidation involved in it.  He avoided every Faey who crossed his path, moving quickly to get away from them, deathly afraid they’d somehow find out.  But when he passed by two Army regulars patrolling the campus, he learned that Jyslin’s other warning was also correct.  He could hear Faey sending.

He’s cute, he distinctly heard, much louder and clearer than the surface thoughts of the people around him.

That’s the human the Marines had so much trouble with, the other answered.  He’s taken.

      More the pity, the first said with regret as they wandered away.

      That blew his mind anew.  He heard them perfectly, and they didn’t seem to notice, mainly because was careful not to let his shock register on his face.  He could hear Faey sending!

      He honestly had no idea what happened most of that day, only a blur of fear and amazement.  He looked up after what seemed like a few minutes after plasma class and found himself standing in front of the dorm, and it was nearly four o’clock.  He could not remember anything from the other classes.  He honestly didn’t know if he even showed up for them, and that scared him quite a bit.

      He ambled up to his room and immediately checked his panel, to see if he’d thought to record the classes.  He did.  Well, that was a relief.  He wouldn’t show up on Monday and Tuesday with blank looks when they asked for his homework.  He sat at the desk and put his head in his hands and tried to get a handle on his headache, tried to push out all the sounds of the thoughts from the students in the dorm, tried to center himself and ignore them, falling back on his mental exercises.  After a few moments, the sounds of the voices retreated from him, leaving him feeling blissfully alone in his own head.  It was quiet, serene, the headache eased, and he felt much better.

      A knock on the door startled him half out of his wits.  He reached over and opened it, and found Jyslin standing there, hand on the doorframe, waiting for him to open it.  She wore the tank top and shorts she always wore when she visited before working out, but a blue tank top this time.  She stepped in and closed the door behind her, then bent down and gave him a lingering kiss.  “I see it’s awake,” she said immediately.

      “I haven’t been able to concentrate all day,” he said wearily.  “I can’t even remember most of it.”

      “Your brain is having trouble processing all this new information,” she told him.  “I think the first thing you need to learn is how to tune it out.  It shouldn’t take you long to learn, it’s