Subjugation

By James Galloway (aka Fel)





ToC 1

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.

ToC 1





To: Title ToC 2

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.