Chapter 2
Karista, 10 Shiaa, 4392, Orthodox calendar;
Thursday, 15 May 2007, Native regional reckoning
New Orleans, Gamia Province, American Sector
It wasn’t easy to study, but he managed it somehow.
All that insanity with Jyslin had completely ruined a day’s studying, and again, if it wasn’t for his habit of recording his classes, he’d be behind. Getting behind when he had seven classes was not a good thing. He felt lucky that she didn’t follow him home, but then again, she was probably still in the Plaid trying to find him. It was only about six, and he knew that when it got dark and curfew kicked in, she’d know where to find him.
He had that test in Advanced Plasma Fundamentals tomorrow, but he felt ready for it. They were studying conduits and PPG’s in a little more detail, and anything involving plasma interested him enough to study well ahead. Plasma conduit was made of crystallized silicon, and it was actually rather pretty. It looked like hollow tubes of glass, but surprisingly tough, and the high-energy plasma was carried inside. Silicon conduit could carry any kind of phased plasma, but not plasma in its raw state. That was the clever little trick the Faey had discovered, which was the only reason they could use plasma as a power source. They phased the plasma into different states, and when so phased and set up that the individual phases of it opposed one another, it made it safe. Just like how humans had learned to use three-phase electricity, the Faey used multiple phases of plasma. But it worked much differently, for they phased plasma into alternate states of material existence, spreading out its energy into many different quantum states. That was called metaphased plasma, and it was why plasma could flow in a glass tube and not be ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. They had other types of phasing techniques, such as interphased, hyperphased, and polarity phased. Interphased plasma was used to power spatial drives, since metaphased plasma distorted the system. Hyperphased plasma was only mentioned but not explained, because it was a military application, used to make the plasma torpedoes fired from their battleships. Polarity phased plasma was very low-energy and worked very well in microscopic applications, and was what powered virtually all very small devices.
All this plasma was generated by the PPG, the Plasma Power Generator, and it itself was an amazing creation of ingenuity. He’d read the history of the device, and it showed the boundary from where the Faey were limited to their own star system, the Draconis system on earth charts, and when they were released to conquer and rule other planets. The PPG was, literally, a miniature sun. That’s exactly what it was. The Faey had technology that affected space itself, allowing them to stretch it, pull it, even tear holes in it, and that was the technology that allowed them to build the PPG. Inside the device was a “bubble” of stretched space, and inside that bubble of stretched space, isolated from the rest of space by the boundaries of its bubble, was a hot nuclear fusion reaction. Just like the nuclear fusion that took place in stars, that’s what was going on inside a PPG. Within the bubble were temperatures approaching fifteen thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but because it was in that isolated bubble of manipulated space, the heat and radiation could not escape it. The bubble was breached in two places so plasma could be drawn out of it, then be fed back into it after it completed its circuit. A PPG’s size and power rating varied, and that affected its shelf life. The PPG in the cutter he’d borrowed had a shelf life of about a year. After a year, the material in the PPG’s bubble would fuse into an iron core, and then the PPG would exhaust itself and stop working. It had a battery of sorts that kept the bubble intact until the PPG could be serviced, for the iron core of a spent PPG was larger than the PPG itself. If the bubble broke down, that volume would return to normal space, and make the PPG literally explode as something larger than itself suddenly occupied its fusion chamber. The device had a couple of very serious cascading safeguards to prevent a bubble breach when the device was fusing, because a breach would cause a cataclysmic fusion-induced explosion that would be about as powerful as five hundred Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. The bubble, or core as it was called, could be ejected from the PPG, sent through a micro-wormhole and out into deep space, and the PPG had protocols for doing that if it detected a disastrous breakdown in progress. It had several other conditional protocols that would lead to a core ejection, such as readings that went over certain limits or a disruption in the bubble integrity. The PPG could eject the core before a tear in the bubble led to a fusion explosion, but the backlash fed back through the tear and tended to destroy everything within ten feet of a damaged PPG.
Because of the danger a breached PPG could pose, they were heavily protected in the devices in which they were installed. They were always surrounded by a metal called vandirium, a Faey alloy that was about a hundred times stronger than titanium, armor to protect against some kind of catastrophic breach. Faey armor was made out of a variation of vandirium alloy that was even stronger, but was more expensive to produce.
It was funny that cost should even matter, but it did. The Faey had a good grasp on molecular-level physics, and that had led to the construction of matter replicators. But the problem with them was that they could only produce materials in base elements, and they couldn’t replicate any element heavier than the metal Palladium. Silver, the next element on the table, could not be replicated, nor could gold or many of the metals that the Faey used to construct armor and vessels. It was even funnier that the human table of the elements was similar to the Faey version. They had many, many more elements on their table than the human table, different variations of known elements because of the number of neutrons in the nucleus, but it was still organizationally similar.
That was why they Faey needed Earth for farming, because they couldn’t replicate food. It was also why silver and gold were valuable to the Faey. It was also why they didn’t give their occupational forces the real armor that they equipped their soldiers with. He’d seen some on CivNet somewhere, powered armor with flight packs, integrated weapons in the arms instead of external weapons they had to carry. That armor was much more expensive, its materials couldn’t be replicated, so they’d equipped their occupational forces with only the weapons and armor they needed to keep the technologically backwards humans in check. Their weapons, well, those were the real deal. Faey used tiny bursts of high-energy metaphased plasma as their primary weapon, which exploded on contact with solid matter and also tended to burn through as it penetrated. The result was like an explosive bullet, which punched into a target then detonated. Living things shot by a metaphased plasma weapon tended to explode from the inside out when blood vaporized from the heat and that steam applied pressure to the flesh, aggravating the explosive contact the plasma had with a much cooler material. The result was a charge of metaphased plasma only two millimeters thick could leave a hole nearly a foot across. It was quite gruesome; even a graze could blow a limb off the body. What made them very nasty was that the fact that because they existed in multiple quantum states, it allowed most of the energy of the blast to pass through coherent energy shields. Any plasma state that matched the state of the shield would be stopped, but the remaining energy of the weapon would pass through and hit what it protected. The Faey employed shields on their warships, but the shields on ships they attacked would be useless.
CivNet was like the human internet… someone with enough patience could find just about anything. It was all in Faey, and he didn’t speak or read the language, but his panel could translate everything into English, so it made it legible. He’d found the technical specs for plasma pistols and rifles on CivNet, as well as the internal technical schematics for a PPG. Given those, and the materials, he could build his own plasma weapon, and he had this wild idea about secretly building a stockpile of weapons and using them to try to overthrow the Faey, but it was a useless dream, and he knew it. Faey telepathy would crush any attempt before it got started. He hadn’t heard anything about it, but he was certain that some other student out there had had the same idea and had tried it, but been found out and stopped before he got off the ground.
That damn telepathy. It just kept coming back and coming back and coming back. Without that, the Faey would not have such an easy time of it here on Earth. It made them very relaxed about their new vassals, almost arrogantly dismissive of them, because what could they do? They sent humans to school to learn Faey technology, because what could they do? They didn’t censor anything, not even the internet, because what could people do? They could think about revolt and object to the Faey all they wanted, but the instant they tried to do anything about it, the Faey would simply swoop in, use telepathy to root out the plot, and crush it before it could even get started. And people caught trying to overthrow the system weren’t killed, they were “reprogrammed” by Faey telepathic specialists, turned into good little loyal subjects of her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Dahnai. Why kill a good asset of the Imperium when you could simply use telepathic reprogramming to make him a lapdog?
To Jason, death was better. To be reprogrammed like that, to do what they wanted him to do, but he felt that somehow, deep inside himself, to know what they had done to him… that was the ultimate torture.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the clock. Six fifteen. Curfew was at nine, when all humans had to be off the streets or have a pass to move about… which were admittedly easy to get. All you had to do was call the Population Control Center and tell them you had to go out. You didn’t even have to give a reason. Tell them you’re going out, they send you a pass through your vidlink that you copy onto paper, and then you go. The curfew was installed more to rein in gangs of youths that liked to vandalize things more than anything else, and the news said that it’d probably be lifted next month. Jason couldn’t do that, of course. He didn’t have a vidlink. He was a student, and he had a panel, which served as everything, including a vidlink. He’d download the pass to his panel and print it out from there. His panel was everything; computer, organizer, vidlink all rolled into one. Besides, in his tiny, cramped room, he didn’t have the space for a vidlink. Those things were about the size of an old human personal computer, complete with a hard keyboard, and if he had one on his desk, he wouldn’t have room for anything else. Vidlinks did about everything a phone and personal computer did, and everyone got one, even farm workers in their little rooms at their farmhouses. There were still stand-alone cell phones, tied to the same system that ran the vidlinks, itself part of CivNet, but one had to buy a phone, where vidlinks were issued to people free of charge. It was just one of the little things that humans didn’t grumble too much about when it came to the Faey.
Bored, he paused studying to surf through CivNet’s news, which was of course biased and inflamed. There was only one news service, INN, the Imperial News Network, and it was but the mouthpiece of the Empress. But, he had to admit, they did cover what they considered news rather thoroughly. They just didn’t openly question her Majesty’s policies or decisions. He switched over to pan-empire, the real Faey news, where a blond Faey sat behind a desk, wearing a strange white robe, and talked in Faey about the news of the Imperium while three-dimensional holograms showed beside her. Earth even showed up in these broadcasts from time to time, such as last week, when an earthquake had rocked California. That made the major news, and they showed holos of Faey and human workers cleaning everything up.
Nothing he could make out. They showed images of some other planet somewhere where a storm had done damage to a seaside town-a green ocean, weird, that was-and other images that made little sense to him. Without the ability to speak Faey, it really would be a string of unconnected pictures, nothing more.
Wait, here was something. The Faey were at war with some other race, he knew that, and they were showing images of damage to a battle fleet that must have just returned from combat. They put up statistics over the images, probably how many were killed, how many of the other side were killed, probably none of it accurate, that sort of thing. He did remember seeing a picture of one of those people, big bipedal red-scaled reptilian things that looked pretty nasty, and he wondered how they stacked up against the Faey. He could imagine it now… big reptilian monsters that looked vaguely like guys in Godzilla suits fighting an army of dainty little female elves with big fuckin’ guns.
Now that was funny.
Not that it was right to trivialize war, but if they were fighting the Faey, then maybe he should toast them the next time he had a beer with Tim.
There was no knock at the door. It opened, and Jyslin came bursting through, again out of her armor. He glanced at her absently, then went back to watching his panel screen. Today she had on a black tank-top that showed off her generous chest and a pair of curve-hugging gray shorts, with running shoes on her feet. Her skin was shiny with sweat; she must have been working out. He could smell her sweat, and found that it was a strange spicy-musky smell that was oddly appealing. Damn Faey, even their sweat smelled good. “Well?” she said hotly.
“Well what?” he countered evenly, not bothering to look at her again.
“How did you do it?” she demanded.
“You think I’m going to tell you that?” he asked with a scoff. “Please.”
He expected her to rant at him or shout, but she instead laughed. “Fair enough,” she said generously, then closed the door behind her. “I thought you had a test tomorrow.”
“I do,” he answered. “I’m taking a break.”
“Watching the news, huh?” she noted, looking over his shoulder. “Damn, the skaa did some damage this time.”
“Skaa?”
“The reptilians we’re fighting at the moment,” she answered. “On the other side of the empire. We’re in a dispute with them over a couple of star systems. The fighting’s more or less contained to battles inside the disputed territory. Neither side wants an open war.”
“Why is that?”
“Our technology is better, but they’re like uncountable,” she replied. “I think their home planet has something like ten trillion people on it. They can put an army on a planet fifty times bigger than anyone else and win by sheer force of numbers.” She looked at him. “Wait, why are you being nice to me?” she demanded.
“Because you’re not acting like an asshole,” he answered honestly.
She laughed. “Will you go out with me?”
“No.”
“Well, what good does it do then?” she asked with a laugh and a wink. “I didn’t know you speak Faey.”
“I don’t. But you can figure some things out if you’re patient enough to try.”
“Want to learn?” she offered.
“I don’t have time for language lessons.”
“Who said I’d teach you the long way? It’ll take about five minutes.”
He realized immediately what she meant. Telepathic instruction. The Faey didn’t do it to humans in school because of certain ways things worked with their power. They could use it to implant knowledge, like history or language or something like that, pure data, but not any information that required the use of motor control. It had to do with the way the brain worked, and it was too complicated for him to understand. All he knew was that was why the Faey had to teach people things the same way that the humans did. They couldn’t just “zap” that information into people’s heads-well, they could, but it really wouldn’t do much good, because they couldn’t really use what they were taught without practice, and having the knowledge to do something without having the skill to perform the task was an exceedingly dangerous combination. To prevent cataclysmic accidents, they didn’t teach any way other than the old-fashioned way. She could teach him Faey with telepathy, because it was purely a mental activity. It didn’t require anything other than thinking, and those were the only things that Faey could implant via telepathic instruction. If she taught him Faey, he’d be able to understand it fine, but he’d have to practice making those sounds to speak it, and practice to learn how to write it or type in it. Those were motor functions, and they had to be practiced until perfected.
“No,” he said adamantly. “I’ll learn it the way I learn everything else. You’re not putting your hooks in my head, Jyslin.”
“We’ll see,” she said with a wink. “I’ll bet you fifty credits you’ll be speaking Faey by next Friday.”
“Not even.”
“Easy money for me,” she announced.
“I never said I’d take the bet. I don’t gamble.”
“Be glad you’re not in the military, then,” she laughed.
“My father was.”
“Oh? What did he do?”
“He was a fighter pilot,” he answered, backing out of the Faey news broadcast and returning to his homework.
“It must be something to fly one of those hydrocarbon engine planes,” she mused. “No control at all. It would be scary.” She looked at him. “Almost any pilot with kids teaches the kids to fly.”
He nodded. “Got my conditional pilot’s license when I was twelve,” he affirmed. “Got my unconditional license at sixteen, just a month before my father died. It made him very happy to see me get it, and about that time, I’d do anything to make my father happy.”
“He was sick?”
He nodded. “Cancer.”
“It’s too bad we didn’t get here sooner. We could have cured him.”
“If you’d have gotten here when he was still alive, you would have had to shoot him out of the sky,” he said bluntly. “My dad wouldn’t have accepted the subjugation. He would have fought, no matter what the odds.”
“Sounds like a spunky fellow.”
For some reason, Jason took exceptional offense to the word spunky. “I think it’s time for you to leave,” he said stiffly.
“Fine, but now I have the plan for our second date,” she told him. “We’re going flying in one of those prop planes they have sitting out at the lakeside airport.”
“Keep dreaming.”
“It’s no dream,” she said, quite seriously. She grabbed the neckline of her tank top and fanned herself absently. “I need to go clean up. I’ll swing by later and see how you’re doing.”
“Don’t bother,” he said in a growling tone.
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow after I get off duty,” she said easily, opening the door, stepping through, then turning around and looking at him. “Then again, I’ll know what’s going on. Lyn and Bryn will be escorting you tomorrow. They’ll keep in touch. See you later,” she said with a wink, then she closed the door.
“That’s what you think,” he said in a low, dangerous tone, glancing at the little cord sticking out from under his bed. He already had their little surprise ready and waiting.
He grumbled a little, still feeling a tad stung by her flippant remark about his beloved father, then got back to studying.
Lyn and Bryn were willowy raven-haired sisters, identical twins, who had managed to stay together from their conscription on. They were very patient, clever, and methodical women. They served as the squad’s logical reasoning, offering cool, sensible advice in stressful situations, and their powerful mental bond, the kind of bond only twins could enjoy, gave them an awesome range of telepathic contact when they were separated. This strong bond and the insane range it gave them was a useful tactical advantage in combat, allowing for uninterceptible communications between two elements of the squad when they split up. They were careful, almost timidly cautious women who never blundered into anything without thinking it through, and weren’t the kind of women who fell for stupid, inane little traps.
Except for today.
What made it even more embarrassing for them was that they’d been warned about Jason. They’d been there last night when he vanished from the Plaid, and they were rather impressed with his ability to foil an entire Marine squad. Jyslin and Maya had specifically warned them that Jason was a very clever and crafty man, and he knew that they were going to be out there waiting for him. She even went so far as to specifically warn them that he might have a little surprise waiting for them when he left his dorm, something to discourage pursuit.
But, like most Faey, when they got curious about something, they absolutely had to satisfy that curiosity. It was a racial trait, very nearly a racial liability, both one of the reasons they were so technologically advanced and a reason they’d gotten into a fair number of wars that could have been avoided if they’d just minded their own business.
What got their curiosity was a little silver egg that was sitting on the stoop of the dorm’s main entrance. It was on a little metal stand, obviously put there deliberately, just sitting on the top landing of the steps waiting. The humans simply stepped around the egg, as if it was supposed to be there, which made it even more unusual. Lyn and Bryn got out of their hovercar-century old piece of junk, why couldn’t they bring in some modern equipment!-and that little egg immediately got their attention. It just sat there, unclaimed, untouched, and completely ignored by the humans who stepped around it as they filed out to go to school.
“What is that?” Lyn asked a short brunette female human as she rushed out, obviously running late.
“Dunno, there’s a note on the board not to touch it,” she answered quickly and honestly. “It’s probably an experiment someone’s doing.”
Lyn let the girl go, and the twin Marines regarded the egg with curiosity.
Should we? Bryn asked mentally. They almost never spoke when they communicated with one another.
It’s probably a trap, Lyn returned.
We have to go get Jyslin’s beaux anyway. Let’s just take a look at it as we go by. We don’t have to touch it.
We’d best not. I still say it’s a trap.
I think so too, but the humans got very close to it and nothing happened. So long as we don’t get any closer to it than they did, we should be alright.
Lyn furrowed her brow. That’s a good point. Alright, but we don’t touch.
Lyn and Bryn went up the steps, their boots clacking on the concrete, and stooped over a little to inspect the egg, careful not to get too close to it. It was a featureless, perfectly smooth egg of a shiny metal, probably refined chromium or hardened mercury. Their reflections in the egg were distorted by its curvature, making them both look like they had eyes or noses ten times bigger than the rest of their faces.
“Good morning,” came a steady, almost amused call from the street, by their car. The turned and looked and saw the human Jyslin had set them on, the student Jason. How had he gotten out of the building without them seeing it? There was only one entrance to the dorm! He was in a simple white tee shirt with no decoration, a blue denim short-sleeved shirt worn unbuttoned over the tee shirt, faded jeans, and ragged old sneakers. He had his brown backpack slung over one shoulder, and the other hand held a small, featureless little device with a single flashing red button on its face. With a flick of his thumb, he pressed that button.
Bedlam!
Something smashed into them from behind, throwing them forward. Both of them tried to put their hands up to protect their faces from being planted in the sidewalk, but something grabbed hold of them and prevented them from reaching the bottom of the steps. Both Lyn and Bryn tried to move, but found that they were stuck fast in something!
Lyn’s head wasn’t stuck in whatever it was, so she turned and looked behind them. It was crash foam, a special foam that they used in vehicles that, on trigger from a sensor, erupted out and filled the volume of a vehicle’s cavity, then instantly hardened into a soft solid to restrict the passengers. The result was a springy, elastic material that absorbed shock and protected the occupants of a crashing vehicle from suffering serious injury, but also stuck fast to anything it was touching as it hardened, as securely as any glue, nearly as securely as molecular annealing. The foam was supposed to decay five seconds after the vehicle came to a stop, to allow the occupants to get out, but then Lyn remembered that it was decayed by a second device that deployed after the sensors told it that the vehicle was at a rest.
They were stuck fast, and they’d stay like that until someone brought a foam decay module!
“Have a nice day,” he told them mildly, putting the little remote in his pocket, then turning and meandering towards school at an easy pace that looked as if he had not a care in the world.
They sent to each other frantically to make sure that the other was alright, that the foam wasn’t blocking mouth and nose. Lyn and Bryn both were frozen in the foam with their heads lower to the ground than their feet, and all Bryn could see was the sidewalk just in front of the steps. The foam had hardened around her neck, and she couldn’t move it more than just a little bit, since fringes of the foam were attached to the lobes of her ears, and if she tried to move too much, she’d rip her ears off.
Lyn glowered in the direction of the retreating human, then she burst into helpless laughter. Bryn joined her seconds later.
What a man! Jyslin was lucky she found him first! Lyn and Bryn both were just a little bit jealous at Jyslin’s good fortune!
Well, do we hang here all morning, or humiliate ourselves and send for help? Bryn asked after she got control of herself. If I remember right, the foam will dissolve on its own in a few hours.
I’m not hanging here all morning, Lyn countered.
Well, it should be fun following him around the rest of the day.
No, Lyn replied. He beat us fair, so we leave him alone. He earned it.
That he did, Bryn agreed. I just wonder where he got the foam, she mused.
I don’t think we want to know.
You’re probably right, Bryn acceded, then she sputtered aloud and started laughing again.
For some reason, those two didn’t come back after he glued them to the sidewalk with crash foam, but that suited Jason just fine.
He took his test that morning and got the highest score in the class, then handed in his physics project after lunch. It still worked, despite what he did to it, a little sensor that measured flux in the spatial fabric that Professor Umera had everyone build as a lab exercise. It was nothing more than assembling pre-fabricated pieces, but it was still almost fun to do.
After lunch there was calculus, then came his second plasma-oriented course of the day, one of four such courses he took this semester, also taught by Ailan. Advanced Plasma Fundamentals, Introduction to Plasma Dynamics (the physics of plasma, which he had to take in conjunction with his physics class), Theoretical Plasma Systems I, and the lab companion class for Advanced Plasma Fundamentals, the class to which he was going. The other class was both lecture and lab, but this class was for lab, with only occasional lecture if Ailan didn’t get the lecture finished from the last class. Those were hard enough, but stack calculus, Imperial History I (ancient Faey history), and Xeno-Psychology I (basically the Faey teaching the humans learning Faey technology how not to insult the Faey when interacting with them).
After lab, Xeno-Psych was the next class for today, and it was held in the old Tulane building on the far side of campus, twenty minutes after lab let out. He always took his time walking over there, and as a result, he always got into the classroom about a minute before Professor Tia-the youngest of all his teachers and without doubt the cutest-was ready to start class. She was a little doll, fairly short for a Faey woman, with hair that was actually blue, a very dark shade of blue that was much darker than her skin, almost midnight blue. She had the cutest little face, very cherubic and a bit mischievous, with noticeable dimples in her cheeks. She also had a very raucous sense of humor. Tia could get downright dirty sometimes, and she loved to tell bawdy jokes during class. Tia was equal measure of angel and devil wrapped up in one insufferably cute little package.
“Afternoon,” she called, which was repeated rather unenthusiastically by her students. “Well, there’s been a little change in plans, people. They just handed down a curriculum change, and we have to put it into effect.”
That got everyone’s attention. They all looked up at her from their panels.
“Usually we do the language insertion at the start of Xeno II, but they’ve moved that to the beginning of Xeno I, effective today. Since we’re already halfway through the semester, that means we have to go back and get that out of the way now, before we continue on in our current chapter.
“Excuse me, Professor, what is an insertion?” a tall, spindly man asked from the back of the classroom. Jason didn’t know his name.
“We teach you Faey,” she explained to him. “Since it’s a language, we can insert it telepathically. We’ll do that today, and spend the next three weeks practicing pronunciation and writing. Then we’ll pick up where we left off, and shift the last three chapters we used to do in this semester into Xeno II.”
Jason’s eyes immediately went flat, and he remembered what Jyslin said last night. Had she known? Had she talked to the school and found out about this beforehand? It seemed so.
He realized that she’d tried to scam him out of fifty credits! Geez, how low could she go!
Then he realized that she didn’t do anything any worse than what he’d already done, and he had to chuckle ruefully.
The amusement faded when he realized what insertion entailed. A Faey would put herself in his mind, deeply into his mind, violating his innermost sanctity. And he had no choice but to allow it, to knuckle under yet again to the Faey Imperium, to be the obedient slave that he was being. He had no choice. He couldn’t refuse, or he’d end up on a farm, and that was a fate worse than having a Faey rake her grubby little claws through his mind.
“Since there are thirty of you and one of me, that means I’m going to have some help. So, pack up your things and come with me down to the lecture hall, where our assistants are waiting. After the insertion, you’ll be free to go.”
“Umm, Professor, is this safe?” someone asked.
“It’s totally painless,” she assured with a dimpled smile. “There is some dizziness immediately afterward, and after you’re over that, we’ll tell you to go home and take a nap. That helps your mind sift through it all and digest it. If you’re worried about it, Stan, I’ll do it for you myself. That way you get someone you know and trust. Would you like that?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said immediately.
Jason was extremely unhappy with this, but there was nothing he could do. He packed his panel in his backpack and joined the others as they went down into the largest classroom in the building, a large auditorium-style room with raised tiers on which desks stood. It held nearly a hundred people, and lined up along the base of the wall were ten Faey, five of them in the black armor of Marines, the other five in the robes or long-tailed shirts that the professors wore.
Jason stopped dead in the door. One of those five Marines was Jyslin!
She gave him a smug, victorious little smile, then shooed him on as someone nudged him from behind. Jason stalked into the room and sat down in one of the desks on the lowest tier, and he glared at her murderously. That bitch. She had this all set up. She knew about the change, somehow, and had managed to finagle her way into being one of the telepaths that would perform the insertion. Marines were much stronger telepaths than the occupational forces that served as the majority of the police and other governing forces, so it was no real shock to see Marines being pressed into service as telepathic inserters.
“Now, everyone take a seat,” Tia called as she came in, then waited as everyone did so. “Not beside each other. Leave one desk to either side of you.” She waited as some students moved to spread out. “These helpers and myself are going to go around and perform the procedure. Don’t worry, all of us have done this before, that’s why we’re here. After it’s over, don’t get out of your seat until I tell you that you can, alright?” She nodded to the others, and they all fanned out. Tia went straight to Stan, but Jyslin didn’t come to him. None of the others did either, telling him that Jyslin was saving him for last, and had already warned off all the others from teaching him.
He sat there and fumed for nearly twenty minutes, not even looking behind him. She had this all set up. She’d played him last night, obviously in revenge for what he did to her yesterday afternoon. He had no idea how she knew, but she did. There was nothing he could do. She’d already fixed it so nobody else would teach him, and he couldn’t get out of not going through with it.
This battle went to Jyslin.
She plopped down in the seat beside him, her armor going clack as she did so, then put her elbow on the desktop and gave him an amused look.
“Shut up,” he growled at her.
“I told you, I cheat,” she told him.
He gave her a cold stare.
“I win this time,” she said in a teasing tone. “Now, turn and face me.”
“Why?”
“Because we do have something to do here,” she told him tartly. “And I pride myself on my work. When I’m done, you’ll be absolutely fluent in Faey. My mother taught Faey in primary school, so I have a stronger grasp on the language than most everyone else here. So, turn and face me. Now.”
He was surprised by the steel in her voice. He did so, and she put her hands on his desk. “Put your hands here,” she instructed. “I’m going to put my hands on your face, and then we’ll begin. At first, you’re going to feel me brush you, as you call it, then it’s going to get much stronger. The important thing you have to remember is not to fight with me,” she said, quite seriously. “In order for me to do this, I need to contact your long-term memory and put things there. I promise you I won’t do anything other than what I have to do,” she said in an earnest voice, her gray eyes very serious. “I won’t look at anything, I promise. I know how you feel about being probed. That’s one reason why I arranged to be the one to do this. At least with me, it’s someone you know, and someone you won’t have any trouble finding and kicking on the other side of her head if you don’t like what she did to you,” she added with a wink.
Now that surprised him, quite a bit. In a way, she was more or less right. In an odd way, he did feel a little better about the idea of a Faey that he knew doing this. Because she wouldn’t just disappear. She promised to stop in tonight after she got off duty, and if he was really upset about what she did here and now, he could always punch her in the nose. That declaration of recognizing the possibility of retaliation actually made him feel somewhat better about the idea of it. Not that the idea of it didn’t set his teeth on edge and make him feel like he was about to be anally probed with a telephone pole, but at least with Jyslin doing it, he could throttle the administrator if it pleased him to do so.
“Now,” she said in a gentle, mollifying, cooing tone, lightly grabbing his hands and setting them on the side of the desk. “You’re going to feel me brush up against you, then press in, like putting your hand into water. Don’t fight me,” she warned. “If you do, it’s going to make it very hard, and it might hurt you. I’ll just press in and sit there a minute so you can get used to it. I won’t do anything, I promise, not until I feel you calm down. Are you ready?”
“Let’s get this over with,” he grunted in a low, ominous tone.
“Close your eyes,” she told him. “It will make it easier. Concentrate on what’s inside, not on what’s outside.”
He nodded and closed his eyes, bowing his head slightly.
“Alright, here we go,” she said, reaching out and putting her slender, work-calloused hands on the sides of his face, over his cheeks.
He instantly felt her brush up against him, and he did his best not to resist that feeling, but it was not easy. It was an automatic, almost reflexive reaction for him to close up his thoughts when he felt a Faey doing what she was doing. He felt her feel around the edges of his instinctively raised barrier, and even as he tried to figure out how to allow her through it, she found a weakness in it and punched through. It was not a pleasant experience to have her breach the boundaries of his mind and invade him like an attacking army, like a disease. Immediately, he felt her presence inside his own mind, a strange thoughtless presence, like an alien object lodged within the pathways of his thoughts. He violently reacted to that contact, the first time a Faey had ever breached his defenses and actively entered his mind, so violently that his hands snapped up and closed around her wrists, seeking to rip them away from his face. But Jyslin’s strength surprised him, holding her hands fast against his strength as she rode out his reaction to her, as the hands holding her wrists slowly stopped trying to pull her away. His reaction was a reflexive one, and as the seconds passed, Jason got less and less resistant to her presence, as he tried to get used to the feel of a presence in his head other than himself.
See, it wasn’t that bad, her thought emanated from that alien presence, and he could hear it clearly within his own mind. I’ll hear what you think, just to warn you. Oh, you can loosen your grip on my wrists now. I’d like to keep you from squeezing my hands off.
Sorry, he thought to himself.
It’s alright, she answered. I had to literally attack you to get into your mind. I hope I didn’t hurt you.
It wasn’t pleasant, but I think I’m alright, he thought in answer.
I’ll wait a bit, let you get used to the feel of it, she informed him. When I start, you’ll see a dizzyingly fast blur of images, sounds, concepts, and even pure thoughts. I’m literally going to take everything I know about Faey and put it in your mind, sending it into your long-term memory. When I’m done, you’re going to be a little confused and dazed, but it’ll pass. You won’t make much sense of what I’m going to teach you at first, it’s going to take your mind a little time to go through it all and piece it together. I’m going to put everything there, but your brain’s going to have to work out how it’s going to store it all.
What do you mean?
I’ll put it where I can, but your brain’s going to take it all and move it, rearrange it the way it wants it, she explained. If it doesn’t, you’ll never be able to use any of this, and you’ll forget it in about a week. That’s why you’ll need to go home and take a nap after the dizziness fades. An hour of sleep gives your brain a chance to rearrange things to its satisfaction without dealing with all the things it has to do when you’re awake.
That made sense, or at least it seemed logical, after a fashion. Since he really didn’t know how it worked, it certainly sounded like it was possible.
Ready?
Do I have a choice?
She seemed highly amused. Alright, here we go.
She wasn’t lying about what happened next. An absolute avalanche of alien, bizarre images, sounds, sights, concepts, even pure thought poured into his mind, so fast that he couldn’t’ make out anything but a confused cacophony, unable to see the individual parts because they made up a confusing and bewildering whole. It was like a school of fish, or a waterfall. He couldn’t make out any one part, but he could see the whole. The problem was, the whole made no sense to him, even though he made no effort to try to make sense of any of it.
He had no idea how long it took. It seemed that one minute she was filling his mind with dizzying information, and then she simply stopped. He felt her presence ghost around the fringes of his memory, coming close but not close enough to make him feel worried, almost as if she were checking her work. He could feel her drawn to the darker tunnels of his mind, where all those things she wanted to learn about him lurked, but she stayed away from the temptation, keeping her word of not going anywhere or seeing anything he did not want her to be, or see.
I’m finished, she announced. I’m going to pull back now. It might make you a little disoriented for a second or two, but then again, what I put in your mind’s going to do that anyway. Oh, by the way, the next time you imagine me naked, get it right.
Just before she withdrew from his mind, she shared with him an image, a visual memory, one that almost made him blush. It was a very, very detailed memory of Jyslin looking at herself in a full length mirror, in what looked like a bedroom behind her.
Wearing nothing but combat boots.
It wasn’t a dirty pose, or even very provocative, it was just the idea of it. Had Jyslin got up from that desk and stripped naked right there in front of him, it would have been no different than this. She showed him her full glory, and the knowing little smile on her face told him that she planned to do it when she stood in front of that mirror and memorized how she looked, just so she could show him. She stood there, one hip raised sensually, and posed for the mirror, posed for a mental picture she shared with him now, and she was enjoying every second of it, both when she made that memory and now, as she shared it. He could tell. And he could only go over that memory with what could be called a fine toothed comb, admiring her ample chest--but not too large--and her sleek, flat belly, and her curvy hips, and her quite splendid legs, and being a male, he could not ignore that neatly trimmed patch of dark red pubic hair which stood out against her soft blue skin.
But she wasn’t done. Quite deliberately, she turned around and looked over her shoulder, showing him her sleek, willowy, thoroughly sexy back and a marvelous heart-shaped backside, with long, long legs that seemed to go all the way down to China.
She was absolutely gorgeous, both in face and body. Jason never thought blue skin could be so damn sexy before that.
And then she pulled away from him, and he felt that presence of her, that suddenly seemed much less hostile now that she had shared so intimate a memory with him, vanish from within his mind. She had done everything she said she would do. She had behaved herself, had kept her promise not to invade his mind any more than what was necessary to do what needed to be done, though he could clearly feel at one point that she had been sorely tempted. Then, as she broke contact, she gave of herself freely, shared with him something private, intimate, personal, something she did not have to do.
If she did that to curry his favor, well, it worked.
Then came the dizziness. The ceiling traded places with the floor, and he felt himself sway dangerously. She slid her hands down to his shoulders and steadied him, and his grip on her arms gave him a foundation on which to cling while the earth seemed to bounce around wildly. “There, now,” she said in a low, gentle voice. “Better?”
“A little,” he said woozily. “I think I’m getting sick.”
“It’ll pass in a second or two,” she said, then she giggled like a little girl. “You’re speaking Faey. It sounds very nice to hear you speak a real language. English is ugly.”
He wouldn’t be able to tell her one way or the other what he was speaking, because his brain felt like it was smothered in day-old mashed potatoes.
The dizziness did ease, and it did so with amazing speed. In a matter of a minute or two, he felt stable again. It was a little hard to think, like he was on medication, but at least he wasn’t dizzy anymore. He blinked and looked around, and saw that he was the last student in the lecture hall, and all the instructors except for Professor Tia were gone. She must have waited to make sure things went smoothly. “Is he alright, Sergeant?”
“He seems to be a bit sensitive,” she answered. “But I think he’s alright now.”
“Are you alright to get back to your dorm room, Jason?” she asked him with sincere concern.
“Yeah, yeah, I think I’ll make it alright,” he said in a disjointed manner, which made Tia give him an amused look. “What?”
“You’re speaking Faey,” she chuckled. “You’re suffering from a case of mnemonic transposition, where your brain can’t figure out if your implanted memory or your natural memory is the one that’s supposed to be accessing, so it’s sorta jumping back and forth between them to try to make sense of it all. Don’t worry, it’s a common enough side-effect for it not to be too much of a surprise. While you’re suffering from it, you’re going to jump back and forth between English and Faey, and you won’t be able to read anything. Even English will look like gibberish to you. So, go back to your room and take a nap, and your brain will straighten everything out. After a nap, an evening of rest, and a good night’s sleep, you’ll be just fine.”
“But I have a test tomorrow in Plasma Dynamics,” he objected.
“Postponed,” she told him. “The waiver’s already on the schedule. All homework and tests due tomorrow are pushed back, so you can recover. No studying tonight, Jason, and that’s an order.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he nodded.
“Now go home,” she told him. He stood up, and his legs felt a little weak. “Woops, I think I’ll have a car take you,” Tia said quickly.
“No, I’m alright,” he said quickly, getting his legs back under control. If everyone else walked out of the classroom, then dammit, so would he.
“I’ll make sure he makes it safely,” Jyslin offered.
“I appreciate that,” she nodded. “See you on Monday, Jason. Enjoy your weekend.”
Jason felt better after taking a few steps, until his strides were confident and long. Jyslin scurried to keep up with him as he made his way out of the building and onto the sidewalk leading to the dorm, which was the next building over. It was a walk of only about thirty yards. Jyslin followed him quietly, into the dorm, up to the third floor, and literally right into his room, closing the door behind her. “I’m here,” he told her. “You didn’t have to follow me into my room.”
“Bed,” she commanded, pointing imperiously at the narrow bed hugging the right wall of his cramped dorm room. “Now!”
“Don’t order me around, woman,” he said jerkily, unsure of what language he was speaking. “Trust me, as muffled as I feel right now, taking a nap is exactly what I intend to do.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and slid his hands over his face in a slow, deliberate manner to try to clear the sand out of his thoughts. It was so hard to think!
“Well, I did what I promised,” she said with a smile. “Think you’ll trust me a little more now?”
“A little,” he admitted.
“Want to go out with me?”
“No,” he said immediately. “No matter how I feel about you, you’re a Faey, and I’m a human. You represent something I protest, so I can’t socialize with you. End of story.”
“So, it’s not personal,” she pressed. “If I were human, you’d go out with me.”
“Probably,” he admitted again. “There are a couple of professors I’d be friends with, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re Faey.”
“I’ll change that,” she promised with a wink. “Remember, a week from today. You, me, fancy clothes, and a Faey opera. It’s already been set.”
“In your dreams,” he scoffed. “I don’t care what you do, Jyslin, I will not go out with you. Period. End of story.”
“They’re so cute when they think they have a choice,” she said in a lilting manner as she opened the door. “Tomorrow it’s Ilia and Sheleese. This time, try not to make such a mess,” she said, then she leaned against the door. “So, what did you think of my little gift to you?”
“I think you need to get out in the sun more,” he said boldly.
“I was in your mind when I gave it to you, Jason,” she purred. “I know how you reacted to it. You think I’m dead sexy. You like me, and you like me a lot, you’re starting to get interested in me, and you want to get to know me better. The only thing standing between us is a stupid point of technical philosophy, and I’m not going to stand for it.”
She gave him a very serious look. “I’m Faey. I admit it. But don’t hold that against me, Jason. Don’t blame me for what happened to your planet. I’m stuck here, where I was placed, the same as you are. What is it your people say? Oh, yes, I just work here. And when I come back when I’m off duty, I won’t be Sergeant Jyslin of the Imperial Marines, upholding her Imperial Majesty’s honor, I’ll be Jyslin Shaddale, a single girl trying to get a date with a mysterious, fascinating, handsome boy,” she said with a wink. “You think about that. And keep thinking about it as you do whatever unholy evil things you’re going to do to Ilia and Sheleese tomorrow morning. I’m dying to see it,” she laughed and winked again.
“I’ll make sure it’s suitably entertaining,” he said dryly.
“Good. I’ll see you later. Get some rest, and think about what I might look like out of those boots,” she said with a naughty little smile just before she closed the door.
Confusing woman. Or was she? Jason laid down and closed his eyes. It was hard to think, but not too hard to consider what she said. In a way, she was right. She was in the same position as him, and it wasn’t her fault. He was blaming her, and every other Faey, for what happened to Earth, and to him personally. It really wasn’t fair.
But, on the other hand, she was a Marine. She was in the military, a direct representative of the power that had conquered them. And then there was also the telepathy.
Quite simply, he just couldn’t bring himself to trust any Faey because of that overwhelming advantage. At any time, all Jyslin had to do was put a hand on him and find out everything he was thinking, everything he felt, and violate the utter sanctity and personal domain that was his own mind. Jason had an intense hatred of that, burned into him after two years of having Faey try to burrow into his thoughts every day, day after day. Faey telepathy was the only reason nobody had managed a rebellion--not that it would really work, given the formidable Faey weapons and armament--but at least someone could try.
Part of that was his own self-loathing, he guessed. If his father could see him now, he’d slap him. He was cooperating, being a good little slave, because he didn’t want to end up on a farm. Or even worse… being shipped off planet like some humans were, off to work in mines and other equally unpleasant and dangerous places. His father would have stolen an F-16 and taken on the entire Faey military by himself.
And now he’d been taught their language. Just another step down the road of making him an obedient subject of her Imperial Majesty.
He drifted off to sleep with that image floating in his mind… wearing one of those flowing robe-like upper garments the Faey favored, loose shirts with tails that dropped to their shins and flared sleeves with tails on them themselves nearly a foot long, and those loose-fitting pants, or robe-like skirts that both sexes occasionally wore. That would have been even worse. Wearing Faey clothes, speaking the Faey language, and standing in front of the featureless figure sitting on the throne of the Empire, bowing like an obedient lapdog.
That was a nightmare.
Jyslin did in fact stop in to see him after work, wearing a red tank top and shorts this time, but not sweaty. She’d stopped in before her workout, and she didn’t stay long. Only long enough to see how the implantation went.
Perfectly. He had a complete and utter command of the Faey language. Jyslin wasn’t joking when she said she knew more about Faey than most, for her vocabulary was immense, and her understanding of the intricate nuances of the musical language was profound.
He didn’t have to study, so he spent most of that afternoon watching INN, which made it more interesting now that he could understand what they were saying. They talked about a surprising range of topics, covering the important news from many of the seventy-two planets in the Imperium. An earthquake on Aurile, a hurricane on the ocean planet of Jaxan, an explosion at a metals facility on Denet. Then they went into the arts phase, and he was surprised that they spent so much time on it. They tracked the movements of many theater troops, singers, and musicians, telling people where they were headed and when they would perform. The arts seemed rather important to the Faey for the movements of the performers to be covered by INN.
Earth even made it into their news. “The Empire-famous Triellian opera company is making its first visit to the newest addition to the Imperium, Terra,” the roguishly handsome news anchorman said in a voice that feigned enthusiasm, which made Jason look at that corner of his screen. “It’s the first visit from a famous performing company for our newest member of the Imperium. If you’re in that part of the Imperium and would like to make reservations, access Terra’s Civnet. There are still tickets available at most of their venues.”
Jason was about to drift back to the other side of his panel, where he was going over tomorrow’s little surprise, when the news distracted him once again. “For those of us in the Imperium who haven’t heard much about Terra, we here at INN think that your interest in our newest planet might increase. The Ministry of Agriculture has announced that the newest shipments of Terran food have passed bio inspection, and will be hitting your local markets by the end of the cycle,” he announced. “In addition to all the more common plants and grains, a new group of Terran-specific products will be made available, as will all the old. This includes a large crop of the newest food craze among Faey, strawberries,” he said in English.
“Oh, I know, Deren,” the female anchor said with a laugh. “I tried some at the unveiling of the new Terran foods last year, and they had to take the plate away from me!”
“I’m partial to their lobster myself,” he replied. “In other Terran news, the Ministry of Security has announced that certain areas of the planet have been approved for tourist passes. If you’re interested in seeing our newest farming planet in action, or you’d like to soak up the local culture and mystique of the indigenous population, contact your nearest travel agent and Ministry of Travel offices.”
“And here with a report on what you might want to see on Terra is Lini Timira,” the woman called.
Jason watched as INN ran a report on the “vacation getaways” of Terra, showcasing most of the places that humans liked to visit on Earth. Hawaii, Alaska, Yellowstone, the Alps, Africa, the Himalayas, they all rated on the natural scenery, and to his surprise, the reporter suggested visits to Paris, London, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Johannesburg, New Delhi, and even New Orleans for people curious about the culture and customs of humans. The reporter, a sharp-featured woman with dark blue skin-tanned from her travels-and hair the color of mud, made sure to point out that the local population was not telepathic, and virtually none of them spoke Faey, so a certain amount of care and caution when interacting with the natives was required.
Jason frowned and cut it off, then absently turned on the television, and switched it to the same channel. He had no idea why he was watching it on his panel when the TV carried the same stations. He wondered absently if they had stories on Earth every day, or if it was just starting to get into the news because the Imperium was about to allow civilian Faey to visit the planet. He had no idea, because up until now, all he could really go on were the pictures.
He wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of the Faey getting so… cozy with Earth or not. They’d taken it over, and now they were going to have Faey tourists milling around. Faey developing tastes for Earth food, Faey getting more and more common… it was like the beginning of the end of the fact that Earth was the home of the human race.
There wasn’t much he could do about it, so he blew out his breath, changed it over to the local station, and went back to his plan.
It was ready and waiting for when Ilia and Sheleese arrived promptly at seven the next morning. They’d parked their hovercar on the other side of the street, and came boiling out of it with their helmets on and their rifles on their shoulders. They were taking no chances with this crafty human, fully intending to march him up and down the street like a new recruit and make him sing bawdy cadence songs. He’d already outsmarted the squad sergeant, Jyslin, and made a laughing stock out of Lyn and Bryn yesterday by encasing them in crash foam, forcing a mechanic to come down from the motor pool and use a dissolving module to get them out.
The little battle between Jason and Jyslin was quickly becoming all the talk among the Faey stationed in New Orleans. The rules were clear; no telepathy, no doing injury. They were rules that both sides seemed to be following, as well, and Jyslin made sure to warn them not to cheat. It was a battle of wits, and peeking into his mind and seeing what he was up to was cheating. If they even could peek into his mind, for she’d warned them that he had amazing, almost phenomenal mental defenses for a mundane human. She even warned them that he’d know if they tried, which surprised both of them. A non-telepathic human, sensing it when Faey used their talent? That was certainly something to talk about!
At precisely seven thirty, they were ready. They were entrenched behind their hovercar on the other side of the street, waiting for him to come out. They weren’t about to get anywhere near him until he was halfway to the campus, which seemed only smart. This was his home territory, and they had no idea what manner of clever little traps he had waiting for them on that side of the street.
Seven thirty came and went. Then seven forty-five. At five minutes to eight, they started wondering if he was coming out at all, since he had a class at eight o’clock.
“You think he overslept?” Sheleese asked absently.
“We should go check,” Ilia replied. “We don’t want him getting in trouble. This may be fun, but it’s not worth it if he gets punished for it.”
“He may not appreciate us barging into his room.”
“He’ll appreciate being late for school even less.”
“That’s a good point.”
Neither of them felt the very light, almost negligible touches on the backs of their armor. “Good morning, ladies,” a voice addressed them, right behind them! Both of them whirled around and found him standing immediately behind them, and neither of them heard a thing! They didn’t even sense the presence of his mind! By the gods, this human was amazing!
They stared at him in slack-jawed shock as he lobbed two little things that looked like a coin to each side of them, each of which struck the hovercar and stuck to it with a light thunk. He reached into his pocket and took out a tiny black box with an illuminated red button on it, shifted it so they could see, then pressed the button with his thumb.
So fast, so hard, that neither could resist it, they both found themselves suddenly getting yanked down. Both of them slammed into the side of the hovercar with enough force to make it rock slightly, and both of them found that they were stuck fast by something that was attaching their breastplates to the car, something they couldn’t overwhelm!
He put the little device back in his pocket, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and then started walking away like he had not a care in the world. “Have a nice day,” he said absently over his shoulder.
That should hold them. Those were quarter-sized devices that were like exclusive magnets, what the Faey used to control raw, magnetically reactive high-energy plasma before it was phased and sent into conduits. The little devices were self-annealing to whatever they touched, and it took a special tool to demagnetize them, something that Marines didn’t carry around in their pockets. Until they did, the backs of their breastplates would be stuck to that car until Doomsday.
Sure, they could take the breastplates off, but he knew for a fact that Marines didn’t wear anything underneath the armor. So, to get free, they had to strip to the waist.
It wouldn’t hold them all day, but it would be enough for him to get to his first class.
He glanced behind himself, and frowned. One of them was already halfway free of her breastplate, and the other popped the seals of her own and removed the front half, exposing her breasts to all of Audobon Park. They really were going to do it! They were going to walk him to class topless!
As fun as it would be to make them do it, he figured that it would make them short-tempered, so a little discretion was in order here. Grabbing the strap of his pack, he bolted across the street and onto the campus, fully intending to be in the Plaid before that other one got her breastplate off. He glanced back and saw that they weren’t trying to follow him. The first to get free was inspecting the other half of her breastplate, trying to see how he did it. She rose up and laughed, then gave him a sly grin from across the street.
You clever little fox! she communicated with him with her mind, a communication laced with wry amusement, strong enough to overwhelm his outer defenses and push the thought through. It gave him an immediate, splitting headache. You wait, Jason! I’ll be outside your class when it’s over, even if I have to stand there naked!
He staggered slightly, putting a hand to his head. God, that hurt! It was like a semi was banging back and forth inside his skull, but the pain eased almost immediately after she finished her mental communication.
He shook his head to clear out the last of the pain. It hadn’t hurt when Jyslin did it. Then again, Jyslin had already been inside his mind. What she did was different, something like forcing her own thoughts into his head as a form of communication. Sending, that was what they called it, sending thoughts to other people. It was just one of the tricks the Faey used with their telepathy.
It had been the first time that a Faey had ever done that to him, and he certainly didn’t want it to happen again.
He managed to get to the Plaid, and hurried through the classroom door right before Ailan closed it. Ailan gave him an amused look, and he quickly took his seat and the class began. He drifted in and out of paying attention as he worried about what those two Marines were going to do, and if they really were going to be standing outside the door topless, or even naked, ready to follow him around and annoy him until his next class. Were they really that brazen? Or would it just be another way to play the game, trying to embarrass him by having a pair of topless Faey following him around. That was what all this was about, after all. Jyslin was trying to embarrass, annoy, or aggravate him to the point where he would finally cave in and go out with her, if only to make her stop. The way those two were talking before he nailed them showed that they thought it was tremendous fun, and that, surprisingly, they didn’t want it to cause him any real problems. That they were willing to brave whatever traps he had laid and make sure he didn’t oversleep, to get him to school on time, did touch him a little bit. But not enough to make him feel sorry.
He drifted through most of class, so much so that he didn’t hear Ailan clap and dismiss them. “You know, there were two Marines sending to try to find you about a half an hour ago,” he said with a chuckle as Jason rather jerkily started packing his things. “They’re outside the door, waiting for you.”
“Great,” he growled, reaching into his pack for Plan B. “Ailan, explain something to me.”
“Certainly.”
“Why won’t Jyslin get the hint?” he asked. “Do I have to break her arm to make her understand?”
“Yes,” he said, quite seriously. “You don’t understand Faey very well, Jason. Remember, the females are the dominant gender. They chase, men play hard to get. It’s how we do things. The more you run from her, the harder she’s going to chase you, because that’s how a man tests a woman to see how serious she is about him. She doesn’t see you saying no as no, she sees it as ‘impress me with your interest in me more, and I’ll go out with you.’ She won’t stop. That’s why I told you that it was best just to go out on the date and get it over with. That’s how you get rid of an unwanted suitor,” he winked.
“How?”
“Make it clear during the date that you want nothing to do with her,” he answered. “You can be blunt about it and tell her not to ask for another when it’s over, or you can be a total ass during the date and make it a bad experience for her. Just so long as she leaves the date with an understanding of how you feel, that’s all that matters.”
“Hmm,” he mused. “Well, I will not go out with her. I’ll just have to impress her suitably that I’m not interested. Even if I do have to break her arm.”
“Good luck,” he chuckled. “You’ll need it.”
“Why are the others helping her?” he asked curiously. “The other Marines.”
“Because they’re in her squad, and Marines do these kinds of things for each other. They’re very tight-knit. They see it as great fun, as would most Faey. We enjoy little games like these, and that’s what this is to them, Jason. A game. A grand and clever game where they’re pitting their skill against yours. And from what I’ve heard so far, you’re winning,” he chuckled. “The whole school knows about that crash foam. Where did you get it?”
“I took it out of the physics lab,” he answered.
“What did you do to those two today?”
“Plasma directional magnets with shock-annealer backings,” he replied, which made Ailan laugh. “I didn’t count on them taking off their breastplates to get free, though,” he admitted. “I guess Marines don’t have much modesty.”
“Faey women aren’t modest like human girls are, Jason,” he answered. “It’s not considered taboo to go bare-chested in Faey society. It’s quite common on planets with hot climates, actually, and there are no laws about nudity. On those hot planets, it wouldn’t be too uncommon to see Faey going about totally naked. Faey here simply don’t show anything more than what humans do because of human customs. We don’t want to offend you, so we abide by your customs.”
“There was my mistake,” he grumbled. “I didn’t know that.”
“If you want to embarrass a Faey woman, you don’t make her show it off, you make fun of what she has,” he told him with a conspiratorial wink.
“Well, that’s handy to know, but it’s not going to help me right now,” he said, hefting the little glass canister in his hand, filled with a dark liquid. Plan B. “In fact, it’s going to make this even less effective than I thought it would be.”
“What is that?” he asked.
“Something that’s about to get me in a heap of trouble,” he answered honestly.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see,” he promised, standing up from his desk and picking up his pack, looking like a man about ready to do war.
He went to the door and opened it, and found both the Marines standing there waiting for him. They had managed to get their armor off the hovercar, and had left their helmets and their rifles in the car as well, for they didn’t have them now. “Well, now,” the taller one with a faint scar on her cheek said with a wolfish smile. “It’s about time. We were about to check and see if you managed to walk through a wall.”
He didn’t even glance at them. He turned his back to them and started down the hall, then, just as he heard their armor shifting as they moved to follow, he tossed the canister over his shoulder.
“Catch it!” one of them barked aloud. He didn’t look, but heard one of them try to grab it, only to have the glass cylinder disintegrate in her hands, unleashing a sudden angry cloud of grayish smoke that smelled like rust mixed with limes. They coughed raggedly and staggered towards him, then came the sound he was waiting for, the sudden angry hissing of their vandirium alloy armor bubbling and sizzling as the reagent dissolved it.
Both of them gasped and started to panic as the grayish smoke ate at their armor like acid, then they both seemed to relax when they realized that it was doing them no harm. The gray cloud was some kind of chemical that only reacted with the metal of their armor, eating it away, but doing nothing to harm anything other than their armor.
“Have fun finding new clothes,” he said over his shoulder as he walked towards the door, intending to head to the cafeteria for breakfast.
Much to his surprise, instead of angry cursing or them running after him, they were both laughing. It was laughter mixed in with the clunking of pieces of destroyed armor hitting the floor, but it was most certainly laughter. Delighted laughter.
Faey were too weird, he thought to himself as he turned out of the hall into the building’s atrium and headed for the door.
Thus came the fatal flaw in this particular plan.
The two Marines were utterly unaffected by what he thought last night would be a devastatingly effective tactic to make them leave him alone. They marched into the cafeteria about ten minutes later wearing nothing but their helmets with the visors down, to hide their faces, but not hiding much of anything else. They were also carrying their rifles, slung behind their right shoulders. All activity in the cafeteria absolutely stopped when they marched in, followed by fierce whispering and buzzing as the two rifle-toting, naked Faey positioned themselves solidly behind Jason’s chair, to either side of him, and simply waited.
“Couldn’t find clothes?” he asked in what he hoped sounded like an unruffled manner, though he was privately quite disturbed by this little upping of the ante here.
“We figured this would embarrass you more,” one of them replied in a low whisper, in Faey, and her words were absolutely dripping with sadistic amusement.
“I can take it if you can,” he shrugged casually, going back to his breakfast of a ham omelet. “I’m not the one whose bare ass is going to be fueling human men’s fantasies for the next few weeks.”
“So long as they don’t know who I am and they can’t see my face, why should I care how much of the rest of me they see?” the other one returned with a chuckle.
He had no real defense against that particular angle of attack, so he fell silent and went back to his breakfast.
They followed him all over school all day, stark naked, and drawing absolutely every eye to him. They decided that just being there was all it took to make him uncomfortable, so they never talked, never annoyed him, never did anything other than follow him everywhere he went-except inside classrooms. And that meant everywhere. The two of them nearly caused a riot when they marched right into the men’s bathroom behind him after his second class.
Jason had no other prepared tricks, and to be honest, their incredibly bold move had put him off kilter, so he did nothing more than go through the motions that day and endure it. He couldn’t just give up, though, because then they’d know that they found something that got to him, and they’d all start showing up naked every morning to escort him around class.
Jyslin had to have a long arm, since the professors and other school administration did nothing to intervene. They just watched from a distance and enjoyed it, like everyone else did.
So, he did pull tricks to get away from them after each class, but they weren’t up to his usual standard, and they didn’t get him very far from them. Sneaking out a window on the first floor, hiding in a cabinet and slipping by them as they came in to search for him, and in once case climbing through a large air conditioning duct allowed him to sneak past them, but he didn’t go very fast, and allowed word to get back to them very quickly concerning his location. In actuality, he didn’t want them to get too far away from him, so he could keep them under control. Two naked Faey had the potential to cause unmitigated chaos on a campus attended by human students, and he wanted to minimize the potential for multi-car pile-ups, broken noses from walking into streetlamps, and bicycles crashing into pedestrians. So he steered them away from the largest concentrations of students and didn’t go anywhere near Saint Charles’ Avenue, confining himself to the Plaid, the cafeteria, the library, and the main campus building, using the sidewalks well away from the street.
One thing was for sure. The boys on campus were very happy for this odd occurrence.
After his last class, in a sort of grand finale, the two of them sidled along behind him as he walked back to his dorm, clearing the path in front of him and causing a traffic jam behind them as people stopped to look, then walked along behind to keep looking. He reached his dorm and went up the steps, then turned around and looked at them. “Have fun with your sunburn,” he told them as he reached into his pocket and took out the little black remote once more.
“We’re done here,” the taller one told him with a sly smile, just visible under the mirrored visor.
“Not quite,” he said, then he pushed the button.
There was a sudden squeal of metal against concrete, and their hovercar suddenly flipped over on the side of the street, making sparks on the asphalt as the metal ground over it, then vaulted up into the air. It went up nearly fifty feet, then simply stopped, hanging upside-down in midair.
“Have a nice walk,” he told them, then turned and went into the dorm.
To his surprise, to the sudden applause and whistling of the people who had followed them back to the dorm.
Both the Marines stood there in chagrin and looked at their hovercar, hanging in midair well out of their reach, as the humans around them laughed and clapped and whistled.
Up until that point, the Marines had been winning, damn it all. It didn’t take telepathy to see that their counterattack of going around naked all day had him on the ropes. They were but one more task of walking him home to come away the victor in that day’s skirmish, and he gets them right at the end! Trust that clever Jason to have the final trick up his sleeve!
Sheleese laughed. “Well, not only will the squad be coming to pick us up, but we’ll have to explain how he got us out of our armor,” she told Ilia.
“How did he do that?” Ilia said aloud, in English no less, staring up at the floating hovercar.
“I’m sure the techs’ll explain it when they come to get it down,” Sheleese said with a cheeky grin. “Until then, we’re naked and without a ride back to the barracks.”
Ilia laughed. “Jason three, Marines zero,” she admitted.
“This is starting to get a bit ridiculous,” Sheleese declared. “The honor of the Corps is at stake here, and he’s playing with us like we’re just babies.”
“Maybe Yana and Myri will have better luck tomorrow.”
Sheleese chuckled. “The way things are going, he’ll have them in dog collars by lunchtime.”
Ilia giggled girlishly. “What a man,” she announced.
“Jyslin has all the luck,” Sheleese agreed with a nod.
Back in his room, he sat down and blew out his breath, looking up at the ceiling.
What a day!
Those damn Marines were starting to play dirty. He was pretty sure that they could tell that their stunt had thrown him off, but on the other side of it, he was positive that his retaliatory stunt got them and got them good. He took out his panel and brought it up, then had it contact the address of another panel with a few touches on icons on his screen and a few quickly typed commands. He knew that that panel was now ringing like a phone, waiting for its owner to answer his call.
Tim’s face appeared on the window holding his call program. “Hey,” he said. The view behind him told him that Tim was in his room, which was one floor up from his own.
“Thanks,” he said.
Tim laughed. “I almost got in trouble, but that’s alright.”
“What happened?”
“An army chick caught me planting that plasma magnet,” he answered. “She had me dead to rights, so what could I do? I told her I was helping you play a trick on the Marines, and she let me go ahead and do it. I think she doesn’t like Marines,” he chuckled.
“You can always count on inter-service rivalry,” he answered with a short laugh.
“I’m surprised it picked up that hovercar.”
“I’m more surprised that magnetic field density sensor worked,” he answered. “If it had malfunctioned, they would have had to send a shuttle to retrieve it from orbit.”
Tim laughed. “Man, you have any idea how popular you are at school now?” he asked. “Two blueskins following you around like lost puppies, naked as jaybirds? That was fantastic!”
“They were trying to embarrass me.”
“Think you could convince them to try to embarrass you again tomorrow?”
Jason chuckled. “They’ll be back, but two different ones. And I think if they found out how much the men on campus enjoyed the strip show, they probably won’t do it again.” He explained how they had come to be naked quickly, and his short chat with Ailan. “I found out that Faey aren’t too solid on our idea of modesty, but if they find out that the humans think they were funny because they were naked, they won’t do it again. That’s digging into their pride, and these Marines have a great deal of that.”
“What are you going to do tomorrow?” he asked eagerly. “Half the school is already laying bets on what’s going to happen.”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll think of something, though.” He looked at the box of components laying on his bed, cast-off supplies and things that instructors had given to him to allow him to experiment on his own. So far, every device he’d built came out of that box of junk, but the pickings were starting to get a bit thin in there. He’d already used up most of the choice components. “It may not be very good. I’m running out of ideas and expendable equipment.”
“Say the word, and I’ll get anything you want or need,” he said immediately.
“No, this is personal,” he replied. “I cheated a little using you to plant that magnet, but I don’t really want to get anyone else involved in this. I can deal with the Faey. I don’t want others getting in trouble because of me.”
“I’m already in it,” he grinned. “I’m not afraid to be your gopher, Jayce. And a second pair of trap-laying hands will keep them off balance. After all, they’re coming at you in pairs, so why not have an extra set of hands?”
“No, Tim, I’ll handle it myself.”
“Well, alright. But everyone’s cheering you on, Jason, so do us proud.”
Jason was a little surprised at that. “Why?”
“Because this little war between you and the Marines makes us all feel better,” he answered. “Everyone looks at you and sees someone willing to take on the Faey, and so far, you’ve beaten them like red-headed stepchildren. After all the abuse they’ve put down on us, seeing them get theirs feels very good.”
Jason said goodbye to him after that and turned on the TV, feeling a little foolish, and suddenly feeling quite dutiful. If his war with Jyslin made the other students feel better, then he wouldn’t disappoint them. He had to study, but this had priority. He went over to the box of parts, rifling through them and seeing what he might be able to come up with.
He pondered on it a while, and came up with something that would at least get him through tomorrow. He set that aside and stood up, mentally telling himself that he’d have to get some new parts tomorrow at school. They went to school six days a week, a highly accelerated schedule, with only one day off. But, on the other hand, they got two weeks off between semesters.
It was a long, stressful day, and he felt dirty. He pulled his clothes off and threw his towel around his waist, then grabbed his shower kit. A long shower would be perfect just about now.
The door opened, and Jyslin stepped through, out of her armor, in the black tank top and shorts she wore when she worked out. She closed it behind him, then burst out laughing before she managed to get it closed all the way. “Jason!” she wheezed. “You’re awful! Wow,” she breathed in admiration as she looked on his bare torso. Jason practiced martial arts and he used to play football, so he was very well developed. But because he did play football, he was much, much stronger than he looked. Jason could bench press nearly four hundred pounds. His arms were muscular, but they weren’t very large. His arms and body held a deceptive, monstrous strength that shocked most of his students.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, I’m looking at a dream, for one,” she told him with open admiration. “But what you did to Sheleese and Ilia was awful! Throwing that stuff on them that destroyed their armor and making them walk around naked? That’s vicious! Hilarious, but vicious!”
“They decided to do that themselves,” he said defensively, “to embarrass me.”
“True, but I’m talking about you doing it in the first place!” she said with another burst of laughter. “I thought you using that chemical spray on me was bad, but this, this is worse! You’re terrible!” she accused, then she laughed even harder.
“Why is it so funny if you think it’s so bad?” he asked testily.
“Faey love jokes,” she said with a wink, “even when they’re pulled on us. I knew you were smart, but you’re proving to be a cunning little monster. Tomorrow it’ll be Yana and Myri. If you can beat them, it’ll be Zora and Mil on Monday, and on Tuesday, if you still haven’t knuckled under, our Company Commander, Lieutenant Lana, is going to take a crack at you. Wednesday, you’re mine. And on Wednesday, it’s over. I guarantee it,” she said with a wink. “Then it’s our date on Friday.”
“Keep dreaming.”
“I am. Of you in high heels, of you in a maid’s apron and nothing else, of you in a bra and panties, a dog collar, and of course, you covered in sweat and with a totally rapturous look on your face while we squeak the bedsprings.”
Jason picked up a conduit bridge and threw it at her half-heartedly, which made her slide to the side and chuckle. “Behave,” she teased him.
“Out,” he barked, pointing at the door.
“You’re no fun today,” she taunted. “Then again, I feel a little jealous that you stared at Sheleese and Ilia all day, and you’ve never actually seen me naked. Just a memory of it.” She reached down and grabbed the hem of her shirt meaningfully. “I’ll take mine off if you take yours off,” she said with a throaty purr.
“Out,” he repeated sternly.
“Then again, I have two and you have one. That’s hardly fair.” With a quick motion, she whisked off her tank top, exposing her lovely, full breasts for his eyes to enjoy. “There, that’s more even,” she said with merry eyes, tossing her tank top onto the desk and hooking the waistband of her shorts with her thumbs. “Now then, do you dare take up the challenge, Jason?” she said with a wicked smile, pulling down on the waistband sensually, letting it ride down lower and lower on her hips, until the upper edge of the dark red hair under those shorts began to peek out over the waistband. “I want to see you, all of you,” she breathed in a husky voice. “Show me your beautiful body, and I’ll show you mine.”
It was all he could do not to swallow and gape at her like a dying fish. She was evil! She was baiting him with the one thing he couldn’t easily ignore!
“OUT!” he thundered, pointing at the door imperiously.
She pulled up her shorts with a seductive smirk, and half of him bitterly regretted that. Part of him—most of him—wanted her to go all the way, to take those shorts off and let him see for himself what she’d teased him with yesterday. But if she took off those shorts and got the towel off of him, got both of them naked, he knew that they were going to end up in that bed. She left no doubt in his mind that she wanted him, and he had to admit that he wanted her. And he couldn’t allow that to happen.
She gave him a victorious, wicked little smile as she pulled her tank top back on, then she opened the door and sauntered through in a very seductive manner, making sure her hips swayed like a boat rocking in a hurricane as she took those three steps out the door. Then she turned to face him as she grabbed the door.
“See you on Wednesday. Wear clean underwear,” she winked. “You won’t be in them long.” Then she closed the door.
Evil, evil woman, he grated to himself. That stunt of sharing the image of her nude body had caused him to admit to himself that he was attracted to her, both mentally and physically. And now she was starting to tighten the noose by getting more and more sexual with him, by making statements that he both did and did not want to hear, pulling off her shirt and letting him see what she was offering. She was right before in that his objection to her was philosophical, not personal. Truth be told, he rather liked Jyslin, but his pride and his sense of duty to the ideals he held dear would not allow him to associate with her. To get around that, she was using his attraction to her like a cudgel to beat the resistance out of him. Jyslin was beautiful, she was sexy, and she had a body most human women would kill for. And the fact that she was more than willing to strip and shove all kinds of exotic parts of her anatomy in his face made it very hard to ignore her.
But something told him that she wasn’t going to push him. She was teasing him, baiting him, enticing him, but she wouldn’t force the issue. She wanted him to come to her. That was why she didn’t whisk off her shorts, yank off his towel, and use some highly aggressive techniques to try to seduce him. Had she done that, both he knew and she knew that she would have succeeded. No sane, healthy, heterosexual male could say no to a woman that gorgeous. She wanted to hear him say yes, and that meant that she wouldn’t push too hard, so hard that her victory might be in doubt because of her own aggressiveness.
It would be a sweet loss, that was for sure. He couldn’t deny his attraction to her, but at least he’d enjoy the agony of defeat. But he wasn’t going to roll over and die just because he was attracted, because he wanted what she was offering, because he also wanted to maintain his ideals. A tryst with Jyslin would be a blow to those ideals, fraternizing with the enemy as thoroughly as one could fraternize.
He’d learn their language, he’d go to their school, but they wouldn’t conquer him. No matter how long he lived. If he wasn’t free in body, he’d be free in spirit, and part of that freedom was the right to say no.
Shower. Showering would be good right now. And he’d better make it a cold one.
Yana and Myri arrived an hour before class was to start, and they weren’t taking any chances.
This one was as cunning as a tibaxi, and there was no telling what little surprise he had waiting for them outside of that dorm. After what happened to the others, they both agreed that staying in the hovercar until he came out and trailing him to the campus was the best move possible. After he got there, they could get out and start following him around, when he was surrounded by the other students and had fewer opportunities to get them.
It was funny, but on another tack, this was starting to get a little embarrassing. This little game had leaked out all over New Orleans, and the Army whores were starting to dig on them because they couldn’t control a single native. Marines generally held the Army in contempt, because they were the grunts who didn’t have what it took to be a Marine. Many of them were provisional, the personal troops of whichever noble controlled a sector, where the Marines were Imperial, serving the Empress directly. The Marines were here in part to make sure that the nobles and their troops did what the Imperium expected of them. If there were no Marines here, there was no telling what those greedy nobles would try to get away with.
Nobles always had to be watched. If they thought they could get away with it, they’d steal the Empire blind, and there had even been instances of nobles breaking away from the Imperium, trying to establish their own empires. Faey history was rife with civil wars, as much as it was little private wars between nobles who took offense to one another. Terra was under the control of the house Tarlinne, which was related to the throne by blood. That was the main reason they were given Terra, because they were very well trusted by the Empress Dahnai. The house sent a Duchess to rule Terra, Duchess Gwyn Tarlinne, and she had brought in her six children to govern the six continents. North America was the domain of Baron Olen, the youngest of her six children, and every state of the three major former nations were under the control of a Baronet or Baronen, with Olenas or Olenens controlling the provinces within those states. Zarinas and Zarinens were minor nobles that watched over cities or interests within those provinces, the lowest rung of the noble hierarchy.
Nobles. Sometimes Myri thought that the Imperium would be better off without nobles.
“Alright, what’s the plan?” Yana asked. Yana was the youngest in the squad, just coming out of boot camp and still looking like a teenager with her relatively flat chest and narrow hips, but she was very smart, and she had awesome talent. Yana’s telepathic powers outstripped just about everyone in the company. Despite that, she rarely used them, for some odd reason. Where most Marines sent nearly as often as they spoke, Yana virtually never sent.
“We wait,” Myri answered. “I’m not getting anywhere near him until we’re sure he’s not packing a surprise.”
“I thought this was a game to force him out on a date with Jyslin,” Yana giggled. “When did it turn into a war?”
“The moment that little Army whore said that if they were doing this, they’d have him in a dog collar,” she answered bluntly.
“They don’t understand the rules.”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s making a fool out of us, and we have to put a stop to it, even if we have to cheat.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“It’ll be better than hearing those Army bitches ragging on us for the next six cycles,” she growled. Myri was the oldest of the squad, the other squad Sergeant, and she had quite a reputation for a foul mouth.
Yana was about to say something, but something hit the roof of the hovercar with a thud, and almost immediately, water began pouring down over the windshield and side windows. They both looked around quickly, and found nobody around. “Some joker’s throwing water balloons,” Myri snapped in irritation, sending her mind out to find the little jokester. In the mood she was in, she felt that a serious chastisement was in order.
Odd… all she could find were human minds watching on in unsuppressed glee.
She started getting a little suspicious when the water cascading down the windows stopped, like it was frozen in time. Myri quickly reached for the door release button and pressed it, then pushed at the door to open it—
—and found it stuck fast!
That damned human dropped into sight from the roof of the hovercar, walking down the hood and to the ground with his pack slung over his shoulder. “Good morning, ladies,” he said in a casual manner. Once on the ground, he turned around and held out a molecular cutter, then used it to carve a neat hole in the hood of their car!
“Hey, we signed this out!” Yana shouted at him angrily. “If you mess it up, it’s our asses!”
Nonplussed, the human pulled the freed circle of hood away from the hole and reached his hand inside boldly. The car was running! Didn’t he realize how dangerous what he was doing was!? Myri scrambled to turn the car off, but all the lights suddenly went out, and the car dropped to the ground with a clunk, clicking Myri’s teeth together from the jarring impact.
The human pulled his hand out, and in his hand was the phase exchanger that fed power into the car’s onboard computer. Without that exchanger, the car wouldn’t do anything.
Without changing his expression, he put the piece of hood back exactly where it had been and annealed it back together. Then he took the exchanger and set it on the hood of the car, carefully placing it so they could see it, and it wouldn’t slide down the sloped hood and drop to the ground.
Myri beat her shoulder against the door, but it was stuck fast, almost as if he had annealed the doors. But it wasn’t annealing, it was that water, or whatever it was. It was unmoving, solid, and it was covering the top of the hovercar, preventing the doors from being opened.
He’d trapped them in their own car! And what was worse, he’d disabled it so they couldn’t just drive back to the motor pool!
“Have a nice day,” he concluded with two fingers to his forehead in some kind of salute, then he simply walked past the car, past the driver’s side door, and started towards the campus.
Yana looked around wildly, looked at Myri, then burst into laughter.
Myri glared back over her shoulder, then she chuckled ruefully. “We didn’t even make it out of the car,” she sighed in lament.
Yana laughed a little more, then gave an amused sigh. “Oooh, my,” she breathed. “Well, what do we do, Sergeant?”
“Send for help,” she said with a rueful chuckle. “What else can we do?”
“True. I think Zora and Mil had better bring a tool bag with them on Monday,” she said, then she burst into laughter again.
“They might need it,” Myri agreed, then succumbed to the humor of it herself. “I just want to know one thing,” she said after a moment.
“What?”
“How the hell did he get on top of the car without us noticing?”
“This one’s full of surprises,” Yana laughed. “What a man! Jyslin’s got the luck of Zanya!”
School went in a blur, but at least it was a peaceful one.
The boys on campus were a little crestfallen that he wasn’t going to have two naked Faey following him around, but the applause he got when he came on campus told him that they didn’t mind all that much. Everyone on the street had seen him come out of the second story window of someone else’s dorm room and circle wide around, then climb onto a large utility control box and jump over onto their car, which was parked right beside it. He’d used a little something he’d remembered from physics, adding a compound to the water in the large jug he’d brought with him that caused it to instantly “freeze” and turn into an extremely hard solid, like a super-strong ice. Just like ice, it would “melt,” as the chemical broke down, which would allow them to get the doors open in about a half an hour or so.
They didn’t come back until after his last class, Xeno I, where he spent all class practicing spoken Faey. In that one class he’d managed to get a firm grip on the pronunciations, and he could speak the language surprisingly well. Jason’s mother grew up in France and as a result spoke French in addition to English, so he’d learned French as a child, and it had many similar sounds as Faey.
After class, he ran home, changed into his sweats, and rushed back to the campus gym, where his class was waiting for him. He’d missed their last appointment, but not this one. They bowed to him as he came in, wearing sweats, shorts, whatever they could find that was loose and comfortable. There were five men and three women in his class, and Tim was one of them. “Sorry I’m late,” he said as he bowed in reply. “Now, let’s stretch, and then we’ll begin.”
After stretching, he started them on their exercises. They were all beginners, so what he was teaching them first was how to fall, how to go to the ground without getting hurt, and how to control their bodies to be able to spring back up immediately. It was a critical skill in Aikido, protecting them from injury as they practiced the forms, and also giving them a powerful defensive weapon to use in case they were knocked down in a fight. After that was done, he instructed on the basic forms of wrist-locks, one of the more important ways to lock an opponent and force him to bend to their will. Aikido was a martial art of gentle persuasion, not an aggressive one, which used an attacker’s own body and motion against him to control him and make him unable to do harm. He was well versed in much more aggressive martial arts, but Aikido had always been his favorite. Aikido allowed him to protect himself without doing anyone any permanent harm. It gave him an outlet to deal with braggarts who mistook his mild nature for cowardice. When a fellow was third string on a college football team, that happened more than he cared to admit. They didn’t understand that he could have easily been first string, but he was more interested in the education than he was the football.
The familiar rhythms of teaching, of falling back into the Zen-like mental state required to practice the art, they relaxed him a great deal. It was a welcome break from the stresses of school and the building insanity concerning Jyslin and the Marines.
After their proscribed hour’s use of the gym, they stretched once more and bowed, just in time, as the pick-up basketball had the gym in fifteen minutes, and the players were already starting to arrive. The Wednesday class took place out on the campus lawn, since they didn’t have the gym, but the Saturday class they got one hour and fifteen minutes of gym time, from five o’clock to six fifteen. There was a fifteen minute cushion, then the pick-up games had the gym for the rest of the night.
“What you doing tonight?” Tim asked as they broke up.
“Dunno,” he answered, cracking his knuckles.
“Want to go down to the quarter?” he asked. “I feel like getting drunk tonight.”
“That actually sounds like a good idea,” he said with a nod. “I think I’m in the mood for Patty O’s.”
“Piano bar?” he asked with a grin.
“You know it,” he replied.
“I still can’t believe they tried to get you to work there,” he laughed.
That much was true. His mother was a music teacher, and because of that, her son absolutely had to learn how to play the piano. His very first memories were sitting on his mother’s lap, looking at the keys. That was the one thing she had given to her son, the skill that defined his relationship with her, just as learning to fly planes had been the defining aspect of his relationship with his father. His mother had been so gentle, so kind, so beautiful. It had been a terrible blow to both him and his father when she was killed in an automobile accident, so much so that his father had resigned from the Air Force and taken a job as a flight instructor at a little airstrip in Auburn, so he could be there for his son. He still played, though he didn’t have a piano now, only a little electronic keyboard that sat on the high shelf over his bed. But sometimes he felt the urge to play, and that required a real piano. There was one at a Catholic Church down Saint Charles, and they also had one up at the music shop on Claiborne. The week he arrived in New Orleans, he stumbled across the bar called Pat O’Brien’s, or Patty O’s to the locals. It was one in the afternoon on a Tuesday, so the place was pretty empty, and they had this room that they called the Piano Bar, which had two pianos on a stage to entertain the patrons. On weeknights and weekends, piano players would sit up there and play requests, which were written on napkins and passed up with a tip for the player. Playing Patty O’s was not an easy gig, for their players were expected to be able to play any request. Most of their musicians had massive stacks of music books filled with sheet music for a huge number of songs. Well, he’d been feeling rather depressed because of being shipped to New Orleans, and after he bought a daiquiri, he asked if he could play. The piano bar was closed and the place was more or less empty, so the managers allowed it. They were shocked. Jason grew up with a mother who was a music appreciation teacher, and he had a vast repertoire of songs he could play. Most didn’t think that a six foot two inch guy built like a football player would be able to play the piano. Playing the piano always cheered him up, and after he felt better, he bought another daiquiri, and they offered him a job. They’d just lost a player to the three month random farm allotment lottery, and they were looking for a new one.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed to work when he was in school. Then again, he wouldn’t have had time for it anyway. He didn’t work there, but sometimes when he went down, if they were short-handed that night, they allowed him to come up and play as a “guest musician.” It wasn’t work, but he was allowed to keep all the tips they sent up when he played requests. He did that every couple of weeks or so, earning a little extra money on top of the stipend he was paid as a full-time student in the Faey academy. That was how he could afford some of the parts in his little box, because he could buy them from campus workers looking to make a little extra money on the side.
“Let’s go get cleaned up, and-” he started, then he trailed off quickly when six Faey filed into the gym. They wore the camouflage colors of the armor of regular Army, much like the Battle Dress that the American military wore before it was dissolved. They were all pattern Faey, with those pretty faces and sleek bodies, accented by that armor. One of them, he noticed, was carrying a length of chain.
“Well, if it’s not the human making the Marines look like idiots,” the tallest of them, a woman with raven black hair, announced loudly in English. “We’re here to restore the honor of the Faey, since the Marines can’t seem to manage it.”
Jason looked her up and down coldly, steeling his mind against possible attack, starting the exercise that formed the wall of repetitive thought that would protect him from any attempt to invade his mind.
“We brought you a dog collar,” she said with a vicious smirk, holding up a leather collar. “We’re going to put you in it and drop you off at the Marine barracks with nothing but this on. After we have a little fun with you first,” she said with a naked leer.
Jason brought himself up to his full height and stared at them. “Faey love games,” he said in a quiet tone. “How about a little friendly challenge?”
“Really,” she smirked.
“Whoever ends up with that dog collar around her neck has to wear it until Monday,” he said. “The one collared becomes the property of the victor, and has to obey utterly until Monday. That means she does anything I say until Monday morning, when I go to school. Oh, and to make it fair, since the Marines aren’t allowed to use their talent, neither are you. Think the six of you are enough to put that collar around my neck without using your power?”
“Six against one, and you think you have a chance?” she asked with a laugh.
“If you think it’s a dead lock you’ll win, then accept,” he urged.
They looked among themselves for a second, obviously communicating with their telepathic gifts. “You have a deal,” she said. “I’m going to enjoy having you as our personal squad mascot.”
“I’m going to enjoy having a maid,” he said, cracking his knuckles meaningfully.
Tim moved away and the floor cleared as the six camo-armored Army regulars moved to surround Jason, who spread his feet out a little and kept himself squarely in front of the one holding the collar. They all started taunting and calling to him, trying to distract and unnerve him, but his eyes remained solidly on the brunette and the collar in her hand.
The other five came all at once, seeking to overwhelm him by force of numbers and pin him down long enough for the brunette to collar him. That actually wasn’t a bad idea, but they weren’t ready to face him like that. He grabbed the one that reached him first and spun her into two rushing from the other side, making them crash to the floor in a tumbled heap of arms and legs, squealing hurting everyone’s ears as their armor screeched against other armor. He surrendered the defense back to use that move, and the one behind him, the smallest of them all, crashed into him to try to knock him to the ground. He totally ignored her weight as he slapped aside the reaching hand of the fifth, then grabbed her other hand by the wrist and yanked on it. She was jerked in the direction he wanted her to go. With the sixth regular clinging to his back, kicking at him with her armored shins to get him to go down, he wove the one he had a grip on from side to side, not allowing her to regain her footing, exactly what he did to Jyslin, then spun her and crashed her into the heap of other Faey who were still sprawled out on the floor. A few slapping grabs at his flank got him a handful of armored shin, and he tore her off his back with main force. She clanged to the floor with her leg still in his grasp, but she took his shirt with her, ripping it off his back. He snatched the shirt out of her hands and let go of her, then advanced on the brunette quickly, wrapping the ends of a long strip between his hands. She backed up in surprise and raised both hands to protect herself, then her face hardened, and she attacked him with her telepathic power.
He’d never been attacked before, not like that, and it was something he never wanted to have happen again. The full force of her mind smashed against his own like a spear, trying to punch through the wall of repetitive thought he used to protect himself from probes. It was blindingly painful, like lights exploding behind his eyes, as he struggled with all his might to keep her out of his head, pushing back against that force with every fiber of his being. He’d been rushing forward when she struck at him with her power, and his momentum carried him right up to her. He could barely think, barely move, but he had enough presence of mind to lower his shoulder. She gaped in shock as he managed to resist her attempt to invade and take over his mind with her power just long enough to get close enough to her to do something about it. His shoulder slammed into her upper chest, and his weight sent her flying. That impact broke her concentration, and he felt the terrible weight of her mind lift off of him like pulling away a blanket.
Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs and the pain, he lunged down and snatched the collar out of her hands before she had the presence of mind to roll away from him. Her eyes looked a little glassy; maybe she hit the back of her head on the gym floor when she fell down. He was about to reach down and put the collar on her when two Faey jumped on him from behind, one grabbing the hand holding the collar as another wrapped her arms around his neck from behind and tried to tangle his legs up with her own.
She did pretty well, for he found himself unable to shift his feet. He yanked in the Faey holding his arm and then grabbed her, and they all fell down to the floor in a pile. There was a great deal of kicking, thrashing, even some biting taking place in that twisted mound of struggling bodies, but Jason was larger and much stronger than his opponents. He managed to grab the collar with both hands as the smaller Faey tried to cover his eyes with her hands and the larger one tried to wrest the collar out of his grip. He rolled over on the Faey on his back, got his weight on her, pinning her to the floor with his shoulders, then pulled the collar out of the other’s hands with a fast snap of his arms. She tried to roll to her feet, but Jason used the Faey under him as a push-off to power himself up onto his feet in the blink of an eye. The Faey had her back to him as she tried to roll back and away to get distance, so it was a simple matter to whip that collar over her head, then pull it taut around her neck and close the ends.
There was a sudden eruption of cheering from the people watching this impromptu battle, after it became clear that the collar ended up snapped around a Faey’s neck.
“Awww, DAMN!” the Faey snapped in frustration when her hands felt the collar around her neck. She stayed on her knees, and fixed the brunette with an impressively cold, murderous glare.
Jason panted, suddenly out of breath and keyed up from the adrenalin, then got himself under control. He gave that brunette his own icy stare. She had used her power against him, had cheated, and she should have been the one in the collar. She was the one he wanted, but he couldn’t risk her doing that again when the other Faey had a grip on him. If she did, they would have gotten the collar around his neck.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he hissed at her savagely as he regained his composure. The one he collared got to her feet and turned around, looking suitably ticked off. She was a cutie, with a heart-shaped face and pouting lips. Her hair was dark blond, almost brown, cut very short, and she had large blue eyes. She crossed her arms and gave him a flat look, then she chuckled.
“Well, looks like we lost, and I got stuck holding the stick,” she announced in thickly accented English.
“Strip,” he commanded immediately. “All of it but the collar.”
That got a roar of approval from the boys watching on.
She gave him a dark look, but did start taking off the armor.
He stalked over and snatched up the chain that was laying on the floor, and waited patiently as the Faey removed her armor, then stood there, her face turning purple in a blush-red blood flushing blue skin-as the boys in the gym whistled and clapped and generally embarrassed her half to death. He locked the chain to the collar with a smooth motion, then started towards the door, pulling her along. She followed, her head bowed and throwing dark looks at the brunette for getting her into this.
She may have thought that he was going to be cruel to her, or abuse her, or take tremendous advantage of her, but she found out that she was wrong. He did parade her around the campus a little as the students cheered, since it made them feel good, then he went back to his room and took off the chain. She stood there by the door for a long moment as he sat at his desk. He felt her mind brush against his, but she pulled away when she found nothing there for her to grasp.
“Don’t do that,” he said gratingly. “I don’t appreciate it.”
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Most humans don’t even notice it.” She gave him a long, steady look. “Well?” she asked in her accented English.
“Well what?” he asked in Faey. “Have a seat.”
“Don’t I have to clean?” she said in Faey, her face bright that she wouldn’t have to chatter at him in English.
“It’s already clean,” he shrugged. “You’ll be doing my laundry tomorrow, but for right now I don’t have anything for you to do. So sit down and watch some TV or something.”
“That’s all? You’re not going to humiliate me or make me do dirty jobs?”
“Do you want to?”
“Uh, no,” she said quickly.
“Then sit down and watch TV,” he said mildly.
“Where do I sleep?”
“That’s your problem,” he told her. “The bed’s mine. You’re on your own.”
“I’m, I’m not sleeping with you?”
He gave her a direct stare.
“Isn’t that part of my punishment?”
“I don’t consider that much of a punishment,” he said dryly.
“It is if you do it right,” she winked with a naughty smile.
“Faey,” he breathed, rolling his eyes. “Don’t you ever think with your brains?”
“We’re the dominant gender, human,” she smiled. “We think with our brains as much as human men think with theirs. Imagine a human man’s sex drive in a woman as happy to chase dick as human men are to chase pussy, and in a nutshell, you have a Faey.”
Her forward, graphic language surprised him, but he made the connection quite easily, and she was right. Imagine a Faey more or less as a human man, and they made sense. “I wonder how either of us ever manage to get anything done,” he chuckled ruefully.
“A question for the philosophers,” she chuckled. “My name is Symone.”
“Jason,” he returned. “But don’t take that to mean you’re not going to really hate me come Monday morning.”
She chuckled. “I’ll get over it,” she promised. “So, what would you command of me, Master?” she said with a grin. “Wash your clothes? Reorganize your closet? Do the Moraki Dance of Forbidden Delights?”
“Keep talking, and you’re going to be chained to the outside of my door,” he said calmly as he turned on his panel.
“What, you’re celibate?”
“On the contrary, I find Faey very beautiful and very sexy,” he answered honestly. “But there’s a principle here that I can’t violate. If it weren’t for that, you’d be pinned to the bed right now. You are sexy, Symone, and I’m not dead. I’d be more than willing to give you that punishment you hinted about if not for that. I’d chain you outside the door to remove the temptation.”
“Well, it’s nice to be appreciated, and I do appreciate your candor,” she said with an honest smile. “I’ll leave you alone, since there’s a matter of principle involved.” Then she turned on the television.
He was quite grateful for that. And over the entire weekend, she was true to her word. She did not flirt with him or come on to him, not even once.
Sunday was a very relaxing day, because he had himself a maid. And he worked her.
She didn’t sleep very well, because she ended up sleeping in the chair at his desk, with her head and arms laid out on the desk. He woke her up early and got her to work. She did his laundry. She moved all the furniture out of his room and shampooed the thin, worn carpet, then moved it all back in while he and Tim sat on lounge chairs in the hallway and watched. She cleaned the window, inside and out. She stood behind his chair obediently as he and Tim sat out on the green lawn between the dorm and the main Tulane building as boys whistled and stared at her, though this didn’t bother her as much as it might a human girl. Though Jason wasn’t going to rub it in too much, Tim was more than willing to torment Symone by barking at her like a drill instructor, haranguing her whenever she didn’t perform up to his exacting specifications, making her wait on them hand and foot, and once he slapped her on her bare butt as she fetched them beers.
“I’m going to hurt him,” Symone growled under her breath as Jason sat at his desk, studying for tomorrow’s classes, after Tim went to the bathroom.
“He likes you,” Jason told her absently. “He’s been sporting a woody since he got here this morning.”
“I don’t understand.”
“English slang,” he said mildly. “He’s had an erection. He finds you extremely sexy.”
“Oh, I noticed that almost immediately,” she winked. “Why do you think I’ve been sticking my tits in his face every time I serve him? I have to get back at him somehow.”
Jason glanced at her, then chuckled. “He’s actually a pretty good guy, and a good friend. He’s just enjoying the moment, that’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“A lot of humans resent the subjugation, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Of course.”
“Well, this is his chance to boss you around.”
“Ohhh,” she breathed, then she chuckled. “Well, I guess I can’t fault him for that,” she said with a wink just as he got back. “Does he speak Faey?”
“Yes,” Tim answered in Faey, but not pronounced very well. Tim was still mastering the motor skills required to speak the language.
“Well then, with your permission, I’m going to the bathroom, Jason,” she asked.
“Fine.”
“We’ll see how brave you are on Monday afternoon, Tim,” she said with a taunting smile. He jumped in shock when she put the palm of her hand against his shirt and pushed her hand down inside the band of his sweat pants. Tim’s face instantly flushed, and he put his back against the door as the bulge of her hand in his sweatpants moved around. “Or even better, how brave you are tonight,” she added in a husky tone, brushing up against him as she slid past. She flicked her tongue out and licked the lobe of his ear as she passed, then disappeared out the door.
“Oh, shit,” Tim said in a wobbly kind of voice, sitting down at his desk rather hard.
“She won’t get back at you, Tim. This is all part of the game for her,” Jason chuckled. “Being bossed around is part of it.”
“No, I think she wants me,” he said.
“Whatever gave you that idea? Her putting her hand down your pants, or sticking her tongue in your ear?” he asked archly.
“Man,” he said in a panting tone. “Was she playing with me, or was she serious?”
Jason suppressed a smile. Symone was getting her measure of revenge against Tim already. She was going to put him into a fever pitch for the rest of the day, he knew she would. It was what she did tonight that would tell the tale.
“Probably playing with you,” he answered honestly. “I wouldn’t take her too seriously. That, or you’d better go back to your room.”
“She grabs hold of my dick, and you tell me not to take her seriously?” he asked hotly in reply.
“It’s your call,” he shrugged.
He was right about that. For the entire afternoon, Symone absolutely tortured Tim by flirting with him, flaunting her assets in front of him, and taking all sorts of liberties with him. It seemed that every time he turned around, she had her hand down his pants, whispering mind-blowing obscenities in his ear. She got him back in spades for the bossing around he’d done to her earlier in the day, that was for certain. Tim couldn’t look at her without his face flushing, and eventually, Jason had to take pity on him by kicking Tim out. Symone looked utterly smug with herself after Tim was banished to his room upstairs, but her smug look vanished when he had her stand outside his door with the chain locked to her collar, wrapped around his doorknob while he took a shower.
He got back, towel around his waist, and she was still standing there. “Um, Jason, you think I might go, upstairs?” she asked in a hesitant manner.
“What’s upstairs?”
“Tim.”
“Why don’t you give that poor boy some peace?” he asked.
“Well, I was kind of going to go up there and keep all those promises I made to him,” she said with a sultry wink. “You think a girl can do that to a sexy guy all day and not get horny? There were a couple of times there when I was about to pull his pants down and fuck him right on your floor.”
He looked at her, then chuckled. “You would have had to clean it,” he told her. “I need to study, so do what you want. Just remember that you’re not done until tomorrow morning.”
“When do you want me to come back?”
“Tomorrow morning. You’re going to help me take care of tomorrow’s Marines.”
“Oh. I don’t have a problem with that,” she winked. “I get to have a hot night with a sexy guy, and I get to rub some Marines’ faces in the dirt. Thanks. For a human, you’re not a bad guy.”
“For a Faey, you’re not a bad girl.”
“I’m about to be,” she purred as she unhooked the chain from the collar.
Jason chuckled as she sauntered towards the stairs. Symone actually was a pretty OK girl. Faey, but other than that, she was alright. She had a sense of humor, she was quite candid with him, she’d respected his position, which really impressed him, she had a lot of patience, and she’d been a good sport. And her torturing of Tim showed that she certainly knew how to play the game. She was the kind of girl he certainly wouldn’t mind calling friend.
But then again, she was Faey. He shouldn’t get too cozy with her. After all, he liked Jyslin just as much, if not more, but his position wouldn’t allow him to be friends with her either.
Symone came lilting back to his room at about six in the morning, knocking on his door without considering that she might be waking him up. He was already up, however, for he was in the habit of rising early. He was lucky in the fact that he didn’t sleep very much, and didn’t seem to need much sleep.
She came in behind him as he opened the door for her, then leaned against it sensually and fanned her face with her hand, her eyes bright. “Where have you humans been all my life?” she said in a thoroughly satisfied tone. “Your friend Tim is—wow,” she related. “No Faey man ever made me mewl like one of your cat animals.”
“I’m glad you had fun,” he said dryly.
“Fun? That was more than fun,” she said with a grin. “I had to take two showers afterward.”
“Two?”
“I took one, then when I came back, Tim mussed me. I had to take another.”
He chuckled, but said nothing.
“We’re going out tomorrow night. I have a few friends in my unit who are free. Want to double?”
“No thanks,” he said mildly.
“It’s going to be weird having clothes on around him. It’s kinda fun for me when he stares at my tits while we’re talking. It makes me feel wanted and very sexy.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Trust me, I can get used to feeling sexy all the time,” she said with a throaty chuckle.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” she laughed. “So, what do you need me to do to get the Marines?”
“You’ll find out.” He paused a moment. “What makes Tim so much different?”
“Faey men are always so standoffish,” she complained. “They make you bend over backwards to get a date with them, then they never tell you where you stand. They’re always hinting, teasing, leading you on, and just when you think it’s going to get serious, they dump you like yesterday’s garbage. Tim was honest with me right off, and he really, really wants me, likes me, despite me being Faey. You have no idea how much I liked that, how much it made me feel wanted.”
Strange that she’d say something like that to him, but then again, he had the feeling that she’d be much more forthcoming with him, someone she promised not to flirt with, than a Faey man, or maybe even a Faey woman. “Don’t hurt him,” he warned.
“I won’t,” she said in a dreamy manner. “Trust me, Jason. I’ll be on his arm as long as he wants me.”
“Be careful. He might take some heat because he’s going out with a Faey.”
“Nobody’s going to bother him,” she promised. “I know how to be discrete.”
“Is he still asleep?”
She nodded, then grinned in a dirty manner. “I wore him out. But he seemed to take it fairly well.”
“Take what?”
“Faey can make love with more than just their bodies,” she told him. “Faey can join in telepathic communion while making love. It makes it ten times better. Sometimes it’s just physical, since both people have to drop their defenses, you know, let the other into their minds, so that takes some trust. First time lovers, people just having casual sex, they don’t usually do that. But Tim was alright with letting me join our minds. He said it gave him a little bit of a headache, but it was the most intense sex he’d ever had,” she said with a bright smile. “Sex is more fun when you can feel your partner’s pleasure,” she winked.
“I’ll remember that.”
“Well, all in all, I’m glad you collared me now,” she laughed. “I didn’t like the cleaning, but I have a new boyfriend. That’s a fair tradeoff.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t mind it all that much.”
“Not at all,” she said with a smile. “Since I’m going to be going out with your friend, I hope that means we can hang out together, Jason. I like you.”
“I like you too, Symone, but I can’t do that,” he said seriously. “I’m one of those people who object to your presence here. My principles won’t let me socialize with people I consider to be the enemy.”
She laughed. “You’re sitting there talking to a girl who’s been with you for two days, naked as the day she was born, who just screwed your best friend until he was a quivering mass of jelly. That’s not socializing?”
He chuckled. “Well, it does sort of sound like it, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I started hanging out with Faey.”
“You object to the Imperium, or the people?”
“The Imperium.”
“Well, I’m not the Imperium,” she declared. “I’m Symone Zabelle. I’m not even Imperial. I’m a soldier for House Tarlinne. I serve a noble, not the Imperium. I’m what you’d call a private soldier, or a mercenary.”
“Does your noble obey the Empress?”
“Of course.”
“Then you’re a part of the Imperium,” he said bluntly.
“Well, what would it take for you to hang out with me?” she asked.
“For the Imperium to leave, put everything back the way it was, then come back and ask us to join,” he answered seriously. “If they’d have asked, we might have agreed.”
“Well, you certainly don’t want too much,” she laughed. “Just give it time, Jason. You’ve seen how the Imperium works. You’re not a conquered race, you’re a part of the Imperium. As soon as you get used to it, you’ll be just like everyone else. You’ll be the equal of a Faey. You’re not the only alien race that’s a part of the Imperium, you know. The Menoda have been part of the Imperium for over two hundred years. They have noble houses and everything.”
He gave her a serious look. “We’ll never be the equal of the Faey,” he said grimly.
She bit her lip, but said nothing.
“I like you Symone, honestly,” he told her. “But you’re a Faey, and I’m a human. It doesn’t matter that you might agree with me. It doesn’t matter that I like you, or you like me. The only thing that matters is that your Imperium conquered my world. Did you think we’d welcome you in? Did you think that you dissolving all our nations and moving entire populations around and putting half of us on farms wouldn’t matter to us? Do you think that just because we can’t rebel, it means we all simply accept your order like weak-minded sheep? Well, it doesn’t.
“I can’t do anything about the Imperium. I admit that, and in a way, I accept it. But it doesn’t mean that I’ll embrace your Imperium, your customs, or even your people. I’ll go to your school and work for you, but I’ll never enjoy it. Whether I’m in a lab or a factory or a farm field, it doesn’t matter, because I’ll end up working for you one way or the other. I can accept that, so I’ll find the place that makes me happiest and stay there. I can’t fight, but I can resist in my own way, just to show you that we humans are not just conquered slaves. And I’ll do so until the day I die. It means absolutely nothing to the Imperium, but it means everything to me.
“It’s not personal, Symone. I like you, and you’re not the only Faey I like. The little war I’m having with the Marines is based on the same issue. The Marine likes me, and I admit, I like her. But I won’t go out with her, and I won’t be friends with her, because she represents the government that took my life away from me and made me nothing more than a slave. I’m sorry if that offends you or hurts your feelings, but it’s the truth. If circumstances were different, I’d be dating her right now, and you and me would be going out, getting drunk, and having a blast every weekend. But they’re not that way. You’re a Faey, I’m a human, and that’s all that it takes in my mind to forever put us on opposite sides of a line. I’m sorry.”
She was silent a long moment. “I can understand that,” she told him sincerely. “And I respect it. I’d try to sound impressive and wise, but that’s not very easy when a girl’s standing here naked.”
He chuckled, and gave her a gentle smile. “Your jiggling notwithstanding, I’m glad you understand.”
“I don’t jiggle,” she said primly. “I undulate.”
He gave her a surprised look, then burst into laughter.
Symone was alright. Too bad she was Faey.
She did her part against the two Marines that showed up at dawn, who immediately piled out of their patrol hovercar and set up an observation post out in Audobon Park, out in the open, where there was no way he could get at them without being seen. Her mission was to distract them, and she undertook her mission with great enthusiasm. The Army hated the Marines, the Marines hated the Navy (what the Faey called their starship military service), and the Navy hated everyone. That was how the inter-service rivalries worked in the Faey structure. The Marines were an elite form of combat troop who also served on starships as ship to ship combat troops and ground assault, so the Army resented them. The Navy looked down their noses at the other two branches of the Faey military, even though they were more than happy to have Marines on board their starships as security. Private soldiers, like Symone, who served a house instead of the Imperium directly, were considered part of the Army, but more like the old National Guard or Reserves of America’s dissolved army. They were here because their house was the one who had been given possession of Earth. Since the Imperium didn’t have enough space available in the Navy, Marines, and the Imperial Army for all the women who served their involuntary conscription, most of them ended up in the private armies of noble houses.
Symone’s help proved invaluable in getting the two Marines who showed up today. Her job was to distract, and she certainly managed to absolutely dominate their attention the instant she came out the door. After all, the last thing those two expected to see was a naked Faey women trudging out the front door of the dorm. She spotted them quickly and crossed the street, pulling the dog collar off her neck as she came out onto the grass lawn of the park. She reached them and started chattering at them quickly, talking fast, spinning quite the tale about how her squad lost a bet with Jason, and she ended up in a dog collar as a result. She asked them for some clothes or a ride back to her barracks, and they agreed. She let them go first, towards the car, and she lightly placed two tiny devices on the backs of their armor that had been hidden in the palms of her hands. She gave him a thumbs-up as they took her to his car, then got in it with them and was hurried away.
Mission accomplished.
He reached into his pocket and pressed a little red button on his remote, put it back in his pocket, then went to school.
Those two Marines discovered later, after dropping Symone off at her barracks, that whenever they drove towards the campus, they had sudden fits of terrible itching all over their entire bodies. The closer they got to the campus, the worse it became. Zora and Mil couldn’t understand what was happening, but when they realized that retreating made the insane itching ease, they both realized that somehow, some way, Jason had gotten them. Circling the campus proved that it was the campus that was at the center of this strange effect, and the itching started when they got within about a human mile of it. It started off very mild, almost kind of nice, like little feathers ghosting over their bodies, but it was all over their entire bodies, and it got worse and worse the closer they approached the campus.
They parked the hovercar about at the edge of this effect and looked at each other. “He got us!” Zora said, then she laughed. “How did he do it? What did he do?”
“I don’t know-hey!” Min said. “That regular was the only one who got close to us! Do you think she was in on it?”
“It’s possible, but how could she do anything? She was naked, and wasn’t carrying anything.”
“Unless she distracted us while Jason somehow did something,” Min grunted. “Myri said that you can’t sense him at all, that he can sneak up on just about anyone. Did you see him?”
“No, did you?”
“No.”
They looked at each other, then burst into laughter. “Should we go pay a little visit to that regular?” Min asked.
“Nah, she was just a part of the game,” Zora replied. “Besides, after being Jason’s pet for a couple of days, I think she suffered enough, don’t you?”
Jason enjoyed his Monday in peace, but Tuesday morning, at four a.m. sharp, he was awakened by a knock on the door. He blearily opened it-he got up at five every morning, so this was a little early for him-and found himself staring at a tall, regal-looking Faey with green hair. Emerald green. He had never seen that color hair on a Faey before. Despite it being green, she wore it in the short, comb-over style that many Marines favored, and it was strangely pretty with her blue skin. She was narrow-faced, almost foxlike in appearance, with large eyes, a long nose, and a narrow, sharp face that looked predatory. She was rather handsome, and it was apparent that she was older than the other Faey who had tasted defeat at his hands in the days past. Instead of armor, she wore a dark blue uniform of sorts, with sleek dark blue pants with a red sash, and a sharply pressed blue jacket that had silver buttons along its front. She had little silver triangles on her lapels, a little starburst design insignia pinned to her left epaulet, and a gold woven rope that was attached to her right, running under her arm.
“I am Lieutenant Lana,” she announced as if that meant everything in the world. “And these are yours.”
She held out his two little sub-sonic induction devices, which had used extreme high-frequency sound to irritate the skin of the two Faey from yesterday. Their armor conducted the subsonic waves, acting like amplifiers, and they were set to get stronger and stronger the closer they came to his remote.
“Thanks. They took me hours to build. I don’t want to lose them,” he said with a roguish smile as he accepted the two button-sized devices, painted the same hue of black as a Marine’s armor. “How long did it take them to find them?”
“Seven hours,” she answered honestly. “We had to use a scanner to find them. They were very devious.”
“Thank you,” he said with a nod. “So, you’re number six,” he said as he turned and walked from the door, leaving it open. “At least you’re civil enough to come and introduce yourself. ‘Hello, I’m Lieutenant Lana, and I’ll be your opposition this morning’,” he said in a voice that a waiter might use to introduce himself.
She chuckled. “I’m not here as the opponent. I’m here as the mediator,” she told him. “I’m here to put an end to this little war, Jason. Before I leave, we’ll have an agreement.”
“What makes you think I’m going to quit?” he asked. “I’m winning.”
“Because I have direct orders from my battalion commander to end it,” she told him with steady eyes. “We all thought it was funny for the first few days, but it’s starting to foment discord between the Corps and the Army regulars, as their little visit to you on Saturday probably proves to you.”
He nodded.
“I’m here to head things off before they get ugly. For you and Jyslin, and also for the Army and the Corps. So, before I leave here, we’ll have an agreement on the table, and one both sides will agree to honor. There’s no way you’ll get out of the date, so be prepared to stipulate that condition right now. But, given how badly you thrashed my Marines, I’m sure you can drag some conditions out of me that will suit you and make them very annoyed,” she winked.
“Why help me like that? Aren’t you supposed to be on their side?”
“Because I believe you deserve it,” she said. “After all, you’ve stymied my squad for six days now, and that’s no mean feat. My unit is good. Very good. But they’ve met their match in you so far. You are winning, Jason, and because of that, you should get the lion’s share in the peace agreement. You will have to concede the main point, but everything else is up for negotiation, and the current conditions favor a strong lean towards your interests.”
“Well, I appreciate the praise.”
“It’s more than that,” she said, pointing at the subsonic inducers he set on the desk. “Those little devices were devious, Jason, and it’s something I’ve never seen before. I had a tech scan them yesterday, and she thinks that they have some potential uses in military or civilian applications. She was impressed by the complexity of them, and she didn’t believe me when I told her that a second-semester tech student built them.”
He wasn’t quite happy about that. He didn’t build those inducers to be used in war. They were built as a prank to best a pair of Marines, that’s all.
“Don’t worry, I had their design patented,” she told him. “In your name. You invented them, after all. I also submitted the design to the Ministry of Technology.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means that if the Imperium uses the idea, you get paid for it,” she answered. “And the submission will get you noticed, Jason. You need that. The inducers are just one of three things I’ve never seen before. I’ve never seen that chemical you sprayed one Sheleese and Ilia that destroyed their armor without hurting them. I’ve also never seen anyone use a plasma magnet the way you did, with a magnetic field density sensor on it to control its magnetic force to make the hovercar hang in midair the way it did. Those are brilliant inventions, Jason. Just brilliant, and it makes it even more impressive when you realize that they’re coming from a second-year tech student with absolutely no background knowledge of Faey technology. To us, it’s like a primitive caveman stumbling on a pile of tools and material and using them to build a PPG. If you can attract the attention of the Ministry, there’s a good chance you can get into either black ops or research. That’s where anyone in school wants to end up.”
He gave her a long, steady look. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because I believe in helping people discover their potential,” she answered. “It’s my duty as an officer. I think you have what it takes to be in research, and I’ll do what I can to get you there.”
He was quiet a long moment, not sure what to say.
“Alright, so let’s agree right here and now that there’s no way you can avoid going out with Jyslin. That’s an absolute.”
“That’s an admission of defeat,” Jason told her. “That’s what all of this is about.”
“You’re going to lose this eventually, Jason,” she told him. “You’d lose tomorrow, I guarantee it. After you get out of school, Jyslin is planning to arrest you and throw you in a cell full of hand-picked cellmates, and keep you there until you admit defeat or she has to let you go in the morning. Then she was going to arrest you again that afternoon, and again, and again, until you gave up.”
Jason’s eyes hardened. “I thought she was better than that,” he growled.
“They’re not criminals,” she told him with a grin. “She was going to put you in a cell with a pack of giruzi.” Giruzi were massive canines that were indigenous to one of the worlds the Faey owned, which looked like black-pelted dogs who were five feet tall at the shoulder. Their eyes glowed red from some kind of bioluminescent reaction, and they had the capability to administer powerful electric shocks. They had bio-electro organs much akin to the shock glands of an electric eel, but they were much more powerful. A giruzi could unleash a blast of what looked like lightning nearly a hundred feet through open air. Giruzi used them to hunt prey, one of the most effective hunting evolutionary developments he’d ever seen. He’d seen them a few times, because sometimes the Marines used them for crowd control, having trained them to use their shocks to stun instead of kill. Humans might not be too motivated to disperse when faced with a few Faey in armor, but they scattered when a couple of giruzi were brought in to motivate them to be somewhere else.
Jason frowned, then he chuckled ruefully. “That’s clever, but it would have backfired. I’m not afraid of giruzi.”
“You would be if there’s someone giving them orders to scare you,” she told him with a wink. “Wouldn’t you prefer losing with dignity, or with an animal that weighs twice what you do chewing your clothes off?”
“It’ll be on her when my grades go down because I can’t study,” he shrugged.
“I know, and that’s the other reason why I’ve been ordered to put an end to this,” she said earnestly. “It’s going to do you permanent harm if we let this go on any longer. This academy is too demanding for you to be distracted for an extended period of time like this.”
“I am not going out with Jyslin,” he said adamantly.
“You will,” she said sternly. “What we’re here to negotiate is what happens during the date,” she smiled. “And the possibility of dates taking place after the first.”
He shouted, he argued, he even threatened, but Lana was absolutely unflappable. She talked him down from his highly confrontational stance, got him to talk. She met his posturing with calm logic, talking him down, talking him down, being utterly reasonable at all times.
She made him see two glaring facts. First, Jyslin was not going to stop until she won. She would be an eternal thorn in his side. And second, that an escalation of the war was going to do real harm to him, and possibly both of them. Where Jyslin and the other Marines failed, Lana succeeded by making him see reason, and that reasoning was that he should try to get what he could out of a bad situation.
So, they sat down in the common room and hammered out an agreement. Jason would go out on one date with Jyslin. That date would entail exactly one dinner at Copeland’s (Jyslin pays), going to the opera (Jyslin pays), and a nightcap visit to a small bar or restaurant of Jason’s choosing after the opera (Jyslin pays). After that, Jason had the option to have her take him home, or he could decide to stay out with her and do whatever they pleased. That was it. During this date, Jason had to behave in a courteous manner and not cause trouble, and Jyslin would be required to treat him with respect and not grind the fact that she was getting her date in his nose.
After the date, it was agreed upon that no matter what, Jyslin would not attempt to force him to do anything he did not want to the way she had before. She could annoy him, harass him, harangue him all she wanted, but she had to do it herself. She couldn’t bring the squad in on it, and she was absolutely forbidden from interfering with his schoolwork. Lana made that abundantly clear to him, and it hit him as rather important. She’d said that some of his little tricks had attracted attention, and now she comes in and admits that someone higher up ordered her to put a stop to it.
He wondered how high up that order came from.
“Are we agreed, then?” Lana asked in a reasonable tone, extending her hand across the table in the common room, which was filled with two couches and three large tables were students could sit and study, or watch the large flat-panel plasma screen TV hanging on the wall.
“I’m not too happy about this, but if it’ll get Jyslin off my back, I’ll agree to it,” he said after a moment.
“Then I think we have a deal,” she said. He took her delicate hand and shook it after a moment, sealing the bargain.
It was the first time that a date had been negotiated at the conference table. It was also the first date ever officially condoned and ordered to take place by the Imperial Marine Corps.
And it would take place on Friday.