 whisper. "Now we both have a secret to keep."

"How long have you known?" he asked in surprise.

"Since the day half of New Orleans heard you," she winked. "I knew what kind of trouble you'd get into if the Imperium knew, so I kept quiet. You can't tell Jyslin about me," she said again. "She might be keeping you quiet, but she's an _Imperial _Marine, and I can't entirely trust her. She won't turn you in because she wants a relationship with you, but I don't have that kind of ammunition to use against her here."

"I wondered why you weren't being as pally with her as you are with us."

"I'm still feeling her out," she answered. "I kinda like her, but I don't know enough to know if I can trust her with that kind of information yet." She grunted. "I need to get Tim going. My tits are burned and that's making them like hyper-sensitive, and anytime I start thinking of my tits, I want someone to play with them, and that just gets me thinking about sex. Care to bend me over a chair and relieve some of my tension if I can't get Tim in the mood?" she asked boldly.

"What? I thought you were in love with Tim."

"Oh, I am. I'm not asking you to make love, Jason. I'm _just_ asking for you to get me off. It's no big deal."

He forgot that Faey had a radically different attitude towards sex, and also that they quite distinctly separated the concept of making love from the concept of physical gratification. It was common practice for good friends to engage in casual sex, for a Faey didn't attach such powerful emotional ties to sex in the physical sense. For a Faey, the emotional ties and intimacy came when they joined minds, and that caused a dramatic separation of the physical act from the emotional act, so much so that each one had a separate standing in their society. In her mind, she wasn't asking for anything emotionally _intimate_. To Symone, it would simply be _sex_, and that was in no way even close to _making love_.

And, in a way, he realized, she was offering to make their friendship closer. She had never _offered_ sex before, at least not since those first days when he had her in the collar, when she found the idea of having sex with him to be an erotic fantasy. By offering sex now that they'd gotten to know each other, she was telling him _I want to be a close friend_. Faey wouldn't have sex with casual friends, but a close, personal friend was more than fair game when a Faey felt frisky. He understood that now, saw that first she shared a secret with him as an act of trust, admitted that she knew his secret to show that she was worthy of his trust in return, and then she offered to share sexual pleasure with him, telling him that she felt so comfortable with him that she was willing to perform a very intimate physical act with him, and that she liked him enough to find the idea of it pleasing. Symone wasn't offering sex-well, not _just_ sex-she was offering to be his friend. And not just a casual friend like they were now, but a _personal_ friend, an _intimate_ friend. She wanted to be a _best friend_.

"I doubt it'll come to that," he said carefully. "Tim's too attracted to you to ever say no when you're serious. I'll take Jyslin somewhere and take her out of the equation, and that'll make Tim comfortable enough. But," he added, understanding that he needed some kind of positive response to her proposition in order to make her understand that he knew what she really was asking for, "if Tim won't play, I'd be happy to take care of it for you, hon. We can't have you running around in a state of frustration."

"I knew you'd understand," she said with a bright smile and a wink, then she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek once more. "I need to find that spray bottle. If you see Tim before I catch up with him, let me know."

"Sure," he said. He watched her saunter away, watching her bare bottom, which was just slightly tinted purple, and chuckled. "Get the back, too," he called.

"I can feel it," she replied as she went up into the skimmer.

Tim came out the back hatch of the skimmer as Jason went to go sit back down in his chair and wait for Jyslin to come out, and he came over and sat in the chair beside him. He noticed that Tim looked just a little bit out of sorts. "Man," Tim said hesitantly.

"What?"

"Er, well, I was in the skimmer's bathroom, and Jyslin came in," he told him. "I told her to get out, that I was using it, but she just said she wanted to use the sink. Well, she took off her bikini bottom in front of me."

"So? Jeeze, Tim, you know that Faey don't care about that kind of thing. Both of them were laying around naked for half the morning."

"Jason, she _bent over_. You know how cramped it is in there. I saw it all, and it was like right in my face! At first I thought she was coming onto me or something, but then I realized that she wasn't when she turned on the water and threw her bikini bottom in the sink."

He smiled knowingly. "It's not a big deal, Tim," Jason assured him, leaning back in his chair and waiting for Jyslin to come out. "Faey aren't modest."

"I asked her what the hell she was doing, and she said she had sand in her-er, her crotch," he said. To his amusement, Tim didn't want to use more base terms about Jyslin in front of him. "She said she had to wash the sand out, grabbed a washrag, and leaned on the lip of the sink _facing me_, you know, like ready to do that right in front of me. I bailed at that point. I'm just glad I wiped before she came in. I was like three seconds from getting off the john when she barged in."

Jason laughed. "I think she was trying to put you at ease, Tim," he explained. "She knows that Symone's getting a little anxious, and I think she's trying to show you that she's not all that worried about it if you and Symone go off and have some fun."

"Like _that_?" he asked in a strangled tone.

"Faey aren't humans, Tim. They tend to get their points across through example, not through words. More often than not, instead of saying something, they'll _do_ something that tries to prove their point. By sticking her butt in your face and fully intending to do something like washing sand out of her crotch in front of you, she was telling you _I'm familiar with you_. She's saying 'hey, I'm willing to do just about anything around you because you're a friend and I'm comfortable with you, so don't feel that you can't do something you want to do in front of me or when I'm with you.' She's not telling you she wants to be in the room with you and Symone, but she is telling you that she knows that you and Symone want to go make love, and she's okay with that."

"I, okay," he said, then he was silent a moment. "You know, she coulda just _said_ something."

"Tim," he said steadily. "They may be Faey, but they _are_ women. Since when does a woman ever come out and _say_ what she means?"

Tim glanced at him, and burst into laughter. "Point," he agreed. "At least it wasn't something for nothing, though."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I didn't exactly pull up my pants _before_ I got off the commode, and she was staring right at me when I did. She got a good look at my johnson. She even looked down at it and everything without even being tactful about it."

"You expected her to be tactful after she did _that_?" Jason asked pointedly.

Tim burst into laughter again. "I guess that was a kinda stupid thought," he agreed.

Jason paused a moment. "Symone's looking for you," he said. "She's feeling _very_ frisky. I suggest you take her into the habitat module for a while."

"I want to, but, you know, Jyslin was here," he affirmed.

"And now Jyslin just told you that you don't have to hold back just because she's here. In her own special little way," he added.

Tim laughed, then grinned at him. "I certainly got the message. Where is Symone?"

"In the skimmer. You came out the back just as she went in the front."

"So she's in there with Jyslin. Making comparisons, most likely."

"Maybe," Jason answered noncommittally. "This might be better coming from me, so I'll tell you now."

"What?"

"Symone propositioned me," he said mildly. "But-"

"No, that's alright, you don't have to explain that," Tim interrupted him. "Symone told me about that kind of thing, about how Faey friends-you know, have sex the same way they might meet at a coffee house and talk, and how it doesn't mean she wants to date you. She said she might ask you someday, when she felt that I was comfortable with it, because that's what friends do. That's when I understood it, you know, how she totally doesn't think it's wrong to be my girlfriend yet have sex with one of her friends. She kept thinking that you were too sexually frustrated or something," he chuckled. "You were sleeping alone, and she said a guy with a girlfriend shouldn't be doing that. She kept telling me that if you didn't get some from Jyslin soon, she was going to have to go down to your room and take care of it, in her words."

"I'm glad you understand what that means," Jason said with sincere relief. "I didn't want you taking it the wrong way."

"Hell, if she's going to sleep with another guy, I'd rather it be a friend," he shrugged. "That way I know what diseases I'm getting."

Jason looked at him, then burst into helpless laughter.

"Alright, time to go find Symone," he said.

"Make sure she used the burn-heal."

"What?"

"She'll understand."

"Oh, okay. See you soon."

Jason watched Tim rush into the skimmer, and not a moment later he and Symone rushed towards the back of the plane, where he'd set up the habitat module. The module looked just like a big circular tent, with a rubber-like door that had actual hinges. It was climate controlled, powered, had its own kitchen and bathroom, and also had a collapsible vidlink built into one of its walls. Using a habitat module was like having a portable house, but to the Faey, it was _roughing it_. Jyslin came out a moment later, still without her bikini bottom on; actually, she was carrying it. She sidled over to where he was sitting and flopped down in the chair Tim had just vacated. "I see it worked."

"What worked?" he asked.

"I was in the bathroom, sticking my pussy in his face to get him horny, so he and Symone would go bang each other in the habitat module and leave us free to talk," she told him bluntly. "He kept holding back while Symone was inviting him. I just wanted to push him over the edge."

Jason chuckled. "He told me about that. I told him that you did it to hint to him that you wouldn't mind if he and Symone went and had a little fun."

"Same result," she shrugged.

"What did you want to talk about?"

"I thought about what you said a little," she said seriously. "I was going to send in that gun's techs without you knowing, like Lana did with the itchers, but I'm not going to do that now."

"I appreciate that. And I appreciate you being honest with me," he told her gravely.

"I still think you should," she pressed. "Look at what the itcher got you, Jason. A skimmer. Sending in the techs on that gun would let you buy a _hangar_ full of them."

"I admit, I love my skimmer, but at least they won't use the subsonics for killing people, or to oppress another world like they oppressed mine, Jyslin. And I _didn't_ send it in. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a lucky windfall," he told her. "They told me that they're using the idea of it for communicating on an ocean planet, and they also adapted it to kill deadly bug larva on another planet. I guess the larva are sensitive to subsonic frequencies."

"I won't try to give you pep-talk propaganda bullshit, Jason," she said honestly. "You know how I feel about the Imperium. Hell, you know a hell of a lot more about it than I thought you did," she admitted. "But we're _stuck_ with it. There's nothing either of us can do but try to make the best of it. You asked what I believed in, but I never answered you. I believe in _me_. I believe in trying to get as far in the system as I can go to make myself happy. Sometimes the system pisses me off, but what else can I do? I just have to keep fighting for what I want. Because if I don't, I'll have nothing but misery and regrets. Even if I fail, at least I can say I _tried_."

"I can't blame you for that, Jyslin," he told her, putting his hand over hers and patting it. "But we're not going to agree on this point. So let's just agree to disagree and leave it at that."

She nodded, then sighed and looked at him. "I want you to move in with me."

"No."

"But-"

"Don't start-"

"I'm not going to get combative," she cut him off in a level tone. "Just listen to me."

He was a bit surprised. "Alright," he agreed.

"Look me in the eye and tell me you're not attracted to me," she challenged.

"I _am_ attracted to you," he admitted with a straight face.

"Alright then, you've stipulated that you think I'm a sexy beast," she said with a slight smile. "And we established last week that you don't see me as the Imperium anymore. So, why not? You're not moving in with the Imperium, Jason, you're moving in with _me_. Jyslin Shaddale, remember? If you can't trust me by now with this between us," she said, tapping her temple meaningfully, "then when will you ever trust me?"

"Remember when I told you about belief, Jyslin?" he asked in reply, and she nodded. "You represent something every fiber of my being opposes. No matter how much I like you, or how much I feel you're not the Imperium, my beliefs simply will not _allow_ me to move in with you. If I do that, I'm admitting defeat and allowing the Imperium to win."

"But we go out. We have fun, we talk, we get along great together, we have great sex, and we do that other thing," she protested.

"I know, and sometimes it destroys me," he answered candidly. "Every time I come back from a date with you I'm kicking myself for being so weak, for compromising my principles because I wanted to spend time with you. I know you're the enemy, but I keep falling right back in with you, because I _do_ like you, and I _do_ want to be with you. I know I have to keep with you because of that other thing, and that contact always breaks my will and leads to the dates and the sex. Part of me wants to move in with you, but that part of me that opposes the Imperium won't allow it, and I know that if I did, I'd never be able to live with myself. Doing that would be admitting defeat, and that is something that I will _never_ do."

She sighed, looking at her knees. "So your pride won't let you be anything more to me," she said.

"My pride, my beliefs, my upbringing, my conscious, just about everything but my affection for you and our stipulated mutual attraction," he answered honestly.

"So... at least I have one thing going for me. Aside from my cute ass," she said with a wan little smile. "What would it take to change that?"

"Oh, just your resignation from the Marines," he answered bluntly. "I cannot even _think_ of having a relationship with a Faey who's a direct representative of a government I despise. No matter how much I understand that you are not the Imperium, Jyslin, you still represent it, and that makes you untouchable to my conscious. If you were a civilian, though, I probably wouldn't feel that way."

"I can't resign. I'm still in my conscription."

"Then we'll just have to wait," he told her.

She sighed, then chuckled. "So we wait. Don't make any long-term plans, Jason. In three years, I'm coming for you, and I won't take no for an answer."

"I'll be waiting."

"Good. Oh, and please don't feel bad when we go out," she told him. "Just think of it as practice for when I'm out of the military. I promise I'll burn my uniform before every date, just so you have some kind of symbolic gesture."

Jason laughed. "That might get expensive."

"Hell, money well spent in my opinion."

He was quiet a moment. "Sophistry," he sighed.

"What does that word mean?"

"Hypocrisy," he elaborated. "I'm making up reasons to go against my morals just to justify doing what I want. But I know it's going to happen anyway, so at least why fight in that regard?"

She laughed. "It's the power of the cute ass," she winked at him.

"It's called thinking with the little brain," he grunted.

"Well, you can't justify being my lover or my boyfriend, but can you at least accept me as a _friend_?" she asked.

"I think I could," he replied, "as long as you don't try to make it anything more."

"Well, In Faey society, good friends often have sex," she told him with a coquettish smile. "Would your towering morals find fault with that? Since we'll be having _platonic_ sex, not _romantic_ sex. You'd be what we Faey call a breakfast friend. A friend we'll have sex with, that often stays for breakfast."

He laughed. "More sophistry," he accused. "That very idea is a contradiction in terms. _Platonic sex_."

She smiled at him. "Only to a human," she replied. "So, I promise to back off and be your friend, and _only_ your friend. You promise not to shut me out, and we both agree that we have the major hornies for each other, and we may, when the mood hits us, have mind-blowing sex. Just _platonic_ sex, no strings," she winked. "We also continue doing that other thing, until you don't need me to help you with it anymore."

"I think I can live with that," he agreed honestly.

"Alright then, we have a deal," she announced, standing up and extending her hand to him professionally, though he wasn't sure how professional she would look, standing there in a white bikini top and naked from the breasts down. He took her hand and shook it, sealing the bargain. "Now then, you can do something for me," she announced.

"What?"

She turned around. "Could you _please_ find the burn-heal and fix this?" she pleaded, showing him the dark purple on the top half of her buttocks, which were rather noticeably sunburned. So was her back, all the way up to her shoulders. There was a light strip along where her thong bikini had been on her. He saw the pattern of it and realized that the most burned areas were what was exposed when they were riding the airbikes. "I don't want to put my bikini back on until it's healed. Every time the strap shifted, it got _very_ uncomfortable. That's why I'm walking around bottomless, hon. I promise, I'm not trying to seduce you," she said with a wink over her shoulder.

"Symone had it in the skimmer," he said. "She didn't come out with it, so it's probably still there."

"I'll go find it," she said.

Jason watched her bound up into the skimmer, then he leaned back and sighed. He hoped that their agreement would keep her from getting too aggravated with him. He didn't really want to go as far as he did, for she would be an eternal temptation to him, but he also knew that she was his only hope of mastering his telepathic ability. And because of that, he had to stay with her. But, he could admit to himself that he could be a friend to her. As long as she respected his ideals and knew where the line was, he thought that they'd actually get along rather well.

He knew he was compromising his principles, but not by a great degree, at least not enough to really feel guilty over it. At least now he felt that Jyslin understood him and understood how he felt, and she was also willing to accept that, work around it, respect his principles. He couldn't fault her for that, not one bit. She was being _very_ understanding.

He felt it would work out. He'd had a week of training, and had learned how to tune out the stray thoughts of the other humans around him, and had learned how to send. He still wasn't very good at it, but he was learning. If he pushed himself, he'd be to the point where he was competent with this new power within two months. And when he was, he'd be safe once more.

At least he fervently hoped so.


Chapter 5

_Kaista, 13 Oraa, 4392, Orthodox Calendar_
_Friday, 1 July 2007, Native Regional Reckoning_
_New Orleans, Gamia Province, American Sector_

Life had definitely become weird, and finals had very little to do with it.

Monday was the start of finals, finals which had had the entire campus in a frenzy of activity. This most-elite of all native educational institutions had gone into an uproar of intense driving, as instructors worked hard to prepare their students for finals, as school officials and administrators rode the teachers, as the _Zarina_ of New Orleans rode the administrators, as the _Olena_ of southeastern Louisiana rode the Zarina, and the Baron of North America rode the Olena. Everyone on campus from students up were short-tempered and almost obsessed with the final exams, so much so that both the regular Army and the Marines had placed extra patrols on campus to keep the tension from exploding into fights.

Jason had his own tension and anxiety as well, but for him, finals was only a small part of it. The core of his tension laid mainly in Jyslin. Though he did truly like her, his moral and philosophical beliefs were more and more causing some friction between them, though it wasn't anything so huge that they decided to quit one another.

Truth be told, Jason had become quite amicable to their relationship. He _liked_ Jyslin, and he was strongly attracted to her, and she had been true to her promise to back off, to treat him like a friend and not a love interest. Under those conditions, he was able to at least partially justify in his own mind being around her, and they'd had a pretty good time. She continued to train him in telepathy, which was the primary focus for both of them. She wanted him not just competent, but quite skilled with his power by the end of July, when she'd have absolutely no qualms about him operating around Faey without worrying. He agreed with her and worked very, very hard to train himself, often at the expense of his schoolwork, though his average never dropped below 94. When not training in telepathy, they had a pretty good time. He started teaching her Aikido and started working out with her, they would watch movies or play bridge or just pal around with Tim and Symone when all four had free time. Every Sunday, they all piled into his airskimmer and they went somewhere. They'd been to the beach, to the Andes for some summer (winter down there) skiing, and had gone on a guided car-safari in Africa. Jyslin seemed to have no problems befriending Tim and Symone, and for her part, Symone warmed up considerably towards Jyslin over the weeks. Obviously, Symone had gotten more comfortable with the Marine.

But there were fights, and some of them got passionate. Most of them revolved around Jason's lack of interest in trying to get placed into Black Ops (where most weapons and top-secret military systems were designed) or R&amp;D (where _everything_ was designed). Jyslin seemed totally incapable of fathoming that doing so was going against the fundamental bedrock of his personality and moral standing, for he had vowed that he would _never_ help the Faey by designing, building, or maintaining anything that would help them continue to keep their hold over Terra or allow them to conquer another planet. Jason still had every intention of washing out next semester and getting a job as a systems technician, maintaining generic Faey technology on Earth, but nothing sensitive or military in nature. Despite two months of being together, Jyslin still could not understand the intense hatred he had of the Faey and what they had done to his world. It was almost like she refused to see the forest for the trees, because she seemed to think that if he could accept her and Symone, then he should be able to accept any other part of Faey government, society, or culture, at least after he got enough exposure to it. She kept trying to bring him into her world, and every time she did so, he set his heels in and absolutely would not budge. She became aggravated that he had no trouble bringing her into his world, but would not even for a moment come into hers.

The only ground he'd given over that was to meet Jyslin's aunt, Lorna. Lorna was a general in the Royal Marines, who worked in their command center in Washington, the Pentagon. The Faey had taken a liking to the building after the dissolution of the American military, and had annexed it for their own use. Lorna was much as Jyslin described, a blunt, straight-talking woman with a broken nose, a scar on her chin, a cybernetic left eye, and a very direct demeanor. They'd met over dinner about a week ago, when Lorna came down to visit her niece, and Jason had to admit that he did rather like her.

Right now, he and Jyslin were in a "cool-off" phase, for they'd had another fight last night when he refused to attend a barbecue that her squad was giving in Audubon park on Sunday. Every month, Jyslin's squad got together for a social occasion, which included the staff officers that didn't always mingle with the enlisted. It helped maintain unity within the squad. Lately, the squads had started playing baseball on Saturdays, when schedules allowed, and Jyslin's squad was currently 3-1 in intersquad scrimmages. Faey seemed have a curious like of the sports of baseball, soccer, football, and basketball, and it wasn't odd to see off-duty Faey walking down the streets or in malls with New Orleans Saints tee shirts or hats. Much to Jason's surprise, he'd even seen a professional baseball game televised on ISN, the Imperial Sports Network, the Faey Imperium's version of ESPN. That game had high ratings, where the Boston Red Sox crushed the New York Yankees, 7-2. Granted, it was at four in the morning by Imperial Standard Time, the time by which the Imperium operated, but given that every world had its own time, but every retransmission station delayed programming to coincide as closely as possible with IST. It was virtually impossible on some worlds, though. IST consisted of a 30 hour day, a 10 day week, and a 30 day month. Local time was impossible to correlate to that because of the 24 hour day. Generally, they let the programming slide for a couple of weeks, then edited a block of programming to resynch local programming with IST. The only stations that didn't adhere to IST were INN and a couple of entertainment networks.

Thing on other fronts were going rather well. Jason had scrapped his project idea, and instead had built a panel "remote keyboard," which was basically just a stand-alone holographic keyboard that linked back to the main panel. It included a redirector to allow the panel to send its video display to another monitor, allowing someone to sit in a chair and use a standard television as the display, while the panel sat on a table across the room. One couldn't use the touch features of a panel's standard display, but it was useful for just writing out reports and such. Jason had built it in about three days, getting his hands on a broken panel's holographic emitter and the keyboard programming, then adding in a few simple programs to allow the hardware to receive panel video information and relay it to a remote receiver. He bought the remote receiver from a mail-order company on Arcturus IV. All in all, his project cost him about 74 credits to build, and it worked.

Not that he needed money. He'd received his first royalty payment for the hypersonic communicators, which were based on his design idea, and it had been quite shocking. That first monthly payment was C67,289.18443. Decimals beyond two places weren't often used with credits, but when it came to royalties, where he had a percentage, they were kept in to keep the books straight. That was 67,000 or so credits for _one month_. And he'd receive a royalty check every month, his cut for every unit that was produced. He had yet to start getting royalties for the larva killer device, because they'd had a production glitch and had had to push back the schedule. They even sent him an email to tell him that, keeping him informed on what was going on. He appreciated that.

Now those things, he didn't _mind_ being paid for. They were non-military, and in the case of the larva killer, they actually helped people. He liked the idea that someone had taken something he thought up and had adapted it so it was being used to help keep people from getting sick. That was probably the only reason he ever thought to spend any of that money, instead of just transferring it into hard currency and throwing it off the Huey Long Bridge. Jason had no beef with the people in the Imperium per se, as long as they didn't represent the system. He had no problems with them using his ideas to help make life better for his fellow oppressed citizens... even if it _was_ an arm of the government that was doing it. In that way, and that way only, he was able to bend his moral position, because his ideas were serving a greater good. The government was just a messenger, and in this case, he wasn't going to shoot the messenger.

There was one thing military he had going on, and that was the rail gun. It was already built, sitting on a rack on the wall over his desk, sitting there taunting him a little bit. The gun was assembled, but so far, he'd had no luck with it. The technical specs were good, and the weapon had been built correctly, but his problem laid in the software. Jason wasn't that bad using TEL, Trinary Encoded Language, the standard programming language of most non-military Faey devices, but he was having a devil of a time trying to get everything just so. So far, the weapon had remained inoperable because of a software-hardware conflict, and he just hadn't had the time to iron it out. Every time he loaded the new code for it, the weapon would go into emergency shutdown mode either as soon as he tried to bring up the processor, after he loaded a round in the chamber, or after he disengaged safety and went hot. He hadn't even got to where he could fire the weapon yet. It wasn't like he was really all that worried about it... after all, he was only building it to see if he _could_. And with everything else going on, it wasn't like he had all that much time to play with it.

It had certainly driven Ailan absolutely _wild_ with curiosity when he asked to use the replicator, then was very secretive about what he was doing. Ailan kept a very close eye on the things his star pupil did, wondering what new idea Jason would come up with next, and actually wanting to get into the design of it a little bit. Ailan had the soul of an engineer, always wanting to tinker or experiment, and had actually done some pretty 