s, she's a blueskin. _Some_ of them are alright."

"Look, they're stopping," Mary said fearfully. Jason looked out and saw that they hadn't stopped, they'd changed course. They were now slowly flying right at his house. Their path would take them right over it. He frowned, trying to guess out if they could see the skimmer from that angle. He realized that he'd failed to put up netting on the sides of the bridge to conceal the skimmer... an aggrievous oversight on his part. Then again, he wasn't all that familiar with this military stuff yet. He could only hope that their angle wouldn't let them see the skimmer.

They were all as quiet as church mice as the two dropships passed directly over Jason's house. He could hear their engines, could almost feel his skin tingling, but it wasn't his skin that had him worried the most. He quickly formed a shield of thought, then pushed it out away from him, one of the advanced techniques that Jyslin had taught him before he left, creating a barrier of talent that would protect him _and_ the two people with him. To the Faey, this house was devoid of any sentient being. He felt several light touches on the edge of that shield of thought, press against it lightly, and then move on. They were hunting for minds, and weren't expecting active concealment, so they didn't test his shield in any way. He could only hope that the house's brick was thick enough to conceal some of the _metals_ that were in his house from their sensors, metals that wouldn't be found anywhere else, metals that would give away his location. He realized that he had no sensor blocking technology on the _house_, and none on the skimmer, leaving them open and exposed.

That was a _glaring_ deficiency. He had to start being more thorough about things like this, before it got him captured. This was _not_ a game. Not being familiar with how things were done was absolutely no excuse. He had to completely rethink how he did things, research how it was _supposed_ to be done, then for God's sake, _do it_. Before he ended up in a windowless black room on Draconis Prime strapped down to a gurney and a mindbender with her hands on his face.

The three of them crept silently to the back of the house and looked out the kitchen window, towards the river. The two dropships were still moving lazily south, out over the river and to the far side. They watched as they drifted further and further out, then were hidden behind the houses that blocked his house's view of the river.

They had missed them.

He blew out his breath, leaning on his hands, which were planted on the counter. "That was close," Clem said in a hushed voice. "They certainly ain't stoppin'. It's not another sweep. Maybe they really were lookin' just for you, Mister Jason sir."

"I wonder if they saw anyone out on the streets," Jason mused.

"No sir," Clem told him. "That sound makes _everybody_ go to ground."

"That's good." He stood back up and put the curtain back down. "Well, you two had better get on to dinner. I'm going to try to get this to work."

"Get what to work, if you don't mind my asking?" Clem asked.

"A little project that helps take up my time," he answered.

"No offense, but you should put some garden out before winter," Clem said. "I've been here four days now, and ain't never seen you hunt or plant. How do you eat?"

"Right now I'm living off the food I brought," he answered. "I've got about a month left of food. I do need to start learning how to hunt, though."

"I can help you there, Mister Jason," Clem said. "Next time me and Luke go up to try our hand, we'll take you along."

"I can help you put in a garden," Mary offered with a shy smile.

"I think that would be a good idea," Jason told her with a nod. "We're not plowing up my yard though. I like my grass, thank you very much."

"We noticed," Clem chuckled. "There's lots of available ground around here, though."

Jason nodded. "We'll just pull up some sidewalks and use the ground across the street," he said. "After I move my traps, though," he added absently. "And I need to do some more work. I realized a few holes in my security when those dropships passed over us. I have to fix that, quickly."

After saying his goodbyes and seeing them out, he got back to work on the railgun. He wanted to get that finished, so he could use the railgun without looking through the scope, and then without using the scope at all when he realized that it was the scope providing most of the data fed to the smartgun pad. It wasn't that hard to install a laser sight or write a rangefinder program, since that was a simple exercise in basic math dealing with the refraction of the laser bouncing off a target, but writing a targeting program and installing a new sensor by the muzzle to detect the laser sight was a bit tricky.

Seeing those dropships gave him a new urgency, so he worked on it non-stop. For nearly thirty continuous hours he worked on it, using no-doze tablets out of his first aid kit to stay awake, because it was _that_ important. But after those thirty hours, after all the coding and recoding and recoding and testing, he came out of his basement with a railgun that could now do anything the attached scope could do, _and_ could communicate over the smartgun link. It could find the range to target, it put a crosshair on the heads-up of his visor when he had the railgun in his hands and the weapon was hot, and it supplied certain choice bits of information to the visor's display, mainly ammo count and weapon status, and would flash critical error codes to his visor if they occurred. He then taped clips together in a flip-flop array, letting him reload quickly by yanking the current clip and flipping it over for the fresh one, much like he'd seen them do on military documentaries, and placed the fifth odd clip in case on his belt. The second taped clip went in a compartment on the thigh, because it was too big like that. That allowed him to carry some 250 rounds clipped, and a couple of other belt compartments were filled with loose rounds, which gave him a very good supply. The last chore was installing carrying strap anchors and fashioning a sling strap, and he was done.

The railgun was now completely finished. It worked, it worked well, it worked either with his armor or with the scope (for when he wasn't wearing armor), and he felt there was nothing more to be done with it... though someday he _would_ figure out why the rounds stopped creating the sonic boom. But that could wait, because he had too much to do.

After a long, needed sleep, he got up in the middle of the night and got to work. The first order of business was netting. He scoured the city in the dark, wearing full armor because he was in _no_ mood to take _anything_ off _anyone_, until he found an old military surplus store in Barborsville. After evicting a bear who had taken up residence inside, he raided the place for a goodly supply of netting, which was one of the few things that someone else hadn't taken. He also raided the National Guard detachment, then the Air National Guard detachment up at the old airport, collecting up more of the netting that nobody else seemed to want. He was forced to use his trailer for his airbike, risking them detecting it because he needed its carrying capacity. After that, he added coating to the spatial engine casing of the carrier in carbidium to his list of things to do, so it wouldn't be detected.

After he collected up all the netting he could get, he pulled it out, tied it together as needed, then hung it off the edge of the bridge around his skimmer. He had more than enough for both sides, but he ran out trying to go across the underside. It left a fifty foot gap, so he centered that gap so one had to literally be looking straight in through the middle to see inside. He anchored the netting directly to the ground and the concrete using an annealer-which almost caused it to overload trying to anneal one composite material to another, something that they did _not_ do very well-and rode around on his airbike to look at his work at varying altitudes and distances. It was the wrong color, he realized as he inspected it from a distance, drawing his eye to it. He then tracked down some paint from Lowe's and literally painted the netting to match the ground, grass, and concrete underneath where it hung. After doing that, it looked _very_ good.

That took him two days. After that, he addressed the problem of blocking sensors. There really was no dependable technology to do so, at least none in the public domain (though there probably were a bunch that were considered top secret), relying instead on hiding the sources of energy that would be detected by the sensors. Faey sensors had a very wide array of detection capability, but they weren't as sensitive as Jason would have thought. With their other technology, he'd have thought that their sensors could find an individual human in a city by his unique biorhythms, but they could not. They could detect "life," but couldn't discern between organisms of the same general size. They could tell a tree from an animal, but couldn't tell a fox from a coyote, or a bear from a human, and they could _not_ pinpoint a return that faint from a great distance... such as from orbit. From orbit, the area around Huntington was just one big blur of "life," with no hope of separating individual life signs. The closer the sensor array was, the more accurate it could get... which was why those sensor pods on those dropships were so dangerous to them.

That sent him back to CivNet, for an intense search on the exact way that Faey sensors operated. They had two modes, passive and active, much like the old sonar used by ships and submarines. Passive was "listening" for certain energy signatures, and active was bouncing a signal off an area to check for the specific pattern of the return. How the signal was returned would tell them the physical makeup of the material in question, and those were rather sensitive. Maya had him hide the skimmer under the bride to protect it against that sensor technique, while keeping it powered down protected it from the passive type.

He brainstormed constantly for _days_, often forgetting to eat and sleep. Temika returned during that time, but he barely remembered it. He would come up to his kitchen and find food sitting on the table, left by Clem's group, and have no idea how it got there, if he cooked it, or anything. He'd been leaving his door unlocked. Every iota of his attention was focused on the single task of devising a means to defeat Faey sensors, to hide him and his equipment from scans. The carbidium defended against the passive sensors by shielding the energy signature of what was behind it, but there was no way to defend that piece of equipment against an active sweep, because it would detect the carbidium itself, as well as the energy signal it was hiding.

The airbikes didn't have any kind or protection against the active component of Faey sensors, but the active portion wasn't as much of a danger to him because of the great distance involved between him and the sensors. At that range, the airbike's active signature was so small that the computer that washed the return for the sensor operator very well might attribute it to a magnetic anomaly, where a shift or disruption in the Earth's magnetic field caused a "bounce," or a false return. That's why Kumi hadn't been worried about the airbikes, feeling that all they needed were signature maskers. The skimmer, on the other hand, was way too large to avoid detection. But, if those sensors were _closer_, like those dropships using sensor pods, then the smaller items were going to get detected. Either dropship would have picked up his airbike had it not been in his skimmer, which itself was under the bridge.

He thought of his skimmer again. It was relying on a combination of defenses to hide it from the sensors. It was powered down, to prevent passive sweeps from detecting its energy signature. But, it was also hidden under the bridge, where the tons of concrete and steel were over it, scrambling the active signal that was reaching it, then scrambling it again when it bounced back into space, which effectively concealed the active signature of the metals of which the skimmer was constructed.

So, he needed some kind of hybrid concept, a combination of physical shielding to defeat passive sensors and some way to defeat the active sensor. He studied the hyperthreaded pulse that the Faey used as their active sensor signal, and found that it too was a _metaphased_ concept. That signal was a composite of an infinite number of individual frequencies that shifted slightly into alternate quantum states, in effect existing in multiple states at once. It was by no means as complicated or far-reaching as metaphased plasma, however, only reaching slightly into alternate quantum states, what they called _quantum shift_. That was how the active sensors could also detect metaphased plasma operations, because they detected the alternate quantum states. But exceptionally heavy metals like carbidium blocked that, because they were _so_ dense that they literally reached just enough into quantum shift to present a physical barrier to a signal that only _just_ extended into quantum shift. It was kind of like the idea of a black hole, a gravity field so dense that nothing could escape it. Well, carbidium was so physically dense that not even the partially metaphased signal of a Faey sensor could penetrate it, even if it was sprayed onto a casing using a sprayer.

He added that into his list of requirements. His solution needed to be able to defeat a hyperthreaded signal, that would possess quantum shift.

He looked, and looked, and looked. He surfed through engineering boards, research sites, even hunted through the archives at Research and Development that he could access, and found no answer.

He literally pounded his head on the desk at one point, disrupting his holographic keyboard. He then leaned back in his chair so deeply that his head flopped upside down behind him, and he was presented with a flip-flopped view of the far side of his room. Over there was stored his stuff and some excess material. His armor was hanging on the wall on pegs for each piece, his railgun on a rack over it, and that spool of excess phase cloth was leaning in the corner.

Phase cloth.

_Phase cloth_!

Holy _shit_! That _just might work_!

All he needed to do was find something that would be effective against the _entire _signal, including the segments that were quantum shifted. The nature of the signal was in itself one of the problems getting around it, since it was a hyperthreaded pulse, possessing quantum shift. Just like how phase cloth could defeat metaphased plasma, he needed something that could deal with the metaphased aspect of the hyperthreaded pulse.

So he needed to fight fire with fire. He needed to stop a quantum shifted signal with a quantum shifted _material_.

Phase cloth was a layered armored cloth with the phased silk of those arachnids in the middle of it. It was designed to stop MPAC fires by defeating the metaphased aspect of the charge, presenting a physical barrier to a substance that existed in a different quantum reality... or multiple quantum realities, in the case of an MPAC.

What he needed was something along the lines of a similar concept. He needed a material, a _layer_, that would intercept that hyperthreaded pulse and either absorb it, refract it, or redirect it, either capture it or scatter it so no coherent reply got back to the receiver. It had to be the outermost layer of the object it was hiding, to prevent anything in front of it from bouncing back a signal. It had to possess quantum shift, to be able to defeat the sensors on that level, but still had to be constituted of a material dense enough to block passive sensors from detecting energy signatures.

If he wanted a barrier that existed outside all others, then he either needed a _field_ or a _shield_. A _field_ was a broad area of energy, like the volume inside a microwave oven, where the energy signature saturated a volume. When turned on, a microwave oven created a _field_ of microwave radiation, trapped inside the oven itself, which excited water molecules. A _shield_ was an active projection of coherent energy with defined borders, not saturating a wide area of volume. The shields in his skimmer were the perfect example of that.

The shield idea was immediately out. It would be too difficult to design, and he didn't have the parts on hand to build one anyway. But a _field_ was doable. The simplest form of a field he could create would be a _white noise generator_. That was simply a Faey hyperthreaded pulse emitter set down here that fired the entire signal back into space, blinding their active sensors by hiding actual returns behind a wall of responses. The drawback of that is that it would be pretty darn obvious, when they saw this hole of _nothing_ smack dab in the middle of a grid of defined response.

Given that the idea here was to trick them into thinking nothing was there, that meant that he needed the second idea of it, an inverse emitter, or _black noise generator_. If he could get his hands on the sensor signatures of certain materials to the hyperthreaded pulse signature, he could simply build a device that detected those patterns then immediately generated a counter-signal at _inverse phase_. When signals at inverted phase encountered one another, they cancelled each other out.

Now that... that had _potential_. It would be very easy to build, he had the materials to build it, and all he really had to do was hook it up to an emitter strong enough to cover several blocks. That wouldn't be hard at all, and would be _child's play_ to program. He already had an emitter, it would just take telling it to listen at a microphone and immediately emit the frequencies that non-native objects would reflect, inverted to the incoming signal. The delay would be in the nanoseconds... that wouldn't cause a _complete_ cancel, but would so seriously weaken the outbound signal that it would be effectively unreadable. And since the device was _only_ blocking signatures of things he wasn't supposed to have, it would let the signatures of things like wood and rock and such through, but hide the presence of carbidium, neutronium, and so on.

All he needed was the sensor signatures of Faey-based materials, a Faey sensor receiver, and the control box he was using on the hypersonic emitter. And God bless, he already had all three. The sensor signatures were readily available on CivNet; the _signatures_ were in no way classified, often part of the basic scientific description of the metal or material, because they in no way gave away the technological secrets behind the sensor itself. After all, the hyperthreaded pulse was just a pulse of virtually _every_ frequency, from ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) up through theta-band quantum. There was a Faey sensor receiver in his skimmer, part of its own sensor system, and the frequency generator was already being used for something.

It took him two hours to remove the sensor array out of his skimmer and install it in the church steeple. It took him two more hours to connect it to the control box and reconfigure his hypersonic emitter. It took one hour to change the emitter so it was capable of generating the required energy signatures when he found out the one he had wasn't capable of it. It took him three hours to program the control box with what to listen for, and what to emit when it detected it. Then, it took him an hour to go over his work and make sure.

After that, he just turned it on and stood up there, watching and waiting for a sensor satellite to pass over. That took almost three hours. But when it did, when he saw the signature spike that warned that a hyperthreaded pulse had been detected, the emitter immediately generated a counter-pulse with the combined composite frequencies in inverse phase to eradicate the signature of every Faey-constructed object within 700 yards of the emitter.

He had no idea if it worked, but that was a _very_ positive sign.

The only real way to test it was to do something absolutely _drastic_. He had to put something out that they absolutely would not miss on a sensor sweep, let the satellite go by, then see if they responded to it. The only thing that he had like that was the _skimmer_.

He saw no other choice. He had to make sure this worked.

But moving it presented a problem, because as soon as he powered it up, the Faey's _passive_ sensors would detect it. If it was a military skimmer, its armor and its signature maskers would hide its energy signature, but it was not. If that black noise generator worked, then they wouldn't detect the skimmer with active sensors... so now he had to figure out a way to move the skimmer without it being detected.

Well, the simple answer was that there wasn't one. The skimmer was way, way too big to even try shielding its power sources with carbidium, because he'd have to plate the whole damn skimmer. Not only would that ruin the paint job, but he didn't have enough carbidium to do that. He wouldn't have even if he still had it all. He wasn't even sure if that would work, because of the huge power plants in the skimmer, and the very large power signature it gave off. After all, it had PPGs _and_ spatial engines that could move 12,000 standard tons _and_ weapons _and_ shields _and_ tertiary systems, all of which would contribute to that energy signature. He wasn't sure a coating of carbidium was going to pull that off. Now, if he was to modify the skimmer's shields to reflect the energy signature back, or absorb it, that might do it, but that would take a team of scientists a long time to pull off. That would take designing a shield generator from the ground up, way out of his league. Then he'd have to figure out how to hide the energy signature of the shield itself.

Actually, he could probably do that. If had access to a full lab and a year or so to experiment, he could probably manage that. Shields could be designed to be _physical_, like a force field, physically opposing kinetic energy or force, or they could be _energy_, creating a matrix of power that performed a specific task. He remembered that from Plasma I. Certain forms of energy actively absorbed other energy. Most starship shields were a hybrid of those two principles, shields that carried both a physical component and an energy component. They were like that so they could both attempt to deflect hostile energy and also absorb it. The combination of those two defenses greatly reduced the destructive power of an attack executed against them. It was just a matter of finding the right composite harmonic shield frequency with the right type of energy forming the shield matrix that would cause it to absorb low-energy emissions, like the energy signature of a PPG.

Something he'd love to have, but just didn't have the year to discover.

No, the skimmer was out. He couldn't move it out to perform the test without it getting picked up, so that wasn't a viable test subject, because if it _was_ picked up, he'd have no idea if it was the energy signature or an active sweep that gave it away. And he had nothing else so large that it would get immediate attention... so he really had no way to test it, not without giving away his position. He'd just have to trust that he did it right, and pray every time he saw that emitter display show the spike of a hyperthreaded pulse.

He came down from the church, feeling both relieved and nervous at the same time. There was no real way to know how effective it was going to be, but he had high hopes. In any event, he'd find out the next time a dropship cruised by with its sensor pods going.

When he came down, he saw Temika sitting outside his house, sitting on her parked airbike, leaning over the handle bars as she talked to someone he'd never seen before. It was a black man of medium height, but monstrous dimensions. He was _huge_, built like a Mac truck, obviously a bodybuilder. Those thick arms were more than visible with the white muscle shirt he wore, and his legs strained the faded, dirty jeans he wore. Curious, Jason ambled over towards them, carrying his tool kit in his hand.

"Hey Sugah, glad tah see yah out among the livin' again," Temika winked in greeting. "Jason, this is Kevin King, but most everyone calls him Tank. Ah think it ain't too obvious why," she grinned.

Jason briefly listened to the man's thoughts. He was a bit nervous at meeting Jason for some odd reason, and hoped that he gave a good first impression. He had to remind himself to offer his hand. "It's good to meet you, Mister Jason," he said in a mild accent that he remembered hearing from some people in New Orleans. This man had spent enough time there for it to flavor his speech, but not totally infect him. The New Orleans drawl was almost like a virus, but it had never infected Jason. He'd spent too much time traveling around as a child to have any identifiable accent, other than it being uniquely his own.

"What are you doing in my neck of the woods, Tank?" he asked.

"Well, I got a couple of people down at my place that say they know you," he answered, and his thought matched his words. Jason's eyes picked up when Kevin thought about the _blueskin_ he had tied up in his basement. "One's a blueskin, the other's a young guy about my height, kinda skinny, with dark hair. Calls himself Tim."

Jason's eyes widened. "You have _Tim_?" he asked in shock. "And Symone?"

"I can't really say I know the blueskin's name, Mister Jason. She was unconscious when I found 'em. The guy, he's just coming around."

His thoughts told Jason everything he needed to know. He'd come across them yesterday out in the forest, both knocked out, after coming out to see what was making a bunch of noise not far from the little house where he lived, down near Williamson. The blueskin-Symone-was in full combat armor, armor that had _burns_ all over it, and her helmet's visor had been shattered. Tim had a broken arm and some burns on his legs, not too bad though, and had just woke up a few hours ago and started going on and on about how they were trying to find Jason. Kevin knew from the way he was talking that he had to be talking about _the _Jason that he'd about from Temika, who visited every few days-he really fancied her, but he was too shy to reveal that to her-and she'd brought him up here to see if he was lying-well, she followed him as he rode a dirt bike up... no way was he getting on the back of that airbike with a crazy driver like Temika driving it. Kevin's brother, Willy, was watching them, using the blueskin's fancy plasma gun to keep the blueskin subdued if she woke up. Kevin was no doctor, but he'd patched up Tim's arm with a splint, and hadn't really touched the blueskin. She gave him the creeps, even knocked out. He did take off her helmet, though, and aside from a bloodied nose, he didn't think she was hurt too bad. He thought she might have a few burns where the armor was burned real bad, but nothing else. He figured she was knocked out from whatever gave her the bloody nose, maybe a concussion.

"Let me get my airbike," he said immediately, fear and concern flooding through him, so much so he forgot himself. "You're taking me to them."

"You know this guy, Mister Jason?"

"He's my best friend. Symone's his-well, let's call her his wife. She's a _good_ blueskin. You have a CB that Willy can hear?"

"How did you know about Willy?" Kevin asked, giving him a strange look.

Jason cursed, then blew out his breath and scrubbed his hand through his hair. "It's a long story. Let's just get down there. Wait here while I get my airbike."

Kevin's thoughts were confused and suspicious now, and so were Temika's. He'd slipped, he'd blundered, and now he had to find a way to either explain it or reveal the truth. That wasn't about to happen, though, because any wandering squatter that knew about his talent would be an open book to any Faey patrol that picked him or her up. He debated what to do while he got his airbike out of the skimmer, then pulled it to a stop in front of Temika. He ignored them as he got off the bike and ran into the house, getting his railgun and his MPAC pistol, and stowing his panel in a shoulder satchel and bringing that along as well. He remembered to put the scope back on the railgun before he left the house, then locked the door behind him and activated the house's security system via his panel after he got back to his airbike. "You can ride with her, or you can ride with me," Jason told him bluntly as he mounted his airbike, then stowed his railgun in the holster behind his right leg specifically designed to hold and secure a rifle. "Choose."

"I wanna know how you knew about my little brother," Kevin said adamantly.

"I'll explain it to you when we get there," he said impatiently. "But we're going _now_, even if I have to lasso you and drag you behind me. Now choose a bike."

"Uh, I'll ride with Mika," he said warily.

"Mika?" he asked her.

"It's what most folks call me, sugah," she told him, though not as warmly as she usually addressed him. "Ah guess three syllables is one too long or somethin'."

Jason reached into the storage compartment where the gas tank would have been on a motorcycle and produced a pair of one-piece visor sunglasses that had a strap on the back, then snugly secured them over his eyes. They acted both as sunglasses and protection against the sharp wind. "Let's go," he ordered, kicking his bike into the air.

He hadn't talked to Jyslin in a few days, so something like this was possible, he pondered grimly as he followed behind Temika's airbike at an altitude of about a thousand feet. But _why_ was the question. What had brought them out here, and what had caused their injuries? Had they fought their way out of New Orleans? Had they fled to the wildlands to protect Tim? Or had they just been on their way to see him, visit him, and had something catastrophic happen? Jason zoomed up to Temika's side, then waved at her to get her attention. He fixed his earpiece in deliberately, and she nodded in understanding. She pulled up her own, then got the extra out and passed it back to Kevin, shouting instructions to him. When he got it seated in his ear and the mic over his mouth, Jason held up one