's like to have my privacy invaded, so I don't do that to other people."

"Well, what's so good about it if you never use it?"

"Oh, I use it, but really just to jabber at Symone," he chuckled. "That's one of the things I like about it. I can talk to Symone just about any time I want. She and I are very close friends."

"They say she's cheating on Tim with you."

"It's not precisely cheating," he said seriously. "You have to understand Faey society. Yes, we've done that a few times, but Tim knows about it. Tim understands Faey society, so he's not offended or jealous. I'm not all that comfortable with it myself, but I understand Faey too. If I _don't_, I'll seriously insult Symone, and that's something I do _not_ want to do."

"What makes that okay to the Faey?"

"Jyslin is Symone's best friend," he answered. "Among the Faey, a best friend will, ah, keep her friend's boyfriend happy if she can't be there. Faey are very casual about the idea of sex, Tom, it goes back to their telepathy. They don't consider the physical act of sex to be a big deal. To Faey, sex is in the mind, not the body. Symone has this idea that I need a girl in my life, that if I get sexually frustrated it'll like make me go wonky or something, so she was kinda pushing herself on me. That'll stop now that Kate-well, you know."

Tom was silent a moment. "So, Symone's doing it because Jas-Jys-Jyslin isn't here."

"Just so. I couldn't quite convince Symone that I don't need that kind of comforting. But she'll stop now that Kate's moved in with me," he added.

"Ah. What does Symone think about Kate taking Jyslin's place?"

"She was all for it. She doesn't see me and Kate lasting for long, because she thinks Kate just wants to feel safe, so she's reaching out to me. I'm not sure about that, but I do like Kate a lot. Besides, in Faey society, it's quite common for a man to have casual girlfriends outside his primary relationship, so Symone doesn't see it as anything unusual."

"Well, what about when you leave? I don't think Kate's quite up to being a guerilla. She's not the fighting type."

Jason chuckled. "Yeah, that's true enough. I don't know what she'll do when I go."

"About that, Jayce. What exactly do you intend to do out there?"

"That's something I haven't entirely decided yet. But whatever I do, it has to be very, very delicate. I can't piss off the Imperium and get them involved. As long as I don't cross the line, they won't interfere in what will be a purely _internal_ matter for House Trillane."

"What would cross the line?"

"Doing so much damage that it threatens global food production," he answered immediately. "The Imperium depends on the food it gets from Earth, Tom. Without it, millions will literally starve."

"But how can you get Trillane off Earth if you can't go after their food operation?"

"That's the balancing act that I'm facing, Tom," he grunted. "Though I think it'll also behoove me to go after Trillane's illegal slaving operation. If I can get proof that they're doing it, I can take it directly to the Empress and demand that Trillane be booted from Earth. We'll never get rid of the Imperium, Tom. That'd take a war, and we'd never win a war against the Imperium. Hell, just one of their battle cruisers could wipe out all life on Earth from orbit, without sending down a single soldier. I'm just trying to get better custodians in here, ones that will treat us like _people_, and not _assets_."

"Sounds good to me," Tom said with a nod. "But that doesn't sound like it's going to be easy, you know, with-"

Tom stopped when the table began to vibrate under their hands in a strange manner. Jason felt it under his feet, and then the room began to rattle in an ominous manner."

"What the fuck?" Tom growled, looking around in confusion. "What's going on?"

Jason raised his head. _Symone!_ he sent with all the power he could muster.

_I have no idea!_ she sent back immediately. _Tim! Tim, what's going on? Are you at the sensor panel?_

_No, I'm over at the power station!_ he replied.

Jason immediately picked up the radio, but someone else beat him to it. _"Oh my GOD!"_ Leamon's voice came over the radio. _"Jason, everyone, get out and look to the west! There's a strange light in the sky over there!"_

Jason and Tom rushed out of the office through the halls of the capitol building, running towards the nearest door outside. They burst out into the chilly air and immediately looked west, as did several other people who had rushed out of the building that was across the street. And Leamon was right, there was an eerie reddish glow low on the horizon, almost looking like a sunset... but it was only ten in the morning.

"What the hell is that?" Tom asked.

"I have no idea," Jason said, fear fluttering through him. "A forest fire, maybe?"

The light began to fade, and the rumbling in the ground became more pronounced, a low-pitched throbbing under the earth that made things fall off counters and shelves and caused the lightpoles on the streets to sway slightly, and then it too began to fade.

"Maybe one of the Faey's ships crashed over that hill," Tom speculated. "If it was big enough, it'd shake the ground."

"Well, that's a possibility," Jason grunted, then he brought up the radio. "I'll go to my apartment and switch on CNN on my panel and see if they have anything about what happened. Tom thinks a ship might have crashed. Everyone else, let's gather back at the office and try to figure out what's going on."

As he and Tom ran across the street and towards the governor's mansion, Jason knew that any number of things could have caused that light and earthquake, and Tom's thought that it was a ship crash was entirely possible. It explained the rumbling ground as a shockwave, and they waning light, visible in his rearview mirror and now almost gone, was the fireball of the crash, the main part of it hidden behind the hills. Given the light and the rumbling, the ship couldn't have crashed very far away, and that meant that Faey were going to be crawling all over this area as they recovered the wreckage. All the work they'd done was now in jeopardy, because their hologram wouldn't protect them from Faey on the ground, or dropships flying so low that they penetrated the hologram itself. All the work they had done could be undone by one Faey airbike or dropship that wandered too far from the crash site.

Jason rushed into the mansion and ran up the stairs two and three at a time, then charged into his apartment and slid to a stop in front of the desk that held his panel. He brought up his media program that let him tap into satellite TV stations and changed to CNN.

_"Jason, Murph over in Hurricane can't raise Clem on the CB,"_ Leamon reported. _"He also said that whatever happened was _west_ of him, and it was so big that it blew all the windows out of the buildings around town."_

Jason heard that even as he saw a picture on CNN, taken from a dropship high above the forested expanse of the Frontier.

It showed _hell_.

There was a massive mushroom cloud standing over a hellstorm below, as fires raged over a blasted wasteland. The explosion had eradicated everything within a shallow, wide valley, leaving a scarred, burning debris field in its wake. Tom ran in and looked at in, and he heard the man gasp. The shot panned out as the reporter talked in a hurried, concerned tone. "These shots are coming in from a cargo dropship and show what looks to be a massive explosion somewhere in the Orala nature preserve," the reporter's voice called over the image. "The explosion was strong enough to register on seismic sensors in Missouri, and what you are seeing is the aftereffect. No one knows yet what could have caused this explosion."

"Do we have the Minister now?" another reporter asked.

"This is Minister Mayin," a female voice called, obviously over the phone, as the aerial view of the devastation slowly rotated as the dropship circled the explosion site.

"On the phone with us is Assistant Deputy Minister Mayin Demare of the Imperial Ministry of Science," the reporter called. "Madame Minister, could you give us some insight as to what might have happened here? Can you see the live feed?"

"I can," she answered. "From the look of it, it appears to be a fusion explosion. It looks to me like a plasma power generator suffered a critical failure and released its fusion matter into unstretched space without ejecting the core, which created an explosion. Judging from the power of it, it was probably created by a large power plant, like in a dropship or an airskimmer. Are there any reports of any vehicles currently missing or having gone down?"

"We have no reports as yet on that, Madame Minister," the reporter answered. "But answer me this, isn't it supposed to be impossible for a PPG to explode like this?"

"My dear, nothing is _impossible_," she answered honestly. "And a standard PPG could not explode with this much force. This would be from a much larger power system, like the power plant of a vehicle. If the power plant was damaged the right way, it could explode like a bomb. It would be highly _improbable_, given the six separate redundant safety systems in a power plant of the scale of one that would be in a vehicle, but it is theoretically _possible_. It would literally be a one in a billion chance, but from what I see before me, this is that one in a billion. And the size and scope of this explosion means that the plasma system must have been both large and powerful, from a large airskimmer or a dropship."

"Holy _shit_!" Tom gasped, pointing over Jason's shoulder at the screen. "That's the Ohio river! Jayce, that's _Chesapeake_! Oh my gawd, Chesapeake blew up! God, oh God, there's still people there!"

Jason looked more closely, and he realized that Tom was right. He recognized the hills around the valley, a valley now filled with a fiery, charred landscape of debris and flames. It _was_ Chesapeake. Jason saw the water of the Ohio, which had been vaporized by the blast and knocked back by the shockwave, rush in to fill the riverbed, and then expanded in a cloud of steam to start filling the crater itself, forming a new small lake. And it was nothing but a smoking crater now. Everything was gone. Absolutely everything. There was nothing left even remotely identifiable. Everything within the shallow, wide valley had been destroyed.

Oh, God.

Jason leaned back in his chair, then leaned forward and put his head in his hands. It was gone. All of it. The entire town had been blasted into dust, and there was a huge crater where the center of town had been, a crater filling with water from the river.

All of it, all their work... gone.

He had no idea what to do. He was stunned, in shock. He was only dimly aware that Tom had run from the room, leaving him alone. He swam in a sea of confusion until a light hand pressed against the back of his neck, and he felt himself _expand_ in a curious manner. There was another consciousness in his head, taking up calm residence, sifting through his memory to understand what was causing his mental state. That other side of the new self was shocked and mournful when the truth came to light, but was filled with a sense of resolve to not get lost in the moment.

It was Kiaari. He felt her hand slide away, and that resolve was still in him. Yes, something terrible had happened, but he couldn't get lost in the moment of it. He had to find out what happened, and what had happened to the people who had still been in Chesapeake.

"Thanks," he told her sincerely, looking up at her.

She gave him a wan smile, then took his hand and pulled him out of the chair. She gave him a gentle, comforting hug, then pushed him out enough to look at him with her arms still on his shoulders. "From the look of it, the explosion was centered near your house," she told him. "And it was very large. It would take something big to create that much force."

"What do you think did it?"

"I don't know," she told him. "But right now, we need to find out what happened to the others, but we can't leave Charleston. There's going to be a swarm of Faey down here now to investigate the explosion, so we have to stay hidden. We can't do anything to attract attention and make them come up here."

He nodded. "Let's go tell everyone."

                                        * * *

Things were grim.

It was well after dark, and those in Charleston were sitting in rooms, watching the few televisions that they had gotten working and powered using a portable power system Jason had installed in the governor's mansion. The mansion and the capitol were the only buildings in town with power, the capitol to power their security systems and the offices they were using, and the mansion because it was housing the refrigerators holding their perishable food, as well as being where most of them were living right now, bedding in sleeping bags and scavenged mattresses in the rooms on the first two floors. There was power but no heat, and the governor's mansion had fireplaces to keep them warm, something the capitol lacked.

It was still all over the news. The explosion had even reached INN as a headline story, because it was still a total mystery. No one knew how it had happened, or what had caused it, but it had been confirmed that it was a fusion explosion, the ultra-rare explosive failure of a large-scale plasma power unit. It was major news because it hadn't happened for over sixty years, and the circumstances of this explosion made it a mystery.

There were no dropships missing. There had not been any maydays or warnings from any private airskimmers that they were in trouble. From the Faey viewpoint, a dropship or skimmer that did not exist had suffered an almost unheard of catastrophic failure of its plasma power plant, and had exploded in a place it was not supposed to be and devastated an unpopulated forest preserve, where Faey firefighters still worked feverishly to contain the fires that raged through the area, an effort caught on live video and broadcasted throughout the Imperium.

And for them, it was still a mystery, but not as much of one. There were a few power plants in the town that could have detonated with enough force to destroy the town, but the main question for them was _what happened_, and had it been sudden and killed everyone, or had the residents had enough warning to run. There had been no word from anyone that was still at Chesapeake, and what was worse to Jason, Temika and Steve were also missing. They were not in Charleston. Jason was dreadfully worried that the two of them had gone back to Chesapeake and had been killed in the explosion.

And so they waited, and watched, and worried. Jason sat on a couch with Kate on one side and Symone on the other, holding both their hands as Tim sat on the other side of Symone and held her other, watching a large television they had scavenged from the media center downstairs and had hung on the wall. They were all connected to his panel, as it served as a video feed for all the TVs in the house, all of them merely displaying the feed the panel was supplying. The news just went over and over and over what was already known, showed new footage of the fires, and had even showed a space-based view of the explosion as a brilliant orange flare in the carpet of green.

But there was no word. The CB network was alive with chatter of the event, but had no news of those who had been in Chesapeake. They were all afraid now, because there would be a large Faey presence in the forest and would hamper their activities as they hid from them.

All they could do was wait.

He squeezed Kate's hand, and she leaned her head against his shoulder as Symone kept a tight grip on his hand as she kept close to Tim, and they watched in desperate worry.

A call over the radio almost shocked all four of them off the couch. _"Jayce! Jayce, Temika is coming in on her Harley!"_ Leamon Lacy called in wild elation. _"Holy shit, she's burned! She's-She's got Doc Northwood with her!"_

They all jumped up and charged downstairs and then out the side entrance, where the airbike was landing on the lawn in an erratic manner. Temika and Doc were on board, and both of them were obviously burned. Some of Temika's wild hair had been burned away on her left side, and she was cradling a charred left arm. Doc Northwood's back was bare in the frigid night air, and the skin was blackened and seemed to glisten in the light of the outdoor lamps.

Ten people charged the motorcycle even before it came to a stop, and strong hands pulled the two from the back of the machine, carrying them quickly towards the house as Symone shouted for someone to bring the first aid kit. Temika's face was twisted with pain, and Northwood was unconscious. The bike itself was scorched and badly damaged, smoke pouring from its engine housing and the back wheel flat and partially melted. That Temika had got that thing here was a _miracle_ as far as Jason was concerned.

"Mika!" Symone cried out fearfully. "Mika honey, what happened!"

Temika opened her eyes as they carried her into the mansion. "It was the Faey," she said weakly. "They surprised us, Jayce, just after me and Steve got back to town. They wasn't trying to capture nobody, Jayce, they charged in with guns blazin'. They was killin' everyone. Steve got shot and lost his arm, and Ah tried to run to him as he crawled towards the garage, he told me to get away. Jayce, Jayce, I saw it in his thoughts, what he was gonna do, so Ah ran like hell. Ah grabbed up Doc and got on mah bike, and me and Doc almost didn't get away, we caught the tail end of the blast. He blew up Chesapeake. He blew up the exomech's power plant. He killed _everyone _to keep them from finding Charleston. Our people, the soldiers, everyone."

Jason's hands trembled. Steve _would_ know how to circumvent the safety protocols in the exomech's power system, which would turn it into a bomb. And the exomech's power plant _worked_, that was established.

"Jason, Ah saw a soldier shoot Mary in the back, and her whole body just blew apart in front of me," she said with a sob. "And they was even shootin' at the _children_!"

"Hush now," Symone told her in a calming voice. "It's over, and you're safe, and we'll take care of you. Get her to a bed, and where's that first aid kit!" Symone barked harshly.

They carried the two of them to the nearest bedroom and laid them down gently as Symone took over getting them out of their charred clothing and tend to their bad burns, and Jason could only stand there and watch and feel the terrible weight of it crash over him. Everyone that had been in Chesapeake was dead. Clem, Ruthie, Mary, Irwin and Paul, Juli, Reggie... they were all dead. Luke would be devastated. He was the only one here, the rest of his family had stayed behind to get everything ready, including his daughter.

One hundred and fifty nine. That was how many were in Chesapeake. One hundred and fifty nine people, people he knew, people he had sworn to help protect... they were all dead.

"Oh, God," Leamon said in a low, shocked voice.

"Amen," Tom Jackson agreed.


Chapter 13

_Kaista, 4 Kiraa, 4393 Orthodox Calendar_
_Saturday, 31 January 2008, Native Regional Reckoning_
_Charleston, West Virginia (Native designation),Orala Nature Preserve, American Sector_

Burying his father hadn't even been this hard.

Jason stood silently over a mound of freshly lain earth, a hand barely holding onto the umbrella keeping the rain off of him as he looked blankly down at the simple headstone marking the 160th victim of the Chesapeake disaster.

_Arthur Jebediah Northwood, M.D. 1953 -- 2008_

For twenty days he clung to life, in terrible pain, drifting in and out of consciousness as Symone, Jason, and everyone else did everything they could to get him better. For a few days, he did begin to improve, but his severe burns became infected, and after that he faded rapidly. His last days were spent in a drug-induced haze, the only thing anyone could think of to help ease the horrific pain he was under from his burns, burns that seared off skin and flesh, and burned down to expose several of the vertebrae in his back. The dreadful severity of those burns, the lack of true medical facilities, and the fact that Northwood was the only person with any kind of medical training still alive, had been a lethal combination for him.

They had done all they could, but it hadn't been enough.

Temika, on the other hand, was on her way to recovery. Her burns were severe, but they hadn't been in the same places as they'd been on Doc; in a way, Doc had saved Temika's life because he'd been riding behind her. Doc's body shielded Temika from the brunt of the shockwave and flame of the explosion. She wouldn't have use of her left arm for a couple of months, if she ever did again, but she was up and about now, her arm lashed to her side with a sling, her hair regrowing and her savage burns slowly mending as they applied the last of the Faey compounds that induced flesh to regrow and stimulated the body's regeneration.

But being up and about was not the same as recovering.

Nobody really felt recovered. The destruction of Chesapeake and the loss of so many of their friends and family had put them all in a state of shock. Luke had not spoken a word to anyone since he'd discovered that his entire family had been killed, he simply sat on a bench in the garage across from the capitol building with a wrench in his hands, turning it over and over and over. Tom Jackson refused to leave the room where Jason had a TV set up, watching CNN every waking moment... why, Jason had no idea. But he was utterly obsessed, waiting for some news or picture or, something. Until then, he just stared at the TV with this strange, scary expression on his face. Quite a few people cried all the time, others wouldn't stop talking about it. Some buried themselves in work, others slept virtually all the time, some withdrew from others, some talked endlessly with anyone around, afraid to be alone and in silence for even a second. Each person was trying to find his or her own way of coping with the grief. But Jason could only feel anger. Terrible anger.

Anger, and crushing weight. It had been his responsibility as town mayor to keep everyone safe, and he had failed. People had died on his watch, people that didn't have to die. He'd known about the dangers, he'd started this plan to move everyone to safety, but he didn't take it seriously enough to demand a faster timetable. Because of his arrogance in believing they wouldn't find him, one hundred and sixty of his friends were now dead.

It was his responsibility.

But now there was a new responsibility. He was still mayor, and he had a duty to the people remaining to get them set up and safe, get Charleston up and running, and then he would leave here and go after the bitches that had done this. He had a duty now to ensure that their deaths would not be in vain, and that they would never be forgotten.

They wouldn't forget it on the other side of the Frontier either. The cause of the explosion, according to CNN, now had an official cause, but Kiaari had gone out to collect information days after the explosion, to try to find out what had happened, and had returned six days ago with quite a different story than what was showing on CNN. That bit of news had been terrifying to Jason, because it directly concerned him.

The attack on Chesapeake wasn't a raid on the town for slaves, or an attack on squatters... it was a direct attempt to kill _him_. Though Kiaari hadn't gotten the complete story, what she did manage to piece together was that the decision to kill him was because he was a telepath, not because of his runaway status or anything like that. This Kiaari deemed as _very _important, and Jason had to agree. They suddenly feared him, a human telepath, feared him so much that they'd sent a military unit out on a secret mission to do nothing less than murder him and everyone around him, to totally destroy any evidence that he had ever been there. They had gone in there with orders to kill everyone, recover any technological equipment or information they could find, then hide the evidence of the massacre by burning down the town... ironically, the same idea Jason had had to hide the fact that the town was abandoned. But they were specifically there to kill him, and they were supposed to come back with ironclad proof of his death, in the form of his dead body. They'd deducedcorrectlythat the town populated with technically savvy people also included Jason Fox, and they'd come down to assassinate him _before_ the town completed its apparent dismantling and scattering. Jason's plan to move the town had incited the attack before they had reliable confirmation that he was really there.

The explosion was thought to be his airskimmer, for his skimmer had a power plant in it of sufficient size to produce an explosion of that magnitude. Their speculation was that he had trapped the skimmer, soldiers had entered it and set it off, and that had caused the explosion that had vaporized all of Huntington and Chesapeake, wiped out the town, killed the inhabitants, and also caused the deaths of 74 Trillane soldiers and destroyed four hoverbikes, two armored hovercars, and two dropships.

The aftermath of the explosion was still in the process off fallout, according to Kiaari. The noble that had ordered the attack had been sacked, at least in the manner of Trillane nobility. The Zarina had been packed off back to the Trillane home planet of Arctus III, basically sent to a minor land holding where she would be kept under a watchful eye, out of trouble, and forever out of the workings of the politics of House Trillane. Heads rolled within the Trillane Army ranks as well, as those who planned the attack were demoted and reassigned. They weren't punished for the attack, they were punished because the attack caused a large section of the Orala preserve to turn into a mushroom cloud, which was a disaster in that it brought glaring, Imperium-wide attention to Earth and to that tiny town that was supposed to silently burn down without anyone ever knowing what had happened there. Had Steve not blown up the exomech and killed everyone, they'd probably have been given cash bonuses and medals. Instead, they were given the boot.

There was no way that such a thing could be kept secret forever, so Trillane had leaked selectively to CNN about Jason Fox and his renegade status, and the fact that he had fled with an airskimmer. CNN, naturally, picked it up, did a little research, and vilified him once they had just enough information to back their hasty conclusions. The story about him had been predictably unflattering, as they painted him as a nefarious villain who had stolen from his school, used an elaborate network of criminal activities to raise the money to buy the airskimmer, ran away using it, then monkeyed with it in ways he shouldn't have and proceeded to blow himself up. Officially, the Orala Explosion, as it was now called, had been his airskimmer, and the explosion was being blamed on him. The Imperium now believed him to be dead, and while Trillane highly suspected it, they still wouldn't be convinced of it until they had possession of his dead body. Jason had squeezed out of tight spots before, and they were giving him that much respect so as to believe that he might have survived the explosion somehow.

Being listed as dead was good in that the Imperium now would stop looking for him.

It was bad in that with him now being officially dead and not simply missing, the royalty payments being sent to his secret bank accounts had been terminated, cutting him off from the primary source of funding for the town and for his plans for rebellion. His patents were now public domain, and that meant that they fell to the ownership of the Ministry of Technology.

That was only a minor setback, though. He already had a plan for getting around that.

The anger had been useful for that, at least. While waiting for Kiaari to come back with news, Jason had sat down and drawn up some elaborate plans for the future. In that time had had worked out exactly how he was going to set up the rebellion, what it would do, how it would operate, how it would fund itself, and what it would have to do in order to secure its stated objective of kicking Trillane off Earth and petitioning the Empress for a new noble house to seated, one more attentive to the needs of the natives. Unlike before, when he hadn't really known what he was going to do or how he was going to go about it, now he had a detailed plan of action, with great attention to detail and marked milestones that would govern how their activities operated and expanded.

And it would all begin in Colorado.

Kiaari's suggestion of Cheyenne Mountain was, naturally, a solid one. After researching it, he found that she'd been correct in that it was everything they needed... and with him now being dead, he wasn't as worried about them looking for him. Once the last of the Faey presence in the Frontier faded, he would be leaving for Cheyenne Mountain, where he would begin preparing it to become the new secret base of operations for the resistance movement. Once he was done, then it would be time to start attacking Trillane.

Jason sighed. That would be a ways in the future. He didn't see himself leaving Charleston until he was sure that everyone would be alright, and they were ready to work without him. He'd probably be there until spring, at least. There was Tim and Temika to worry about, and not just physically. Her frenzied report of what happened in Chesapeake had revealed to everyone that she was also a telepath, and like Jason, had kept it a secret from everyone. They'd taken Jason's telepathy at least moderately well, but now there was a hint of paranoia among the survivors, even in their grief, as they wondered just who else had telepathic ability. Because of the fear, Symone had convinced Tim to reveal himself as well... so now everyone knew that the tight little group of Jason, Tim, Temika, and Symone wasn't just because they were friends, it was because they were all telepathic.

But at least there were no torches and pitchforks. Right now, the fact that the four of them were telepaths wasn't exactly high on the list of priorities for the survivors. They still had to come t