 an ion pulse would crash, and that crash was what did most of the damage, tearing the fuselage up, dealing catastrophic damage to the internal systems, and basically causing the ship to be written off as unsalvageable. But in space, a Stick hit by an ion pulse would just go dead. It could be towed back to a maintenance bay, the plasma relays and damaged moleculartronic equipment replaced, and the Stick was basically ready to go back in service. Those weren't that expensive. Engines, however _were_ expensive. The new mines would blow the _engines_ of the Sticks, not the power systems, and force a very costly repair bill to get them back into service. Again, Jason could have simply planted bombs in the mines, but his consideration for the civilian crews of those ships wouldn't let him be so, so ruthless about it. He'd give them a chance to survive, and besides, though the Stick could be repaired and put back in service, he was going after the most expensive part of the Stick to repair.

Money, money, money. The more it cost Trillane, the better.

And again, it was something he could only do to a Stick. Stick engines were strong, but they lacked the redundant shielding that military engines had to protect them from _just_ this kind of attack. Faey Fighter engines were very resistant to spatial flux, and could operate when attacked by a spatial flux field. Stick engines couldn't tolerate it.

Oh, and since the sensors were going to be damaged, that didn't mean that the Stick crews could breathe a sigh of relief once they were in the atmosphere. Jyslin's revamped ground-based mines were ready to go, mines that used a remote button camera on a tightbeam link that let them see without being exposed. Those mines would use optical recognition to detect Sticks, and then attack them. Unless that bitch Myleena Merrane could make Sticks invisible, there was _no defense_ against this tactic. The only defense would be to stop the mines from hitting their targets, and that went right back to forcing Trillane to use convoys of Sticks with fighter escort, which would snarl their cargo transport system and cost them time and money.

"Myleena, you are going to _hate_ me," he muttered under his breath as he sent down the order to start building the Jyslin Special version of the mines.

                                        * * *

The B-Bs From Hell were literally a _smashing_ success.

Jason, Kiaari, and Tim watched video they plucked from Trillane's system at the end of the day, a day that would live in infamy in Trillane military history as Black Raista. On this day, a two-fold attack was unleashed against House Trillane, and it had sent them into absolute disarray.

The first attack was only a diversion, but on its own level, it was more damaging than a thousand drones blowing everything out of the sky over Earth, for it was utterly humiliating. Through the unwitting assistance of an innocent third party cargo delivery service, they managed to get a crate of his little surprises on the orbital station, and they were there right on time. That morning, the device that kept the little balls in stasis queried its location using the Faey's own GPS system, realized it was on the orbital station, and then released its hold on the 785 little black balls it was shepherding, each the size of a child's marble.

They didn't just explode out of their container. At first, there was a low vibration, and then a hum that conducted through the deck of the landing bay, and then the container began to vibrate. Then it began to shake. Then the staccato drumming of the balls banging on the interior of the container became audible, as the container began to jitter and convulse, sliding across the deck as startled bay workers looked on in curiosity, stopping all activity in the bay, and triggering an alarm that something was amiss. Faey who had been perplexed by the shaking box heard the klaxons, and then started running for the exits.

That alarm probably saved quite a few lives.

A hole appeared in the container. And another, and another, and another, as the balls built up enough kinetic energy to pierce the titanium hull of the container. Those balls escaped with lesser energy, having been slowed by the breakout, but they had a nice _large_ landing bay to work with. At first, nobody understood what was going, on, but then the container literally exploded, sending a cloud of twisted titanium and a swarm of black objects flying in every direction.

Chaos!

Faey abandoned all dignity and raced for their lives as a swarm of little black balls started flying all over the cavernous landing bay, bouncing off ships, off equipment, off the bulkheads, off containers, and off unfortunate Faey who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The balls had no pattern, no predictability, and they seemed to come from every direction at once. Faey struggled to pull injured companions out of the bay or into ships, and those ships being assaulted by the balls that were manned lifted off the deck and made a mad scramble for the airskin shield at the mouth of the bay, seeking to escape from the chaos. They were mercilessly assaulted by a multitude of strikes from those little balls, but every ship managed to escape the bay without being compromised because the balls had not yet built up enough kinetic energy to let them break through metal. Every ship that got out of the bay looked like it had chicken pox, due to an innumerable number of small pits and dents in the hulls, caused by strikes from the balls. The balls chased the ships all the way to the airskin shield, but bounced off of it as if it were a solid object, reflected by the electromagnetic field that kept its integrity.

For a long moment, the balls careened around the bay, knocking everything over, and then they started bashing dents into all the metal objects, and breaking anything not metallic or that was small. The sound of them battering the landing bay got louder and louder on the playback, until it was a muted roar of constant _PANG-PANG-PANG-PANG_. Unmanned Sticks, and civilian dropships, skimmers, and shuttles in the bay were systematically torn apart by the balls, their thin hulls compromised much faster than the other metal in the bay, shredded by the relentless assault. One dropship in a corner exploded when a ball hit it right in the power plant and compromised the spatial containment of its fusion matter and caused it to eject its core, sending a hellacious firestorm through the entire bay, a blast so fearsome that it bulged the external hull of the station on the starboard side of the main bay mouth. Fiery trails raced out of that cloud of fire as the invulnerable little balls raced right through the explosion unharmed, getting faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, until it was nothing but one continuous thunderclap inside the landing bay.

The bulkheads lasted nearly four minutes as the Faey in the control center tried feverishly to understand what was going on down there, what the balls were, but the balls had destroyed most of the sensor antennae in the landing bay that would give them detailed information. They were forced to point an external sensor towards the bay, and the readings weren't as precise. That gave the balls enough time to generate enough energy to be able to break through the bulkheads. One by one, they smashed through the metal bulkheads and were unleashed into the internal structure of the station, having lost too much energy to break through the bulkhead on the other side, so they were trapped between the walls. Some balls hit doors, though, and that sent them flying into passageways leading deeper into the stations, where they were trapped in the halls, bouncing wildly all over the place, going faster and faster as they rebuilt their kinetic energy after losing it in the punch through the bulkheads.

It wasn't the balls in the passages that were the most destructive, though. They did make it impossible for any Faey to use those passages, made it impossible for teams to get down to the bay to begin damage control. The balls stuck in the bulkheads, however, had access to much more vital parts of the station than just the lights and the passages the Faey used. They ricocheted all over every open space they could reach, and it was in those bulkheads that the vast majority of the infrastructure of the station ran. Plasma conduit, water pipes, sewage pipes, datalines, they were all defenseless against the balls, which tore them apart as they pingponged through the interior of the bulkheads, building up enough energy to pierce the wall and gain entry to a new section of the station. Whole sections of the station lost power as the balls shattered plasma conduit in a wide swath around the bay, sending the computer that controlled power generation and distribution in the station into a hissy fit.

And those balls in the walls _did_ build up enough energy to break through the bulkheads. Some were unleashed into new compartments in the station's interior, but some tore through the outer hull of the station and careened off into space, to be lost forever. Those holes they left behind, though, immediately started to vent atmosphere into space. And without power or damage control teams on hand to contain the hull breaches, they continued to decompress the station's internal atmosphere into space unabated. Nearby military vessels scrambled, raising shields to protect them from the deadly little projectiles as they approached the station and launched shuttles, fighters, and damage control teams in E-suits to seal those hull breaches quickly, ships and maintenance personnel that kept a wary eye out in case another white puff heralded another hull breach, which would send a little black ball screaming through space in some unpredictable direction that might threaten them.

It took them nearly ten minutes to finally understand what they were dealing with, and another fifteen minutes for a station engineer to hastily throw together a magnetic containment system that would capture the balls inside it, neutralizing them... but by then it was too late. They turned on every security force shield in the station, for the shields' electromagnetic fields would cause the balls to rebound off them, which helped slow the spread of the balls through the station. Some balls managed to travel all over the station, however, ones that got inside the pipes that they destroyed in the bulkheads, then traveled up or down their lengths to explode into new sections of the station, creating general pandemonium throughout the entire station.

At the peak, there were balls being reported in _every_ section of the station, including one that had managed to get into the private quarters of Duchess Silla Trillane, the governor of Earth, a ball that had wreaked havoc upon her private domain before hitting a window, going through it, and decompressing her cabin, which caused some of her possessions to be blown through the shattered window and out into open space before a security force field activated in the sill of the porthole and sealed the breach.

It took them nearly two hours to capture every ball, which was a very dangerous task for the control teams, who had to catch them in magnetic nets and keep them in a magnetic stasis field. Balls that were inside the bulkheads couldn't be reached, though, which forced a cruiser to come close to the station and aim a directed magnetic field at the station, which pushed all the balls in one direction, and eventually worked them out to where containment teams could get at them. When it was over, the balls had done catastrophic damage to the landing bay, considerable damage to the sections of the station abutting it, serious damage to other sections where small numbers of balls had managed to migrate using pipes, passages, or elevator shafts, and had caused 147 hull breaches in various parts of the station. Every bit of internal infrastructure that was held in the bulkheads in the five sections surrounding the landing bay, and the bay itself, had been completely destroyed. Conduit, datalines, pipes, everything.

The main landing bay was a total loss, as was everything that had been in it that didn't escape in the first two minutes. At their peak, the balls had gained enough kinetic energy to punch through the crystallized Neutronium hulls of _fighters_, dents that had destroyed those balls that had struck with that much force, which sprayed that white-hot shrapnel into the internals of the fighters, which basically destroyed them from within. All the equipment, all the cargo, it was totally destroyed. They'd been forced to anneal a makeshift door over the main bay opening, because the airksin shield had been destroyed by balls in the outer bulkhead, and the outer doors had been mangled beyond any hope of getting them to move. They'd had to anneal a makeshift door over the opening so they could repressurize the landing bay. The damage was extensive enough to force them to evacuate the entire station of all personnel until a complete damage assessment could be made, which took Orbital One completely out of service. That would hamstring Trillane's cargo system.

It was a success beyond any of Jason's wildest expectations. He'd expected his little balls to deal some damage, but not on such a massive scale, and not to cause the entire station to be shut down as they assessed the damage and began repairs. Even he had underestimated the deadly potential of those little balls.

Just as they were starting to feel like the worst was over on the station, however, the drones attacked. That part of it wasn't half as successful, for the drones weren't all Jason hoped they would be. They performed their primary function perfectly, which was to destroy all the stationary arrays. All of them were destroyed within the first six minutes, but it was their confrontation with the Faey that were _quickly_ scrambled to deal with them, since the fighters and warships were already on alert because of the chaos taking place on the station, that left them lacking. No drone managed to destroy more than four arrays, and 7 drones were destroyed en route to their second target. The AI in the drones worked fairly well against the fighters, making them slippery opponents that were hard to shoot down, but what Jason hadn't counted on was the _cruisers_ firing on the drones. They had expected only the fighters to engage the drones, and they paid for that assumption. They didn't program the drones to deal with that, and so they didn't try to evade cruiser fire. In the end, only 37 arrays were destroyed out of 473 pre-programmed targets, but they got the important stationary arrays, and in the end, that was really what mattered. Each downed drone was a brilliant blast of light visible from the ground, for the drones were using unshielded PPGs that had had all their safety protocols disabled. This caused them to explode like hand-grenade sized nuclear bombs when they were damaged, miniature versions of the fusion explosion in Chesapeake. They were rigged that way intentionally, to be all but vaporized when they were hit, protecting the sensitive programming and equipment inside them from being captured, analyzed, and used against them.

After watching the video, Jason, Kiaari, and Tim looked at each other, then exploded into delighted laughter.

"By the Denmother, that was amazing!" Kiaari said between gasps for air. "Jason, I want to be like you! That was _brilliant_!"

"Holy shit, are they gonna be _pissed_!" Tim wheezed. "We knocked out Orbital One, Jayce! I never dreamed those little fuckin' marbles would manage to do _that_!"

"I didn't either," Jason laughed, then he leaned back in his chair.

"We'd better lay low for a little while, though," Kiaari said, regaining her composure, patting her flat belly while blowing out her breath. "This went way beyond what we expected, so there's going to be a pretty intense reaction. More like an over-reaction," she amended. "We didn't just knock a few Sticks down, guys, we just dealt massive damage to a space station with nothing but a box of marbles. Trillane is going to retaliate, so we better be ready for it. We should just hide in our little hole, tell the guys in Charleston to keep their heads down, and wait for the initial shitstorm to pass before we start anything else."

"The mines do have to keep going out, but yeah, I think it'd be a good idea to delay the raid for a week or two," Jason agreed. "And we need to warn Charleston to send out the word that there might be a pretty savage retaliation by the Faey on the preserve. People need to go to ground, and do it _fast_."

"Still, that was just _classic_!" Kiaari laughed. "I'm so glad my sister sent me here! I can tell my children stories about this for years!"

"I'm so glad you're having fun, Kate," Jason smiled.

Jason's panel started beeping, and it just made him all warm and fuzzy inside, because he knew exactly who it was. He picked it up and put it on the desk facing him, so she would only see him, then accepted the call. The flustered face of Myleena Merrane appeared on the monitor. "Well, he-_loo_ there," he crooned.

_"You... are... a... son... of... a... BITCH!"_ she said through clenched teeth, but then she laughed helplessly. _"Do you have ANY idea just how much you pissed off Trillane?"_

"A pretty good idea of it, yes," he said evenly, though he couldn't resist smiling. "I hope you enjoyed it."

_"As an engineer, I can appreciate the cunning of it, but as the woman that was sent here to stop you, it really pisses me off!"_ she shouted. _"You're giving me gray hair, human! And you're making me look bad! I can't believe that an elite team of Black Ops engineers just got the absolute _shit_ stomped out of them by a self-trained newbie Terran and his box of _fucking _marbles! _MARBLES_! Do you have any idea how _humiliating_ that is? DO YOU!?"_

Jason almost fell out of the chair laughing.

_"I am going to take you _down_, boy!"_ she raged. _"This isn't the end of this, do you hear me? I will _own_ you! You just got me _really_ into this game, and now I'm going to kick your _ASS_! Do you hear me!?"_

"Goodbye, Myleena," Jason said with an evil grin. "It was nice talking to you."

_"You, BASTARD!"_ she screamed as he cut off the call. Jason looked at Kiaari and Tim, and the three of them erupted into gales of helpless laughter once again, Jason literally falling backwards out of his chair.


Chapter 16

_Daira, 33 Suraa, 4395 Orthodox Calendar_
_Tuesday, 8 September 2008, Native Regional Reckoning_
_Zabrag, Vuraak Prefecture, Zhadpha Province, Sovereign Planet of Moridon_

If any place in the universe could be the most closely associated with Hell, this was it.

It wasn't the climate of this alien planet, Moridon, that made it so, though it was dark and rather unpleasant. Moridon had a sub-tropical climate, somewhat warmer than Earth, but it was winter where they were and that made it quite comfortable to him. It seemed like twilight to him, but this was daytime on Moridon, because Moridon's two suns were both rather dim, being a red giant and a white dwarf. The air pressure here was only slightly more than on Earth, which required no compressional preparations to come here. The air did smell somewhat of ozone and sulfur, but that was because at almost any time, there was at least one volcano erupting somewhere within a hundred miles of where one was on the planet. Moridon was a highly volcanic planet, due to the fact that it orbited a binary star pair, and the twin gravity wells caused more stress in Moridon than it would if the planet orbited a single star. That caused volcanism.

What made Moridon seem like walking in Hell were its inhabitants. For if there was any creature Jason would think of as Satan, it was a Moridon.

They were about eight feet tall. They had red skin, black spiky hair, and large horns growing out of their foreheads. But it was those _eyes_ that made them look so damn demonic. Glowing red eyes stared at one, stared right through you, and made you feel decidedly creepy. The glow was a bio-luminescent reaction that allowed them to see, for their eyes generated a composite light spectrum that went from infrared to ultraviolet, light at the ends of that range that Jason's eyes couldn't see, and then they "saw" the reflections of that light back into their eyes. Their mode of vision was akin to a bat's sonar back home, but it was a sonar using light. Giruzi had the same bio-reactive eyes... but that wasn't much of a stretch, since giruzi were native to Moridon. Nearly half the species on Moridon had similar modes of
 vision, and had glowing eyes. Jason had wondered how those eyes handled external light sources, but he found out that they couldn't _see_ any light that their own eyes didn't generate. The eyes discarded any and all light information they sensed that came from external light. Their vision was weakened in conditions of bright light, when their own generated light was swallowed up by the ambient light, but in conditions of low or no ambient light, their vision was perfect.

Being a human among these demons was really damned uncomfortable, but he really had little choice. He had to come here because of his bank account, and the Moridons absolutely would not be satisfied with anything less than a visit in person.

When one opened a Diamond Prime account, the Moridons demanded that the customer be there in person to do so.

This was being done at the behest of Kumi. She wanted this account, this uncrackable, unbreakable, untraceable account for Vultech, to help her more efficiently launder money, and this was needed because, to put it plainly, House Trillane had gone absolutely _crazy_ after Jason disabled Orbital One.

Crazy was a _very_ mild term for it. Duchess Silla Trillane personally ordered a brutal retaliation, which began with the removal of the Orala Preserve's protected environment status. Two hours after that, the entire Appalachian forest was on fire.

The Faey did not swarm into the preserve with tens of thousands of troops and dropships and military equipment. They _burned_ it.

The entire forest, from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, was set ablaze by orbital bombardment. Plasma bolts from the heavens struck the forests and set them on fire, and every abandoned city in the preserve was bombarded so heavily that it was reduced to molten slag. In some kind of twisted need to be thorough, the orbital bombarded rained down destruction on literally _every abandoned structure visible from space_. Every building, every house, even every backyard storage shed was targeted and struck by orbital guns. That devastating barrage couldn't help but set the entire forest on fire, and those fires burned unchecked in the dry summer. The fires burned for days, and put so much smoke into the air that they blotted out the sun on the eastern seaboard. When it was over, over 80% of the forest canopy in the preserve was burned away. It was by the grace of God that they managed to warn the people that had been in Charleston in time, and those people had warned most of the squatters. When the fires began, everyone ran for the caves that were liberally scattered all over the mountains, or sought refuge in coal mines, or railroad tunnels. Few squatters were killed in the fires, but they didn't have time to worry about how they were going to make it through the winter, for the armies of Trillane didn't even wait for the fires to go out before they started combing the ash-strewn wasteland looking for the survivors.

That forced them to do something that Jason felt was wrong, but understood was necessary. Before the soldiers reached the people from Charleston who had been hiding, Jyslin returned in the skimmer, bringing supplies. She was not there to help, however. Once she was in the cave with them, she went to work. She eradicated all memory of where the rebels had gone from anyone that had any knowledge of it. If the Faey captured them, they would know that they had once been cohabitating with the resistance, but the resistance left for a new base and left those that did not want to fight behind. Even the memory of taking shipments of food and supplies from the rebels was eradicated from their minds. In their memory, and what any Faey who probed them would see, the supplies they had from the outside were what remained of last year's humanitarian drops, for they'd been given over a year's worth of food and basic supplies in that drop, food they didn't touch during the summer when home-supplied food was plentiful. Jyslin even erased her visit from their minds, striking them when they were sleeping, then leaving quietly in the night. When they woke up, they never remembered Jyslin's visit, and thought the supplies she brought had always been there.

When Jyslin left, all ties between the rebels and the squatters in the preserve were severed. Those people were now on their own, for any help they received from the rebels would only put both sides in grave risk.

Jason hated to do it, but it was necessary, both to protect the rebels and protect the squatters. If Faey soldiers knew that those people were taking food and supplies from the rebels, they'd murder them all; execute them as collaborators with the enemy. And thanks to the new declaration of martial law that Duchess Silla had invoked the day after the station was attacked, they had the legal power to do that.

Trillane house troops were now crawling all over the entire planet. Grand Duchess Trillane had agreed to sending more troops, and they had started arriving by the hundreds of thousands, and were deployed _everywhere_. There were now nearly twenty million Faey soldiers on Earth, a massive, almost overwhelming number, and they were there to ferret out the resistance and crush it.

And yet, it was as if it did not exist.

It took them only a few days to realize that the rebels were not in the Orala preserve and that put a wrench into all their plans. It was then that they started fanning out and looking for the rebels almost anywhere they could think of, and that included Cheyenne Mountain.

God; was that tense. A detachment of Trillane soldiers had arrived at the mountain and started poking around. They entered the main tunnels and investigated the place, but nobody used that tunnel, and they were very careful to never disturb it. They came all the way up to the massive blast doors, and finding them closed and with no way to open them from the outside, they decided that rebels could not have possibly gotten them open and got in, since the mountain had no power and those doors required power in order to open. They poked around the entrance to the hangar tunnel, as well, and that was the most heart-stopping moment. Jason almost had a seizure when those soldiers walked _right over_ the spatial compression array for the bubble conveyor, which was buried at the base of the closed doors. They checked out those doors and found them rusted shut, and decided that nobody could have opened them without leaving signs of it.

After a hair-graying two hours of investigating Cheyenne Mountain, the soldiers left, and reported back that no unusual activity had taken place at the old human military base, that it was abandoned and unused, and that it was clean.

They almost heard the sigh of relief in Denver. All that work they did to keep the outside looking abandoned really paid off.

They didn't just concentrate on likely places. Hundreds of thousands of Faey soldiers literally searched house to house all over North America, searching for _anyone_ that might have _any_ knowledge of the rebels or their location. Trillane really upset and infuriated quite a few people with their heavy-handed tactics, punishing everyone for the actions of a few, but this only served to help Jason rather than Trillane. People who were at least tolerant of Faey rule were becoming disgruntled by the treatment they were getting.

They didn't focus on the ground either. There was an entire squadron of battle cruisers in orbit now, and the fighters patrolling the lanes between the planet and the stargate were as thick as flies. The sensor arrays that they destroyed were replaced with bigger, stronger, even more sensitive ones, and those arrays were guarded by space-based exomechs, large robotic fighting vehicles that floated in protective defense of those arrays, armed with very large, very nasty plasma cannons. They put cameras _everywhere_, so they could see anything coming, and the cruisers and the fighters and the exomechs basically fired on anything that didn't return a friend or foe signal, including meteors and space debris. They were taking absolutely no chances whatsoever that _anything_ that wasn't broadcasting a friend code was anything but another trap placed in space to deal damage.

While the military was going bonkers all over North America and in space, Trillane forensic accountants were in overdrive. Vultech got no less than nine visits from those hounds, and even a visit from one of Trillane's own in-house mindbenders. That mindbender went after Luke, but her training was not enough to breach the masterful work that Jyslin had done in the creation of the fake persona of Jack Brewer. Everything she found in Luke's mind matched up perfectly with the Vultech books, and those books passed muster. Though they just couldn't seem to get over suspecting Vultech, they could find no shenanigans.

But it was enough to scare Kumi to the point where she felt that this, a Diamond Prime account, was necessary. The Faey were like cavemen compared to the Moridons when it came to computer security, and a Diamond Prime account carried absolute, utter secrecy and discretion. Using this account meant that any computer hackers Trillane employed would find themselves trying to break a system that no one had ever broken.

Getting here had not been easy. Because they had to come on Vultech-2, it meant that Jason and Kumi had been forced arrange a viable reason for the dropship to come here, and that was to make a pickup. They were here for a shipment of moleculartronic boards, bought at a rather frightful price from a Moridon manufacturing company, and the dropship had a four hour window to complete its mission, which was more than long enough for Jason and Kumi to complete this task. What made it difficult wasn't getting past the Faey, it had been getting per