The Valiant (Star Legend Book 1)

by J. J. Green

  “No,” said Lorcan. “Call off the search.”

  “But, what about the—”

  “The kid got himself lost, he can get himself found. There are comm panels, drones, and workers all over the ship. It shouldn’t be too hard for a boy his age to make contact, if he really wants to.”

  Lorcan harbored a suspicion that Dwyr Orr’s son wasn’t lost at all; that he was hiding somewhere and very much enjoying all the attention and kerfuffle from the search. He had a feeling that little whats-his-name would soon show his face when he realized no one was looking for him anymore.

  “Tell his guardian he’s to wait in his cabin in case the boy goes there. From now on, I don’t want another second spent on that child.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the end, Little Perran didn’t turn up for the rest of the day. But it was only when the shift was over and his department heads went to dinner, leaving him alone in the control room, that Lorcan remembered about the boy. He checked the general comms to see if he’d missed an announcement that the boy had been found, but there was nothing.

  He tried comming the guardian.

  “H-hello?” the old man said, his face appearing on Lorcan’s interface.

  “I take it Dwyr Orr’s son hasn’t returned to your cabin?”

  “W-what’s that?”

  Lorcan tutted. “The kid,” he said, louder. “Has the kid come back?”

  “No, Perran isn’t here. I was hoping he might be with you.”

  Why the hell would the guardian think he might be looking after the child? It beggared belief.

  “I think I should inform the Dwyr about the situation,” the man said tremulously.

  “You mean you haven’t already?” Lorcan had thought it strange that Kala hadn’t contacted him yet.

  “N-no.” The guardian paused. “She will be...rather angry.”

  So that was it. He didn’t want to face her, knowing she would blame him. Though actually the little shit must have slipped away deliberately, easily able to outwit the old fool.

  “Let’s leave it till morning,” said Lorcan.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He’s bound to turn up by then, and the Dwyr will be none the wiser. If he doesn’t, I’ll tell her our outward comm had a fault and we weren’t able to contact her.”

  The old man looked relieved. “If you’re certain that’s the right cause of action, sir.”

  “I am.”

  “T-thank you, sir.”

  “If you haven’t eaten, go to dinner, and then get a good night’s sleep.”

  “I will. Thank you again.”

  Lorcan closed the comm. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guardian. He had a raving lunatic for a mistress and a conniving snake as his ward. His life couldn’t be easy.

  Rubbing his eyes as sudden fatigue hit him, Lorcan decided to go straight to his suite. He was in no mood for chatter over the evening meal—though, in truth, he rarely was—and he had snacks he could nibble on if he grew peckish. A new consignment of genetic material had arrived a few hours ago. He was looking forward to spending the evening studying it and imagining how the species might become part of the ecosystem of a new world.

  He trudged the familiar passageways of the Bres that took him to his rooms. When he arrived, he got the shock of his life. Though later, when he looked back on it, he knew he shouldn’t have been at all surprised.

  The kid was there.

  Bold as brass, he was perched on the edge of the sofa in the living room, surrounded by empty snack packets and idly browsing Lorcan’s personal interface.

  “Oh, hello,” the boy said, looking up, calm as anything.

  For a second, Lorcan was too overcome with rage to speak, or move, or even think. Until he finally spat out, “You little bastard,”

  The kid’s eyebrows rose. “Did I do something wrong?”

  Lorcan uttered more foul expletives about the boy’s parentage, related him to private areas of human anatomy, and suggested he perform a lewd act upon himself.

  “You mean I wasn’t supposed to come in here?”

  Lorcan didn’t bother asking him how he’d circumvented the security, or how long he’d been there, or what he’d seen in his private files. As it was, he was only just holding himself back from spacing the lad.

  “You are going home,” he said. “Right now.” Not taking his eyes from the Dwyr’s son, he commed a shuttle pilot. The man would probably be eating, but that could wait. If the little arsehole wasn’t off the Bres in the next five minutes, he might do something he would later regret.

  “But I like it here,” whined the boy. “Why don’t you want me around? I saw a picture of a boy about my age in your files. Is he your son? Can I meet him? Or did he die, like your wife?”

  That did it.

  Lorcan marched over to the boy and slapped him so hard he spun around before he fell off the sofa and hit the floor.

  Slowly, he pulled himself to a sitting position, but he didn’t cry. Instead, he sat on the rug, clutching his cheek and looking up at Lorcan with malicious eyes.

  “I’ll tell my mother you did that.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The writing was almost indecipherable. The lines were faint with the passage of time, and the pages of the book had been yellowed by the same process, so it was difficult for Kala Orr’s tired eyes to separate one from the other.

  And of course the script was old, too. Very old. She’d often wondered if she was the only person in the world who knew the ancient languages in which such books were written. She’d never met or heard of anyone else who had studied them, at least not these ones, written by monks and scholars who had lived and died thousands of years ago.

  She sat upright, stretched her aching back, and rubbed her shoulders. How long had she been poring over the aged texts?

  Seeing the sun’s beams slanting through the leaded window of the library, she realized an entire night had passed while she’d been reading. That had to make fifty or more hours of study since the battle, yet she was no closer to understanding what had taken the BA ship. The books mentioned monsters of many kinds, mythical and spiritual as well as actual dangerous beasts of the time, but nothing came close to what she’d seen, not even in an allegorical sense.

  Until she could hazard a guess as to what the thing was and its implication to the EAC, if it was dangerous or benign, and what it might portend, she didn’t want to push on any further in the conflict with the BA.

  If the astronomical phenomenon was intelligent and could be harnessed to do others’ bidding, then the EAC’s struggle could be over. All she had to do was to discover how to reach its mind, then she would simply direct it to swallow the rest of the BA fleet, shortly followed by Ua Talman’s colony ships. But if it wasn’t living, or it was living but senseless, like some kind of cosmic worm, then it was as much a danger to the EAC as it was to anyone else who crossed its path, and she’d been right to immediately withdraw her ships from the area.

  She was certain of one thing: The appearance of the entity at that place and that point in time could not be a coincidence. Before turning to her library of ancient tomes, she’d searched all the information she had on bodies in space and found nothing even resembling the cloud that had arrived from nowhere in the middle of the battle. The fact that it had materialized there and then had to be significant.

  The same synchronicity had occurred when she’d almost retrieved the man of the myths from the cave, and at the exact same time, BA had turned up. It was as if it had been predestined.

  What did it all mean?

  She reached out to the corner of the weighty volume open before her on the table, lifted it, and carefully closed the book. Then she stood up and returned it to its place on the shelf, sliding it between Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England and Nennius’s Historia Brittonum.

  Kala stretched again and crossed the library to the heavy oak door, darkened with age. After pulling it open, she passed
through the quiet hallway. The castle was beginning to stir with movement as the other inhabitants rose for the new day. She began to climb the stairs wearily.

  She halted.

  From outside came the distant sound of an aircraft. It was not something she expected to hear in that part of the BI. If one had been chartered for a special purpose, she would know about it. As she hesitated on the stairs, the sound grew louder. The aircraft was approaching the castle. She recognized a distinctive rumble. It wasn’t an aircraft, it was a shuttle arriving from space. The speed of the craft’s arrival quickly turned the rumble to a roar.

  She descended hastily. No shuttle was due, or, at least, no one had notified her of one.

  At the castle entrance on the opposite side of the hall, she lifted the iron bar and pushed open one of the double doors. A fresh, morning sea breeze gusted in. The shuttle was already visible, a dull gray triangle swooping down from a rosy sky.

  One of Ua Talman’s vessels. What could it mean? Had she missed a message?

  Super-heated gas burst from the shuttle’s thrusters as it came in to land, turning the air beneath it hazy. Kala wrapped her arms around herself, chilled by the wind. The landing props came down, and the vessel lowered onto the pad. Finally, the ear-piercing noise of the engine faded.

  Had Lorcan come to pay her a visit? Perhaps he wanted to go over what had happened at the end of the battle again, face to face. But she’d said all she had to say on the subject. He’d had the option to press on with his own fleet and finish off the BA if he’d been so certain that was the right course of action. Only he hadn’t. He hadn’t wanted to take the risk without the support of the EAC. That had been his decision, yet he continued to want to blame her.

  She tutted and waited impatiently, her long night catching up with her.

  The shuttle hatch opened and steps extended to the ground. Before the bottom step touched the flagstones, Perran clattered down them, shouting “Mummy!” and waving. He jumped the remaining gap and raced toward her.

  Kala’s lips hardened. Why had Lorcan brought her son back so abruptly, without any notification?

  His short legs sped over the ground between them, his dark hair whipping around his head. When he’d covered about 75 meters, the steps hanging from the shuttle retracted inside and disappeared, the hatch closed, and the engine started up.

  Where was Lorcan? Or Tom, her son’s guardian? Had Ua Talman actually sent a young boy on the journey to Earth with only the pilot for company?

  Had he risked the life of her child?!

  Perran reached her and grabbed her around the waist, pressing his face into her. “I missed you!” he said, his voice muffled.

  Kala took his shoulders and squatted down to look him in the eyes. “What happened? Why are you back so soon?” A sudden thought occurred to her. “Is the colony ship building site being attacked?”

  “No, Lorcan told me I had to go home right away. He was so mean. He even hit me!”

  “He hit you?!”

  Her son nodded. “But I was brave. I didn’t cry, Mummy.”

  “That was very brave. I can’t believe he did that. Hitting a small child is a terrible thing to do. Did he hurt you badly?”

  Perran shook his head.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Maybe it’s for the best that he sent you home if he was going to be so bad-tempered. Why did he do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hm...” Kala straightened up and softly touched her son’s head. “Where’s Tom? He didn’t come with you?”

  “He’s still on the Bres. I heard Lorcan tell him he can stay there as long as he likes, and he can go with them to the new worlds if he wants.”

  “He did, did he?” What a cheek. “Come on, let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

  When they were in the hall, she closed the door against the wind, and let the bar fall into its slot. The rasping sound echoed from the stone walls. Taking her son’s hand, she said, “I need to go to bed now, but if you go to the kitchen I’m sure Cook will be awake already and she’ll make you some breakfast. But, before you go, did you get all the information I asked for?”

  “Yes, and I memorized it all just how you taught me.”

  “Was it hard to find?”

  “Not once I got inside Lorcan’s private suite.”

  “Clever boy. Run along and have something to eat, and then I want you to put everything you learned into a file and send it to me. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, Mummy. I will.”

  She watched him as he trotted across the hall to the doorway that led to the kitchen.

  Had Ua Talman suspected Perran of snooping during his visit? Was that why he’d been so angry and sent him back without an escort?

  One of the reasons she’d arranged for her son to do the job was because he was young and so unlikely to be closely watched, but it was possible that Ua Talman had figured out why he was there. That would definitely put a spoke in their relationship. After their argument at the end of the battle, however, it didn’t seem so important. The accord between the EAC and AP probably wouldn’t last much longer anyway.

  Feeling more tired than ever, Kala climbed the stairs again, and then went directly to her bedroom. She planned on taking a three-hour nap before tackling the puzzle of the dark space phenomenon again.

  But when she reached her bed, her interface light was flashing. Wondering if it was Lorcan reaching out to apologize for his ill treatment of her son, or accuse her of spying, she opened the screen.

  She’d guessed wrong. The comm was from her contact within the BA. As she read the contents, a knot of excitement formed in her stomach. The intel could be her chance to put an end to the Alliance forever.

  But she would need the AP’s help.

  That made the situation rather delicate. Since sending Perran home, Lorcan would have had time to cool off, but he was the type to hold a grudge forever. And now she had two counts against her. Yet he was also pragmatic, and he wanted to stop the BA from interfering in his operations as much as she wanted their remaining lands.

  It wouldn’t hurt to ask. If they were to take advantage of this new development, they would have to act quickly.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Taylan pressed the door button, wondering for the nth time if she was doing the right thing. She’d debated on whether to bring Arthur along but had decided that might work against her. Better to play on the miraculous aspects of his rescue and recovery.

  “Who is it?” said Colbourn over the intercom.

  She sounded annoyed, but the brigadier always sounded annoyed, so her mood was no indication of the likelihood of Taylan’s success in her endeavor.

  “Corporal Ellis, ma’am. I know it’s highly irregular, but I’d like to speak to you in person, if I may.” She cringed at the submissive tone in her voice. The old bat didn’t deserve her respect, but she was going to have to fake it in order to get what she wanted.

  The door opened. Colbourn sat behind her desk, already glowering. Taylan sucked in a breath at the sight of her. She hadn’t seen the woman since she’d returned from Earth. She’d heard about her injuries, but she hadn’t known they were quite so bad.

  “Make it fast, corporal.”

  Taylan stepped into the office and waited for the door to close before saying, “I don’t know if Major Wright has spoken to you yet, but I wondered if I could talk to you about what’s going to happen to the man he rescued at West BI.”

  “Really, Ellis, that man is the last of my concerns right now. What do you want to know?”

  Colbourn’s response was about as amenable as she got. Taylan decided to go for it. She doubted she would ever find the woman in a better mood.

  “It’s pretty clear he’s a West BI native, or at least, he used to be. I assume we’re going to return him to his home at some point.”

  “Why would you assume that?”

  Taylan faltered.

  “In case it isn’t obvious, corporal, we’re a
t war. We can’t go on jaunts around the solar system, taking passengers home. Do you think the Valiant is a taxi service?”

  “No, but if you don’t plan on taking him back to West BI, what’s going to happen to him?”

  “I imagine that if we aren’t all captured, killed, or annihilated by a mysterious space octopus, I’ll find the time to send him in a shuttle back to Earth eventually. Probably not to West BI as that’s now enemy territory, but to another country we still hold. That would be safest for him. When that’ll be, however, I simply can’t say. Now, I have work to do. You’re dismissed.”

  Taylan swallowed. Here goes... “When we take Arth...When we return the man to Earth, I want to resign from the Royal Marines. I want to go with him.”

  After Colbourn had dismissed her, her head had dipped to focus her attention on her screen. Now she jerked it up, her eyes narrowed. “I beg your pardon?!”

  “I want to leave the marines. I don’t think the patient will survive on his own back on Earth. He needs someone to look after him. If we just set him down in the middle of nowhere, with no money, not understanding the language, he’ll die. It’s rough down there, even in BA-held territories, unless you’re rich.”

  The brigadier swiped her screen closed, leaned back in her seat, and folded her arms. “Why are you so concerned about this man’s welfare? I know you were part of the rescue team, but I didn’t think you had much to do with the actual rescue. Is he a relation or friend of yours?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.”

  “Then what?” Colbourn moved forward and rested her forearms on her desk. “Are you feeling all right? Major Wright said he’d recommended you for a psychological evaluation. Is the reason for his recommendation something to do with this man?”

  “He didn’t explain?”

  She shook her head.

  That was something, at least. Wright hadn’t got to the brigadier first and prejudiced her against the idea of who Arthur was. Looking back, it wasn’t surprising the major had thought she was insane.

  The whole thing was insane.