Graham McNeill - I, Mengsk

Valerian shook his head. "No, what's it about?"

"It's about a man called Logan Mitchell who keeps law and order on one of the fringe worlds. Lois of guns, lots of girls, and plenty of shoot-outs with corrupt officials. Logan's a hard-talking, hard-fighting man who always gets the bad guy. Pretty simple stuff really, but it's good fun and full of blood and guts."

"Why would I want to read about blood and guts and shoot-outs? That sounds horrible."

"I thought most boys liked reading things like that."

"Well, I don't," said Valerian. "I don't like guns."

"Have you ever fired one?"

"No."

"Would you like to?"

Arcturus saw the gleam in the boy's eyes and smiled.

Like most people who professed to dislike guns, Arcturus figured, Valerian had never actually fired one and had probably not even ever held a firearm. There was something about firing a weapon that appealed to the primal urge in everyone, male or female, and even avowed pacifists couldn't deny the thrill of unloading a powerful weapon—even if only into a paper target.

"Come on then," said Arcturus. "I've a gauss rifle and a slugthrower on the Kitty Jay. It's time you learned something about being a man."

Valerian lay back on his bed, struggling to hold back tears of frustration and disappointment as he rubbed analgesic ointment into his shoulder where the butt of his dad's gauss rifle had bruised him black and blue. If Valerian hadn't already hated guns, he would have learned to despise them thoroughly during the time his father had spent with him.

The last seven days had to rank as the greatest and worst week of Valerian's life.

The greatest because his dad was here and he was just as he had pictured him: tall, strong, and handsome. Everything his dad said sounded clever and important, even if a lot of it was beyond Valerian's understanding.

The worst because nothing Valerian did seemed good enough for him.

Valerian had greeted every day as a chance to win his dad's approval, and every day he hoped he was going to grow up just like him. He found himself trying to adopt his dad's mannerisms, his walk, his posture, and even his speech.

It was just a pity that his father paid little or no attention to Valerian's many acts of devotionm seeming only to notice the things he couldn't do.

The lessons with the gauss rifle and slugthrower had been a disaster, the savage recoil of the rifle knocking Valerian onto his back and the bucking pistol spraining his wrist. The guns were loud and even when he managed to hold them straight, he couldn't hit any of the targets his dad set up at the edge of the river.

Every failure seemed to irritate his dad, but no matter how he concentrated, squinting down the barrel and pressing his tongue against his upper lip, he could not get the hang or love of firing a weapon.

Not only that, but his favorite books had been consigned to the trash and replaced with freshly uploaded digi-tomes of economics, history, technology, and politics—things he wasn't interested in and which didn't have any aliens in them.

They were confusing and used big words he didn't understand. None of them had any stories in them, apart from the history ones, but even they were really boring and didn't have any pictures of the bits that sounded like they might have been exciting.

The one thing Valerian did enjoy was the sparring with wooden swords, which he and his dad engaged in on the lawn before the house. The weight of the sword was unfamiliar, but his dexterous hands could move it quickly and nimbly around his body. Though he was bruised and sore at the end of each of these sessions, his dad would look at him without more usual expression of disappointment and nod.

"You're fast," said his dad, taking his arm and squeezing it hard, "but you lack power. You need to build up your strength and stamina if you're going to be a swordsman."

"But why do I need to be a swordsman?" Valerian had protested. "Surely no one fights with swards anymore now that we have guns."

"And if you find yourself without a gun, or you run out of ammunition? What will you do then? Anyway, learning how to use a sword isn't just about fighting with one. It also teaches you balance, speed, coordination, discipline. All things you sadly lack, I'm afraid."

That had stung, for it was harsh and unnecessary. His grandpa had argued with his dad after Valerian told him what had been said. Valerian had heard them shouting at each other from behind the closed door of his bedroom.

Grandpa had left the house yesterday, and though Valerian didn't know what was going on, he had seen that his grandpa looked really worried. His mum told him that the Ruling Council of Umoja had been called to an emergency sitting (whatever that was) and that something very important was going on.

She didn't say what that might be, but Valerian could read his mum's moods as easily as if she had spelled them out, and he could tell she was worried.

As well as what was worrying her about Grandpa, he knew she wasn't too pleased with his dad, either. But she had kept her opinions to herself, as far as Valerian knew.

At leasl, he hadn't seen them argue.

With Ailin Pasteur gone from the house, Arcturus helped himself to another measure of the man's brandy and sank into one of the leather seats before the fireplace. He sipped his drink, its taste pleasant enough, and remembered his first sip of brandy: the night the Confederate assassins had come to kill them at the summer villa. Thinking back to that night, Arcturus remembered sitting in the dining room and talking to his father, and felt a sudden, and wholly unexpected, pang of nostalgia for those long-ago days.

Back then everything was simpler, he mused, then realized this kind of thinking was just the rosy mist of memory softening problems that, at the time, had been huge and calamitous. Time, he knew, had a way of distorting the truth of experience, embellishing past pleasures and diminishing hardships.

Though he was still a young man, Arcturus felt old now. Part of that was no doubt the fact that he had a son, a factor surely designed to make any man feel as though he had advanced in age—if not maturity—by an order of magnitude.

Arcturus wondered if his own father had felt like this when presented with his newborn son. He didn't think so, since Angus would have had nine months and more to get used to the Idea. Fatherhood had been sprung on Arcturus like a bolt of lightning from an open sky.

The idea had taken root, though, and instead of railing against the idea of a son, Arcturus had begun to feel that perhaps it was for the best he now had an heir (and had skipped the messy years of nappy changing and midnight feeds).

He had sent a message to Korhal—tagged specifically for his mother and Dorothy— telling his parents of this latest development, though it had taken him several days to work out exactly how to tell them of Valerian's existence without casting himself in an unfavorable light.

That hadn't been easy.

Arcturus had fought Kel-Morian pirates, been shot at by angry miners, and faced furious superior officers, but composing himself to record a message to send home and inform his family he was now a father had been the most nerve-wracking experience of his life.

Arcturus remembered when he'd been about eight or nine and had broken one of his mother's ornamental dancers with a poorly thrown padball. He'd sweated for days to pluck up the courage to tell her he'd broken it.

The sensation engulfing him as his finger hovered over the Record icon on the vidsys was uncomfortably familiar to the cold dread he'd felt as he stood before his mother's drawing room bathed in a guilty sweat.

He smiled, realizing it didn't matter how old you were—your parents would always be figures of authority, and it never got any easier telling them something difficult. Just as would always be their child, no matter that you grew up, fought battles, made a life for yourself, and perhaps even started a family of your own.