An Alien Warrior's Fated Valor

Chapter 1

FALKIN

Falkin leaned back in his chair and watched Karuk leave the bar. Not with swagger or arrogance, like many of the Vorjan house carried, but a quiet confidence.

Something he’d not seen on Karuk in a very long time. Not since well before the Earth girl, Jenny, came to their world.

She brought him joy. Far outside of what she’d signed up for when she’d joined the scientists on their space station.

“Shocking,” Aldric said, as he sipped his festival ale, “he wound up mated to one of those Earth girls.”

“He seems happy,” Falkin said.

“Happy that no one wants his head,” Aldric snorted. “He’s lucky you went after him and not someone else.”

True words. Not every Vorjan Guard would have paused at the orders. Questioning orders could get any of the guards killed, which was exactly what had put Karuk on the run in the first place.

Falkin had paused.

Long enough to find out that the situation was not what Karuk believed. He hadn’t gone to that planet’s station looking for a mate. He’d gone there to hide.

The Intergalactic Dating Agency’s system had other ideas.

“A long way to go to find a mate,” Aldric added.

“You have no place to speak,” Falkin said.

“Mates are not worth their trouble.”

Falkin glanced at his friend, whose gold markings displayed both his wins on a battlefield, and his own personal trials. The marks of gold meant many things in the Dalgurian world. For some it was status. For others, it was heritage. For others still, it was tragedy.

Aldric wore tragedy. Loss that no one should have to bear.

Loss that kept him separate from the rest, by his choice.

Falkin pitied that distrust of others. Of course, that same distrust made him a strong soldier.

“They could be,” Falkin muttered.

“What? A mate?” Aldric shook his head. “Not worth it.”

Falkin raised his eyebrow. “You seem certain.”

“I am,” Aldric replied. “You sentimentalize your mission.”

Falkin shook his head. “I’m not.”

Aldric took a swig of his drink and wiped his mouth. “You saw a man relieved he wasn’t executed. Give it a year.”

“It’s more than that.” Falkin had gone after Karuk because if he hadn’t, someone else would have, and Karuk would not be breathing air today.

Even the tribunal had rescinded the orders against Karuk.

Falkin had been one of the soldiers to testify. His friend had walked out clear and gone home to a small loud human woman and a cat that talked.

Something in him that had been clenched for as long as Falkin had known him had let go.

Falkin glanced at Aldric. “You didn’t feel it. I did. Through the cuff, even. It’s real.”

Aldric made a sound. “Because a human woman found him. On a whim. By accident.”

“That agency isn’t an accident.”

“The agency is a matchmaker with a database.” Aldric met his gaze, his brow raised, in the most pitying expression. “You want that. You want what he has.”

Falkin didn’t respond.

And Aldric shrugged. He didn’t have to say anything. Falkin knew.

Aldric thought he was a fool, lighting up at an idea.

Falkin wanted to punch him.

Then Aldric decided to add fuel to it. “If you can find a mate just like him, then I’ll even try.”

Falkin raised an eyebrow. “That is a commitment?”

Aldric nodded. “As House Vorjan breathes.”

“As House Vorjan breathes,” Falkin said.

Though the look on Aldric’s face said everything.

He didn’t think Falkin had a chance in a starfield at finding a mate through the agency.

Months later, the transport groaned as it started its connection with the space station that orbited Earth.

Not sound. Feeling. It came up through the deck plating and through the cuff and through the back of his skull like weather blowing in ahead of a storm. Thousands of minds, packed into an orbiting station.

Excitement. Fear. A hundred small wantings, all of them pushing at once.

He pressed two fingers to the cuff and raised the resistance a notch.

Better. Not good. Better.

Across the cabin, the Paxian pilot glanced back at him, curious. Falkin gave her the small, courteous nod that meant nothing is wrong and turned his face to the viewport.

She wasn’t fooled.

He could feel that too. The pilot’s brief question when he winced at the overwhelm: was the Dalgurian all right?

Their looks alone had made the Dalgurian species of humanoids a curiosity. Skin in cool colors, gold markings on the body—the more markings, the higher in rank. Slightly pointed ears. They were considered attractive as a whole.

Pretty, some species called them. And it was never a compliment.

An insult was livable.

Until they started reading minds.

Then the Dalgurians became ostracized.

Most races didn’t want them around. A race of humanoids who could hear their thoughts before they fully realized they thought them?

That was dangerous.

It made Dalgurians dangerous.

So typically, Dalgurians kept to themselves. Among their own people, they’d learned how to control their abilities. But they also grew up with a regular practice of mental discipline that many species didn’t have.

He focused on the windows. The angle let him see the blue-green planet, bright as they came into their orbital docking.

This new station on this newly opened humanoid world of Earth. A place where the idea of empathy was a thing of fiction. The last place any Dalgurian would have headed.

Falkin never would have touched the soil, if he hadn’t had to hunt down Karuk. And while he was being honest, his time there had been overwhelming enough that he’d been thankful to leave the place.

He had to go to Earth, Falkin thought, for probably the hundredth time.

Just going there, Karuk had started a series of events that were proving to be more complicated than a male trying to evade capture.

Not only did Karuk wind up mating with an Earth girl, but she was a smart Earth girl, a scientist who specialized in genetics.

And she was fascinated by how Dalgurian empathy and telepathy worked.

She, like many, unfortunately didn’t realize the overwhelm that came with being around other bipedals who didn’t know how to shield their thoughts.

The Dalgurians did what they could, including creating technology that would repress their abilities around others. The cuffs they wore on their ears were not enough.

At least not for Falkin. He was blessed—or cursed—with strong telepathy. Even among his own people, he did not have many close companions.

The irony of finding a mate on the last world he’d ever want to step on was not lost on him.

Falkin had a house on his home world.

The closer the station got, the more the emptiness of that house pressed on him. The way a bruise you’d forgotten announces itself when you lean the wrong way.

It was a good house. Earned.

When you rose through the ranks of a noble house’s guard in service rather than blood, they gave you a house. No generational gold in your skin, only the marks you’d bled for.

A place to remove yourself from the work.

Falkin’s was fine and white and clean-lined and set where the blue-purple grass came right up to the step. He’d stood in it the night before he left, boots off, feeling the silk of the grass through the open door. And looked at what he’d built.

White walls. Hard lines. Rooms with good light and nothing in them.

Nothing on the walls. He had never put anything on the walls. It had never occurred to him. Then one day he’d noticed it hadn’t occurred to him, and that was worse.

How did a man live twelve years in a house and never once think to make it look like anyone lived there?

You made a home for someone. That was the thing no one told you. You didn’t decorate for yourself. A warrior didn’t need it, and Falkin had never had the softness of pretending otherwise.

You put color on the walls because someone was coming home to them who liked color.

You cluttered a shelf because two lives generated clutter.

Was the empty white house a failure of taste? No.

It was proof that there had never been anyone.

His birth family’s house had been full. Noise and warmth and his mother’s cooking, cousins underfoot, the low hum of many people living close. Even young, even before the cuff, he’d felt that as shelter and not the assault the rest of the galaxy became.

He had not known, then, that it was a thing that could be taken. Right up until the day he told them he was pledging to Vorjan House instead of the family trade. The warmth went out of all of it at once.

Nineteen years of silence since.

Vorjan House had become his family, whole and complete. Did he regret it? No. He would not let himself.

But their houses were full.

And his was white.

Enough.

He pressed the cuff, harder than he needed to, and the sensation gave him something to hold onto that wasn’t inside his own chest.

Envy of a friend was a foolish emotion.

Karuk had a full house now. Small and human and loud. Falkin had seen it once, over a comm. Jenny’s face crowding the frame, the cat’s tail swishing across the corner. Karuk in the background looking like a man who’d been let out of a cage he’d stopped believing had a door.

And behind them, on the wall… something.

A drawing. A cheap human thing tacked up crooked.

Someone had put something on the wall.

That was the moment. If Falkin was honest—and under the cuff, he could afford to be—it wasn’t the tribunal that had undone him. Not the mission, or any of the long service he could point to.

It was that. A cheap crooked drawing on a wall, put there by someone, for someone.

He had looked at it and felt something in his own chest turn over and want.

The thing that started the hyperdrive.

An application. A match.

A station full of humans, one of them meant for him.

Her name? He didn’t know it. The agency held the match until arrival—some ceremony to it, Re-lee had explained over three separate messages, radiant even in text.

He knew only that she existed. Somewhere in that space station in orbit of the Earth world. Entirely unaware that a Dalgurian guard was falling out of the sky with his heart already half unlatched.

There you are, he thought, at the station, at the stranger, at the reckless idea of it… I’m coming.

The transport docked with a shudder and a long hydraulic sigh.

The noise redoubled the instant the seal broke. Falkin had known it would—had braced for it—and it still nearly took his knees.

A wall of it.

A dozen species’ worth of feeling poured in through the opening doors, unfiltered, before the ear cuff could take the edge off.

Joy and boredom and grief and hunger and the sharp bright terror of someone who’d just seen a ship for the first time. It hit him the way surf hits, all at once and from every side. For one blinding second, he could not tell his own pulse from the crowd’s.

He pressed the cuff to the last notch.

The wave broke. Receded.

Left him standing in the hatchway with his heart slamming and his face composed. Because a man of Vorjan House did not let the galaxy see the cost of anything.

Twenty years, he thought, and it still does that.

The cuff held the worst of it and had since he was a boy. But holding was not the same as not feeling, and every arrival in a new place was the same small brutal reminder.

There was a full shut on it too, past the last notch. He had never once used it. A guard who could not feel the room was no guard at all.

The flood was always there. The only thing that stood between him and drowning in it was a piece of ornate gold and a discipline he’d bled to learn.

And it was getting worse.

The degenerative curve Karuk’s human had found, the thing this whole mission was quietly built around. Falkin didn’t need a study to believe in it. He could feel it every day he lived. Was he already worse than his father had been? He suspected so. And whatever came after him would be worse still.

Unless a small loud woman from a green and blue world was right about the dirt.

Beyond the doors, the station stretched out in front of him. Bright and curved and absurdly like a hotel. All soft light and polished floors and beings of forty kinds crossing paths under a great slow-turning ceiling.

Somewhere in it, a bell chimed. Someone laughed. The air smelled of a hundred things. And faintly, underneath, of something green and growing that had no business being this far from any world.

Falkin adjusted the collar of his blue-and-gold armor. Set his shoulders.

Let the small knowing smile come to his mouth because it was true, for once—he did know something the crowd didn’t.

He knew why he’d really come.

Then he stepped off the transport and into the noise, and the mission began.