Jay Knight's Departure from Aquila
Jay Knight, Delan, Bea, Jack
Time 3500: Shortly after the assassination of Atropos
Jay Knight contemplates leaving Aquila in search of his missing half-sister, Lady Renalda Anderon.

Aquila smelled of failure.

The stench of it seemed to be in his nostrils day after day.  It was there when he woke up between crisply laundered sheets in the magnificent suite of rooms he had been told to think of as his.  It was there when he sat down to breakfast - in the company of the various guests of the House and - more rarely - of the family of the Head of the House.  It was there in the long days of enquiries, the sorting through documents, the questioning of anyone, everyone who might be able to help. 

It was there in the magnificent dark eyes of the only woman he had ever loved as she looked, lovingly, at his half-brother.  It was there is the face of his son, unclaimed for so many wasted years, and now the accepted son of that same half-brother, Delan Anderon.

Delan Anderon - who had everything, while Knight had only failure.

It had not been meant to be like this.

Aquila had always been bad for him, that was the trouble.  First, there had been those long years of his childhood, when he had been hidden away, one of the illegitimate sons of old Lord Anderon.  Then, when he was sixteen, there had been the hasty escape, when Drostin Anderon, his eldest half-brother, had began his murderous campaign to eliminate all his illegitimate siblings.  He remembered his mother, her face pale and strained in the early morning light at the spaceport, as she paid the freighter pilot all the jewels her lover had given her in order to save her son.

"But Mother," he had protested.  "Why don't you tell the Lord?  He would protect us!"

She had gripped his arm - days later he had had her finger prints in livid bruises on his flesh.  "Jay ... listen to me.  You must forget the Lord.  You must forget ... your father never existed.  You never knew your father, do you understand?"

And he had forgotten - expunging the old Lord from his life.  Even the name he had known was forgotten - he was simply Knight - a lowly grunt, working the freighters between the stars.

Gradually, he had made his way up the ranks.  Not for him the Academies of space flight, or even the schools where poorer boys trained.  He learned his skills on the job - flying the scummy routes in battered craft in danger of catastrophic collapse, operating just this side of legality.  And slowly he rose to be second officer, first officer ... studying his Captain's exams late at night in lonely cabins where the lights sputtered, in danger of crackling out one final time and trapping the three men and a dog of the crew in a lonely tomb in space. 

But he passed; he gained his Captain's papers.  And then ... disguised ... he could return to Aquila , to reassure his mother, and perhaps even impress that forgotten father who must surely take pride in a son who had achieved so much.

Yet nothing had gone as he had planned it.  His mother was proud ... but she was also dying - and dying of a disease that could so easily have been prevented on a world other than Aquila .  By the time he came back, it was too late.  He was just in time to see her pride, and hold her hand as she died.  After that, throwing his triumph in his father's face seemed the hollow sham he had always, secretly, known it would be. 

There were things to be done, things that should have been mercifully mind-numbing, but weren't.  As he arranged the sale of all his mother's property (enough to allow him to buy that elderly small freighter, he knew), he had found refuse with his mother's old friend, the Salters - both the parents and the brother and sister - Josh and Bianca. 

Bianca, Bianca ... his beautiful love.  Seventeen, sweet and gentle ... with her magnificent dark eyes.  So proud of her place at that ridiculous Women's College.  So eager to talk about her studies, her delight in learning, her pride in those foolish courses she was taking, until he distracted her with tales of space, of flying through the stars.  Till he distracted her with love ... her shyness changing to ardour, to passion.

And then ... she rejected him.  It was her brother Josh who had told him - she was marrying a rich old man.  She didn't want to see him - ever again.

Those had been the dark years, the years where woman and money had come and gone in a bewilderingly dizzying spin.  It was then he had made his vow - to use his skills; to build up the money and power he needed - to return to Aquila and claim his birthright - House Anderon - to take it from his arrogant father, his murderous half brother Drostin Anderon.  And to prove to Bianca Salter how wrong she had been.

But when he had come to Aquila a third time, it had all gone wrong.  His freighter had been crippled in that asteroid storm - by the time he had reached Aquila , it was so much junk.  And he had discovered House Anderon was ruled by neither his father nor by Drostin Anderon ... but by his younger half-brother, Delan Anderon.  Delan, with his high moral code, his fierce sense of right, and justice and duty.  His unemotional exterior, his apparent coldness masking his deep and real love for those closest to him - his two sisters, his wife, his stepson, his friends.  A group that he was prepared to admit his half-brother to.  And Renalda Anderon, so young and heedless, but so prepared to love this new half-brother too.

But it was Delan's new wife that had stopped Knight cold.

For Delan, in defence of House tradition and Aquilan convention, had married a mere citizen, a widow, and taken her son as his own.  Bea Kennington - by birth Bianca Salter.  And her son, Jack Kennington ... was Knight's.

Suddenly his rejection had become horribly clear.  Bea hadn't turned from him; the old man had been found for her, to hide her shame, by her parents.  And his response - to leave the planet - had left her with no choice but to marry the old man who was willing to take the boy as his heir ...

At first he had believed that once Bea knew, once she understood what had happened, would turn to him again, unhesitatingly.  She would be his again, and so would his son ...

But he had reckoned without one simple fact - Bea loved Delan.  She loved him with all the passion and ardour that had once been Knight's ... and she would never betray him.  Even Knight's attempts to blackmail Bianca into returning to him (once she came back, he had reasoned, she would realise the truth - that she had never really loved anyone else) had failed when she turned instead to Delan and told him the whole truth.  And Delan had understood; Delan had let her choose freely between her old love and her new.

And Bea, without hesitation, had chosen Delan.

By then, of course (for with Knight, a woman in his arms was almost an inevitability) he had himself met someone else - Millaria Windhaven, the beautiful, abused daughter of a noble House.  She had become his mistress - yet it had always been clear that the ambiguities of her position on Aquila had troubled her - and in the end she had left him.  Knight had hunted her with increasing desperation; it had been Delan, who had long warned him that Millaria had been placed in an impossible position by Knight's behaviour, who had pointed out the obvious truth - Millaria had clearly fled to a convent.

By then, other events had overtaken him.  Renalda, travelling to Earth with Gallfrey, the new Aquilan Ambassador to the Imperium, had been seized by space pirates from the Efrosian ship on which she was travelling.  There was suspicion that these were no ordinary space pirates ...

The Efrosians had offered one of their fastest ships to Delan, with a full crew, as their contribution to the search.  But before Delan could leave, the ruler of Aquila had been assassinated, and Delan had become Lord Regent of the planet.  Then he had turned to his half-brother, the experienced space pilot and asked him to undertake the search.  And Knight had agreed.

Aquila smelled of failure.  The time had come to seek success elsewhere.