Dauntless

By Robert A.V. Jacobs

Five hundred years had passed since Daisy had come to this little planet with the three suns, and four hundred and fifty since her husband had died. As she sat by his graveside, the thought came to her that after all this time it really was time that she got over him.

An unexpected visit from a starship, and her first contact with another human being in almost five centuries, awakens in her the need for human companionship, and convinces her that it is time to return to Earth.

So together with the Lentor, an intelligent and telepathic, dog like creature who has adopted her, she shifts through the dimensions to arrive back into a place far different from the England of her memories.

But not only is it different, something is not quite right. It is as if an evil is lurking, changing, affecting and influencing in areas where it can do the most harm. Some power is planning the overthrow of a society that has lasted for hundreds of years, and not with benevolent intentions.

Dealing with violence, death and insurrection is difficult enough, but the discovery of a new affair of the heart may be more than she can bear, when it become clear that she may have to be the one to confront that power, for the sake of the whole of mankind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert A.V. Jacobs
• Release date: Aug 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301832477

Book preview

Dauntless

Dauntless

Third Edition

Copyright 2013 Robert A.V. Jacobs

Seventh volume in the Daisy Weal series.

Published by

Robert A.V. Jacobs

Cover background by Richard K Green

Cover Future City Image by cg4tv.com

Smashwords edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is written in ‘English’ English, so there may be some differences in spelling to other international forms of English.

Internet sites quoted in this book were active at the time of writing. No responsibility is taken for web sites that cease to exist or discontinue the stated articles.

This book is a work of fiction and all characters are fictitious or are portrayed fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Whether any of my scientific statements bear any relationship to actual fact is most unlikely.

Suitable for Children from ten to infinity.

Also by Robert A.V. Jacobs

Children’s fiction, ten years of age and upwards:

Daisy Weal

Daisy Weal and the Monster

Daisy Weal and Sir Charles

Daisy Weal and the Last Crenian

The Adventures of Daisy Weal (Omnibus edition, containing four of the books in the series)

Grandpa’s Shed

Short Stories in the Daisy Weal series

(Available as ebooks):

Daisy Weal and the Grelflin

Daisy Weal and the Weenies

Daisy Weal and the Millions

Daisy Weal and the Face

Daisy Weal and the Secret

Daisy Weal and the Disaster

Daisy Weal and the Ghost

Daisy Weal and the Figment

Young Adult and Adult Fiction:

The Lost Starship

The Star Queen

Speaker (A collection of 29 short stories)

The Yellow Dragon

The Diamond Sword of Tor

Cardoney (Omnibus edition containing both The Yellow Dragon and The Diamond Sword of Tor)

Adult Science Fiction:

As a Consequence

Taldi’na

Adult Detective/Murder Mysteries:

Dexxman

The Disappearance of Natalie Firth

Time to Die

A Promise to Doreen

Almost Enough

Non-fiction:

Sudoku, Food for the Mind

Table of Contents

Also By

Author’s Note

Foreword

Chapter One: The Lentor

Chapter Two: The Visitors

Chapter Three: Return to Earth

Chapter Four: Supergirl is Back

Chapter Five: The Prime Minister

Chapter Six: The New Cook

Chapter Seven: Crisis in Parliament

Chapter Eight: Lenty on Guard

Chapter Nine: The Fairy

Chapter Ten: The Queen’s Dress-Cab

Chapter Eleven: Alison Kane

Chapter Twelve: The Outside Place

Chapter Thirteen: Hyde Park

Chapter Fourteen: Between Realities

Chapter Fifteen: William

Why Not Write a Review?

Character List

The Yellow Dragon

About the Author

Author’s Note

I had intended that ‘Daisy Weal and the Last Crenian’ should be the last in the Daisy Weal Series, but as I explained at the end of that book. An idea lurked...

I had always meant for her to be immortal, and to ride off into the sunset at the end of the series, but then came ‘The Lost Starship’ which was set in the Daisy Weal universe some two hundred years later. This was closely followed by ‘The Star Queen’ where another three hundred years had elapsed, but even so, both of these books managed to overlap in a couple of areas. Those two books were never intended to be part of the series, being more light Science Fiction than fantasy, but they did end up being positioned between ‘Daisy Weal and the Last Crenian’ and this book, and I have therefore included them in the Series.

Now comes ‘Dauntless’, once again with Daisy as the lead character, carrying on from where ‘The Star Queen’ finishes. I hope you enjoy it.

You can read this book, without reading all that have gone before, but just occasionally you may need to make a few assumptions

Foreword

Daisy Weal reached her eighteenth birthday and knew that her life had culminated in her marriage to the only man that she had ever loved, or ever wanted to, in the form of a certain Major William Dauntless, late of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service.

It was all she had ever wanted. If she had ever been asked to make a choice between the enormous power that she commanded or her William, everyone who knew her, knew instinctively what her decision would have been.

For her, the icing on her cake came with the birth of her twin daughters Marjorie and Millicent, who had been named after her mother and grandmother. But it was also this event that brought her life down around her ears. A chance remark by a doctor, just after the births, brought home to her something that she had suspected but never quite believed,

I must say, you are very young to have twins, the doctor had said, "true, it does happen, but the event is rare enough to raise a few eyebrows.

His eyes raised even more when she requested that he contact a Sir Hector Londstrum for her,

Used to work for the Queen in some place called ‘Dauntless and Weal Confidential Investigations, she explained.

If the truth were to be told, Daisy had not really expected him to come, so even she was a little surprised when she awoke the following morning to find him sitting by her bedside.

Sir Hector! she exclaimed, I must say it’s lovely to see you.

Cut the crap Daisy, he said, I know why I’m here. You look no different to the last time I saw you when you were fourteen. What are you now, twenty two is it? And you want me to confirm what you already know.

And what would that be Sir Hector? she asked sweetly.

That you’ve stopped aging, and sometime ago as well by the look of it.

Under Hectors guidance, it only took the experts two days to confirm that she had stopped aging at eighteen. They further confirmed that it was not a ‘slowing down’ of her aging, but rather a complete, and apparently irreversible, stop.

It made no difference to the way that she felt about William, and her love for him was as strong when he began to look like her grandfather, as it had been when she had fallen for him as a dashing Captain in the SAS. But she knew that William minded, and that it tore at him, when he realised that the three women in his life began to look more and more like triplets every day.

It was facing the death of her beloved dog Bruce, and then her grandmother Millicent, and seeing her mother, father, children and friends aging before her eyes, and not having the power to do anything about it, that finally convinced her to leave. She had gone to Marjorie, who had begun to look very much like her grandma Millicent in recent years, as she always did with important decisions. She had placed her dilemma before her mother, and pragmatic as always, her mother had agreed that it was time for her to leave.

I will miss you Daisy, she had said, being your mother is an experience that I have thoroughly enjoyed, and I love you more than I can say, but for your own peace of mind, you have to go.

So, every spare minute that she had, she started to take mental trips across the universe, in search of somewhere very far away, where she and William could set up home. It was a long and difficult search, but finally when the twins were coming up to their eighteenth birthday, she found the perfect place. It was a small planet with three Suns, and it was a seriously long, long, way from earth.

The twins had inherited many of her powers, though these powers were watered down somewhat from the influence of the mixture of Daisy’s and William’s genes. She loved them dearly, but William was her life. So as he got older and the twins were married off, she called a family conference and informed them all of her decision to take William and go away.

There was no argument. The twins knew that they would always be in contact with their mother wherever she went, and they fully understood how much people’s eyebrows were raised as the middle aged man and the ravishing young girl walked past arm in arm.

She told them that she would be taking their father halfway across the universe to a nice little planet with three suns that she had found and named William in honour of him. Then she told them that she would not be coming back.

There were tears of course, floods of them, but in the end they understood. She would never grow older, but they would, and they knew that it was something that none of them would be able to face without considerable pain.

Chapter One

The Lentor

I urge you, before you start to read this book, to read the Foreword. I know that a large percentage of readers tend not to, but instead plunge straight into the story. In this case, a great number of years have elapsed since the end of Daisy Weal and the last Crenian, and far too much has occurred in the intervening years to be ignored. So, I have included a brief summary in an effort to answer some of your questions.

Daisy Dauntless stepped outside of her little house, and eased herself down onto the grass to enjoy the late afternoon suns. There were three, each set at a different distance from William, but appearing quite close together as they moved down towards the horizon. They were far enough away that the combined heat from the three of them was only a little more than that produced by Sol, resulting in a climate remarkably like that of Earth. Weirdly, as William orbited the three suns, they always appeared as a triangle in the sky. The Planet did not really belong to any of them, but had been a wanderer that had been caught up in their strange gravitational field. In the scheme of things, it would last for no more that a second compared to the life of the universe. But while it lasted, it was idyllic and the place that Daisy had chosen for her home. As she sat and watched the strange sunset, a single tear coursed its way down her cheek, a vision of her husband filling her mind. She got up and drifted, half a metre above the ground, up a small slope to a single Oak tree under which he was buried, and her companion silently padded along beside her.

It’s been four hundred and sixty five years since you went away my love, she said to the small headstone beneath the tree, as she settled gently down to the ground again, but I really think that it’s about time I got over you.

Even with all of the powers that she possessed, she had discovered that she couldn’t slow down ageing in others, nor could she prevent death that occurred naturally. So she had sat with William during his long illness, and had thought that her heart would break when he had eventually died. She had not made a sound, but the tears had flooded unchecked down her face. Her body had shuddered as the pain of his passing tore at her, but she had still managed to wrap his body gently in a sheet and take it to the place by the oak tree where they had sat so often in each other’s arms. As she slowly sank him into the ground, the earth parting and oozing over him, it became too much, and her howl of anguish echoed across the universe. For a split second every living thing that existed or ever had existed, mourned with her in her loss. But it was only her children who had also heard, that really understood what had happened.

The children mourned with her via their link, and stayed in contact for the rest of their lives. Their daughters and sons took this up when they became old enough, but as the generations passed it became harder and harder to keep in touch, until eventually there was no-one left