by Richard Dee
Chapter Eight
Caluga was another new world, way out on the ever-expanding rim. It took us ten days to get there, the information we had said was that it was a forested world with suggestions of minerals as well. There were so many worlds like this, ripe for development. With the abundance came the notion that we could try not to screw the new worlds up; as we had with a lot of the industrialised ones.
According to Myra, this place was to be managed so that more trees were planted than were cut down; the mining works hidden. The overall environment was to be as little disturbed as it could be.
Caluga wasn’t a Villiars world, the rights were owned by one of the rival companies in the same business. They were employing Messinya as a surveyor at the site of the first of their intended settlements. They wanted to make sure that they didn’t build a town over a large mineral deposit.
From orbit, the planet looked beautiful, blue and green with clouds in the atmosphere. There were no customs, just a relay station that asked for our details. After a conversation with Myra, we were allowed to descend.
As the planet spread out beneath us, it was a glorious sight. There were tall mountains, snow-capped, together with white beaches, forests and rivers. All the things that would need protection from the development that was in progress. We passed over cleared areas, tiny specks in the vast landscape, then slowed as we approached the coordinates that Ria had sent us. She had spoken to Messinya, who had agreed to meet us, provided we went to where she was working and didn’t disrupt her life too much. I got the feeling that she wasn’t really bothered whether she saw us or not. I thought that was a bit strange. I had been with both her children when they died. But then, I’d never bothered to try and see her before. Maybe that had something to do with why she didn’t seem interested. With what I had to tell her, I was pretty sure that would change.
Myra now landed us in the port, by the side of the building work. It was a busy space, with a line of freighters unloading all sorts of material, rather like the chaos that we had been part of back on the Villiars world. The settlement was situated on the coast, in a wide bay with cliffs at each end and flat space in the middle. There was a cluster of prefabricated huts and a stores compound, with a landing strip for atmospheric craft off to one side. The shoreline was dotted with tidal generators, providing unlimited electrical power as the tide rose and fell.
Freefall landed in the area reserved for non-company ships. We used Elana’s ground car to drive through the stream of loaders and flatbeds to get us to the site office. Inside the building it was a picture of disorganisation, there were maps and models of all sorts of buildings, mud on the floor and computer screens everywhere. Phones rang constantly. A harassed looking man came over to us. “You the groundworks team?” he asked.
“No, I’m looking for someone, Messinya Rixon.”
“She’s somewhere out on-site,” he said. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Dave Travise. I need to speak to her, it’s a family thing.”
A young girl must have overheard our conversation. She left her desk and come over to us, in her late teens she had thick brown hair and intense deep blue eyes. There was something about her, the way she moved, that bothered me.
“Hello, Dave,” she said, shaking my hand. “I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m Messinya’s assistant, Melva. She said that you were arriving about now. I can take you up to her.” Her grip was firm, again there was that something in the gesture.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s get you up to the site.” We left the office and walked across towards a line of ground cars.
“This is my partner Irin,” I introduced her and she gave her a strange look, just for a split second it wasn’t friendly, then the smile returned.
“Hello, Irin,” she said. “Would that be a business partner?”
“None of your damn concern,” Irin replied, with a smile.
She stopped walking and looked at me. “I thought this day would be so different,” she said, I realised that she was crying.
What was going on? I moved towards her but she turned and ran, splashing through the mud back into the office. The door slammed.
Irin and I just stood there for a moment, not really knowing what to do. “Have you ever met her before?” she asked me and I shook my head.
“No, but there’s something about her, I can’t think what.”
What should we do, how were we going to get to Messinya now? Loaders whizzed past us in all directions, horns blaring. It wasn’t safe to just stand here. We started to make our way back to the office to try and sort things out when a large ground car, fitted with a flatbed and some sort of surveying gear on a tripod mount came towards us flat out. It stopped about a foot from me. Mud splashed and I stepped back, almost losing my balance. A large woman, all wild curls and red-faced, vaulted out of the car. She strode over and planted herself in front of me, hands on her hips, angry and elemental.
“What the hell are you doing harassing my assistant?” she demanded. “She just called me, she’s upset.”
Now I was totally confused. “Excuse me?” said Irin. “She offered to take us to meet someone, I guess that was you. Then she started asking me inappropriate questions. I politely suggested that my life was none of her damn business.”
She ignored Irin and looked me over. “So, you’re Dave Travise?” she said, mainly to herself. “I suppose I can see the attraction, a few years ago.”
Realisation dawned on me. “You’re Messinya, Myra’s mother,” I said. “I’ve come to see you.”
“About time too,” she replied. “How many years has she been gone?”
That was true, I couldn’t argue. I should have come. I hadn’t tried as hard as I could have. In my defence, it had taken me a long time to stop blaming myself for what had happened in the skies over New Devon.
“You’re a hard person to find,” I said lamely, “and believe it or not, I didn’t want to have to tell you about Myra, because I blamed myself and I thought that you would too. And I couldn’t have taken that. Then, as the years passed I just kept putting it off until it was too late.”
“But now you’ve found the courage?” she said. “At least you’re not trying to hide behind Ria; or a bottle. I heard about that, as well as a few other things. I think you’d better come over to my house, you might need to sit down and I could do with a cup of tea.” She turned and stalked off before I had the chance to tell her about Rixon.
We followed her, around the back of the offices to a large trailer, fitted out in luxury.
“Take your boots off,” Messinya ordered as we stepped into the vestibule. We obeyed and walked through, sitting in worn leather seats. Messinya made us all tea.
“If you’ve come this far after all this time, it must be important,” she called through from the kitchen. “Get comfortable, you can tell me all about it.”
Irin sat beside me and held my hand. Messinya came in with a wooden tray, tea, and biscuits, which she distributed. She sat, perched on the edge of an armchair, beside an overflowing desk.
“Sixteen years,” she said, “the last time I saw Myra, she came to tell me that her brother, my son, was dead.”
The day she had left to do that was as fresh in my mind as yesterday was, and all the months she had been away, the lost time that we never had together. I took a deep breath.
“That’s what I need to tell you,” I said. “Something you were told all those years ago was wrong. Rixon’s not dead.” There was silence, her hand went to her mouth.
“What!” she almost shrieked. “My boy is alive?” She got up and grabbed me. “When did you see him?”
“About six months ago, he tried to kill me.”
Irin spoke up. “I worked for him for over a year. He held my family hostage to make me work for him.”
“He’s alive,” she repeated, ignoring her again. “Where was this?”
“The Silver Moons, I was working for a survey crew and he tried to stea
l our data.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “I never thought he was dead, a mother knows somehow.” She sat back down and picked up her tea, her hand trembled as she lifted it, tea slopped onto her leg but she didn’t notice. “You know, he had an evil temper. Myra kept him from showing it too much but he could drive me crazy with his sharp tongue. If you angered him he could fly into such rages. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I could see him turning to crime.”
She stopped. “I thought that you were here about the other thing. I thought you’d come because Ria had finally told you?”
“No, it was my idea to come. Until now, Ria has always tried to stop me.” What did she mean, the other thing, what would she have told me?
She continued, “Myra and Ria had a deal, I was involved as well, against my better judgement I might add, I suppose it’s about time.”
This was making less and less sense. What did Ria know? About time for what?
The door opened and the girl, Melva, came in. She crossed to Messinya’s chair and stood behind it, her arms around the older woman’s shoulders. Looking at them both together, I realised what the other thing was, why Myra had been gone so long and why Ria hadn’t wanted me to take my new lover when I went to find her.
Melva gazed across at me. “Hello, Father.”
Chapter Nine
I just sat there, not knowing what to say, it almost felt like Myra had come back to me. Melva moved in the same way, flicked her hair from her face with the same hand gesture and the more I saw of her, the more I realised that it was like looking into my past. Messinya got up and went to the large piece of furniture that dominated the room, an ornate cupboard made from dark wood. It was scratched and aged, she rummaged around in one of the drawers and pulled out a letter, it was unopened.
“This was meant to go to you if anything happened to me. Myra had a terrible decision to make, she was expecting your child and she wasn’t sure about how you would react, she wasn’t even sure how she would react. She thought that she wasn’t ready and before she needed to tell you she came and sought my advice. There was the whole Chenko thing to deal with as well. When she arrived, I thought that was strange, because we had never been close, we disagreed over so many things and yet I suppose in the end we were always family.”
I thought about my family, my older brothers and my sister and wondered if we could ever have been that close, perhaps the rest of them were, I had been late to the family party and never really felt like I belonged.
Messinya was still talking. “We talked and talked, Myra was worried about what might happen and wanted to keep her child safe, she was sure that what had happened to the Orca was just the start and that they would be coming for her next. Originally, she was going to come back and get Melva when she thought it was safe, you know all too well what happened then.”
“So why didn’t anyone tell me? You say I never got in touch, well that works both ways.”
She sighed; as if she had been carrying a burden for years. “That was the biggest regret of my life,” she said. “At first I told myself I was doing it for all the right reasons. I knew that after losing Myra you couldn’t take another shock straight away, especially if it involved having a one-year-old child to look after. So I kept in touch with Ria and I waited. I was right; you know what happened next.”
She turned to Irin. “Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me what my boy’s been doing.”
While Irin started talking about her life with Rixon, I let my mind wander. Back to the time after I had buried Myra, near where I thought Rixon had died. I had been to see Evan, Ria’s father, on Wishart to tell him that the threat from the Chenko’s had passed. Then my life had fallen down. I had taken Griff and Ria back to New Devon and descended into a half-remembered haze; I just went off and kept myself drunk. I had money and didn’t need to work, I found a quiet corner of the rim and proceeded to try and shut everything out. When I got thrown off one planet, I went on to the next. Eventually I had ended up on Nara, in Ma Esters, where there were so many memories, of good times and bad.
I drank a lot and fought a lot and did very little thinking about anything much. There were a few times when I almost got it together; when I ran out of money or when someone convinced me to do a job which needed a ship. But all too soon, I went back to how I had been.
Then, after a couple of years had passed, I woke up one morning as the bar came to life around me. I had slept, slumped forward on the table like I did most nights, it saved time getting to a bed and was cheaper. I looked up that morning and Griff was coming through the swinging doors. He marched up to me, nodding to the other patrons, most of whom seemed to know him. A few noticed his missing arm and stopped him to chat. I watched his progress and drank the remains of the last night’s half-empty glasses, avoiding the ones with the cigar butts floating in them.
“Come on, boy,” he said, “that’s long enough to wallow; I’ve come to take you home.”
But I was still angry. “Don’t try and make me.” He shrugged.
“OK; sure. But it’s harvest and we need you and your ship. If you want to stay here, that’s fine I guess but I need Freefall and I've come to get her. With or without you.”
I stood, even though it was only mid-morning. I was still half drunk and I swayed slightly, Griff regarded me with a slightly amused face. "Really?” he said, “I’ve only got one arm but I don’t think that gives you much advantage.”
“Freefall’s all I’ve got left,” I slurred. “Everything else has gone. You want her, you have to get past me.” I took a swing at him, he leaned away and avoided it easily, the trouble was that the momentum of my arm spun me around and I landed flat on my back, via a chair and the edge of a table. I thought about rising but it all seemed too much bother. Griff bent over and grabbed my foot.
He dragged me out of the bar and my head bumped on just about everything until I got back to Freefall, where he threw me in the shower. I had a vague recollection of Ria standing by him as they watched me soak and splutter for a good ten minutes. Then we took off for New Devon.
“Good to have you back, Dave,” said Myra as we lifted off. “I’ve missed you,” which very nearly got me started.
I tore myself back to the present, Messinya was talking and Irin was poking me in the ribs. “Dave,” she whispered, “pay attention.” As I came back to the present, I realised that Melva had left us. It bothered me, where was she?
Messinya was talking to Irin. “I can’t get my head around the hostage thing, the threats and blackmail. It’s a whole new world. I thought you were all criminals together, one happy family.”
“It’s true,” Irin said. “That was the threat and he tried to carry it out, our friend was killed on Jintao, on his orders.”
“I don’t find it hard to believe that he would do it. You know, Myra was always my favourite,” Messinya said. “They both grew up without a male influence, yet Myra managed to come out reasonably well adjusted, in fact, she was more of a man than him in some ways, with her engineering. But my boy was a good boy; he did well in the career he chose. I was glad that Myra was around; I think she stayed with him, even though she didn’t need to. It helped keep him calm.”
This was not the Rixon I remembered on the Orca. He had seemed in control, not dependent on Myra. Or was that why he had warned the original Dave Travise off? In case he lost her and her influence. No, it couldn’t be; the real Dave was the Chenko’s spy. Rixon had been happy to leave us both on Wishart to repair Freefall. Things had escalated once we were gone, but he always thought that we were coming back. If it was hard to reconcile my memory of Rixon with the man I had rediscovered, it was easier for his mother to believe he was who he had become.
Messinya took a sip of her tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. “What are you going to do?” Her eyes bored into me, I could hardly tell her that Ria wanted him dead.
“I have the signature of Rixon’s ship, I know where he was. There are other
people looking for him, as well as us.”
Her face fell. “It’s OK,” said Irin, “they’re with us, not bad people like last time. We’ll find him in the end.”
“And then what?”
“I want to know why he never got in touch. Where he’s been and why he’s become what he has.”
“You’re not going to hurt him are you?” She sounded worried. I couldn’t tell her what Ria had demanded that I do.
“I need some answers from him,” I said. “Why did he change? Why was he keeping hostages and what really happened on the Orca when Griff lost his arm and we all thought he’d died?”
“Promise me,” she said, “promise me now, that you won’t hurt him. He’s my boy, whatever else. It doesn’t matter what you say he’s done. Bring him here, let me talk to him, there has to be a reason.”
That was another promise; I had already promised that I would make him pay. Now I had to promise someone else that I wouldn’t hurt him. How could I keep them both?
“I think that Ria and Griff want a word with him as well, about Elana and various other things. Where’s Melva gone?”
“She’ll be back, there are jobs we have to do. We can’t just have a day off just because you’ve turned up.”
I had a sudden idea, “I need you both to come on board Freefall, there’s something that you have to hear.”
“I’ll come over,” she said. “Melva can catch us up.” She picked up a small radio and made a quick call.
We walked back through the mud to Elana’s ground car and headed for Freefall.
Chapter Ten
“What do we need to hear?” she asked as we walked up to the ramp. “So this is the Freefall? Myra spoke about how happy she had been repairing her with you, and about how you argued over the name.”