by Richard Dee
To our surprise, Melva had been waiting at the ramp with a small bag over her shoulder as we arrived in the ground car. Messinya gave her a look and shook her head. Melva ignored her.
We walked across the hold and up to the wheelhouse, they both saw me glance at the dent as we went through the doorway, neither said anything but they must have noticed how I rubbed it. I would have to explain that to them at some stage.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
“Hello, Dave; and there’s Irin too. Who have you got with you?”
Beside me, Messinya gasped. So did Melva. “Is that you, Myra?” Messinya asked.
“I’m Myra,” the computer answered, “but I don’t know who I’m talking to. You are not in my memory banks. Your chips say that you’re Messinya Rixon and Melva Rixon, that’s my surname as well, are we related?”
It was said so innocently, Messinya started to cry and Melva looked like she was about to join in. I suddenly wondered if this had been a good idea, Messinya might think that I was being cruel.
“Is that my mother’s voice?” Melva asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I had it done as payment for a job, at first it was just for fun, she said that it would be good to order me around. I’m so pleased that I did.”
“So, a part of Myra lives on,” Messinya said. “I’m not really sure if I’m glad to hear it.”
I suddenly realised that Myra might pick up on that comment, ask either of them some sort of weird question. That was the last thing I wanted. Hoping that nobody noticed, I pressed the speaker mute button located behind me, before a conversation started that might be hard to complete.
I showed them around the rest of the ship, the mess, the cabins and the engine room. “Myra fixed all this up,” I said, with pride, “we found Freefall in a barn, it was owned by Ria’s father.”
“I know all that,” Messinya said. “Myra told me how much fun it had been.”
“Ria told me, she was going to fly Freefall away,” added Melva. “Only she was never able to. She had to stay and look after her father. He blackmailed her with promises of a better future if she’d just stay a little longer.”
Messinya gave her a look. “Do you think I’m doing that?” she asked.
Melva shook her head. “No, but if I told you that I was going back to New Devon, what would you say?”
“I’d tell you not to go.”
Melva raised an eyebrow. “What, with my father?”
“Yes,” she added. “You’ve only just met him and… where are you going?”
Melva turned and ran out, I could hear her boots clanking on the stairway as she headed for the hold. I moved to follow her but Irin stopped me. “Leave it,” she said. “I’ll go.”
Now Messinya and I were alone. “That could have gone better,” I remarked dryly.
I realised that, although we had only just met, I wanted to spend more time with Melva. It must be some sort of paternal thing. I’d never felt this sort of emotion before. It didn’t matter where, if it had to be on Caluga, that would have to do. I needed to get to know her but I knew it would not be sensible to rush her into accepting me back into her life. After all this time, the last thing I wanted to do was pressurise her and drive her away. Now she was upset, torn and unsure.
“I know,” Messinya replied. “I said I wasn’t keeping her prisoner then I promptly did exactly that. Why did you turn Myra off?”
She didn’t miss much. “I didn’t want her asking any embarrassing questions,” I said. “I was worried that she might say something upsetting.”
She nodded. “I understand. I was shocked to hear her voice but I can understand why you did it. It shows you still care about Myra, Dave Travise. And that means a lot.” She sighed, “if only we could go back and start again.”
“I haven’t come to take her away from you, I didn’t even know about her before today.”
“But you’ll take her, all the same?” This conversation wasn’t going the way I had wanted. I tried to be conciliatory.
“I’m grateful to you for bringing her up, I was in no position to do it, but if she wants to come with me, that’s fine. I’ll look after her. And I’ll never stop her from seeing you.”
“I know.” There was sadness in her eyes. Messinya wasn’t sure, I guess she didn’t want to let her go with me and Irin, she was the last link that she had with her daughter.
Irin came back in, alone. “She’s alright,” she said. “It’s all been a bit of a shock to her. She’s sitting in the hold, she’s turned the local terminal on and she’s talking to Myra.”
“Clever girl.” There was pride in Messinya’s voice. “What are you going to do when you leave here?”
“I have commitments,” I said. “I need to earn money. Legitimately. As well as that, I want to find your son; he’s changed so much from the man I remember. I thought he was dead so when I heard his voice I was pleased. Until I found out from Irin what he had been up to. He let me go, he said it was for old time’s sake but that was only the start. Irin told me what he would do to her family and I had to stop him. Then, when I lost my friend on Jintao, he told me that he would leave us alone, but if we met up again he wouldn’t be so charitable. Now Irin’s family, the ones he had promised the safety of, well they’ve vanished. I need to find him; if only to prove that he isn’t involved.”
“And I want to be there when you do,” Messinya said. “I think I can convince him that everything’s OK. But I know one thing, if he promised he wouldn’t hurt them, then he hasn’t.”
“I know,” said Irin. “I was around him long enough to believe his word. But they’ve gone and I can’t find them, so what am I to think?”
I realised then that both times I had seen him, at the moons and again over Jintao, I had never told him about Myra. Mind you, with his connections he was sure to know. But where could we start to look?
I had the signature and it would give me a type of ship, that and what he had told me, coupled with Irin’s knowledge could give me pointers but I didn’t want to fly around the galaxy with Myra’s mother and my long-lost daughter on board all the time, it could take years to find him.
“Tell you what I’ll do; Irin and I will locate him and then come and get you before we meet up.”
She accepted that. “Fair enough, I can’t really leave here anyway, I’m contracted. Just keep me informed. I’ll be on Caluga for another year at least,” she said, “but I’ll keep in touch.”
Melva put her head around the door. “Can I come back to New Devon with you?” she asked. “I’d love to meet Ria. We’ve been friends for all my life over the communicator and I really want to see her in person.” Melva saw the expression on her grandmother’s face, came into the room and hugged her. “Don’t worry, Gran,” she said. “I can get back easily on one of the supply ships, I know we have deliveries from New Devon, technology and whatever; I can always ride with a load.”
“It’s not that,” said Messinya, “I’m frightened that if you go, you won’t come back.” She could clearly see that the point that was coming when Melva would stretch her wings and fly. “You be safe,” she said, a catch in her voice.
“I’ll be back, I promise,” she said. There was another one, the promises that we make, all the time we promise things, almost without thinking. And we keep them; mostly, in the same way. But I was racking up a few that I didn’t feel confident about, especially as some were mutually exclusive. How could I keep Rixon safe and make him pay, at the same time? And now I had a daughter to be responsible for, to worry about.
Melva came to me and put her arm around my waist. “Who else could I be safer with than with my father?”
Messinya declined the offer of a ride back to the place she called home. We watched as she trudged across the ground away from Freefall. She never looked back, although she must have heard the sound of the engines starting up and the ‘thunk’ as the ramp closed. Then the whine as we lifted off. Not once did she look back as we lifted into t
he sky. Melva sat in the wheelhouse, talked to her mother’s voiceprint on the computer, as the sky turned black and Caluga grew small astern of us.
Chapter Eleven
“Ria and Griff are going to have some explaining to do,” I said as we went trans-light. “Do they both know about you?”
Irin had diplomatically left us alone. “I’ll go and sort out a cabin for you,” she said as she left. Melva thanked her and we both went and sat in the lounge. Melva picked the chair that Myra used to sit in and seeing her there reminded me of her so much that it hurt.
She shook her head. “Griff doesn’t know. Ria told me that it broke her heart to keep it from him but she says that it was Mum’s wish; she manages it somehow.” That was going to be an interesting conversation. Although I suspected that it would be had before we arrived, if it hadn’t already.
To make sure it wasn’t too awkward I called Ria and told her who I was bringing back, to give her a chance to get it all sorted out before we turned up. She was really pleased that things had gone so well on Caluga and that Irin hadn’t been embarrassed. “Messinya used to ask if you had found anyone else,” she told me, “and I used to lie and say that you hadn’t.”
Which was mostly true, there had been women, though nobody had been able to put up with my drinking and my tempers for long. I upset a lot of people as I raged against the injustice of it all. “What about the drinking, did you lie about that as well?”
“Of course I did, I told her that you were upset and dealing with it in your own way. If she chose to think you were drinking and out of it for a more than a year, well I never encouraged the thought.”
I was touched; I had never known any of this. “Thank you. What about Griff?”
“You leave Griff to me,” was all she would say.
The trip was great, the happiest time I could remember for ages. I loved being with Irin, she was special in so many ways, I was so grateful that she left us alone to become friends. But being with Melva was something else, a deeper sort of relationship. Even though I didn’t know her I knew her. And Irin was sensitive enough to give us room; not easy on a small ship.
“I don’t want to crowd you,” she said when I thanked her. “I don’t want Melva to think that I don’t respect her and the place her mother had in your life. It would be rude to flaunt our relationship in front of her.”
I discovered that Melva was so like Myra, I found myself remembering so much about her, things that I’d forgotten or pushed from my mind. It took me a while to get over the crazy idea that she was Myra and that I was young again. As I spent more time with her, I saw that she was independent, her own person and could be feisty. These were all qualities that I knew from Myra, in Melva they were somehow different.
You could see the influence of Messinya in her as well; the spirit that she had given her daughter had been passed to her granddaughter as well. We talked about her life so far, her schooling and her plans for the future.
“I’m learning from books and the web,” she said. “I’ve passed all my online exams so far. I have to decide what I want to do soon. I don’t know whether to go to college or whether to sign up for the Navy like you did. I want to fly a ship like Freefall, learn how it all works; the same as my Mother did. The Navy will teach me, all I have to do is give them my time.”
I wasn’t too keen on that; I had mixed memories of my time in the Navy, some good but more of them were very bad. At that moment, I had to understand, like Messinya had when we left Caluga, that in the end it was her decision. All that was required of me was my support, as long as she knew that I had her back.
I showed her around Freefall with pride; after all, it was her mother’s legacy. She spent hours on the bridge or in the engine room talking to Myra, which sounds weird but she told me that after a while you didn’t notice that it was a machine. “It’s not that I think she’s real either,” she told me, “I just like to hear the voice. I’m not talking about anything in particular, no mother-daughter stuff.”
One of the first things she spotted was the collection of Myra’s old clothes and possessions that I still had in the stores, which made for a potentially embarrassing moment. To my surprise, instead of it being awkward, she hugged me and said that it was ‘sweet’.
After a couple of days, Irin started to appear and they got to talking, soon they were ignoring me and spending all their time in deep discussions, which Irin wouldn’t tell me too much about.
“It’s girl stuff,” she explained when we were in bed, “nothing to do with you.”
“You could give me a clue.”
“Let’s just say we’re talking about relationships.”
“What, like ours?” I was worried, how would Melva see Irin?
“That was one subject, but she doesn’t see me and you as wrong. Probably because her mother has been gone so long, she doesn’t remember her anyway. She hasn’t really known either of you. As far as she’s concerned, I’m not the wicked stepmother or anything like that. It’s about her life and friendships as well, with Messinya and some boys on Caluga. She’s very adult; you don’t have to worry about her.”
And of course, we got to the point where she wanted me to tell her my life story. I had been dreading that part, not just because it would bring up all sorts of memories but because it might change her opinion of me when she found out what I had done. How much should I tell her? That was another good question.
“You don’t want all that ancient history,” I said, trying to make it sound boring.
“Of course I do, it would be nice to hear a little about what you’ve been up to; after all, I’ve told you about me. Ria has told me a lot but I’m sure there are things she didn’t know.”
I decided to mention nothing about my real family, my father, brothers and sister. As far as I was concerned, they had gone and were no longer a part of my life anyway. So I glossed over them and started when I joined the navy. Even that was a problem, I had to give her an edited version of my life, telling her about the Navy but not Oonal, or Basilan. When it got to the part after I had become Dave Travise, which I didn’t mention, I could tell her more of the truth about Rixon and recent events. Everything I said about Myra and me, how we had met, and some of the adventures we had been through, was all true.
Her eyes grew bigger as I spoke. “Wow, you’ve had an interesting life,” she said. I could only wonder what the rest of the story, the truth, would have drawn as a response?
“Do you want me to tell you about what happened to Myra?” I asked. I knew that I was going to have to and figured that I should get it out of the way.
“Please,” she said. “Ria has told me a lot of it, how she was caught and tied up, the dent and you blaming yourself.” She came over and put her arms around me, I was close to tears as I remembered that day, the choices that I made and the sight of Myra, sitting against the panel, the red dot over her heart.
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” she said, “you did what you thought was right and that’s all you can do.”
“But she saved me, by warning me about Marik,” I said. “Then I put her in danger, I sent her to the wrong place and when she needed me, I couldn’t save her.”
She shook her head. “No, you thought that you were doing the right thing. It’s what anyone would have done. I know it ate you up but you have to let it go, sometimes bad things happen to good people.”
She was so adult about it, I had to admit that one of my worries was that she would blame me.
“Thank you,” I said, “for understanding.”
She smiled. “Love you, Dad.” That did it, I couldn’t stop myself from sobbing.
I noticed that the next time we went to the wheelhouse, Melva rubbed the dent as she passed it.
Griff called me when we were still two days out.
“I have a lead on Rixon, but you’re not going to like it,” he said with no beating about the bush. “You’re going to have to go to the Independent Worlds.”
“That explains it,” said Irin, who was listening. “There was a place we went, we were never told where it was but Rixon used to say that the Federation couldn’t touch us there. It must have been either a neutral planet or on the Independent Worlds side of the border.”
I was shocked. “And you never thought to mention it?”
“Oh Dave, what would have been the point, I never told you because I didn’t know any more details about where it was. I’ve been trying to remember but we were all kept in the dark. Remember, I didn’t even know we were at the Silver Moons until you rescued me.”
“Why do you think it was in the IW?” asked Griff. “It could have been way away on the rim somewhere, beyond the Federation.”
“No,” she said forcefully, “it was a settled planet, he had a base there, we never went ashore, we weren’t allowed but we could see the cities as we landed.”
As she said it, I had a memory. “You know where it is, don’t you, Griff,” I said. “There was a place you went on a regular basis when you were on the Orca. You used to get the food there for that bloke, what was his name?”
“That’s right,” said Griff. “Stu was his name, good man. It was all he would eat. It was years ago, I can see the place now. Do you remember Dolmen? Well, he had a lot of sway there. It was called Rosskine.”
I had a sinking feeling, beside me Irin gasped. Eyck on Jintao had told us that Costa had taken Irin’s family to a place called R-something. And everyone thought that it was a Villiars world in the Federation. I remembered Dolmen alright, he was the one who had saved my life, back on Oonal, when I was still Finn Douglas.
That was a subject for discussion with Irin when the call finished. First, we had to find the place. If it was in IW space then I needed to know how to get to it.
“OK, so how do I get there?”
“Ah well,” Griff replied, “you’ll need a chart plug-in for Myra, an Independent Worlds one. Now you can’t get them, officially that is, but I think I might be able to lay my hands on one for you. When are you coming back?”