Promise Me (Dave Travise Book 3)

by Richard Dee

  That kind of made sense, except for one thing. “I’m not sure that Elana has anything to do with it,” I said. “She had calmed down, she only got angry again when we found out about Messinya being involved. When Rixon didn’t drop everything to rush to her rescue. I wonder if it’s not more to do with her own mother, and comparing Rixon to her father?”

  Whatever the truth was, there were the four of us now, with two ships. We were up against an army. The only advantage was that they didn’t know we were coming.

  There was nothing else to do, we sealed ourselves in Freefall and I started her up. “Where are we headed?” asked Myra.

  “Tell them we’re going home,” I said as I switched over control and the ship rose into the sky. Although the controller on Kendye didn’t care, I didn’t want the Federation to know we were headed for the IW.

  “Fair enough, Dave, but where are we really going?”

  Then I realised, the Federation was in lockdown, nobody was taking any notice of us until we landed on a Federation planet.

  “We’re going to get my family back,” Irin said.

  “Herstra, in the IW,” I added.

  “How do you know Angie?” Irin asked Rixon, over our evening meal. “And that ship, it looks like a pleasure palace, will she be any use if it comes to a fight?”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea about Angie, or the Sister,” he said. “I’ve been with her for a while, ever since my enforced retirement. I met her in a bar on Rosskine, she was supervising the scrapping of some mining ship, we got talking, one thing led to another. In the end, I persuaded her to move in. We get on alright, we’re both looking for something we missed when we were younger, a bit of stability, companionship.”

  “She’s nice, I liked her,” said Melva, “but I got the impression that she was a bit more than she made out.”

  Rixon looked at us. “She’s ex-military. The Sister is designed to look like that, she’s pretty handy. Angie can take care of herself. If she’s got our backs, we’ll be fine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  As we crossed the border, Myra warned me that we were being shadowed by a ship with an IW identity.

  “Is it the same one as before?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “but it has the same border patrol tag that we know is fake. Now it’s asking us to stop.”

  “I’m off,” Rixon announced. “I’ll be in the smuggler’s hole.”

  “Better do what they say, Myra,” I suggested.

  “I hope this doesn’t take long,” Irin fretted. “We don’t have time for messing around.”

  The airlock pressurised and the door opened. The General came on board, she was alone, dressed in civilian clothes. In silence we walked to the mess, to find Irin and Melva waiting.

  “I’m relieved that you got my message, Mr Travise,” she said. “I take it that you’re on the way to Herstra now. I suppose Ms Walch is around somewhere. I don’t want to delay you but there’s something I need to check. I found an anomaly on your chip, the last time I scanned it.”

  With a sinking feeling, I realised that my past was finally coming back to haunt me. Would it be enough to stop me doing what we were on the way to do? Then it hit me. As far as I knew, the General was alone, she wasn’t in uniform, just how official was this?

  She spoke again. “I know Miss Siggursson, who is the other lady?”

  “That’s Melva, my daughter,” I said.

  She smiled. “Hello, Melva.” Melva nodded in response.

  “What’s she on about, Dad?” she asked.

  “Can’t it wait until after we have solved your problem for you?” Irin asked.

  “Keep calm, Miss Siggursson, Ms Travise,” she said kindly. “I know you’re on a tight schedule to get to Herstra before Malkin. Don’t worry too much about him, last I heard, he was still on Galette under investigation. I apprehended him on his way back from Bartrams Landing. He won’t be released until I get back and say so. You have time to humour me.” She brandished the hand scanner that I had seen before. “You remember that I scanned you when we last met? The hidden information that I found; I’ve had time to analyse the data that I got. I couldn’t believe it so I’m going to scan you again, let’s see if you really are who you appear to be.”

  “You’d better get on with it then,” I said. I only hoped that her desire for my help would override what she was going to find.

  “What does she mean, Dad?” asked Melva, looking worried. “You’re not who you say?”

  “Don’t worry, Melva,” said Irin, who didn’t know the full story, only that I wasn’t Dave Travise. What could I tell Melva? It was all so long ago.

  “I’m your father,” was all I could think of. “Whatever happens, remember that.”

  She waved the scanner over my arm and looked at the readout. She frowned, then looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “I wanted to check again,” she said. “I had the data from the corrupted layer on your chip. Last time we met. When I had a chance to see it properly, I knew I had to find you again. After all, I’m the General, I’m renowned for always solving the case.”

  “You know about my past,” I said. “So what? It was all a long time ago and in the Federation. Surely that’s no concern of yours.” Which just showed how wrong I could be.

  “So you were Finn,” she said, and I tensed at the name. Irin looked interested. Melva just looked confused. “I often wondered what became of you.”

  She didn’t say Finn Douglas, just Finn, should I know her?

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “You should,” she replied. “This is very hard for me; I have to keep reminding myself who you are. Neither Dave Travise nor Finn Douglas has committed any crimes in our territory, so I can’t arrest you even though you shouldn’t be here.”

  “But we’re working for you, doing what you want.”

  She brushed that aside with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Tell me about your family, your real one,” she said.

  “My father was a trader,” I said. It wasn’t worth trying to tell her anything other than the truth. “I had brothers, and a sister, they were all older than me. They had a different mother. Why do you want to know that, how can it have any relevance to what I’m here to do, what you want me to do?”

  She looked straight at me. “Because I’m Silvie, your sister.”

  That was a bit of a conversation stopper. I didn’t really know what to say, I just stood there. Beside me, Irin gasped. I heard her mutter, “How many more of his family are there?” Melva said nothing. Perhaps I had lost the ability to surprise her with random relatives, popping up when least expected.

  “Well,” she said, “don’t you remember me?”

  “All I remember about my sister is that she disapproved of me.”

  “It wasn’t you that I disapproved of, it was our father. You were too young to know; he drove my mother crazy with his antics, always trying to be the macho man, proving himself to himself. And when you appeared, from a woman who didn’t seem much older than I was, it was easier to blame you.”

  “Because I couldn’t fight back?”

  “That’s right, we were all frightened of him, he was embarrassed by your arrival, it was a safe way of hurting him, getting at you.”

  Never mind my feelings. It explained a lot, her bullying, my brother’s indifference, my father’s relentless antagonism. And the absence of my mother. I had been innocent, merely a receptacle for everyone else’s guilt.

  “Now I can atone for it all,” she said. “Do you want to know what happened to them all, your father and your brothers?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Do we have time?”

  “Don’t worry about Malkin, like I said he will be detained, you have plenty of time, when you get to Herstra we will be right behind you.”

  “Why haven’t you rescued my family already?” asked Irin. “If you know where he is and that my family are there, why are you leaving them in danger?”


  “It’s not what you want to hear,” she said, “there are bigger things than your family at stake. I know that’s unfair but it’s true. I need to rid the IW of a cancer, corruption and misery. And I have to do it properly. The lives of three individuals are not more important than that.” She hung her head. “I’m truly sorry.” It was roughly the same as Angie had said, the greater good and all that. Not a lot of consolation. Irin was silent.

  “Our father died about a year ago, Finn,” she continued. “He was strong right up to the end; it was his heart that failed.”

  It still felt strange to hear the name again; in my mind, I could see the younger Silvie. I could almost hear her taunts. “And my brothers?”

  “They’re scattered around the place, still running the company and still making money. They ignore me; I’m the embarrassment now, which is ironic. I think they worry that I might find out about the way they do business.”

  “Wait a moment, brothers?” said Irin. “Not the Douglas brothers?”

  “Well,” said the General, or should I say, Silvie. “That’s given you two something to talk about later, hasn’t it?”

  “I know all about the Douglas brothers,” said Irin, in a voice that suggested that it wasn’t a happy relationship.

  “Anyway, there is some money for you, Father’s legacy. I rescued it from Jon, and said that I would keep it for you, rather than invest it in another one of his money-making schemes.”

  “How much?” I asked. Not that I wanted to sound avaricious, even though it felt like my right for all the misery he had put me through. She mentioned a sum that made my eyes water.

  “I can transfer it to you, now that I know who you are,” she continued, “and I will, just as soon as I get back to my terminal.”

  “Thank you,” I said, there was so much more I needed to ask, but I didn’t know where to begin.

  “Are you my aunt then?” said Melva. A smile broke over the General’s face and suddenly I saw a different Sylvie.

  “Yes, I am, dear,” she said. “Your father is a good man, whatever name you know him by. I will be there to protect him, don’t you worry about that. I’d better let you get to Herstra. I’ll send you the location of his hideout when I get back to my ship.”

  There was the trace of a smile. “Mr Rixon must be getting quite uncomfortable in the smuggler’s hole by now.”

  She left and Rixon reappeared, just as Myra told us she had received a position on Herstra.

  “That must have been the General?” he said. “Did she tell you where Malkin was?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Melva, “it was his sister.”

  He didn’t look at all confused by that. “So now you know,” he said.

  I wasn’t happy. “And you never told me.”

  “It never came up. And it wasn’t definite. Just a possibility. Rick on Basilan passed it all on to Griff; after he had changed your chip. We needed to know who we were dealing with, in case we had to blackmail you into doing something for us. As it happens, we never had to use it.”

  I cast my mind back to the cave on Oonal, to the priest saying that he knew my father. At the time I had been grateful, it had kept me alive. The priest had said that he knew him from the Holy Wars, not how well. Now, it all made sense. Rixon had mentioned something about it too, on the Orca, it was just that I had been too preoccupied with my new life to make any more of it.

  “The Douglas brothers,” said Irin, “are one of the families involved in Malkin’s play for power.”

  Rixon nodded. “With Dolmen and his crew, the Douglas brothers are part of the criminal hierarchy in the IW. But they don’t venture over the border, so you’d never hear of them. There was only you and Silvie who kept out of it. She was known as the sister who forsook her life of crime.”

  “Is that why nobody trusts her?”

  “Yes, and it’s also why she’s safe, nobody would dare to hurt her, just in case.”

  Chapter Thirty

  We headed to the position on Herstra that Silvie had given us and landed in a clearing in a sparse forest, about half a mile from the buildings we had seen on the way down. The four of us stood in the hold as Rixon opened the trunk of Elana’s car. Melva watched as he unzipped bags and his arsenal was revealed.

  I wanted Melva to stay on Freefall, as far away from danger as I could get her. “Stay here, keep the engine running,” I told her. I thought that there would be an argument. She pulled a defiant face and shook her head.

  I could tell she was about to say something when Rixon spoke up. He handed her a pistol. “Can you use this?” he asked. “Can you shoot someone? Come with us and you might have to.”

  She looked at the ground, kept her hands by her sides. “I’ll stay here, keep the engine running.”

  We grabbed guns, ammo, grenades and equipment belts to attach them to.

  When we were ready, I opened the ramp, we disembarked. Two small moons were in the sky and although it was night-time, it was light enough for us to see where we were going. It must have been winter, there were no leaves, there was a chill in the air and the frosted grass crunched underfoot. The cover was minimal but it was the best we could get.

  I took the lead with Irin in the middle, Rixon brought up the rear.

  “There should only be a couple of guards,” said Rixon. “If the General’s right and Malkin’s still on Galette. He’ll have taken some of his men with him, to keep him safe. There shouldn’t be a problem.”

  The buildings were in darkness, not even a signal light was showing as we crept closer. At the edge of the trees we stopped. Rixon produced a small torch from his pocket. He pointed it at the doorway and turned it on. There was no light but its invisible beam showed a mesh of red lines stretched across the entrance. There was no need for a watch, they had an infrared beam on guard duty.

  “Break that and everyone will wake up.”

  “There must be another way in.”

  “We could walk all the way around the place I suppose,” Rixon said. “It might be easier to flush them out from the other side.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Irin, suggesting that she had done this before. “You wait over there.”

  She picked up a branch and advanced on the doorway. Stopping about ten feet away she threw the branch and as it spun in the air, she turned and ran back into cover.

  The spinning branch broke the beam. For an instant, nothing happened.

  Suddenly, lights came on all over the building and at least two heavy cannon opened fire on the area in front of the doorway. It was like the setup Urssa Mining had on Tauro. Mud was churned by the strike of the shells.

  “Good job we spotted the beam,” panted Irin, “we’d have been in trouble.”

  The silence was a relief. We heard a voice behind the door. “Is it off?” it asked. The reply must have been positive as the door opened and a man appeared, perfectly silhouetted by the light from inside. Beside me, Rixon raised his rifle, it coughed once and the man fell without a sound. We all ran across the ground to the door, I was tense but the cannon was silent. We got inside, ahead was a short corridor, branching left and right, and there were stairs leading up. Rixon had slung the rifle over his shoulder, he now brandished a pistol.

  “I’ll go left,” he whispered, Irin took the stairs and I went right.

  I crept along and paused at each corner, passing several rooms on the way. Each one was deserted but there were signs that people had been living in them, rubbish and food packs littered the floors. One door was locked, a large padlock on a hasp over the handle. I left it and moved on. Suddenly there was a scream and several shots. I ran back towards the entrance and followed the alleyway that Irin had taken. I went up a flight of stairs and found her at the entrance to another room. The pistol was smoking in her hand. Looking past her, there was a man lying on the floor in an untidy muddle of limbs. Behind him, signs of captivity, chains and mattresses on the floor, a bucket in the corner.

  “They were here,” she s
aid. “Look.” She held up a toy spaceship. “This was Nuri’s.” She pointed to the corpse. “I wanted to question him but he shot at me.”

  I took a look, he was dead.

  There was a noise behind us; we flattened ourselves against the wall by the doorway. A pistol came into view followed by an arm in a blue sleeve. We relaxed as Rixon came into the room. “Are they here?” he asked.

  “No, but they were.”

  “I took one out too,” he said. I hadn’t heard a shot. “Let’s carry on searching.”

  We went through the house as quickly as we could. The locked door fell to a shot from Irin. Inside was a radio set up, which we smashed. There were no more guards and no signs of the three hostages either.

  By the time we had finished it was light. We disabled the cannons connected to the alarm system and went outside. The body by the door was dragged into a side room. As we walked around the buildings, I called Melva on my radio. “We’re alright,” I said, “stop there, we’ll be back soon.”

  “OK,” she replied.

  We found a patch of fresh earth, a mound about two feet high. I knew what it was immediately, so did Irin. She ran to it and started scraping the dirt away with her hands, shouting her mother’s name, her son’s name, over and over. Rixon and I helped her dig, using our bare hands.

  After a few minutes digging I uncovered an arm, a man’s arm. I stopped and pulled Irin away. Her clothes were stained with mud and tears, blood oozed from cuts on her fingers. She shook as she saw what I had uncovered. Rixon and I held her. “I need to find them,” she said wriggling free she launched herself at the mound and scrabbled handfuls of earth away.

  I grabbed her again, “STOP,” I said. “We have tools in Freefall, we can go and get them, do it properly, with respect.”

  As we moved back towards the trees there was a loud noise and a blast of displaced air. We threw ourselves into cover as a ship appeared and settled on the ground.