Read Online Dark Beneath the Moon by Sherry D. Ramsey - Free Book Online Page A

and it galled me to admit it.
    Discouraged, I had decided to let it go. I took passage to Vileyra, a planet where my parents and I had never lived, and tried to get on with my life. But I couldn’t get Emmage Mahane and what she’d done to us—inadvertently or not—out of my head. I found myself drifting from planet to planet again, telling myself I was simply travelling for fun or to find a better job or a more welcoming climate—but I was fooling myself. I was really searching for her. When I found myself applying for a job as part of the cleaning crew on a starliner, thinking I might come across her that way, I knew I had a problem. And I had to do something concrete about it if I was ever going to shake it.
    My biggest obstacle was lack of funds—I didn’t have my own ship and no resources to get one. But then I got smart. If I couldn’t beat PrimeCorp, maybe I’d let them help me, without even knowing they were doing it. I got close to one of the lowly clerks at PrimeCorp main, and worked my way up until I landed myself an audience with Alin Sedmamin himself.
    That had been an interesting meeting. He perked right up when I introduced myself as the “great-granddaughter” of Berrto Sord himself, who had worked at PrimeCorp so long ago. I spun him a good story about how my great-granddaddy had died ever so many years past, and I’d only recently found out the family history of how Emmage Mahane had done him wrong. I didn’t tell Sedmamin why I wanted to find Mahane, just left it up to his imagination. I’ll give the man one thing, he has a good imagination. Told him I had some impressive credentials and would be willing to pool resources. Of course he said he couldn’t see Mahane hurt, because she had information he wanted. Of course I said I wasn’t planning on hurting her—or at least not until he had what he wanted.
    An interesting meeting, indeed.
    I’m sure he ran a background check on me and my father. But by then the records showed only what I wanted them to show. No mention of how we’d lived on Renata and dad taught at the university there. No mention of the years on Vele under other names. No record of my mother entering the health care system, because of the bioscavs that shouldn’t have been in her blood. No mention of how expensive black market health care is, my father’s gambling, or his involvement in the Longate scandal. None of that.
    Instead, he’d found a rather predictable and boring family tree of predictable and boring people, leading to me. Completely fictitious, but useful. Very, very useful.
    “Jahelia, are you listening to me? I said, what do you think they’re doing?” Pita said again in an aggrieved tone.
    I snapped out of the memories and returned to the pilot’s skimchair, balancing the mug on the console. “I don’t know! Why don’t you have another go at decrypting that datapacket you intercepted, if you’re so curious? Maybe there’s a clue in there.”
    “It’s a Protectorate classified packet,” Pita said with exaggerated patience. “They make them so that unless you have the key, you can’t decrypt it, you know? Stripping a copy from the original is the easy part.”
    “Well, you’re the one who’s so fired up to get some answers. We’ll find out. Be patient.”
    “Hmmm,” Pita said. “They’ve initiated a long-range scan.”
    “Out here?” I sat forward in the chair. “What are they after out here?
    Pita laughed, one of the personality enhancements I found particularly annoying. “We’ll find out. Be patient,” she mimicked.
    We’d followed the Tane Ikai , always skirting the edge of scanner range, while they made a stopover at Mars, then skipped to Lambda Saggitae and made an even briefer stop on Anar. Then they backtracked to Sol system, skipped through MI 2 Eridani and Beta Comae Berenices, and wound up in Delta Pavonis without making any other stops along the way. It was a weird, roundabout route and I couldn’t figure out what