Dark Beneath the Moon (8 page)

Except the data that lived on in my parents and me. Fortunately, Dad had covered his tracks or played dumb well enough that PrimeCorp wasn’t suspicious enough to test us. I guess we had to thank Emmage Mahane for taking the heat on that one.

Why did I think I could succeed where PrimeCorp, with all its resources, had failed? Because every big corporation in Nearspace suffers from a bad case of bureaucracy, and it seemed to me that one person, in a case like this, would simply be more efficient.

“I can’t figure out where they’re headed now,” Pita fretted, bringing me back to the present. “I mean, there’s nothing out here!”

“Maybe they’ve got Paixon’s mother stashed on an asteroid somewhere,” I said.

“You know as well as I do that she’s got to be on Kiando again. Otherwise why would the
Tane Ikai
even have gone there?”

I shrugged. “Because the Protectorate told them to? Paixon dances to her brother’s tune.”

“I’ve done the math, Jahelia. There’s a ninety-six point oh four percent—”

“Oh, shut up, Pita. I don’t really doubt that Emmage Mahane is back on Kiando with Gusain Buig.”

“Then why are we out here following her daughter’s ship? I thought the point was to get to Mahane through her.”

“Because I’m working for PrimeCorp, and that’s what they want me to do.”

“I thought you were only using PrimeCorp as a means to an end. The end being—”

“Will you
shut up
?” I stood from the pilot’s seat and stalked to the little galley, although it wasn’t really far enough for stalking. And there was nowhere on the ship I could go to actually get away from the annoying AI.

I took deep breaths as I pulled a
cazitta
from the machine. I wished I hadn’t been quite so open, talking to Pita, before I’d realized that she’d remember everything I said and bring it up in later conversations. “Look, PrimeCorp is paying me pretty well to keep tabs on Paixon and her little gang. It’s a good gig, so I’m playing it as long as it’s worthwhile.”

“Hey, hey, all right,” Pita huffed. I could imagine her, if she were a person, throwing her hands up in exasperation. The PrimeCorp programmers were
good.
“I just like to know the program. I’m the one flying the ship, right?”

“Yeah, right, that’s you,” I agreed sarcastically, rolling my eyes. She couldn’t fly the ship without me giving her instructions. Unfortunately, since Pita was based on my personality, she was proficient at recognizing my sarcasm.

“Pfft,” was all she said.

I ignored her and sipped at the
cazitta,
savouring the licorice bite
.
I wasn’t about to tell her that now, suddenly, when I finally knew where to find Emmage Mahane, I didn’t know what to
do
with that information.

After two years of searching, I hadn’t been able to find Emmage Mahane on my own, 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 their end destination might be, but they weren’t stopping to pick up or deliver cargo. That meant they were headed somewhere with a purpose beyond the normal hauling jobs—maybe an important passenger. I figured their roundabout route was an attempt to confuse or lose anyone like us, who might be following them. Now their route suggested that they weren’t in Delta Pavonis to go to either Rhea or Renata, the two inhabited planets. At first I thought they might be heading for the Split, since I’d seen them travel that anomalous and dangerous wormhole twice lately, but they turned away from its coordinates as well.

I tapped my fingernails on the console. We weren’t close enough to get a visual signal, so the
Tane Ikai
was nothing more than a tiny, hologrammatic dot on my fancy new display. “Yeah, this just got more interesting. What are you doing, Luta Paixon?”

“Should I pull back? They could catch us in a long-range scan.”

“Sure—no, wait.” I stared at the glowing dot and considered. “Hang here a little longer and see if they spot us. If they do, I’m not averse to a little cat-and-mouse. It’s been getting a little boring.”

Pita chuckled. “Who’s the cat, and who’s the mouse?”

I smiled. “Meow.”

WE’D MADE AN
uneventful skip into the Delta Pavonis system, and Yuskeya laid in the coordinates for the new wormhole. Lanar had sent them as a classified datapacket, so the Protectorate must have been able to keep its whereabouts a secret so far. Our instructions were to start long-range scans early and not get too near the wormhole unless we were certain there were no other ships in the vicinity. It wasn’t likely we’d been followed, but the Protectorate didn’t like to take chances.

Their paranoia turned out to be a good thing. The scans showed a ship outside the range of our short-range scans, but close enough to monitor us if it wanted to.

“Can you get a drive signature?” I asked.

Yuskeya shook her head. “Still too far out.”

I sighed. “Well, we’re not supposed to get too close to the new wormhole if there’s anyone around, so let’s pretend we’re passing through. Keep heading past the wormhole and checking on that ship, and once they’re out of range we’ll double back.”

“What a waste of time,” Baden grumbled. “They’re probably not paying any attention to us, anyway.”

I patted his shoulder. “I know, but we’re on a Protectorate mission, so we’ll play by Protectorate rules. I’m not willing to screw it up by being impatient. We’ve got lots of time to get Cerevare there. Let’s be cautious for once.”

A half-hour or so later Baden commed me over the ship’s system; I’d gone to the galley for some lunch. “Guess you were right, Captain. I think that ship is following us.”

“Really?” I hadn’t actually suspected anything of the sort. I was just following the precautions Lanar had asked me to take.

“They haven’t gotten much closer to us, but they haven’t moved off, either. Unless they’re following a route parallel to ours, and I can’t really see where that would be taking them, since we’re only marking time.”

I chewed the last bite of my sandwich while I thought about it. “Hmm.
Okej
, give them another half hour. If they’re still keeping pace, we’ll head over to their position and see if they want to talk about anything.”

They hadn’t changed course in the allotted time, so I gave Rei the order to move toward the ship. I hadn’t decided what to do. I could make contact with them, get their story—but I didn’t know if I wanted to come right out and accuse them of following us. That would imply that we had a reason for someone to follow us, and I didn’t want to put that idea in anyone’s head.

We didn’t get to ask any questions, anyway. We did, however, get one answered. The ship took off quickly as soon as we’d covered about a quarter of the distance between us, so there was no doubt that whoever they were, they’d been monitoring us.

“Want to chase them?” Rei asked, swinging around in her skimchair to face me. Her eyes were bright behind the mask of her
pridattii,
and I could tell she hoped the answer would be
yes
. “We could try out the new burst drive.”

I hesitated. I was, in fact, burning to know who was following us and why. Was it that someone had noticed us pick up Cerevare and had reason to wonder why? Or was it PrimeCorp again?

“I don’t want to get sidetracked,” I said finally, “but I want to know who that was. Run us close enough to scan the drive signature—use the burst drive if necessary. That might put a scare into them and they’ll leave us alone for a bit, which will give us time to get through the new wormhole.” I grinned. “They won’t be following us there, I’ll bet.”

So Rei poured it on, with a little encouragement from Viss, and the new burst drive worked beautifully. We managed to close the distance between the two ships enough for Yuskeya to catch our quarry in a drive scan. Once she gave the word that she had enough data, we dropped back and let the other ship keep running, putting a nice margin between us again, then wheeled to head for the wormhole.

“Okay, Rei, use the burst drive all the way to the spot where we engaged it before. Even if they come back, our normal signature should have dissipated before they can trace it to the wormhole.”

“Who did you piss off this time, Mother?” Maja asked, then bit her lip. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

I shrugged. “I don’t really know. Could be PrimeCorp, could be someone following Cerevare. Could be something else entirely—pirates, trying to decide if we’re a worthwhile target.”

“Hey, Captain, guess what?” Yuskeya looked up from the nav board where she had analyzed the scan data. “It’s our friend from the other day. That’s one pirate who gets around.”

I frowned. “Now, that, I don’t like. He’s far too persistent.”

“Yeah, and I’m guessing he’s got a lot more inside that hull than you’d think,” said Baden. “I sent a little tracer piggybacking on Yuskeya’s scan, and it picked up some tech readings you wouldn’t expect.”

“Like what?” I crossed to study the data over Baden’s shoulder.

“Better weapons than flash-pack torps, for one thing,” he said. “Wasp missiles and a particle beam, too. Long-range scanners that are probably as good as ours, enhanced comm capability. You name it, he seems to have it. You just wouldn’t think so from the outside, or from what he’s demonstrated so far.”