Honey Moon Read Online Free Page A

brother and sister hadn’t been aborted. If the mom hadn’t stayed off the grid, avoided healthcare, the first prenatal chromosome scan would have shown the fetuses with gross defects. The twins lacked functional synapses in alternate sides of their brains. The parents hid their existence until the eight-year-olds got themselves published in science journals with articles on tachyons, wormholes, space-time warping with the negative implications of creating time paradoxes being redundant.
    In the simplistic terms he understood, they’d shown a doable means to draw IE—infinite energy—from a vacuum and utilize it within a spaceship. That in turn provided the power needed to alter time by speeding through time-space. He’d read the publications, got the gist of maybe one percent of the math, and been thrilled to imagine the possibilities of colonizing space in his lifetime.
    The past decade had also seen tremendous advances in technology, including mass-production of sheets of graphene. They’d developed carbon nanotubes able to retain their ultralight and strongest alloy in existence properties, even when stitched together.
    Affiliates of the LC claimed to have successfully colonized planets on a massive scale. Homes and gardens built inside translucent domes were made out of this newfangled super-graphene alloys and supposedly tested with consistent results showing the terrarium-style enclosures could withstand extreme temperatures and pummeling by massive meteoroids, even comet collisions.
    It was an amazing era to be alive.
    And a terrible one to have a life cut short.
    If only he had a solid grasp of evil intent—but no. Circling the bleeding neurons that made up his mind, he had little but fears that’d started out as minnows named WTF, then morphed into giant sharks who answered to Martyr, Masochist, Attention-Seeker and so on. Meanwhile, the question of why he didn’t go public—let the authorities sort it out—got pushed farther and farther into the abyss of no return.
    He sighed as he stared out over the neon-lit city, so thick with SHIT—what the locals called the buildings, based on the acronym of the slogan Scraping Heaven is Tangible , dreamed up by some marketing idiot—he couldn’t tell if the dull sparks in the gray sky were stars or beacons marking the pinnacles.
    Suspecting without proof—other than bigotry toward gays and guys with documented vasectomy points—the nefarious nature of the homes on offer was one thing. Creating an elaborate ruse in hope of exposing a powerful monopoly with ties to every government on Earth was quite another. Not like he was police, licensed journalist or had a family member duped into whatever this was or wasn’t.
    Sam was nothing but a general do-gooder with a popular political blog, about to get his ass handed to him. A guy who couldn’t sleep at night thinking of the potential body count, and he was afraid to squeal before he had something more tangible than projection based on illegally-gotten statistical spreadsheets. Without the public behind him, it’d be simple to frame him as a nutjob, then make him disappear. Ergo, the need for a bride. The ruse of a guy who took advantage of a woman, dreams of status and power in her eyes and not a bit of love, but still an innocent, so he could get onto a shuttle and see without rose-tinted glasses what—if anything—was rotten.
    Then the reply came. Samuel Cooper and Laree Gilson had a day to file the thousand dollar marriage certificate confirming their seats on shuttle 7877 leaving in one week.
    The yippee and big kiss Laree gave him were delightful.
    The huge black hole of insecurity rolling in his gut? Not so much.
     
    * * * *
     
    Two days later, Laree seized Sam’s wrist phone off the desk and read the mysterious text— Congratulations. A wedding gift awaits. Wear a red rose. Be there tomorrow—3p.m.—or suffer a terrible consequence. It included an address for what had to be a bar.
    “Damn it,