Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 93

After a tense moment, Henry nodded slowly and pointedly moved his hand away from his beltline.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” Decker asked.

“My name isn’t important,” the man said. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway. But if you have to have a name to go with the face, you may call me Milo.” He spoke Oceanian, but with the sort of neutral inflection that indicated very expensive and thorough language training.

Aden looked at Maya’s face, which was equal parts fear and anger, and he tried to judge if he could make it to her from his side of the table. From Tristan’s body language, he could tell that the ship’s cook was having the same thoughts. The intent must have been too obvious in their faces, because the unwelcome guest looked at them and shook his head with a slight smile.

“If I see anyone’s asses getting out of any chairs even a little bit, your young friend here dies, and I’ll take my chances with the rest of you. I’ve got two of these. Don’t want to use them tonight, but don’t think that I’ll hesitate.”

Tristan held up his hands in appeasement, anger etched on his face. Aden kept his own hands where they were, on the armrests of his chair.

Maybe he’s bluffing, Aden thought. But if he’s not, I won’t give him an excuse.

Milo prodded Maya lightly with the point of his blade, and the way she sharply sucked in her breath dispelled all notions of a bluff from Aden’s head. This man would do exactly what he said, and there was nothing anyone at the table could do about it. Aden knew he could leap out of his chair and cover the meter and a half to Maya and Milo in just a second, but he also knew that he’d be half a second too late.

“All right. Like I said, my name isn’t important. I’m here on someone else’s behalf. You owe a debt to my employer, and I have come to collect payment.”

“You work for the people who hired us to smuggle the nuke for them,” Decker said.

The black-haired man nodded.

“The cargo you surrendered to the Rhodian navy was very expensive. Hard to obtain. Almost impossible to replace.”

“My heart is broken,” Decker replied. “If you’re coming to collect your advance, we had to turn it over to the Rhodies. And I hope you aren’t asking us to buy you a new black-market nuke.”

Milo shook his head.

“I’m afraid that would be impractical. It took my employer long enough to source the one you lost.”

“So what did you come to collect?” Henry asked.

“Twenty million ags,” Milo said. “That is what my employer has lost due to your breach of contract. And they were generous and didn’t add the ancillary damage they incurred after you surrendered their cargo.”

“Twenty million,” Tess said with a snort. She looked like she wanted to laugh out loud but didn’t quite dare.

“Who walks around with twenty million on their comtab?” Aden asked, taken aback by the casual way Milo had thrown out a number that would have been hard to raise on the spot even if Aden still had access to the family fortune. People with twenty million ags on their ledgers didn’t spend their time chasing courier contracts between the planets.

“We don’t have a tenth of that between all of us,” Tristan said. “You’ve come a long way to stick your hand into an empty jar, I’m afraid.”

“I know you don’t have the money in your ledger. But you have something of roughly similar value. A Tanaka Spaceworks model two thirty-nine.”

Decker shook her head and chuckled.

“We couldn’t give you our ship. Even if we wanted to, which we most certainly do not. Zephyr doesn’t belong to us. She is owned by a consortium.”

“I know who owns the title to that ship, Captain Decker,” Milo said.

Aden noticed that Milo still had his arm around Maya’s shoulder. To any casual observer, it would look like someone being tender with a partner. But the hand that held the knife hadn’t wavered since he had taken his seat.

“I also know she’s docked at Tanaka right now for her three-year overhaul. You can be glad for that because it gave me a reason to come here and make a business proposal instead of just disposing of you all one by one. You’re not half as wily or clever as you think you are. I got to the spaceport two hours ago, and I had you all tracked down forty-five minutes after I got here. The ride on the travel pod to this place took longer than that.”

“She already told you the ship’s not ours to give,” Aden said. “She doesn’t hold the legal title for it.”

“And without the title, she’s useless for what she was built,” Tess added. She looked profoundly offended, as if Milo had proposed they all surrender their eventual firstborn children to him. “You can fly her, but you can’t dock her anywhere without getting flagged for a stolen ship. That’s not some rack-grade freighter whose registry plate you can just renumber in the command deck. They only made four two thirty-nines.”

Milo smiled and shook his head.

“If you are quite done with your interplanetary legal advice, I’ll give you my proposal. Or we can decide to start stabbing each other. Just know that I kill people for a living. Your Palladian friend there may give me some hassle, but he’s across the table. I will have three of you bleeding out on the floor before he can get to me, and I’d put even money on being able to add at least a fourth.”

From the way Henry’s hands were flexing almost imperceptibly, Aden could tell that the first officer was evaluating that claim and considering putting it to the test. Just like it would be impossible to stop Milo from slipping the knife into Maya’s heart, Aden knew that it was equally impossible to keep Henry from launching himself across