Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 94

Don’t do it, Aden thought. You’ll kill him. But not before he kills her first.

“Let’s hear your proposal,” Decker said. “And why don’t we stop talking about blood and stabbing.”

She reached over to Henry and lightly put a hand on his knee without taking her eyes off Milo.

“You’ll take possession of your ship after the overhaul is complete,” Milo said. “Then you will fly her out to coordinates I will supply, where you will simulate an emergency that requires you to abandon ship in a life pod. Then one of our subsidiaries will come in and take over. You will be returned to Acheron, and we can all go our own ways, with clean ledgers.”

“Simple as that,” Decker said. “And you won’t just blast the life pod into pieces.”

“You want to claim a salvage title,” Tess said. “That’s pretty devious.”

“It’ll work better if you are alive to corroborate the story, of course. So no, they won’t blow the life pod away. And your ship will have just had its overhaul, so a mishap wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Dockhands screw up all the time. Things don’t get plugged back in, or they get plugged in the wrong way. You know how it goes. You have a good engineer. She should have no trouble faking a convincing emergency.”

Aden glanced at Tess. He knew her well enough by now to realize that the proposal was morally unpalatable to her, and that Milo might as well have asked her to strangle a crew member and use the corpse for emergency rations.

“If you think that’s going to happen, you are out of your mind,” Tess said dryly.

“The proposal I just gave you is Option A,” Milo replied. “If you choose to do anything else, you will have picked Option B. You can fly off and try to go about your business. Maybe report the whole thing to the Rhodies again. But rest assured that no matter where you dock, we’ll catch up with you sooner or later. And there will be no Option C at that point. We will get that ship one way or another. The only difference is going to be whether we’ll have to mop blood off the deck once we have her.”

The air between them was thick with the possibility of impending violence, a highly combustible mix that would take just a quick gesture or a slipping temper to ignite and consume them all. Aden had no great martial abilities, but he knew he’d join in if anyone else tried to lunge across the table and pry Maya away from the hard-eyed, smooth-talking black-haired man who still held her in an almost friendly embrace. But he also knew that he’d probably end up bleeding on the floor with the rest of them. He hadn’t been in a violent line of work, but as an intelligence officer, he had dealt with people who were. This man reminded him of those professionals—his utter calmness in the face of a close-quarters fight with six people, one of them a Pallas Brigade veteran armed with a monomolecular blade.

Whatever Aden had seen in their unwelcome visitor, Henry seemed to have come to the same assessment. His hands relaxed, and he let out a deep, slow breath. The Palladian martial ethos was their way of life, and Aden had a good idea what kind of self-control the first officer had to exert to keep himself from drawing his kukri and taking up the challenge. But even if Milo wasn’t quite as good as he thought, Maya would die. Aden wouldn’t have made that trade, and he was glad to see that Henry wasn’t willing to make it either.

“Can we have some time to think about it?” Decker asked.

Milo shrugged.

“Personally, I don’t know why you would. It’s a simple A or B choice. Like I said, there is no C. But you have two weeks anyway. Until you go back up to the spin station to get your ship back from Tanaka.”

He stood up carefully, pulling Maya up with him as he straightened out.

“I will send you the coordinates I mentioned before you leave the dock. If you get the bright idea to pass them on to the Rhodians, rest assured we will know. If you do anything else other than make best speed to that spot and abandon ship once you get there, I will come to collect the payment on Option B.”

He flicked his wrist a little to let them see the knife he was holding against Maya’s side. It had the dull white shimmer of ceramic composites.

“I will walk toward the atrium in just a few seconds. Please don’t get the idea to rush me and start a fight. I have two of these, and I’m very good with them. Don’t put too much stock in that flashy parade knife on your first officer’s belt. I don’t care how many mudlegs he killed with it during the war. But if you want to roll the dice, go right ahead.”

In a smooth movement that looked almost gentle, Milo pushed Maya back into her chair. Then he turned around and walked off without another word. Aden held his breath, but Henry remained in his own chair, his face tense with controlled rage.

When the trim black-haired man with the ceramic knives had disappeared in the atrium beyond the bar’s entryway, it felt to Aden like someone had pounded the relief valve off a pressure tank with a hammer.

Decker and Tristan leaped out of their chairs and rushed over to Maya.

“Holy shit,” Tess said. “What the fuck just happened?”

“Are you all right?” Decker asked.

“I’m fine,” Maya replied. She unzipped her flight suit and lifted one side to look at her rib cage. The white compression shirt she wore underneath had a fist-sized bloodstain on it.

“Fucker only poked me with the tip. Half a centimeter maybe. Just to let me know he meant it. Sorry, everyone. He came out of