Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  “And who might you be?” Henry asked.

  The man had wrapped one arm around Maya’s shoulders. It would have looked like a casual embrace except for his other hand, which he had pressed against her side. He nudged her downward into one of the empty chairs and sat down in the one beside her, all in one smooth and fluid motion. Aden could see something white and pointy in that hand.

  “If your hand goes any further toward your knife, I’ll stick mine straight through her heart,” he said to Henry in a pleasant tone. His voice was honey poured over polished steel. “Your blade may be sharper, but my blade is faster. Do you understand me?”

  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 the table if he chose to try his luck.

  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 pick
ed 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 nowhere. I walked up to the order station, and he was right behind me.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tristan said. “Let’s get that shit bandaged up.”

  “Thank you,” Aden said to Henry.

  “For what?”

  “For not trying to take his head off. I don’t think he was talking big. He absolutely meant it.”

  “Oh, I know he was,” Henry replied. He got out of his chair and looked at the atrium entrance for a moment. Then he flexed his hands and balled them into fists.

  “How’d you know?” Aden asked.

  “He walked up to six people and started talking about killing them and taking their ship,” Henry said. “Anyone who does that is either insane or really sure of their skill. And that man wasn’t insane.”

  “Ceramic blades,” Tristan said. “Only two kinds of people really use those. Cooks who are too lazy to sharpen their steel every day. And professionals.”

  Aden didn’t have to ask what sort of profession Tristan meant.

  “Well, he didn’t look like a fucking cook to me,” Maya growled.

  “We should split up,” Aden said a little while later, after Tristan had patched up Maya in the sanitary suite and gotten everyone a round of expensive Rhodian whisky. “Junk our comtabs and get new ones. Rent different rooms every night. Make it hard for them to track us.”

  Captain Decker shook her head.

  “We’re better off staying in a group. Watch each other’s backs. Switching comtabs won’t do us any good without different ID passes to link to them.”

  She tilted her glass and watched as the liquid’s surface changed its angle as well, beholden to the gravity of the planet.

  “We don’t have many options here. Rhodia is going to grab us as soon as we dock there. Gretia is blockaded—not that I want to go to that shithole anyway. We can’t go to Hades because we don’t have the shielding for the approach. We’d just toast the ship and give ourselves a radiation overdose. That leaves us with Pallas and Oceana.”

  “We’ll have a hard time making our operating budget with Oceana-to-Acheron runs,” Tristan said.

  “Or we stay on Acheron for now,” Tess suggested.

  Henry shook his head. “With the docking fees and everything else, we’ll be burning up our operating budget inside of a month.”

  They mulled the situation while sipping the whisky Tristan had provided. On the floor underneath Maya’s chair, Aden noticed a few drops of blood that had dripped from Maya’s side onto the Alon, where they had formed an irregular little pool of crimson.

  I can still go my own way, he thought. Ditch the comtab, disappear in the crowd, get passage to Oceana or Hades. I have enough in my ledger to stay somewhere for a year, maybe two if I live cheaply.

  But then what? And how many nights would I spend awake, looking at the ceiling and wondering what’s happening with the rest of them?

  “The way I see it, we have two good options,” Decker said. “Because turning over the ship to these people isn’t one. We either head home to Oceana and lay low for a while. Or we go to the Rhodies, turn over the ship to them, and try our luck with their legal process.”

  “That sounds like one good option and one sure way to spend the next ten years in a Rhodian prison,” Tristan grumbled. He looked at Maya.

  “You could ditch us,” he said. “Take a long leave of absence. This is your home planet, after all. You’d be safer here. We’ll make for Oceana and hole up somewhere for a while.”

  “Not likely,” Maya said. “I can’t leave. None of you can fly the ship for shit.”

  That got the first chuckle out of them since Milo had appeared next to Maya at their table.

  “We have two weeks to figure it out,” Decker said. “But Maya isn’t bailing on us, and none of you are asking to cash out right now and get the hell away from this mess. So whatever we do next, it looks like we will do it together.”

  The sun was coming up by the time they left the bar and walked out into the plaza below. The sky on the other side of the dome was a roiling sea of orange and red currents, constantly intermixing and flowing apart again, an endless kaleidoscope of atmospheric fury. The streets were as busy as they had been any other time of day. The encounter in the bar felt almost surreal to Aden in the daylight, l
ike a bad dream after one too many glasses of liquor, but the bloodstain on the side of Maya’s flight suit served to anchor the event back in reality when he glanced at her.

  “Well, crap,” Tristan said. “We’re on two shit lists now. The Rhodies and whatever fucking gunrunner cartel sent that prick with the knives. This will be an interesting month.”

  “Your idea of ‘interesting’ doesn’t really overlap with mine,” Henry said.

  Aden could tell by the swaying and the unsteady gaits that all of them were still more than just a little drunk, even Maya, who usually nursed a single beer all evening.

  “It was a pretty good evening, though,” Tess said. “I mean, except for the part with the knives and the blood and the death threats.” She was walking next to Aden and using him for balance control by holding on to his arm, and he found that he didn’t mind at all. He knew that if they had ended up in a fight, he would have jumped in front of her, or Maya, or any other member of the crew without hesitation.

  And I’ve only been with them for three months, he thought. Until this moment, I never would have thought about taking a knife for anyone except Solveig.

  He thought of his sister, who was just a few kilometers away, probably asleep in her hotel suite. The fates had deposited them both here in the same city at the same time. If she couldn’t go back to Gretia at the end of her negotiations, maybe it meant they’d be able to get together in person again. The knowledge that she was in walking distance from him, and away from the turmoil that was sure to erupt on Gretia, made Aden feel a sense of profound relief.

  Whatever we do next, we’ll do it together, Decker had said. Maybe it was the drink clouding his judgment, but right now Aden found that he was fine with that idea, even if the crew voted to go to Rhodia and he ended up in a prison with them for the next decade.

  There are worse things in life than having to tend a garden and share communal meals with people you like, he thought.