Chapter 10
Nick Corso didn’t knock. He kicked the reinforced door to Maltese’s inner office with all the pent-up fury of the hyperspace sprint back to Alora.
The heavy steel panel, designed to withstand small arms fire, buckled inward with a tortured shriek of stressed metal.
It didn’t fly off its hinges, but it crumpled around the lock mechanism, hanging drunkenly askew.
He stepped through the wreckage, flanked by Hadley James and two of his best enforcers, Brask and Voss.
James held a compact plasma cutter leveled at the room, her expression tight and focused.
Brask and Voss had drawn heavy laser pistols, their eyes scanning the dimly lit space beyond the ruined doorway.
Maltese jerked upright from his sad, overstrained chair, his considerable gut managing to shove the steel desk in front of him forward a few inches. Shock ripped across his fat face as his enormous bodyguard fumbled for the disruptor holstered at his hip. Too slow. Way too slow.
“Don’t!” James snapped, the whine of her plasma cutter rising to a high-pitched keen.
The red targeting dot settled unerringly on his forehead. Brask and Voss had their weapons trained on the guard.
“Hands where we can see them,” James snapped. “Now.”
The guard froze, eyes wide. Slowly, with exaggerated care, he raised his empty mitts. Maltese’s dark eyes darted from the ruined door to Nick’s face, then to James’s weapon, calculating, searching for an angle that wasn’t there. Fear sweat beaded on his upper lip, glistening in the low light.
“Corso,” Maltese managed, his voice a wheeze that tried for affability and landed somewhere near panic. “This is unexpected. Dramatic entrance. What seems to be the—”
“Where is she?”
Nick’s voice cut through the air like a knife.
Low, controlled, vibrating with a rage that made the guard flinch.
He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. The absolute stillness of his body, the intensity in his pale eyes, was threat enough.
He took two deliberate steps towards the desk, his expensive boots silent on the grimy floor.
Maltese blinked, confusion momentarily overriding the terror.
“She? Who? Corso, I have a lot of—”
“The Xena!” He slammed a fist down on the steel surface. “Where. Is. She?”
Understanding dawned slowly on Maltese’s face, followed by a flicker of something else – not guilt, not yet, but dawning horror. He swallowed, a thick, audible gulp.
“Corso, she was loaded onto your ship. Are you telling me you lost her?”
For a moment, Nick’s eyes flared. Then he started laughing.
“I lost her?” he said with a guffaw. “You hear that, James? Apparently, I lost her.”
Fear jumped off Maltese in thick waves. The greasy bastard reeked of it.
“Listen, Corso, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he whined. “I hired you for this job, because you’re the best. My people put the containment unit aboard your ship.”
“NO, THEY DID NOT!” he screamed. He was sick of playing games with this slimy bottom-feeder.
“If your people had put the containment unit aboard my ship, it would have been in the cargo bay when I went to inspect it en route to Babcinq. Instead, there was a different shipping container there, one that was not on my manifest. Would you like to know what was in that container, Maltese?”
The fat fixer’s face had gone pale. Sweat streamed down his temples and onto his bloated cheeks.
“What?” Maltese managed.
“Coffee!”
Maltese’s eyes went wide and what little color was left in his face drained away. Nick threw him his cruelest smile.
“I’ll give you credit, Maltese,” he drawled.
“As far as double-crosses go, this one is epic. I don’t know who paid you to do this, but they are clearly Grade-A Stupid or have balls the size of planetoids.
But whichever it is, you made the worst mistake of your life thinking their money could buy you out of trouble. ”
“Oh, no,” Maltese mumbled. “Oh, hell, no.”
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen here, you fat fuck,” Nick spat. “You’re going to tell me where my package is and how to get it back. Otherwise, my first mate is going to introduce you to her plasma-cutter weight-loss program.”
For a moment, Maltese directed his attention to James. She smiled wickedly and gestured with the plasma cutter. But then he returned his gaze to Nick.
“Corso,” he babbled, “it’s so much worse than you know. It’s the most colossal fuckup in the history of the galaxy.”
“You’re damned right it is. Fix it if you want to live to write the history book.”
“The coffee wasn’t supposed to go to your ship—”
“No shit, Maltese! Tell me something I don’t know – like where the fucking Xena is.”
“Corso, the coffee … it was supposed to be loaded onto … onto Antilles.”
His gaze went distant, inward. The pieces clicked together in his mind with almost audible force. The confusion vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated dread.
“Oh, fuck me sideways,” he swore. “You were berthed right next to her in the adjacent bay. The dock manager must have mixed up the numbers for the shipments.
Nick straightened, the cold fury inside him crystallizing into something sharper, deadlier. This couldn’t be.
“Díaz?” he said, pronouncing the hated woman’s name like a curse. “Carmen Díaz has my Xena?”
Maltese nodded, his jowls quivering.
“The manifests ... the dock codes ... they must have gotten swapped,” he blathered.
“The crews loaded the wrong containers onto the wrong ships. Standard procedure mix-up, happens sometimes with rushed jobs....” He trailed off, seeing the murder in Corso’s eyes.
“An honest mistake! A fuckup by the dock chief! I’ll have his balls for this, Corso, I swear! I’ll—”
“Shut up.”
Nick’s voice was a whisper, but it silenced Maltese instantly. The fixer shrank back into his chair, which groaned in protest. Nick turned away from the desk, pacing a tight circle. His mind raced.
Díaz. That stubborn, self-righteous bitch. Stumbling blind into a job this big, this hot? She had no idea what she was carrying. No idea the firestorm she was sitting on.
“Where was Díaz taking this coffee?” he asked.
Maltese gulped audibly.
“Babcinq,” he said.
“Oh, shit,” James cursed.
The implications hit Nick like a pulse cannon.
If Díaz tried to deliver the Xena to Babcinq – if she even made it past the COPS patrols in that piece-of-shit Antilles – she’d bungle it.
She’d get scanned, boarded. They’d find the Xena.
And when they did, the interrogation wouldn’t stop with her and her pathetic crew.
They’d trace the manifest. They’d trace the broker. They’d trace it back to Maltese.
And that meant they could trace it back to him. To Nick Corso. Harboring a Forbidden Zone species, a XenX! That wasn’t just a fine. That was a one-way ticket to a penal asteroid, life spent breaking rocks until your body gave out.
He stopped pacing, facing the wide viewport that looked out over Alora’s grimy docking spires. Distant ships crawled like insects through the perpetual twilight of the asteroid field.
Carmen Díaz, flying blind with a live grenade in her cargo bay. The sheer, staggering incompetence of it made his teeth ache. She was going to get them all killed. Her, her crew, Maltese, him. Because she was too proud, too stupid, to know when she was out of her depth.
Contempt, cold and familiar, washed over him, momentarily eclipsing the fury.
Always playing captain. Always thinking she knew better.
That little spitfire back on The Buccaneer, refusing his advances, refusing his authority, thinking her technical skills made her his equal.
His better, even. The memory of her face, twisted in disgust.
Get the hell out of my workspace before I dock you a day’s pay for interfering with critical repairs.
She didn’t understand power. Real power. She didn’t understand the game. And now her ignorance was going to burn down everything around her. He almost laughed. The cosmic fucking irony of it. Díaz, thinking she was running beans, hauling the hottest cargo in the sector.
He turned back to Maltese. The fixer was mopping his brow with a dirty handkerchief, his breathing ragged. The guard stood rigid, sweat beading on his forehead. Brask and Voss watched him, waiting for the order.
“Babcinq,” Nick said, his voice flat, devoid of the earlier rage. It was worse, this cold certainty. “She’s heading for Babcinq with a Xena aboard, and she may not even know it. You’re right, Maltese. This is the most colossal fuckup of all time.”
Maltese nodded miserably. Nick threw him a smile that was all malice. He jabbed a finger at the fixer.
“Get me everything you have on the Antilles’s last known trajectory, projected jump points, estimated arrival at Babcinq.
Everything. Scrape every sensor log, bribe every dock rat, hack every buoy.
I want to know where she is, where she’s going, and how fast that rust-bucket can limp through the black. ”
Maltese scrambled, fumbling with a data-slate on his desk. “Yes. Yes, of course. I have her departure logs, her filed flight plan, though gods know if she stuck to it. I’ll get my slicers on it immediately. Full passive sensor sweep along the probable routes.”
“Good. James, recall the crew. We’re lifting off in ten minutes. Prep the Shrike for a maximum-burn run to Babcinq. Tell Sarkov to have the jump-drive spooled and ready the second we’re clear of the station’s mass shadow.”
She nodded sharply, her expression grim.
“Understood, Captain. Babcinq direct?” Her eyes flickered with the unspoken question – the risk, the COPS presence.
“Direct,” Corso confirmed. “Shortest possible route through hyperspace. We cut corners, ride the edge of the safe lanes. I don’t care about the wear on the drive coils. We need to be there before Díaz screws the pooch for the entire sector.”
He turned back to Maltese, who was frantically tapping commands into his slate.
“And Maltese? You breathe a word of this to anyone – your clients, your rivals, the fucking station janitor – and I won’t just kill you.
I’ll make sure you watch while I dismantle every single operation you’ve got on this station, brick by greasy brick.
Then I’ll feed you to the recyclers feet first. Understood? ”
Maltese looked up, his face ashen. He managed a jerky nod.
“You got it, Corso. Not a word. My slicers are already tracing the Antilles. You’ll have her projected course within the hour.”
“See that I do.”
Nick didn’t wait for further assurances. He spun on his heel and strode towards the ruined doorway, his enforcers falling in behind him.
Díaz. That infuriating, incompetent woman. She had his prize. The biggest payoff he’d ever had, the greatest smuggle in the history of the Belt – stolen.
And she was flying it straight into the jaws of the UPA’s most draconian enforcers.
The thought of her smug face, that defiant tilt of her chin, being replaced by the dawning horror as COPS troopers stormed her pathetic ship should have been satisfying. But all he felt was cold fury. Her failure wouldn’t just humiliate her; it would destroy him.
He quickened his pace, boots ringing on the metal decking. The Star Shrike awaited, sleek and powerful in its docking cradle. The Antilles was slow, damaged, cautious. He had speed. He had firepower. He had a crew that knew how to get things done.
He’d get to Babcinq first. He’d intercept that walking disaster before she could blow everything to the stars. He’d take back what was his.
And maybe, just maybe, he’d make sure Carmen Díaz understood, once and for all, the cost of defying Nick Corso.
The image formed in his mind: Díaz, on her knees before him, the Xena standing obediently at his side. Proof. Ultimate proof.
“Move!” he barked at his crew, breaking into a run towards the docking umbilical. The chase was on. And failure wasn’t an option.