Free Angel of Destruction by Susan R. Matthews

come to see you sooner if I’d had a decent chance.”
    That Sarvaw mercantile pilot.
    What had his name been?
    Kazmer. Kazmer Daigule.
    The friend of her older brother’s oldest son, Hilton, a big lumbering barge of a man with sufficient calm quiet charisma to have almost seriously disturbed Modice’s psychological equilibrium, not too many years ago.
    Modice was clearly not very disturbed right now; her voice had strengthened from a whisper to a murmur, and Walton could hear what she was saying even though Modice clearly had her back to the room, talking out the window.
    “If you had the interest, you’d have come sooner. But it’s nice to see you. And Hilton will be sorry he missed you. Hilton likes you, Kaz.”
    There was no venom to her scolding, but no childish uncertainty, either. Walton listened to her with pride and wonder: if only Modice’s mother was alive, to hear how her daughter had grown. Modice seemed clearly confident of her ability to hold her own with a man several years her elder. She had learned well, during the years that the Langsariks had lived as a fleet-borne community. She took after Walton herself a bit, maybe; or maybe it was just the result of having been beautiful all her life, Walton admitted to herself, reluctantly. Modice couldn’t have learned that from her aunt Walton.
    “Oh, there are those in your family who don’t like me at all, Modice.” Daigule seemed to be teasing, but his tone of voice was ambiguous — was that genuine regret that she heard? “Your aunt doesn’t care for me a bit. She told me so. Well, she told Hilton.”
    She would have to see his expression and his body language to decide for sure. For that she would have to be able to see into the room, to spy as well as eavesdrop.
    “Aunt Walton is just a little overprotective. That’s all.”
    Walton didn’t know if she wanted to hear this. Raising Modice hadn’t been her idea; she had neither expected nor been prepared to take responsibility for the child that Modice had been when her parents had been killed. She knew she hadn’t done as good a job as a real mother could have, would have done. But if she withdrew — to avoid hearing scornful words from Modice — she would be leaving the situation unresolved; and she would not be able to close the door quietly enough to avoid alerting Modice to the fact that someone had been listening.
    “She’s no such thing.” Given her suspicions about Daigule’s designs on Modice, it certainly felt odd to hear him, of all people, come to her defense. “She just means to see you properly married to someone who shares your own culture. Sometimes I think she forgets that you and I have already been to bed together.”
    Walton tightened her grip on her truncheon. Been to bed together, was it? She’d give him “been to bed together,” all over his foolish skull. Been to bed together . How dare he?
    “Kazmer, no joking. That was serious. You know very well it was the only way to hide you. Shame on you.”
    That Sarvaw had been fully clothed at the time. At least from the waist down, a certain degree of bareness being necessary to carry the deception off. The soldiers had been too busy trying not to stare at the blinding perfection of Modice’s flawless shoulders to think too deeply on the potential correspondences between the person of interest they were hunting for and the apparently naked young man in her niece’s bed.
    Or if they had made up their own minds about what was going on, their insufferable tyrant of a junior officer had arrived at no such conclusion, and nobody had bothered to disabuse him of a notion that he had clearly felt to be near sacred on account of having been his.
    “Come on, Derchie, I’m only joking, it’s just you and me. I didn’t mean any harm by it, who else can I talk to? And I’m here to tell you that any man who got to share a bed with you, and didn’t want to talk it up, would have to be crazy.”
    “No jokes!” Modice