Angel of Destruction by Susan R. Matthews

“I’ve always found them to be efficient. Conservative. No unnecessary effort.” Meaning, by implication, no unnecessary violence. “I’d expect them to be especially careful to keep the noise level down. Frankly, I’m a little surprised they’re risking any noise at all.”
    And maybe “they” weren’t. Maybe this whole setup wasn’t Langsariks at all, or at least not fully sanctioned. Maybe Hilton and some of his peers were just blowing off a little steam. It had to be hard on people like Hilton to settle down on dirt and look for mundane, lawful employment after having spent nearly sixteen years as a law unto themselves, answerable to none, taking what they needed when they needed it from wherever they could find it.
    That could be.
    The fence shrugged. “Who knows if what the authorities say about the other procurement is even true? Maybe there wasn’t any broken furniture.”
    A good point, that, what with public propaganda being what it was. Maybe the events associated with this Okidan raid were being exaggerated for effect.
    Just then something caught Kazmer’s eye for the second time this morning, and it was the same something, too. Hilton, in the entryway that led to the meal line, standing in the entrance with someone, discussing something. Hilton looked across the room, looked right at him, but gave no sign of recognition; and moved on.
    Kazmer decided.
    Accidents happened and people changed, and Hilton was a Langsarik pirate; but Hilton would not involve himself with murder. If this was a Langsarik gig, and Hilton was in on it, it was a straightforward grab-and-run operation. And Hilton was in on it; there could be no question. There was no other reasonable explanation for his presence here, for his behavior earlier.
    “I’m in.” He’d had all the porridge he could stomach. Pushing the bowl away from him, he started to leave. “I’ll see you all later.”
    The engineer nodded, and then the navigator. The fence stared at his hands, picking at the ragged cuticle of his left thumb, and finally nodded at the table in turn. “All right,” the fence said. “I’ll see you later, too.”
    The others had apparently already decided. So they were a crew.
    What had happened at Okidan?
    It might call unwelcome attention to himself if he started asking questions. Maybe he’d hear some gossip in Port Charid. He could always get the details from the more well informed members of this crew, once they were safely on their way to wherever it was they were going.
    So there would be plenty of time to hear all of the news, public, private, rumored, and invented. At the moment Modice Agenis was waiting to see him, though she didn’t know it yet.

    ###

    Garol Vogel turned his shuttle over to the transport pool for maintenance and refueling. He never spent much time at Chilleau Judiciary’s administrative center; he didn’t intend to spend much time there now.
    Chilleau Judiciary was within Garol’s orb of assignment, so he had an office in Chambers — along with Jils Ivers, and whoever else was on rotation this cycle. It was nice to have someplace to come back to, even if it was at an administrative center. Nice to have a corner to himself, dark and cool and quiet, where he could be sure that things would be where he had left them and nobody would have tried to tidy up.
    People might have been in to have a look at what he was doing, yes, that was something that happened from time to time; but sensitive information was always either secured or otherwise protected, and people who were after information they had no business being interested in could, be relied upon to put things back carefully, as exactly as found as possible.
    Garol walked through the great gates and into the administrative center of Chilleau Judiciary’s Chambers in the middle of the night. Traffic on campus was relatively light, the corridors comparatively empty. He let himself into his office — three levels down from the senior