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in my career! I am Kor’Vala D’Telenor! I do not cook my own meat , I do not scrub my own floors , and I do not stimulate myself for pleasure ! My people don’t even have a word for that!”
    “Do you have a word for raving egomaniac?” Skye screamed back at him, sobbing. “Do you have a word for bully-handed bastard? I hate you! I’d rather you shot me out into fucking space than live here one more day with you!”
    His mouth shut with an audible snap. He glared at her, breathing hard, then suddenly lunged forward.
    Skye leapt back, and without giving herself time to think, she hauled back her arm and slapped him right across his prominent snout, just as he reached, not for her, but to slap the door-panel open and storm out.
    For a decorated military expert, he didn’t seem to see it coming. His eyes bulged in the instant before her hand cracked into him, that was it. And then there was a moment that didn’t have any time in it at all.
    ‘He was leaving,’ Skye thought. She had time to think it all. And she felt in minute detail the form under her hand. His skin was obviously very thin where it stretched over the thick bone of his beakish snout; she could actually feel the roadwork of veins beneath as she crushed them into his skull. Then time snapped back into place and she stumbled away from him into the wall as he screeched and dropped with a ‘wham’ onto his knees. Blood burst out from under his lips, spraying out over the metal panels as he sucked in breath and screeched over and over, collapsing by degrees onto his side and thrashing in a paroxysm of pain.
    There was absolutely no sense of vindication or triumph. She knew at once and without doubt that a few smacks on the ass, even last night’s vicious and undeserved punishment, did not begin to compare with what she had just done to him. Watching him convulse in agony filled her with nothing but a sick sense of horror.
    She fell to her knees beside him, patting timidly at his shoulders and babbling out apologies that were not, could never be, enough. She’d never hit anyone in her adult life, and this, this wasn’t just a piddling slap across the face, the sort of thing people laughed at when they saw it done in sitcoms. She had really hurt this man, hurt him bad!
    And dear God, she was representing all humanity against a technologically superior race who had already threatened once to annihilate Earth if anyone attacked their emissary.
    Skye burst into fresh tears, fumbling at his head and trying to see what she’d done, just like there was anything at all she could do to help. Vala curled tighter on himself, put one hand on her chest, and slowly but firmly pushed her away. Then he made a fist and beat it a few times on the floor, keening shrilly in short spasms. She ran to her room, but couldn’t put enough doors between them to drown out that sound. Even her own sobs couldn’t do that.

    * * *
     
    The light went on that night.
    Skye, sitting in the dark as she had done for hours, flinched and stared at it open-mouthed for almost an entire minute without moving. He couldn’t mean it. Maybe he just wanted to fire her, or whatever you called it when you loaded your woman back into her space shuttle and shot her back to Earth, but there was no way he was in the mood.
    She didn’t dress up for this one.
    He was sitting on the edge of his bed when she came in, and he looked awful. His face was grotesquely swollen, pulling his lips up so that he couldn’t close his mouth. One of his eyes was half-shut and leaked a thin, steady trickle of bloody fluid which he wiped away with a towel every few seconds. Even that side of his throat was puffy and discolored.
    “I’m so sorry,” she said, clinging to the doorway. “You were just so mad. I thought you were coming at me.”
    “I realized that,” he said, with some difficulty. “After.” He had to put his head at an angle to look at her, and his gaze was weary more than anything else. “But if I