Fresh air and beautiful scenery seem to be rather conducive to establishing international relations. I suppose before you go you’ll want to know wha... I did to my ex-wife and her lovers. Well, Sharon didn’t come out of the divorce as well off as she thought. I had done the decent thing by the Flanagans, giving them the market price for their business, but I’d had to raise a mortgage on mine to buy them out and rebuild the petrol station. It cost a fucking fortune to have the old fuel tanks taken. I said to Beth, “That gives us about five months. I can only assume that means we have to go while the Earth is in this half of the hemisphere. After that, the transporter must not be able to get a line of sight or something to where we need to go.”Beth said, “That’s not a lot of time in the scheme of things, but I suppose it solves our problem with ageing on this planet. It will probably worry Mitch the least.”“He said he isn’t that close to his mum as she shipped him off to a boarding school. During those final agonizing weeks of debugging the new Nav Avoidance Module, she'd stared with ever-increasing hunger at the old abandoned transport docked not a quarter mile from her work pod. She could tell it was still powered up from the running lights dimly visible at night, and she knew the Oh-Two system was always left running, on the off chance it'd need to be pressed back into emergency service. Levitra hadn't even seen a guard in the last 10 days.She just had to get off this world;. ..” Jeff left the rest unsaid.Tired of talking about Tanaka, Diana asked, “So, are you ready to go see what Jasmine needs?”“Sure. Want to scare the shit out of Aiko and take her with us?”“Jeff, that’s...”“Are we supposed to sugarcoat everything she’s exposed to? You know that won’t work around here. If she’s going to live with us, she might as well start getting used to us. She seemed to accept Ship and her healing without any major problems, but I doubt if, deep down, she believes that Ship is.