"Please," a female voice replied, she sounded terrified. There was no way I was going to take on a knife welding mugger in a dark alley, my best optio... was to slink away and get out of here as soon a possible. I turn the corning and I walked right into the action. She was a young, white girl, now silent because he had his knife up against her neck. Her attacker was also young but black. I became like a statue, unable to move, his eyes locked onto mine and in the dim lighting his teeth. "Tina looked puzzled but Janice seemed to understand. "This colony has people who scored the six point five CAP necessary to volunteer, but aren't the types the military really wants," she observed.I nodded. "Right now it looks like we might have twenty families who would want to work towards making the colony a success, plus an uncertain number up in the front of the ship who we don't know about. It's pretty clear that of the fifty sponsors in the back, thirty are not going to be active in. Not a motel.”“An alley, then.”“Ha. No.”“Yeah, you’ll be the john, and I’ll be the back-alley slut.”“Shush. You’re not a slut.”“I don’t want to go home yet.”“Mom’s waiting for us. She’s still sulking?”Heather nodded. “Yeah.”Caledon slapped his forehead. “She knows. God, she knows. We’re fucked.”“Calm down. She suspects, but she doesn’t know.”“No wonder she’s been so cold with me lately. Ah, fuck me…”“Daddy, stop.”When the food came, they mostly ate in silence.He hurried to pay the bill. “Come. She'd been too busy all day to reapply sunblock. After fueling, they'd returned to the area she was at yesterday, and this time, there was little rest. Manasares had had them trying to figure out how to best pack and offload the various electronic equipment and the precious circuit boards. Someone had made a few mockups of those from wood and particle board, and it'd shown the effect of seawater fairly clearly.They tried a small round rubber-boat-like thing, but the gear packs were fairly.