Kenny had been invited to a prestigious gathering of leading education experts in Washington and he had been thinking over the past few weeks about ho... he could spread his influence around the globe. He saw the conference as an opportunity to use his brain defragmenter to reach out to the youth of other countries around the world and he was going to grasp it with both hands. It might also be a good thing for him to be out of the country if and when something happened to MacGhee, a watertight. I mean, if that’s alright with you.’ She blushed profusely as she realized her own words. She sounded like a startled high school girl. Nails with chipping hot pink polish scratched at her rib cage to avoid appearing idle. ‘Yeah, that sounds great. So, should we meet up Sunday then?’ Meet up? She had forgotten about that part of the equation. She was going to have to sit and speak with him without making a complete ass of herself, which would not be easy. ‘Ummm… I have work in the afternoon,. Did that mean that I was now in debt to him! Not on your life. But, it did lessen my visceral, if more or less dormant, hatred of what two of them had done to me.Ann had been at pains to convince me that it was time to move on. Had he done something good or useful for me, for us, as she maintained? The short answer was yes. Did it make up for all of the bad stuff? The short answer was no. Did it buy him, and for that matter Claire, some level of tolerance or bode well for some kind of. So far they'd been lucky the pattern of movement they were on was erratic at best. Jim had destroyed almost half of the fueling stations in the sector of the alien space, so at best there were a lot of mad bugs out there. At worst almost every warrior race would be coming for them; Jim decided to head back to the empire planet, besides Amber couldn't be absent much longer without the fleet setting out to find her. Once inside imperial space the empress was updated about everything that had.