"All right. We now have those in favor of Proposal Three, which is to rescue the people in the group." Most of the rest of those who hadn't voted rais...d their hands. "Okay. The last proposal is Proposal Four, which is to kill all of the animals and people." Only Evan and one other man voted for that.Poppa said, "The two most popular proposals are One and Two. I want to suggest that we sort of combine them into one. First, we must be sure the incursions into our fields are stopped. Second, we. By the time two months had elapsed, we were back to being completely full six days a week. We were closed on Sundays or it would have been packed all seven days.The hard guys liked the dining room. They could hold small meetings there while eating a fancy meal. We even had a small dance band on Friday and Saturday nights. The hard guys brought their wives or girl friends to either show them off or shut them up. I made sure that none of Uncle Joe's guys ever got bills.The bistro was the favorite. They coasted for a while, dropping towards their destination at orbital speeds with no sensation of motion besides the tremor of the engines that radiated up through the deck beneath their feet.The team gripped the handrests of their chairs as the shuttle hit the atmosphere and began to jostle them, Sleethe rocking back and forth as he gripped the handholds in the roof of the craft, their harnesses keeping them secured as the little shuttle was shaken and buffeted by turbulence. The fiery. Or try to smuggle the raw stones out in a messy body cavity. And searching or x-raying them was cheap and easy. So what if the workers would develop cancer or DNA mutations in twenty years? They weren't expected to live that long, anyway.Joe S. was the leader of Team Beta for 5225. He ran a tight crew of three fellow mercenaries. Team Beta was competent if not imaginative. His second in charge was Aiko H., also a former merc. She was heavily muscled and an expert in Krav Maga. Both were enough.