“Tell your daughter to concentrate on her book studies if the teacher is such a bitch,” Rose added.  “And then promise her a reward if she passes and a punishment if she fails.”

“It's hard to punish her these days,” Kurt confessed.  “I’m here, Molly spends half of her time at work ... the kids have just too much leeway to get into trouble.”

“They do get better,” Rose assured him.  She stood and headed towards the hatch.  “Good luck, sir.”

Kurt scowled after her, then picked up his terminal and started to write, feeling the age-old frustration bubbling up within him.  Molly was a wonderful person, really she was, but when she got the bit between her teeth she was almost intolerable.  The kids could drive her to the edge of a screaming fit – and, when it wasn't the kids, it was everything from money to how much time she could spend with her husband.  He couldn't even remember the last time they’d had sex.

He finished writing the message, then scrolled through the message log.  As always, a handful of messages had arrived in the buffer while the carrier was on deployment, held at Earth until they returned home.  Half of them were untraceable spam – spammers could be fined a pound for every unwanted message, but the bastards were very good at remaining untraced – but the remainder were various messages from the press and other organisations.  Some of them wanted interviews, some of them wanted permission to interview his children for background news – he wrote back categorically denying permission – and a couple invited him and his pilots to Sin City.

They’d love it, he thought.  Even now, two hundred years after settlement, the moon was still a patchwork quilt of tiny settlements, with no overall authority.  Sin City prided itself on allowing anything, as long as the money was there, from whores to gambling and illicit VR simulations.  Rumour had it that travellers could get anything there, as long as they had the money.  And discretion was part of the package.

It was tempting, he had to admit, if he could convince the XO to let them go.  The pilots needed some reward for their efforts, something more than the respect of their formally sneering peers and mentions in dispatches.  But at the same time ... he had no interest in gambling or semi-legal VR games.  If he went, he'd want to see a whore ...

... And that would be betraying Molly.