Jocasta cursed as the occupants of the tavern surged to the windows, eager to get a look at the impending show down. There were shouts of alarm from inside the VIP area and alerts began to appear in her optics. Red dots flagging Chalnarc's gunmen as they shook of their booze and drug induces stupor to come to their bosses aid. For a moment she hesitated, this was nothing like her original plan but this would be her one and only chance to take a shot at Chalnarc. Win or lose he would either be dead, captive, or on the move and she didnt want to spend months hunting him down and prepping another extraction. She toggled one of her contingences active. The pianist, having stopped playing to watch the battle outside jumped as the vase of flowers atop his instrument seemed to stand up on metal legs like some kind of insect. It rotated a few hands breath and then made a humming sound. The concealed claymore, planted by Jocasta the previous day went off. Unlike the conventional type of the warhead this variant was anything but indiscriminant. Six chambers went off, spitting six spikes of burning copper, hammered by the backing explosives into a lethal dart. Each was targeted on one of the henchmen and they went down in a windrow, flailing arms and spraying shattered chest plates. One of the six was taken down by a head shot. That wasn't showing off, if the computer could have safely plotted a center of mass shot it would have taken it, but a civilian had blocked the line of sight at a critical moment. Internal titanium partitions funneled the back blast down, shattering the piano in a spray of splinters and flying keys. Several of the crowd screamed as they were pepperd with the secondary shrapnel but those were the breaks. Jocasta took care not to kill unnecessarily, but she didn't waste sleep on minor injuries to people who, in all likelyhood, deserved worse.

Jocasta slipped from the bar as the blast and shrieks thinned the crowd by the door momentarily. The hot sun scorched her skin immediately and she wished she had the time to don better clothing for the task, though if she were getting wishes she probably wouldn't start there. Chalnarc and the mysterious stranger were circling each other now, Chalnarc holding his blade in a low guard. Her AI, patched to her implant and linked to the database in her ship flashed up a half dozen identifications for the mysterious combatant, but none of them had more than a twenty percent likelyhood, making them the electronic equivalent of guesses. Clutching her stunner insider her coat, she prepared to wait out the combat. If Chalnarc won he would be weak and off guard when she struck, if the newcomer... well she would cross that bridge when she got to it.