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It was impossible to be bored if you had access to information. Jocasta’s mother had always maintained that. As a girl Jocasta had spent many hours in her mothers electronic repair workshop cobbling together devices from the recycled tech she found there. It was amazing what you could accomplish with a little curiosity and access to a data link. Military training had made being bored an offense, intelligence recruits were often left in semi-secure areas and always scolded for probing too much, or reprimanded for not probing enough. Being interested was a habit by this point in her career. She didn’t much like Dirk running off to a meeting without her, but she figured she had already been paid and if he fucked aroudn too much she could just ditch him and be on her way. The guards, or whatever they were with the shotguns gave her appraising looks as she longued against the hallway wall. She returned them a look of lazy consideration, calculated to keep them interested enough not to move her along, but not to encourage them to bother her, an impression she reinforced with the slightest hint of psi.
 
Jocasta split her mind. One part of it was assigned to keep watch on her immediate environs, another part followed the camera feed of her drones, watching there would be assailants tramping down corridors. Judging from the audio she sampled they were bitching at each other for botching the job and discussing getting better hardware and going back to finish the job before their targets got off world. Data searches from the cities integral link ran in mental sidebar, comparing their route with maps of the city and various underworld players, running computations on who they might be working for. Another fragment of her mind was placing orders for the ship from one of the more reputable chandleries. Laying in extra food and electronic components in bulk. Ordinarily she liked to do her shopping in person, but it didn’t seem likely she would get that chance here. On a whim she placed an order for some automotive parts also, pondering repairs and updates for the speeder they had recently acquired. Still another fragment of her mind was running comparative searches on the various pieces of Dirk’s armor, comparing manufacturing marks and silhouette with various military databases for which she had forgotten to turn over her access passes. Another part of her mind was bored.
 
Nearly eight minutes had passed when their attackers emerged from a low rent hab block which records suggested was owned by one of the major organized crime families in the spire. The drones immediately tagged weapons, a mixture of slug throwers and laser carbines of Commonwealth surplus patterns. There was a loud debate about where ‘that bastard’ might be found and some discussion of heading to the hangar decks to head him off. A chronometer display suggested a possible transit time of twenty minutes to reach the hanger, perhaps half that if they headed this way. Jocasta was not unduly worried about the hanger. Better quality muscle than this had tried to force their way onto the Dragonfly. She rather hoped they would try, that certainly wouldn’t be boring. Abruptly the men changed direction. A pulsing symbol showed that one had just received a message alert of some kind. The probabilities suggested that they were on the way here, which meant someone had tipped them off. Her visual field didn’t have a correlating sender but that didn’t mean much, other than the informant had taken a minute to get out of sight.
 
She was thirsty. She wanted a bath. She needed to replace number three lateral stabilizer within the next two hundred operational hours. She hoped that Dirk would hurry.
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