“What? Does it have a built in tanning bed?” Jocasta asked as she appraised Dirk, noting with amusement and some curiosity that he kept his helmet on. She rolled like a log across the bed and kicked out a leg to hook over the frame pulling herself up by the drink cart. There was a wide selection, little of which was familiar to her, so she took the fanciest bottle, circular vessel of yellow glass that curled up into a pouring spout and splashed some into her mug. One of the drones flitted down and landed on the rim, extending a needle like proboscis into the fluid.

 

“Hey, get your own,” Jocasta admonished brushing at the insectile machine with the back of her hand. The drone took flight but not before a green response flashed across her optical implants indicating that there beverage was potable. She took a mouthful before reading that it was nearly seventy percent ethanol however.

“Whaaaa…” she gasped in a suddenly parched wheezy voice, narrowly avoiding spraying the burning fluid out her nostrils, eyes watering.  Nova Tears, sixty seven percent ethanol, floral flavoring and Terran lime sugar the expanded report read. Jocasta took another, much more cautious sip. If there were flowers and limes in there they were obliterated by the alcohol burn.

 

Setting the mug of fiery liquor down she turned her back on the bathing area and unzipped her shipsuit, kicking off the soft boots as she did so. With a gymnasts efficiency she pulled the garment down around her hips and kicked it into a corner. Beneath the one piece suit she was nude and even from the back it was clear she wasn’t heavily muscled. Union intelligence was of the opinion that if a spy needed brawn they were a pretty poor spy. The same dictum kept her unmarked by permanent tattoos, though she had experimented with various temporary body art may times. Jocasta’s enhancements were more in the nature of protective coloration, a soft, svelt figure with a slightly pinched waist and broad hips which tapered down to long legs. That very enhancement had allowed her to blend in as a burlesque dancer back in the rad wastes and was surprisingly useful in a variety of settings. It wasn’t always an advantage, but it was usually possible to disguise to some degree with loose clothing when that was the case. Biohackers had a variety of glandular drugs that one could use to provide a sudden burst of strength and power, but all of them had significant side effects and Jocasta was of the mindset that, just this once, Union Intelligence might have been onto something. There was another buzz of wings and when she turned to face the tub a pair of drones were gripping each end of a towel so it draped artfully before her breasts, another a smaller wash cloth spread to preserve the rest of her modesty. The effect was curiously reminiscent of the way certain holodramas used contrived photography to avoid full frontal nudity. She padded casually across the suite and climbed up into the bath, the drones keeping station as she did so. As her hips sank below the water line the dragonfly that had been holding the smaller wash cloth let it fall and worked itself into a bottle of soap with the tenacity of a carpenter bee. It emerged a moment later, covered in a slick layer of detergent. It flicked its wings and dived into the tub, whirring furiously as it whipped up a froth of bubbles a moment before Jocasta’s breasts sank into the water. With the bubbles taking the place of their concealment,  the other two hauled away the towel and zipped across the room to retrieve her mug while the third device preened and clicked, shaking off the last of the soap before spreading its wings and soaring back to its concealment on the ceiling.

“Ahhhammm,” Jocasta sighed happily, stretching out her arms to either side of her to grip the side of the tub and luxuriating in the foam of bubbles. Spacecraft were built with efficiency in mind, particularly small ones like the Grasshopper. The goal of any naval architect was to cram as much avionics, sensors, drives and comms system into a metal box as she could, and things like wet showers, much less baths were anathema. Jocasta had opened up a lot of space by replacing the crew with a combination of automation and Cygi, but had faced similar constraints when repurposing the space to suit her needs. The simple sonic shower technically kept you clean, but it never quite gave you the feeling of clean the way water did.

“My last job,” she mused, taking her cup from the two dragonfly drones that carried it across to her without looking in their direction.

“There was this guy on Bartle’ Star, you know Bartle?” she asked. Dirk, who had not moved during her admittedly theatrical entrance, shook his armored head. He was… beyond fit looking, either the result of a punishing exercise regime or as a side effect of living in however many pounds of armor most of the time. Probably both. She felt suddenly hungry but ignored the sensation.

“Well they grow big genetically engineered bison out there, continent wide grazing runs,” she explained. Bartle’s Star had been terraformed in the first few centuries of human expansion and seeded with a monocrop, self sowing grain. The company operating the place had dotted it with huge automated harvesters the size of super tankers that crawled across the surface on treads. Over the years the crop had become so polyploid that its DNA had warped to incorporate nonstandard nucleotides, making it inedible to humans. Worse still the mutant strain had been so aggressive that it had not only wiped out the edible kinds within a century, but it out competed ever attempt to reseed it, all the way up to orbital sterilization. Their profitable breadbasket and expensive tech destroyed, the big agricombine had pulled out and abandoned the place, leaving nothing but flowing fields of mutant wheat and rusting superharvesters. It had mostly been ignored after that, save as the occasional haven for pirates and scavengers, until colonists from the Salines had come along with their bison, bison which could digest the grain without issue. Within two generations the protein rush had made Bartle a rich world, though due religious nature of its founders, a close and repressive one. The Four Churches, essentially the big families, had closed it off to outside immigration and ruthlessly controlled its wealth. Decadence begin decadence however, they found the need to bring in foreign laborers to do some of the actual work, particularly the slaughtering of animals, which was looked down on as an impure task.

 

“One of the ranch hands, a slaughterman actually, got several of the local nob’s daughters in the family way,” Jocasta explained, gesturing to her own flat stomach with her free hand to emphasize the point.

 

“The randy bastard managed to impregnate three girls who he shouldn’t have even been permitted to look at,” she continued. Women on Bartle’s Star were normally veiled in gauzy white fabric when in public, though there was a degree of freedom in the family unit.

“When he realized his impending paternity he skipped the planet on the first freighter dumb enough to take him.” In fact he had lied to the captain to get aboard, no commercial captain would risk jeopardizing his relationship with the beef barons by harboring a fugitive.

 

“The Four Churches clubbed together to hire me to bring him back. It seemed like good money for an easy job…” Jocasta continued. By now the bubbles around her chest were beginning to thin, and one of the dragonfly drones dived into the water with a plop and a whir to replenish it.

“But?” Dirk prompted. Jocasta sighed and took another sip of her drink. To her surprise it seemed to be improving with time and she could taste the slight hint of lime at the back of her mouth. Maybe there was something to Nova Tears afterall. She swished the liquor around a little experimentally and then swallowed.

 

“The stupid bastard had gotten himself thrown in an asteroid prison on Camden,” she sighed.

“I had to bust him out before I took him back. He was really grateful until he figured out that I was taking him back to Bartle’s Sun, at which point he begged me to take him back to prison. Yap yap yap yap yap.”

 

“What did they do to him?” Dirk asked, though it was clear from his tone if the answer was ‘they threw him into a black hole’ he wouldn’t have much cared. Bounty Hunting wasn’t a business that engendered a lot of sympathy on the part of marks. Most people that got a bounty put out on them had done something to deserve it and if not, well it wasn’t really up to the plumber to have a moral position on running water.

"They made an honest man outt'nim," she drawled in her best Bartles' accent.
 

“They gave him the choice of marrying the girls or having his fun bits removed with a slaughter knife. Seems like an easy choice, but one never knows when it comes to men,” she snickered.