"They are using some kind of crazy encryption," Jocasta observed, watching bands of signal traffic dance across her display. A twitch in her left eye poked and prodded at it for a moment before she gave up and beamed it to Cygi. Dirk grunted as he stepped across a hallway and swept right and left with his blasters.

"You cant break it?" he asked without interest.

"Not entirely sure its even a cipher per se, it might be a trade langague im not familiar with," Jocasta opined. Rather than attempting to unravel the meaning of the words, she set the algorthim to monitor the traffic volume, looping it back over the records she had made for the past hour or so as a baseline.

"This is more fun than I had bargined for on this vacation," the apparent old man chuckled, ducking into a side room with surprising speed and sweeping it with the tip of his cane as though it were a laser rifle, which as far as Jocasta could tell, it might be.

The door at the end of the hall burst open and a bearded man in an armored chest plate burst in. Both of Dirk's blasters punched him in the chest, a half second before Jocasta's C-beam and the capacitor lance in the old man's cane did. The armor sublimed cherry red, then white, then exploded hurling the man back through the doorway in a spray of shattered plasteel. The signal traffic spiked way up.

"Oh oh," Jocasta said a moment before a pair of grenades came sailing through the door.

"Bugger," the old man added. Dirk was characteristically silent. Jocasta stepped surreptiously behind Dirk a moment before both of the spinning bombs went off in a flash and a concussion that shattered the glass windows in a spray of airborne shards. A moment later a drone that had wormed its way through the vents flashed a warning about three men crouching in the stairwell poised to burst out. 

"Thanks alot," Jocasta muttered at the somewhat tardy drone. It bleeped abashedly as its camera watched the men storm into the hallway. Dirk had been stunned by the overpressure of the blast but he had clearly trained himself to work through it. Rather than standing there to be killed he charged forward, crashing into the would be assault team as they came through the door. Bodies went down in a clatter and Jocasta fired her C-beam on general principle. It hit a fire extinguisher which burst in an explosion of dust and burning propellant. Dirk grabbed one of the attackers and pitched him bodily back down the hall. Jocasta yellped and hurdled the flying body before it cracked into a door frame. The old man stepped out of the side room and stabbed the goon in the joint between helmet and breastplate with a subsonic sizzle. Jocasta tracked the melee infront of her with her pistol but couldn't get a clear shot. Dirk through an elbow that connected with one mans chin.

"Sorry!" she premptively appologised, then cranked a setting on her pistol and then opened fire, hosing Dirk and his attackers indiscriminitely. The blue white bolts richoted harmlessly off the armored figure by one of the thugs staggered backwards from a burn to an exposed arm. Dirk's boot caught him in the chest and slammed him into a wall so hard that the back of his head cracked against the wall and he slumped to the ground.