Jocasta pondered the question. Bounty hunting wasn't a trade for those that were particularly squeamish, the types of people who could afford to have their enemies hunted down were rarely pleasant. There were various ways of justifying the work, few of them satisifying in the long term.

"To be honest," Jocasta admitted, "you aren't normally the kind of target I go after. It just so happened that I stumbled across you in the Soak Stack."

"I just happened to be in town when my actual target got hit by a ground car, just bad luck I stumbled across you. I have no idea what you might have done to get such a huge bounty put on you, but I have a ship to run, Cygi to keep in computing power, all that."

"Also you don't know you are going to be executed. No one pays 5.4 millions to have someone brought in alive if they are just going to kill them. It'd be way cheaper to have me shoot you and take a gene sample."