Cassandra: There's always someone who'll spoil your day

Who: Cassandra
Where: Cafe René, the promenade
When: Around three or four hours after Seymour woke up
Lounging in one of the chairs around the small tables in the front of the little cafe on the upper promenade drag, Cass smiled thanks at the waitress as her wine was delivered, and after a moment idly plucked the glass from the table to gaze silently into its ruby lit depths, the ghost of a smile playing across her lips as she dwelt upon her recent successes
Everything had gone perfectly; she had stowed a lift back to the 'Dwarf on one of the fleet of beer transport tankers plying their steady route back and forth between Fourth Base and Blue Dwarf, and had engaged the slave system, masking her presence from the security monitors, and then made her way directly to Seymour's apartments.
With the Ambassador safely out of the way sleeping off his double dose of HexoPro'Meth, it had been a simple enough task to gain access to his suite and steal the Fallen Madonna, even in spite of the numerous additional security measures that Seymour had installed around the place; the alarms and force fields had all been expected and easily deactivated, but the punji spikes and poison darts had provided an entertaining diversion, and in all honesty would have likely given Cass a bit of a headache had it not been for the fact that Seymour, with his anally retentive attention to detail, had actually logged the plans for his security systems with central security
Allowing herself a sly smile at the ridiculousness of the man, Cass savoured a sip of her wine and relaxed back into her chair to gaze out over the balustrade of the promenade and watch the milling crowds drifting past on the level beneath her
It had been years since Cass had felt as good as this, buoyed up as she was by her heavily edited personality, the successful robbery, and the technical and scientific breakthrough that she had engineered to actually hide the Fallen Madonna; it had taken no small amount of genius to achieve what she had with the hiding place, and she was quietly pleased at what, by her own estimation, could easily shape up to be a something revolutionary with a bit more work
As she had expected, the Fallen Madonna had been tagged with a microscopic location transponder that Cass had removed, cloned, and scattered the copies around the ship, taking a circuitous route around a couple of the sleazier gay bars, the sewage reprocessing plants, garbage pods, and even the arboretum to name but a few places, finally winding up on the promenade where she had decided to allow herself a break and a celebratory drink
Taking another gulp of her wine, Cass briefly considered the idea of a life of crime as a possible future career; did cat burglars feel as elated as she currently did after they pulled each job off?
The feeling could easily get very addictive, especially when there was all the money to consider too...
Draining her glass Cass reached forward, picking the bottle up to refill her glass, but stopped, bottle halfway tipped when she spotted the unwelcome sight of Mr. Butler making his way down the promenade towards where she sat
Trying not to panic unduly, she put the bottle back down on the table as calmly as she could and sank back into her chair, hoping against the odds that he hadn't spotted her; it wasn't so much that the man worked for Le Souteneur - or at least *had* until their erstwhile boss had recently disappeared, it was more that he represented a link with a previous life that she hadn't realised she had recently moved so far away from, and now served with a reminder, she found herself instinctively recoiling away from the memories; she was Cassandra Jones the genius art thief right now, and not some poverty stricken stripper shamefacedly struggling to make ends meet by getting her bits out for perverts and drunkards
Sinking even lower into her chair Cass quickly snatched the menu from the table and tried to conceal her face by taking an intense interest in its contents
'Please don't come over please don't come over please don't come over... Oh, that salad looks good...'
Butler came to a stop next to her table and cleared his throat. A sideways glance at his grim countenance told Cass that this wasn't going to be good
"Le Souteneur" he rumbled "insists you attend him Ma'am. Now"
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