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Jadanth - Ferris Fields Spaceport - "Waiting in Line"

Not for the first time that morning Jadanth silently cursed the humans at the data centre. He'd been standing in line for nearly two hours now, long enough by the standards of the general population of humanity that lived on Ferris Fields, but for a Salarian like Jadanth it felt like an eternity. Why was everyone so slow in dealing with anything? They seemed to thrive on bureaucratic nonsense and be adept in the creation of ever more convoluted ways to make it harder to get the job done.

Jadanth was not a human, he was a Salarian. At two metres high he was tall compared to most humans but still only average height for a Salarian. His build was slight and his skin a light grey that faded to a darker brown as it reached the top of his horned head and three fingered hands. It wasn't entirely without foundation that the humans compared the Salarians to "the greys" of their pre-FTL history. The most striking feature, however, was his eyes - over three times larger than a humans, black and entirely featureless. Salarians could outstare any human, usually while contemplating several other things and trying not to get bored with the entire process.

The data-centre had all looked promising when he'd first arrived - the system looked efficient and people were queuing, waiting in what he'd supposed was an orderly fashion. But half an hour later he was still waiting as people seemed determined to argue about utterly irrelevant subjects rather than the data-service requests this place was meant to be for. Then when his ticket number had approached the service counter display had conspicuously skipped his number and moved on past it. And kept going up and up.

He'd complained twice now, the surly staff had told him to go back in line and wait.

The LED banner above the service desk finally flashed his ticket number and Jadanth headed for the desk and pulled up a spinning globe of data-time projections for his request from his Omni-tool.

"I would like, finally, to request a 2000 cycle time slot of the data-centre to process my off-world link parameters, the full details of this..."

The human behind the desk cut him short.

"Been a mistake pal, your number came up by mistake. Get back in line."

Jadanth's mind quickly assessed all the responses, looking over the man's face he could see that his time here was going to be an utter waste. There was no way he was getting at time at this data centre. He stared unblinking at the man with his large dark eyes, calming himself by calculating just how large an explosion might be needed to propel him out of his desk and through the data centres window.

"I see. I shall return to the queue then."

Jadanth walked out of the data centre.

He'd been at the spaceport for nearly five days now, tracking down various pieces of information for a client who had interests here. A delivery of ship thrusters had gone mysteriously missing from a consignment that had been delivered over twenty days ago and the client hadn't had any luck finding where it had gone, so he'd hired Jadanth to locate who and where exactly they had gone. Three million in ship parts, it was an expensive loss.

But the people at Ferris Fields had been far from helpful. Most of the humans seemed very reluctant to help him with his requests and thus far he'd not made that much progress. He knew he could use the data-centres massive processing power to cross reference movements for the parts and give him a likely delivery station to the port, but getting the time for it was not going to happen.

Outside the data centre people wandered past, most just ignored him. There were few non-humans around, the whole planet gave Jadanth the feeling that he was being watched however.

Around the side of the data-centre a large hover-van pulled up, two men began to unload boxes into a service entrance.

Jadanth allowed himself a small smile. There was more than one way to get time on their servers.

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