Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

He doesn’t see me coming: hardly a surprise. Who expects a random victim chosen from a crowd leaving a club to have a bodyguard?
I punch him in the side of the head to get him away from the target, then kick him in the ribs to pre-empt any arguments he might make. Bones break. He staggers off. These streets will be safe from him for a while.
Crouching down by the woman he was terrorising, I smile. Hopefully reassuring, but possibly not. I’m not up on the niceties of social interaction for this world.
“Who are you?”
“Just a passerby who dislikes those who prey on innocents.”
She looks over my militaristic attire, then grins.
“The police might call that ‘going prepared’, you know.”
Oh, I know.
“It’s not the police I’m prepared for. Anyway, you’re safe and I’m not, so this is where we part ways. I have a principal to look after, and I’m late meeting her.”
Always drop a clue.
Before she can follow up on it, I leap up onto a wall, then onto a fire escape, and am on the roof and away in moments.
Activating camouflage and countermeasures, I scale an old building with lots of architectural features: gives me more places to hide. That done, I settle to wait. The alleyway is visible in the middle distance. I grin. Start the clock…
Eight minutes to first contact: two police officers accompanying the woman. I see her pantomiming my exit while pointing up at the building I scaled. They’re reporting in. Here we go.
Twenty minutes more until plainclothes officers, presumably police, arrive. The woman is interviewed again, then escorted away by the uniformed officers.
Thirty minutes after, a lone operative in a suit arrives and talks to the plainclothes officers. They depart together. I bet they’re having a thrilling conversation involving more guesswork than any of them are happy about.
It’s barely a half-hour before dawn when the main show begins. A pinnace with visibility suppression and more sensors than this world could ever dream of parks itself above the scene of the attack. From that effortlessly hovering baby warship a six-being team drops onto the dirty pavement. With the smooth precision of an often-practised routine, they check the area for traces of me, confirm it, search the near range, then pack it up. I watch them. Looks like Dogan is off duty tonight, and they’ve got a new member. He’s about the same size, but not as graceful.
With the team rising towards their ship, the petite lead agent looks about the scene one final time. As she rises, she taps two fingers against her neck.
Love you too. Stay safe.
The pinnace takes off. Wait for it…
It returns from a different direction a few minutes later, lingers for a moment, then departs at speed.
Give them a couple of days to get thoroughly engrossed in trying to find my principal and I’ll take one of the regular stealth flights out of here.
It’s been seven years since Carrie and I parted ways. The Hegemony don’t know what she looks like, but they know me. So they track what they know, reasoning she’ll always be nearby. What they don’t know is she’s been part of their ranks since creche. Her parents were brilliant like that. Body doubled from birth, while enrolling her as an orphan recruit.
Now the heiress the Hegemony wants dead leads the hunt for herself. One day we’ll meet and talk again. Until then – two fingers to the neck, checking for a pulse: still alive.