“Wait, what was that? Go back.”

The operator pressed a finger to his console and traced a counterclockwise circle on the digital dial.

“There, yeah, stop.”

“Sir?”

“Shit, Frank, we’ve been at this post for three weeks. Eric is fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

Eric closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What is that?” he asked when he looked back up at the frozen feed on the holo display. He lifted his arm and pointed, his hand interrupting some of the volumetric image projected into the air from below.

Frank worked the console again, tapping at the controls he configured the first day they settled into the tight second floor room that was masquerading as a surveillance post. The picture zoomed in around Eric’s finger, becoming grainier as it expanded.

“It’s a light source, sir. The way the colors are shifting, I’d guess a sign or an awning.” Frank scrubbed the feed timeline forward and back—pinks, yellows, oranges, and greens bathed the walls of the alleyway the camera was tucked into. He tapped a few more commands out and the image changed to a new, much higher view.

“Adjacent street,” Frank said. “It’s not one of ours.”

Eric grunted. “Nice job, kid.”

“Looks like a bar and not a busy one, either.” Frank added, remarking at the lack of foot traffic on the claustrophobic side street. He confined the feed they were looking at into a small square pane and recalled the alleyway in a separate one. Then, he tiled both next to each other, synchronized their times, and played them forward. They watched as the colors in the alleyway changed in sync with the gaudy light show exploding off the face of the tiki bar.

Eric rubbed this chin, tracing the shallow groove of a scar with his fingertips. “Okay, I’m going for a walk. Keep an eye on the place and let me know if you see anything unusual.”

“Like that?” Frank angled his head towards the holo and raised an eyebrow.

A woman spilled out of the bar in a blue silk kimono that shimmered in concert with the facade. It was decorated with a pink cherry blossom print and its left sleeve was ripped to the shoulder. She glided away from the entrance, keeping her weight on her toes through long, deliberate steps. Her left arm was out in front of her—palm facing forward, fingers together. The other was hidden behind her back.

A massive figure emerged from the interior, ducking his head to clear the threshold. His shoulders, biceps, and even his forearms were at least as big as his head. He was so broad, it was a surprise he fit through the doorframe without having to turn sideways—almost like eyeballing a perfect measurement. He stalked towards the woman, raising his arms as he closed the distance on thick, powerful legs.

“What the f—”

It was over before Eric could finish his thought. The woman sidestepped the lunge, spun to her attacker’s flank in a flurry of fabric, and leapt into the air. Her knee connected with his lower back on the way up and, when his upper body arched back in response, she bashed him on the head with a shock stick. The man toppled in a heap as every muscle in his body seized. The woman met the ground with far more grace, seeming to slow down as she descended. After, she flourished the weapon with a spin, collapsed it against her thigh, and tucked it behind her back into the kimono’s obi. She bowed over the fallen man, turned towards the bar entrance for a moment, and then walked off.

Frank looked over his shoulder to confirm the long hours weren’t causing him to hallucinate but found the only thing keeping him company was the whine of the holo’s projection array.

Eric took the staircase in two leaps and slipped through the opening just as the door on the ground level started sliding open. He broke into a full sprint and tore down the street towards the bar, following the colorful navigation line superimposed on the ground via his ocular display’s HUD. He glanced at the ETA floating perfectly still in his periphery every few seconds. Eric wasn’t young anymore but his military grade enhancements still worked just as well as they did when he was. It meant, among other things, that he could run a mile in three minutes flat if he needed to. He felt the individual beats of his heart as he weaved through a crowd of what felt like stationary people. Stale, recycled air pressed against him as he surged forward.

Eric peeled off the busy adjacent street and appeared on Frank’s video feed just under two and a half minutes later. As he slowed to a stop, a cocktail of synthetic hormones flooded into his bloodstream via his endocrine implant, leveling out his blood pressure and, mercifully, preventing his heart from leaping out of his chest. Despite the effort, there was a skimmer already bent over the body.

“Ho, man, like lightnin’ you was!” The startled kid jumped up, dropping something to the ground as his arms shot up. He looked Eric up and down, assessing him.

Eric bent down and checked the big man for a pulse. His ocular had already tagged him with a ninety-seven percent mortality chance but he wanted to be certain. A few seconds later, the number ticked up to one hundred and then faded from his vision.

“You see what happened here?” Eric asked, acknowledging the skimmer kid.

“Me? Naw? Juss makin’ due now, y’know?” The kid started toward the body again but Eric shook his head, freezing the emaciated youth in place.

“How’d you get here so fast?”

The boy didn’t say anything but the fight or flight response in his body language was so obvious Eric didn’t even have to read it.

“You won’t be able to outrun me and I don’t have enough chems left to tamp down my adrenaline when I catch you. Might be the wrong kind of night for you, if so. Or maybe I make a call and you spend the night in a cage?”

“Aye, aye, don’t call no police! I’m keen!”

“Bad luck. I am the police.”

The kid’s gaunt face elongated as his jaw hung. “Local law? Moving like that?” There was a touch of awe in his voice.

“You scan him already?”

“Yeh,” he replied under his breath.

“Fuckin’ vultures. Alright, get outta here.”

The kid scampered off without hesitation, holding the small terminal that was slung over his shoulder in one hand to keep it from flopping about. Eric turned around, searching for the source of the feed he was just watching with Frank. He squinted and the shadows brightened, revealing more detail as his eyes adjusted contrast, white balance, and exposure for him. When he spotted it, he waved at the broken streetlight the cam was attached to.

“What the hell are you?” Frank’s voice crackled in his ear.

“Just a washed up cop. You track down our kunoichi?” Eric asked, but Frank didn’t reply. “Let me guess. She disappeared.”

“I… I checked every feed—nothing. I mean that, not a damn thing. Once she moved out of range of this one, she was gone. Like she didn’t exist.”

Eric sighed but it wasn’t the confused, ponderous type. It was the exasperated, understanding kind.

“Am I missing something?” Frank asked.

“This wasn’t a bar fight; it was an assassination.”

“But why the pizzazz?”

Eric held both arms out wide and looked from side to side before returning his gaze to the streetlight.

“Okay, to make a statement,” Frank said, answering his own question. “That’s a different level of criminal.”

“Way above your pay grade. Tell me about the body.”

“Dock worker. Looks like he’s repair detail, patching commercial transports for a small shop. Explains the body mods, at least. Loose affiliation with some shady characters. Hold on, gimme a few.”

Eric pulled out his slab in the meantime—a utilitarian model with just one rectangular pressure sensitive physical button and a small rotary knob next to it at the very bottom. He rotated the knob back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, watching the video feed his ocular projected onto the empty area above the slab’s controls. He mashed at the lone button as he cut the fight footage out of Frank’s feed. Then, he glanced at the body to capture a few stills before bundling everything up with the background info Frank just pulled. When that was done, he drafted a message, watching the words appear, disappear, and rearrange on the slab as he collected his thoughts in real time.

“He was part of a job last night. Looks… unofficial. They’re on a few feeds—small group. Some barge that belongs to… Rising Sun Shipping Partners Ltd. If that’s not a front then I don’t know how to spot one. Registration and transponder on the ship are keen but the company has no employees. No financials or any public records, either. Looks like a proper rabbit hole. Maybe if I—”

“Shimizu Kato,” Eric muttered which caused Frank to swallow his words. Appropriate reaction, Eric thought as he sighed a second time. He looked back down at his slab, reread the report, and sent it off before stashing it in his jacket’s inside pocket.

“You going to talk to the patrons?” Frank asked. His voice was smaller, less confident.

Eric craned his neck and the volume of the world around him went up. A moment later, all sound muted in every direction except for the bar; he listened as the lyrics seeped out from its entrance.

…thought you said you loved me, needed me, wanted to be with me, would split the seas for me…

He smirked—moody electro-jazz in a tiki bar visited by an assassin in Old Earth Japanese attire on a rest stop station two days out from Mars. It didn’t add up to him but it was obvious each part of the equation equaled something to somebody. Every element staged, like a play.

“No, we’re done here. You can start tearing down the post, grab anything you need to hold onto. Start thinking about what you want to do next, kid.”

“I don’t… what’s going on?”

“I sent the report upstream. They’ll send official word that we’re shut down tomorrow, maybe the day after. You’ll get a decent severance and be told you’ve been made redundant. Congratulations, you’re a witness to something that never happened. Don’t ask questions when they have you sign the extra NDA.”

Frank made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a yelp.

“It’s okay, you’ll be fine. Got skills, too—should take them private. You’ll get paid a lot more and can avoid the corruption, if that sort of thing matters to you.”

Eric started walking away, following the steps of their disappearing woman.

“What about you?”

“You’ll never see me again,” he replied, just as he moved out of view on Frank’s feed.

Frank cycled to the adjacent street but Eric wasn’t visible amongst the crowd. The deja vu chiseled creases into his forehead. He queried the personnel database to retrieve Eric’s service profile but it returned a “not found” error. Frank sprang up and gathered his things; his hands trembled for reasons he didn’t understand.

Eric pulled the folded paper he palmed from the body out of his pocket. He turned it with his fingers, feeling the texture and marveling at the audacity that it might have been produced from real wood. The origami shape was made with care and precision; each fold was scored in advance and none were misaligned. He wondered how much they offered to pay the skimmer kid to plant it and whether he was still alive. Eric pulled at the paper, breaking down the scorpion and revealing the note inside. The message was coded—indecipherable to him—but he knew the seal at the end. He folded the small sheet in half and then in half again before returning it to his pocket.

Eric sighed for a third time as he melted into the crowd.