In the Arms of Lachiga: Stories

El Mirador

The first story in the collection, “El Mirador,” is one I wrote specifically for submitting to an augmented-reality themed anthology put together by science fiction novelist Thomas K. Carpenter. It pays homage to a number of stories, songs, ideas, and aesthetics that have inspired my work over the years: the Niven habitat, most obviously, which I first encountered through the enormously popular Halo video game franchise; Cormac McCarthy’s sparse, darkly beautiful fiction; various filmmakers, from the Spaghetti-Western era to Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved animation to the eclectic work of Quentin Tarantino; heck, even Journey’s classic-rock hit “Wheel in the Sky,” which for me always evokes the image of Larry Niven’s strange but ingenious ringworld concept whenever I hear it. This story was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing—I hope you have fun reading it, too.

El Mirador

You wake to find yourself in a cramped, foul-smelling capsule spacious enough for one. After coughing up congealed phlegm and bronchial surfactant, you stretch your arms and legs, roll your neck, and glimpse the artificial world beyond the escape pod’s porthole.

The Niven habitat El Mirador stretches out before you: a pearlescent band filled with verdant earth and vast oceans, its distant pinnacle arcing sunward to the point of near-invisibility.

A ping flashes in the corner of your eye; then highlights your destination, and marks it with real-time ETA and proximity data.

Two blinks, in rapid succession.

The pupil-centric indicator in your field of vision hovers to CONTINUE ON PRESENT VECTOR, and winks green.

You rub the coarse sleep from your eyes, and wonder just how long it’s been since you were put into cryo. Has it really been twelve years? Thirteen? Does the mission still stand, after all this wakeless time?

Pulling up the contract shows it was last synced with Astralum Corporation’s database just over a month ago.

Valid. Incomplete.

You’re still their dog, still on the hunt.

Just a highly intelligent, highly dangerous animal, as far as the suits on Earth and the inner colonies are concerned. The Lagrange points, they probably snicker from a coward’s safe distance, befit an engineered killing machine like you.

All that wild emptiness.

The megastructure outside the pod draws nearer, but no red fireball licks at the pod. Not yet.

You catch sight of the flaring solar mirrors that regulate temperature and sunlight. The telescopes and laser comm relays that speckle the vacuum all about the station like a swarm of winged insects, each pointing toward its own assigned in-system colony.

Memories come flooding back like the vague recurrence of some long-forgotten dream.

A name: Tzitzi.

Something about irony, flowers and a dead language on some plague-ravaged precolonial continent. Life prior to that of the mercenary huntress. Prior to purpose.

Untold debt, still waiting to be paid. Ah, you think. That’s what this bounty was all about, yeah. Getting that shit paid off so I can buy my freedom. Clear my fugitive status, maybe even have fifty or sixty thousand credits leftover.

Except that you know this one gig won’t be enough. There will have to be more. You might go to sleep for months, or years, but debtorship doesn’t ever freeze. It just expands.

You think, Someday.

Inside the ring’s atmosphere, now—beneath the kilometers-high outer walls. A glow of rushing heat and fire. The rattle of air resistance.