In the Arms of Lachiga: Stories

In the Arms of Lachiga

In the Arms of Lachiga

Two figures emerged from the shadows, and I knew the night was far from over.

Moonlight filtering in through the skylights of my apartment glinted off the ruby monocles secured to their masks. No doubt by now their sonar lenses had revealed to them my concealed Xing-Barron .45, a felony, as well as the amount of high-end tech scattered throughout my trashed living room. My implant would tell them everything they needed to know, right down to my blood type and server number. An endless stream of sensitive information with which to identify and blackmail me.

I froze, arms raised in surrender. There were only two of them, but two would be more than enough.

They’d trailed me here, I knew, all the way from the old city. Why else would they have suspected me? Shadowplay didn’t perform door-to-door audits. It was no game.

“I’m a mod,” I said. It came out as a harsh, quavering whisper.

As if my job mattered to them. I was screwed. They had me for possession, for one—not to mention the countless illegal apps on my drives, should they choose to search them.

“We know what you are,” the one closest to me said. A hand reached out through the dimness and seized my throat.

Choking amid silence, I fought to pry the gloved fingers loose.

The agent tightened his grasp and then hurled me onto the couch. I resisted the urge to reach for my pistol, knowing I had little chance of success. I’d be dead before my finger even twitched.

The second operative, a woman, came at my flank. She held me down with an outstretched arm, and rammed a hypodermic injector into my shoulder.

The neurotoxin struck me like a bolt of white-hot lightning, and though my body tried to shiver at the flood of tingling sensations that swept through my muscles, I remained completely still. Paralyzed.

“Dax Marquand?” the male agent asked. He came closer, presumably to get a better look at my face; the camera lens on his mask would relay my image back to HQ for verification. And then they could either bring me to justice—if such a thing existed—or dispose of me, wiping clean every trace.

I briefly considered lying, but said: “In the flesh.” A grunt, barely intelligible. But I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.

The man drew a wand and pressed it against my neck. One tap of the switch would fire a regulated pulse of electricity through my body, inflicting as much pain as could be dealt without causing me to black out.

“You wanna die in prison?” the agent holding the shockstick asked. “Because that thing under your arm is worth at least a life sentence, if anybody were to find out you ever used it. Just a single shot caught on camera…” He applied pressure to my airway. My vision blurred in a wash of white fuzz.

“It’s just a precautionary measure,” I stammered, finding comfort in the antiquated virtue of honesty. “I’ve never fired the thing.”

I heard the whooshing sound of the baton being raised, then felt it crack the top of my skull. Pain blossomed like an explosive headache and my eyesight flickered in the darkness. Bastard.

“Of course you haven’t. If you fired even a single shot, we’d know about it the second it happened. That’s not why we’re here.”

Was I supposed to feel relieved?

The woman who’d stuck me with the needle crossed to the light switch, which glowed upon being touched. The overhead lights cast their bluish illumination throughout the apartment.