Tales From the EQ

Her hair glistened in the early afternoon sun as the warm breeze whipped it around her face.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her, so in that respect I suppose it was a shame I had to kill her, not that the bitch didn’t have it coming.

A few months ago she’d been nothing more than a small-time arms dealer operating out of the Easter Quadrant. She’d got some serious coin behind her though and got herself involved in a much more severe, and much more illegal, operation. She was smuggling humans.

As she sat there, sipping politely from a cup of something outside one of the trendier cafés New Paris had to offer, she reached to her purse and pulled out a carton of cigarettes. Now I’ve always had a thing for chicks who smoke, but fuck me when this girl put a cigarette to her lips I swear my heart stopped beating.

Her skin was a deep emerald green and her hair a fiery red, such was the norm in the Easter Quadrant. The vast majority of citizens in the EQ were of an alien race known as the Xax and by their standards, she was a dog.

You’re wondering how hot the rest of the Xax chicks are, right? Trust me, you couldn’t handle it!

I checked my side-arm and slowly began to make my approach. Now one other thing I should probably mention about the Xax is that their sense of smell was pretty damn sensitive, I mean they could smell a fart in a sewage plant, and I cursed to myself as she glanced around at me. I’d been careful don’t get me wrong. I was upwind and almost two hundred feet away yet still, apparently not careful enough.

From out of nowhere she pulled a plasma shotgun on me and I dove for cover. The range on those things was fucking ridiculous, and she managed to skim the heel of my boot as I scrambled. By the time I got back to my feet she was gone, nowhere to be seen. Two months of tracking and planning wasted.

Fuck.