I fell to the ground convulsing, my nerves on fire.
Nguyen’s voice mocked. “As I was saying, take your little monkey of a partner for instance. He sure tries hard. You might be able to teach him a few tricks, but he’s just too dumb to think for himself.” She patted my head.
I couldn’t move. The air reeked of burned flesh and my own shit.
She straightened up. “We must be going, Paul Chang. I trust we won’t be hearing from the two of you again.”
“…s’okay Juno, you’re gonna be okay. I’ll get you to a doc…”
“…might hurt. I just have to pull you up into the car. On three, okay? One…two…three…”
“…almost there, Juno. Stay with me, okay? You have to…”
“…palm is burned pretty badly. We’ll have to graft some skin…”
“Hey, Juno. You awake?”
Everything was blurred, white walls, white sheets. Paul’s smile came into focus. “Paul?”
“Yeah, Juno. It’s me. Doctors say you’re going to be fine. How do you feel?”
“How long?”
“Three days.”
“Nguyen?”
“Gone, she’s gone…best I can tell, the shipment of O is gone, too. We have nothing on her except maybe assaulting an officer. No evidence, though. It’s just our word. A cop’s word is normally good enough, but not with her money. There’s no way we could make it stick. She’s offplanet now anyway.”
“What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember going for that bitch’s throat.”
“Shit, that temper of yours is going to get you killed one of these days. She was rigged, micro wires under her skin. She electrocuted you when you touched her.”
“Wires under her skin?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“You have the scars to prove it.”
“What can we do against these people?”
“I think we’ve been going about this the wrong way.” His trademark smile was gone.
MARCH 19, 2762
“The doctors clear you yet?”
I flexed my right hand. “They say I can start in two days.”
Paul beamed. His smile was infectious. “That’s great, Juno! It’s been tough working alone.”
“It’s only been two weeks.”
We sat at the counter of a fish bar near the pier. I was careful to sit on the edge of the stool. They’d grafted a piece of skin from my thigh to my hand. I’d already opened the thigh wound once when I’d sat too hard, and I didn’t want to bloody another pair of pants. I forked through the bowl of fish and noodles. Chopsticks were too hard to control-left arm in a cast, right hand too stiff from the skin grafts.
Paul finished his bowl. “Are you ready for me to fill you in yet?”
“Sure.”
“I IDed the local that sold the O to Nguyen. His name’s Pavel Yashin.”
“How’d you find him?”
“I thought the guy looked at least forty. I figured that if he’s dealing at age forty, he must have a record. Nobody goes that long without getting picked up for something, right? I pulled the records on all offenders aged over thirty-five.”
“You looked at mugs?”
“Yeah, but most of the mugs were too old. I didn’t think I could pick him out of a lineup when he was twenty years younger, so I called up to the Orbital and had them pull all their current phone records and beam down their holos. I didn’t have to go through more than a few dozen before I recognized him.”
“What do you have on him so far?”
“Nothing. I’ve been waiting for you to get better.”
I hurried the last few bites. “Let’s go.”
“I thought you had to wait two more days.”
“I won’t do anything strenuous. Let’s go.”
Pavel Yashin lived in an upscale neighborhood, in a house that was large by Lagartan standards, two stories with an attached garage. We hid in a nearby alley and waited for him to show himself. Mosquitoes sucked our blood for a full hour before the garage door opened and a car pulled out. We leaned back into the foliage as the car passed, our balding local at the wheel.
Paul went over the outer wall. With me unable to give him a boost, he had to climb my body like a ladder to get to the top. I kept lookout while Paul put six of our stolen cameras in place. These weren’t as sophisticated as the flycam we’d lost to Mai Nguyen. These were stationary but next to impossible to detect. All you had to do was stick one to a window, like a piece of rubber cement. It dried clear so you could only see it if you knew to look for it. As long as Pavel Yashin didn’t have the same tech as Nguyen and her heavies, we’d be able to spy in as long as we wanted. More offworld magic, thanks to our offworld bodyguard friend.
Six cameras: living room, kitchen, dining room, office, and two upstairs bedrooms. The cameras had a limited broadcast range, so we found somebody in Yashin’s neighborhood to rent us a room with a private entrance. The cameras’ audio feed was excellent, even the kitchen’s drippy faucet came through, but the 2-D image was seriously low quality. No depth to the picture and no ability to rotate your viewing perspective around the room. Wouldn’t matter, the important thing was stealth, not quality. The monitor had buttons labeled A through F, that you could use to cycle through the six cameras.
We flipped through all the cameras: nobody home. We left it on the kitchen: button D. Paul turned off the recorder.
I tilted my chair back. “I guess this could take a while.”
Paul looked apprehensive.
“What is it, Paul?”
“Do you like being a cop?”
I held up my cast. “Some days better than others.”
“You ever wonder what we accomplish?”
“What do you mean?”
“We bust all these pimps, hookers, and pushers and what does it ever accomplish? As soon as we lock one up, there’s another one ready to take their place. What’s the point?”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Lagarto is always going to be poor, Juno. The pols are always telling us times will get better, but you know they won’t. Our currency is worthless. You saw it yourself. It takes so much of our money to be worth anything that you can’t count it all. Yashin had to weigh it; you understand that? We don’t even deal in single pesos anymore. Our smallest denomination is a hundred. Offworld money isn’t like that. Pols say it’s just a trade ‘imbalance.’ No fucking kidding. We have nothing to trade. We export a few illegal drugs to the Orbital and the mines, maybe a little food. That’s it. We get a few tourists coming down here looking for a good time, but half of them are too afraid to leave their hotels. We can’t make anything that offworlders can’t make for themselves faster and cheaper. Their tech is centuries ahead of ours, I mean centuries. We’re using fossil fuels for god’s sake. What does that tell you?”
I knew he was right, but I spewed the same shit the pols did just to piss him off. “That’s where you’re wrong. We keep whining that offworlders have all this tech we can’t afford. We don’t have to buy it; we can build it ourselves. All the information we need is on the nets.”
Paul was heating up. “What the hell have we done with the information we have? Nobody even understands it.”
I tried to keep a straight face as I egged him on. “That’s why they’re starting to teach tech in schools. Those kids are whizzes. We’ll catch up in a few years.”
“Jesus, Juno, you know most kids can’t afford to go to school. You know that better than anyone. School is worthless anyway. When I got my degree, they taught us all kinds of useless tech shit like how an antimatter drive works. You see an antimatter store around here? What the hell good does it do to know how antimatter works when we don’t have any?”
I toed the optimist’s line a little longer. “So what if we don’t have the resources of other planets. We just need to make a few products that we can export. Then we can import all that other stuff in.”
“That’s just it,” he said excitedly. “We can’t even do that. Any information on the nets is years old by the time we get it. They can’t transmit any faster than the speed of light, so whatever information we get is already out of date by ten years or more. So say we take a year to learn to build whatever it is that you think we can export. That’s eleven years already, then we have to ship it fourteen years back to Earth. You think they want a twenty-five-year-old product? It’d be worthless.”