saplings offplanet, and soon after, all the settled planets began raising their own fruit. Why pay extra to import Lagartan brandy when the local variety was just as good? Especially when it took anywhere from five to thirty years to ship it in from Lagarto?
In fact, the brandy market had already been dead for twenty years by the time my great-grandparents landed. The plantation owners had sent message to Earth that they didn’t need any more labor, but even at light speed, it still took ten years for the message to reach Earth, and by the time it was received, my great- grandparents were already four years into their journey. When they finally made landfall, they found that all but a few of the sprawling plantations had already reverted to jungle, and all the great riverboats had been sealed up and left to rust.
My great-grandparents were taken to Tenttown, nothing more than a succession of slashed and burned fields upon which do-gooders raised tents for the twenty-four-year stream of immigrants that landed after the economic crash. No jobs, no homes, no medicine, no food-welcome to Lagarto.
Jimmy Bushong’s address was listed simply as “Tenttown.” A half hour’s worth of asking around my old stomping grounds and we located him at a canal party. It didn’t matter that it was still early afternoon. As soon as the sun went down in Tenttown, the youth came out for good times. I checked out the four-piece band cranking out the tunes. I scoped the sweated-up dancers, barefoot in the mud, their whites rolled up to the knee. I took it all in: buckets of shine with enough tin cups to go around, eye-straining strobe lights, mud-coated topless chicks speaking in tongues. My heart swelled with teenaged memories.
We led Jimmy away from the party, to the canal’s edge, which was coated with slippery-wet moss. Reptilian eyes reflected from the water below. Maggie was silent. I took the lead. “You serve under Lieutenant Dmitri Vlotsky?”
“That’s right.” Jimmy was dressed in his whites. His pants were rolled up, exposing mud-caked bare feet. His sleeves were rolled to the shoulder, showing off his Army tats. He had a boy’s face with Army-cut hair. His eyes had been replaced with metallic night-vision implants. He was sipping from a tin cup, drinking shine. My mouth watered.
“Where were you last night?” I asked.
Jimmy said, “Right here. Why?”
“Lieutenant Vlotsky was murdered last night.”
“Murdered? Shit, you serious? Can’t say I’m surprised, but shit, that’s fucked up.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You gonna tell anybody I talked to you?”
“No.”
“Know what? I don’t care if you do tell anybody. My two years is up next month, that’s right, next month. It ain’t worth it to ’em to send me back out on patrol, so I’ll be workin’ a desk while the rest of the Two-Nine is goin’ back to the jungle. Not me, man. I tell you, I’m through with that jungle shit. I can’t wait ’til they pop out these night vision eyes and give me back my biologicals. As long as they didn’t lose ’em like they lost my cousin’s. He had to wait almost a year for them to get a new set grown ‘n’ flown from the Orbital. Say, man, you guys’re cops, you think I got a chance of landin’ a job like that? I’m not talkin’ no detective shit. I know you gotta be smart for that. I’m talkin’ phones, filin’, you know, ’ministrative shit. I did some of that in basic before they sent me out on patrol with the Two-Nine. I was the best they seen in a long time. Sorry to see me go. That’s what they told me.”
I threw the kid a bone. “I can put in a good word. You look me up when they let you out. KOP can use a smart and honest guy like you.”
“You serious? Yeah, you’re serious. Ha, ha, what’s your name again?”
“Just ask for Juno.”
“Juno. Okay. Thanks, man.”
“Why weren’t you surprised about Vlotsky?”
“Yeah right, the lieutenant. We all wanted to kill that asshole. I didn’t sign up for the shit he put us through.”
“What did he do?”
“You see, we was workin’ out of a base upriver, you know, jungle duty. We’d spend two weeks doin’ maneuvers, then one week on the base. Now these maneuvers was fucked up. They’d give us a truck. Four walk in front, four in back. Two guys take turns drivin’.”
We didn’t have time for this. The mils would be here soon. “What about Lieutenant Vlotsky? We just need to know about Vlotsky.”
Jimmy sounded insulted. “Shit. I know, man. You want to know about the lieutenant, but you got to have some background in order to understand; you see what I’m sayin’? I ain’t goin’ to waste your time. You’re goin’ to want to hear this.”
“Sorry. You’re right, Jimmy. Go ahead.”
“Now, when the rest of us are doin’ maneuvers, Vlotsky takes a bedroll, ties it to the top of the truck, and sleeps. You believe that shit? I’m talkin’ all day. I don’t know how he does it-these roads are rough. I couldn’t sleep like that. The truck’d get stuck in the mud all the time. We’d be shovelin’ out, and Lieutenant Vlotsky’d be up their snoozin’ away. Only time you see him’s when it rains, then he sits in the cab.”
Maggie Orzo asked, “What’s the purpose of these maneuvers?”
His metal eyes swiveled inhumanly. “That’s the kicker, man; there is no purpose. We ride around all day lookin’ for this hill, that creek-shit like that. Shit, this ain’t no real war. If it was, we’d be invadin’ and shit, but they never give us those kinds of orders. We could wipe them out inside a year, I guarantee it. Shit, they ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of farmers.”
“They’re drug lords, Jimmy,” Maggie emphasized the words drug lords like it proved something.
“Shit, I know that, but they ain’t so dangerous. There ain’t no money in brandy no more, so they growin’ poppies. So what? Who’s it hurtin’? They sell most of that O to offworlders anyway. It’s the politicians that make them out to be some kinda threat. You know they do that ’cause they just want to keep those offworlders sendin’ in that aid. Shit, man, they gettin’ rich off that money.”
“That aid keeps us from getting overrun by the warlords. Without it, we’d lose our independence.” Maggie was wasting time, getting into it with the kid.
“You believe that shit? They just talk all that freedom and democracy bullshit to keep that aid money comin’ in. I know for a fact that they don’t want to win no war. If they did, we’d a won it thirty years ago. The politicians hold us back from goin’ all out on the warlords. They know that if we took the warlords out, there’d be no more reason for them offworlders to keep sendin’ in that aid, you hear what I’m sayin’. I’d be surprised if half that money makes it to the Army. Shit yeah! They keep us runnin’ around the jungle doin’ a couple raids here and there to make it look good, but they ain’t serious about winnin’ no war.”
Maggie started to speak, but I cut her off before she could parrot more bullshit propaganda. “Tell us about Vlotsky.”
“Nobody likes the lieutenant. For my first few months, things was pretty smooth, but then things got real bad when they swapped in six new soldiers. Two of them enlisted like me, but the other four got sentenced.”
Maggie interrupted. “What do you mean sentenced?”
“Yeah, you believe that shit? These assholes are criminals-I’m talkin’ hard-core. Some dumb-fuck judge gives them shorter jail terms in exchange for service. I guess they’re havin’ trouble recruitin’, so now they got to start sendin’ convicts.”
Jimmy leaned in close like he was telling us a secret. “Now, Kapasi is the baddest of these convicts. The others, they do what he says. They started by shakin’ the rest of us down. You know, they’d take our shit, eat our food. We went to Lieutenant Vlotsky and told him what was happenin’. He didn’t do a goddamn thing. It took me a while to figure out what was goin’ on. One day, I went into Vlotsky’s tent to pick up some reports. I didn’t know he was there, so I just unzipped my way in. He had this big-ass pile of brown sugar right there on the floor.”
Maggie sounded shocked. “Lieutenant Vlotsky was an opium addict?”
“Damn straight he was. That’s how come he sleeps all day. It didn’t take no genius to see that Kapasi was his supplier. That’s why the lieutenant let him get away with all that shit.”
I told Maggie to take notes; I could barely write legibly anymore. I told Jimmy to give us names. Make Jhuko Kapasi the ex-con ringleader. Make Pardo, Magee, and Deng the other three ex-cons. We’d have to look up their records. Make Cardoso, Jiang, Jiabao, Sarney, Serra, and Jimmy Bushong the non-ex-cons. Maggie entered it all into
