Chapter Text
The job is mostly a charity case, and Juno knows it. The message he received a couple days back, attached to a set of coordinates, didn’t mince words:
A contact of mine in Arcadia Planitia just stopped responding to me. Jasper Jackson had a case of Uranian diamonds with my name on it, and if you’re in the neighborhood with nothing else to do I’d appreciate if you’d check in with him for me. I owe you one.
Love from your old buddy.
Buddy could easily send Jacket to intimidate her contact. She could easily intimidate him herself. But she must have known that Juno was in a cheap motel in the seedy side of Arcadia Planitia, bored out of his skull and itching to feel useful. Juno isn’t sure exactly how she figured out his location, but it probably wasn’t hard. Buddy and Vespa are master criminals with their ears to the ground, and Juno isn’t exactly unknown nowadays. Infamy is inevitable when you’re the one who shot the mayor of Hyperion City.
After calling Buddy up and getting the details of the case, Juno takes the creaky sky train across town until he gets to the address: an abandoned holo-movie complex, next door to an abandoned mall and across from an abandoned pizza joint. The ticket windows out front of the movie theater are smashed, the awning is stained and peeling, and the faded facade is layered with graffiti, each tag a silent proclamation: I was here. But there’s nobody here now. Public records say this area closed down years ago, when Arcadia Planitia started losing money fast enough that anyone with the money to see holo-movies moved away, like rats leaving a doomed space hauler. Buddy says this is where Jasper Jackson, jewel smuggler, hides out when he visits Mars.
He sends Buddy one last message: Buddy, Going in now. This place is creepy as hell.
She replies: Good luck, Juno. Get me my jewels.
Juno rests his hand on his gun.
He’s been practicing, shooting bottles in the alleyway out back of his motel room all day until his aim is almost as good as it used to be with the THEIA. There’s nothing better to do, besides drink himself into a stupor. The owner of the motel doesn’t mind, so long as Juno pays them an extra tip each day. They’re probably used to gunshots echoing down the streets of their neighborhood.
They came out to stand beside Juno one afternoon as he squinted down a row of bottles set up on the dumpster. “That blaster on stun?” they asked.
“Yeah,” Juno said, and squeezed the trigger. BANG. One of the bottles fell, a tinkle then a crash as it shattered onto the cement behind the dumpster.
“Looks like you killed it anyway,” the motel owner said, and they snickered as they walked back inside.
Juno squeezed the trigger again. BANG. But his hand must have been too shaky; the bottles didn’t move. “Dammit,” he muttered.
He’d needed to let Hyperion City know the truth, so with Rita’s help he’d broadcasted it to every computer in the city. Ramses found him halfway through the broadcast. Juno had only meant to stun Ramses when the new mayor rushed at him, when Juno had looked into Ramses’ eyes and seen a man still willing to do anything to keep his power. But despite all that power, in the end Ramses was an old man with a heart condition.
The HCPD forensic officers would figure out the death was unintentional; they’d seen his broadcast, just like the rest of the city; most of them already had it out for Ramses. Still, Juno know there were enough of them left who were committed to doing their job, and he ran.
At night, alone in his hotel room, he rarely grieves for Ramses. Mostly he grieves for Rita, Mick, Alessandra, Sasha, who he isn’t sure he’ll ever see again. For Hyperion city, and the life he’ll never get back.
Imagine floating alone in space, so far out that no light reaches you. A star flung out of its orbit with nothing to anchor it, no gravity to tether it to anything else in the universe, drifting listlessly through the cosmos.
Imagine drowning.
Juno surveys the abandoned movie theater in front of him one last time. He breathes in deep and finds the place in his brain where it is quiet, where all that’s left is the details of the case spread out before him, laser sharp. He moves forward.