Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 50.12KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

And the Deep Blue Sea

by Elizabeth Bear

The end of the world had come and gone. It turned out not to matter much in the long run.

The mail still had to get through.

Harrie signed yesterday's paperwork, checked the dates against the calendar, contemplated her signature

for a moment, and capped her pen. She weighed the metal barrel in her hand and met Dispatch's faded

eyes. "What's special about this trip?"

He shrugged and turned the clipboard around on the counter, checking each sheet to be certain she'd

filled them out properly. She didn't bother watching. She never made mistakes. "Does there have to be

something special?"

"You don't pay my fees unless it's special, Patch." She grinned as he lifted an insulated steel case onto the

counter.

"This has to be in Sacramento in eight hours," he said.

"What is it?"

"Medical goods. Fetal stem-cell cultures. In a climate-controlled unit. They can't get too hot or too cold,

there's some arcane formula about how long they can live in this given quantity of growth media, and the

customer's paying very handsomely to see them in California by eighteen hundred hours."

"It's almost oh ten hundred now— What's too hot or too cold?" Harrie hefted the case. It was lighter

than it looked; it would slide effortlessly into the saddlebags on her touring bike.

"Any hotter than it already is," Dispatch said, mopping his brow. "Can you do it?"

"Eight hours? Phoenix to Sacramento?" Harrie leaned back to check the sun. "It'll take me through

Vegas. The California routes aren't any good at that speed since the Big One."

"I wouldn't send anybody else. Fastest way is through Reno."

"There's no gasoline from somewhere this side of the dam to Tonopah. Even my courier card won't help

me there—"

"There's a checkpoint in Boulder City. They'll fuel you."

"Military?"

"I did say they were paying very well." He shrugged, shoulders already gleaming with sweat. It was going

to be a hot one. Harrie guessed it would hit a hundred and twenty in Phoenix.

At least she was headed north.

"I'll do it," she said, and held her hand out for the package receipt. "Any pickups in Reno?"

"You know what they say about Reno?"

"Yeah. It's so close to Hell that you can see Sparks." Naming the city's largest suburb.

"Right. You don't want anything in Reno. Go straight through," Patch said. "Don't stop in Vegas,

whatever you do. The overpass's come down, but that won't affect you unless there's debris. Stay on the

95 through to Fallon; it'll see you clear."

"Check." She slung the case over her shoulder, pretending she didn't see Patch wince. "I'll radio when I

hit Sacramento—"

"Telegraph," he said. "The crackle between here and there would kill your signal otherwise."

"Check," again, turning to the propped-open door. Her prewar Kawasaki Concours crouched against

the crumbling curb like an enormous, restless cat. Not the prettiest bike around, but it got you there.

Assuming you didn't ditch the top-heavy son of a bitch in the parking lot.

"Harrie—"

"What?" She paused, but didn't turn.

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

She glanced behind her, strands of hair catching on the strap of the insulated case and on the shoulder

loops of her leathers. "What if I meet the Devil?"

· · · · ·

She let the Concours glide through the curves of the long descent to Hoover Dam, a breather after the

hard straight push from Phoenix, and considered her options. She'd have to average near enough a

hundred sixty klicks an hour to make the run on time. It should be smooth sailing; she'd be surprised if

she saw another vehicle between Boulder City and Tonopah.

She'd checked out a backup dosimeter before she left Phoenix, just in case. Both clicked softly as she

crossed the dam and the poisoned river, reassuring her with alert, friendly chatter. She couldn't pause to

enjoy the expanse of blue on her right side or the view down the escarpment on the left, but the dam was

in pretty good shape, all things considered.

It was more than you could say for Vegas.

Once upon a time—she downshifted as she hit the steep grade up the north side of Black Canyon, sweat

already soaking her hair—once upon a time a delivery like this would have been made by aircraft. There

were places where it still would be. Places where there was money for fuel, money for airstrip repairs.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: