Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy Read Free Page A

Olympia, Seattle I think, was working on getting that dance bug out of the organic plastic. But then a lot of people were working on a lot of things. They were trying to put together a new web in Redwood, and I’d heard that someone way the hell out in Atlantis was working on it, too, but so far all we had was a ragged and rare mess of spotty egos spiking out of the West. Gran said the leftovers and revived bits and pieces of the old Internet couldn’t compare with the web of her youth, and no matter how close I got to the East Coast I still couldn’t get anything there except netsys email that didn’t work half the time. A few optimists kept trying to blog but more often those addicted to communication or to history had started local newspapers, printed on re-pressed paper and plastic. They came in handy when nothing else was working right. Gran found it funny. Newspapers were practically extinct, made obsolete by the Internet, when she was young.
    It took three tries to get the sticky lock open. The room had water stains on the ceiling but no drips that I could see. The bed was dry. The bathroom was spotted with mildew. A cheap fifty-year-old sys hung from the bedroom wall, a low-speed, unsecure clunker no better than a toy linked to TV, capsule player/recorder, and phone. I tapped its on-button. Dead. This motel could use a fixer. But then why would a fixer hang around here?
    I set the bounced beer down to rest on the nightstand—I wanted it in me, not all over me— the food next to it and my own sys beside that, and tapped the on-button hopefully.
    “New Mail.”
    Hallelujah. Back in service. Most recent message:
    “Rica Marin, by order of the…” The bored male voice said the Iowa General was demanding that I appear in his offices by ten a.m. that day for questioning in the death of blah blah blah. Eight hours ago. Well gee whiz damn, I’d missed the appointment. If things stayed true to form he wouldn’t be the Iowa general in a week, anyway.
    As always, a message from Gran:
    “Why does the mercenary cross the road? To get home, dummy. I miss you. See you after Sierra?”
    I punched the talk-back: “Yeah. Getting homesick for the fog.”
    She wouldn’t expect more than that and there was no need to tell her about my day.
    I damped the mike and shot the screen. The holo shimmied for a second and resolved, backdropped against the stains on the dirty beige wall. I needed to do some searching and I do that better with my eyes than my ears. Headers scrolled to the unread messages.
    What I was looking for first was a message confirming a three-day gig in Rocky, a quick catch-a-bandit job for a local chief that I really wanted to do. He was offering a one-night acting undercover as Lady Macbeth at a Denver amphitheater that I knew attracted crowds of a hundred or more. A great gig. I’d always wanted to do The Lady.
    No such luck. A short message from the chief.
    “Godders wrecked the theater, bandits bribed my cops, I’m on my way to Desert. Phoenix I think. Maybe see you there some time.”
    So much for Lady Macbeth. Well, that just meant I’d get to Sierra and the Tahoe job sooner. I unscrewed the soup lid. Split pea. Sniffed close up. Not spoiled, anyway. I tasted it. Oniony, but probably not dangerous.
    I realized suddenly that I hadn’t let the Sierra chief know I was on my way. After a quick send to her, I scrolled to the earlier messages we’d lobbed back and forth. The case had grown vague in my mind.
    It involved a group of people— a clan, really, mostly related— who Chief Graybel said the neighbors suspected of a conspiracy to grab some kind of power. They were accusing them of several different kinds of illegal activity: everything from skimming taxable profits to murdering the mayor of Tahoe to smuggling bootlegged vaccines to plotting secession from Sierra. Maybe even running antibiotic medicine shows to sucker the mountain people. They owned a casino called Blackjack, one of the two big