The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2)

by Cassandra Duffy

  The room smelled of burning plastic, metal shavings, formaldehyde, soot, and a great many other unidentifiable chemicals and scientific nonsense. Olivia had long since lost the ability to marvel at the machinery he’d managed as she wore one as part of herself and it wasn’t all that wonderful.

  Upon her entrance, the hunched little man extracted himself from his work and wheeled over toward her. He had also lost limbs although his were double and from the hip down. He had long since given up on creating prosthetics for himself. His time went into enhancing his wheelchair, a marvel in itself, raising him to the height he’d held before the accident that claimed his legs. The three sets of wheels in a strange triangle pattern on the side of the chair’s waist-high tower, along with their corresponding gears and levers, actually allowed the chair to climb and descend stairs, an obvious necessity in the new world of very few ramps or elevators. The chair drove under battery power, guided by movements of his hips, or through manual power via fold-down flywheels for his hands.

  The doctor motored out to greet Olivia, running his hands feverishly through his salt and pepper beard as though the project he’d just left had launched a face-full of itching powder at him during his work, and for all Olivia knew, it might well have. His ruddy skin, cleanly picked bald head, and beady little eyes spoke of a man who had never much thought of women and likely had never been thought of much by them. Still, Olivia would consider him charming in an odd sort of way, although she was a bit odd herself and perhaps she was mistaking fondness for a sufferer of a mutual malady for actual charisma.

  “Leg acting up again, is it?” Dr. Gatling asked, knowing full well it was.

  “If I wasn’t having bad luck with it, I wouldn’t be having any luck with it at all,” Olivia said. She put her right leg forward and pulled up the cuff of her tan woolen trousers. The brass plated leg, a marvel really matching her real leg in almost every dimension excepting composition and color, required opening smooth plates to find the inner workings that might have gone awry.

  The doctor popped a plate off her thigh with practiced grace and clicked his tongue in a disapproving tsk tsk tsk. “You’ve been hyper-winding the down thrust gears again, haven’t you?”

  “Not more than it can handle…”

  “I swear by the…” Dr. Gatling quickly removed the bent gear rods, the gears with the worn down teeth, and replaced the main spring on the down thrust mechanism. “…I’m going to weld this plate shut and you’ll just see what a time you’ll have with this leg when I’m dead and gone. I didn’t show you how to tinker with it so you could go over-clocking the thing. Because a clock is precisely what it is; you’re wearing a glorified Swiss pocket watch in your bloody leg. Stop treating it like a battering ram.”

  “Fine, you have my word,” Olivia said, rolling her eyes.

  “I’ll have your bloody leg and stick you in a chair not so nice as mine if you don’t knock it off. Or a peg for a leg, like a proper pirate, wooden and stiff. People will start calling you Peg, they will, and so help me, I’ll be the one to get the ball rolling.” He chuckled to himself, in spite of himself, at a joke meant really only for himself as he constantly muttered such nonsense under his breath whether or not anyone was listening.

  The doctor worked so quickly to replace and repair the offending parts that Olivia wondered if maybe he didn’t enjoy when she broke her leg to give him a handy excuse to show off his alacrity. Still, she decided it wasn’t wise to push him too far, even if he did seem to enjoy the work. She couldn’t very well fight from a wheel chair and she doubted a peg leg would be much better.

  “On an unrelated matter…”

  “No, that patient still hasn’t woken up yet,” Dr. Gatling said, knowing full well what the other matter was. “Feel free to go stare at the bubbles if you like though. I’m done with your leg and don’t want to be seeing it in here again anytime soon.” He slipped the tools he’d used into the leather vest he wore with all the other countless tools in it and turned back to the workbench, signaling for good and all the end of the conversation.

  Olivia passed through the double doors between the laboratory cluster and the clinic side of the doctor’s floor. Things went from being a combination of auto repair shop and a high school science lab to an only slightly less preposterous combination of a mad scientist’s laboratory and a modern hospital.

  The patient in question, the one with the answer to the question asked by everyone in the City of Broken Bridges, was in a giant glass jar, filled with vaguely green suspension liquid, and supported by countless tubes and wires. Olivia stood outside the glass, as she always did, staring into the medical marvel keeping the woman alive, waiting to see if any sign of life came to the petite girl who was definitively the commander’s daughter.

  The girl was hauntingly beautiful, with a very slender face, a squared off chin, much like her father’s in a more delicate size, and had the slightest upturn on her nose and the outer corners of her lips as to give her something of a natural bemused facial expression. Her long, curly black hair floated ephemerally around her in the suspension liquid, catching occasionally on the compression bandages held firmly over her eyes. Olivia wondered for the millionth time what color those eyes really were.

  Commander Marceau, executive officer and hero of the city, said his daughter’s eyes were dark blue. Olivia wanted to know what blue specifically. Gatling had said after the radiation doses she’d taken more likely than not, those eyes would be milky white like dead fish eyes at best or decayed enough to require removal at worst. Only time would tell, he said. The radiation weapons used by the Slark in the early stages of the war created different radiation than anything on earth and did very different things to people than even atomic bombs. Dr. Gatling was figuring it out, albeit slowly, and his guesses as to its effects in what doses was still fairly unreliable.

  This wasn’t the first time Commander Marceau had believed he’d found his daughter—this was simply the first time he was right. The commander had mistakenly identified runaways and random urchins with black hair and blue eyes as his daughter so many times that people were beginning to ignore it as a simple eccentricity of post-apocalyptic stress. Aside from the odd proclivity of seeing his most likely dead daughter everywhere, the commander’s mental ship seemed to be stout and sound, which led most to be forgiving of his occasional misidentification. It was almost inconceivable to everyone when the daughter he wouldn’t believe was dead actually showed up, infected with the strange radiation sickness, coming across a bridge nobody had crossed in years, and identified her father even with completely fouled eyes. Dr. Gatling had checked the DNA without the commander’s knowledge, and sure enough, the girl in the jar was in fact Claudia Marceau. Dr. Gatling had made a joke about a broken clock being right twice a day, which was far more often than the commander was in his search for his daughter, but apparently he only needed to be right once for it to all be worthwhile.

  She’d been in the stasis jar for a month with November coming on quick. Her father had spent the entire time in a prison cell awaiting his daughter’s words to free him. Dr. Gatling said it would be a miracle if Claudia’s lungs ever worked right again. Olivia knew they only had to work right enough and long enough for her to confirm the commander’s story about what really happened on the bridge, and then she could cough her lungs up onto a plate and eat them with hot sauce for all Olivia cared.

  Commander Marceau’s story went as follows: his daughter came across the bridge, oddly enough showing the mutants chasing her how to make it across as well. The commander moved to save his daughter, fouling the line of sight to shoot the mutants, and sadly it all went horribly wrong after. General Hastings went over the side fighting two of the mutants and his men didn’t fair much better. There was blood and radiation enough on the bridge for the story to hold some water, but the possibility of five seasoned fighters all falling off the bridge held a vague scent of seafood. When none of the bodies were recoverable by boat as they all seemed
to have fallen directly in the current heading out to sea, the commander was jailed on suspicion without accusation to await the only corroborating witness’s version of the story.

  For the hundredth time, Olivia spoke to the glass in hushed tones, telling Claudia exactly what her father said happened. Should she ever awake, the investigators would question her before she could speak with her father, and if there were any discrepancies in the stories, Commander Marceau would have a lot to answer for. The city was in enough trouble after losing General Hastings. Olivia didn’t know what might happen if they lost the commander too.

  Genera Hastings, the commander of the British flotilla that had shipwrecked in San Francisco right before the whole world went belly up on them, was the supreme ruler of the City of Broken Bridges. In his absence and with Commander Marceau, the obvious heir to the despot’s throne incarcerated, Olivia’s own father had taken up leadership of the city. Her father was a smart and capable man, the former head of the philosophy department at U.C. Berkeley, but they were still at war, and he was a devout pacifist. They needed the commander to take Hasting’s place, and they needed him soon.

  Olivia stared at the petite woman in the jar for the millionth time and wondered what sort of daughter Marceau had spawned. His love for her was obvious, even to a fault in many people’s estimation. Olivia wondered what this frail little creature had done to earn such adoration from such a great man beyond simply being his only child.

  Olivia turned from the tank and made her way from the building. After a short elevator ride to the ground, she collected her heavy woolen pea coat at the security checkpoint. The cold, foggy day greeted her back on the street.

  Her own father, the Grand Keeper of Knowledge as the city’s commoners called him, earned respect easily from everyone but his daughter. Olivia loved her father to the point she thought a daughter was required, but no further. It was only happenstance that she and her father were both in San Francisco, which made her wonder how remarkable it was that both Claudia and the commander both found their way to the city independently in search of one another five years apart. The bond between them was something Olivia couldn’t grasp in terms of her relationship with her own father and she came just short of comparing how far she would go to remain near Commander Marceau should they be separated. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t his daughter; his daughter was in a decontamination tank in the tower.

  She strolled the barren city streets with brazen, long-legged strides. Her mechanical limb whirred and clicked with every step, a sound she could still focus to hear, but one that had long faded into the background of normalcy. The war shattered most of the city’s buildings save the Transamerica Pyramid. Bombardment by Slark artillery continued to tear down structures even after the great wall was built. Her father’s recycling programs dismantled the rubble and cleared it leaving a great grid of what the city once was in the shape of empty foundations. The bombardments might have even continued had Commander Marceau not pushed the Slark back out of no man’s land into the ruins of San Jose.

  The true City of Broken Bridges lay beneath the earth, buried by earthquakes, built over through the decades, and mostly forgotten until the new inhabitants unearthed the relics out of necessity. Before the war, Olivia’s father said a few blocks of the underground city of San Francisco functioned as a tourist novelty. But they’d dug deeper since then, rebuilt more, and rediscovered much of what was lost until the population of nearly 100,000 pure humans were able to exist in an entire city beneath the ground, five levels deep, sprawling over most of the oldest parts of San Francisco, and incorporating long lost sections of the city dating back to the early 1800s. There were a few thousand surfacers still, partially mutated people who hadn’t quite recovered even after Dr. Gatling’s attempts to cure them, still living among the older buildings of Noe Valley and the Castro. But these were not thought of as real citizens of the city—indeed, many didn’t even think of them as human anymore.

  Olivia strolled past one of the guarded gates into the under city, immediately being greeted by the chaos of the Chinican District where the Chinese and Mexicans melded nearest the entrances as the bastions of commerce and labor. Before the war, the two cultures had little to do with one another, but once national pride was stripped of humanity, the Chinese and Mexicans blended seamlessly into the Chinican people as though it was what they were always meant to do. Patrons crowded vendor stalls, seeking out the best prices on chickens, strange vegetables, beans, rice, and seafood. If it was grown, caught, raised, or slaughtered in the City of Broken Bridges, it was likely done by a Chinican. The first level didn’t look significantly different from a modern city marketplace, albeit one completely underground. The streets were still asphalt and the buildings still of recognizable architecture.

  Olivia’s stop was still one level lower. The deeper into the city one went, conversely the higher they went into social standing with the Keepers occupying the lowest and oldest tier in the darkest section dating back nearly to colonial times. The second level, the one she felt most at home in, was occupied by the Cons, short for Conscripts. The drafted British soldiers and sailors who had unwillingly been forced onto ships during the earliest stages of the war, who eventually found themselves shipwrecked in San Francisco. They were the dregs of their own society and took in other dregs and immigrants along the way. Olivia, a former yeoman on a British destroyer, had joined the military willingly, which held her apart from the Cons who had been forced. She was a Bowler Con rather than a Rag Con.

  Yellow, flickering lights lined the labyrinthine tunnels of the under city. Buildings dating back to the Old West held a few modernized trappings on the second level although most remained in roughly the same shape they were in when that part of the city sunk beneath progress. The streets here were dirt and rock, the sidewalks made of plank, and the architecture was that of a bygone era kept fairly congruous even in the required repairs that had to be made. Men and women in simple woolen and linen garb strolled the street, many staggered drunkenly, too inebriated to stroll effectively. She could hear the Ukrainian Cause long before she saw it. The bar, her bar, was a raucous affair owned mostly by an old Polish couple with a minor interest owned by Olivia. She’d bought her share a year ago to prevent from being thrown out so damned often.

  She pushed open the heavy steel door with the spray painted U.C. scrawled across it. The interior was louder and more chaotic than the outside. The original use for the building had been a tavern of some kind, with plank floors, and the serving bar restored. Windows, two to either side of the door, were boarded up permanently as glass to fill the oddly sized panes couldn’t be found anymore. Even if glass was plentiful, Olivia didn’t think it worth procuring anymore since people kept getting thrown through the wooden slats they’d tried to use until they’d boarded them up permanently.

  Olivia counted the top hats among the patrons and found the numbers to be about even across the boards. A smoky haze obscured the low ceiling, making all but top hats difficult to discern in the crowded bar. Top hats were worn by the eastern Europeans while the cockneys favored bowlers or bare heads. If she belonged to a group, it was the bowlers—not necessarily cockney and still fancy enough to use a fork instead of their fingers when eating.

  She pushed aside two top hats at the bar to find her place. One was a man she’d pummeled earlier that week; he gave his ground as easily as a beaten dog. The other was a top hat she hadn’t yet bested, and he seemed rather perturbed about being shoved aside.

  She beckoned the bartender over with a flash of her ring-bedecked hand. The bartender Orlovsky, a limping, hunched man in his seventies, dressed in a stained apron, tattered undershirt, and battered leather trousers, made a slow trip down the bar toward her, throwing a ragged bar towel over his shoulder where the stout, gray wires of his shoulder hair held it in place.

  “Gimp bowler bitch, I was next,” one of the top hats protested.

  “And now you’re next to be next,” Oli
via replied, not bothering to turn back. She didn’t need to look to know her retort had set his bushy moustache twitching. She could pick a fight with a look or a word if she wanted. She liked to draw it out a bit more as of late, savoring the adrenaline high of combat at every opportunity.

  “Step aside or you’ll feel the back of my hand,” the top hat said, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  Olivia allowed herself to be turned, giving the top hat a coy smirk. He was bigger than her, but not by much. His protruding lips were already wetted and red beneath his impressive handlebar moustache. He had the Ukrainian accent and red swath of alcohol blush across his cheeks and nose common to the breed. He raised his hand as if to backhand her, more in threat than in action.

  “It’s to be fisticuffs then, is it?” Olivia asked with a little wink.

  The man didn’t recognize her or the challenge, new to the bar most likely. The crowd around her on both sides knew what her words meant and gathered close to catch their own glimpse of what was to come. Realizing a moment too late what was coming, the Ukrainian took a single step back as his only act of preparation. Olivia lunged forward, driving off her mechanical leg to increase the power of her left jab. The punch caught the man square on the chin, sparking blood among the stubble when Olivia’s brass rings did their work. She followed it immediately with a right cross before her left even fully pulled back to cocked. The second strike sent the Ukrainian’s jaw swinging like a rusty gate.

  She backed out to savor the moment. The crowd gave her space, their dusty work boots dancing across the bloodstained plank floor in a familiar jig. The Ukrainian wasn’t done despite the first two hits raising significant lumps. He came at her enraged, throwing a left cross followed by a wild right haymaker. Olivia easily dodged the man’s left with a step to her left and ducked the follow up right. She countered with two quick strikes into his exposed stomach, doubling him over.