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

by Cassandra Duffy

  A Geiger counter confirmed Roger was not irradiated beyond normal levels. A few other pokes and prods by the remarkably efficient staff confirmed a broken hind leg along with a likely concussion. “We’ll have your dog fit to travel within the week, Warder Kingston,” was the official word from the staff, and thus Roger became Olivia’s dog, much to the chagrin of the other men in her squad.

  Olivia was barely back out to the highway at the edge of the fishing fleet’s dry docks when Major Bradley caught up to her.

  “You came back with a witness,” the old Major said with a smile. “Did the pup have anything to say?”

  “Concussed, I’m afraid, sir,” Olivia said, matching the major’s smile. “We’ll interrogate Roger once he’s recovered.”

  “Why don’t you debrief me at dinner? The old restaurant across the way was turned into the mess hall. We’ve got a feast of the sea’s bounty waiting for us.” Major Bradley motioned for Olivia to walk with him. As they neared the old two story restaurant and club, the lumberjacks, fishermen, soldiers, and sailors from the Balclutha thickened, all heading in for the raucous environment within.

  Olivia was slower than Major Bradley, but he slowed to match her pace. “Sadly, there’s not much debriefing to do,” Olivia said. “We came across a dozen or so mutants attacking a pack of wild dogs. We killed the mutants with a staggered skirmisher line, the dogs that were well enough ran off, and we brought back the injured one.”

  “A dozen is a good sized group,” Major Bradley mused. “Glad you cleared them out though. From what we’ve seen, the mutants talk to each other. If even one survived to tell his tribe, they’d be riled up by the killings.”

  “I didn’t know the mutants were that organized,” Olivia said, a cold tremor of foreboding running up her spine.

  “Neither did we until recently,” Major Bradley replied.

  “We could stay on awhile and see to bolstering your security.”

  “That’d be a bucket to bail out a barge,” Bradley said. “If you want to do us a favor, find out if the other outposts are having the same troubles and take what you know back to the City of Broken Bridges. You’ve seen it first hand, which is the real reason I sent you out. If Commander Marceau, your father, or whoever else is in charge these days asks, you can say you saw the mutant encroachment with your own eyes.”

  “Can you hold out until help arrives?”

  “That’ll depend on a lot of things, but we’ve started practicing evacuation drills using the fishing fleet and some rafts. If worse comes to worse, I believe we can limp to Gold Beach.”

  “I’m friendly with the commander’s daughter,” Olivia said. “After what she went through, I imagine she’ll be helpful in preventing others from falling prey to the mutants.”

  “Here’s hoping for all of us then.” Major Bradley held open the door to the restaurant turned mess hall. The warm glow of lamp light and the cheerful reverie of working men poured out. Olivia and Bradley entered the festivities under storm clouds nobody else saw or felt.

  Chapter 16:

  With Just the Right Eyes.

  In the early dawn, with a chill and bank of fog lying over the city, Claudia’s father came to her in the White Tower with a gift. He gently shook her from sleep in the hospital bed she was still convalescing in. He held a gun case in one hand and her robe in the other. Without a word, he handed both to her and escorted her from the room.

  The halls of the tower were quiet in the small hours surrounding dawn and Claudia felt she should be quiet as well. The floor chilled her bare feet as she followed her father up the stairs a few flights to the opposite side of the tower from where her room looked out. When the case became heavy for her and her breath became short from the exertion of climbing stairs with her still recovering lungs, he slowed to wait for her, but didn’t offer any help. She took this as a sign of confidence and a challenge at once, resolving to make him proud.

  They reached the floor he had in mind toward the top of the tower. He guided her to an empty office at the end of a hall on the abandoned floor. When he opened the door, frigid, wet air flooded into the hallway. The windows along the wall were missing along with most of the wall itself. She followed him through the scant rubble clinging tenaciously in the exposed room to look out over what the city had become from the lonely vantage point. The sun rising in the east across the bay picked up on only the highest points able to reach above the layer of fog, which were the mountains on the northeast edge of the bay opposite them and a lone broken stump of a building on a rise between them and the water.

  “The Slark destroyed most of the city in their initial invasion,” her father said, staring over the ruins of the kingdom he’d inherited. “Down to the ground destroyed, I mean. What remained, and there was very little, Hastings and his flotilla destroyed in taking it back after the cascade momentarily struck technology from the world.” Her father pulled her closer to the edge he was standing at so she might better see the view and feel the thrill of the precipice. “The tower you see standing above the fog was once Coit Tower. It sits upon Telegraph Hill as a final gift to the city from a remarkable woman, although I believe it was built after her death. The Slark that once held the city used it for their last stand.”

  Claudia shifted her attention fully to the tower, seeing in it something suddenly interesting. She’d glanced over it meaninglessly a few times in her few brief walks among the ruins of the city, but never gave it much thought. She couldn’t be sure if the Transcended left it as it stood because they didn’t want to climb the cratered hill or because it held some greater meaning. Black smudges from fires and explosions scarred the exterior of the tower even when viewed from the great distance and she suspected it was probably riddled with bullet holes. The top of the tower was clipped off with a jagged edge leaving a question of how tall the tower had ever actually been. In a landscape completely swept clean of signs of war by the Transcended, the tower stood as a lone reminder of the war that wiped out the San Francisco that was. Before her father could even say what happened, Claudia pieced together why the Transcended hadn’t cleared the tower—its destruction was owed to humanity, not the Slark.

  “Rather than fight them for it, Hastings destroyed most of the tower from a distance with artillery and starved out the rest,” her father said. “Your Ravens may not know this, in truth, I didn’t either until I inherited Hastings’ papers and began reading them, but the cascade was a worldwide effort. The ship we felled in New York that irradiated the entire northeast was one of many. London is likewise destroyed…Moscow, Tokyo, Berlin, Rio, Mexico City, Beijing, and a few dozen other cities stand like the toxic graveyard New York is or are inhabited by the fallen ships and Slark survivors as in Los Angeles. Hastings knew this when he gave the order to destroy Coit Tower.” Her father placed his hand upon her shoulder in a gesture that seemed partially for his own support and partially to comfort her. He looked older and sounded tired from the weight of what he’d seen and now knew. “It was meant to be a killing blow,” he finally said, his voice husky with an edge of frustration, “but it simply crippled us both. We’re a cancer patient on the other side of chemo therapy but we still have cancer.”

  Claudia knew the analogy hurt her father and she knew he’d used it to drive the point into her heart. Her mother was such a patient, weakened and sick from chemo therapy that was supposed to eradicate her cancer along with her own health; she’d come through on the other side too weak for another round yet still riddled with pockets of cancer. Ultimately, the cancer won.

  “I cannot wage war with just the army we can raise here,” he said. “There are too few soldiers left and too many Slark. Nor can I abide further destruction of our home in the pathetic hope of eradicating the invaders. Hastings’ destruction of Coit Tower must be our last failed attempt at chemo therapy.” He turned her away from the tower to look him in the face. His eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep and edged in tears, no doubt matched hers. “Can your Ravens do it? Can they
finish this Extinction War?”

  Before Tombstone, before she’d seen what Juarez was willing to risk to take a single Raven stronghold from female hands, she would have said yes without a moment’s hesitation. Combining the hard lessons she’d learned in Carson City with her frantic escape from Tombstone, she didn’t believe anymore. If Veronica survived Tombstone, she would continue colonizing to spread Raven influence, but it would be far too slow if what her father was saying was true. The Red Queen Carolyn and The Black Queen Ekaterina could spread Raven influence at the point of a knife, which would move faster, but leave more dead than could be spared. No, too much of the old sexist guard remained for the Raven model to wrest control over the tattered remains of humanity from the hands of men, not with their brutal tactics and not with the Slark encountering no such gendered opposition to their recovery. Humans didn’t seem capable of cooperation anymore, or maybe they never really were.

  “No,” Claudia finally said. “If it was just Los Angeles, they might be able to, but if what Hastings’ papers say is true, it will be a momentary victory with a final loss to come.” He’d used the phrase she’d only heard in the early days of the war. It was based on supposition since knowledge of the enemy was almost non-existent. With the tenacity of the enemy known, scientists had hypothesized the Slark were on a last ditch effort to save their own species by populating a new planet. If they succeeded, humanity would go extinct; if they failed, they would go extinct. This created the phrase Extinction War—she’d heard it a few times in radio transmissions before the cascade, but not since. Apparently, everyone but her father had forgotten the direness of the stakes for both sides. “We need more,” Claudia said, not wishing to extinguish hope entirely. As much as she hated to admit it, the Ravens needed at least one male leader to rally other societies to their cause. “If we seek out the Ravens, we cannot do so fragmented and we need to come to them as equals, which won’t be easy. They have armies and have won wars against the Slark and other human factions. They don’t share because they haven’t had to, or maybe they’ve spent their lives sharing too much and have decided they won’t anymore.”

  Her father nodded, but seemed to have spoken his last on the topic. “Open your present now,” he said.

  Claudia settled the gun case along the cement floor and knelt before it to unclasp the latches with reverent hands. Her fingers were quaking from excitement and cold as she opened the case to reveal a sniper rifle of entirely unknown design. It looked to be made of piping in ways other rifles weren’t and had chambers in addition to magazines. To add to the strangeness, in place of a bipod at the front of the rifle for stability, there was a cluster of six tentacles, like a small robotic octopus had buried its head along the underside of the tapered barrel.

  “The design is Dr. Gatling’s,” her father said. “The weapon is one of a kind. It’ll take you some time to train on, and I don’t want you fighting until you do, but once you understand one another, I suspect everything else you know will fall into place.”

  Claudia touched the strange tentacle pod at the front. The little, prehensile limbs retracted from her touch. “What are these?”

  “They’re from a captured tackle box off a Slark fishing trawler,” her father explained. “They grasp inorganic things and let go at the touch of something organic. I think they’re used to gather the strange net things the Slark use to catch fish. Gatling surmised they would make a good bipod to offer stability. What we learned of robotics from the Slark has jumped our own technology ahead centuries, but apparently we’re still clumsy students needing to repurpose what we can’t build.”

  “I’ll begin training immediately, Papa,” Claudia said.

  “Good, I have plans that will need you, including the training of a new scout sniper corps.” He helped her to her feet and slid the strange rifle strap over her shoulder. “We will find our way forward, tourterelle.”

  He kissed her on the forehead and she wanted to believe the Ravens would see in him the great man, the warrior, and the father that she saw. He would be a marvelous ally and a banner to draw the men of the world to their cause as the organization’s first White King, if only he could bring the whole of his own city beneath his rule. Others might suggest Professor Kingston and still others, like the remnants of Hastings’ guard, would likely reject anyone but their dead commander. She didn’t know what he was planning to surmount what she thought was insurmountable, but she had to trust he had a plan. She would do what he asked for the moment and the future, starting with learning her new rifle.

  †

  Bundled in heavy wool coats, hand knit scarves, and berets, Esme and Claudia stood on one of the remaining streetcar platforms along what used to be the Market Street F-Line. Most of the street was gone. Stretches of asphalt remained of the road, but generally the tracks cut across flat gravel land as though the street cars were normal trains. Claudia had no idea what the Transcended were doing, stringing lines and repairing rails, until Esme finally pieced it together that they meant to rebuild the streetcar and trolley tradition of the city.

  Esme was a bundle of excited energy at Claudia’s side, smiling from ear to ear. A Transcended stood beside the raised cement platform, staring in the same general direction as Esme and Claudia. Standing still as it was, the Transcended could easily have been a sculpture rather than an autonomous robot. Claudia kept glancing up to the colossus waiting for the street car with them. It couldn’t be waiting to see them get onto the streetcar it so carefully restored as the Transcended didn’t seem to even see people. Claudia kept glancing out across the rolling hills of crops, trees, and grasslands that the San Francisco peninsula had become, wondering what the Transcended was looking at. This particular Transcended was made of mostly copper plating and steel tubing. The copper was tarnishing in places, going from the cheery bronze glow to a green similar to the Statue of Liberty. A few faint orange lights flashed along its body at specific points, which Claudia guessed made it easier to avoid at night as they were placed on the robot’s extremities; it might not see people, but it clearly wanted people to see it. Up close, standing perfectly still, Claudia was able to give one of the Transcended a proper inspection. The only true similarity she saw between any of the others was the murky blue globe. This particular Transcended’s globe was in the center of its chest, roughly the size and shape of a basketball, guarded by copper grating. She’d seen the globes on the others as well, all in different places. Some wore the globe like a cyclopic eyeball, on the shoulder like an epaulette, and one even had it as the pommel of a cane permanently attached to its hand.

  “What do you suppose is inside those glass spheres they all have?” Claudia asked.

  Esme glanced over as if seeing the ninety foot tall robot beside them for the first time. “I don’t know,” she said. “Robotic stuff I guess. To be honest, I don’t even notice them anymore.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “After enough years of them not noticing us, it gets easy to not notice them back,” Esme said with a shrug.

  Claudia wondered how many years it would take for that to happen to her. Esme drew her attention away from the Transcended to the approaching streetcar as it clacked its way down the tracks toward them. The car, which looked like a prop from some 40’s movie, had been repainted by the Transcended with a mural depicting a city. When it got closer, Claudia surmised it must have been Los Angeles from the inclusion of the famous Hollywood sign.

  “The streetcars were all taken from other cities at one point,” Esme said. “I guess the Transcended liked the idea.”

  The doors opened, and they stepped on board. The interior was that of a normal streetcar, bench seats, bars to hold onto, straps dangling from the ceiling, with the one obvious difference of all the people inside being bronze statues. Claudia and Esme both stopped just inside the doorway when they were greeted by a bronze statue in the driver seat, followed by several other statue passengers in various positions. There was a man in a suit wit
h a fedora, standing with his hand looped through a ceiling strap, reading a paper with his other hand. A woman with a bag of groceries was looking out the window, peeling a bronze orange. As Claudia and Esme ventured farther into the street car, they marveled at the remarkable detail of the passenger statues. Their faces told stories, some sad, some bored, some excited, but all remarkably human.

  “It occurs to me that we are the only living passengers,” Claudia said in a hushed tone.

  “Most people are afraid,” Esme said.

  “I can imagine,” Claudia replied. “Wait, why are you unafraid?”

  “I feel safe with you.” Esme blushed and nodded her head a little. “You make me bold.”

  Claudia smiled to her and linked their arms. “Then let us find a seat not occupied by a metal ghost of the past.”

  They sat by the rear entrance with Claudia nearest the window upon Esme’s insistence. She watched the countryside as it rolled by. It was incredible to think it once was all a city. The peninsula looked more like the moors of England rather than the ruins of San Francisco. Fog rolled across the fields only partially broken up by lines where streets and buildings once stood. An occasional piece of architecture survived to be restored by the Transcended and inhabited by the Irradiated, be it a house, a store, a warehouse, or an apartment complex.

  “What happened to the capitol building and the churches?” Claudia asked, finally realizing what was strangely absent among the few surviving structures.

  “The Slark destroyed those first,” Esme said. “It’s sad really. The city once had some beautiful cathedrals and government buildings. Didn’t that happen in Las Vegas?”

  “Probably,” Claudia said, “but who would notice their absence?”