This seemed to strike a chord in Esme, “what do you mean?”
“I mean there weren’t many government buildings or churches to speak of and they certainly weren’t noteworthy in such an eclectic landscape,” Claudia said.
“Las Vegas wasn’t destroyed the way San Francisco was?”
“Hardly touched,” Claudia said. “Most of what was damaged was damaged by us fighting over it. The Slark wiped out the military and the airport and moved on. The city has no tactical significance, few natural resources, all the food, water, and electricity is shipped in from elsewhere—they probably thought us insane for even creating such a place.”
“They probably thought you would starve and kill each other off,” Esme said sourly.
“We would have, were it not for Ekaterina,” Claudia said.
“Tell me about her, the great Raven leader.”
“I only ever met her once. She seemed the perfect Russian mix of anger and sadness.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Not anymore, although she might have been at one point, long ago. She is fifty something now, having lived a hard life for many years. She is strong though, and ruthless in ways that still make me shudder.”
“Do you admire her?”
Claudia considered the question for a moment before answering as she’d never actually stopped to question how she felt about Ekaterina other than grateful for survival. With distance from the situation and her survival now guaranteed by other means, she could be honest with herself. “In truth, I do not know. I am French—we must have music in our lives and she has gone deaf to all kinds of music to become what she is.”
“French Canadian,” Esme corrected her, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
“That is a joke with a rapidly approaching expiration date,” Claudia said.
“It’s true though. Quebec is in Canada, not France.”
“We do not see it that way,” Claudia said.
They rode in silence for awhile, cuddled close to one another. The sun began to break through the cloud cover and fog, casting shafts of light along the reclaimed moors and farmland they passed down toward the wharf. As they neared the docks and the defensive parapets created by the Transcended, they began to see people running and walking in the same direction the streetcar was heading. As the car rounded the corner to head along the old waterfront, the crowds thickened, taking on an excited tone. Claudia pulled the cable to notify they wished to get off at the next stop. She didn’t even think until after she’d done it that the cable running above the windows might not do anything anymore, what with the driver being a bronze statue and all. Either it did still serve a function or the next stop was intended anyway as they were let off at the remains of the old Pier 39, right in the thick of the gathered throng.
“What’s happening?” Esme asked of the first person to cross their path.
The person shook her off and continued along their way, forcing Claudia and Esme to push along with the multitude down toward the water. A familiar voice with a soothing British accent spoke behind them when the gathered people thickened too much to continue forward. “They’re excited about the return of the sea lions,” the man said.
Claudia and Esme both wheeled around at once to find Inspector Cavanaugh behind them, dressed smartly in a three piece hound’s-tooth suit with a matching wool tam and a gray trench coat. Claudia recognized the voice but not the face. Esme seemed to truly know the man.
“I heard rumors you were involved with the commander’s daughter,” Inspector Cavanaugh said. “I hoped they weren’t true, Mouse.”
“Why do you call her ‘Mouse’?” Claudia demanded. The fear she’d had of him when she was blind, weak, and disoriented evaporated. She was strong now, guarded well by her father, and had long since lost the fear of men from her years with the Ravens. She could see now, could still shoot a gun, and couldn’t see Cavanaugh as a threat so long as she was armed, which she’d been whenever she left the tower once her father had returned the Walther he’d found on her the night she arrived.
“You’ll have to ask her that yourself,” Cavanaugh said. “As for our earlier discussions, Miss Marceau, there are some important discrepancies between your rendition and the facts that have come to light since.”
“Are these the sorts of facts that will resurrect your beloved General Hastings?” Claudia asked with a sly smirk. “Because, if not, I fail to see why you would care or why I should be concerned about them.”
This barb didn’t seem to land on the unflappable Cavanaugh, which deeply disappointed Claudia. Perhaps she mistook Cavanaugh’s interest in the Hasting case or his true motives in the matter or perhaps he simply had a remarkable poker face. Regardless, he’d tipped his hand in saying anything to her about the investigation continuing.
“We’ll have eyes on you and your father,” Cavanaugh said.
“Obviously,” Claudia replied. Counter-intelligence and spying was a game, and a game Claudia was good at. It might take awhile to determine who was to be the cat and who was to be the mouse, but Claudia had every intention of winning regardless. She smiled to him to let him know she was eager for the game to start in earnest; Cavanaugh did not smile back as he took his leave, tipping his hat curtly to Esme who actually flinched at the gesture.
When Cavanaugh was thoroughly out of earshot, pushing his way in the opposite direction of the crowd, Claudia took Esme’s hand in hers. “Why does he call you Mouse and why are you afraid of him?”
“In the early days when Hastings fought the Slark to liberate the city, before the Transcended, before your father came, children were used within the tunnels of the city below. We were spies, carriers of information, and when the liberation war turned against us, suicide bombers. The information network, the one Cavanaugh was in charge of, didn’t let us keep our names. I was Mouse so nobody would mourn me if I was captured, killed, or sent on a suicide bombing.”
Claudia did some quick math in her head, determining that Esme must have been twelve or thirteen at the time, probably even slighter of build, and petite to begin with. Yes, the Ravens had done similar things with willing volunteers though. Children stopped being children at around age ten in the new world, but suicide bombings and stripping them of their names…barbaric wasn’t a strong enough word for it.
“You said it was before my father?”
“When your father came, looking for you as the stories go, he turned the tide. We had a true champion of the field where Hastings had simply been a tactician moving pieces around on a board. He outlawed suicide bombings, which was easy to do since we didn’t need them anymore once he started winning fight after fight.”
“How did you never get sent on a suicide run?”
“I was good at spying. I grew up here, knew the city better than the Slark, and survived by being too valuable to throw away on a single strike. Many of my friends weren’t so lucky.”
Claudia gave Esme’s hand a reassuring squeeze. That explained Cavanaugh. He was a man who had willingly thrown children into the war machine to die. Whatever blink or flinch might exist in Inspector Cavanaugh was long gone. Claudia had met such men before—the world was sick with them now as they tended to survive when most fell to their hesitations and humanity. As with the promise she’d made to Fiona in regards to killing Yahweh, Claudia made a silent promise to herself that she would be the one to kill Cavanaugh for Esme. Addition by subtraction, as Veronica was so fond of saying; the world would be a better place without him.
“Come, let us see if the rumors of sea lions are true,” Claudia said.
They made their way through the crowd, guided by Esme as someone who knew a thing or two about sneaking through tight places. They found their way to the front of the docks where rocks were piled by the Transcended as sea lion refuge. The rocks, which Esme explained had sat vacant for six years, were now alive with the barking sea lions. The brown aquatic hunters lounged, played, and cuddled upon the rocks, somehow used to an audienc
e.
Claudia glanced from face to face in the gathered masses. Men and women, hard men and women from the under city, Irradiated field workers, and Chinican merchants all had happy tears in their eyes and hopeful smiles on their lips. Claudia looked to Esme and found the same expression of fragile hope. Claudia recognized the feeling as a strange and frail pride. The people weren’t Americans, Californians, or humans so much as they were San Franciscans. The identity of French that Claudia clung to for her sense of self seemed paltry in comparison to the identity of San Franciscan that Esme and the gathered people had. Claudia was struck by a powerful urge and acted on it, scooping Esme into her arms to kiss her fiercely. She could taste Esme’s tears in the kiss and reveled in the salty edge they added to the passionate moment. The slender woman in her arms was Mouse of the City of Broken Bridges and this seemed like a marvelous thing to be; Claudia felt honored to know her and be adored by her.
On the ride back up the hill, the street car was full of living bodies to go with the bronze riders as the native San Franciscans found their courage and faith in the return of a symbol of recovery to a city that had somehow survived.
Chapter 17:
Mapping the Radioactive Tides.
Olivia didn’t like leaving the Crescent City lumber camp. It felt like a tenuous hold on their southern most outpost. The Balclutha’s captain and Major Bradley both insisted though, and soon they were on their way to Gold Beach.
Roger was declared fit to travel and found a comfortable spot with Olivia in the Balclutha’s chartroom. The little cabin atop the poop deck living chambers was once the sewing room of a captain’s wife more than a century prior. Under Olivia’s ownership, the chartroom was transformed into the ship’s armory and her living quarters. She left the door open onto the port side of the deck to let people come and go during the day to see Roger. It also allowed the sea air to blow out the stench of unwashed dog, which was a little overpowering if the windows or door were closed for too long. To his credit, the skeletal German shepherd seemed reasonably comfortable at sea. The pitch and roll of the ship didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest so long as Olivia was within view of his hastily constructed bed of a rag stuffed old sleeping bag.
The Balclutha had a schedule to keep and they were already a few days behind. They dropped off supplies, fresh laborers, and machinery on their way up the coast, and then picked up raw materials collected by the outposts, mostly lumber, on the way back down. They would return to Crescent City in a week or so as their last stop on the way south to collect the rough cut lumber and the livestock deemed suitable to return to the City of Broken Bridges. Olivia took the time between to chart the movements of the mutants. She drew and redrew the map as though she were charting the tides of the sea. If the Ravens were responsible for pushing the Slark back, which in turn were pushing the mutants west, using Carson City as the genesis point heading directly west wouldn’t make sense; Crescent City was too far north to feel any effect. Using radiating patterns, not too dissimilar from those used to calculate underwater explosion impact patterns, she determined the Ravens must be trying to flank the Slark line to roll it south. The mutants might not be pushed by Slark, but rather the Ravens trying to create space enough to move large troop quantities.
She didn’t quite know what to make of the new theory. If the Ravens were motivated in forcing out the mutants, Crescent City was likely to see a huge influx of attacks. If the Slark were heading north to try to escape a direct westerly assault, the mutants would be slower, but likely followed closely by Slark. She desperately wished she knew which was happening so she might warn Major Bradley.
The Balclutha’s northern most stop was the fisherman’s village at Winchester Bay in what used to be Oregon. The fishery that harvested and processed salmon was a tiny camp with next to no defensive positions as it didn’t sit on a former population center. If the mutants made it far enough north to attack the two dozen fishermen camped out on the dunes beside the bay, they would be slaughtered. Olivia resolved to leave a contingent of her men there just in case. The food provided by the fishing outpost was too valuable to risk losing for want of a few defenders she could easily spare.
With the charts drawn, Gold Beach on the horizon, and her orders planned for the rest of the trip, Olivia lay out on her bunk to remove her prosthetic leg to let her stump breathe. She felt more comfortable with the leg in place, but Dr. Gatling had made it all too clear that she shouldn’t wear it indefinitely, especially not in the salty, dirty air aboard a ship. She unbuckled her belt, undid her trousers, and slipped them off. Her brass leg was losing some of its gleam from so much work without tending and so she resolved to polish it a bit at the same time. She unhooked the banding and clasps that held the metal limb to the stump of her leg that ended at mid thigh. Dressed in just her t-shirt and underwear, she hopped across the room, leg in hand, to her workbench where she maintained the ship’s small arms. Roger erupted in a furious barking fit at the sight of her leg or perhaps it was the stump.
“What are you going on about?” Olivia asked of the frantic dog. She took a seat on the stool at her workbench and slipped her leg back on. Roger’s barking ceased. She removed the leg again and he resumed barking. “You’re becoming an irritation, boy.” She didn’t have the maternal instincts required to be anything but annoyed by the pungent dog scent and the raucous barking at her fake leg. She resolved to feed him up, help him recover from his injuries, and then give him to someone who felt a kinship with dogs. Idly thinking, with her chin rested in her hand propped on the workbench, something fairly ingenious occurred to her—she could give Roger to Claudia. She’d mentioned having a dog when she was younger and it would be a gift unlikely surpassed by the donut shop girl who had become a romantic rival at some point.
Her attraction to Claudia had only deepened over the past few months. She was charming, beautiful, and the daughter of the commander she respected so much. These were the obvious qualities that drew her in, but the real draw quickly became her war record. Olivia had never met another female soldier of such quality. Claudia could spin a masterful story, no doubt about that, but it was the content of her war stories that really impressed Olivia. Hearing about her assassination work in ridding the world of the mad cult leader Yahweh and then turning the tide in Crescent City by eliminating the Gator was music to Olivia’s ears. She wanted Claudia to be every inch the warrior her father was, but in a less idealized, more feminine package. Olivia could never get past her hero worship of Commander Marceau or the fact that he was male, but she would do every depraved or loving thing Claudia could want if she would simply ask.
She looked over to the resting Roger with a newfound interest. If the ship’s cook could be persuaded to feed up the dog and one of her men could bathe him in Gold Beach, Roger would almost be presentable. “I’ll bet dogs to donuts she’ll like you more than a cruller,” Olivia said to Roger who quirked his head to the side as though he were trying to understand her.
†
Olivia left Lane and his pick of two others at the fishing outpost in Winchester Bay. The fishermen seemed largely unconcerned about the threat of mutant attacks. That particular section of Oregon was lush and nearly untouched. They’d constructed a few log cabins along their new beachfront property and were making good use of the blackberry bushes that grew like wildfire along any stretch of open ground. In addition to the processed salmon haul, the Balclutha also picked up an impressive amount of blackberry preserves, promising to bring glassware on their next trip. Standing amidst the barely re-tamed wilderness in what was formerly a lovely national park, Olivia understood the cavalier dismissal of mutant attacks by the fishermen. They lived in a world so set apart from the war it might as well be on another planet.
They were a week and a half out of their original stop at Crescent City when they finally departed Gold Beach for the second time. Olivia was glad to see the Gold Beach lumber camp boss, although not a military man, had done well in fortifying the pos
ition after the initial warning. An autumn squall slowed them further, forcing them closer to the rocky shore than most were comfortable with. The Balclutha’s captain masterfully skirted the margin of the storm and the killing zone of the coastal rocks with only a torn sail to show for it. Olivia couldn’t imagine where the old man had learned to sail nineteenth century windjammers with such skill. She’d gone to him when they were clear of the storm, standing beside the wheel he was guiding one handed. She’d told him how impressed she was, thinking the endorsement of a career navy woman might mean something to the captain. He’d shrugged and went right on staring ahead into the gray skies ahead. His soaked gray beard jutting from beneath the yellow hood of his rain slicker dripped water like a spigot to which he also paid no mind.
When she turned back toward her cabin, he finally spoke. “She survived too long to give it up now,” he said.
Olivia stayed with the captain atop the poop deck the rest of the day until the clouds finally broke in the west. They rode easily the rough sea and the pitching of the deck, both practiced sailors with impeccable balance. They didn’t speak again as simply sharing the space felt like company enough.
Crescent City was just on the edge of visible with the naked eye when the watch at the bow rang the alarm bell. Smoke pillars, he screamed.
“Get your team ready and take the fast boat out,” the captain told her. “We’ll anchor past the breakers until you give an all clear flare.”
Olivia moved to carry out the order, kicking herself with the leg she didn’t have anymore for leaving almost half her squad in Winchester Bay. In the cabin beneath the wheel and charthouse, her squad was already armed and ready to put to water. She grabbed her own carbine and accompanying pistol. A shock of cold fear ran through her—she’d have to climb down the side of the Balclutha in a rolling sea to sit inside a rubber boat with an outboard motor while it drove through rough waters toward a turbulent beach landing. There was no doubt in her mind, if she went into the water, she’d drown. Her leg wasn’t made for swimming and there wouldn’t be any way to get it off in time, nor did she know how well she could even swim with one leg as she’d hadn’t tried since losing the limb. If she hadn’t left Lane in Winchester Bay, she could have trusted him to lead the shore party; without him, she’d have to go.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 15