The families and friends of the support staff, the top hats who had worked on the tanks, the Chinicans who helped armed them, and a few gawkers came out to watch Olivia’s column depart. Among them was Esme, holding tight to her own arms like they might fly away. Before Olivia mounted the lead vehicle, the largest by far with the main cannon on an armored pod on the front and two lobes on the sides for machinegun nests, she went to Esme. She hugged the diminutive donut shop girl who seemed to be shrinking by the moment. Olivia didn’t need to ask to know that Esme loved Claudia. Whatever had gone on between them while Olivia was at sea clearly deeply affected Esme.
“I’ll bring her home,” Olivia said, making no further promise. She had no intention of relinquishing her tenuous claim on Claudia simply because she saw the depth of Esme’s emotional bond to her. Olivia might not be as certain in her feelings for Claudia, but she wasn’t about to give up now on someone so clearly remarkable.
She climbed the ladder up the side of the armor on her command vehicle and stepped inside among the men who were to be her crew. She’d held over Alfie as her driver and the Greek as her loader for the main gun. Among the two hundred soldiers under her command, only those two still had all their limbs.
They rolled out at a crawl beneath the gateway under the western edge of the wall, following the same path Claudia’s torch brigade had taken, guided by Alfie in the lead tank down a path he knew all too well. Their progress was slow, about ten miles per hour at their cruising speed, which slowed further when they hit the ruins of South San Francisco. Torch brigade columns were usually around the same number, but they were lighter in armor and armaments, and spread readily from one another to cover a lot of ground. Olivia refused to let her column get too far from each other and the support they might provide with their numbers. The trails forged by the torch brigade through the ruins were soon choked with the tractors turned tanks as not all the drivers were as familiar with the terrain as Alfie.
They were still mostly in the ruins when noon hit. Olivia could only tell the hour by her watch as the sky was overcast and the air was thick with a mixture of fog and smoke of the battles raging to the east. They were making slow progress. Steady progress, but very slow.
A flare shot up to the southeast, sparkling green as it descended through the haze. The forward elements of her column had struck their first resistance—light resistance from the color of the flare. Olivia watched closely to see if a red or orange flare might follow. When none did, she directed the primary elements within the center of the column, her tank included, to wheel left to support while the rear guard and southwest forward vehicles hardened the right flank.
Olivia was eager to see what her men and new vehicles might do against the Slark.
The engagement they advanced upon was on the southern face of one of the many rolling hills that formerly held South San Francisco’s closely clustered suburban sprawl. Her forward elements, ten vehicles in all, were advancing in good order. Machinegun fire and the occasional hollow pop of mobile artillery explosions brought the ferocity of the battle to her ears before she could even spot the tanks among the ruined husks of houses and apartment buildings.
“Tank Commander Biggs says they’re pushing back a light scouting patrol,” Alfie shouted above the sound of the engine, relaying the information coming into the shortwave radio earpiece in his leather pilot’s helmet. “He says the Slark thought to take a torch brigade by surprise and ended up getting taken by surprise themselves when they hit a dozen gun platforms.”
Olivia could hear the joy in Alfie’s voice, and by proxy, the joy that was likely in Tank Commander Biggs’ voice. Giving back a little pain felt good after being torn out of the combat rotation and giving the pain back specifically to the invaders, rather than mutants, was downright euphoric.
“Move us onto their southern flank to support their push,” Olivia directed Alfie. The flagger on the back of her tank, visible to the spotters on the other vehicles directed out the maneuver. It was remarkable how easily the nautical communication flags worked for directing tanks. Sure, they were close enough to one another to shout the orders over, but with the deafening sounds of the vehicles, visual cues were easier. They were a land flotilla of tiny battleships sailing across rough seas as Olivia saw it, and while she had no experience in tank battles, she knew quite a lot about the sailing of it all.
As they rounded the southern flank of Biggs’ position, Olivia got her first view of the conflict. The Slark recon platoon was getting solidly routed by the numerically inferior tank squadron. The handful of centipede crawlers the Slark brought to the fight were smoking wreckage or limping slowly away by the time Olivia’s tank got into position to support. The four hundred or so Slark foot soldiers were in full retreat, losing dozens more as the machinegun gunners found easy targets on their backs.
“Tank Commander Biggs wants to press the attack, chase them down as it were,” Alfie shouted. “Your orders?”
“Denied,” Olivia said. “Our mission of search and rescue takes priority.” It was true and something Biggs would respect, but not the only reason she denied him. They were slow, too slow to chase anything down, and a dozen tanks repelling a lightly armored surprise attack by a scout recon team was one thing—giving chase to a retreating platoon only to end up making a charge on an entrenched division was something else entirely.
They turned back to the south, fanned out to their skirmisher line in hopes of widening the search, and continued on. She could see for herself what the likely toll was on the Slark and imagined the estimates given by Biggs and his men would only be inflated. They’d taken down three crawlers and maybe a couple dozen Slark in the process without losing a man. Those were numbers Olivia could live with. Losing someone, anyone of the two hundred under her command seemed unthinkable. They were throwaway troops to anyone else in the City of Broken Bridges, but to her, they were as precious as surviving pre-war technology.
She knew she couldn’t hold the leash so tightly forever. Soldiers died in war. It was a truth every officer who led troops had to accept. She hadn’t truly been in charge of the men under her until the Balclutha’s security detail, and to her knowledge, she’d never truly ordered someone into a fight that would mean their death. During the liberation battles for the city, she’d always been part of a command structure, relaying orders from above, leaving the onus on those with more uniform decoration than her. Now, as on the Balclutha, she was on her own, and she was determined not to make the same mistakes she’d made then.
Once they found Claudia and any other survivors they could pick up, then she would let her men fight an offensive war in earnest. She needed an unquestionable success first—a completed mission that resulted in more than just nobody dying or the rescue of a single wounded dog. She needed this for her own morale.
†
Claudia was surprised when she saw another sunrise. She’d expected more of the mutant dogs to chase her down, more Slark to come after her, or exposure to the elements and her compiling wounds to finally finish her off. The rain had stopped before the sky grew gray with the light of the coming day. It was still cloudy, hazy, and cold, but the rain was done for the moment. It hardly mattered though as she was still wet from the soaked, tattered clothes she wore that she was in no position to repair or replace.
All she knew was walking. One weakly placed foot in front of the other. Her eyes never left the ten feet or so of pavement in front of her. She only knew the sun was behind her, which would keep her heading vaguely north. The fever and delirium that caught up to her in the morning wasn’t surprising, although the hallucinations accompanying it seemed far more vivid and horrible than simple disorientation from hypothermia, loss of blood, infection, and whatever else was wrong with her at the moment.
Her vision narrowed to a tiny tunnel with only what was directly ahead remaining clear. Gray haze encroached around the edges, preventing her from seeing anything out of her peripheral vision. She knew Veronica was on
her right though and Liam was on her left. They were walking with her, but didn’t seem to want to talk to one another. In Claudia’s befuddled mind, this made sense—they didn’t know each other well enough to have much to say.
“I might not be much to look at anymore, but you still could have waited until morning to see if I was truly dead,” Liam said to her. “You might have even learned something about the Slark that killed me or the dogs he had with him if you’d just waited to see.”
“I couldn’t, not again,” Claudia said.
“He doesn’t know about trump cards,” Veronica told her. “How could he?”
“They had something similar,” Claudia said. “Mouse’s friends did suicide bombings.” Claudia couldn’t remember what Mouse’s real name was. She could sort of picture her face, knew it had something to do with donuts, but the name refused to come to her.
“That is nothing like what we did,” Veronica snapped. “The trump card is a final valiant rejection of oppression. Ordering children to kill themselves in hopes of taking a few Slark with them is cowardice at its worst.”
“The end result is the same,” Claudia said.
“What couldn’t you see again?” Liam asked, filling in the portion of the statement she’d left out. She felt a little triumphant in using his question as proof to show herself he was just a hallucination. Despite knowing the real Liam was dead, it seemed important to further prove the Liam beside her wasn’t real by pointing out he couldn’t know what she was thinking unless he was a figment of her imagination.
“In Tombstone, the night I left, I saw a girl, a little bird who had taken that last, valiant stand,” Claudia said. “She was blood and pulp, impossible to separate from the men she’d killed. We could not have truly buried her alone. I did not know her, but I did not need to. She was me.”
“I’m not you and the Gator wasn’t a man meaning to take us captive,” Liam said.
Claudia wanted to point out that the Liam hallucination was indeed a part of her, but she couldn’t even completely form the thought let alone articulate it. The concept was well beyond the current state of her conscious mind.
“I couldn’t see you like that either,” Claudia said instead of giving the other explanation an awkward try. “I need to keep you in my mind as you were, not a mangled mess of flesh mingled with a dead Slark.”
“Plus, she always walks away,” Veronica said. “Sometimes it is reluctantly, but make no mistake, she always walks away.”
“We aren’t the father she doesn’t even know anymore who doesn’t even know who she is now,” Liam said. “She’s walked toward him, keeping everyone else at arm’s length, for years now.”
“I had daddy issues once,” Veronica said, “but then I turned thirteen and got the fuck over it.”
“Then you will both be pleased I am likely to die soon and take my pathetic, distancing daddy issues with me when I do,” Claudia said sourly.
“What a maudlin little thing you are,” Veronica said. “Of the many differences between you and Gieo, I would say that is probably the most pronounced.”
“Gieo, the pilot who took Fiona from her, the one she doesn’t even like saying the name of?” Liam asked.
“One in the same,” Veronica replied. “Although to say she took Fiona is inaccurate since Claudia never so much as told Fiona she might be interested. You see, our dark little dove here calls everything night. Gieo took failure after failure and spun them into positive successes. While Claudia, melancholy Claudia, managed remarkable survivals, great victories, and always treated them like crushing defeats.”
Great, Claudia thought, her brain was so broken even her hallucinations were starting to talk strangely. “I think I’m going numb,” Claudia said weakly. She wasn’t cold anymore, her shoulder didn’t hurt, and the tunnel of her vision was down to a tiny, dirty window looking out on the rubble-strewn street her feet were stepping toward.
“You might have been the best thing for her,” Veronica said. “I was too much like her, too soured on the world to do her gloomy outlook any good.”
“I died though,” Liam said, “and my laughter with me.”
This brought fresh tears to Claudia’s eyes. She couldn’t sense much now, but she could feel her weak sobbing ripple through her fragile frame and feel the tears welling in her eyes to roll down her tingling cheeks.
Madness, a common malady in the post Slark-invasion world, started to sound like a likelier and likelier outcome for Claudia. Veronica was right about her. She was once physically strong enough to pull herself through so much. After Yuba City and the radiation that scorched her lungs, this wasn’t true anymore. Her body always pulled her through the struggles her mind was ready to give up on as though the machine was too tenacious to let the ghost’s depression drag it down.
Her father had this same strength of body, but he combined it with strength of mind she simply didn’t possess. When he suffered a loss, he rallied to fortify twice as hard around what he had left. Again and again he had done this.
“My father should have had a son,” Claudia murmured. “I was ruined when my mother died.”
“In a world of orphans, the girl who still has her father is wishing she’d never been born,” Veronica said with a laugh. “I tried like hell to fuck a little happiness into her, but it never stuck.”
“Maybe that was the problem,” Liam said. “Maybe that’s why she’s been so reluctant to take on new lovers and so reticent to enjoy the one she’s actually had since you. If she equates sex with your desire to bring a little light to her dismal outlook, best to avoid good sex entirely.”
“It’d explain why she’s run from love her entire life or picked seemingly unlovable or unattainable people to fixate on,” Veronica said.
“Finally got her dad back and she can’t even be happy about that,” Liam said.
“It makes me wonder why she’s even still walking,” Veronica said. “It must be twelve hours or more of her trudging along without a goal in mind.”
“Have to keep walking,” Claudia said, completely devoid of an answer for any of what they were saying. Their voices were beginning to warble anyway. They’d started sounding like warped records played by a dirty needle on a slowly dying turntable. If they left her, she would walk on as it was the only thing left to do. If the grimy little window of her vision closed off entirely, she would stumble on. She might believe her every step was entirely futile, but she had too much Marceau blood in her to stop taking them.
Liam and Veronica were trying to shout to her to be heard, calling her name again and again as the only thing that made it through the sudden terrible raucous. Clanking, rumbling, shouting, and machinegun fire was drowning them out, but they never stopped yelling her name.
Her exhausted foot finally caught on something she couldn’t see and she stumbled. She managed to stay upright for a moment, but her other foot went into a hole she’d also missed, and she pitched forward without even the strength to throw up her hands to deflect the ground rushing up to meet her. The impact with the hard pavement never came though as strong arms caught her and suddenly Claudia was lifted, turned over, and looking up into the sun breaking through the clouds, putting a halo of cold autumn light around a woman’s head.
“Savez-vous ma mère?” Claudia asked the ethereal woman dragging her deeper into the din.
Chapter 26:
Cats Should be so Lucky.
Olivia went in for her daily visit to Claudia’s room and monthly check up for her mechanical leg. Dr. Gatling took her to the mixture of a mechanic’s shop and a doctor’s office first, promising she could see the miraculous Miss Marceau when he made sure she hadn’t done anything egregious to her leg.
Up on the table, with the inner workings of her leg laid bare to the doctor’s pokes and prods, Olivia relaxed at the normalcy of the whole situation. Somehow it felt routine to have Claudia in a hospital bed and Dr. Gatling grumpy about damage done to prosthetics.
“How is our repea
t customer?” Olivia asked.
“Physically, she’s going to be fine,” Dr. Gatling said, still tinkering with Olivia’s worn knee joint. He could take the limbs off his patients, work on them in an entirely different room from the person the limb belonged to, and would likely get his work done much faster if he did, but Dr. Gatling insisted all the wearers of his prosthetic marvels be attached to their limbs while he worked on them. He said it made him feel more like a doctor and less like an appliance repairman; Olivia suspected it also helped the patients feel like whole people rather than freaks. “Cats don’t have the lives Miss Marceau does. The combined weight of what happened to her was pretty significant, but it was all very fixable stuff. She probably had a concussion, a road map of bruises, exposure, mild hypothermia, three deep scratches, a blood infection from said deep scratches, dehydration, malnutrition, and signs of extreme exhaustion.”
“That’s the insane list I saw on her chart,” Olivia said.
“Then you know she’ll be fine,” Dr. Gatling snapped. “Her infection responded to IV antibiotics, she’s stitched up, hydrating nicely, and resting comfortably. Give her another week or two of bed rest and she’ll be back to denying death in wholly unbelievable ways.”
“You said physically she would be fine…”
Dr. Gatling adjusted the straps of his harness into his chair, which he always did when he was nervous about broaching a topic with Olivia. There was still his oath to keep private his patient’s more intimate issues, although he considered Olivia something of a colleague even though she barely held the medical training of a candy striper.
“She’s depressed, clinically, would be my guess,” Dr. Gatling said. “It’s the real reason she’s so lethargic.”
“I’ll talk to her, see what I can find out,” Olivia said. She’d suspected as much as well, but wanted a more professional opinion to confirm her diagnosis.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 23