The door to the bar swung open, and a familiar, yet surprising face came strolling through. Actually, her steps were far more mincing than strolling, but Olivia thought it probably qualified as a stroll for Esme these days. She’d taken the advice to go home and get cleaned up to a level Olivia hadn’t expected. Esme actually looked a little dolled up with some curls in her hair, a little eye makeup, and a cute, navy blue dress with a tight cinch around her slender waist.
“What brings you down here?” Olivia asked of her.
“I overheard Claudia talking to her father,” Esme said, immediately making her way across the bar to Olivia’s side.
“Nothing complimentary by the look on your face,” Olivia said.
“She doesn’t want either of us, maybe she never did since we’re both apparently so flawed in her opinion,” Esme said.
“That sounds like a familiar answer to a common problem,” Olivia murmured.
“And there was a man, outside the wall, he died, but she wanted him, cared for him…”
This took Olivia by surprise. She knew Claudia had a history with men, specifically she’d mentioned a man named Danny or Manny or something in Tombstone. Claudia also had specifically said she preferred women. Olivia didn’t think Claudia was lying when she said the words, but she also might have subconsciously meant she preferred women when suitable men weren’t readily available, which would certainly describe the City of Broken Bridges as huge swaths of the male population were married, gay, or barking at the moon crazy…or all three in some cases. The mystery man was dead though and Olivia had poured more grieving on by delivering the Veronica news so soon after. Despite the jilting, the ingratitude of her rescue receiving such a frosty response, and the secondhand news from Esme that Claudia wasn’t really into either of them, Olivia still felt sorry for her. It was shocking how much sympathy the little sniper could illicit without lifting a finger to seek it out.
“Do you still feel bad for her? Do you still want to do kind things for her to try to cheer her up?” Olivia asked, a little disgusted with herself that she did.
“Yes, but that’s not going to stop me from doing this.” Esme took Olivia’s face in her hands and kissed her.
Olivia’s hands came up to her waist and the kiss deepened in length and intensity as both women were holding on to prove to the other it wasn’t something either wanted to pull away from. Scooting to the edge of her barstool, Olivia spread her long legs around Esme, and pulled her closer until they were completely entwined. They broke the kiss, both panting with roiling sexual desire, and simply held one another.
“When you protected me from Inspector Cavanaugh, I saw you, truly saw you for the first time,” Esme whispered against Olivia’s neck. “I meant to tell you that the morning I came out to watch you depart, but you seemed so focused on rescuing Claudia that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.”
“I’m not her and I don’t want to be a way to hurt her,” Olivia said.
They pulled back from the hug to look each other in the eye. Olivia expected to find tears around Esme’s large, brown doe eyes, but instead found an intense fire burning behind them.
“I don’t want to hurt her. I want to help us.”
Olivia’s first reaction to the wonderful words was to take Esme by the hand and find some place they might do a proper job of helping one another, but she refrained for the moment, still not entirely trusting the shift in the romantic dynamic. Instead, she led Esme to an empty table, of which there were many, and beckoned for food and drink to be brought.
Sitting in silence across from one another they poked at the plates of food brought to them. It was meant to be similar to baked beans on toast with a fried egg, but instead of baked beans, the dish contained stewed chickpeas; instead of toast, the hollowed skin of a potato; and instead of being fried, the egg was scrambled with grilled sweet onions. As much as Olivia didn’t want to immediately go to their one interest in common, she couldn’t think of anything else to say to Esme to fill the growing silence between them.
“Claudia said the food here is a lot better than in Tombstone or Las Vegas,” Olivia said.
“It’s a lot worse than it was before the Slark,” Esme said with a wry grin. “How does it compare to what they served you in the Navy?”
Olivia considered the strange forkful of potato, chickpeas, and egg. “I’d rate it a sideways move. The tea here is atrocious though. Worse after the antebellum supplies were used up.”
Esme smiled to her, looking wistfully for a moment. “I love the way you talk.”
“Yes, I’ve been told my Manchester accent hits a pleasing part of the American ear.”
“It’s not just that,” Esme said quickly. “Your accent is lovely, sexy even, but it’s the way you use words, and make it all sounds so important—like you don’t say unimportant things.”
“That was a product of growing up with my father,” Olivia said, blushing a little under the dual compliments of sexy and articulate. “The man wouldn’t let my brother, mother, or I get a word in edgewise. Every moment was a teaching moment for him and every conversation a speech. With such an economy of words afforded the three of us in the gaps between his lectures, we all became fairly adept at only saying what absolutely must be said. I think I’ve gotten a little better since.”
“I spent so much time worrying that Claudia would see something in you that she didn’t see in me. I never stopped to consider if I might see something in you,” Esme said. “I’m glad I did. You’re a very interesting person.”
“Made all the more interesting through science and technology.”
“Have you been waiting to bring up your mechanical leg?”
“It’s not something everyone can get past.”
Esme leaned forward across the tiny table, catching Olivia’s eyes with hers. Her voice dropped to a soft purr. “I already have lusty thoughts about seeing you naked, metal leg and all.”
Olivia considered pointing out that the comment sounded like one Claudia would make, that Esme must have picked up some tricks from their mutual acquaintance, but she discarded the thought as irrelevant. She’d certainly learned a few things from Claudia as well, and it wasn’t the sort of thing to say to move the romance forward. Instead, she leaned in to cover the rest of the distance and kissed Esme’s full lips.
“We’ll have to see about turning those thoughts into reality,” Olivia said, mirroring a statement she could hear from Claudia’s lips.
They slid closer to one another around the edge of the table to nearly sit on the same side. Silence stretched between them as if neither knew where to take the seduction from there. Claudia had been such a driving force in their relationships to that point that neither Olivia nor Esme were particularly equipped to take control.
“I think my mental scars might be worse than your leg anyway,” Esme said. “I know they’ve made me difficult to sleep with. At least three nights a week, I wake up screaming or don’t even wake up for the screaming.”
“After Cavanaugh called you Mouse, I asked around about you,” Olivia said. The civilian freedom fighters and the remnant British military units that fought to liberate the city hadn’t overlapped much. A few MPs, Cavanaugh included, were sent by General Hastings to keep the civilian combat operations from getting in the way. Olivia had thought that was the sum total of the influence Hastings had over the civilians, but hearing Bruce Coffey’s telling of it, the civilian militia was often used as shock troops or suicide ops. The animosity between herself and Bruce made a lot more sense after their conversation. He didn’t know that she didn’t know what really went on.
“Of the twenty-five who started out as couriers and spies, only three of us survived,” Esme said. “Shin killed herself a few months after the wall was built, but I still see Chandra sometimes. She’s not doing as well as I am.”
“It was abhorrent that Hastings or Cavanaugh would use children as soldiers. I promise I didn’t know anything about it.”
“I don’t think many people did. Claudia said she wasn’t much older than me when she started training as a scout sniper. She says this world doesn’t have children anymore; everyone grew up when the Slark landed or they died.”
“Claudia lives under a black cloud of that kind of thinking,” Olivia countered. “It may keep her alive, but it also keeps her from happiness.”
“There has to be more to it than that,” Esme said.
“There are three kinds of people when it comes to war: those who were born for it, those who can muddle through it if they have to, and those who were never meant to take part in it. Strangely enough, it was General Hastings who told me this. As he explained it, the vast majority of people were the third type, most soldiers were the second, and the ones likeliest to become career warriors were the first. Claudia, her father, and Hastings are, or were, the kind of people who were meant for war. I brought the theory to my father and he said it was reasonably sound, although he postulated that the first type likely only comprised one or two percentage points of the entire population, while ninety or more percent is probably the third kind.”
“Which type do you think you are?”
“The second. I don’t thrive on conflict the way Claudia and her father do. It’s a job and an important one. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s dangerous, but it’s still just a job.”
“Then why join the Navy before we even knew about the Slark.”
Olivia shook her head and sighed. “It seems too silly now. I did it to upset my father.”
“Did it work?”
“Not a bit,” Olivia said. “He actually had this bizarre romanticized notion left over from his boyhood of taking to the seas for adventure. He read a lot of Joseph Conrad as a child.”
“Who is that? I was a product of American public schools. We only read two books in high school: To Kill a Mocking Bird and The Great Gatsby.”
“He wrote Heart of Darkness and a bunch of other adventure tales, mostly about sailing, all incredibly dense Victorian era stuff. My father must have been one of a tiny handful of twelve-year-olds who actually thought they were exciting. After he told me about his Lord Jim style fantasies about being a sailor, I tried to read the book.”
“How was it?”
“I was back to reading my lesbian murder mysteries in a week,” Olivia said.
“Getting back to the three types thing…” Esme began although the sudden rattling of bells and wails of alarms broke off the rest.
Olivia was to her feet immediately, followed closely by most of the rest of the patrons in the bar. She made for the door with Esme close on her heels. In the streets, the resting members of the militia were arming and heading toward the surface.
“It’s a general mustering,” Olivia said, shouting a bit to be heard over the alarms. “You should get home.”
“I feel safer with you,” Esme said.
The comment on its own might have been enough to pluck a heartstring, but combining it with Esme taking her hand and looking up to her with those beautiful doe eyes and Olivia was helpless to deny her. She led Esme toward the surface. Elements of Olivia’s Clockwork Warriors came to her side as they walked. They were men whose names she didn’t know yet although their faces were familiar. They distributed weapons among them, handing Olivia an old revolver.
The push toward the surface created chaos of its own on top of the clanging bells and wailing alarms salvaged from a dozen different sources like schools, ambulances, and carnival games. When they broke free of the subterranean tunnels into the cold night air, the chaos shifted from noise to full-scale war. A battle was raging in the bay and the shore forces were doing their best to provide support.
Olivia grabbed the first of her men that she recognized as an officer. “Gather who you can and get the heaviest artillery tractors we have to help support the sea wall,” she told him. Esme released Olivia’s hand, following closely behind as if waiting for an order herself.
The general push of militia was heading toward the bay and the sound of combat. Olivia and Esme followed along, waiting to see someone who might know better what was going on. As they neared the water, the sound of battle intensified and they got their first glimpse of Alcatraz ablaze on the water among a dozen other fires.
The mutant onslaught had abated over the past few days. The sea wall was secured against the Slark, albeit at a steep cost. And the bay was once again patrolled by human vessels. All this seemed to be changing in one very impressive nighttime raid.
Olivia found Bruce Coffey at the crest of a small hill ringed in by sandbags and armor plating. He was commanding the militia with remarkable competence in the absence of Inspector Cavanaugh who, to Olivia’s knowledge, hadn’t been relived of his command yet.
“Olivia, glad to see you awake and armed,” Bruce said.
“Where can I help?” Olivia replied.
“If you can get your Clockwork Warriors and their tanks along the northern edge of the sea wall to provide fire support for the boats pulling out survivors, that’d be a great help.” Bruce led Olivia to the front of the makeshift command bunker and pointed to the sandy area along old pier 43 and the remains of the Embarcadero.
“Consider it done.” Olivia turned to find which of her men she might give the order to, but only found Esme still at her side.
“I can run the message,” Esme said.
Part of Olivia wanted to deny her, to keep her safe at her side, but she couldn’t see another way to move the order any faster. “Do it, but stay out of the fighting and get back here as soon as it’s done,” Olivia said.
Esme smiled to her. “I need your authorization phrase.”
Olivia leaned in closer to Esme’s ear to whisper it to her, but also to lay a brief kiss on her cheek. “Toxic tango.”
With that, Esme was off and running, moving faster through the mobilized military units than Olivia would have thought possible. Once she’d started asking around about the Mouse, the reports couldn’t have been more impressive. During the liberation of the city, the Mouse didn’t get caught, didn’t get delayed, didn’t forget even a scrap of her message, and never left a trail the Slark might follow to her destination or her departure point. After talking with Esme, Olivia was convinced most of what had made her so competent was a healthy dose of fear. Strangely, being terrified by her work served to keep her from ever becoming overconfident in her obviously impressive and much praised skill.
“I’ll understand if you want to keep her as your private runner,” Bruce said, “but I could sure use her and a dozen more like her.”
“So could the world,” Olivia said wistfully. “What is the situation, Militia Captain Coffey?”
“The details I’m getting are pretty beggarly, but it’s clear from this vantage point what’s happening even without full military clearance.” Bruce handed Olivia his field glasses and directed her to look down around the edge of pier 39 and out across the bay where the battle was still raging. “The Slark pulled back to the Oakland side of the bay once our patrols gained strength. We thought they were done with trying to cross after the casualties their attack boat squadrons took, but then earlier tonight, they launched a raid with a force we didn’t think they had anymore. Once they broke our bay patrol, they ferried over a thousand mutants or more on cattle-barge-looking-things and landed them all on Alcatraz. It must have taken them weeks to corral so many freaks.”
“The automated defenses…”
“Knocked out in less than an hour by the nuclear EMP bursts the damn mutants give off when they die,” Bruce said. “We’ve been trying to reinforce the two hundred regulars still on Alcatraz, but the Slark are hitting us pretty hard in the crossing. The civilian fleet, including the Balclutha, made it out before the fighting got too thick, but by the look of it they won’t be coming back anytime soon.”
Olivia continued watching the battle raging in the bay, focusing specifically on the long, sleek shape of the Hercules as it comprised the tip of the
spear for the human fleet. She saw the suicide swift boat attack from around the southern edge of Alcatraz before the crew of the Hercules could. Five Slark skimmer boats, likely loaded with explosives, shot down along the human fleet’s flank, striking the Hercules and her three escort vessels broadside. The explosions lit up the night, obliterating the smaller ships entirely. The Hercules listed and began sinking bow first into the black water of the bay.
Olivia’s heart froze at the sight of the Hercules going down with a hundred souls aboard. She was one of the last fine ships of humanity with no new vessels being built. The greater implications for their war effort aside, which were devastating, the loss of the 1905 tugboat turned destroyer was practically the death of a distant family member for Olivia. She’d sailed on her before she lost her leg, knew every bolt and bulkhead, knew the faces of her crew, and had lulled herself into the same belief so many had that she’d survived too long to sink now.
“That’ll be it then,” Bruce said, spitting angrily on the ground. “They’ve got Alcatraz and the bay.”
Chapter 28:
Hardened Lines.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 25