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

by Cassandra Duffy

  “What do you want in exchange?” Olivia asked. Her voice sounded flat and emotionless in her own ears. She knew the price was going to be steep and she knew the military command of the city wouldn’t pay it.

  “The city, the secret to refining Slark fuel, and a list of the most competent women warriors in your ranks,” Dylan said. “I’ll save you the suspense—you and Claudia are already on the list.”

  “You don’t mind asking for the sun, moon, and stars,” Olivia said, already knowing Esme’s name would find its way onto the list at some point as well. She might have avoided being named a competent war asset if the last few weeks hadn’t seen a resurgence of the fame of Mouse.

  “When you consider we offer continued existence, it doesn’t seem like that much, now does it?” Dylan said.

  “I can take it to our military council, but I can tell you right now what their answer will be.” Olivia turned to walk away. Dylan covered the distance between them and caught Olivia by the arm.

  “If you’re concerned about Claudia, you don’t need to be,” she said. “Tell her the new White Queen is Alondra and that the newly promoted Red Bishop Bancroft has vouched for her. When San Francisco is in Raven hands, and it will be in Raven hands one way or the other, Bancroft will be in charge. See if Claudia doesn’t strive to change minds after she hears that.”

  Olivia knew the name from Claudia’s stories of Carson City. Bancroft and the Owl was the husband and wife duo who had begged help from Claudia in killing the Gator and their gratitude apparently wasn’t spent yet. Olivia swallowed hard and nodded her understanding.

  “You’d cut a dashing figure yourself in our uniform,” Dylan said, adding a wink so subtle in its flirtation that Olivia doubted anyone who hadn’t been targeted by it would even feel its weight.

  Olivia knew she was blushing but she hoped Dylan couldn’t see it in the moonlight, or, if she could, would chalk it up to the cold wind biting at Olivia’s cheeks. Olivia allowed herself an inward chuckle at the thought of Hastings’ empire being conquered by women he would have deemed unfit for combat. When Hastings reduced the female soldiers under his command to breeding stock, he’d burned every last bridge he had with Olivia. Now, in seeing another option for her sisters in arms, Olivia wanted to deliver the City of Broken Bridges to the Ravens.

  Olivia met Dylan’s gaze, mustering her strength to follow through with a treasonous declaration. “The Lazy Ravens have a friend in the City of Broken Bridges,” she said, “and with a little time, they’ll have an army of allies.”

  Chapter 31:

  Called Bluffs.

  Claudia listened in on the military council debating the Raven’s offer. There wasn’t a single person arguing they should take the deal and only her father was arguing temperance in how they responded. Claudia was surprised at how easy it was to find a vent in one of the adjoining rooms in the tower to listen at. She’d only missed the first few hours and it didn’t sound like anything was going to be resolved before morning.

  It took her awhile of eavesdropping to even figure out what the offer was. Slowly she pieced it together based off what people were railing against. Her father had actually called the rest of the council an “Anglo-centric herd of mules” at one point, which brought a grim smile to Claudia’s face. He could be so French sometimes. He was fighting for a measured response, a counter offer at the very least, or some effort to bring the Ravens to a negotiation table. The rest of the council, which was mostly comprised of British officers left over from the flotilla and a mishmash of Americans, were almost entirely set on the course of telling the Ravens to go fuck themselves. Claudia knew that would be a mistake none of them would live to regret. The Ravens were born out of a particularly brutal branch of the Russian mafia. They were a government only in the sense that there wasn’t really a government overseeing what they were doing anymore. There wasn’t any voting, nobody represented anyone’s interests above the Raven collective, and when something insulted the command structure, that something tended to die horribly. They wouldn’t let the secret of Slark fuel die with the idiots in the other room.

  Of course, if Claudia was being honest with herself about her former and probable future compatriots, they weren’t any likelier to negotiate with her father if he brought them a counteroffer. He was making good points though, and it wasn’t her place to inform them that their entire meeting was an exercise in futility.

  It took her awhile to figure out what they meant when they kept repeating the number 4.5 million. Apparently the command structure of the British military made several estimations of what would be left after the cascade and invasion. These survived longer than Hastings, and her father apparently made the top secret information public knowledge among the military council. Four and a half million was all there was supposed to be of humanity on the entire continent of North America. The estimate was conservative, but also seven years old. Claudia could update that number with information from the Ravens that would make it significantly lower. They kept insisting the Ravens wouldn’t sacrifice nearly 100,000 people just to get the Slark fuel. They insisted the City of Broken Bridges was the largest remaining city on the entire continent and should be given deference for that very reason. Claudia couldn’t help but chuckle at this. The Salt Lake City separatists had thought much the same thing up until their entire budding civilization was burned and enslaved by the Ravens.

  Then the conversation turned back to the cascade and the ruins of mankind that were left over. This perked Claudia up. She didn’t know much of the story since the Ravens didn’t know much. She knew more about what was happening in the east since the cascade than they seemed to, but she didn’t know how they came to be where they were. The smartest scientific minds, the best soldiers, and the greatest military leaders that could be assembled from every nation were brought together to make one last ditch effort to give humanity a glimmer of hope for survival—this was as far as she knew into the story.

  “They knew that no national interest, no country could be put above the survival of our species,” her father said. “They burned it all down, sacrificing themselves and everything we ever knew in the hope that the seeds of civilization left over might once again grow. One percent. That was all that was supposed to survive on both sides. If that one percent is scattered to the wind, arguing with each other, and ignoring the threat that drove us to destroy what took us ten thousand years to build, then they may as well have killed us all and let some smarter species rise up to take our place.”

  This Claudia hadn’t known. She hadn’t known that her father carried such horrible knowledge all this time. She knew things were dire to create the cascade, to burn most of the eastern seaboard, almost all of Europe, and who knows how many cities in Asia just to even the odds, but she didn’t know it was done so deliberately with such clear knowledge of how damaging the nuclear base EMP weapons would be. She always assumed the people in charge of pressing the button that ended the world were taking a calculated risk that might leave hope for their own survival, the survival of countries and governments. She didn’t know they were planning, all along, to slaughter most of humanity in the hope of preserving an improbable future for the species. The knowledge made her sick to her stomach and she assumed it was the same nausea her father carried all the time. One percent repeated in her head. They knew before they did it that one percent would be all that was left, but they did it anyway. No wonder he thought of his people as so astoundingly valuable.

  “Extinction was the other option,” her father said, “and it is true now as it was then. We must make hard, even distasteful choices to ensure the survival of humanity as they did.”

  To hear her father speak with such passion and resolve, it made Claudia believe, but it didn’t seem to make a dent in the tired men of the military council who remained convinced the Ravens were bluffing. Bluffing—it was an interesting thing to imagine Ekaterina doing. Claudia knew the Black Queen to feint, but bluffing just wasn’t her style. They
would find out soon enough, Claudia surmised, when they were dangling from the ends of ropes as traitors to humanity. If she acted quickly, got some time alone to work on Dylan or Bancroft when they took the city, she could probably spare her father’s life. His value was undeniable, even more so if she could convince him to burn Hastings’ papers so the only copy of the intelligence would be in his head.

  Remarkably, as the sun was rising, her father gained enough traction with the exhausted council to send a reasonable response. Olivia arrived to take the message. They told her to tell the Ravens that they seriously considered the offer, but ultimately would prefer to try to handle the Alcatraz problem on their own. Once the bay was retaken, they would negotiate with the Ravens to begin large scale production and exchange of manmade Slark fuel. Olivia seemed as surprised as Claudia that their reply was so measured.

  Claudia waited until the boardroom cleared out and then snuck around the corner to find her father organizing paperwork on a table that looked like it had spent a hard night with angry men. Claudia waited until he noticed her.

  “You listened in, I assume,” her father said without looking up from his task of cleaning up his files. “It was a game you played when you were younger—eavesdropping and spying.”

  “It’s gotten me into trouble before,” Claudia said.

  “A fact that never dissuaded you from doing something more than once,” her father replied.

  “What plan do you have to retake Alcatraz?” Claudia asked.

  “A dangerous, flawed plan that will likely cost us dearly in lives we can’t afford.” Her father stopped his work, searched the organized pile he’d created, and slipped out a folder to set aside for Claudia to look at. She crossed the room and tentatively opened the file.

  “Fire boats, bombardment, and a distraction assault on the amassed army…” Claudia gleaned from the plan it had a low chance of true success. The number of fireboats was too few, the distraction relied heavily on the militia to hold the beach in the real army’s absence, and even the troop numbers seemed a little slapdash as some descriptions were incomplete like an ambiguous listing for “Kingston’s contribution” without further information. The truth was the City of Broken Bridges didn’t actually have the ordinance to blow up Alcatraz. It was rock, cement, and steel fortified from the inside to keep prisoners in at one point and then armored on the exterior after the war when it was used as a fortress in the bay. The plan looked like it might succeed in destroying a few artillery placements on the island, prevent a shipment of the larger guns, and slow the Slark plans down, but nothing about it would prevent the Slark from simply trying again later. “The council should know better than to think this plan will accomplish much.”

  “The council does not believe the Ravens are the force you say they are,” her father explained. “Too much of Hastings’ teachings settled in with them. They see women as cavemen saw women—it is an old ignorance that blinds them.”

  “So you will sacrifice men to attempt a temporary solution to a permanent problem?”

  Her father slapped his hands on the table and finally looked at her with a ferocity in his eyes that belied what she thought was a dying fire after a long night of burning. “Do I have to convince you now too?”

  “No, Papa.” Claudia shied away from the topic.

  They stood in silence on opposite sides of the table for a time. Claudia had nearly forgotten what kind of anger resided beneath her father’s judicious surface. He didn’t like being questioned and he’d spent an entire night being roughly objected to by men he thought his inferiors. He didn’t need his daughter participating in the same foolishness, and she didn’t like having him mad at her.

  “I would volunteer for the distraction team,” Claudia said, regaining an iota of her former defiance that somehow drained from her whenever she was near her father.

  He clapped his hands together, not even close enough to her face to truly be dangerous, and held them there, all ten fingers pointed at her. She flinched, far more than would be reasonable for such a simple loud noise and abrupt movement.

  “You are not ready,” he growled, “and I do not have so many daughters that I could throw them away to indulge their foolishness.”

  “But, Papa…”

  “I have spoken on the matter,” he bellowed. “You will remain in the tower until it is over for good or ill.”

  Tears threatened at the corners of Claudia’s eyes and she willed them to remain in place until after she took her leave. She couldn’t let her father see her cry. “Fine, are we done here?” Claudia asked, her father nodded, and she managed to clear from the room before the tears rolled down her cheeks.

  The tense anger and embarrassment roiling beneath the surface felt so impotent against the world. In one conversation, he’d reduced her to the small, weak child she truly was in comparison to him. All her years of survival, fighting, and soldiering paled in comparison to what he was. He would always be a commander and she would always be his dutiful daughter. She could never be the warrior he was simply because her gender would not allow it. He claimed it was old ignorances about gender preventing his military council from taking the Ravens seriously, but he was truly no better despite being more knowledgeable. She wasn’t angry at him because he misjudged her; she was angry at him because he’d judged her correctly and told her so.

  She stormed up to one of the higher, completely uninhabited levels. She sank into a quiet corner. Shortly, she was joined by Roger who slunk in as though he too had recently been yelled at. He crawled along his belly to her and gently rested his muzzle on her leg, licking his lips and looking up at her expectantly. She gently caressed the scruff of his neck. The anger drained from her. When she calmed enough to think rationally again, she remembered back on something strange in the plan. A list of assets for the diversion assault included something explained only as “Kingston’s contribution” without data on strength of numbers or combat capability description. Claudia assumed it meant Olivia Kingston and her Clockwork Warriors, but if that were the case, it would have included the numbers she was adding like all the other platoon strength information. “Kingston’s contribution” apparently wasn’t human and didn’t need to be numbered.

  “Could it mean a Transcended?” Claudia asked Roger.

  Roger responded by wagging his tail.

  †

  Claudia awoke with a start to the sound of heavy cannons firing. She couldn’t remember falling asleep in the abandoned storage room with Roger curled up at her side. It wasn’t good news, although it wasn’t unexpected either. Her father’s plan could happen at any moment, relying entirely on the Slark trying to move artillery out to Alcatraz. Her waking mind was satisfied with the explanation, but something nagged at her. She couldn’t be sure how long she’d slept; however, there was no way it was long enough to actually set the plan in motion.

  The men guarding the beachhead were supposed to be revolved out of their positions and replaced with Bruce Coffey’s militia. They were then to muster with other elements of the army and take the far west exit under the wall to come at the Slark’s main force outside in a flanking maneuver meant to draw attention away from the bay. All of that would take a day at least. They couldn’t be more than a third of the way done, which meant the artillery shelling was starting sixteen hours too early. Her musings on timetables and troop mustering failures were cut short when she heard the buzz of Slark weapons between the thunder of cannon fire.

  There shouldn’t be any Slark weapons firing on the inside of the wall.

  Claudia leapt from her position of slumped against the wall. Roger jumped to as well. She raced to the window. The thunder wasn’t from cannon fire—it was exploding mortars and Olivia’s tanks detonating. The Slark must have been waiting for an opening to invade and the rotation of army regulars for militia was the perfect breech. Through the haze of war and extreme distance, she picked out the gray, multi-armed aliens already on land. Claudia raced from the room with Roger q
uick at her heels.

  She burst into Dr. Gatling’s lab and found him readying for an influx of wounds to flesh and mechanical body parts. He didn’t even seem to notice the out of breath sniper and her canine companion.

  “I need my rifle,” Claudia said.

  “I’m under orders not to give you a weapon,” Dr. Gatling said without looking up from what he was doing, which appeared to be placing various lubricants and pain killers into syringes. Claudia idly hoped he wouldn’t mix up the two.

  “Then keep your back turned while I take one since you weren’t ordered to stop me from stealing.” Claudia crossed the room to where Dr. Gatling kept the front inventory of his armory, her eyes already locked on her sniper rifle in the rack on the end.

  “Actually, I was,” Dr. Gatling said.

  Claudia’s hand froze inches from the gun.

  “But after a five minute conversation with the chaplain I can understand why you didn’t want to continue your therapy,” Dr. Gatling said. “I still think you’re an emotional train wreck, probably mentally unstable by now, and worst of all, you’re full of accursed Marceau blood, but if I started pulling people out of combat for those reasons, there wouldn’t be anyone left to fight, including your father. Take the gun, go with Cthulhu, and give those gray bastards hell.”

  Claudia grabbed her rifle, briefly considered asking who Cthulhu was, but then thought better of it, and ran from the room.

  Roger didn’t struggle at all to keep up with her as she ran across the fields and hills toward Telegraph Hill and the steep incline up to Coit Tower. If she could find some rocks or rubble to hide among, the shots would be long, but with an excellent line of sight. A mile or under as the crow flies from her emplacement to her targets—with a normal rifle and an above average sniper, this would be unimaginably difficult. But she had a technological marvel as a weapon and she was a superb markswoman.

  Roger barked and urged her up the hill as she labored to keep up her pace once the grade became too steep. By the time she crested the ruins on the hill, the sounds of combat were closer and she imagined she wouldn’t have to make any shots over a half a mile. She found a perfect position behind the trunk of a tree, lying out on a slab of concrete that was jutting from the shattered earth at a thirty degree angle. The tentacle pod on her rifle found a solid grip on the edge of the cement and she took her first survey of the battlefield below.