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

by Cassandra Duffy

  They were through the defenses and pushing hard to solidify their hold on the beach. The militia wasn’t in full retreat, but they were on their heels and losing ground fast. Claudia scanned the human lines first to find her father or Olivia. The army regulars were turning back from their mustering point well to the rear to create a new line of defense and even gathering for a counterattack under her father’s direct command. Olivia’s Clockwork Warriors on their miniature tanks were trying to reinforce and provide covering fire for the militia’s retreat, although it looked to be costing them dearly and she couldn’t find Olivia among them with her cursory scan.

  Claudia turned her attention to the Slark line with a cold certainty hardening her resolve. She started first with the mobile turrets giving the retreating militia such fits. The heavy, repeating weapons sat on the backs of smaller crawlers that looked a little like spiders. It took two Slark to fire the weapons effectively and two to drive although they were nearly unstoppable over almost any terrain. The Ravens typically targeted them at the outset of any conflict with rocket propelled grenades; apparently the soldiers of the City of Broken Bridges hadn’t figured this out yet.

  Claudia centered her reticule over the first gunner’s center mass, adjusted to ticks over and one up for the wind, and fired. The shot struck high on the alien’s chest. He jerked and spasmed a few painful times, trying valiantly to hold onto the gun’s controls, but ultimately ended up falling backward off the spider-pod. She clicked in another round, found the second gunner, similar to a human reloader but with more responsibility in angling the gun, and fired before he could even get out of his crouched position. Her shot, after making another set of adjustments based on her first, punctured the Slark high on the upper shoulder and tore a satisfying green chunk of flesh off near his neck when it exited.

  She continued her grim work of striking from a distance. She found a target, calmed her breathing, steadied her aim, watched for shifts in the wind patterns, fired, and repeated the whole process again and again. She ticked off her misses as rare until she’d counted out nine of every ten rounds landing on target, seven of ten resulting in a kill on the first shot. She had their spider-pods unmanned and useless within twenty minutes of work.

  Her gun was heating up in her hands and her nerves were beginning to fray. The Slark pushed forward, which made her shots easier, but also put them closer and closer to the base of the insurmountable hill she was on. They might not be able to climb up to get her, but she’d seen Slark bombard an entire city grid with artillery to get rid of one sniper—shelling the hill she was hidden on wouldn’t be a stretch if they pieced together where she was. Dr. Gatling’s guns were remarkable in two importantly clandestine ways when compared to traditional firearms: they were a fraction as loud and boasted no muzzle flash to speak of.

  Before she could begin her search for Gators among the Slark ranks, something strange happened. Two knives out of the human force began cutting two bloody swaths into the Slark position. Claudia focused back on the human counterattack to find two surprising sources of the pushback. The resurgence in the south followed an unimaginable spear tip in the Transcended she’d seen die and resurrect with the strange proclivity to see humans. The Transcended was the unstoppable killing machine everyone always said they would be if they could be convinced to join the war. Slark guns and explosives were of little use against its armored skin and it was outfitted with an astonishing array of weapons that seemed to fire accurately in every direction at all times. The bronze juggernaut rolled through the Slark as though they were of little concern. People had likened Transcended to gods and the one that finally joined the war certainly seemed to boast the wrath of one.

  Claudia shifted her focus to the other front, expecting to find a second Transcended, but instead spotted her father, leading from the front. She’d never seen anyone fight the way he did. She knew he was an exceptional soldier before the war even began. He was decorated, first in his class at every training series, and spoken of in hushed, reverent tones by other Special Forces soldiers, but now he was a warrior of fabled capability. He moved faster than she would have thought a man could move across the muddy field, found targets she would have thought outside his field of vision, and wielded the massive machinegun as though it were little more trouble to wield than a garden hose. He skipped from cover to cover, feinted, gave ground, redoubled his attack, raced through openings in the Slark line, and devastated their ranks whenever they showed the slightest hesitation. She thought she should record what he was doing to show to the Ravens.

  Instead, she focused on helping ease his path. She traced the likely area he would head, and looked for hard targets. She found a Gator at long last, but before she could fire on it, her father had riddled it with bullets and was racing over its blood splattered corpse.

  “So, that’s how it is going to be,” she muttered to herself, moving farther out to find another target her father couldn’t possibly reach before she fired.

  A Gator, recognizable by his massive size and height, was directing reinforcements from a series of landing craft to shore up a failing defensive position. She faintly spotted the blue light lines of a communicator on the back shoulder of his improvised body armor. The beams were leading back to the ships and relaying out to the island. Claudia catalogued the information as interesting, but not particularly pertinent to the current fight. She wanted desperately to blow the Gator’s head clean from its body, but didn’t think she could manage it at over a mile’s distance. She thought of the astounding feat her father was performing though in defense of the city and decided to try. If he could match the killing power of a Transcended, surely she could cleave one head from one body.

  She took a deep, calming breath and held it, willing her heart to quiet to an unobtrusive thump only once a second. The wind died out enough for a single shot, a tiny window of stagnant air across a fairly windy battleground. She gave the trigger the gentlest of squeezes, prayed to Apollo or Cthulhu or whoever might be listening, and watched as the shot landed perfectly on the top of the Gator’s muzzle, ricocheted off something hard inside its head, and exploded out the side, taking most of the Gator’s skull with it.

  Without their commander, the reinforcements looked lost and rattled. Then, a few moments later, when her father’s force reached them, they looked dead.

  The triumph of the moment was tempered by the realization that, while they repelled the Slark assault, it cost them dearly and certainly spoiled any possible chance of affecting their plan now. Her father and the Transcended were mopping up the beach when the sun began to set, casting the shadow of the hills of old San Francisco across the bloody field.

  Claudia slipped from her sniper’s nest, achy, tired, dehydrated, and starving. To her surprise, when she scaled the edge of the embankment she’d slid down, Roger was still there, standing guard over her exit. He hadn’t been lying down only to stand at her return, but stood proper vigil, only turning his head from his guard duties to see her when she returned.

  “Good boy,” Claudia said by way of reward. Maybe the next time she faced a Gator using hunting hounds, she would have a canine sidekick of her own to even the odds.

  Getting back down the hill was less time consuming and exhausting than scaling it was. She circled around wide to come in well from behind to survey the total damage as she walked the field. Their battle-ready forces were dwindling as it stood and she wanted to estimate how many they’d lost in regaining a defensive position they shouldn’t have lost in the first place. This was when she heard the resumption of battle.

  No new Slark boats were landing, the wall wasn’t breached to the south, and there certainly wasn’t enough of a Slark force left over from the original assault to warrant so much gunfire. She raced over one hill, leaping over bodies as she went, Roger ran at her side. As she crested the last hill before the dip down into the old wharf, she spotted the source of combat. The Transcended was chasing a small, dark-haired woman across the battlefie
ld and men were hurling themselves at the violent, metal god to stop it from catching her.

  Claudia slid in the mud, coming to rest behind a sandbag wall. She trained her rifle first on the source of the chase, only to find Esme ducking and dodging as the Transcended hurled everything it had at her. She was fast and intuitive in avoiding fire. The men assaulting the Transcended were helping some, but they were too easily felled to truly harm the crazed monstrosity.

  Claudia targeted the Transcended. Human bullets weren’t doing much better at piercing its armor than the Slark. A retaliatory strike by her father’s squad, this time properly led from a distance by the no-doubt exhausted commander, managed to slow the Transcended, and Esme finally slipped away into what Claudia could only guess was an entrance into the under city that only a handful of people knew about. Claudia sighted in on the only soft spot she could think of—the blue orb in the robot’s massive shoulder. It was guarded somewhat since she’d last seen it, with a few chunks of metal mesh around the edges, leaving only an apple sized exposure in the middle. Her first shot, taken in haste, struck off the armored edges and succeeded only in telling the Transcended something potentially dangerous had located its weak point. The metal juggernaut turned its attention to Claudia and charged, scattering mud and dead bodies as it barreled up the hill.

  She snapped in another round, sighted, held her breath, and fired. The shot hit low and to the right, bouncing off the metal mesh. Soon it would be in firing range to retaliate and she wasn’t nearly as fast as Esme and certainly didn’t have her stamina. She had time enough for one more shot, maybe two if she snapped off a wild prayer, before the Transcended would obliterate her hiding spot. She could see the weapons powering up and a swarm of red laser sight dots painted her as she brought the rifle to bear, found the blue orb in her crosshairs, and fired, anticipating the Transcended’s gait as it broke free of the smoky haze collected across a low point in the battlefield. The shot hit home, shattered the glass, and spilled a stream of blue gel from the bullet wound. The Transcended died for a second time in a way befitting a human, staggering forward weakly through the mortal wound before crumpling forward with an arm pinned beneath.

  Claudia promptly threw up from the stress and fear colliding with her already knotted stomach. Not having eaten that day, it was all acid and bile. Roger gave her a questioning look. “Don’t eat that,” Claudia croaked when she was done.

  Her father was at her side shortly after. He helped her from the foxhole she’d hidden in and gripped her in a hug that would be her only wound for the day when her father left two tiny bruises on the backs of her shoulders from the overzealous and adrenaline-fueled hug.

  She followed him down the hill as he stormed toward the fallen Transcended, shotgun in hand, meaning to do it more harm if it so much as shuddered. Claudia felt safer walking a step behind him, remarkably so after seeing what he was truly capable of on in combat. He was an ancient Greek hero, an Achilles figure among already battle-hardened veterans, and now she knew why he was shown such respect in the City of Broken Bridges.

  “Get it rolled over,” her father commanded of the men approaching the fallen Transcended with anxious, mincing steps. “I mean to see what is inside this thing once and for all.”

  Getting the Transcended rolled over onto its back was a Herculean task, requiring a tow chain and one of Olivia’s tractors turned tank, to finally get it moved. Muddy and still leaking the peculiar blue gel, it required cutting torches to get through the armor seamlessly incorporated into the robot’s shell around its shattered blue orb. Claudia and her father looked on as the men finally pried away the plating, broke out the last of the glass with a hammer, and began scooping out the remaining gel with their bare hands. The three workers surrounding the Transcended recoiled in slow, muted horror at what they found inside. They looked to Claudia’s father as they backed away.

  Claudia and her father stepped forward together, climbed the Transcended’s arm, and gazed into the gaping hole in its shoulder where the blue orb once was. A vaguely human form, stripped of skin and most of its flesh, lay twisted in the bottom of the hole. A perfect bullet hole cracked the skull above the left eye socket which was a nest of wires in lieu of an eyeball.

  To Claudia’s shock and dismay, and likely everyone else’s around her too, her father reached into the Transcended’s wound, grasped the skull in his mighty fist, and tore it free both from the wires and braces holding it in place but also the remains of its spinal column and neck. He held the modified head in front of him as though he were about to address it in a Hamlet fashion. He glared hard at the wires, tattered flesh, and the blue goop still clinging to the head and his hand. He stared hard into the bullet hole that clearly was its demise as if the answer might be hidden within.

  He stormed out of the gathered halo of concerned and curious soldiers with the head in one hand and his shotgun in the other.

  “Papa, where are you going?” Claudia asked.

  “Pour obtenir des réponses de professeur Kingston,” he said in a tone so cold Claudia shivered inwardly.

  Chapter 32:

  The Broken Machines of War.

  Claudia caught up with her father in time to join him on the elevator down to the sanctuary of the Keepers. He’d said he was going to get answers from Kingston and she judged from the twitching muscles in his jaw that he was likely to turn violent if he didn’t so much as care for the phrasing of one of the answers. The wire-riddled skull was still clenched in his hand at his side, dripping blue goop onto the elevator’s metal floor as they descended into the earth. She wondered if he knew he still had it.

  She couldn’t think of a thing to say to him that wouldn’t make him angrier. The potential harm to her the Transcended posed was likely only part of the rage. Professor Kingston had sent the Transcended into their midst, and clearly her father was holding Kingston responsible for every death and injury caused by the mechanical creature when it went insane. Claudia got the feeling from the head in her father’s hand that Professor Kingston probably also lied to her father about what the Transcended really were since he seemed determined to carry proof to the Professor’s door.

  Upon arrival on the lowest level, after winding their way through the blackened tunnels in silence, they came upon the main chamber above the thermal vent. Few students roamed the stone walkways and no Transcended were anywhere to be seen. Professor Kingston beckoned to them from across a causeway before vanishing into an arched door in the natural rock wall. The fact that Claudia’s father was holding a mangled, blue head didn’t seem to perplex the handful of Keepers and students they passed.

  They entered the doorway Professor Kingston vanished down, finding a winding stairway into a deeper recess. The pathway was large, much larger than would be necessary even for Transcended to use it. The walls also showed signs of metal scrapings in the rocks, which was odd considering how smoothly the Transcended shaped rock when they cut it. They exited the passage into a large room dominated by the skeletal remains of what looked like an alien submarine. Professor Kingston was standing with his back to them and the doorway, hands folded behind his back, gazing up at the derelict spacecraft.

  “I think it’s time you met our wayward traveler that has taught us so much,” Professor Kingston said, gesturing to a chamber near the top of the vaguely fish-shaped vessel. In a holding chamber, similar to the one in the shoulder of the Transcended, was a desiccated Slark corpse with wires jutting from its limbs and eye sockets to connect it to the ruined chamber surrounding it.

  “You told me it was under control,” her father bellowed at Professor Kingston, not nearly as interested in the marvel before him as Claudia was.

  “I told you it was as safe as it could be made,” Professor Kingston replied. “Desperation colored how you interpreted that statement.”

  Her father hurled the skull at the floor near Professor Kingston’s feet. The blue head bounced and rolled in a meandering manner, finally coming to rest slightly in f
ront and to the right of Professor Kingston. The Professor looked down at it without alarm.

  “Who was that?” Commander Marceau demanded.

  “Inspector Cavanaugh,” Professor Kingston explained. “He was of the original group who found the spacecraft wreckage and helped us bring it here. He kept our secret for so long that I actually forgot he knew it. Then, when Feinstein died, Cavanaugh was suddenly at our doorstep making demands in exchange for his silence.”

  “Who is Feinstein?” Claudia asked, not wanting to step on her father’s interrogation, but needing an answer she already dreaded she knew.

  “The Transcended you saw die on the beach in the Slark missile attack was Keeper Feinstein,” Professor Kingston explained casually. “We think he was planning on building an aqueduct.”

  “You turn people into those monstrosities?!” Claudia said, her voice becoming shrill.

  “It is the next form of evolution,” Professor Kingston said, finally turning to face his interrogators. “People work for years to become worthy of their ascension. They build their shells with care and must display a mental discipline and moral clarity worthy of being lifted to the next level of life.”

  “Inspector Cavanaugh didn’t seem all that mentally disciplined or morally clear and he didn’t build the shell,” Commander Marceau said. “You scraped out the remains of Feinstein and shoved Cavanaugh in.”

  Professor Kingston sighed and looked down at some minor flaw in the stone floor. “I was pressured from all sides to provide support from the Transcended. We’d never had one die before. We didn’t really know what to do with Feinstein’s shell or his body. Cavanaugh offered to become the first warrior Transcended ever in exchange for never telling anyone what was really going on down here. It seemed like a single solution for two problems.”