Claudia’s stomach did a somersault. Olivia was one of the people who pressured her father into the catastrophic decision. Claudia knew she could never be told what her father had done or why, in part, he had done it. As distasteful as the entire thing was, the incident would need to be swept under the rug for the good of the entire city. She had no idea what they would tell the Ravens when they inevitably took the city.
The rage was gone from her father and she could tell the answers he’d sought were far more devastating for him than he expected. She hadn’t heard him pressure Professor Kingston about the Transcended, but from his body language, she could tell he was weighed down by his part in all of it. She placed her hand on his arm and smiled weakly up to him when he looked to her.
“How do you even know how to do this?” Claudia asked of Professor Kingston, taking over the questioning from her drained father.
“This is why I wanted you to meet the traveler, which is what we’ve been calling him.” Professor Kingston again gestured to the Slark corpse in the ship resting against the far wall. “We found the wreckage in the earliest days after the cascade and we brought him down to the caves only a few of us knew about to study his secrets. As we unlocked the secrets of the ship, our knowledge of robotics jumped forward a thousand years. Their technology didn’t survive the purge, but we were able to build simulacrums of it and that is how the Transcended came to be.”
The Professor motioned for them to join him in his slow, reverent approach on the mostly dismantled ship. He stood a few feet below the compartment holding the nearly mummified Slark corpse. It lacked skin and sensory organs as Cavanaugh had, but it seemed a little more intact than the human skeletal remains in the dead Transcended, which only had a thin layer of tissue on the bones.
“He isn’t like the foot soldiers and laborers you know,” Professor Kingston said. “His head is larger by nearly two-thirds, his arms are longer and thinner, and there are no ocular nerve endings. Don’t you see what that means?”
Claudia and her father shook their heads.
“He was born to be this!” Professor Kingston exclaimed. “We select our Transcended from the worthiest, the smartest, the most creative, and enlightened people we can find, but the Slark grow theirs in genetically altered embryos. The traveler hatched and was immediately hooked to the ship that would be his true body for his entire life. He saw the stars and the cosmos as no living thing could. He flew through space as a fish swims the sea or a bird flies through the air. This higher form of Slark wasn’t just how they got to earth, it was probably how they even found us. What’s more, I think they sent scout ships and I think we intercepted at least one.”
“Like the Roswell autopsy?” Commander Marceau scoffed.
“Nothing that old,” Professor Kingston said. “It would have been recent, a few years at most. Didn’t it seem strange to you that we just happen to have a weapon capable of wiping out an advanced alien invasion force in the middle of a war we were losing badly that was less than a year old?”
Claudia could see the realization come over her father’s face, but she didn’t follow the epiphany that apparently was already part of Professor Kingston and her father’s knowledge.
“What did you figure out, Papa?” she asked.
“If they captured a scout ship with one of these things in it, they would have thought all Slark were cyborgs for lack of a better word,” her father said. “The EMP weapons were meant to wipe out a species believed to be partially robotic.”
“Precisely!” Professor Kingston said. “They didn’t learn until after the invasion began that these Transcended forms were only the leadership and thinkers of the species. The flesh and blood Slark foot soldiers were still the bulk of the population, which is why they added the nuclear radiation and firestorm elements to the cascade. They didn’t have time enough to formulate a more targeted weapon as we were on the brink of extinction already and the combined weight of the United States and her allies had already spent nearly all the resources they could muster in building the cascade in the first place.”
“They built the cascade before the invasion even happened?” Claudia asked.
“Probably,” Professor Kingston said, “but just barely. The modifications to add nuclear weapons, strengthened by Slark technology robbed from ships, were likely an un-researched and unproven plan done after humanity became a cornered and wounded animal. The existential and ethical crisis the scientists who worked it must have faced…remarkable” Professor Kingston trailed off and for a moment Claudia could see the philosophy professor he once was, marveling at the inner workings of human thought from his lofty, academic perch.
Her father sighed and clenched his jaw again. “You have to destroy the empty shell and you cannot make any more Transcended.”
“Nonsense,” Professor Kingston protested.
“Papa, we can’t afford to throw away something so potentially valuable,” Claudia said. Both her father and Professor Kingston looked at her in shock at what side she came down on when it came to the issue.
“Cavanaugh went insane from the stimulus in part because he was probably insane when we put him into the shell and partially because his mind wasn’t capable of handling the massive influx of information,” Professor Kingston said. “The mistake was mine, and I will answer for it, but that doesn’t mean the process is dangerous. The flaw was always in humanity in Cavanaugh’s weakness and my rush to judgment. My own ascension will be pushed back years because of my part in this.”
“Wait, you’re planning on becoming one of them?” Claudia asked. “What about Olivia?”
“It is the goal of all Keepers to transcend someday and Olivia will lose her father to time and decay regardless. I do this for her so I might build a better, safer world for her as is the expressed goal of all Keepers who undergo ascension. We have an oath that explicitly says this and it is programmed into the shells themselves. Because Cavanaugh did not believe in any of it, forgoing the ritual entirely, he was not soft or hard coded to be an egalitarian—what soldier truly could be?”
Claudia didn’t need to point out the obvious insanity of what the Professor was saying. He was too far gone to see it and her father likely didn’t need her help catching that the Keepers were all completely off the deep end. Still, Claudia was trying to amass bargaining chips to exchange when the Ravens took a superior position within the city and there was a treasure trove miles below the surface if she could figure out how to use it all.
“Fine,” her father grumbled. “We will split the difference. The shell will be returned to the sanctuary, but a moratorium is ordered on creating new Transcended until the peninsula is secured again.”
“It goes without saying that the secrecy must remain as much as possible,” Claudia said, thinking again of what the information might do to Olivia.
“That’ll be a difficult prospect considering how many men saw me rip most of a human head from the body of one of those things,” her father said.
“When the Ravens land, and they’ll have to now, there will be a compelling distraction,” Claudia said. “We’re all about to have a much bigger and much more immediate problem.”
†
Olivia was pulled from the wreckage of her tank in better shape than she would have thought possible considering the blast obliterated the entire center of her formation, centered on her tank. The Greek of all people was the first to grasp her reaching hand and drag her from the twisted, burning metal. He was burned and bleeding as well, but in fine spirits otherwise.
“The blast threw me from the tank. I landed in the nice soft mud over there.” He pointed in the direction of a patch of mud twenty or so yards away where there was indeed a large, Greek sized impact crater as evidence for his landing.
Olivia, aside from being thoroughly shaken and dinged up, felt fine. She tried to stand, but her mechanical leg came apart at the knee, raining gears and widgets from the gaping hole where her lower leg should have been. Maybe it wa
s Esme’s drawings that made her mechanical limb suddenly seem beautiful or maybe it was the trauma of losing her leg all over again, regardless of the source, Olivia burst into tears at seeing the tattered remains of her mechanical leg falling apart fast before her eyes.
“Where are Alfie and the rest of the crew?” Olivia asked through her tears.
The Greek hauled her well away from the wreckage before he set her down in a makeshift foxhole lined with sandbags, several of which were punctured and bleeding their grimy sand across the muddy ground in front. He sat down hard beside her in the little alcove as they waited for aid. He dabbed at a few oozing cuts and burns along his arms and a particularly bad scrape under his wide chin. His reluctance to answer was answer enough, although he added a small shake of his head all the same. That made sense to Olivia. If he only survived by being blown free of his gunner position and she only survived by losing a limb, albeit a mechanical one, then it was extremely unlikely anyone else would have made it.
The battlefield seemed to be returning to a state of normalcy after the botched changing of the guard. Medics were moving among the wounded, soldiers were returning to their posts, and combat engineers were repairing defensive positions as best they could. Olivia strained her neck to look up over the sandbag alcove to find Esme and her bobbing dark braid as she ran messages among the troops. She spotted other runners, lithe women and small, agile men, racing down new paths as the battle had torn down old routes, but she didn’t spot Esme among them.
“Where is Esme?” Olivia asked.
The Greek shrugged his massive shoulders and shook his head. “The flying and landing rattled my brains a bit. I take too much time figuring out I am not dead to see how the battle end. Then, when my head work again, I come find you.”
“Find her, and if you can’t find her, find Bruce Coffey and see if he can help you,” Olivia said. When the Greek looked at her with concern, she pushed his shoulder to no appreciable effect. “Go, I’ll be fine.”
The Greek stood on shaky, tree-trunk legs, and took off in his strange waddle run that was remarkably quick despite the power-walk look it had. She watched him go for a time until he vanished into several of the large groups of troops moving about. A combat medic team spotted her a moment after and she waved them over.
They hoisted her into the bed of a truck heading up to the tower alongside a dozen other wounded. The old army rig bounced and jostled them all the way up the muddy, rutted slope before the battlefield’s muck gave way to a proper trail. Even then, for the first few dozen yards, the truck flung great hunks of mud from its tires as it tried to fully shake free of the mire it emerged from.
The other wounded around Olivia were in much worse shape. The wound she suffered was one that wouldn’t threaten her life. She couldn’t walk, but she wasn’t likely to bleed to death on the back of the rattling old truck. The wounded around her had no such luck in which body parts were blown from them. None of them were her Clockwork Warriors originally, but, judging from some of their current wounds, they would be if they survived.
Civilian volunteers at the tower were waiting and ready to aid the medics in transporting the wounded into the safety of the tower. The chaos within hadn’t hit its full stride yet as Olivia was among one of the first groups of wounded to be hauled from the field, although she suspected a second battle would soon be waged in the operating rooms and expanded hospital to save the injured from death. She was quickly looked over by a male triage nurse who had sharp blue eyes and a thick, muscular neck. He deemed her green card and set her aside in a waiting area for officers with minor wounds.
Olivia sat in the side room on a surplus army cot with no mattress. The other five officers in the room, scattered among the twenty or so cots, were all lying down, trying to catch up on sleep or at least appeared to be. Olivia couldn’t even force herself to rest until she knew Esme was okay. She sat up as the only defiant action she could take.
Eventually, Dr. Gatling came down to find her, no doubt having received word she was among the wounded. He wheeled into the room on his elevated chair, wiping his hands clean of some mechanical grime or other with a clean rag. He clicked his tongue at seeing the state of her leg. As he rolled up to the side of her cot, he made a quick, blasphemous sign of the cross as he was a devout atheist, and shook his head.
“That leg is done for,” Dr. Gatling said.
Olivia let out a strangled, stressed laugh. “That’s the same bloody thing you said to me when I lost it the first time,” she said. “Your bedside manner hasn’t gotten any better after all these years?”
“No, and I don’t suspect it ever will,” Dr. Gatling said. “You’ll be on crutches, maybe with an antebellum peg-prosthetic if I can find one, but I can of course fit you with another leg eventually.”
“Splendid, I’ll take the crutches now if it’s all the same to you, and I would appreciate if you rebuilt this leg rather than start from scratch,” Olivia said, scooting to the edge of the cot as though her departure was imminent.
“Got your medical degree without telling me? I should have liked to come to your graduation, Dr. Kingston,” Dr. Gatling snarked. “You’ll wait until you’re medically cleared to leave and I’ll do what I damn well like when it comes to restoring your limb.” He pushed a lever on the side of his chair to lower the hydraulics enough to get a closer look at her ruined mechanical leg all the same. He prodded the stump with a few fingers, popped open a dented panel, and let out a frustrated sigh. “You realize this leg probably saved your life. If it were still made of flesh and blood, you would have bled to death in a matter of seconds when your femoral artery was severed. If it wasn’t so sturdy and partially armored, the shrapnel would have shot up through your hips, likely shredding your lower organs. Yes, any leg but this one on your body and you’d be fitted for a body bag by now.”
“All the more reason to save it rather than throw it upon the scrapheap,” Olivia argued.
“Fine, fine,” Dr. Gatling said. “Unhook the blasted, heroic limb and I’ll see to its salvage.”
Olivia eagerly unstrapped the leather clasps and braces that held what remained of her bronze limb to the small stump left over from her original leg. It came free from the tattered ends of her trousers and she handed what little was left to Dr. Gatling who slipped the whole mess into a leather bag along the back of his marvelous wheelchair. He raised himself back up to his original height on the hydraulics and began to wheel away, muttering to himself. “If I had another friend, any other friend, I wouldn’t have to tolerate such outlandish demands from that girl. Blast it all, I need to get out of my lab and make another friend, even one more so she would have to think twice before…” was all she heard before he was out of range.
She sat back, a little calmer now, but not nearly enough to lie down. There wasn’t any way she could convince anyone to give her crutches, certainly not in defiance of what would be very explicit orders from Dr. Gatling not to. The medical staff, even the temporary members, thought he walked on water with legs he didn’t even have anymore.
Hours later, a medical assistant came through to clean up her cuts, take her blood pressure, check her breathing, and basically strip off her clothes to give her a once over. The little old woman was something of an anomaly in the City of Broken Bridges. Most of the elderly died out during the guerilla war waged to retake the city after the cascade. Many volunteered for dangerous tasks that would certainly lead to death at once or eventually in radioactive zones. It was remarkably noble and courageous, but resulted in few people over the age of 65 after the city was delivered. The elderly Chinese woman treating her likely had seen her share of these tasks as her left hand didn’t have a full compliment of fingers anymore.
After Olivia’s wounds were cleaned and dressed and her vitals recorded, she slowly redressed in hospital clothes provided by the woman. “Thank you, wise grandmother,” Olivia said to the woman as she was packing her gear. It was the Chinician tradition to call the remaining elde
rly among their kind by such a revered title, regardless of whether or not the person was a grandmother or grandfather. As Esme explained it to her, in both cultures, Mexican and Chinese, when a person reached a certain age and respectability within their village, they were thought of as being everyone’s grandmother or grandfather. Reverence for the elderly was part of what helped meld the Chinese and Mexican citizens into a single Chinican people.
“You are welcome, precious child.” The woman smiled and nodded to her before moving on to the next soldier in the quickly filling beds.
It was another few hours before the Greek found her and with him was Esme, unharmed in every exterior way. They both came to Olivia, weaving through the crowded room of cots filled with wounded. Esme practically threw herself onto Olivia when she arrived. The Greek stood at the foot of her bed, fingering a woolen cap he’d taken off upon entering the room. His bushy hair was sticking up in most places and still had a bit of mud clinging around the right side where he no doubt landed on his hard noggin.
“Thank you so much for finding her,” Olivia said to him, looking over Esme’s shoulder as she held her in an intense hug.
“She did not want to be found, I think, but the people who knew her told me which way I might be going to find her,” the Greek said. He replaced the cap on his head, tipped it to them, saluted, fidgeted a bit more, and took his leave.
Olivia held Esme close for a time and while the embrace seemed to do Olivia some good, Esme didn’t stop quivering in her arms no matter how long they remained entangled.
“What’s wrong?” Olivia asked.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 31
