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

by Cassandra Duffy

  “Make your questions quick, Kingston,” Commander Marceau said.

  “Why did you kill General Hastings?” Olivia demanded, happy to oblige the Commander’s request of bluntness.

  “He intended to throw Claudia off the Golden Gate Bridge when she arrived, claiming she was little more than another worthless mutant,” Commander Marceau said flatly. “Her life is far more valuable to me than the General and his men, so I killed them.”

  There was a coldness in the battlefield calculus that made Olivia shiver a little. After seeing Commander Marceau fight, she didn’t doubt that General Hastings and his private guard wouldn’t be a match for him. She also knew the General to be a massively arrogant man who likely wouldn’t have believed anyone capable of disobeying an order he gave, even including “please don’t kill me.”

  “Fair enough,” Olivia said. “Why did Claudia killed Inspector Cavanaugh?”

  This answer came slower as though the Commander wasn’t as certain in the truth, or perhaps the truth was ugly and not as wholly owned by him in this case. “He was inside the Transcended that attacked the donut shop girl; Claudia killed him to save her life.”

  It was a judicious response, and one Olivia knew lacked important elements to be fully understood. “What are you even talking about? Cavanaugh was inside a Transcended?”

  “The Transcended are people,” the Commander finally said. “Your father can explain more if you need more.”

  The finality of the statement left little room to continue along that line of questioning, so Olivia moved on. “Are you planning on delivering the city to the Ravens?”

  “I’m planning on preserving as much human life as I can with the options left to me,” the Commander replied. “At the moment, that means a transfer of power from the military council to the Raven command. I have tried to make the process as bloodless as possible.”

  “That’s not going well so far,” Olivia said.

  “Isn’t it?” the Commander replied. “The people we are killing would have been hung as traitors anyway. Isn’t it better that they die on their feet fighting rather than dangle from the ends of ropes?”

  “Where did Esme go and why didn’t she say goodbye?”

  “She is helping the Ravens in their mission to destroy Alcatraz. In what ways, I do not know. As for her lack of a farewell to you, that is a question better answered by her when she gets back.”

  “I have other questions but I’m afraid to ask them.”

  “Then you have as much information as you need.” Commander Marceau guided Olivia back toward her defensive position.

  †

  To call the night eventful would be an astounding understatement. Claudia picked off attackers from her hiding place in Coit Tower as the loyalists tried again and again to take the hill. Only once did they break through the defenses in a mad rush to capture or kill Commander Marceau.

  Her father wasn’t easily taken dead or alive. Claudia managed to eliminate two of the five men sent for him on a suicidal run. He killed two more in close combat and Roger felled the fifth with a running attack-dog tackle followed by a very wolf-like tearing out of the man’s throat. Claudia hadn’t even seen Roger’s entrance into the fray and neither had the man he felled in defense of her father.

  The brilliant feint followed by an overwhelming assault mounted to provide cover for the five men sent for her father seemed the last gasp of a failing counter-coup. The attacks from then on out barely scratched at the midway point of Telegraph Hill before being driven back under superior fire and a remarkable defensive position.

  Amid the chaos below, Claudia finally found in her scope the line of Olivia’s Clockwork Warriors and Bruce Coffey’s militia making their best push toward what Claudia guessed to be the loyalist command post as the sun began to rise across the bay to her back.

  Before the true dawn could even fully break, a titanic explosion rocked the entire bay. Rocks and shrapnel rained down miles away when Alcatraz exploded. Claudia knew it was likely several charges set at different places, but the detonation was so simultaneous that is sounded simply like a multi-toned single explosion. She let out a deep sigh of relief, letting her guard down at the wrong moment as a final death gasp of the failed counter-coup began their bombardment of the hill.

  Chapter 34:

  Metal Birds of Mercy and Prey.

  Claudia barely had enough time to recognize what the sounds were before the first shell struck the tower. Her attempted evacuation lasted only a few seconds. The crumbling ruins of the tower were already looking for a reason to fall and a few direct hits from artillery gave the perfect opportunity for the whole thing to come crumbling down. The stonework beneath her feet shifted and fell away even as she raced along it, trying to find any exit she might hurl herself from. She ran for the back of the tower, the side facing the wharf, in hopes it would survive the bombardment coming from the city side. She leapt for the outer wall on the far side even as it was falling away from her. She managed to grasp a gloved hand onto the edge of something, possibly a window or vent, and pulled her body flush against the stone surface that was quickly going from vertical to horizontal.

  Dust and explosions overwhelmed her senses shortly after and soon she wasn’t even sure whether or not she was still falling or had already landed. When rocks and brickwork didn’t rain down on her, she suspected she’d selected her escape route well. She covered her head with her free arm all the same. Her mind was racing, but the world around it was going even faster. She impacted the ground with the crumbling wall beneath her in answer to her short-lived wonderings of whether or not she was still falling. Despite her best efforts to hold onto the ledge, the wall came away from her when she bounced free and her handhold failed. The air exploded from her lungs and refused to refill, which she thought might be for the best as she couldn’t even see a foot in front of her face from the dust kicked up in the destruction of the tower, making her think breathing would probably be a gasping, choking affair anyway.

  She tried to roll free of the rubble raining down, grasping her ribcage painfully as her lungs tried again and again to refill from having the wind knocked out of her. A tree trunk stopped her rolling before it even began. She wrapped herself around the tree, placing the stout trunk between her and any further debris coming down. Something must have gone wrong in her hasty plan to escape. The tree line on the wharf side of the tower was well away, meaning she must have dropped out of the northern side into the old garden.

  Her lungs were recovering from having the wind knocked from them and the dust was settling when the second barrage hit. The tree trunks around her, barely visible in the tan cloud of dust kicked up by the tower’s collapse, started exploding in showers of splinters and shattered earth. She huddled in closer to the tree she’d selected as her shelter, hoping it wouldn’t be targeted as she really didn’t know what else to do.

  Between the distant pops of cannon fire, the whistling of shells descending, and the earth-shaking explosions when they impacted, she heard people shouting to one another, a few even calling her name, and Roger was barking somewhere. She was glad of the other survivors and glad she hadn’t lost any hearing in the explosion that took down the tower. When she tried to shout a response though, her mouth filled with blood, choking off her words. She felt around in her mouth to see if she’d broken any teeth, which was her primary concern, only to recoil from her tongue painfully. She’d bitten the tip, hard, likely when she landed, and she hadn’t even noticed in the adrenaline rush and turmoil.

  A third salvo, which she dreaded would be the end of the top of Telegraph Hill and everyone on it, never came. Bruce’s men must have finally pushed through to the loyalist artillery positions to silence the cannons. Still, Claudia clung to the rough bark of the tree trunk, waiting to see what new catastrophe might befall her. The sound that finally pried her eyes open was more disorienting than alarming.

  The drone of airplane engines filled the air. Not blimps, which she’d seen
and ridden in since the Slark invasion, but actual airplane engines. She pried her eyes open to search the sky through the hazy dust clearing around her. Out of the east, soaring through the smoke pillar coming off the ruins of Alcatraz, were a dozen or so World War II bombers. She recognized the fuselages from the History Channel programs her father used to love watching with her. Most were heavily modified B-24 Liberators but among the flock of strange birds were a handful of the larger B-17 Flying Fortresses—they were her favorite when she was a child.

  She watched the bomber formation as it winged its way toward the part of the peninsula south of the wall. Before bombs could even begin raining down on the target that she suspected was the assembled Slark army, white streaks of rocket pods fired off. They were flying so low and so quickly, Claudia wondered if maybe the engines weren’t really jet-props running on Slark fuel. The machine gunner pods on the planes, originally intended for aircraft defense, appeared to be replaced with rocket placements, which made sense since there wouldn’t be any fighters attacking the bombers. She could see the hand of Gieo in the bombers—brilliant and eccentric with a strangely creative practicality.

  Her admiration of the tiny bomber wing was cut short when her eyes scanned to follow them. Roving through the dust cloud, large and frightening in the obscured field of view, were the silhouettes of several Transcended climbing the hill. The terrifying image of Cavanaugh’s shell charging her remained at the forefront of her mind and she couldn’t help but huddle to hide away from the metal giants. They began plucking something from the rubble and it took Claudia a moment to figure out through the slowly settling haze that they were picking up people. The human figures being delicately harvested from the destroyed hilltop were so tiny in the Transcended’s colossal arms that it sent another shiver of fear through Claudia. She skulked down the edge of the hill and found a proper hiding place among the fallen trunks of several trees, well away from the main group, and there she waited, hoping she wouldn’t be discovered.

  The sounds of the metal giants sifting through the debris seemed to go on for hours, but never came any closer to her than a few dozen yards, which was closer than she would have liked. Eventually, after an interminable wait, the Transcended lumbered off the hill in a slow trickle. Claudia waited for several minutes more before slipping from her hiding place.

  The dust was settled by then and the hilltop was an entirely alien landscape from what she remembered. Coit Tower was little more than a pile of scattered stones. Only a handful of trees remained, including the one she suspected she hid behind. Craters dotted the landscape where a dozen or more shells landed. She scanned the area for other survivors to no appreciable effect. Her tongue still hurt, but a thorough examination of it with her fingertips confirmed she hadn’t bitten through it, or probably even far enough to require medical attention. Still, shouting would hurt, so she tried clapping her hands. The clap immediately brought a familiar figure out of a similarly brilliant hiding place.

  Roger shook the dust off his coat and ran to her. Somehow, he’d secreted himself away in an alcove beneath the bronze statue pedestal. She knelt to receive him and embraced his dirty, but happy frame, when he nearly knocked her over in his joy at finding her.

  She spent an hour searching the hilltop for other survivors with Roger’s help. When their thorough examination of the area yielded neither body nor living person to dig free of the wreckage, she started looking for a path down. The eastern side of the hill was still a sheer cliff face for all intents and purposes, which made it a lousy option, and so she focused her attention on the northern side as she didn’t want to try for the western where there may still be loyalist soldiers.

  She found the trail she’d used to first infiltrate the rally point the night before was in reasonably good shape, although she had to climb over a few washouts caused by rockslides jarred free during the bombardment. Roger’s spirits never flagged as he stuck close by her the entire lengthy descent. She wondered if he had any idea how uncertain she was about what they were doing.

  A patrol of soldiers almost immediately discovered her when she reached the bottom of the hill. The field on the northern side that she’d crossed the night before sat barren after what she guessed was a grain harvest, leaving her nowhere to run or hide when she spotted the soldiers and their truck rumbling across the expanse toward her. She placed her hands on her head in surrender knowing she couldn’t escape back up the hill before they caught her and she didn’t have a weapon left to fight them with if they turned out to be loyalists.

  The men were dressed in military regular uniforms, but they seemed happy to see her. One of the men spoke into the radio that they’d found her. The others exited the beat up pickup truck armed, but were apparently more interested in guarding her than securing her as a prisoner. One of the men, as young as she was and also as battle hardened by the look of his face, pressed a pistol into her hand.

  “There are still pockets of resistance,” the officer in the passenger seat told her as she was ushered into the cab of the truck.

  She nodded her understanding and allowed herself to be positioned in the center of the bench seat between the driver and the officer. She glanced down to the pistol. It was a standard issue .38 revolver of some kind, likely from an old police stockpile. She’d started to wonder if she would ever use a gunpowder weapon again, which reminded her of other survivors, including Dr. Gatling who had built so many marvelous guns.

  “Did anyone else make it off the hill?” Claudia asked as the truck pulled away with Roger in the back and her in the cab.

  “Most everyone,” the officer said. “Your father is commanding the forces taking back the Transamerica Pyramid as we speak and the rest were hauled down into the Keeper sanctuary by a group of Transcended.”

  “That’s where I’d like to go,” Claudia said, noting the officer’s use of the White Tower’s proper name—he must have been a native San Franciscan.

  “Your father requested we take you back to heavily guarded areas,” the officer said, “but I suppose the sanctuary would qualify.”

  Claudia’s primary concern was defending Olivia against the knowledge of what was really going on in the bowels of the Keeper’s labs, but she suspected she would be too late judging from the way Professor Kingston was coming clean about so many things lately. The truck wound its way through the fresh war zones that had gone quiet. The strange landscape of San Francisco that went from city to farmlands had made another transformation into a World War I battlefield with impact craters, barbwire barriers, and sandbag bunkers. Claudia hated how quickly conflict could ruin so many things.

  The soldiers parked the truck at a subterranean entrance, which was guarded by other troops loyal to her father, and escorted her through the tunnels to one of the elevators leading down into the sanctuary. There they took their leave from her, promising they would remain and wait for her to come up no matter how long it took. They offered to watch Roger for her as well since no amount of calling or cajoling could convince the dog to step onto the rickety miner’s basket.

  The elevator ride down took longer than she expected. She wondered if it was because she was using a different route than she’d ever used or if it just felt that way because of the urgency of where she was going. The ride did give her a second to wipe the dried blood and dust from her face and ruffle chunks of wood and debris out of her hair. She suspected doing a proper job of cleaning away the grime of what she’d just been through would take hours. Tending her battered vanity was a relatively pleasant distraction for the rest of the elevator ride into the under world.

  If the elevator ride felt longer, the darkened tunnels where she had to feel her way toward the end seemed much shorter as she almost immediately popped out in the hellish glow of the thermal vent and the enclosed canyon above it. Her wanderings came to an abrupt stop when one of Professor Kingston’s students, a young woman who looked like any grad assistant a person might meet on a university campus, came running up to gree
t her.

  “They’re about to start and Professor Kingston said you might want to see,” the woman said, grasping Claudia’s hand to drag her along.

  They raced through the labyrinthine series of tunnels and causeways over the lava filled vent. The woman seemed to know precisely where they were going, although Claudia was almost immediately lost. They came upon a great chamber off one of the smaller tributary fingers of the lake of magma beneath them. The hand of the Transcended was obvious in the room as it was almost a perfectly smooth sphere, large enough to hold several city blocks. Machinery lined the room, looking like a combination of the steam-powered vents and tubes created by the Transcended and the entirely alien technology favored by the Slark, which was a cross between watery waves and insect chitin. On a large platform in the center of the sphere, the shell of the Dr. Feinstein Transcended, briefly inhabited by Inspector Cavanaugh, was awaiting a new occupant.

  Claudia cried out, making her bitten tongue sting. It was a wordless utterance that served its purpose of grabbing the attention of the people gathered beneath the altar that was clearly used in the creation of new Transcended. Olivia, still hobbling on one crutch and one leg, came away from the crowd of a dozen or so students and Keepers. She looked as haggard and battered as Claudia felt, and she looked angry at Claudia’s interruption to boot. Esme followed her from the crowd, keeping a respectful few steps behind the woman she had clearly come to love in ways she never loved Claudia.

  “This is a quiet moment,” Olivia hissed to her when she got close enough.

  “Your father promised to put a moratorium on the creation of new Transcended,” Claudia protested, although she dropped her voice an octave or so.

  “You and your father interpreted his silence that way, but that doesn’t mean he agreed to the order,” Olivia said.