Murder of Crows (Book One of The Icarus Trilogy) (24 page)

Jenkins clicked on the web address of one of the Crows and a message popped up on the display.  It told him that there was “No Contact Allowed.”  He tapped the address again with the same result.  Jenkins started to get frustrated and clicked another name.  The message popped up again.

“No Contact Allowed.”

Jenkins’ eyes narrowed and he sat back in his chair again.  He wondered what was happening with this terminal.  Jenkins wanted to know why he couldn’t talk to any of these people.  The young Crow was tempted to hit the display with his hand when he heard a book fall behind him.

“Oh, damn,” he heard before Jenkins spun to see his companion in the room.  He looked up to find Roberts standing by a stack of books and looking down at a tome near his feet.  The mousy brown-haired soldier sighed and then looked back into Jenkins’ face.

“Well, sorry about that.  Wasn’t trying to break your concentration,” he said while attempting a half-smile.  The attempt was rather weak and Jenkins’ brow furrowed.

“Were you watching me?” Jenkins asked with a note of violence.  He didn’t like being followed.

“I was.  Sorry for that, too,” Roberts said before walking to the computer terminals and sitting backwards in the chair next to Jenkins and setting his arms on the backrest.  Jenkins didn’t appreciate the familiar antic.

“Why?”

“Thought you might be going through some shit.  I saw how you acted in the mess hall,” the boy soldier said before tilting his head to lie on his shoulder.  Jenkins hadn’t ever seen the soldier dosed like this.

“Yeah, what was that ‘it’s ok’ about?  What did you mean?”  Jenkins turned his body to face the younger man.  He subconsciously was preparing himself for a fight.

“I just meant that I understand.  I know how it is.  This place is starting to get to you; I get that.  This little addiction of mine isn’t exactly fun,” he said before looking Jenkins in the eye.  The movement caught Jenkins slightly off guard and his eyes narrowed.  Roberts shrugged and sighed while lazily setting his head on his arms.  “I figured Feldman probably told you, by now.  You two seem to be chatty.  And it actually helps me out.  I know I can trust you to believe me when I talk about all this.  You already have me at a disadvantage,” he said before turning his eye to the computer display.  The boy soldier could see the error message still flashing about the screen.

“Trying to talk to some of the old soldiers, huh?” he asked before looking back at Jenkins.  The less-experienced soldier knew the boy was asking a leading question and sat straight up.

“What do you know, Roberts?”

“Much more than you, kid.  And stop being so antagonistic, I’m just trying to talk.”  Jenkins was startled a bit by the statement, but kept his reaction hidden behind a stoic visage.  He suddenly felt ashamed of his behavior without realizing why.  Jenkins looked at the screen and read the message blinking back at him.

“Apparently I can’t talk to any of these old members of the Crows.  I don’t really know why,” Jenkins said before breathing out with some force.

“It’s because they don’t exist,” the boy soldier said in a soft voice.

“What are you talking about?” Jenkins asked, suddenly wanting to know everything that Roberts was holding back.

“They don’t.  They did, of course.  I remember seeing some of these guys back when I was a kid.  But when their contract was up they stopped playing,” Roberts said lackadaisically.

“Yeah, they retired,” Jenkins said, suddenly wary of what that meant.  Roberts sighed and scrunched up his face.

“One way to say it.  But you know how the system is, Ryan.  We’re in debt up to our ears.  At that age most of the guys can’t ever pay it back.  And this is where the cruelty of the system is really apparent,” Roberts said before lifting his head back off of the chair.  “If they can’t pay the Commission back, the Commission doesn’t resurrect them.”

Jenkins' eyes narrowed and he looked down at his hands.  He tried to fathom any other possible meaning to what Roberts had said and couldn’t find any other answer.  He looked back up at the boy soldier and tilted his head.

“Then that means…”  Roberts nodded and shrugged.  He knew that Jenkins was a smart kid.

“Yeah, if we can’t pay them back then they essentially kill us.  For good, it seems,” Roberts said before turning to look at the computer display in front of him.  It was off, but that didn’t matter to Roberts.  It was just something he could focus on so that the world would stop shifting around him.

Jenkins looked at the boy soldier and contemplated what it all meant.  If it were all true then there was no happy ending waiting for him.  He would grow old and then when the Commission had no use for him they would just stop letting him live.  Then they would make a biography for him along with a smiling picture.  There was no planned retirement; he would just cease to be.

“How do you know all this?”  Roberts looked at him and shrugged.  The movement made him wince and the boy soldier wished he’d brought his pills with him.  It was a long way back to his room.  Roberts looked back at his compatriot and resolved that he had to tell him the truth; all of it.

“Friends of friends.  Medical records I dug up.  Roster reports and yearly incomes and balance sheets.  Basically a lot of illegally acquired information.  I tried to contact some of those same soldiers, same as you, and basically found that there were no records of the guys after the games.  Did a little database mining and found that they had never left the asteroid.  Found incineration orders for their old bodies.  I’d show you, but I don’t want to risk them finding out that I was rifling through their personnel files again,” Roberts said before lying his head back on the chair.  Jenkins was confused and tilted his head.  He hadn’t expected the boy soldier to say anything so thorough.

“How?” Jenkins asked before Roberts raised his eyebrows and looked at his hands.  He raised them up and imitated tapping a keyboard before giving a half-hearted smile.

“I was a hacker in a past life,” he said as he regretted his finger movement.  They were already starting to ache.  “A simple error message like that wasn’t going to stop me.  Especially since that’s what got me here in the first place.”  He leaned back in the chair and felt his back muscles starting to strain.  Roberts wished the new Crow would understand so he could get back to his room.  The boy soldier thought about taking five pills again.  Jenkins looked back down at his own hands and then eyed his compatriot.

“You’re not lying?”  Roberts decided he couldn’t take it anymore and rose to his feet.  He would have entertained the new soldier if he could, but the pain was really starting to get to him.

“What would be the point?  I was just trying to break it to you easy.  Don’t want you getting all suicidal on us,” Roberts said before turning to leave.  He was at the doorway when he looked back at his new friend.  Jenkins was still staring at the team roster on the computer display.  Roberts felt horrible for telling him, but he knew that the new guy would have found out eventually.  The boy soldier remembered when he had first realized the truth, all alone with no one to comfort him.

Roberts didn’t want anybody to feel that kind of despair.  Not if he could help it.

-

Jenkins looked at the blinking computer display in front of him and pondered what Roberts had just told him.  Roberts wasn’t the most credible source of information, but the boy had a point.  He really had no reason to lie to Jenkins. 

The slave soldier thought about what he could do to change his fate.  He didn’t want to despair; he didn’t want to turn into Carver and simply be retired once the Commission thought he’d outlived his usefulness.  Jenkins thought about Feldman and his outlook.  The titan was everything that Jenkins could hope to emulate.

But in the end Jenkins knew that he wouldn’t be able to come close.  The soldier sat there in the library and started to sink into himself.  He didn’t see any way out and he was sure no one would save him.  Jenkins thought about all the groups that had tried to save the perpetual soldiers.  There had been two protest groups that had been founded and crushed since Jenkins had started watching the games.  He remembered the riots by the Eris Freedom Initiative in St. Louis and the scattered pools of blood and mangled bodies.  At the time he thought they were stupid to even try.

He desperately wanted them to try again.

Jenkins picked himself up and wandered around the barracks for a while.  He saw the odd soldier now and then, but he didn’t pay attention to them.  That might have been rude, but Jenkins didn’t much care.  Every time he thought he understood his surroundings something came out of the woodwork to kick him right back down.  Jenkins had promised to himself that he would be more like Feldman.  He had promised that he would look forward to the future.

Jenkins could only see that the future was bleak.  There was no joy to be had.  He would continue to suffer and he would continue to die.  The slave soldier would continue walking through these gray hallways day after day and see all the poor souls who were stuck in there with him.

How could he be optimistic when every life around him was doomed?

Jenkins stopped near somebody’s room and looked at the door.  It was open by a crack and there was no one walking around.  Jenkins figured he must have missed some alarm or bell to signal some event.  The soldier shrugged and looked at the tiled floor at his feet.  It was somewhat dingy, most likely because it was rarely cleaned.  The corporations that owned the Crows and the nearby teams were not overly concerned with keeping a tidy home for their soldiers.  They only had to abide by the rules that the Commission had provided for them.

The young Crow sat down anyway and put his back against the wall.  He leaned his head back so that it made contact with the surfaceand he closed his eyes.  He tried to justify his world and his position; he tried to justify the hope that Feldman held inside that big brain of his.  Jenkins couldn’t see the silver lining.  He would never think Feldman was an idiot, but it seemed the giant was misguided.  Jenkins could understand his unique perspective; the games helped Feldman regain his body.  But Jenkins wasn’t like that.  Almost nobody was really benefiting from the games.  The giant was just an outlier.

Jenkins’ thoughts fell back to Roberts and his spirits fell even more.  He wondered what the kid had done to end up here with all of these career criminals and desperate people.  Jenkins wondered what the boy thought of all this.  That’s when he saw the name placard beside the door.

The young Crow was sitting outside of Christopher Roberts’ room and he hadn’t even realized it.  He wondered if his brain had subconsciously driven him to this part of the barracks, but Jenkins couldn’t think of anything that he wanted to say to the boy.  Roberts didn’t want to talk; he just wanted Jenkins to know his own situation.  It was a show of compassion but little else.  Jenkins didn’t think the conversation was meant to be the beginning of a friendship.

But his subconscious or fate or merely coincidence had led him to the boy’s door.  Jenkins took that as enough of a reason to knock on the door and see if the boy was in.  He knocked against the door and felt it give way.  It seemed like Roberts had never gotten around to closing the door all the way.  Jenkins could see why.

Roberts was curled up on the floor in front of his desk.  A white, plastic bottle was lying on its side on the floor and there was a great deal of blue pills scattered on the desk and the floor.  Drool was collecting into a puddle near Roberts' open mouth.  The boy was drawing in quick breaths and Jenkins could see that the soldier was suffering spasms throughout his body.  His fingers were curled and the veins in his neck were popping out; tears were streaming out of eyes that he couldn’t close.

It was not something that Jenkins had been prepared to see when he knocked on the door.  He rushed over to the boy and tried to put the soldier’s arms to his side instead of curled up in the air.  Roberts surprised Jenkins with his strength but Jenkins had a few years of muscles on the kid.  He did what he could to help as he calmed the boy down.

“Roberts!  It’s ok.  It’s just me.  It’s just Ryan.  I just want to help.  What can I do to help?”  Roberts seemed to recognize his compatriot through the pain and started to gasp out words between spasms.  He couldn’t muster anything intelligible and soon closed his eyes in despair.  The boy soldier just wanted to die.  Roberts used all of his strength to point at the pills scattered around near his arm.

Jenkins thought about trying to help Roberts get through this without medicine but realized that this wasn’t the time to help the boy out of his addiction.  He could save the boy’s soul some other time.  The Crow grabbed a handful of pills and placed them one by one into Roberts’ mouth.  Jenkins figured seven would be enough to handle a fit of this severity.  Roberts didn’t bother to count them as his friend gave him the medication; he just needed the pain to stop.  The boy soldier couldn’t think of consequences while he felt his world was on fire.

After a few minutes Roberts’ body started to go limp ever so slightly.  Jenkins figured the medicine had yet to kick in, but the sense of security that it gave Roberts was probably enough to help in its own right.  Roberts turned his neck to look at his compatriot.

“Thanks, I … needed that.”  Jenkins smiled back at him and laughed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to take so long.  I didn’t know what to think,” he said before looking towards the doorway.  Jenkins had left it open and suddenly felt uncomfortable that some passerby would see him cradling a weak Roberts surrounded by contraband.  He decided it wasn’t worth worrying about and turned back to the boy in his arms.

“This time seems a little worse than normal.  I’ve …never had a fit like that.  I felt it coming on in the library, which is why I left so early.  I don’t know what they did to me, but …it’s not normal,” he said before coughing weakly and turning his head down to the ground.  His eyes started to droop and his limbs started to lose their strength.

“How many….did you give……” Roberts said with a concerted effort.  He didn’t expect his consciousness to fade so fast.