Murder of Crows (Book One of The Icarus Trilogy) (4 page)

“YOUR SIX!”

Abrams was able to wheel around before the first bullet hit her.  She had learned long ago to trust anything over Comms.  The impact staggered the woman but from the lack of pain Abrams guessed the rounds hadn’t pierced through the combat armor.  It was a lucky thing, but she was by no means safe.  She fired a quick burst as she rolled to the ground.  If nothing else it would make her a smaller target.

Meanwhile Jenkins was rushing behind a cement wall.  He couldn’t think while he was in the open.  When he finally reached relative safety he breathed in quick and jagged bursts.  He needed just a couple seconds to gather himself for these new opponents.

He had half a second.  One of the soldiers pelted Jenkins’ cover with a hailstorm of bullets, content with keeping him there. The Boar had faith his teammate would finish off Abrams in no time.

Neither of them had noticed Roberts flanking them.  The boy soldier was two meters away when they stopped to reload.  The soldier firing at Abrams bent down to grab the clip at his ankle and twitched when he heard the heavy footsteps approaching.  He turned his head just in time for him to see the boot connecting with his helmet.  He hadn’t even hit the ground when the pistol round sank into his parietal lobe.

The other soldier spun to greet Roberts and was about to fire when he was knocked off balance by a couple of rounds from Abrams’ revolver.  Though it didn’t pierce his armor, it gave Roberts more than enough time to sink three bullets into the man’s ribcage.  The man sank to his knees and started to fall over.  He would drown in his own blood soon enough.  Roberts thought about granting him mercy, but decided against it; he might need the bullet.  The young Crow stood on the man’s carotid artery and watched as the man stopped breathing.

Roberts grabbed the man’s automatic and walked over to Abrams.  She was busy inspecting her armor for bullet holes.  After seeing the four pock-marks she sighed and looked back at Roberts.

“Well, thanks, I guess.  Definitely doesn’t hurt to have you around.”  She threw out her hip when she spoke, determined to give off an air of nonchalance.  The soldier felt it was important for people to think she didn’t care.  She was aware of the implications inherent in the behavior, but the only person who would know was nowhere nearby.  One day she’d get to see Rebecca again, but until then no one would know the insecurities she harbored.

Jenkins picked himself up from behind his pile of rubble and started to approach the two veterans.  He was just glad that Roberts showed up.  The young man was a comfort to him and now that the bullets had stopped flying he finally felt at ease.

Jenkins heard a click behind him and a muffled percussive sound before feeling a pinch and then an explosion of pain in his chest.  Jenkins staggered a bit and then looked down at his chest plate.  He didn’t see anything, but the burning in his chest was certainly real.  Then it started to fade.  Then everything started to fade.  He heard Abrams shout something as Roberts unloaded into the poor soldier that had fired at Jenkins.  The rookie had completely forgotten about that first soldier; he had assumed Abrams’ revolver had ended the man.

Jenkins fell to his knees as his compatriots charged towards him; their guns still drawn in case there was a further threat.  Darkness was rapidly filling his field of vision now and he could barely make out Roberts’ figure kneeling down to catch him.  Jenkins thought he heard him saying “sorry” before the darkness completely overtook him.

And then he was gone.

Jenkins’ body hung limp in Roberts’ arms.  He had meant to give the rookie some words of consolation, but the explosive round that had penetrated his armor had ruined any chance of goodbyes.  Jenkins’ insides more closely resembled jelly than human organs.  Roberts dropped Jenkins’ corpse and hauled himself to his feet.  He thought better of it and kneeled back down to give the dead man some dignity.  The boy soldier laid out the body and folded the Crow’s hands over his midsection.  He couldn’t just leave it sprawled out like that.  Roberts picked himself up and looked at the corpse lying in the grey dirt.  He wondered if such respect to the dead really meant anything.

Roberts looked over at the soldier who had done the deed.  The man’s helmet had been completely dismantled by his assault.  The boy soldier admitted to himself that he’d gone a little overboard.  He had no hatred for the soldier, whoever he was.  The Boar was just trying to take someone with him.  Dying was a lonely business.  The soldier was just about to speak with Abrams when a flashing announcement came over his visor feed.  A lovely artificial woman’s voice accompanied the message scrolling across the bottom of the display.

“Round over.  The Crows win.  Repeat, the Crows win.  Make your way to your respective rendezvous points and return to your base.  Repeat, the Round is over.  The Crows win…”  Abrams scoffed at the situation.

“Poor fucker almost made it.”

-

He didn’t see any light.  Everyone had lied to him all along.  All those people with near-death experiences must have been seeing something else because Jenkins knew he was dead and there was only darkness.

On the other hand, he heard quite a bit.  He didn’t feel his ears anymore, so “hearing” might not have been the right word, but he sensed something, at least.  He could feel whirring and clicking and ambient noises he couldn’t quite pick out.  The ambient noise reminded him of machines and gears, but that was based on what he had seen in movies and shows.  He had never been too keen on technology and advanced toys; that was the realm of the tech geeks and the cyber witches of the digital world.  He had lived his days on the streets of New Chicago; there was little tech to be found in the gutter.

Ryan Jenkins had run in a gang just like everyone else in his position.  Nobody could even find jobs anymore so most people resorted to crime.  He couldn’t afford to spend time on technology or entertainment.  At the very most he would watch the games every once in a while to satisfy some bloodlust and watch commercials for things he could never really have.  The TV spots about the resort planets were the best.  Just a quick day of space journey and he’d be able to experience something other than dirt, rampant pollution and garbage covering his everyday world.  Jenkins had dreamt that he could smuggle himself aboard one of those space cruisers and find some job on Solaria or Elysia.  Living the life of a pool boy seemed like paradise.

He chuckled to himself, or at least thought he did.  How appropriate that he ended up off-planet at the one place worse off than the overpopulated, desiccated husk that was Earth.  Twenty-four years of selfishness had landed him on an asteroid devoted to war and now it seemed like he had found himself in Limbo.  Jenkins had always assumed consciousness ended after death.  He had thought that it wouldn’t matter if he died a thousand times and kept getting resurrected.  There wouldn’t be any real consequences; he would just keep fighting.

How horrible it was to think that he might be like this forever.  Not just him, but every one of those thousand clones would have the same problem.  He panicked.  He’d felt as if he’d doomed his soul to purgatory just to be on television.  Jenkins cursed himself and just wanted it to end.  He hadn’t meant it.  He’d rather go back and choose twenty years in the slave yards on Demeter instead of brief bouts of warfare punctuated by an eternity of ellipses.

As he bemoaned his fate he felt himself moving.  No longer was he trapped in a tomb of sensory deprivation.  He felt things happening to his body.  He
existed
.  This couldn’t be purgatory.  The whirring and clicking he heard had to be from something.  He just needed to focus on it.  Focus on that instead of the panic that was still flooding his brain.

That’s when he saw the light.  It hit him that they might have been right after all.  Maybe it just took his soul a little time to get used to being dead.  Maybe eternity was just starting.

The light grew.  It expanded and became brighter.  It was almost pink, rather than the white he expected.  As he approached it he realized that the slight pink hue was from his eyelids.  He wasn’t some disembodied consciousness; his body existed and he just had his eyes closed.  Jenkins opened them, slowly at first, but soon enough he could see.  He could actually see.  Something was touching his eyes and it stung, but he didn’t care.  He was alive, or something like it, and he was about to find out what was going on.  Jenkins couldn’t move his head, but he wasn’t afraid anymore.

All of a sudden the light was too much for him to handle.  He had a splitting headache and his eyes burned.  The light came faster now and within moments he was completely enveloped; he couldn’t help but wince and shut his eyes to keep the light from overwhelming him.  Jenkins felt himself jerk to a stop and then felt his legs swaying through whatever surrounded him.  The new soldier was still very much numb, but his sense of weight reminded him that his legs still existed.   He was about to open his eyes and allow some light in when he felt a current start rushing down alongside his body.  Before he could react he felt his head being exposed to cool air.  He finally realized he was surrounded by liquid and felt it continuing to drain away from his body.

Jenkins felt awkward and cold afterwards and forced his eyes to open.  Things were blurry at first, but he could notice figures moving about in front of him.  He did his best to blink away the rest of the water, which felt thicker than it should.  He tried to bring his hands up to wipe away the rest of it, but they were too weak to move.

He suddenly realized what was happening.  Jenkins had been too busy fighting his disorientation to realize it but he had a solid grasp on what was happening now.  He hadn’t died at all; at least, not really.  His consciousness had been transferred to the organic hard drive that was his current brain.  All of his memories, behaviors, quirks had all had been digitally moved to a clone.  He had a new body now.  He was waking up in a clone of himself.

It made him nauseous to think about it.  He
had
stopped existing, even for just a moment.

-

The biotic fluid encasing the soldier inside the cell had emptied out.  Dr. Hawkins pushed himself off of his desk chair and walked to the plastic packaging which contained the new toy soldier.  He thought he was clever when he called them toys, action figures or dolls.  They were in better shape than he would ever be; Peter Hawkins had quite the paunch and his hair was already receding.  His eyes were framed behind thin glasses and he had a permanent crease in his brow. 

He didn’t care about any of it, though.  The middle-aged scientist cared more about his mind than anything in his life and it was as sharp as ever.  He sighed and hit a few buttons on the computer display.  The loading arm lowered the resurrection cell into the proper position and then retreated into the darkness of the storage bay.  It was only a few seconds before the front half of the vessel popped open with a hiss and then rose to the open position.  The nude soldier, whose name escaped Hawkins at the moment, was lying against the back of the cell, covered in electrodes and wires and ready for his attention.  The scientist looked at the display again and saw that the man’s name was Ryan Jenkins.

“Jenkins, Jenkins…” Hawkins murmured to himself.  There were studies that showed that soldiers had less of a chance of a resurrection episode if they were coaxed back into the world with their name
.  What foolish, little creatures
, Hawkins thought.  The scientist didn’t much care for the man. 

Hawkins only had to work eleven more years in this hellhole and he could retire to Elysia.  Then he could find some gold-digger and contribute to the overpopulation problem.  That prospect and his experiments were all that motivated him. There was just something about playing God that just appealed to him.

His new assistant shuffled through the door behind him.  She was a troublesome thing and was often clumsy with her bookkeeping, but Dr. Kane had that pesky bedside manner that was absent in Hawkins.  She had only been in Hawkins’ clinic for a couple of weeks, but things were already looking better for the scientist.  Toleration of the woman allowed him more funding for his work, so it was a necessary annoyance.  It didn’t hurt that the woman was reasonably attractive.  Her shoulder-length black hair framing her pleasantly round face was a welcome sight.  Her brown eyes were a rich coffee and gave off an air of kindness.  Hawkins would never admit to the doctor that he enjoyed looking at her, but sometimes his thoughts did wander in the middle of the night while he played with the pain thresholds of his guinea pigs.

“How are you today, Hawkins?”  His appreciation for aesthetics fell away as reality broke back into the scientist’s mind.  Charlotte Kane had a habit of asking questions for which Hawkins had no use.  He grunted and checked the readings for his newest patient.  His brainwaves and vitals were off and that annoyed Hawkins.  In any case it was more interesting than pleasantries.  Dr. Kane moved to the box of gloves and sighed.

“Ok, then.  What’s this man’s name, Hawkins?”

“Jenkins.”

“And his first name?”

“What does that matter?”

“Peter, the man just died.  I would say it’s pretty important.”

“Ugh, fine, it’s Ryan, I think.”  Charlotte sighed again and walked over to the terminal to check the patient’s name.

“Let’s check here, yes, Ryan Jenkins.”  Hawkins looked over at this “assistant” with a scowl.

“I said so, didn’t I?”  Kane walked over to their newest patient.

“You said ‘you think.’  I’m not traumatizing a poor boy because you had a hunch.  And furthermore, ah,” Charlotte squeaked.  She might have been in the middle of a rant, but Jenkins’ wide-open eyes had startled her.  They were filled with fear or shock or a number of other reactions and emotions.  More importantly, they weren’t supposed to be open at all.

“Hawkins!  Why are his eyes open?!” 
This
grabbed Hawkins interest.  He had been so caught up in the routine and the subsequent distractions that he hadn’t bothered to actually look at the soldier, who was clearly conscious.  The readings were no longer mysterious.