Murder of Crows (Book One of The Icarus Trilogy) (8 page)

The Hawks were not prepared for what came next.  They had thought the giant was already dead.  They had thought he had died kneeling.

The broken titan rose and lunged at the four children.  His sword was heavy, but he had enough strength left in him to propel his weapon in a wicked arc from right to left.  The poor boy on his right only had enough time to look down before the plasma beam passed through his armor.  The super-heated coil of energy literally burned through the man’s breast plate and sealed the man’s wounds as it passed.  There was a pop from the super-heated air in the man’s lungs when the plasma burned away the air, but Feldman wasn’t paying attention.  The Hawk was still alive as his two halves fell to the ground.

The soldiers had started to fire on the giant but it was of no use.  The only hope they had was to detach Feldman’s arm and that wasn’t going to happen.  Even the giant had started to lose consciousness midway through the swing.  His arm sailed on in its own momentum.

The sword bisected the next Hawk just below the diaphragm.  It continued on its downward arc and cut through the next man just above the waistline.  Those two men died quickly; they didn’t last very long once they fell to the ground.

The last soldier was another story.  The blade passed through the thighs of the last man.  That Hawk fell to the ground screaming and Feldman fell right beside him.  The giant was fading now, but he could still hear the child screaming his heart out.  He just wanted it to stop.  Feldman reached out his hand and closed it around the man’s throat.  Pain lanced through his fingers in the action, but it was dull now.  It was almost gone and he finally felt alright.  That infernal screaming had stopped.  The gladiator decided he wanted to sleep but before he closed his eyes the giant looked around him.  A shadowy figure was walking towards Feldman with the sun framed behind him; Feldman was comforted by the sight.

“There you are.”  Then the giant closed his eyes and died.

-

Jenkins had stayed behind the ridge while the Hawks had unloaded into Feldman.  He couldn’t follow the giant; Jenkins would just end up dead or dying alongside him.  Staying behind was the smart play.  That didn’t stop him from feeling like the worst kind of coward.

After the gunfire stopped and the screams died down Jenkins couldn’t control his curiosity and peered over the ridge to see what happened.  The young Crow saw the carnage that Feldman had wrought with just one swing.   Jenkins was more than just impressed; the display made him violently ill.

Fortunately he had nothing in his stomach to throw up.

The young Crow climbed over the ridge and started running to his fallen comrade.  He noticed the bloody titan had one of the Hawks grasped by the throat.  By the time Jenkins got to the two soldiers the Hawk was dead.

So was Feldman.

The Crow sat back on his feet and tried to figure out what he was going to do.  If he was going to live through this match it would be a complete accident.  Feldman was supposed to protect him; the man was a glorified security blanket but the Hawks had saw fit to shred the man.  Jenkins was slow and he didn’t have a chance in hell.

He lost himself to despair for a few horrible minutes.  The young soldier contemplated shoving his rifle under his chin and pulling the trigger, but he remembered his resurrection and pushed the thought from his mind.  He wouldn’t be able to take that again so soon.

That’s when things fell into place for the soldier.  His priorities were clear.  He was going to live; he didn’t give a damn about what he would have to do.  To Jenkins that meant he had to ally himself with those most able to help.  He scanned the horizon and looked for the indicators of his teammates.  There were four ID tags on the horizon.  Three were to the south, but only one mattered.

He left to join Carver.

-

Carver was tired.  He was always tired, but he wasn’t partial to these new rules and handicaps they had started forcing on him.  The worst part was that War World Entertainment didn’t bother to tell the men who were about to die for “their” profit.  The old Crow despised the men in charge.  The veteran had dealt with the Commission and so many middle-men over the years that he just didn’t bother keeping up with the date, anymore.  He guessed that he had been on Eris for thirty years or so, but it didn’t matter.  Jonathan Carver would be a Crow until the end of his days.

The veteran was walking east with Warner and Cortes.  There had been six of them at the beginning but the Hawks had a high concentration of soldiers in every area.  The veteran was left with stragglers.  He noticed Jenkins’ marker moving towards him and there was another ID tag four kilometers away just sitting there to the northeast.  Carver didn’t recognize the numbers, which meant the soldier wasn’t worth knowing.  He would be traded away soon enough.

Carver wished Abrams hadn’t died.  Cortes was a decent kid, but it was likely his fault that Carver didn’t have a decent soldier.  The veteran wouldn’t say anything to the Spaniard but he was allowed to think whatever he wanted.  His thoughts wouldn’t hurt the boy’s feelings.

The veteran could figure out what happened to the woman, but he had no idea what had happened to Warner’s other half.  Warner had shown up without his partner and hadn’t said a word about it.  The old man knew not to push it.  The convict looked grim and reserved; certainly not the soldier’s usual MO.  After the game, if Carver still cared, he could look up what had happened on the highlight reel; maybe see why Warner’s arm had a bullet in it.

The only thing on Carver’s mind was survival.  He’d been through the process more times than he could remember, but he’d rather find his way off the battlefield intact.  Resurrection was never comfortable.  In order to survive the best thing he could do was keep moving.  Hopefully Jenkins would catch up and add his weapon to their arsenal.

From time to time they would hear the distant explosions of artillery.  There were at least seven other games on the asteroid at any given time.  The people loved their war; the Commission made sure to give it to them.  It did nothing to help the soldiers’ morale.

After twenty minutes of wandering the three Crows saw Jenkins running towards them from across a littered landscape.  The boy was winded when he got to the remaining soldiers, but he didn’t let them stop on his account.  Between breaths he tried to brief his older compatriot.

“Feldman’s dead.”

“He’s not the only one,” replied Warner.  Any indication that he was ever mad at the boy wasn’t present.  He was bitter, but that most likely had something to do with what had happened to him earlier in the battle.  Carver eyed the man, but then turned to face Jenkins with a grunt.

“Figured.  Guessing he took a few of ‘em with him?” Carver asked without making eye contact. Jenkins scoffed at the question and regained his full height as he caught his breath.

“More than a few.  He’s still dead, though,” Jenkins said, trying to put more importance on the last statement.

“Happens to the best of us.  Any trouble on the way here?”

“One Hawk out there.  Took him out before he even knew I was there.  Didn’t feel too proud about it.”

“Good.  Only cretins take pride in a coward’s actions,” Carver said as he started to look around.  He was tired of aimlessly moving; something odd was going on.  If there was a time limit it should have been long past gone and that worried him.  He spotted a war-torn building off to the south and motioned to his comrades.

“Time we hole up somewhere and talk.  Somethin’ ain’t right.”

“Time for tea, old man?” Warner jabbed at the older man.

“Careful.  My bones are old and brittle but I still have enough fight in me to break all of yours.  Shut your mouth.”  Carver didn’t even bother looking at the man as he made his way to the dilapidated house.  The old man walked up the exposed staircase and settled up against a broken wall.  The creaking of the stairs covered the sound of his creaking bones and joints and he was thankful for it.  Carver was past his prime, but he didn’t want his teammates to hear the evidence. 

The soldiers settled throughout the house doing their best to cover each avenue of approach.  The atmosphere wasn’t conducive to high spirits and there was an itch in the back of their minds they just couldn’t scratch.  Jenkins gave voice to the question on their minds.

“Hey, Carver, why’s the match still going?  It’s way past the hour limit.”  Carver looked at the boy soldier and turned to the others.  He wanted to reassure them; he wanted to ease their minds.  He couldn’t.

“I don’t know, kid.  It’s bugging me, too.”  Carver looked outside the house towards the unknown soldier’s beacon.  The Crow’s beacon was still floating above the same patch of ground.  Carver wondered who the coward was; he’d have to slap the boy around before the next game.  The old Crow looked back at his teammates and saw Warner.  The convict had been looking out in the distance, but turned his head back to Carver and confirmed what the veteran had been dreading.

“We’re in an annihilation match.”

-

“And why didn’t you fucking say so!?”  Carver didn’t much appreciate having information withheld from him.  He wanted to hit the man, but the veteran restrained himself.  They’d pretty much lose all cohesion if
he
lost control.  That didn’t stop him from blurting out a number of obscenities.  Warner was calm and took the verbal abuse.  He lazily rolled his head back to Carver and sighed.

“Look, it doesn’t matter.  We’re all dead.  They fucked us from the beginning.”  Carver huffed at the convict’s remark.  The old Crow was angry at his comrade, but he was more angry that Warner was right.  Jenkins stood near the two and looked noticeably confused.  He turned to Warner and shook his head.

“Wait, how do you know?”  Warner took his eyes off Carver and looked at Jenkins.  He just shrugged and looked at his hand.

“When Corrigan and I were hit I heard the Hawks talking about it.  Dumbasses thought they killed me with a bullet to the shoulder and started gloating.  Made sure they regretted it when they turned their backs.  So anyway, yeah.  We’re kinda done for.”  There were no fights after that.  They all settled into a desperate silence.  The Crows were faced with almost-certain death.

“Goddamned handicaps on an annihilation match.  Those corporate fuckers,” Warner said.  No one criticized him; they were all thinking it.  Jenkins looked around at his teammates and felt helpless.  They were giving up before it was over.  They had resigned themselves to death so easily and they were taking Jenkins with them.

That’s what made him angry.

“Listen, you assholes.  We’re not dead yet.  I don’t know about you but I have no interest in training another body.  Sure, the team’s practically broken and held together with safety glue, but we’ve killed everyone we’ve fought, right?  There can’t be that many of them, either.  I say we hunt those assholes down and earn our way home.”  Jenkins finished shouting at his teammates and gauged their reactions.  His heart was pounding from the surge of adrenaline and every second seemed to pass by slowly.  He looked to Carver and found the older man’s gaze already burning into him.  The old Crow liked this new soldier in front of him.

“Whaddya suggest, kid?”  Jenkins breathed a sigh of relief at not being completely shut down.  He then realized he didn’t have a suggestion.  Jenkins scrambled his brain and looked out on the battlefield before seeing the lone soldier’s ID tag.

“Well, that soldier out there…”

“Roth,” interrupted Cortes.

“…yeah, Roth.  He’s been there since the beginning.  I say we grab him and then figure it out from there.  Five guns are better than four, right?” Jenkins asked as he looked at his fellow soldiers for approval.  “We could probably change things with him around.”  Warner was apathetic; Cortes shrugged.  Only Carver nodded. 

It seemed like a good plan.

-

Roth was dying and he knew it.

He looked down and could see the stumps where his legs used to be.  He could still feel the chainsaws tearing through the back of his legs and sweeping through his knees; he could feel his life flowing out of him.  It was his first death and he was terrified.

Percival Roth had joined the Crows for fame, glory and money.  He had come from a middle-class family and was destined for a life of accounting on Gaia.  His father had paid for everything; he had used his connections to get him into the best schools.  If Roth had followed through with it and just let his family make his decisions for him he could have lived a life of mediocrity and died an easy death.

But Roth had been an idiot.  He had wanted to show his mother and sister and father that there was more to life than sitting in a cubicle and punching numbers into a computer display.  It didn’t matter that Roth’s brain seemed to be built for quick calculations.  Just because he was good at something didn’t mean he had to spend the rest of his life doing it.

As he looked around the small clearing he could see his legs off to his side.  The bastard who had done this to him had come up from his left and taken Percival out of the fight without really trying.  He had rushed up to Templeton immediately after and dug his meat-threshers into the black man’s chest.  Roth had already started to go into shock but he could still hear the gurgling coming from his teammate’s throat. 

The man was in pieces now, but that was his own doing.  While the Hawk was busy tearing apart Templeton’s chest, the black man had pulled the pin on his grenade.  Both soldiers had burst apart and pieces of their bodies were scattered around Roth.  The new soldier wasn’t surprised that the other two Hawks had left; they had assumed there was nothing left living in the area.

Roth wondered how he was still alive.  From all the movies and shows he had seen in his little suburban town it seemed absurd that he hadn’t bled out by now.  He hadn’t considered that the suit itself had tried to stem the flow of blood from his wounds.  Roth hadn’t read the owner’s manual.

The new recruit cried as he lied on his back.  Roth couldn’t do anything in this situation.  The new soldier had done what he could; he had tried to shoot at the two Hawks who had attacked them, but Roth wasn’t expecting the man with the chainsaws.  It wasn’t fair.  He was supposed to be an accountant and now he was dying.