Phoenix Rising (Book Two of The Icarus Trilogy) (3 page)

Feldman almost didn’t notice the bullet flying past his head.  He had been looking down at the ground in front of him and had only just heard the echo of the rifle firing.  The bullet landed four meters behind him and at the other soldier’s feet.

“Goddamnit, Feldman, pay attention!”  Feldman snapped his head up to see two soldiers ten meters in front of them.  To another rifleman it wouldn’t mean very much, but Feldman was a melee fighter.  The distance was too great for him to cross without getting riddled with bullets.  He activated the kinetic motors in his armor and used them to propel his body off to some cover two meters to his left.  As he tumbled through the air and along the ground he could feel the vibrations the bullets made as they hit the ground nearby.

As he collected himself behind his cover he looked at his compatriot.  The smaller man was behind his own patch of cover and was taunting the pair of Vipers. 
Such a troublesome child,
Feldman thought.  The giant wondered what he would be able to do in this situation.  Almost all of the scenarios he considered ended with him bleeding to death on the ground.  Feldman looked back over to his partner who was trading bullets with the men in front of him.  He watched as the Crow popped out of cover, threw a grenade and then trained his rifle on their opponents.  The giant heard the explosion and then saw the muzzle flare coming from his partner’s gun.

“Hah, suck it,” Feldman heard the man shout over the gunfire.  He was foolish and arrogant standing above cover like that.  Feldman was about to say something over Comms when he saw the soldier’s head snap back.  The corpse stood there assisted by the power armor for a moment before finally crumpling to the ground.  Feldman cursed at the man’s incompetence and wondered if he would make it out of this situation.

He was answered by a grenade falling at his feet.  “Shit,” he cursed under his breath as he kicked away the grenade as hard as he could and brought his sword up to shield him from the shrapnel.  The grenade burst into a hundred fragments in front of him, most of them ricocheting off of the heavily-shielded plasma sword, but some of them sank into the soft parts of his armor by the joints.  In another stroke of luck the brunt of their destructive power had been taken by those soft layers of armor, but he felt the pain of a dozen minor cuts.

It could have been worse.  It could have penetrated the shielding of his weapon and caused the fusion battery to enter meltdown.  Feldman had read an article detailing the explosion that had destroyed a few square miles of battlefield.  He would have hated to be the reason for another event like that.

Feldman weighed his options.  Whether or not there was one soldier or two, they had no real way of knowing that Feldman had been left largely unscathed by the grenade.  He could rush out to meet them and get mowed down by their rifle rounds or he could wait and see if they wanted to confirm the kill.  The giant realized that he didn’t want to rush headlong into death, so he waited, perched on his heels with his sword lying behind him. 

He did his best to pick out the footfalls of any opponent.  It was a difficult prospect, considering all of the echoing gunfire and explosions from bombarding shells, but Feldman knew how to pick out the right sounds.  He couldn’t rely on just sight if he was to overcome his debts.

Feldman heard at least one soldier rounding his cover.  He paid careful attention to hear if there were any other footfalls or if there was any communication between the soldiers.  The success of this attempt was directly related to whether or not he would have to swing his blade more than once.  If there was another soldier Feldman was a dead man.  He heard no communications; he heard no other footfalls.

Unless the other soldier was hanging back, the Viper was alone.

Feldman decided that it was now or never and sprang up from his position; he wasn’t going to die squatting on the ground.  As the giant rose above the wreckage he could see his opponent a meter away from him.  The Viper was alone and there was no other soldier in sight, which was good for the massive soldier.  Feldman stepped forward and brought his sword in an upward arc from right to left.  The Viper let loose a few rounds, but they glanced off the armor around Feldman’s knees.  It wasn’t enough to stop the plasma beam from burning through the Viper’s torso and completing the wicked arc through the man’s right arm.  Feldman could hear the pop of the super-heated air in the man’s lungs and did what he could to breathe through his mouth.  If he became hungry after this encounter he would be sick with himself.

The man fell to the ground unconscious, which was a relief to Feldman.  He didn’t want to step on another soldier, but quickly he scanned the horizon to see if there were any other threats.  He found the other Viper lying dead a little over ten meters away.  Feldman’s partner had done that well, at least.  The giant looked down at the carnage he had wrought and sighed.  He hated having to kill people like this, even if it was his job.  A gun was so much more efficient.

He walked towards the other Viper, determined to see if the man was dead, when he heard a crackle over Comms.  It was Warner’s voice.  Feldman didn’t like the man, but he was a good enough soldier.  The former convict just lacked the ethics of the giant.

“Hey, Feldman, how are things on your end?”  Feldman thumbed the signal for Comms and looked at his partner.  He breathed in deeply and let it go after a moment.

“Ran into a couple of groups.  Three and Two.  All five are dead.”  He tapped at the signal and waited for the reply.

“Well, that’s good.  Pretty sure we’re gonna win this one.  The Vipers don’t know their guns from their dicks.  Jenkins still there?”  Feldman looked at the corpse of his partner.  Underneath the helmet it looked like Jenkins, certainly, but it was a different man.  Jenkins was already dead.

“Dead.  Took a rifle round to the head.”  He let his thumb slide off the button and looked towards the horizon.  Warner and Roberts were off to the north.  Feldman wondered if he had already decided subconsciously to meet up with the pair of soldiers.  He heard the crackle over Comms again and heard Warner sighing.

“He might be more fun, now, but the kid used to be a better soldier.  I preferred that,” Warner said before pausing.  Feldman was surprised that the past and present murderer had the wherewithal to notice Jenkins’ change, but he let the thought slide.  It was fairly obvious to anyone who had known the boy. 

“Well, if you want to stop being a lazy kike then get your ass over here.  Roberts and I are in a good position, but I want to go hunting.”  Feldman’s eye twitched at the slur, but then decided it didn’t matter.  It was Warner’s nature to be rude and prejudiced, but he had never attacked Feldman or any of the other soldiers just because they were different.  For a man as violent as Warner, racial slurs were mostly harmless.  Feldman started to walk to their position before replying.

“I’m coming.  Don’t worry,” he said before flicking off the Comms.  The only reason he left to join them was because it was the safest option, but he wasn’t going to waste any words explaining that to Warner.

-

Abrams hated the whole thing.  She hated having to live on this asteroid.  She hated having to kill people every other day.  And while it was a smaller issue than anything else, she really hated having no hair.  She missed her curls.  Her life on Eris was filled with all kinds of things she hated, but most of all she hated being separated from her sister.  Abrams swore she would see Rebecca again, but for the time being she shot her revolver at the man in front of her.

It wasn’t the best situation for the Crow.  The revolver in her hand was stronger than the man’s automatic, but she had only six possible bullets; he had thirty.  She strafed and dodged to the right, rolling to cover and popping up whenever she felt it was safe.  He did likewise and they continued along in a circle.  She cursed the Viper and his parents for their responsibility in his creation.  He was one of the better ones on their team and Abrams had the rotten luck to go toe-to-toe with him.

In a better situation she could rely on her partner, but Abrams was paired with Templeton.  The black man was thin and useless.  He had been recruited a month after Jenkins and while that boy had continued to refine his skills, Templeton seemed to consciously stay terrible.  She cursed his existence, too.  The other soldier was off beyond the ridge trading bullets with the Viper’s partner.  Abrams figured that she would eventually have to take out that soldier, too.

She landed behind cover and put her back to the rusted transport.  She checked her ammo belt without looking and her hand hit nothing comfortable.  She was out of extra rounds.

“Fuck,” she yelled, not even bothering to cover the curse.  She hit the release on her weapon and looked at the six chambers in her revolver.  There were only two rounds left.  She bit her lip underneath her helmet and wondered what she was going to do.  If she was lucky she could kill the man with just one, but from her experience the Viper was going to dodge both.  She slammed the shells back into the gun and thought about the situation.  After a moment, the warrior woman shrugged and popped out of cover into probable death.

The Viper had trained his gun on her position and spewed bullets over the hood of the transport.  Abrams didn’t even have time to raise her weapon before she fell back down to the ground.  There was no point in trying to fire past a hail of bullets.  She looked at her grenade belt and found it empty.  She cursed as she remembered that she had used both the chaff and the frag grenades in an encounter with a Viper carrying a minigun.  Templeton had been useless there, too. 

Abrams looked down at her revolver and thought about how she was going to get out of this.  She thought about how many games she would have to survive before she could see her sister.  As always it was too much.  Abrams didn’t regret selling her freedom so that her sister could survive her illness, but it bothered her that she had to keep putting off her return because of her deaths and debts.  Jessica Abrams resolved that this time she wasn’t going to die; just like every other time.

She rolled to the other end of the transport and popped up over the trunk with her revolver arm already extended.  The Viper adjusted his aim but not before Abrams pulled the trigger.  The round sailed past his head.  She didn’t bother to curse and squeezed the trigger again.  Again it flew past the man harmlessly.  She fell back down below cover and started slamming the ground with clenched fists.

“GODDAMNIT!”  She rained down her fists and yelled expletive after expletive.  All she had was a knife and he had a gun with however many bullets, every one of which could kill her.  She was inconsolable and continued to strike the asteroid long after her hands started to ache.

She sat there for a moment after finishing her tantrum.  The man hadn’t fired any bullets and hadn’t thrown any grenades to her position.  So, she reasoned, he was probably low on ammo and didn’t have any explosives.  These were good assumptions for the soldier, especially if she had to resort to using her knife against the man.  Abrams decided that she could risk it and prepared herself for the coming assault.  She set her hands against the transport and crouched down on her heels, ready to activate the kinetic motivators and launch herself at her opponent.  She breathed in deeply and let it flow back out of her.  Then the warrior woman brought up her gaze and breathed out.

Abrams leapt up two meters into the air over the transport and scanned the battlefield in front of her.  The Viper had abandoned his cover and started to creep towards her, but he was still too far away for it to be easy.  The soldier started to fire at her as she sailed through the air, but luckily he hadn’t anticipated her flight.  She landed and quickly started to run in a zigzag pattern towards the soldier.  He continued to fire his weapon but couldn’t deal with the woman’s agility and constant juking.  Abrams closed the gap and slipped her knife out of its sheath.  She flipped up the blade and dived at the soldier’s left.  Abrams leapt backwards over his weapon and brought her left hand holding the knife across the man’s throat, just under his helmet.  The man kept firing for a moment, but nowhere near the woman who had killed him.  He dropped the weapon and fell to the ground clutching his throat.

Abrams walked over to the man’s weapon and picked it up.  She sighed and then pulled the trigger, filling the man’s visor with rounds and ending the man’s life early.  She looked at the man and saw that he had plenty of ammo and a full grenade belt.  Abrams was shocked when she realized what the man had assumed.

“The greedy fucker thought I was going to be easy.”  She narrowed her eyes and looked at the man, stunned, but soon she gave into anger.  Abrams kicked the man’s ribcage and then stood over the corpse. 
That’ll teach him
, she thought as she turned to look for her partner.  The sounds had stopped coming from beyond from the ridge and as she looked over the battlefield she saw her partner walking towards her with his automatic in his hands.  At least he had taken care of the other Viper.

“You good?” she asked.  She didn’t want to start criticizing the man just yet.  Templeton lowered his gun and shrugged.

“Good enough.  The guy wouldn’t ever stop firing.  Only reason I was ever able to shoot was because he ran out of ammo.”  Abrams closed her eyes and wished she could strike the man without any consequences.  She opened them and then scratched the back of her neck with her free hand.

“Next time just throw a grenade and get into a better position.  I really could have used you down here,” Abrams said before seeing the man lower his head.  He was so easily cowed; it disgusted her.

“Oh, sorry.  I guess you’re right.”  Abrams closed her eyes again and brought her hand up to her helmet.  Templeton was giving her a headache.  The soldier had been here for a couple months, now, and he was still acting like a rookie.  Jessica couldn’t even swear at him since it would hurt his feelings.  Abrams missed the old Jenkins; she could swear at him and she wouldn’t really feel bad.  He would fix his behavior if it was warranted.  She shook the thought from her head; she had to deal with the present.