Phoenix Rising (Book Two of The Icarus Trilogy) (6 page)

There were a couple of other theories, but they were both ridiculous.  Templeton could have been an undercover reporter trying to get the “inside scoop” on the living conditions of these professional athletes.  The Commission was aggressive with their PR and shouted stories from the mountaintops about how these men and women were treated like celebrities inside their barracks.  It was both a recruitment tool and a way to fool the massive amount of poor people into thinking that soldiers had the good life.  The last thing the corporations needed was an unhappy proletariat.  Journalists would sometimes try to sneak in and get the “real story,” but they were often never heard from again.  The Commission had a tight grip on the communications allowed to the soldiers and, often, even when they avoided capture the reporters were stuck with ever-increasing debt just like all the rest of the slave soldiers.

They tended to be caught by the very system they were trying to expose.

The other theory was equally ludicrous.  Resistance movements had popped into existence more than a few times since the inception of the games, but they had always failed.  The Trade Union, the EOSF and the Commission had all the power.  They had all the weapons and all the “legal” soldiers.  Governments were useless and held nothing but the symbol of power.  The world was full of mannequins and puppets and the people didn’t know it.  The population was thankful for the EOSF for their “protection” and how they handled the insurgents.  All resistance agents were instantaneously labeled “enemies of the state” and were hunted down.  Joining one of those movements wasn’t just hazardous to health.

It was suicide.

Roberts let the thought fade from his mind.  It wasn’t going to be useful to think about something like that.  It was just silly.  When Roberts looked at the thin, black man he saw a plant; the soldier clearly had to work for the Commission.  Roberts watched Templeton round a corner and increased his speed so that he wouldn’t lose sight.  The boy soldier didn’t know what he was going to do if he confronted the man, but he figured that it would be best to follow.

The young Crow rounded the corner and immediately walked into Templeton.  The slightly-taller man was looking down at him in surprise and backed off a step after the impact.  Roberts silently cursed as he realized he had been made.  The boy soldier knew that Templeton had noticed him analyzing their compatriots.  Roberts braced himself for what was coming.

“Oh, man, didn’t see you there.  Sorry, Roberts.”  The boy soldier looked up to see Templeton awkwardly smiling.  Roberts didn’t want to play the game, but he didn’t have a choice; it was better for Templeton not to suspect anything.

“That’s ok, Templeton,” he said as he suddenly felt the pain from the collision.  It was distracting, but Roberts was grateful that his painkillers were dulling it to a degree.  “You didn’t know I was there; I probably should have been watching where I was going.”  He looked up to see Templeton laughing and then shrugging.

“Nah, it’s my bad.  Forgot something in the locker room and wheeled on my feet.  Shoulda known better.”  Roberts awkwardly laughed and stood there for a while.  It was a tense moment for him, but as he watched Templeton out of the corner of his eye it didn’t seem like he was bothered at all.  The slave soldier seemed his usual cheery self.  Roberts thought about what he could say but Templeton spoke before he had a chance.

“Man, how about Warner, today?  That was crazy.  He went off on
everyone
, well except for me and some of the other guys,” Templeton said before shaking his head and looking at the opposite wall.  Roberts wondered if maybe he had imagined it all.  He shuffled his feet and dug his hands underneath the waistband of his khakis.

“Yeah, it was pretty brutal.  Felt like too much,” Roberts said while kicking himself for the awkward small talk.  This wasn’t going anywhere.  He looked up to see Templeton biting his lip.

“Right.  He just tore Carver down, man.  How’d he even know that stuff?” he asked before looking down at his feet.  After a pause he looked back up and scratched the back of his neck with his left hand.  “So, man, is it true?  About the painkillers?”  Roberts looked at the man and tried to convince himself that he had been mistaken earlier.  If the soldier was acting it was masterful.  Templeton really did seem to be as dumb and clueless as he had been the entire time.  Roberts sighed and rocked back and forth on his heels.  He wasn’t going to tell the truth; at least, not all of it.

“Yeah, pain gets to be a bit much sometimes.  Wasn’t trying to kill myself, but, you know…”

“Yeah,” Templeton said before pausing.  “Resurrection’s a little rough…”

They stood there for a moment and Roberts wondered if he’d ever had a more awkward conversation, but thankfully Templeton put an end to it.

“Anyway, I’m gonna go back to the locker room.  I’ll see ya, all right,” he said before brushing past the boy soldier and heading around the corner.  Roberts backed up a step and settled up against the wall.  He thought about what just happened and came to the conclusion that it was just a silly thought in the first place.  Templeton was just an average soldier.  There was no reason to think otherwise.

He pushed himself off from the wall and started the walk back to his room.  As his head started to ache he realized it was time for another batch of painkillers.  Roberts almost hoped he would die again soon so that his tolerance would be kicked down a notch.

-

Percival Roth was not happy.  He never was, but his current situation didn’t help any.  He had done as well as he could since he had been traded, but his new home had never been too accepting of the soldier.  Roth couldn’t blame the rest of the Hammerheads; he wasn’t exactly the best man for the job.  Due to his poor skills and inability to think on his feet, the powers that be had decided to train Percival in the ways of explosives.  With a big enough blast radius even Roth had the ability to kill a man.  All he was given on the field was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and a pistol.  Most assumed he would use the RPG a few times and then get killed before he could even use the pistol.

Most of the time they were right.

Roth had a problem with self-worth.  He had always been picked on when he was growing up on Gaia, one of the three residential asteroids, and his family had never appreciated him.  He sighed as he thought about his past.  It was so bland and tasteless.  The worst he ever had to experience were those schoolyard taunts, but he had never experienced anything truly exciting or good for his well-being.  Roth guessed that’s why he jumped at the chance to be part of the most exciting game in the system.

The young soldier picked himself up from his desk chair and stumbled over to his bed.  It was way past lights-out, but Roth was able to find his way without bumping into anything.  Not only was it sparsely decorated, but it was exactly the same size, color and shape of his room back at the Crows’ barracks.  It seemed that each headquarters was exactly the same.  Even the soldiers were similar to the Crows.

None of the Crows had liked him, either.  Percival had only lasted a couple of weeks there after his training was done.  Corrigan, Templeton and the other sleep-walking zombies were better-suited to the team than him.  It wasn’t a surprise.  The soldier with the dirty blonde hair had never fought a day in his life before he reached Eris.  He thought it would be exactly like all the video games he had spent his youth on.  He would kill people, die and then re-spawn.  There wouldn’t be complications.  It would be so much more interesting than sitting at an office desk all day.

He laughed about his situation while staring at the ceiling.  Roth hadn’t been able to sleep since his first game; since his first death.  Each time he died the pain from coming back to life was terrible; the therapy agonizing.  Then he was just sore all over for the next few days. 

That was if he even made it past a few days.  All of the soldiers were expected to fight after just one day of recovery.  The Trade Union wouldn’t make anything off their investment if they were confined to the hospital every other day.

Roth had died so many times in the last few weeks.  He’d only survived three of those games.  They had felt like small victories, but the reality of the situation sank into him around the eighth death.  He had called home and talked with his snide sister.  Harriet had never supported his decision and she had asked when he was going to come back to Gaia and resume his old life.

He had gone to check his balance the next day.  Roth had a bit of a crisis as he realized he was going to spend the rest of his life on Eris.  He had never considered the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to pay back his debts, but after some quick calculations and double-checking the numbers he realized that the interest alone would never be paid back.  He realized very quickly that he had made a mistake.

Percival had to live with it.  He had to die with it.  And every time he died he woke to a painful existence.  The poor soldier died at least twice a week.  If he was lucky, sometimes he would hear the screams of men as he burst them into flame.  He had never liked the sound in the video games; he hated it in real life.  There were quite a few moments where he hesitated and didn’t want to pull the trigger.  On those occasions Percival was ripped apart by gunfire and thrown into such pain that he never thought possible.

Roth hated this life of his.  He had never taken ownership over his own decisions during his childhood or during school.  In college he had studied the courses his father had wanted.  He graduated with the degree that his father wanted.  But in his idiocy, instead of taking the job his father wanted to give him, Roth made the first decision that was ever truly his own.

It had landed him on War World.

Percival cursed himself as he again agreed with his father.  He didn’t have the brains to make his own decisions; he had needed help to put his life on the right track.  And instead of following through with it, Roth got to see for himself how much of an idiot he truly was.

Roth watched from his window as the broken moon rose from the horizon.  He had watched it many days now; watched as it danced through the sky and the numerous shards of rock still floated in its gravity.  The broken thing was beautiful in its own way.  A failed experiment with creating a smaller version of Earth that resulted in the Moonfall, the disastrous event where a thousand shards of rock came floating down and laid waste to civilization.  Civilization had bounced back, but the moon would forever stay broken.

Roth couldn’t help but identify with the shattered thing.  It was such a waste of potential.

-

Jenkins woke up in total darkness.  He was used to it now, but there was a time when the absence of everything had terrified him.  Ryan had thought it was the afterlife and he had ended up in purgatory; the naïve soldier had thought that he had made a terrible decision and had ruined his own existence.

The now-experienced soldier smiled at his former stupidity.  Jenkins knew after so many resurrections that he was just being suspended in the holding cell for this particular clone.  Out of all the soldiers on Eris, Jenkins was one of the few who consistently underwent a process known as premature adoption.  Whenever a soldier was killed on the field, his or her consciousness was transferred into a genetically identical clone of themselves.  Most would take a couple hours before full synchronization and would wake up in the gentle confines of the resurrection chamber. 

But Jenkins was different.  He would undergo full synchronization almost immediately after his death and wake up in the holding cell suspended in the absolute darkness of storage.  It had terrified him the first two times.  It had terrified his doctor, as well.  When Dr. Kane had first met Jenkins it was a rough experience.  Most soldiers who suffered premature adoptions were left brain dead or, worse, severely mentally-impaired.  The half-formed soldiers didn’t understand when they were killed again.

Jenkins had no such problems.  With every resurrection he was healthy and mentally primed.  There was only one other soldier that Jenkins knew of that experienced the same phenomenon, but the young soldier didn’t like to talk to Carver about it.  The veteran had recently taken a very condescending approach to the young soldier and Jenkins didn’t appreciate that.

He smiled as he started to flex his muscles in the darkness.  If nothing else, Carver had let him onto that little piece of advice.  Since they were given a few extra hours of consciousness, the two Crows could use that time to rehabilitate their bodies.  While the scientists who developed the cloning technology had done what they could, there was little that could be done to fully adjust the soldiers’ muscles to everyday life.  The clones were covered in electrodes which stimulated muscle use, but in order to fully adapt to their new bodies each soldier underwent a strict therapy session immediately after resurrection.

For others it was torturous, but to Carver and Jenkins and all those other unknown soldiers it was merely a nuisance.  They were given a gift, or so Jenkins thought.  He could complete his therapy in style.

Ryan smiled as he thought about the last game.  The artificial Crow had been able to kill that Viper easily.  He had shot the man right onto the grenade and watched as the soldier rose into the air from the concussive blast.  Jenkins had died from the other Viper, but that was alright.  The soldier thought that as long as he had just one impressive kill it didn’t matter if he died.  He’d come right back, anyway.

Jenkins’ time in the darkness of storage was always the same.  He would flex his muscles while he reminisced about the carnage he had caused.  And though he had a re-breather stuck in his throat he vibrated his vocal chords anyway.  He liked to flirt with Dr. Kane right out of the gate.  He felt like it wouldn’t be much longer until she gave in and slept with him; he always had a thing for doctors.

After an indeterminable amount of time Jenkins felt his holding cell moving along the track. 
Finally
¸ he thought.  He was an impatient man, and while he appreciated being able to work on his body before the therapy it still
felt
like work.  He didn’t like that part of it.