To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (29 page)

To combat us.

At least Gaius and Marcus still had their loyalties straight.

It didn’t matter.  What mattered was the
orb.  Once we have it, all we need to do is figure out how it’s supposed to work, and we can go home.  If we can’t, we have no choice but to destroy it, along with the second one as well.  Better we end its potential for trouble now, instead of waiting for something even worse than me to come through next time.

I just w
ish I knew how it worked exactly because all I have are theories.

Theories I’m not even ready to go into yet.

All we want to do is go home.  We’re so sick and fucking tired of Rome, and all its “glory and splendor,” but we can’t just leave.  Not yet.  We can’t leave with Agrippina’s claim to the throne lingering.  Nor can we leave without Bordeaux, Wang, and Vincent… if they even wanted to go.

Our first priority was to get Agrippina away from Germany and all the chaos she’s wrought there.

Oh, have I not mentioned that yet?

Well would you believe it?  Agrippina’s decision to take control of Vespasian’s legion wasn
’t a great one after all.

No surprise there.

To Vespasian’s credit, there was no way he could have foreseen the devastation she’d bring with her.  Needless to say, she’s a horribly inept commander, one prone to brash decision making and poor generalship.  Not that it would have been easy campaign, anyway.  Throughout Roman history, Germany had been one of the few provinces Rome had actively campaigned against that never completely fell under their control.  Through stubbornness and determination, Germany remained relatively independent throughout Rome’s existence.  And despite initial gains by the legions over the past few months, making its well past the Rhine region, months of fighting had resulted in little progress at the cost of thousands.

Ironically, Agrippina’s strategy mirrored
that of the
blitzkrieg,
developed by more modern Germans a half century before I was born in the original timeline.  It called for a massive invasion force to simply push hard and fast in the direction it wanted to go, smashing everything in its way, striking so precisely and swiftly that the enemy had no chance to counterattack.

That might have worked for Hitler, the douche that started our second world war, but he had access to tanks, trucks and planes, vehicles that could move far quicker than any Roman.  Plus, he had a well-established infrastructure already in place to help logistically supply and feed
the massive army that had exploded out of Germany in a manner of weeks.  The Romans had no such infrastructure to work with.  Germany was a hinterland for all intents and purposes, and Agrippina’s blitzkrieg went against almost every rule in the Roman playbook.

A legion’s strength did not come from the flexibility and discipline of
its fighting men alone, but in their logistical genius as well.  Romans built roads, constructed farms, erected forts – created infrastructure – as they campaigned both slowly and deliberately.  Legions could move quicker than any other infantry based army in history, but they were also methodical.  As they traveled, the land they walked on inherently became “Roman.”  They were always ready to receive reinforcements, supplies and dispatches from Rome itself, because they protected their asses.

Agrippina made no such preparations, and I had no idea why generals like Vespasian or Galba hadn’t challenged her decision making.  Probably because they feared her three cohorts of Praetorians, not to mention the Sacred Band (which never left her side).  They could overwhelm Agrippina’s small bodyguard unit if they wanted to
with the help of their
entire
legion… but it would cost them more than they’d want.

Maybe even their
own lives.

I’d
offer more on the campaign, but we only have sketchy information at this point, and no details pertaining to the battles themselves.  I just wanted to point out how important it is to draw Agrippina away from the legions and let men like Vespasian and Galba take over.  I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I had a hunch that if we were to go after one of her precious orb’s she might have something to say about it.

So, we needed the orb
, and that’s where Gaius and Marcus come in.  Over the past few weeks, we’ve had intermittent contact with them via a series of dead drops we’ve established throughout the city.  Their dispatches assure us that they’re close to locating the seller of the orb.  Once they do, they’ll let us know and we’ll go from there.  Hopefully, we can just buy it, but something tells me it won’t be that easy.

Oh, I guess I should also mention Helena and I are finally… finally… back to normal
.  More or less.  We… made up a few weeks ago, and she’s become a wonderful stress reliever.  On another positive note, she hasn’t lost an ounce of that craziness she brings with her to the bed…

What the hell am I doing?

Go read a romance novel.

As I put down my pen, I promised myself that was the last time I ever mentioned Helena and I in the journal.  The thing was supposed to be a historical record of what was happening with us in case we never make it home, not a novel, and hopefully, once I got more details on the orb itself, it will become a technical manual for how the troublesome thing works.  With some luck, if someone finds both manual and orb should we be unable to destroy it, they’ll be smart enough to leave it well enough alone and get rid of it.

Still, it was probably nice t
o give it a more personal touch – make it more interesting for the ladies.  They loved a good romance story.  I wasn’t quite sure if what Helena and I had was “good” or not, but I, at least, thought it was special.  Besides, if we let Santino write the whole thing, we’d run the risk of alienating anyone above a fourth grade reading level and I still wanted a movie deal out of the whole thing.

Closing the journal yet again, I secured it and tossed it to Helena.  She was sitting on our bed, keeping herself busy with something while I’d been writing at the table.  Santino sat opposite me, balancing his knife on a fingernail.  I watched him flip it in the air and catch it by its grip.

We were bored.

After our run in with our black clad nemeses, the three of us had l
imited our time outside of the apartment to a minimum.  It was frustrating, because I couldn’t visit my lovely lunch location, and I knew the meat-on-a-stick vendor had to miss me.  The only time we went out was to get food and supplies, alone, and we never went to the same place twice.  We did whatever we could to keep our identities hidden, knowing Agrippina’s ninjas, for lack of a better term, were probably out there looking for us.

Night
time was a different story.

Between midnight and dawn
, against our Roman friends’ advice, the city was our playground, and we took to it like Batman in Gotham City.  Like modern day free runners, we’d climb, run and leap our way around the rooftops and walls, patrolling the city.  We kept to the shadows, but we weren’t perfect.  It was only a few nights after Gaius and Marcus came to our room that we started hearing rumors on the streets about mysterious ghosts that scampered around on people’s homes and disappear the moment they were noticed.

High praise.

But we weren’t just having fun.  We were training and reconnoitering the city, working out bodies that had sat idle for far too long and looking in every nook and cranny we could find.  We planned every escape route back to our room and every hideaway we could duck into at a moment’s notice.  If we had to run from those ninjas again, we didn’t want to end up cracking anymore ribs in the process.

There was also the possibility that we would need to obtain the
orb through more scrupulous means than a simple monetary transaction.  If things went down the way we suspected they would, it would be at night, some place secluded, and there was absolutely no chance we would pull it off without a hitch.  Statistics never lie, and since we’ve been in Rome, nothing ever went the way we planned.

It was currently 2330, and we were getting ready for our next nocturnal prowl.  Boredom had been the only thing on the menu
for the past ten hours, and now we were getting antsy.  It was hard to explain the adrenaline rush that comes with anything we do, but back home, as a SEAL, my time spent in the field had been some of the most exhilarating of my life.  The amount of terror, anger, testosterone, and bullets that flowed freely during those missions had made my blood boil, and after every successful mission, the only thing I wanted was more.

I loved and hated what I did.  It reminded me of a quote from the Roman poet Catullus who wrote:

“I love and I hate.  Why do I do this, you ask?  I know not, but I am tortured by it.”

Living in a world consumed by war left few options to find fulfillment.  One could sit back and wait for the inevitable or one could fight, waging an ever losing battle to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves.  It was a bleak reality, and even though I despised killing, even when necessary, I couldn’t deny the rush I felt every time the bullets started flying.

It invigorated me like nothing else.

Doing what we’ve done here in Rome was no different.  Running around on rooftops, trying to avoid detection and spooking small children who just happened to be glancing out their window was just another way for me to get my kicks.  Helena and Santino felt the same.

Santino had been in the military a few years longer than I had, and being a member of Delta was the ultimate adrenaline rush.  The guy would walk into enemy territory and meander around like he was a local, trying to gain intel as he went.  Exposed and alone, it had to be the most nerve wracking job on the planet.

Helena, on the other hand, had lived a life of luxury and opulence, even though it had hardly been a life worth living
at all.  Her first taste of combat, and the rush that went with it, came with our first operation back in 2021.  She hadn’t been involved in the infiltration part of the mission, which had its own kind of tension, but she’d told me months later, after we had gotten to know each other better, just how much of a rush it had been.  She’d shot two wild drivers with two fantastic shots, and combined with a half dozen more conventional shots earlier in the night, had been the first kills of her life.

She hadn’t been happy with what she’d done, but she did admit a certain amount of pride in her endeavors.  She’d participated in an operation meant to capture or eliminate a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and had single handedly protected the lives of her teammates.  Now that was something to be proud of, and she’d grown hard over the years, perhaps, in some ways, too hard.
  But at least she found a way to keep on loving me.

Without that, I had no idea where I’d be in this world.

Probably dead.

***

The boredom was
killing
me.

So much so, that as my mind sat idle, unconsciously reminiscing about countless things, it was
unable to register the fact that my chin was about to slip off the hand that supported it.  A few seconds later, when it finally slipped, my mind had no explanation.  I looked around, thankful that neither Santino nor Helena were paying me any attention.  Helena had her back to Santino and me, slipping on her combat fatigues, while Santino tried to flip and catch his knife again, only to let it slip through his fingers.  The knife implanted itself in the wooden floorboards and he snapped his fingers in defeat before retrieving it.  He put it back in its sheath.

We were bored
and
antsy.

Then, all of a sudden,
we heard the sound of overly seductive women trying to ensnare their next meal ticket.  Not soon after came a series of insistent knocks on our door.

I
immediately reached for Santino’s HK416 beneath the table.

We weren’t expecting company tonight.

“Wait!”  Santino said emphatically, leaping from his chair and over the table in the direction of the door.

He walked carefully towards it
and put an ear against it.  I looked at Helena, who had put on her combat fatigues and was now leaning against our wardrobe, her arms crossed.  She looked at me and shrugged.

Santino reached out tentatively and returned the knocks, two quick ones, pausing briefly before a third one.  Almost immediately, a reply knock sequence came back, four knocks with a pause in between the first and second ones.  Santino whistled the tune to “Hail, Britannia” with each knock.

I rolled my eyes while Santino opened the door.  Gaius and Marcus rushed through.

“See,” Santino said as he closed the door behind
them.  “These guys must watch their spy movies.”

I ignored him and picked up my chair and moved it to the other side of the table, offering it to one of the Romans.  I moved over to sit on the bed and Helena joined me while Santino
sat with our visitors at the table.

“So?”  I asked.  “Any new developments?”

“Yes,” Gaius answered.  “We’ve found the seller and have already arranged a meeting with him.”