To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (63 page)

“Three days after you and your team went
dark,” Archer started, “the President ordered a search and rescue operation to find you.  He called us in.”

“The President?”  I asked with a sigh. 

“Of course,” Archer answered, before shaking his head.  “Oh, right.  The timeline is fucked up.  You guys were working for the Pope.”

“What do you mean by, ‘fucked up’?”  Vincent asked.  I’d never heard him swear
like that before.

The cuss word also brought up another interesting question.  How were Diana and Archer even standing here?  Let alone speaking English?  The guy was talking about being sent by the President, not the Pope.  That single change alone was significant enough to suggest the timeline was in some form of disarray.  If that’s the case, how
also are they exactly as I remembered them?

“We can get to that later,” Archer said politely.  “As it stood, you were two days past your deadline.  We were sent to your last known location off the Ottoman Coast
in Syria.”

Ottoman Coast? 

“We found the caves along with plenty of dead bodies.  None of them members of the North Atlantic Federation Forces.”

North Atlantic Federation
…Forces?

“Most of it had bee
n blown to hell and we immediately feared the worst, but we found two anomalies that made us think otherwise.  The first was that your equipment cache was gone.  We weren’t sure if it had been taken by the enemy, but it did raise questions.  The second anomaly was a locator beacon, transmitting so weakly we almost didn’t pick it up.  We found it a few miles east of the cave, next to a lake.”

I narrowed my eyes, suddenly very curious.

“We had to dig about forty feet down.  What we found surprised the hell out of us, and we hadn’t even opened it.  A standard issue, ballistic grade cargo container, but of a design unfamiliar to us.  It also looked as old as God himself.  What we found inside confused all of us even more…”

As he spoke, consciousness started to elude me and my head grew foggy.
I felt myself start to pass out.  I really must have lost more blood than I thought and it was starting to hit me.”

“Jacob!”  Both Helena and Diana called out simultaneously as they reached out to steady me.  Both women looked at each other, still technically having not been introduced to one another.  Santino’s stupid interruption hadn’t even given them the chance to shake hands.  Even so, they both helped me shuffle back
over to my slab of concrete.  Wang stepped over and gave me some water and an MRE cracker.

“Thanks, Wang,” I said with a nod, turning back to Archer.  “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. 

I was surprised at the lack of animosity between us.  Maybe he really
had made his peace with Artie.

Helena moved to sit to my right, making sure I wouldn’t fall off.

Archer looked around the ruined building, as if noticing its dire state of repair for the first time.

“Shouldn’t we get out of here, Hunter?”  He asked.  “This place doesn’t seem stable.”

I hesitated.  If the building hadn’t moved after the force of the orb’s activation, it would stand long enough to find Varus.  “We can go after we find someone.  Have your men look for…” I paused again, looking at Helena.  “Have your men look for a head and a body.  The body should be wearing a toga.  He was with us.”

Helena looked at me curiously.

“Varus…” I whispered.

She gasped and looked at the floor.  Everyone else who’d known the man dropped their heads as well.  None of them had been as close to him as I was, but they
’d all respected him just as much.  Varus had been a good man.  We had to get his body back to Rome so that his wife and small child could pay their respects.

Archer flicke
d his hand to verify my request and his men spread out through the rubble strewn room.  I watched as they broke glow sticks to brighten the area, their green glows only making the situation more morbid.  It made me think of Varus’ family, especially his son.  The thought ate at me.  His son would have to grow up fatherless.

Because of me.

“I’ll help them,” Santino offered respectfully.

I nodded in thanks and watched him go.  I noticed Artie watch him go as well.  Trying to forget about Varus, I eyed her in that big brother kind of way.  She shrugged at me and returned my big brother look with a little sister scowl.  I sighed.  So it was going to be like that then.

Only Wang and Bordeaux hung back from the search.  Madrina was still out, and even though I assumed Bordeaux had put all the pieces together, it was best not to anger him.  That left Archer, Artie and Helena with me.  Definitely not the most ideal double date, but at least I only disliked one of them.

“So what was in the container, Archer?”  I asked.

“Well, we couldn’t open it in the field.  It had been sealed with something kind of sealant epoxy and we were worried about damaging its contents.  We had to carry it back to the States for analysis.  It took the techs four hours to pop it open.  Inside were three objects, and it hadn’t been pretty.”

I was on the edge of my seat.  I really was.  Ever since I started writing the journal earlier this year, the only thing I wanted t
o know was how all this ended.

“First wa
s a blue sphere.  This one,” he said holding up the one Artie had used to get them here. 

How many d
id that make now?  Three?  Four?  The math was officially too much now.

“Second, was a very interesting notebook.  It was brit
tle and falling to pieces, but I bet you know what the very interesting part was.”

“Let me guess,” I said with a half-smile.  “That it was written in English,
blue ink, and in poorly worded grammar and syntax.”

“Exactly,” he replied.  “I have to admit, it was a pretty interesting read.  At least it was after an antiquities preservation team from the natural history museum in New York managed to transcribe it.  I’m sorry, but the notebook is pretty much trashed.”

“Nuts.”

Archer smirked.  “The third object was the most interesting, not to mention disturbing.  It was the source of the locator beacon.  A human body.”  He paused, glancing at his feet hesitant
ly.  “After close examination, it was determined to be identical to your body type and size, with a crack in the left tibia.  Carbon dated as two thousand years old.”

I looked at Artie, who leaned against the wall near us, her arms crossed.

“I confirmed it, big brother.  The leg had a break right where you cracked it when you fell out of the tree house when we were kids.  I didn’t believe it at first.  Your body… your skeleton… just lying there.  I couldn’t believe it.”  She shuddered and shifted her arms to hug herself.  “It was creepy.”

I smiled
nervously, but not at the thought of my own body having withered to little more than a skeleton, still in existence at a point where my sister could view it.  I didn’t let existential things like that bother me.  At least I tried not to.

I smiled because Diana had always been so blunt, so chi
ldishly naïve in the delivery of her thoughts that I found her to be a walking enigma.  She was eighteen months younger than me, but by the time I graduated from Dartmouth, she was already walking away from MIT with a Masters in Aerospace Engineering.  She was a child prodigy, but even with that big old brain stuffed in her head, she was as silly as Santino… and that thought caused me to pause in my tracks.

I shook my head.  I’ll have to watch those two.  Just another thing to worry about.

Helena held up a hand like a student in a classroom.

“Excuse me, but are you telling us that when you found a two thousand year old body in a historically impractical container, along with a notebook spewing forth all sorts of nonsense,” she looked at me, “no offense, Jacob…”

I shrugged.  “None taken.”

“…
that you actually believed our team traveled back through time?”

“You must be Major Strauss,” Archer said with a halfhearted salute.  “Senator Strauss will be very happy to learn that you’re unharmed.”

Helena and I exchanged glances, our eyes wide and surprised.

Major Strauss?  Senator Strauss?

Oh, boy.

As for Archer, his look lingered on “Major Strauss” a second longer than I would have liked.  Considering his past, I immediately grew suspicious.

“Just as an aside, Hunter,” he said, covering his look rather well, “the President wasn’t too happy about certain parts of your journal…” his voice trailed off, and he settled with just pointing between Helena and I.

“Excuse me?”  I asked.

He looked at me sharply.  “Don’t play dumb with me.  You two are supposed to be officers.  We have rules about these things for a reason.  The President feels…”

“Listen buddy,” I interrupted angrily, “you get stuck in ancient Rome for four and a half years and we’ll see if you do something stupid…”

Helena offered me a sour look.

“Oh you know what I mean,” I said with a dismissive wave before turning back to Archer.  “You can go tell this so-called ‘president’,” I said throwing up air quotes, “that he can take my journal and shove it up his a…”

“That’s enough, Jacob,” Artie interrupted.  “He understands where you’re coming from; he just wished you would have been more professional in your journal.”

“It’s not an AAR,” I told her
, even though memory reminded me that it was.  “It’s just a stupid journal.  I didn’t even really think anyone would actually find it.  It was just something to keep me focused.”

Helena almost laughed at that comment.

“Whatever,” Archer piped up, annoyance obviously evident in his voice, “but to answer the major’s question, no, that wasn’t our first thought.  Remember, it took us a few weeks before we could translate the journal.  The fact that we picked up a transmitter signal was odd, yes, but hardly confirmed anything.  The tech was so far beyond us that we thought it was Persian.  It wasn’t until we called in Diana after we had the first part of the journal translated that we confirmed it was Hunter.  A final DNA and dental record test confirmed it.  Like she said, Jacob, even though we parted on such bad terms, even I too found it very creepy.”

I nodded absentmindedly.  I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like.  The sheer absence of any kind of normality to the situation had to have been mind
-blowing.  I tried to picture Archer, a tough guy SEAL through and through, trying to sit there and listen to a bunch of eggheads try and explain what was going on.  Despite being a jack ass, Archer had always been a patient thinker, exactly what the military looked for in their 21st century officers.  It had made him a good platoon leader, if not a good person, but I knew that if I had been in his shoes, even with all the TV I had seen over the years, I’m not sure how I would have dealt with it.

Helena always joked that when we’d first been sent back, I
’d handled it so well because it was almost like I welcomed it, or even planned it.  She’d been fairly right, as always, but I countered by explaining how I’d always been good at adapting to new situations, which was true, and that I’d always hated movies where people could never actually figure it out that zombies were in fact attacking, or aliens were invading, or monsters were maiming, when it was clearly happening right in front of them. 

Did people not watch movies in the movies?

That never made sense to me.  It was partially why I was so impressed that Archer and whoever else was involved managed to come to the logical, if not obvious, conclusion as quickly as they had.  These kinds of things don’t happen every day.

“Just out of curiosity,” I started, “just how much time has gone by between when
we disappeared and now?”

Archer and Artie exchanged glances.

“A month,” Artie answered sadly.

“A month, eh?”  I asked
.  “A fucking month!?  We’ve been stuck in Rome for five years!  Five years!”

“How could you possibly blame us for that, Jacob?”  She asked.

“Do you know what we’ve gone through?!  What I’ve gone through?!  Do you know how many times I’ve had to watch things happen that have been slowly pecking away at my soul?”  I yelled, poking my head and chest in frustration, my anger burning inside me.  “Years!”

“Hunter, you’re the expert here,” Archer said, holding a hand out to calm me down.  “All we know is what you described in your journal, which sorry to say, some of which was lost.  And you didn’t really do a great job describing time travel theory in there, anyway.  Like you’ve said, you have had five years to think abo
ut this.  Your sister and the other scientists back home have only had a few weeks.”

Artie looked at Archer, finally some of that original resentment I knew she felt towards him surfacing.  If it’s only been a few weeks like Artie said, they’re breakup was still technically rather fresh.  Peace or no, I couldn’t imagine she was enjoying working with him.

“I’m an engineer, Archer, not a scientist.  I do math.  I don’t spend my time developing theoretical concepts about wibbly wobbly time travel theses.”  She turned her attention back to me.  “We don’t have much, Jacob, but I know how you think.  To me, your journal read more like a movie script than a doctoral thesis.  You always did watch too much TV.  By the way, I’m sorry to say, your movie isn’t going to happen.  The whole thing is classified.”