An attitude like that wasn’t going to get him very far with me.
“Why don’t you tell us what your present is like,” Vincent suggested. ”and please, just for clarifications sake, did you leave from the year 2021?”
Whether it was because of Vincent’s age or calm attitude, Archer’s tone grew more respectful. “Correct,” he answered, “but as you can already tell from our gear alone, your 2021 and my 2021 are considerably different.”
“But why, Archer?” I asked, already paging through the history book, beginning at the end, and flipping to the beginning, nothing jumping out at me. But when I reached the title for the very first chapter my heart nearly skipped a beat.
It was labeled: The Dark Ages.
I looked up at Archer in disbelief. “Have you ever even heard of the Roman Empire?”
He glanced at his teammates again, shifting in his seat before answering.
“Yes,” he said easily, “but what we know of it is very limited, and most of what we do know begins with its fall, which is why that book begins where it does.”
“But we had a dark age as well,” I said, frantically flipping pages. “So much history, knowledge, and technology were lost, and Europe went to shit for centuries, but much of it was preserved by outside forces and the Renaissance also saw a lot of information retained. Where did your timeline go wrong?”
I continued leafing through the book, occasionally glancing at Vincent, whose knowledge of history outshone even my own. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem any more helpful than Brewster’s history book was at the moment.
Archer shrugged. “We don’t know, Hunter. That’s why we’re here. We need to fix whatever event it was that you screwed up.”
I glanced up from the book slowly. “Is your world really that bad?”
“I suppose it depends on who you ask,” Archer replied, “but from where you come from, Hunter, and where the rest of us come from, it is. Very bad.”
“You mentioned the Ottoman Empire earlier in the present tense,” Vincent interjected. “Can you explain?”
“The Ottoman Empire is just one of many Islamic empires throughout Eurasia,” he replied. “They control Anatolia, some of the Middle East and their Eastern European holdings. Then there is the Moorish Caliphate who controls Africa as far south as the Congo, Spain, and Italy. Finally the Kingdom of Sauds control most of the Middle East through western Asia. There are a number of smaller nation-states that comprise the hegemony, but those are the big hitters. The only thing that has kept them from wiping out America and Great Britain is that they don’t always get along.”
“When did these Muslim empires begin their invasions of Europe?” Vincent asked.
Archer shrugged. “None of us are historians, remember? If you want details, read the book, but if I had to guess, I’d say some time in the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth centuries, I really don’t know.”
I whistled through my teeth but I still couldn’t buy it completely.
Not yet.
“I guess all of this makes sense,” I said. “Even with a dominant Islamic force throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, America still would have been discovered by Spain by an Italian explorer, England would have later colonized it, we would have later gained our independence, and I still would have been born in Midwestern Indiana to parents whose grandparents had called Central Europe home.”
“Right, Hunter,” Archer said.
“Wrong!!” I shouted, clapping my hands at him, causing Vincent and Helena around me to jump. “Don’t you realize what you’re saying?! You’re telling me that even though Europe went through an extended dark age, didn’t enter a time of medievalism, so no knights and conflict with Islam over Jerusalem, Islamic containment in the Middle East, no rediscovery of Roman and Greek knowledge, probably no invention of firearms until much later, and yet you’re still going to sit there and tell me that, ‘in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,’ and everything else managed to fall into place perfectly? Tell me, was Washington even the first president and did Lincoln free the slaves?”
Archer cleared his throat. “Everything you’ve just said is true, Hunter. 1492, 1776, 1812, 1865... Are these dates important in your history as well?”
I looked at the ground and pounded a fist on my thigh. I could not understand what was happening. None of this made any sense. I closed my eyes and tried to think, but Archer wouldn’t let me.
“Well?” He demanded. “Are they?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, leaning back and wrapping my arm around Helena’s waist, more for my own piece of mind than anything else. I looked back at Archer. “Okay, smart guy. Say I buy all this. What do you plan to do about it?”
“Fix it,” he said, his voice even.
I pulled my arm from Helena and shook my fist at him. “Just like that then? Just… fix the universe? Without even knowing where to start? Good luck with that, buddy, I’m sure you’ll do a…”
“Stop it, Jacob!” Artie exclaimed, having apparently pulled herself out of her stupor. “This isn’t all about you, you know. We’ve lived our entire lives in a world at war, as did our parents. Don’t ignore what he’s saying just because you can’t imagine how horrible our lives were.”
Her scolding took me by surprise, and left an empty feeling inside my stomach.
“I guess I’m sorry, Diana,” I said meekly. “It’s just that it’s been nearly impossible for us here. It’s been hard for me to even remember life outside of this place.”
“You’d better believe…” Archer started, but Artie cut him off.
“Shut up, Paul,” Artie said, shooting him a look. “You read Jacob’s journal too. You know what they’ve all been through. You don’t have an excuse for making an ass out of yourself either.”
Archer looked at her angrily, but then turned away under her scrutinizing gaze. I almost smiled at Artie, but then remembered that I wasn’t completely innocent in all this either. Silence befell our group again, but there was still a lot to talk about.
“I think it’s time we shift topics,” I said.
“To what?” Archer snapped.
“The orb,” I answered, “and how it can get us home. Because I don’t know about you guys, but every time I’ve used it, something different has happened, and I don’t come out of it any more enlightened.”
Every head immediately turned toward Artie as she sat there, completely oblivious to our attention, still fuming over my interchange with Archer. After a few seconds, Santino poked her in the arm, and she snapped her head around.
“What?” She asked.
“We need to discuss the orb,” Archer said before I could.
“Why are you looking at me, then?” She asked. “Jacob’s had way more experience with it than I have.”
I stepped in before Archer could take control of the conversation again.
“You’re the closest thing to a scientist we have, Artie, and you have a higher I.Q. than Santino and Wang put together,” I said, receiving asinine smiles from them both. “And like you said a few days ago, I’d just go off explaining it with movie refer…”
“Shh!” Santino interrupted with a finger over his lips.
“Oh come on, John, you know I didn’t mean anything by…”
“Shh!” Santino repeated more insistently this time.
Defense mechanisms kicked in at Santino’s insistence, as they did in everyone else who knew him. The only time Santino was ever really worth listening to was when he sensed something was wrong, and I could tell he wasn’t goofing around right now.
I scanned the courtyard but found nothing amiss, while Helena reached for her bag and what I assumed was a pistol hidden within. I swore under my breath for not bringing my own but felt assured by the fact that enough of us had, but there didn’t really seem anything wrong in the vicinity to justify Santino’s sudden plea for silence. I looked at him sitting opposite me in our circle, noticing that he seemed as alert as ever despite my lack of understand
ing. He rose to his feet with great caution and stared unblinkingly over my right shoulder, at an area of the park that was nothing more than an open field filled with dirt, some scrub grass, and a scattering of trees. There was nothing there, and I started to wonder if Santino was getting paranoid in his old age.
Much like I was.
“What’s wrong?” Archer asked, and for once I didn’t have a problem with his question.
In response, Santino snapped up his left hand and held it in a halting gesture. He had his pointer finger extended toward the sky but then slowly lowered it so that he was tracking it right to left. I kept my eyes on his finger, waiting for more information.
“There!” Santino yelled, lowering his left hand and drawing his pistol with his right in one smooth motion. The gun lifted so effortlessly that even my trained eye had trouble keeping up with what was happening. I tore my eyes away from Santino and finally saw what had spooked him. A few dozen meters away were Agrippina’s ninjas, wrapped in their dark clothing and armed with swords, knives, bows, and arrows.
I dropped to a knee, giving Helena a clear line of fire in their direction and keeping my ears away from her gun. Taking cover, I saw Wang, Stryker, and Archer go for their weapons at about the same time as Santino and Helena started firing. Artie dove to the ground and crawled toward my position, and I wrapped an arm around her protectively and kept her body as close to the ground as possible.
“Stay down!” I yelled at her and she nodded vigorously.
I lifted my head and saw ninjas nocking arrows to bows and releasing them in our direction. I pushed Artie closer to the fountain for cover and pressed myself against it as well, relying on my friends to handle the situation.
Helena dropped beside me and continued firing.
As I kept myself out of the way, I felt a pain in the back of my head like an intense headache pounding away at my skull. My first thought was that I’d been hit by arrow, but that didn’t make much sense. Instead of thinking about it, I squeezed my eyes and cringed at the pain, raising a hand to my temple in the hopes that it would somehow help, but it didn’t. The pain inexplicably increased and stars burst into my vision as the back of my head impacted the marble fountain when I fell to the ground.
I barely took notice of the arrows falling around us by the dozen.
I hadn’t heard the screams from someone hit by one just yet, but my head hurt so badly that I wasn’t sure such a sound would even register. It seemed ready to explode at the slightest touch, but then someone tugged at my sleeve and yelled for me to crawl away, but I could barely comprehend the spoken words let alone comply with them. All I could do was fight off the pain in my skull and hope that it went away on its own.
I turned to Helena who was in the process of reloading her pistol, her head directed toward me, her mouth moving to form unheard words. I shook my head and turned toward the rest of my team, noticing they’d taken up defensive positions behind trees or beneath benches, but in the next second, all I saw was blood.
Like an image flickering to life from a faulty movie projector, the entire scene before me suddenly became clear. One of my friends was already dead. The body I saw was Wang’s, his chest perforated with a half dozen arrows and another through one of his eyes. He sat against a tree almost casually, but his head hung lifelessly to the side, his pistol useless in his hands. Seconds after realization set in, my attention was diverted to Vincent, who took an arrow to the stomach. It hit with such force that it went clean through, not a life threatening injury, but it dropped the older man to a knee and out into the open.
Time seemed to move in slow motion now, as it often did in combat, but never quite like this. I felt myself trudging through reality at a pace that would have made a snail seem swift, and as time continued to unfold around me, more of my friends started going down. Santino took an arrow to the knee, Stryker to the arm, and Brewster right in the chest. I couldn’t believe what was happening, so I closed my eyes and forced time to pick up again, willed it to accelerate and go back to normal.
I was rewarded with another sensation, however, when the pain in my head seemed to just disappear, and when I opened my eyes, everything had changed again.
Wang was gone, as was Santino, Vincent, and Stryker. Artie was no longer next to me but over by Archer and Helena, who was also no longer by my side. Dazed, confused, and suddenly exhausted, I struggled to my feet, and continued my inspection of the area. The scene was pristine and there was no blood, like nothing had happened at all, and I started wondering how long I had been sitting there with my eyes closed.
A moment later, Helena noticed me rising to my feet and rushed over. She grabbed me by the arms and helped me sit on the lip of the fountain again.
“Jacob… Christ, are you all right?”
“I, uh…” I started saying as I tried to think, “…I’m fine. But what about Wang and…?”
“What about me, mate?”
I craned my neck to look behind me and saw the man who had been dead just seconds ago standing in a very non-dead like position, looking as healthy as ever. My eyes narrowed and I looked at Wang in a state of utter shock before turning back to Helena, who looked very concerned.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was just going to ask you the same thing, Jacob,” she said, shifting her head from side to side gently, studying me. “You passed out.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you did. Just when Santino spotted the scout.”
“I did?” I asked again, unable to accept such a story.
“Sure did, buddy,” I heard Santino say. I turned again and saw him approaching from behind Wang, perfectly fine and without a mark on him. He and Stryker were carrying a body between them. “But don’t worry, sweetheart, I kept you safe.”
I would have sneered at him if I wasn’t so confused.
I turned back to Helena. “What happened?”
She didn’t seem eager to answer, but she did anyway. “Santino spotted one of Agrippina’s ninjas who must have been a scout for his Octetus. Cuyler took him out before any of us could react, but the rest of his group wasn’t far away, and everyone else went after them.”
“Two got away, the squirmy bastards,” Wang said as he took a seat beside me.
“But not this guy,” Santino said as he dropped the body unceremoniously to the ground. The man coughed as he hit, and Santino kicked him in the side to keep him down. “You were just too slow, weren’t you, guy?”
“Cuyler’s on the runners,” Stryker reported. “And Gaius and Marcus are covering the perimeter, but one could slip out of the city if they’re lucky.”
I nodded distractedly and looked at my hands, but Helena reached up and took them in her own. She lowered her voice. “What happened, Jacob? I’ve never seen you just pass out before.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know… I really don’t.”
I hadn’t lied to her, not exactly. I didn’t know what happened to me, but I wasn’t exactly keen on sharing what I’d experienced. Everyone thought I was already on edge, and some may already suspect I was going insane, so now wasn’t the time to provide them with further evidence to support the argument.
I tried to shrug off my confusion for Helena’s benefit and to maintain my authority. I noticed the body of Agrippina’s ninja on the ground out of the corner of my eye and pointed at him.
“He talk yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Wang answered as he retrieved a scalpel from his small trauma kit.
Santino grinned at the sight of it and kicked the man on the ground again, and I was only mostly sure the two were just putting on a show for their attacker’s benefit. But when Santino’s kick struck the man’s body, there was no reaction. Stryker kicked him harder, but the result was the same. The two traded glances before Santino knelt down and rolled him over but pulled back almost instantly.
“Fuck!” He yelled as he jumped away, doing everything he could to avoid a spray of arterial blood gushing f
rom the man’s neck. The downed ninja must have had his hand clamped over the self-inflicted wound until the moment Santino rolled him over, and the blood had just come streaming out. I wasn’t sure when the man had died, but he’d clearly killed himself to avoid interrogation.
Santino looked irritably at Wang. “I thought you searched him!”
“I thought you searched him,” Wang shot back.
Both men glared at each other before turning on Stryker jointly, who held out his hands innocently. “Hey, I just got here. I don’t even know who the hell this guy is.”
Wang and Santino bobbed their heads in reluctant agreement and turned back to me, so I turned to Helena, not sure what we should do.
“I think it’s time we leave,” she said coldly, and I didn’t think anyone would disagree with her.
***
An hour later, we were all back at camp.
Cuyler hadn’t reported anyone tailing us as we returned, but we’d all mutually agreed that we had over-stayed our welcome here and that it was time to push on. There was only one place any of us could think to go, and that was back to Caesarea where we could report in to Vespasian.
Once we arrived, Helena and I immediately went to work collapsing our tent and preparing our gear for immediate deployment. The atmosphere around the camp was energetic and chaotic as over a dozen people scurried around to make their preparations for egress. The sun had recently set, and without fires for illumination, most everyone performed their tasks in the dark. Some utilized flashlights occasionally, and I’d even used my night vision goggles as I packed our tent away into its pouch, but the darkness only served to slow the entire process. Even so, Helena and I were among the first to finish, having performed this particular ritual a hundred million times over the years together.
We then shifted our attention to our gear, but we always kept most of it packed up for rapid deployment anyway, so we were ready to go. We took our packed tent and all our spare gear to one of our large carriages and loaded everything carefully. All of our horses were nearby, but since we didn’t have spare ones for the newcomers, we had to pack the carriages tighter than normal to leave room for them to ride along.
Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion Page 6
