The Champion

by Taran Matharu

  Six months had been stolen from him. Months he could have spent with Amber and his friends, with no timer hanging over them, no struggling for food and survival. The Romans seemed to have no trouble cultivating food in the orchards, or catching fish and small game in the jungles.

  Abaddon had given him no respite. Those glorious, empty hours alone on the spire had been traded for a goodbye. He knew, one way or another, he would have time to make peace with his friends. To say what needed to be said, even if he could not tell them why.

  With his arrival had come the Codex. There was no timer yet. No terrible danger hanging over them yet. Even so, he knew as soon as he woke, the game would start again.

  The Romans might rule here. But Cade was the player.

  Only now, Abaddon was in the game. A greater game, one only he and Cade would play. Abaddon just didn’t know it yet.

  * * *

  “Come on, lad,” the voice said, drifting through his consciousness. “We’ve waited long enough.”

  Cade opened his eyes, and Marius’s face swam into view.

  “That’s it,” Marius said, squeezing Cade’s shoulders. “Up you get.”

  A hand pressed his back, and Cade sat up, taking in the room properly for what felt like the first time.

  Marius sat on a stool beside him, with the contenders crowding around. It was some relief to Cade to see the others there. He had seen them, briefly, in his strange, wakeful walks to the baths.

  “You’ve been through a lot, I can see that,” Marius said, not unkindly. “But you’re back now. And we need the Codex.”

  He waved behind him, where the Codex hung motionless in the air.

  “Jesus, give him a min—” Scott began, but a look from Marius clapped his mouth shut.

  “It won’t respond to your friends, let alone me,” Marius said, his voice firm. “So I think it’s time you swore us in as contenders and passed control to me.”

  Cade rubbed his eyes and let out a sigh. He had not even considered this situation.

  He was just so tired. Even despite his long sleep.

  So he laughed. It was a bitter laugh, but one that lasted until his breath ran out. He wheezed, then faced Marius.

  “The Codex is mine. Kill me if you want to. But Abaddon was quite clear.” He looked Marius dead in the eye. “You’re a good man, Marius. But you’re not an idiot. So tell me, why do you think we won against the Grays, when you had failed for years?”

  Marius’s face was grim, but he leaned back and considered Cade’s question. “You breached their stronghold,” he allowed grudgingly.

  “How?” Cade asked.

  Marius furrowed his brow. “We all know what happened,” he growled. “Don’t ask me stupid questions.”

  Cade held up his hands in peace. “Just tell me, how many rounds did you win before we came along?” he asked.

  “I’ve won more battles than you’ve hairs on your balls, whelp,” Marius snarled. “You had better get to your point quickly, before I present my own point to you.”

  He gripped the hilt of his sword tellingly, but Cade was unfazed. Marius needed him, and there was something of a performance in his voice. As if the man regretted his words even before he said them.

  “I’m not talking about battles, I’m talking about rounds,” Cade said. “We’ve won two. Three if you count the battle with the vipers. I’m sure the others have told you about that by now.”

  Marius relaxed his grip and nodded for Cade to continue.

  “I don’t care who leads here. I have no desire to be commander. But you cannot forget, this is a game, not a war. We’re nothing more than pawns.”

  “Pawns?” Marius asked.

  Cade shook his head. Obviously Marius’s vocabulary did not extend to chess. It probably hadn’t even existed in the Roman’s era.

  “All I’m saying is, I’m good at this game. I’ve won, and I keep winning. We are one round from freedom. One round from returning to Earth. Let me keep doing what I’m good at. You keep doing what you’re good at. It worked against the Gra—Tritons, didn’t it?”

  Marius sighed and rubbed his eyes. It seemed Cade wasn’t the only one who was exhausted.

  “What do you want to know?” Cade asked. “You want to see the remnants? A map of the area? That’s about all it’s good for.”

  Marius nodded slowly, clearly considering Cade’s words. “You’ll let me ask it any question?”

  Cade smiled. “Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “We’re all on the same team. Codex, show me the map.”

  The drone turned toward Cade, and the map appeared, semitranslucent in the air. Marius hissed a breath between his teeth.

  “Such … power,” he said.

  The commander reached out, rubbing his fingers together as they passed through the holographic screen.

  “This is … from above?” he asked.

  Cade nodded.

  “Almost half of our men died in the attack,” Marius said. “Only a few of the Romans who once lived here, before my legion was summoned, are alive.”

  He gestured at the walls. “They are all common legionaries, so they knew little of the area, or the game. I have been fighting blind ever since I arrived on this planet. But I know I cannot win alone. It is your knowledge of the future that has won the rounds.”

  “Your future.” Cade inclined his head in mild disagreement. “My past. If we had the weapons of my time, or even my recent history … those Tritons wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  Marius smiled for the first time. “If you will allow me access to the Codex whenever I need it, there is no need for further disagreement. We work together, yes?”

  Cade grinned in return, and extended a hand.

  “Together.”

  CHAPTER

  33

  Cade sat in silent contemplation, watching the jungle’s trees sway in the wind. Amber sat beside him, just as silent. Only the soft squeezing of her hand gave him comfort, even as she allowed him his time. She seemed to know Cade needed to think. And time to heal, both inside and out.

  The afternoon had passed in a blur, though he had hardly left the storeroom. His friends had talked his ear off, and then some. So much seemed to have happened while he had been away, yet at the same time, nothing of true consequence.

  They were alive, healthy, and content, at least for the moment. That was all Cade truly cared about.

  Quintus had been made tesserarius, a sort of squad leader or sergeant in the legion. It came with a small squad of ten soldiers, who followed his every command. They seemed in awe of their young leader, and Quintus had come into his own, leading hunts in the jungles for prey and keeping a careful watch over the jungles in case of slaver attacks.

  As for the others, they were just glad there was food on the table and soldiers to keep them safe. The hard scrabble for survival among the ruins was behind them; life now was more restful, for Marius did not order them to do anything beyond their fair share of the chores and fishing.

  Now, Cade had emerged for some fresh air, and to see what the legionaries had done to the keep. The orchards were tilled, stripped, and planted, and the harvest boiled in clay jars and stoppered with corkwood to preserve them.

  He wished they had thought of that. All the knowledge in the world was only useful if you thought to ask the right questions.

  The keep had been repaired, clay used as mortar and rocks from the waterfall used as filling. Cade was glad that the Gray ship had not been discovered—that would have thrown quite a wrench into Song’s plan.

  “Codex,” Cade said softly. “Show me the caldera.”

  The machine flickered into life, slower and more glitchy since the EMP. Clearly, the pantheon had yet to recover from the attack fully, and Cade was glad of it.

  But now was the time to plan. The contenders had hardly managed to scrape through alive in the past, focusing on keeping themselves from starving.

  They had to take the initiative. To mount an expedition of their own, befo
re the timer began again and they were forced to rush into danger without thought or preparation.

  “What are you thinking, Cade?” Amber asked gently, laying her head on his shoulder.

  Cade turned his head and gave her a soft kiss on the forehead. He wished he could take a day off. Walk alone with her beneath the waterfall and pass the evening watching the twin moons.

  Instead, he breathed deep and pointed at the hologram, where the blue dots glowed amid the sea of jungles.

  “I want to go out again,” Cade said.

  Amber stiffened and lifted her head.

  “So soon?” she asked.

  Cade closed his eyes and nodded. Every second he delayed was another that his plan could be found out. Another in which the second EMP device could be found. Perhaps Song was being tortured at this very moment, to tell the pantheon of the Gray’s plans. No, there was no time to rest.

  “It’s my … duty. Our duty,” he said.

  Amber bit her lip, then nodded and returned her head to his shoulder.

  “You’re right,” she whispered. “I wish you weren’t, but you’re right.”

  Cade squeezed her hand tight, then released it and pointed at the map.

  “We don’t know what the rules of the next game will be. What weapons we can use, what obstacles we will have to overcome. But if Abaddon is going to force us to attack the top of the leaderboard, well … the least we can do is be prepared. No desperate battles where we’ve barely had a second to prepare. If we bring back the best of what’s out there, in our own time…”

  He left his sentence unfinished. It was hard to live in a world of hypotheticals. Would he be advocating for the same had he never met Song?

  “I trust your judgment,” Amber said, snuggling closer into the crook of his shoulder.

  Cade sighed, his eyes flicking up to the unwavering gaze of the Codex. Always there. Always following.

  For a moment, he wondered if he should give the Codex to Marius. With the drone elsewhere, he could fill in his friends on the plan. But he knew it was too great a risk. Who knew what other drones hung above him, silent and invisible? Perhaps Abaddon liked to watch him suffer through multiple angles. He wouldn’t put it past the sadistic voyeur.

  No, he would have to do this himself. Convince his friends of two reasonings at once. For now, they intersected—both plans involved heading into the jungle. But when it came to bringing nuclear weapons back—how would they react?

  But now was the time to “realize” that the bomb was what they needed.

  “Show me the remnants within fifteen miles from here that the current contenders have not seen before with their own eyes.”

  The screen flashed, and blue dots scattered across the map winked out. He cursed silently. The crashed plane was just out of range—the clearing where it sat must have been a mile farther.

  “Make that thirty,” he said.

  The screen flickered again, and this time the blue dot he was looking for appeared. He tried not to look at it directly.

  “Oh?” Amber asked, “were those not enough for you? There’s at least ten we could go for.”

  Cade cleared his throat. “Yes, well. It would be silly to go so far if there was something really good a little bit farther. We’ll only go for them if they’re worth it.”

  Amber hummed. “I guess that makes sense. Remember, we’ve never spent the night in the jungles. Not without shelter anyway. Maybe there’s somewhere we can use as base camp on the way?”

  Cade moved his fingers over the screen. “Remove this one, and this one, this, this, this…”

  He swiftly ran through the remnants they had encountered in the past or he already knew of that would be useless for their endeavors. What remained were only a few dozen remnants. More than Cade had expected, really.

  The Romans had been lucky, considering their two expeditions had effectively been random wandering through the jungles. There were advantages to following the Roman routes, made obvious by the string of blue dots that followed a winding but semidirect route along the map.

  For one thing they knew it was safe. Well, forgetting the area where the slavers tended to hunt. If there were places rife with predators, the Romans had survived them.

  At the same time, if they followed the same route, they had no chance of stumbling upon new remnants of their own. But ultimately, it did not matter. Because at the very end of one of the Roman expeditions, deep in the heart of the jungles … was the nuclear bomb he needed.

  He swiftly skimmed through the remnants that lay within the range. Several he recognized from when they had sought Wladyslaw’s armor all those months ago.

  Spearhafoc the monk, with stolen treasure. Many explorers. Benjamin Church, the British spy, along with the prison ship he was on at the time. And of course, the nuclear bomb, along with the plane it sat upon.

  There was a train called Dolly, some semimodern civilian ships that would contain no guns; nothing that would be a game changer.

  But it was the other items he had not considered before that drew his interest. If a nuclear bomb was not enough to tempt his friends into another expedition into the jungles, he would have to find something else.

  “Let’s get the others,” Cade said. “We’ve got some planning to do.”

  CHAPTER

  34

  “Codex, run us through the remaining remnants within the twenty-mile radius.”

  As the group sat on the old tree stumps outside the tunnel, Cade only hoped there was something they had overlooked close by. That, at least, would get the conversation about leaving on an expedition moving.

  A dot flashed.

  “Charles Redheffer, con man who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine, disappeared in 1820.”

  Cade shrugged. “Anyone want a fake perpetual motion machine?”

  “Next,” the group chorused.

  “John Jeffrey, Scottish botanist, disappeared while researching plants in the Colorado desert in 1854.”

  “Another desert one,” Cade said. “It’s like Abaddon just watches over deserts, waiting for someone to wander through it.”

  “Next,” Amber said. “Unless someone wants to learn about plants.”

  “Bela Kiss, insane serial killer, disappeared in 1916 after murdering twenty-three women.”

  “Moving swiftly on,” Amber growled. “I’d only stop there to spit on his corpse.”

  “That is all,” the Codex replied.

  Cade sighed. This was not going to be so easy.

  “Show us the remnants within thirty miles,” Cade said, trying not to let the desperation show through to his voice. The nuclear bomb would be a hard sell. Without some way of setting it off remotely, it was basically a very large suicide bomb—and an unwieldy one at that.

  “Imperial German Army Zeppelin LZ 90 disappeared without a trace after it broke loose in a storm and was blown out to sea in 1916.”

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Cade said, pounding his fist into his palm. “They could have guns on there, right?”

  “No,” the Codex replied flatly. “It was unmanned.”

  Cade cursed. “Next, then.”

  “Panfilo de Narvaez, a Spanish conquistador, and a raft he built following a shipwreck,” the Codex intoned.

  “Useless,” Cade muttered.

  He peered at the screen, where a cluster of blue dots stood out, deep in the jungles.

  “The tombs of: Imhotep, 2950 BC; Alexander the Great, 205 BC; Cleopatra and Mark Antony, 30 BC; Boudicca, 61; Attila the Hun, 453; Genghis Khan, 1227; Atahuallpa, 1533.”

  Cade gaped at the blue dots flashing on the screen.

  “What, all together?” Cade asked.

  “Yes,” the Codex intoned.

  “That’s … messed up,” Scott said.

  “What use is that?” Cade asked, half to himself. “There might be weapons in there, but we need guns, explosives…”

  “You can trade,” the Codex said. “Treasure for favors.”<
br />
  “Favors?” Scott asked.

  “Information, teleportation to locations. Most anything within Abaddon’s power. Primarily remnants, undiscovered or otherwise,” the Codex replied. “It is how the Ninth Legion was summoned by the previous contenders.”

  “Could we use it to trade for guns?” Cade asked.

  “If Abaddon deems the trade worthy,” the Codex replied.

  “Well, what did the Ninth Legion cost?” Cade asked.

  “The Ninth Legion cost the entire contents of the Las Cinque Chagas, a Spanish treasure ship that disappeared in 1594. It contained two thousand tons of precious metals and jewels.”

  Another dot flashed blue on the map, the farthest point on the long string of dots that marked the Roman expedition’s progress. Clearly, that was what the Romans had been looking for.

  “Can we trade it then and there?” Cade asked. “As soon as we find it?”

  “Yes,” the Codex replied.

  Cade cursed quietly.

  “Wait, why is that a problem?” Scott asked. “If we find treasure out there, we won’t have to lug it back to the keep.”

  “Correct,” Cade said, his fists balled with frustration. “But that means the Romans didn’t have to either. Any remnant on the map there that had treasure in it was probably traded—gold’s heavy, remember. And if they didn’t know what to do with it, they would have paid some of it to have the rest teleported back. We won’t find any left out there.”

  “Oh … right,” Scott replied dejectedly.

  A grim silence descended on the group.

  “Was there treasure found in the tombs, then?” Cade asked, dejected.

  “Unknown,” the Codex replied. “The tombs were only scanned from the exterior.”

  Cade looked up, his eyes widening.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I cannot answer that question,” the Codex replied.

  Cade leaned back, a flutter of hope within his chest. The tombs had been found on the second expedition’s way back to the keep, before they had been chased from their course by the slavers. Perhaps they were in a hurry to return, having found treasure enough already.