The Champion

by Taran Matharu

  “Well, that’s one avenue,” he said after a moment’s pondering. “Tombs mean treasure. Lara Croft taught me that.”

  “I’m a Nathan Drake guy myself,” Yoshi said. “But you’re right.”

  “Whatever that means,” Grace said, rolling her eyes.

  “Weirdos,” Trix said, prodding Yoshi good naturedly.

  Cade scratched at his scruffy beard, staring at the map. There were far fewer remnants in the depths of the jungles, for only the second expedition had explored that far.

  “What’s left?” he asked the Codex.

  “An A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft loaded with a B43 nuclear weapon fell from the deck of the USS Ticonderoga in 1965. Pilot, plane, and weapon were never found.”

  Cade held his breath, but nobody proffered an opinion.

  “Anything else?” Amber asked.

  “That is all,” the Codex replied.

  Cade sighed and rested his chin on his hands. He had to play this right.

  “It’s a risk,” he announced after a moment’s thought.

  “Duh,” Scott said. “Dino-infested jungles aren’t exactly a walk in the park.”

  Amber glared at him, then turned to Cade with a reassuring smile. “What are you thinking?”

  Cade’s heart twisted. If only he could tell them what he was thinking. He didn’t care about the treasure. If it was up to him, they’d make a beeline for the nuclear bomb, drag it back, and be done with it.

  “Our end goal is the tombs. Abaddon placed all these tombs together for a reason. He wants us to explore them, and I bet there’s treasure inside.”

  “That’s like … the second farthest thing,” Scott moaned.

  “Well, I doubt that monk’s treasure is still around, and I don’t see any guns either. The only thing that’s useful is that nuclear bomb.”

  Amber scoffed.

  “You don’t think so?” Cade asked.

  “Have you seen a nuclear bomb?” she asked. “They’re huge.”

  “Yeah, and who knows how long it’s been there—at least a few years, right?” Grace said. “I bet it’s rusted as hell. Might even be radioactive.”

  “Codex, how much does the bomb weigh?” Amber asked.

  “Two thousand sixty-one pounds.”

  Cade’s stomach twisted. He felt like throwing up.

  “Well, that’s out, then,” Scott said. “That’s like moving a car, only without wheels, through a jungle, surrounded by predators. Oh, and the car has a rusted nuclear bomb inside it.”

  Cade closed his eyes, letting the nausea fade. He had mentioned it offhandedly, but he should have put more thought into his argument. Worst of all, they were right. How the hell was he going to get it back here?

  “And how do we set it off?” Yoshi asked. “Smack it on the nose until it blows up? And say that works: Won’t we blow ourselves to kingdom come?”

  Cade held up his hands, a fake smile pasted across his face.

  “All right, all right. But say we do manage to set it off, remotely. Maybe we trade some treasure for a remote timer, right? And pay Abaddon to teleport it where it needs to be? It’s game over for whatever we face then. They send an army? We blow them to kingdom come.”

  Amber bit her lip. “Either way, we need treasure,” she said, though Cade saw his logic was not holding water. “So the tombs are the plan, no matter what. When we see how much treasure is there, then we decide what we do with it.”

  Cade held his tongue, knowing there would be no winning them over right now. He needed to convince them to do the expedition first. The bomb could come later.

  “If we’re going to travel into the jungles, we need to plan a route. We can’t camp in the open, so we need to use the remnants the Romans found as places to camp,” he said.

  The others nodded along.

  “We could take the river—it would be faster and safer from predators. But we know the slavers hunt on that route. I vote we walk instead.”

  “Agreed,” Amber said.

  The others blanched, fear stamped across their features. Yoshi, Bea, and Trix in particular.

  “Are you sure?” Bea asked. “A dinosaur would … you know. Eat us. The slavers are trying to take us alive.”

  “You guys haven’t seen predators yet,” Cade said to the group. “And some of you haven’t seen the slavers. I’m the only one who has experienced both. Trust me, the slavers aren’t better.”

  Quintus held up a hand. “I was in the jungles for a long time,” he said haltingly. “Slavers are … worse.

  Yoshi nodded slowly. “Okay, so where do we camp?” he asked.

  Cade rubbed his eyes, looking at the map. “First place we stop is Benjamin Church’s prison ship,” he said. “We can get there by nightfall if we walk there directly. The Romans took longer because they did not do that.”

  “They didn’t?” Bea asked.

  “No, they were searching for remnants. Based on the time stamps of each remnant discovery, I’m guessing they would explore one area after another thoroughly, setting up camp in appropriate locations and ranging out during the day. I doubt they would have come across so many remnants if they’d traveled in a straight line.”

  He traced the route with his finger. “Next, we hit the Leifsbudir. That’s the first-ever settlement in North America, made by the Vikings.”

  “Wasn’t that Columbus?” Amber asked.

  “Nope,” Cade said, somewhat pleased he could share one of his favorite pieces of trivia. “I mean, he was an idiot who just got lost on his way to India. The Vikings settled in Newfoundland, or Vinland, as they called it, in the year 1000.”

  “Nerd,” Scott muttered.

  “Not to mention the Roman ships they found wrecked in Brazil,” Cade said, then held up his hands as the others began to speak all at once. “Anyway, hopefully there’s a hut of some kind there we can shelter in.”

  He grinned, looking at the map again. “Okay, so then we head for the tombs from there. We’d have to shelter in them overnight, explore them and all that. Better take some torches with us to be safe.”

  “Wait,” Amber said. “Didn’t you say we would walk five miles a day last time?” She pointed at the tombs. “This is almost thirty miles. That’s six days there, six days back.”

  Cade nodded. “I was thinking about that earlier. I massively underestimated how fast we could travel before. The jungles aren’t so overgrown. We walked between Hueitapalan and the Sea Dragon in around an hour. That’s about a mile, right? If we walk ten hours a day, we’d make it there in three days. That’s two sleeps there, two sleeps back, plus one sleep at the tombs. It works.”

  Amber grimaced. “Those jungles had been burned. And who’s to say we won’t run into a swamp or heavy bush?”

  Cade hugged her close and felt her relax in his arms. “We won’t know until we do it,” he said. “I just know we have to try.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  Cade realized his problem only when they returned to the storeroom. In the heat of the moment, alone with his contenders, he had been thinking in the old way. Where all decisions were their own.

  But that was not what he had agreed with Marius.

  He was supposed to stay here. He was their access to the Codex. Instead, he was about to abandon the Romans, taking the Codex with him.

  Leaving it here was not an option—the contenders needed it to scan discoveries, and to make any deals for the treasure they found. Nor was Cade staying and letting the others go an option, even if they could somehow summon the Codex when they needed it. He now knew they hated his bomb idea. Left to their own devices and having to make a decision on what to trade with Abaddon then and there … they couldn’t be trusted to teleport the bomb to the keep.

  He’d have enough trouble convincing them to do it if he was there. But that was a bridge to cross for another time.

  The good thing was, they didn’t need to build a raft this time. And thanks to the Romans, the food, water, and equipment need
ed for a trip into the jungles were in plentiful supply. The legionaries even had backpacks, and there were hundreds to choose from, piled high in the storeroom while they were not in use.

  Still, Cade knew that abandoning the Romans without telling them their plans would be seen as an act of betrayal. Returning with treasure, or the results thereof, would do little to calm Marius down. Their leaving would undermine his leadership and leave him simmering with anger the entire time they were away.

  He needed to speak to Marius.

  “Coming to bed, Cade?” Amber asked, poking her head out from behind a shelf.

  Cade turned, only to see her settled in the cot beside his. It had been pulled surreptitiously behind some shelves where they could have a little privacy. Cade’s heart beat a little faster, and Amber blushed as his eyes flicked between her and the cot’s new location.

  “Uh…,” Cade felt his stomach twist with a sudden rush of anxiety.

  Amber usually slept with the other girls. Something had changed while he’d been gone.

  “I need to speak to Marius,” Cade said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He hurried out of the room, strangely relieved for the excuse. He’d have to think about why that was later.

  Still, now he was standing in the atrium, the eyes of a score of legionaries having a late-night meal upon him. He smiled awkwardly and walked up the stairs, his mind spinning. It was not a conversation he was prepared to have, yet he needed to gauge what Marius’s views were on expeditions and remnants. What would he even say?

  “What do you want?” His way blocked by a legionary. The man raised his eyebrows.

  “Marius,” Cade replied simply, too tired to drag the Latin words from his memory.

  The legionary stood aside, and to Cade’s dismay, the commander was in the hall between the two rooms of the top floor. No time to gather his thoughts.

  Marius turned to see Cade and gave him a smile, beckoning him closer.

  “Cade!” he said. “We were just talking about you. Come look at this.”

  Cade stepped forward and saw a large map laid out on the round table at the hall’s center. Other men, officers, stood around it, deep discussions interrupted as Cade walked closer. Their eyes followed with a strange mix of fear and annoyance.

  What was he to these men? An aberration from the future. A stranger of even stranger origin, who had somehow given them victory. They owed him, yet they did not want to.

  The map was of the caldera. It was a crude thing, though the scale was off, and it did not, of course, show remnants. Instead, wood-carved figurines had been placed to delineate the locations the Romans knew of so far.

  “Codex,” Cade said, trying to hide the hesitation in his voice. “Show me the map.”

  Instantly, the map appeared at the table’s center, floating horizontally above the one the Romans had been so carefully poring over.

  This was followed by a collective intake of breath and a flurry of Latin, too fast and intermixed for Cade to follow.

  “It is a … this Codex is…”

  Cade tried to hide his wince. But if he was to convince Marius of the value of the remnants in the jungles, he had to show them its powers. Now was the time to balance the benefits of keeping it here against the discovery of remnants.

  “Do you see the blue … things?” Cade asked. He spoke in Latin for the benefit of the officers, even as he struggled to find the right word for dot.

  Marius understood though and nodded.

  “These are more objects. Like the cannons. Some from my time, or close to it.”

  “More cannons?” one of the Roman officers asked, overpronouncing the new word.

  Cade nodded. “Maybe. But those are not…”

  He paused, then turned to the Codex. “Translate for me, would you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any cannons we bring here would be useless,” Cade continued. “They need powder, and we don’t have deposits of potassium nitrate—that white powder we used—here.”

  The man scoffed and chuckled. “So what use are they?”

  Cade jabbed his finger at the map. “Imagine if I could wipe away an entire city with a click of my fingers.”

  This time, the officer fell silent.

  “Codex, please tell them how many people died in the bombing of Hiroshima.”

  “The death toll of the 1945 Hiroshima nuclear bombing totaled an estimated two hundred thousand deaths.”

  Cade brought his finger closer to the blue dot. “You thought the cannon was powerful? The remnant here is a million times more powerful.”

  The men around him stared, their faces horrified.

  “Such … power,” Marius whispered, horror struck.

  “There are enough of these weapons on Earth now to destroy it ten times over,” Cade said. “They are used as a deterrent for war.”

  Marius brought a hand to his mouth, his eyes wide with shock.

  “It doesn’t just set the world on fire,” Cade pressed on. “It poisons the air, as far as the wind will take it. The ground is infected, so much so that people can’t walk on it for a hundred years. It causes an invisible disease, so that even those who survive the initial blast will die a slow death of cancer and blood sickness.”

  Silence now.

  “I would never use such a weapon,” Marius finally said. “Would you have us caught in its web, for the sake of the destruction of our enemies? I would not turn such a weapon on those forced into battle the way that we are.”

  “Were the Tritons any different?” Cade retorted.

  Marius glared at him, anger and shame apparent on his face.

  “We had no choice,” he said in a low growl. “And they had already used a similar weapon against us.”

  Cade shook his head. “Don’t you get it? If we have the bomb, then Abaddon’s rivals in the pantheon will know we do. How could they ever attack us again, knowing we could destroy their contenders easily?”

  Marius took a step back, and Cade hammered him with his words.

  “Imagine if we’d had this weapon against the Tritons,” Cade said. “Not a single one of your men would have had to die. We wouldn’t have even had to place it that close to their gates. We could’ve just hidden it in the long grass, retreated to a safe distance, and then…”

  He clicked his fingers.

  With each word, he felt more ashamed of himself. He had forced himself to turn to the darkest of his thoughts, that cruel, selfish side of his human soul he had not known he possessed, in order to appeal to that same nature in the man before him.

  Marius held up a hand. “You say this … weapon … it is out there?”

  Cade nodded. “And more. We think we know where to find treasure we can use to barter with Abaddon. We could get more troops. Even more advanced weapons.”

  Marius shook his head, disbelief stamped across his features.

  “Give me an hour, just me, you, and the Codex,” Cade said. “Let me show you the future.”

  CHAPTER

  36

  Cade jerked awake, then groaned as his back spasmed with pain. He was in a rickety chair, one that pressed into his spine as he levered himself upright. Sleep had overcome him, and Marius had suffered the same, collapsed on the bed’s edge.

  They had spoken long into the night, the Codex droning in its monotone voice, proving again and again in meticulous detail the horrors of the weapons of Cade’s world.

  There was no discussion of an expedition. Cade didn’t think he even needed to bring it up. Marius grew more fascinated and horrified with every word, even as Cade’s stomach grew sicker.

  He felt like Lucifer in the Garden of Eden, tempting an innocent soul with knowledge of evil. Yet he had achieved his aim. Marius was now interested in expeditions into the jungles. Now he had to convert it into permission.

  Cade descended the stairs with heavy steps and even heavier eyelids. All he wanted was to go to sleep. To just not … be, for a while. The discussions through the night
had weighed heavy on his heart. With every detail Marius wrung from the recesses of human history, the world seemed a little darker, a little crueler.

  It was still the early hours of the morning, so it was with some relief that he found his friends asleep. He tried not to think about what it meant when he saw his cot had returned to its original position, a shelf dividing it from Amber’s.

  “Back, are you?” Amber’s voice came through the shelving as he settled down onto the lumpy, straw-filled cot.

  Cade lay silent for a moment. “I had to sell the expedition to Marius,” he whispered back.

  Silence. Then:

  “You couldn’t have waited till morning?”

  Cade winced, the question cutting through his deception.

  “I … I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d dealt with it,” he replied lamely.

  Even through the shelving, he heard her snort with derision.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  There was no reply.

  * * *

  He woke to Quintus’s face, and the boy’s thin hands shaking his shoulders.

  “What?” Cade groaned, then caught Quintus’s expression and instantly sobered from the drunkenness of sleep.

  “They are preparing an … expedition,” Quintus hissed.

  Cade rolled from his bed and followed the young Roman, who was already almost out the door. They emerged from the keep, yet Quintus ran on, down the tunnel through the mountain.

  When Cade emerged, huffing and puffing, from the darkness of the tunnel, he found Amber there, with Quintus beside her. Ahead, a crowd of Romans had surrounded Marius, who was standing atop a log, speaking rapidly.

  “Your little chat with Marius sure lit a fire under him,” Amber snapped. “So much for our plan.”

  Cade winced; he had no time to explain himself. Only to wade into the crowd, shoving and worming his way through.

  “Who will go?” Marius bellowed.

  Cade nearly fell to his knees as the onlookers jostled him, jumping high and raising their hands to volunteer. Whatever speech he had just missed, it had been a doozy.