During the war in Iraq, the polyethylene substance was hoped to be the next evolution of the bullet proof vest, but early testing indicated it wasn’t effective enough to risk the lives of troops on it. It wasn’t until 2016 when advancements were made in its base properties that the gel finally lived up to its potential. It had been a ground breaking development for soldiers, having saved thousands of lives since its implementation.
I only had one problem with it. If it was so soft and flexible, I never understood why the entire pants and jacket set wasn’t completely smothered in the stuff. Leave it to the military brass to cut corners. Even the helmets supplied in the containers were the old school versions that were notorious for being anything but bullet proof. At least they had the decency to cover the groin, but any impact to that region wouldn’t end well anyway.
Sometimes I really wondered who was running the military.
Other than the combat fatigues, there was little other advanced equipment within. We were still supplied with electronic equipment like night vision, flashlights, and the means to charge their batteries, but I guess the papacy didn’t want to make its new soldiers too reliant on technology, something I was completely at ease with. A soldier was only as good as his training, instincts, and determination. To rely on technology was a recipe for disaster.
So the days went.
Thankfully, two weeks to the day after Caligula set his time table, he sent us a message, indicating his three assassins were required. That morning, the six of us spent two hours prepping the team assigned on the mission.
Bordeaux gathered a large amount of C-4, at least thirty bricks, enough to bring down the Colosseum had it been built yet. Vincent borrowed Santino’s UAV for aerial recon, and Helena grabbed the “Light Fifty” from storage. All three packed their night ops combat fatigues, tents, and survival gear.
As they completed their preparations, Helena pulled me aside, a frustrated look on her face.
“Jacob, there’s something I really need to tell you.”
I groaned. Usually, when women “really” needed to tell me something, I ended up spending a long night cleaning up tissues.
Holding my hands in the air, I feigned innocence. “You know. If this is one of those, ‘I may die tomorrow, so we should be together tonight’ speeches, you really should know that tomorrow is now, and we kinda missed our chance last night. I mean, I could try and get it over within the two minutes we have, but I think that would kinda ruin the moment.”
Surprisingly, Helena’s look wasn’t the one of annoyed anger I expected, but instead, she wore a smile that could make even the most womanizing of men’s hearts think twice about her. I was ready for any reaction except that one. To make matters worse, she took a step closer, bringing her mouth just to the side of my ear and dropped her voice to a seductive whisper
“My, my, Lieutenant, aren’t you the naughty one. Maybe you had better hope I don’t make it back, or I may make you put your money where your mouth is.”
I sighed, surprised at how easily I shrugged off my embarrassment. I really was getting used to her. “So, what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”
Backing away and ignoring her little performance, she cut right to the point. “I’ve never killed anyone with the fifty. I’ve never even fired it in the field.”
“What!?” I practically yelled the word, enticing the rest of the team to turn in our direction. Throwing them a smile, I grabbed Helena by the arm and pulled her away from the group. “But your record said you had confirmed kills with it. Dozens.”
She sighed. “My government tweaked my record a bit. They just wanted one of their own on the team and they knew the Pope wanted a female, and the team was looking for snipers. I was the only obvious choice. Don’t worry. I’m not a spy or anything. Everything else you know is true.
I gave her a skeptical look, but I had to believe her when she said she had nothing to do with changing her record. It’s hard to trust the Germans. Opting to focus on the problem instead, I put my hands on my hips, and looked at her sternly. “So what’s the problem?”
She looked confused. “What do you mean, ‘what’s the problem’? I’ve never had to do this before. I was nervous in the training room with you backing me up for Christ’s sakes.”
“So the fuck what? You’re a trained professional. Just do the math and don’t forget to breathe. You don’t need me.”
“Are you sure? You said you’d always be…”
I reached my arms out and gently grabbed her shoulders, staring at her reassuringly.
“Helena. I understand your confidence has taken a hit since your late fiancé, but you know you’re a great shot. Just focus. You’ll do fine.”
I gave her shoulders a squeeze, and smiled. She couldn’t afford distraction on the mission, especially with two of her teammates’ lives on the line.
She looked at the floor, sighed, and set her shoulders before straightening her posture, the confident demeanor I saw in the training room returning.
She looked up at me. “Thanks. I’m not sure where I’d be without you.”
“Probably not in ancient Rome, for one.”
She hit me on the arm, but it was playful. “Very funny. Anyway…” She said, glancing towards the rest of the team, none of whom were paying us any attention. “… thank you. Your confidence means a lot.”
Nervously, she leaned up on her toes, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. Her kiss lingered just long enough to seem suggestive, more than the peck a mother would offer her son. As she pulled away, she looked sheepishly at the floor, before heading back towards the rest of the team looking over her shoulder briefly to smile at me.
I reached up and rubbed my cheek, ironically, on the same side of my face she had punched weeks ago. I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond.
What was that for? She can’t actually like me. I’m not that lucky. I’m just some guy that resembled some other guy, who she probably didn’t want to think about. Still rubbing my cheek, my head shaking involuntarily, I turned to follow her. Vincent was giving some last minute orders when he noticed me.
“Hunter. Nice of you to join us. We’re ready to head out, but there’s a few points I need to go over first.” He turned back towards the group. “First off, while we’re gone, Hunter’s in charge. Wang,” Vincent looked over at the man who had been brimming with confidence and cockiness just a few weeks ago, but no longer, “I’m sorry, but you’re in no shape to take over.”
Wang had been steadily improving since McDougal’s funeral. His sense of humor had returned, and considering how many goofballs were already in the group, he slowly started fitting in again. He and Santino had formed an allied front against me and my music tastes, and their taunting made me miss my temporally lost mp3 player more and more.
But Wang knew he wasn’t fully there yet, so he accepted Vincent’s decision with a small nod.
“And Santino,” Vincent said, directing his attention to the biggest goofball of them all, “sorry, but placing you in command…”
Helena interrupted. “… would be about as responsible as giving America’s nuclear launch codes to a toddler.”
Vincent’s shoulders slumped. “Basically.”
Santino was shocked, but not out of embarrassment. “Strauss? Was that a joke? A real, honest to God joke? I can’t believe it. There may be hope for you, yet.”
She looked him square in the eyes, pausing dramatically. “It wasn’t a joke.”
Santino hesitated. A look of genuine hurt creeping onto his face this time.
Helena smiled. “Just kidding.”
Santino’s own smile returned, although slower than normal, realizing he had just been played. He offered a mock bow. “How quickly the grasshopper becomes the master.”
Everyone laughed.
I laughed alongside everyone else, secretly happy because I knew Helena’s jokes were a good sign. She’d taken my advice to heart and her confidence had reappeared.
Vinc
ent cut off the laughter quickly. "All right people. Before we move out, there’s one last thing. Hunter, apparently one of Caligula’s closest advisers has some information regarding how we got here. I informed the emperor that I would send someone over to talk to him and try and figure this out. God knows, if anyone can, it’s you. Work on it while we’re gone. We should be back in about three weeks.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll hold down the fort,” I said, before giving our modest accommodations a sour look. I shrugged. “Good luck.”
***
Three weeks later, I was still waiting for Caligula to send for me. Within that time I learned a very important fact of life: Santino is much more boring to be around when he doesn’t have any material to work with, and a depressed squad member and his equally sarcastic best friend doesn’t offer much material so I spent most of my time exploring the city on my own.
I couldn’t believe how much I missed Helena.
Now, that would have sounded sappy and pathetic had we been dating, but we weren’t, so it wasn’t, making me feel only partially pathetic. I just hoped my friends in the field were all right, particularly her.
I thought I was about to go insane from boredom when I was finally summoned by Caligula. I was escorted by two of the original Praetorians who’d led us to the Curia the day we arrived. Gaius and Marcus were their names, but I had to constantly remind myself which was which because they were practically carbon copies of one another. Even so, with Vincent’s help, I’d gotten to know them fairly well over the past month. We’d taken to each other like any group of professional military men would.
Nice fellas.
The Praetorians took me within the bounds of the pomerium to one of Rome’s numerous libraries. The exterior facade looked magnificent, but once inside I found myself in a dimly lit, dust covered room, overcrowded with information decaying from mold. It was a far cry from the snazzy library I’d worked at on my college campus, but the musty facility made my inner historian feel like a kid on Christmas morning. The place was a gold mine. Besides the hundreds of scrolls lying on what looked like modern day wine cellar shelves and tables with documents sprawled everywhere, I spotted the slinky man from the cavern I had seen almost a month ago.
Finally. Time to get some answers.
Noticing our approach, he nodded to the guards. They replied by performing an about face and marched out of the room, leaving the two of us alone. For the longest time, we just stood there measuring one another up before he started things off.
“My name is Marcus Varus. And you do not belong here.”
I stepped closer to the man, hoping my size would intimidate him to the point where he’d be too scared to screw with to me. Barely a forearm’s length away, the man held his ground and didn’t so much as blink, as he waited patiently for me to speak up.
I ground my teeth in annoyance. “You can call me Hunter, and what do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Your presence here is a mistake and you must go home.”
I just stared at him, my patience already wearing thin. That sentence was confusing enough without the added stress of what I thought he said. Too many ablatives. Or were those datives? I always got hung up on the grammar.
Taking a deep breath, I slowly straightened my back, raised my chin up, and pulled my shoulders back. I didn’t have to do it too often these days, but pulling myself into perfect military posture gave me a sense of purpose, not to mention a few extra inches which demanded respect, something this little man did not show much of towards me.
I loomed over him with my additional inches, effectively enhancing the image that I was far larger than I really was. “I don’t have time for twenty questions,” I said grimly. “Now, how do I get home?”
The man was finally intimidated. Taking a step back, his throat visibly gulped. “Well, I’m not sure,” he said, his words stammering indecisively. “What I do know is that those who opened the doorway thought they would find vast amounts of treasure. Not human beings. Especially not ones like you.”
“What do you mean, ‘the doorway’? Did it have anything to do with that sphere?” I couldn’t think of the Latin word for sphere or ball, so I just mimicked its shape with my hands. The doorway he was referring to must have meant the portal that sucked us through time. My limited vocabulary was going to make this hard enough without Vincent, and trying to determine archaic terms, and convert them into colloquialisms I could understand would be another, much harder task.
The man just nodded at my question, wandering aimlessly around the room before he settled into a chair behind a table. His eyes moved towards the floor, and he seemed lost in thought. Maybe he was just trying to bullshit his way out of this so I didn’t kill him, but then why bring me here at all?
“Look,” I said holding out my hands. “Just calm down. Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out. We’ll work this out together and maybe I can help you get me out of your life.”
The man perked up at that. We’d only known each other five minutes, but it was clear he wanted nothing to do with me. Hopefully, the potential for me leaving was enough incentive to get him to work that much harder, and get me home.
So he talked.
And talked.
Unlike Vincent, who spent as few words as necessary to get his points across, Varus had a knack for allegory and long winded descriptions, of which, he provided no context for. Of course, that was probably the language barrier’s fault, but it still took him fifteen minutes to get to the part about documents found with the sphere, finally getting to something useful.
Helena would have killed him.
“So, when I was presented with the sphere and documents, I immediately got to work translating them,” Varus continued. “They are written in an old dialect of Etruscan. I am one of a very small amount of people who can still read it.”
“Can you date them?” I asked.
“I can only extrapolate its origin from the context of the writings itself. From that context, I have surmised that this document may have been written by Remus himself, or someone working closely with him. Are you aware of who Remus was?”
Remus? Co-founder of Rome? Of course I knew him. If what Varus said was true, the sphere would be one Rome’s oldest relics. I had to make sure I played it off cool.
“I have heard of him in passing. What else did they say?”
“Not very much, unfortunately. It spoke of how he knew of his brother’s plot to murder him, and that he had known about the plot for many weeks. Fearful that he would be unable to thwart his brother’s attempt on his life, he sought help from some sort of adviser. Apparently, this friend was a druid from the north, a very powerful one, who, as the document indicates, possessed great power and abilities over nature. The result of which, appears to be the blue sphere.”
“Magic?” I asked. Even though I had suggested it myself a month ago, I never really believed it. “You’re joking, right??
“I too find the subject distasteful and hard to believe, yet, here you are.”
True. At least we agreed on something, and he did make a good point.
“So what does it do?” I asked. “Exactly.”
“Besides bring annoying plebeians to my door in search of my aid?”
As we had moved our conversation to chairs, seated across from a table, I couldn’t impose my height over the man. Instead, I leaned back in my chair, and put my hands behind my head. Wearing a tight, short sleeved t-shirt, I flexed my biceps, which, I had to give myself credit for, are in pretty darn good shape. He looked at my arms, and then at my face, before continuing.
“Does everything come down to physical violence with you? Are you just like those thousands of legionnaires who have nothing better to do than kill each other and fight in the dirt like children?”
I gave him a smile. “Of course. But I can make a swell turn-over cake as well.”
He looked at me, obviously not understanding the reference. Frustration and annoyance obvious
on his face, he picked up where he left off. “Apparently, the sphere is meant as a gateway to a vast treasure and the downfall of those who uphold the legacy of Remus’ brother, Romulus. The Senate, I believe, felt that by treasure Remus meant money, and of course, with enough money anything can be accomplished. I can only imagine their surprise when you and your friends arrived instead.”
“But why is it that we came here at all? Nothing happened until I touched the sphere, but I wasn’t the first to do so.”
“There was an obscure mantra at the bottom of the document, nearly indecipherable. What I could make out of it said something along following, ‘the gateway shall bring treasure of unfathomable power. Once the relic has felt the touch from my loins, all the power of our descendants shall become theirs.’ There is more, of course, but from what I gather, it would seem that perhaps those who are blood kin to Remus have the ability to utilize the sphere. But I do not understand what roll you play, as it would seem it was only the two of us who came in contact with the sphere. I know the Senate’s lackeys kept it wrapped in a cloth. Yet, the two of us cannot be related. My family has always been very small. ”
I barely heard anything past, “Senate’s lackeys…” my mind completely focused on the table, deep in thought. Everything was starting to fall into place. I only needed one last piece of evidence to prove my train of thought.
I looked up and began a thorough inspection of Varus’ face.
The Last Roman (Praetorian Series - Book One) Page 20
