“Jacob, what are you do…”
With her words came a flash of bright blue light and the hiss of a thick cloud of mist winking into existence. I felt an electricity discharge, like a static bubble building up all around me followed by the wash of cool air against my face and a gentle blast of pressure as it burst.
Thankfully, the building remained still, unless of course we weren’t in the building anymore.
The orb dimmed and went inert, still glowing its dull blue, but seemingly inactive.
Helena snatched it from my fingers and threw it back to Santino.
Nothing had happened. I hadn’t thought so. The figure within hadn’t been me.
Then I saw movement. Something clawing its way out of the mist. Figures. Dark ones. Six of them.
In that moment, I knew exactly how the Roman augers must have felt five years ago. The ones who’d intended to find nothing but treasure but instead found us.
As the mist cleared, the figures looked more and more familiar.
They were dressed in black clothing, simple BDUs from the look of it. They wore harness type rigs over their chests, somewhat akin to the ALICE webbing worn by grunts in the 20th century. They also carried weapons.
Rifles.
Most appeared to be M16s, even if certain details seemed… different.
I was speechless. Helena rose off my shoulder like a sloth trying to climb a tree. Her mouth was open and staring at them as well. The rest of our team was arrayed around them in a circle. Those who had found their weapons trained them on these new visitors, even me, despite the fact Penelope was empty. All we needed were Romans to show up before the standoff turned into a Mexican style one, but the lead figure in the group finally stepped forward, raising his rifle over his head.
Then he spoke.
In English.
“Stand down!” He bellowed – to everyone it seemed.
His men lowered their rifles, except for two, who already had their rifles slung and were tending to a small figure resting on his back. The one who held the orb.
Another fucking orb.
Those of us with weapons lowered them as well. The lead figure took a step forward in my direction. He was wearing a type of balaclava, revealing only his eyes. His entire appearance surprised me less than what I saw in those eyes.
Recognition and relief.
He took another step and reached up to pull off his mask, and my eyes grew as large as his own. The guy looked like a model, or an actor, or any number of those kinds of people who were too good looking for their own good. He had blond hair fashioned in a longer style crew cut, bright blue eyes, a chiseled jaw line, and shallow cheeks. The guy’s look screamed, “d-bag,” and I knew it was true.
He smiled a toothy grin and opened his arms wide in a friendly gesture.
“What’s wrong, Jacob?” He asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stared at him.
“You know this clown?” Santino asked, still peering over his gun sights.
I did know this clown. I knew him very well, in fact.
I rose to my feet painfully, motioning for Helena to stay back and took two steps closer to the blond haired phantom. I knew he had to be a phantom because he was right. I was seeing a ghost. He was dead, after all. At least, he was assumed so. Two months before I’d activated the orb, this man had been sent on a mission, one he had not come back from. No one had seen him since, but his locator beacon had placed him deep in the North Korean mountains where it had continued to pulse for months, unmoving.
Since I knew he had to be dead. Therefore a phantom. Therefore not real. Therefore a ghost. I had absolutely no problem with what I was about to do.
Taking one last step forward, I reared back with my right arm and jacked him in the face with a very solid, Helena worthy, right hook. He went down hard and his troops raised their rifles again, but he motioned for them to stand down almost instantly. I stepped forward to loom over him and pointed down at his face, ignoring the blazing pain in my side.
“That’s for Artie, you backstabbing piece of shit!”
That felt good. Very good. Great, even. I’ve wanted to do that for over five years. Too bad he was just a figment of my imagination and the real man in which I could truly relieve my frustration on was stuck back in the 21st century, if he was even still alive.
The man sat up and spat out a glop of blood. He wiped his mouth and stared up at me.
“I deserved that, Hunter,” he admitted, “I really did. But I’ve made my peace with her.”
“Fuck that!” I shouted, our interchange seeming more and more unreal with every word.
“You can ask her yourself,” he said, pointing behind him towards the figure holding the orb.
I shifted my attention. The figure was smaller than the rest, but not overly so, but now I noticed more curves. The man was in fact a woman.
Once she pulled off her mask, my suspicion was confirmed. The blue eyed bastard had been right.
It was Artie.
I took a step forward, my heart beating faster than it had during Bordeaux’s charge and unable to believe what my mind was telling it. The shock of seeing both these people was completely drowned out by my excitement at seeing this particular woman. She wasn’t supposed to be dead, and seeing her told me these people were, in fact, real.
“Artie?” I called out tentatively, trying not to get my hopes up.
I took a wobbly step towards her, oblivious to my friends’ stunned reactions over the interchange occurring before them, still in awe of Artie’s presence and still aware of the pain in my side.
The woman looked up at me. “Hi, Jacob.”
I smiled down at her. She smiled back. She shot to her feet like a jackrabbit and ran the few steps to me in a blink. She threw her arms around my shoulders and I didn’t even care that it hurt like hell. I wrapped my non-bound arm around her back and she hung there while I rocked her before Helena stepped forward, coughing politely into her fist.
I pulled away and looked into her jealous face. Besides Agrippina, she’d never seen anyone offer me anywhere near as much affection before. And I wouldn’t even call what Agrippina offered me as affection. I laughed at the whole thing.
“Sorry, Helena. This is Artie. She’s…”
“Good evening, mademoiselle,” Santino interrupted, brushing past me to take Artie’s hand so that he could kiss it gently. “Jonathon Archibald Santino the Third, at your service. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Helena looked at me. Archibald? she mouthed.
I shrugged. I thought he’d headed his mission entry with that.
Onions indeed…
“Ah,” Artie said, her voice high and smooth, not quite at the annoying pitch. I smirked at how she drew out the sigh in knowing recognition. “So, you’re Santino…”
He smiled dashingly, but I shoved him to the side and out of the way.
“Artie, that’s Santino,” I said, waving my hand dismissively at him. “And this is Helena van Strauss,” I said, indicating Helena. “Helena, this is Artie, but her actual name is Diana Hunter.”
Helena snapped her head to look at the young woman.
“Diana?” She whispered.
Diana “Artie” Hunter.
Engineer. Astronaut. Genius.
My little sister.
Diana was tall, not quite as tall as Helena, and weighed about a buck forty. She and my mother always used to argue over who was taller and in better shape, so I knew their details only all too well. The two had been as competitive as Wang and Santino, only far more loving. They’d practically been like sisters for the few years between when Diana had entered adulthood and mom had died. It was unfortunate it hadn’t lasted longer.
She had dark brown hair, more so than mine, and kept it about shoulder length. Dark brown eyes and a cute round face gave her features more like dad’s, but she was just as lovely as mom. That said, she was my sister after all, and while to me she had proportionat
ely pleasant features, I wasn’t an objective source of criticism. She’d been good looking enough to date the D-bag I’d punched out a few minutes ago, so that must have counted for something.
Her nickname came from our mother. An avid reader of anything she could get her hands on, my mom had read everything from romance to history, mysteries to biographies and the classics, but her passion had always rested in mythology. Later in my life, I’d always found it odd how much she’d enjoyed the subject, considering her staunch Catholicism, but it didn’t matter which society the stories came from because she loved them all.
As for Diana’s nickname, it came straight from Greco-Roman mythology. Diana was the Roman derivation for the Greek goddess, Artemis, Apollo’s sister and goddess of the hunt. Mom used to love telling infant Diana all of Artemis’ stories, about how independent and strong she’d been and about how she never took crap from men and always blazed her own path. After a while, my young sister started saying the name Artemis in that cute little gibberish way kids that age do, and after a while, mom just started calling her “Artie,” and the name stuck.
Santino was as confused as ever.
“Diana? Hunter?” He asked as he turned to look at me, his hands on his hips. “You never told me you were married!”
I rolled my eyes while Helena answered for me.
“She’s his sister, you dimwit.”
Santino looked between Artie and me, back and forth, disbelief still evident. He pointed a finger at her and scanned her from head to toe. “This… this is your sister?”
I ignored him, my mind and my heart racing uncontrollably. Diana and I had always been very close. Up until college almost inseparable. Seeing her now made me feel something I hadn’t legitimately felt in a long while.
Hope.
And then reality kicked in.
“Just what the hell are you doing here, Diana??” I asked.
“We got your message, Jacob. Your journal.” She paused, and reached out to grab my shoulders. She looked up at me with her big, dark, doe eyes. “I’m here because they needed someone with Remus’ bloodline, and since I have a higher security clearance than you do, the President called me in.”
Jesus, her short sentence was a lot to take in. Here was someone, other than myself, speaking as though they knew exactly what the hell she was talking about. I wasn’t used to that. It was exciting on another level as well. I guess my journal wasn’t a complete waste of time after all.
“Is that true?” I asked the blond haired leader of the group.
His name was Lieutenant Paul Archer, US Navy. SEALs. About 6’1’’, 225 lbs., the guy was built like a linebacker. He’d been in the same BUD/S class as me and we’d continued our training together at SEAL Qualification Training and had bonded instantaneously. Some of the enlisted men in the class had thought we had interestingly similar names, despite the fact they were completely different. In the rigorous world of BUD/S, participants needed anything they could find to latch onto, and the two of us had figured since everyone else thought we already shared a bond, we might as well make one.
It hadn’t been hard. He’d been a good friend during the intense program. He and I were only two of three officers in the graduating class, and we’d both admitted later that without our friendship, it was possible neither one of us would have made it.
It was at our graduation ceremony where he had met Diana.
Despite being literally planets apart most of the time, their friendship grew into a romance that lasted nearly two years and grew to the point where he’d once considered popping the question. All of which had changed when I’d visited him during the very random instance when the both of us had leave on the same weekend. I’d gone to his California home, sneaking in a window as any good SEAL would sine we only used doors when we were kicking them in.
Inside, I’d found him nailing some floozy.
I remember grabbing him by the neck as he went at it, throwing him out of the bed and against the wall. The girl had grabbed a sheet and high tailed it out of the room before I could toss her out as well. I hadn’t beat the shit out of him like I should have, but I did tell him that our friendship was over, and that I wouldn’t go so easy on him if we ever met again. I’d also told him that if he wasn’t upfront about it with Artie, he was a dead man.
The next day he’d called her and told her the news.
She was devastated. She’d been poised to take the next trip to the US-EU Joint Operation Moon Base later that day. She went, but it had not been easy on her. I remember talking to her via a satellite uplink video conference, watching as her tears floated all around her as they pulled away from her face to free fall in the low gravity. She’d gotten over it, but it hadn’t been easy. That had been three months before I’d transferred to the Pope’s Praetorians. Archer had disappeared in Korea two months before that seminal moment as well.
I don’t remember Diana shedding a single tear.
Archer got to his feet and nodded.
“Give me a sit-rep then,” I ordered. “From the beginning.”
Archer took a look around, clearly not happy at being undermined in front of his men. I looked around as well. My people were gathering closer around where Artie, Helena, Santino, and I stood while Archer’s men closed in as well. I looked at their faces. All were hard, with looks of seasoned military personnel.
“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 been 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.
&
nbsp; 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 flicked 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.
To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) Page 44
