Praetorian Series [3] A Hunter and His Legion (8 page)

Artie smiled at her new gal pal and gestured for her to continue.  Helena nodded and
glanced at Santino, Bordeaux, and Wang in turn, waving a hand at them.

“Feel free to jump in whenever you want, guys,” she said.

Bordeaux nodded politely but Wang beamed at her, saying, “You don’t need any help from us, Helena.  Just don’t forget Hunter’s more embarrassing moments.”

Helena returned his smile
and patted my hand while I scowled at the Brit.  He hadn’t been that bad during our first year in Ancient Rome, but his recent time with Santino had made him a relentless jokester.  They were a regular comic duo, and with the addition of Gaius and Marcus, who had devilish senses of humor themselves, and the impressionable young Titus, whom they’d already taken under their wings, that entire quintet was starting to get on my nerves.

Helena turned to Vincent.  “Sir?”

The older man offered her a half smile.  “You’re doing fine.”

She nodded at the reassurance
.

“
Okay then,” she said, taking a small breath before explaining in detail the past five years of our lives.  She explained our dealings with Caligula, Claudius, and the Roman general Galba, and later the Battle for Rome.  She then went on to describe Agrippina in the colorful way only Helena could, as well as detailing our time on the run when she, Santino, and I had taken the mantel of
Vani
, acting as Sheriffs of the Roman Empire. 

She finished by describing the team’s reunion a few months ago, o
ur dealings in Caesarea that initiated a Jewish-Roman civil war, and our introduction with Vespasian – currently the man in charge of said war.  Finally, she described the battle that had gotten us all killed a few days ago, that is, before I went back in time and saved the day.

Each of the new arrivals sat quietly, processing Helena’s tale, and it was Artie who spoke up first
, and nodded her head at me.  “You went back in time again just before we arrived here, didn’t you?”

I nodded.  “Sure did.  It was completely by accident but it was enough to save our asses.”

She slowly leaned back and looked off into the distance.  It was a response I was used to in her.  Whenever Artie was exposed to new information worth pondering, she would simply close up into her own little world and think, only to snap out of it when she was ready, or by an outside force akin to a tornado.

The rest of Archer’s party continued their silence.

“Have any of you studied ancient history?”  Vincent asked.  “Does anything of Helena’s tale sound familiar to you?”

Again, no one responded until Archer finally turned
to Brewster and gestured to her with a “come on” gesture.

“
History lessons haven’t exactly been a priority for any of us,” he answered.  “We’ve been too busy fighting a losing war for decades, but the closest thing we have is Brewster here.”

All eyes turned to the tiny woman as sh
e shrugged, still digging around in her bag.

“I was an
Art History major,” she clarified.  “Never finished though.”

I chuckled.
  “So tell me, Art History Major, what can art tell us that will make sense of anything?”

“Actually,”
she said, finally pulling something large and square from her bag, “not much.  Luckily, we brought this.”

Sh
e finished by tossing the object – what looked like a book – at me, which landed with a loud thump on the ground by my feet. I peered down at it, noticing its front cover was emblazoned with an image of the globe on it, with a series of different pictures from what looked like multiple time periods scattered around it, although none seemed familiar.

Still… i
t was all too familiar at the same time.

Even though I could read the cover, and knew exactly what it was
, I still felt the need to ask, “What the hell is this?”

She
smirked.  “It’s a high school social studies textbook.  One of the better ones, I’m told.”

I
looked from the book and back to her.  “You have got to be kidding me.”

Brewster shrugged
again, but Archer cut off any response from her.

“Feel free to flip through it at your
leisure, Hunter, but not now,” he said.  “World history isn’t the priority here.  Determining where the break in our timelines occurred is.”

His tone was paternal
istic and dismissive, and I felt my anger growing.  Since the moment Archer had arrived, his demeanor had been authoritative and commanding, as though anything we had to say was of little use to him.  He seemed to think his arrival meant we were now all under his command, and that we no longer had any purpose but to help him and his timeline only.

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 beginnin
g, nothing jumping out at me.  But when I reached the title for the very first chapter my heart nearly skipped a beat.

I
t 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 whistl
ed 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 wh
at 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 scruti
nizing 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 ar
e 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 close
st 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.

D
efense 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 understanding.  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.