“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.
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.
“So what was in the container, Archer?” I asked.
“Well, we couldn’t open it in the field. It had been sealed with something kind of sealant epoxy and we were worried about damaging its contents. We had to carry it back to the States for analysis. It took the techs four hours to pop it open. Inside were three objects, and it hadn’t been pretty.”
I was on the edge of my seat. I really was. Ever since I started writing the journal earlier this year, the only thing I wanted to know was how all this ended.
“First was a blue sphere. This one,” he said holding up the one Artie had used to get them here.
How many did that make now? Three? Four? The math was officially too much now.
“Second, was a very interesting notebook. It was brittle and falling to pieces, but I bet you know what the very interesting part was.”
“Let me guess,” I said with a half-smile. “That it was written in English, blue ink, and in poorly worded grammar and syntax.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “I have to admit, it was a pretty interesting read. At least it was after an antiquities preservation team from the natural history museum in New York managed to transcribe it. I’m sorry, but the notebook is pretty much trashed.”
“Nuts.”
Archer smirked. “The third object was the most interesting, not to mention disturbing. It was the source of the locator beacon. A human body.” He paused, glancing at his feet hesitantly. “After close examination, it was determined to be identical to your body type and size, with a crack in the left tibia. Carbon dated as two thousand years old.”
I looked at Artie, who leaned against the wall near us, her arms crossed.
“I confirmed it, big brother. The leg had a break right where you cracked it when you fell out of the tree house when we were kids. I didn’t believe it at first. Your body… your skeleton… just lying there. I couldn’t believe it.” She shuddered and shifted her arms to hug herself. “It was creepy.”
I smiled nervously, but not at the thought of my own body having withered to little more than a skeleton, still in existence at a point where my sister could view it. I didn’t let existential things like that bother me. At least I tried not to.
I smiled because Diana had always been so blunt, so childishly naïve in the delivery of her thoughts that I found her to be a walking enigma. She was eighteen months younger than me, but by the time I graduated from Dartmouth, she was already walking away from MIT with a Masters in Aerospace Engineering. She was a child prodigy, but even with that big old brain stuffed in her head, she was as silly as Santino… and that thought caused me to pause in my tracks.
I shook my head. I’ll have to watch those two. Just another thing to worry about.
Helena held up a hand like a student in a classroom.
“Excuse me, but are you telling us that when you found a two thousand year old body in a historically impractical container, along with a notebook spewing forth all sorts of nonsense,” she looked at me, “no offense, Jacob…”
I shrugged. “None taken.”
“…that you actually believed our team traveled back through time?”