Praetorian Series [4] All Roads Lead to Rome (27 page)

I’d enjoyed the film so much that I’d immediately sought out and read the novel, which had only worked to further my obsession with the story and all its implications.  One line, however, had stood out more than all the others, one that hadn’t been included in the film version – although it was in the sequel – but had become the lynchpin for all my memories of the story. 

It was all I could think about now as I stared into the night sky. 

Through the thick cloud layer, I could finally see what lay beyond in vivid, clear detail.  It was overwhelming, implausible, and beyond words – at least any creative ones, which is why my mind focused solely on that one line of dialogue, the one thing that popped into my mind that could possibly comprehend what I was seeing. 

Near the end of the novel, astronaut David Bowman had stared into the monolith and saw stars, and boy did he see stars.  He saw them in a place where stars couldn’t possibly be…

But I didn’t see stars in the night sky.

What I saw was quite possibly the exact opposite of light in the sky.

I felt Boudicca reach out and place a hand on my arm, gripping it tightly, a decidedly vulnerable gesture from an individual who seemed larger than life and a woman who rightfully knew no fear.  But I could hardly blame her for that vulnerability now, because mere mortals could never understand the machinations of what must have been a godly influence.

“In the sky, Jacob… what… what are they?”

“My God…” I breathed, and I could feel Boudicca turning to look at me.  I shook my head, barely believing my next words.  “It’s full of… black holes.”

VII

Science

Date:  Unknown

Location:  Unknown

Jacob Hunter

My jaw fell open as my eyes lingered on the sky.

If my mind thought the volcano was some unnatural freak of nature that was destined to alter the laws of science and physics, then what filled the sky was bound to send my mind into a state of delirium and panic.  It was already happening to Boudicca, who backed away step by step, as though pulling back a few feet would somehow keep her from being sucked into the cavernous voids that dominated the sky.  While she had no idea what a black hole could possibly be, or what they actually do, I did, and even though my rational mind knew that we were already dead, I too found myself trying to back away.

Except nothing happened.

There were maybe a hundred of them, each and every one powerful enough to tear a solar system apart and feed on the scraps, yet they just sat there in the sky, doing little of anything.  I hadn’t a clue how close this planet was to them, having nothing to use for scale, but I had to assume they were fairly close to us – at least in terms of galactic measurements.  The ground I was walking on should have been ripped to shreds and sucked into one or more of these black holes long ago, yet nothing in the vicinity suggested anything of the sort.  In fact, with so many black holes in such close proximity to each other, I had to assume they would have worked to tear each other apart as well.

But they just sat there in the sky, appearing more like oil paintings than reality.

I snapped a hand out to grab Boudicca by the arm, who flinched and backed away further at the contact, her face awash in concern.  I used her momentum to pull myself to my feet, and stared into her wild and frenzied eyes.

“What
are
they??”  She demanded, pulling away from me.

She seemed in a state of pure panic.  Facing other humans in battle was one thing, but being faced with the colossal, godlike presence of enormous black holes in the sky was something else entirely.  I reached out and gripped her arms tightly, hoping to comfort her before she hurt herself.  The last thing I needed was to babysit her when I had more important things to deal with.

“It’s too difficult to explain, Boudicca,” I said, which would have been true back home, let alone to a primitive who probably thought the Sun was a god instead of a star.  “But they can’t harm you.  They aren’t dangerous… apparently.”

She looked at me, her eyes flicking rapidly, unable to focus on me.  “How can they not be dangerous?  They have devoured the heavens!”

I looked over my shoulder and at the sky, at a loss for words again.  They
should
have been dangerous.  They
should
have torn this world to pieces well before Boudicca and I ever stepped foot here.  Yet they hadn’t, and no matter how unexplainable that was, it left me assured that we weren’t in danger.  My eyes had been presented twice today with unbelievable phenomena, and while my rational mind had needed extra time to process them, I’d recovered from the initial shock and was now able to think clearly.  The presence of an enormous volcano and dozens of black holes in the sky did not make sense, and the fact that I was still alive at all made even less sense, but since I was, then there was something else at work here that I wasn’t yet aware of.  Something was working to keep these elements at bay, and that gave me hope that we were on the right track.  There was no way nature could control these awesome powers, providing evidence that something unnatural and artificial was present.

Which is exactly what I needed to find.

And where I needed to be.

***

Calming Boudicca hadn’t been easy.  I wasn’t exactly empathetic these days, but it was surprisingly easy to sympathize with her.  Exposing her to all this wasn’t exactly fair.  It wasn’t much better than taking a caveman to the twenty first century.  It was like trying to explain time travel to Galba.  These people had no understanding of science, of physics, and astronomy.  They were primitives and mystics, associating everything they didn’t understand with mythology and the paranormal.  Faith was one thing, a belief in a divine being another, but these people simply lacked a basic understanding of… anything.

But it was a testament to Boudicca’s strength that she’d come to understand that she was still breathing and that nothing was threatening her life – at least not directly.  I hadn’t needed to say much, just a few extra reassurances that nothing in the sky could hurt her, and she’d seemed to understand in short order and had calmed.

Once she was settled, I was left with the problem of what we should do next.

Our obvious destination was the volcano, but it was miles and miles away.  It was so large that perspective no longer meant anything to me, and it could actually be hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.  There was no way Boudicca and I could make that trip in a reasonable amount of time, and our supplies would evaporate at about the same time our bodies did thanks to the heat.  I could feel the sweat beading down my chest and legs, and a quick glance at Boudicca confirmed that she too was perspiring heavily.

She also seemed to have found something new to distract herself with.

I was about to ignore her, but then remembered the last time she’d found something of interest.  I followed her gaze and, for the third time today, was left speechless.

“What is it?”  My companion asked.

Instead of answering, I moved past her to walk toward the object in question while she fell into step with me a moment later.  The trip was short and not particularly difficult, which was good because I hadn’t taken my eyes off of what Boudicca had discovered since I’d laid eyes on them.  She followed closely, and with every few steps repeated her inquiry into what it was we were approaching.

When we were finally within a few steps of the object, I stopped suddenly and Boudicca nearly walked into me.  Crossing my arms, I found myself smiling for the first time in as long as I could remember as I inspected the Old West-looking handcar that sat comfortably atop a pair of rails that ran as far off into the distance, directly toward the volcano.

“Jacob?”  Boudicca asked again, the patience in her voice waning finally.  “Your face tells me you know what this is.”

I gestured at it with a hand in disbelief.  While I knew what it was because I could see it with my own two eyes, I still couldn’t believe it, almost as much as I couldn’t believe I was in the presence of the volcano or the multitude of black holes orbiting above us.

“It…” I coughed out a small chuckle as I shook my hand at it, “…it’s a handcar, I think.  You see that handle in the center?  If we pump it up and down, we can use it to propel this platform along the tracks it’s on.”

The information seemed to jar Boudicca from her stupor, and she bravely stepped toward it and placed a hand upon the wooden platform.  She rubbed her hand along it and pressed down on the handle, causing it to inch forward.

She looked back at me.  “It appears of basic design, but I have never seen anything like it.”

“No, no you wouldn’t have,” I mumbled, cupping my chin.  I had no idea when the handcar had been invented, but I was
fairly
certain railways hadn’t yet existed at the time of the Roman Empire. They certainly predated The United States of America, who had used them to such success when spreading across the North American continent, but they shouldn’t have existed now.  To be fair, the rails on which this handcar sat were extremely primitive and not particularly well-fashioned, and it wasn’t as if the principals Archimedes had written about hundreds of years ago couldn’t have been adapted by someone fairly clever to invent such a handcart.

“But if you have, Jacob,” Boudicca continued, interrupting my thoughts, “then why do you seem so alarmed by its presence?”

“Because,” I said immediately as I lowered my hand so that I could climb aboard the cart, “while its presence is certainly weird enough… its
all-too-convenient
presence is weird on a whole other level.”

***

Suspiciously convenient or not, the handcar was the only solution to our predicament, and a rather effective one at that.  With the two of us taking thirty minute shifts, we’d managed to trek along the railroads at a pretty good clip.  We weren’t cruising at highway speeds, but we had to have covered at least a hundred miles in the few hours we’d been at it so far.  The trip hadn’t been smooth, nor entertaining, but the volcano had grown considerably larger in my sight, and that alone had made the trip worth it.

I hadn’t taken my eyes off of it much during our time on the railroad, and I stared at it even now as I sat upon the handcar with Boudicca behind me, dutifully pumping away and moving us along.  Nor had I thought much about the oddity that was the handcar either, as the sole of my attention was on our destination and what could possibly lay ahead.  I hadn’t felt this curious about something in a long while, and I even felt something akin to excitement.  These were peculiar feelings as of late, but it was nice to know I could still experience them.

I’d grown comfortable with the presence of the volcano and black holes, seeing them now as little more than mysteries that needed solving, mysteries that no one else could possibly even comprehend.  Even guys back home like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku wouldn’t understand what the hell it was I was seeing here, but I assumed they would at least be proud at how I was handling the situation, as well as impressed with the solution I’d already come up with concerning one of my mysteries: the absence of day light.

It seemed an obvious answer with the revelation of black holes in the sky.  There was no day because, simply, there was no sun.  In all likelihood, the sun had been devoured by one of the black holes within the solar system, or, perhaps, it had collapsed to form a black hole all on its own.  The implications were mind-numbing, and speculating over the truth was sure to turn my brain to mush.  I was no scientist, but contemplating the notion that dozens of black holes could coexist in the same solar system really excited me.  This entire world defied all logic, and here I was, right in the middle of it, the only person alive capable of understanding it.

And at least that solved the question of whether or not we could survive here if the sun came out, since it seemed that it never would.  We were going to be hot and uncomfortable, but at least we wouldn’t be incinerated before we found the orb. Then again, without the sun and any obvious sign of plant life, that certainly begged the question of what exactly I was breathing, because it was most likely not oxygen.

Unless there was something artificial producing it.

Thinking on these conundrums was about all I could do as we roared down the track, putting all thought to our safety behind us as we continued on.  All I could do was sit and watch as the Martian-like landscape rocketed past us, its features indiscernible and completely barren.  I rested against the center mast that held the lever action that controlled the hand cart, keeping myself slightly off-center so that the length of the lever opposite the one Boudicca manhandled fell past my shoulder instead of crushing my skull on its way down.  It caught my attention on it latest downward plunge, and watched it as it rose again, only to be pumped down again by Boudicca's strong arms and shoulders.  Shifting beneath it would be easy, and I had little doubt that the heavy wooden beam being pushed down by Boudicca would have little trouble pulverizing my skull or crushing my neck – ending this entire story quite neatly.  It was a curious idea, one I hadn’t yet entertained, but one that came to me with such clarity just now that I couldn’t deny its appeal. 

We were certainly bound to die here, by whatever monsters lurked near the volcano or simply exhausted by the relentless landscape, so it seemed an enticing notion: to end one’s own life on one’s own terms.

It was a choice that grew more interesting with every passing moment.

But not quite yet.

My eyes turned back to the terrain before us, with the looming volcano growing ever-closer, and my thoughts returned to the task at hand.  It was pleasant that my conscious mind seemed at peace again now.  Everything had been so muddy and blurry these past few months since leaving Britain that even coherent thoughts on suicide were welcome.  I wondered what I owed this newfound clarity to.  Perhaps the power of the blue orb was wearing off, or maybe I was growing an immunity to it, or perhaps there was something in the environment here that was stifling its negative effects – although I couldn’t yet think of what that could be.

***

We were close.  A few more hours had passed and the volcano had to be within a hundred miles of us now, although determining distance and scale was still difficult.  It truly dominated my vision now, obscuring the entire world, it seemed.  Were I to outstretch my arms at a generously obtuse angle, the volcano would still encompass everything between my hands, and then some. It seemed to go on forever, an odd illusion since I could see from one end to the other quite clearly, although I had to crane my neck left and then right to accomplish it.

But as we barreled closer, a thought entered my mind that perhaps this wasn't the only one of these monstrosities.  While its size was incalculable, it was still only a dot upon the landscape of planet Earth.  It, alone, may have been responsible for the destruction of all life on this world, but like the illogical presence of so many black holes orbiting overhead, it seemed quite possible that there were more than one of these volcanos as well.