Invictus

Invictus by Ryan Graudin





To my mother, whose roots go deep enough to stand even after a fall





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AB AETERNO





ACCESS LEVEL: RESTRICTED [PLATINUM BLACK]

RECORDS OF DECEMBER 31, 95 AD, ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

PLEASE REFER TO ARCHIVE 12-A11B FOR ORIGINAL DATASTREAM.



RECORDER EMPRA MCCARTHY SAT IN THE bleachers of the Amphitheatrum Flavium, her pregnant belly round as a globe under her indigo stola. The Colosseum—not that it was called that, not yet—was a frenzy of life around her. Nearly fifty thousand souls had come to watch the day’s bloodbath, filling the seats with earth-toned togas, popping salted peas and chunks of bread into their mouths, screaming last-minute bets and Latin slang as the gladiators marched through the Porta Sanavivaria into the arena below. Morning air was already salty-ripe with sweat and blood, scents so thick the crowd seemed drunk with it. They retched and roared and called for more. Blood! Blood! Blood!

Two gladiators lined up in front of the imperial box, bowing to Emperor Domitian and handing over their weapons for inspection. Both stood as men prepared to die.

And for what?

Blood! Blood! Blood!

Empra tried to take note of everything—it was her job, after all, the reason she was here, in a time not her own. She tried to ignore the constant ache of her lower back, the throb of her ankles, the flaming, wet misery of her heart.

Usually, when Empra sat in the thick of living history, she thought of her great-grandfather: Bertram McCarthy, professor of history at Oxford. A man whose life was a tidy sum of tweed jackets and pipes and paperbound books. He worshipped the past with a strange fervor. It was, he liked to tell her, the weight all mankind was born to bear. The roots we did not choose, but chose us.

Bertram McCarthy had terrible timing. Born four centuries too late, dying two years too early. Two years before time travel was firmly within humanity’s grasp. Empra often thought about what it would be like to travel back to Oxford’s mote-strung halls, to show her great-grandfather the CTM Ab Aeterno and take him for a ride through time. But there were rules upon rules regarding this sort of thing. Time travelers were to be unobtrusive observers. Interacting with people from the past was dangerous business, best kept at a minimum. Lest the course of history be altered.

Not, her swollen belly reminded her, that she’d been so diligent in all the rules.

Thus, Bertram McCarthy was stranded in his own timeline: dusty life and quiet death. But the love of history he’d planted in his great-granddaughter rooted well. Empra hungered for the past: a world unwired. Without personalized adverts constantly streaming through her corneal implants or meal blocks that tasted suspiciously the same no matter what kind of food she ordered.

That was why she’d worked her tail off to become a licensed time traveler by age eighteen, why she’d joined the Corps of Central Time Travelers on a yearlong survey expedition to ancient Rome. Traveling, seeing, recording. Blue skies, green plants, real food. These were the things Empra lived for. Also, love… which she hadn’t known she was looking for until it found her. Until he found her.

Love. Which brought her back here. To this round belly. To this bloodthirsty arena. To the gladiator who stood at the center of it all. Empra wondered if Gaius searched for her among the crowd that roared for his death. She’d already said good-bye, already told him they could never be together. Every moment of their last encounter had felt like plucking out her own heart, string by sanguine string. Empra knew she’d never forget the shadows hooding his already shadowed features, his promise to live for her and the baby, his Why? so broken and desperate that for just a sliver of a moment Empra considered telling Gaius the truth.

Star-crossed didn’t even begin to describe their romance. She loved him to the core, but there could be no future between them, even if he lived. This was because he’d already died. On a day thousands of years before Empra twinkled in her own parents’ eyes.

She had a feeling that day was going to be today, though Empra couldn’t know for sure. She’d scoured the Historian databases with keywords like Gaius and gladiatorial games and 95 AD, but the results were sparse, informationless wastelands. Gaps of knowledge waiting to be filled with her own datastream.

The facts weren’t hard to add up: Gaius was a good fighter. She’d seen him train as a retiarius at the gladiator school, snaring opponents in his net to be trapped at the mercy of his trident. But the gladiator Gaius was pitted against today was one of the empire’s best. A secutor with a brutish blade and fifteen victories under his belt.

Empra hated watching the violence, but more than this, she hated not knowing. Did Gaius die today, his blood just one more reason for the crowd to cheer? Or did he survive this fight? Gaius was a man long buried. His ending did not matter in the scheme of things, but Empra knew if she didn’t watch this battle, did not see his past future ended or extended, it would haunt her.

This was why, after nine months and one day of pregnancy, Empra sat in Rome’s barbaric heart instead of coddled up in some Central hospital, plugged into an entertainment system to distract her from the oncoming woes of childbirth.

“You’re pushing it,” Burg, her ship’s Historian, had warned her the night before. “The Corps isn’t going to like that you’ve stayed so long.”

“Just one more day.” This could have been a plea except for the way Empra had said it. With the same determined gravitas that had secured her this post in the first place. “That’s all we need to finish out the survey year. Besides, tomorrow’s fight… it’s important.”

She’d never told anyone about Gaius. Simply speaking to him—sitting down for that first off-the-record interview to learn more about gladiatorial life—had been a massive breach in protocol. What followed was unforgivable, and if word of it slipped out, Empra’s Corps license would be revoked forever. She’d be as stuck as her great-grandfather Bertram.

“Watching men hack each other to bits for fun is not what I would consider good maternal preparation.” Burg frowned. “You can’t have the baby here, Empra.”

The baby’s paternity had been a point of contention among the three male crew members of the CTM Ab Aeterno, each of whom regarded the others with raised eyebrows and unvoiced suspicions. As long as they didn’t suspect the truth…

“It’s not like we can’t come back,” he’d gone on softly. Too softly for her liking.

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