“Cade!” he said. “We were just talking about you. Come look at this.”

Cade stepped forward and saw a large map laid out on the round table at the hall’s center. Other men, officers, stood around it, deep discussions interrupted as Cade walked closer. Their eyes followed with a strange mix of fear and annoyance.

What was he to these men? An aberration from the future. A stranger of even stranger origin, who had somehow given them victory. They owed him, yet they did not want to.

The map was of the caldera. It was a crude thing, though the scale was off, and it did not, of course, show remnants. Instead, wood-carved figurines had been placed to delineate the locations the Romans knew of so far.

“Codex,” Cade said, trying to hide the hesitation in his voice. “Show me the map.”

Instantly, the map appeared at the table’s center, floating horizontally above the one the Romans had been so carefully poring over.

This was followed by a collective intake of breath and a flurry of Latin, too fast and intermixed for Cade to follow.

“It is a … this Codex is…”

Cade tried to hide his wince. But if he was to convince Marius of the value of the remnants in the jungles, he had to show them its powers. Now was the time to balance the benefits of keeping it here against the discovery of remnants.

“Do you see the blue … things?” Cade asked. He spoke in Latin for the benefit of the officers, even as he struggled to find the right word for dot.

Marius understood though and nodded.

“These are more objects. Like the cannons. Some from my time, or close to it.”

“More cannons?” one of the Roman officers asked, overpronouncing the new word.

Cade nodded. “Maybe. But those are not…”

He paused, then turned to the Codex. “Translate for me, would you?”

“Yes.”

“Any cannons we bring here would be useless,” Cade continued. “They need powder, and we don’t have deposits of potassium nitrate—that white powder we used—here.”

The man scoffed and chuckled. “So what use are they?”

Cade jabbed his finger at the map. “Imagine if I could wipe away an entire city with a click of my fingers.”

This time, the officer fell silent.

“Codex, please tell them how many people died in the bombing of Hiroshima.”

“The death toll of the 1945 Hiroshima nuclear bombing totaled an estimated two hundred thousand deaths.”

Cade brought his finger closer to the blue dot. “You thought the cannon was powerful? The remnant here is a million times more powerful.”

The men around him stared, their faces horrified.

“Such … power,” Marius whispered, horror struck.

“There are enough of these weapons on Earth now to destroy it ten times over,” Cade said. “They are used as a deterrent for war.”

Marius brought a hand to his mouth, his eyes wide with shock.

“It doesn’t just set the world on fire,” Cade pressed on. “It poisons the air, as far as the wind will take it. The ground is infected, so much so that people can’t walk on it for a hundred years. It causes an invisible disease, so that even those who survive the initial blast will die a slow death of cancer and blood sickness.”