Ouroboros 2: Before

by Odette C. Bell

  But she didn't need to make sense of it yet; she simply needed to understand what the people of this time looked like, and what they wore.

  Once she figured out what they wore, she sifted through the clothes she'd found, until she selected ones that matched what she assumed was the current tastes.

  A pair of black, sturdy pants for Carson, a white, high-collared shirt, and a brown, worn leather vest. And for her, a long skirt made of quite beautiful alternating strips of blue and green fabric. The green fabric had detailed little flowers embroidered over it, and led up to a tight, almost bodice like top with more embroidery over the bust line. Underneath this, she wore a black, long sleeved, tight shirt. She was lucky enough to have found a pair of elbow length, black, almost opalescent gloves too, which handily covered her glowing left hand. Then she finished the entire outfit off with a blue, beaded veil that wrapped around her neck and head, and sat low over her eyes.

  There was a mirror in a room she assumed was the bathroom, that she considered herself in for a good few minutes, even twirling around on the spot and watching the skirt dance around her ankles.

  She looked completely different.

  And she was well covered, which was a particularly good thing; when the entity woke up again, it would probably make her entire body glow blue, like it had before. And though Nida didn't know much about the people inhabiting this planet, she could bet that glowing women were not usual around these parts.

  Once she was done with the clothes, she sat down and tried to figure out how exactly she would make the rest of her body look like one of the aliens on this planet.

  Thankfully, they were humanoid, and as far as she could tell, were about the same height and weight range as your average human. But that was where her luck ended.

  These people had white hair, jet-black eyes, ridges along their arms, necks, and cheeks, and vibrant blue spots to finish it all off.

  While she could probably get away with things by just tugging her veil down, and relying on the fact that the rest of her body was completely covered, Carson would be a different matter.

  Realizing she probably couldn’t figure this one out on her own, she set to work analyzing what she thought were food stores in the kitchen. Though the scanner was busy trying to calculate a language model, it had enough left over power to help her assess the chemical constituents of the packets she found, and she soon selected some that wouldn’t kill her or Carson. They weren’t exactly perfectly nutritionally balanced for humans, but they would do. Then she spent a strange 20 minutes opening several of the packets and trying to . . . well . . . figure out how to make them palatable.

  It was while she was doing this, bending over what she thought was a stove, that she heard footsteps behind her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Carson asked.

  She yelped, surprised by his sudden entrance, and accidentally tipped forward, losing her balance.

  She threw out a hand, caught the edge of the bench, and managed to steady herself though. Then she straightened up, turned around, patted a hand down her tight green bodice, and sighed.

  Far from laughing at her, Carson simply stood there in the doorway, staring at her with an open mouth. ‘Nida . . . what are you wearing?’

  ‘The traditional garb of a modern woman of this planet,’ she said with a curtsy. ‘I think. And the gloves,’ she brought them up, ‘are just there to stop people from noticing my glowing hand.’

  Carson didn’t appear to be capable of speaking; instead, he stared at her. Thoroughly. His eyes appeared to dart over every single centimeter of her, and before too long, she started to blush. She was thankful for her long veil, and suddenly tugged it down over her eyes.

  ‘Where did you get those clothes?’ Carson finally stopped staring, and perhaps he realized just how intense he’d been, because he straightened up, coughed, and looked sheepish.

  ‘Upstairs. I’ve found something for you too,’ she walked past him awkwardly, then practically ran into the hallway, the shoes she had selected clicking over the stone floor.

  She quickly found the pile of clothes she’d selected for him, picked them up, and handed them over.

  He took them off her, then considered them, concentrating on the worn leather vest especially. ‘Fashionable,’ he quipped in a long drone. Then he glanced at her again.

  It was a weird, awkward kind of look, and he immediately cleared his throat when she saw him watching her.

  She shuffled her feet a little. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said quickly. ‘But we have a lot to do. We have to figure out this alien race’s language. I have no idea what time we’ve gone back to, but I doubt that they’re using—’ he began.

  ‘The Standard Galactic Dialect,’ she finished off his sentence. ‘They aren’t. And the scanner has just finished building a functional language model for them.’ She gestured to where she had set it down on a small side table several meters from Carson.

  He actually frowned at her. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well, while you were asleep, I tried to remember some of my Academy lessons, and gathered together everything that looked like it had alien language on it, and fed it into the scanner. Then I told the scanner to monitor all airwaves for any kind of coherent data that looked like communication. Well, it found radio waves; I told it to assess those too. And now it has built a functional model.’ She felt a little bit like she was presenting a project in class.

  Carson’s lips were a little too far open. ‘You did that on your own?’

  She suddenly felt defensive. ‘Yes. I followed Academy regulations,’ she began.

  He put a hand up. ‘Never mind. I’m just . . . impressed,’ he winced as he said it, ‘sorry, that sounds bad. I mean . . . you did good.’ He winced again. ‘No, that sounds worse. Look, never mind.’

  Though she wanted to remain defensive, she couldn’t. He was terribly cute when he was being awkward. Which was incredible when you thought about who he was. That was Carson freaking Blake standing in front of her. He wasn’t meant to be cute. He was the leader of the Force; he was effective, efficient, trained, and sharp like the sword of justice.

  Yet now he looked like he wanted to crawl back to his little chair and fall asleep so he could snuffle the day away and forget his embarrassment.

  Thinking about that reminded her of just how damn sweet his snuffling was, and she brought a hand up and couldn’t help but giggle behind it.

  His eyebrows shot down over his eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said in a high-pitched voice.

  ‘Yeah, right, now tell me,’ he grumbled.

  ‘You snuffle while you sleep. Maybe it was just the effect of the device,’ she tried to reason quickly, surprised that she’d actually just shared that detail with Carson.

  He looked mortified. Then he straightened his back, lifted his chin, and gave her that same look he always did when he was trying to pull rank. ‘I do not.’

  ‘My mistake, never mind,’ she added as she waved a hand at him. ‘We should just concentrate on the fact that we don’t know when we are and are completely on our own with an impossible mission to complete.’

  She couldn’t distract him.

  He just frowned at her. ‘Right,’ he looked down at the scanner again, making a show of going through her work. ‘Now we’ve got this, at least we’ll be able to translate what we see and hear. Now we’ll just need to figure out what we can actually eat on this planet,’ he added as his stomach gave a rumble.

  ‘I’ve already done that,’ she pointed to what she thought was the kitchen. ‘There were a couple of foil packets, and I assumed they were food. I scanned them, and I selected the ones that won’t make us terribly ill.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ he quipped. ‘Perhaps I should check your work though,’ he said, rather condescendingly. Then he turned from her, his demeanor unusually frosty as he headed towards the kitchen.

  He was clearly still unhappy about her snu
ffling remark.

  Rather than try to soothe his hurt feelings, she trundled after him.

  In silence he scanned the same foil packages she had, and came to the same conclusion. Bravely selected one, opened it, stuck his finger inside, and licked the silver, powdery contents.

  He immediately made a face.

  He slapped his free hand down on the bench, blinked his eyes close, and hissed slightly. ‘Holy crap,’ he said after several seconds, ‘that tastes like being punched in the gut.’

  She just raised an eyebrow. Leaning past, she dipped her finger into the packet, then, with only a slight pause, licked the contents off her finger.

  She practically fell over.

  Swearing, she slammed both hands down on the counter, and started to shake her head. ‘Oh . . . god. I need water. I need water.’

  He didn’t move to help her. He simply stood there and laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he conceded seriously.

  She wanted to punch him, but as he was still wearing his armor all the way up to his neck, she refrained. If she so much as touched her knuckles to the ablative plating of his arm, they would probably shatter.

  And as now she was away from the best medical facilities the United Galactic Coalition had to offer, she had to be careful. Very, very careful. No more broken ribs or concussions for her.

  And no more silver powder from foil packets either.

  Once she finished choking, and Carson stopped laughing, she snapped at him to put his clothes on.

  He simply stared back at her as if she were a fool. ‘We are not playing dress ups. We are on an alien planet. By simply putting on a crappy leather vest, I’m not going to fit in. We have no idea what the inhabitants of this planet look like, but I can guarantee you they don’t look anything like us.’

  She regarded him silently, then she rolled her eyes. ‘You really do think I’m the worst recruit in 1000 years, don’t you? I’ve already accessed images of them; that’s how I know what they wear. And as for their physical appearance, thankfully they’re about the same build as we are, but . . .’ she trailed off.

  ‘But,’ he repeated challengingly.

  ‘They have white hair, black eyes, blue spots, and ridges over their bodies.’

  ‘How about I look that up for myself,’ Carson mumbled under his breath as he manipulated the scanner.

  She’d had just about enough of the rude, defensive Carson, and she cleared her throat properly. ‘Are you always this cranky after you wake up? Or is this just because I said you snuffle while you sleep? Because you do. But what’s wrong with that? It was adorable.’

  Oh no, that had been the wrong word.

  Carson looked appalled. ‘Adorable?’

  ‘Cute?’ she tried instead.

  ‘Cute?’ he challenged in a far more menacing tone.

  ‘Attractive?’ She finally chanced upon.

  But that was an even worse word, because the look Carson shot her sent her stomach careening through the floor.

  He didn’t look angry anymore; his expression was a muddle of surprise and something else.

  Clearing her throat and shaking her head, she tapped her hand on her implant. ‘Look, just forget what I said. Can we get back to, oh, I don’t know, saving the universe?’ It was a trite and somewhat silly thing to say considering how much trouble they were now in, but at least it shifted his attention.

  With a grumbled yes, he kept playing with the scanner.

  In fact, he considered it with focused attention for several minutes until finally he sighed.

  ‘What?’ she asked when he didn't volunteer anything further. ‘What's the matter?’

  He sunk his fingers into his brow and pressed the nails hard into the flesh. He still looked tired. Of course he did. He'd had all of several hours sleep, and that was not nearly enough to pay back the debt using the device had amassed.

  ‘We can't really, seriously consider going out there,’ he finally explained.

  ‘What?’

  He looked up at her, and though at first his expression was almost withering, with another sigh, he went back to being the sweet, well-behaved Carson she was starting to get used to. ‘Look, I'm sorry, I'm just . . . tired. But seriously, though, we can't actually consider going out there,’ he gestured with his hand towards the wall.

  She wasn't dumb enough to think he meant the yard. They'd already been in the yard, and it hadn’t been that bad. No, he meant amongst the populace of this planet.

  An alien race they still knew next to nothing about.

  ‘We might have a functioning language model, but it's going to be damn hard to use it discreetly. And what's more, frankly, though you occasionally glow blue, you don't have spots. And I don't have neck ridges. And we know nothing about the culture of this planet. They could be murderers, there could be ritual sacrifices, we could walk down the street, fail to wave at the right person, and commit a crime punishable by death. We can't go out there,’ he said one last time, his voice growing weak.

  She just looked at him, her lips parting open gently. Then she had to shake her head. And for a moment she wondered whether it was her doing the shaking, or whether the entity had woken up just enough to force the move. ‘No,’ she said in a firm tone that wasn't entirely her own. ‘We have to.’

  Though Carson had appeared ready to overrule her, he stopped. ‘Nida?’ he asked carefully.

  She patted her implant, feeling the minute influence the entity had wielded over her dwindle. She nodded her head. ‘It's still me,’ she said. Then she took a pointed breath. ‘And we have to go out there. How else will we find the dimensional bridge? And how else will we get back to our own time? We need to find another time gate.’

  ‘We have one here,’ Carson pointed to the floor. ‘Somewhere,’ he mumbled again. ‘I think.’

  ‘This isn't the time gate,’ Nida said, unsure of how she knew that fact. ‘I think it's just a random point in space where the gate dropped us.’

  Carson looked at her skeptically, then, after she appeared to pass some test, he swore bitterly, massaging his brow with his fingernails once more. He was leaving little half-moon, red marks etched in his skin. And they were a clear testament to how stressed and tired he was.

  He let out a long, beleaguered sigh. ‘We will find one. But you have to understand what I'm saying. We can't go out there and meet the people of this world. We know next to nothing about their culture, their morals, their laws. It will be suicide. And I don't know if you've noticed, but we've got technology from the future,’ he gestured to the scanner, ‘that would be crippling to this world's timeline if they were to get their hands on it. My armor,’ he patted a flat hand on his chest, the movement a clanging one. ‘My gun,’ he gestured to the handgun in his magnetic holster. ‘And this,’ he finally brought up his right hand, and considered the device with an expression that was part filled with awe and part filled with suspicion.

  Finally, he looked up at her.

  She swallowed.

  He was right. Absolutely everything he had said made sense. But the trouble was, she couldn't see a way around going out there. Because none of what they needed was in this house.

  She tried to stand up straighter.

  Carson shook his head immediately. ‘This is nonnegotiable, Cadet; it is in order,’ he tried.

  There would have been a time when a statement like that would have terrified her. Back at the Academy, she had done nothing but get in trouble. She'd never been a rebel or a particularly bad egg. She’d just been awkward and clumsy and unsure of herself.

  Well right now, she was sure of herself. And that fact alone made the look in Carson's eyes and the challenging note to his voice simply ineffective.

  ‘Carson,’ she said softly, ‘you know we have to go out there,’ she said simply. It hadn’t been what she was intending to say, but at the last moment, she had switched her words. Or maybe the entity had.

  Again Carson got that
careful edge to his gaze as he surveyed her. He swallowed loudly. ‘I'm going to need more than that. It's far too dangerous,’ he began.

  She brought her hand up in a stiff, stopping movement. ‘We don't have the benefit of wasting time. The longer I remain here, the more I corrupt. I must find a bridge.’ The entity spoke through her. But its once sure voice now shook badly. As it manipulated her body, she felt how weak it was. The strong presence that had once filled her mind and supported her with its reassuring power was now a shadow of its former self.

  That fact scared her. Deeply. And once the entity stopped speaking through her, Nida gasped.

  ‘What is it?’ Immediately Carson closed the distance between them, and lightly grabbed her shoulder, looking into her eyes with a penetrating gaze.

  She blinked languidly, then shook her head. ‘I think it's . . . weak,’ she managed, choking over the statement. ‘Opening the time gate took a lot of energy,’ she continued, still shaking.

  ‘Is it okay? Will it . . . live?’ Carson asked, his words coming out slowly and with pressured, staccato breath as he clearly tried to frame his question in a way that made sense.

  ‘It's weak,’ she concluded simply. ‘I think it just needs to rest.’

  ‘Then rest,’ he commanded, and she wasn't sure whether he was talking to her or the entity.

  But one thing was for sure: he didn't loosen his gentle grip on her shoulder. And that fact gladdened her.

  He was strangely supportive if she let him be.

  In a way, that was completely different to the legendary Carson Blake she'd thought she had once known.

  The real Carson had a memorable tenderness to him, and it made him seem all the more human. He wasn't completely fragile or anything; he had taken on an entire team of Barbarians on his own, after all. But there was just this look of uncertainty in his eyes that made Nida realize he wasn't perfect and he knew it. Yet that didn't stop him from trying to do whatever he could. For every fault he had, he had a bucket of determination to compensate for it.