Ouroboros 3: Repeat

by Odette C. Bell

  Then he heard it.

  Nida gave a strangled, truly frightening cry.

  He spun on his foot, expecting the worst.

  She was not ensconced in a vision though. She merely had her heard directed up as she stared above her.

  Slowly he tipped his head back too.

  He couldn’t see anything. Just the stars. Granted, there seemed to be smaller flashes of light, as if the sun of this system was illuminating satellites in orbit, but that was it.

  She gasped again, forcing her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Nida, what is it?’ he reached out to her.

  ‘Oh my god, oh my god,’ she repeated through sobs.

  Fear rose through him in a spike. ‘What?’

  ‘It . . . it’s the future. I can . . . .’

  Alarm now shot through him hotter and harder than he’d ever felt it. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Over there,’ she pointed now, over his shoulder towards a hill in the distance.

  He could barely make it out.

  There was a dark shadow, and that was about it. But there were dark shadows all around him.

  He now considered it more carefully though, straining his eyes until his vision could resolve the details.

  ‘And over there,’ she turned and pointed behind her.

  ‘What, what are you pointing to? What’s happening?’ he snapped as he whirled on his foot.

  ‘The United Galactic Coalition,’ she choked. ‘It’s . . . .’

  He froze. His muscles just stiffened as if they’d been cast in concrete.

  No.

  No, it couldn’t be.

  Suddenly he understood her fear.

  Suddenly he recognised it.

  When Nida had undergone her vision in the resistance, and she’d seen the United Galactic Coalition destroyed, she’d been inconsolable.

  Now he recognised that fear.

  He pushed himself forward.

  He wasn’t thinking.

  He just ran towards that dark shape in the distance.

  He powered forward. It didn’t matter that he was still weak from whatever the Vex had done to him; he just pushed towards that shape.

  ‘Come on,’ he hissed, ‘come on.’

  His eyes were wide, his mouth open, his body a blur as he pelted forward.

  He kept stumbling, his bare feet snagging in the holes and dips in the ground.

  It didn’t matter though; nothing could stop him.

  The balls of his feet stung from the impact of his frantic footfall, and no doubt he lacerated them on the sharp edges of stones. Yet, once again, it didn’t matter.

  He had to get to that shape.

  He had to confirm she was wrong.

  It took a long time, but soon he reached it.

  As he did, his heart sank.

  It sank faster than it ever had before. It took with it every scrap of hope he could muster.

  It was a chunk of hull plating. Before he could question whether it belonged to a Coalition ship, he saw the remnants of their insignia over the side.

  He ground to a halt, still about five metres away.

  he planted his hand over his mouth and he breathed through his sweaty fingers.

  He couldn’t blink.

  He couldn’t speak.

  He couldn’t take a single step closer.

  All he could do was stand there it total, ashen shock.

  Finally he heard footfall behind him, and soon Nida rushed up to his side. She was puffing, and had to collapse her hands onto her knees to regain her breath.

  Then she lifted her head, and he could see her eyes draw wide as she stared across at the hull plating.

  Her whole body was still lit up; that blue glow encased her completely. It was far more evenly distributed than he’d ever seen it. And it no longer flickered. It was simply a constant, steady light.

  Without a word to him, and with only a bare tremble, she walked forward.

  He couldn’t move, but she could, and soon enough he forced himself to join her.

  Together they assessed the chunk of hull.

  It was, obviously, badly damaged. It had clearly been torn from whatever ship it had once formed an integral part of.

  It smelt of a combination of burning metal and sulphur.

  He pressed the back of his hand over his lips.

  The plating was on the low side of a hill, and now Nida walked silently up it.

  He followed her lead.

  They reached the top. They stared down.

  Into a valley.

  A valley full of broken ships.

  At the sight of only one chunk of hull plating, Carson had held out the slimmest scrap of hope.

  Perhaps only one ship had been destroyed. Perhaps Nida had been wrong.

  Yet now that hope evaporated. It burnt up and drifted away in the wind.

  Below him was a graveyard.

  Ship after ship, all destroyed, all mangled.

  All United Galactic Coalition.

  Neither of them said a word.

  There was nothing to say.

  Nida collapsed first. She just descended to her knees, then down to a seated position.

  Without a single word, not a mumble, nor a cry, she brought her knees up, locked her arms around them, and nestled her head against her legs.

  She wasn’t crying. She didn’t rock back and forth.

  She simply sat there and crumpled up into a ball.

  As for Carson, he just stood there. Staring.

  He wanted it to be a dream.

  It wasn’t.

  There was no fog invading his mind, nobody trying to manipulate him.

  Just reality.

  He had no idea how long he stood there, staring, yet eventually she rose.

  She pushed herself up, and finally the tears stared to flow.

  She sobbed softly. It wasn’t a grand display of emotion. She didn’t clutch at her face and scream at the horror of it all. She simply closed her hand over her eyes, whimpered, and finally turned away.

  And that was a far more poignant display of emotion. Far more chilling.

  He turned away now too.

  Together they stood on the opposite side of the hill, staring down to that singular piece of destroyed hull plating.

  He wanted to collapse a hand around her shoulders and whisper it was all okay.

  Except it wasn’t.

  It was all gone.

  Their future. Their past. Everything they lived for.

  The United Galactic Coalition was gone.

  ‘Nida,’ he finally pressed the word out in a tortured breath.

  Though his voice hardly carried, she turned.

  She let her hand drop from her face.

  She stared across at him, her eyes lit up by that blue glow.

  It was his only comfort. No, she was.

  He reached out to her, and she leaned into him.

  It wasn’t an embrace. It wasn’t a hug. They simply held onto each other in that moment because they were, quite literally, all they had left.

  Again, she was the first to pull away. And again, he had no idea how long they remained there in silence.

  ‘We have to do something,’ she finally croaked.

  He couldn’t acknowledge her words. He couldn’t mumble a yes or force a nod.

  Because there was nothing they could do.

  ‘We have to find out exactly what happened,’ she breathed harder, her chest punching forward.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘We have to stop it,’ she finally said.

  He looked up sharply. He held onto the determination suddenly lacing her words. It pushed back her fear and torturous grief.

  ‘How?’ he croaked.

  ‘We will warn them. We will find a way to stop this,’ she said, her determination now burning brighter.

  It drew him in. And he swore that as it did, she grew brighter.

  ‘We still have access to the entity, Carson. We still have access to the time gat
es.’

  He stopped.

  He stared.

  He breathed.

  She was right.

  ‘We can find out what happened here, go back into the past, and stop it before it happens,’ her voice, though quiet, felt like it boomed with certainty and strength.

  ‘You can’t control when the time gates take us,’ he tried, shaking his head.

  ‘I’ll learn,’ she said forcefully.

  He considered her in total silence.

  Then he nodded. As he did, finally the tears touched his eyes too. Yet now they were filled with a mix of hope, of anticipation, of the knowledge that, just maybe, he could do something about the graveyard behind him.

  He could stop it.

  She locked her gaze on his, and she did not glance away.

  If he had the opportunity to alter history, to change who he’d gone on this mission with, he wouldn’t.

  He wouldn’t have taken Travis, he wouldn’t have taken Cadet J’Etem. Not even Sharpe.

  Only Nida.

  Only Nida.

  He nodded once.

  ‘We can do this,’ she closed her eyes and nodded her head.

  He nodded too, even though she couldn’t see him.

  ‘We have to,’ she added in a small voice.

  Yes. They had to.

  They were the United Galactic Coalition’s only hope.

  Chapter 17

  Cadet Nida Harper

  What happened next, happened quickly. Now she had pushed back her grief in order to come up with a plan, and now she’d shared it with Carson, they finally sprang into action.

  Though it was one of the hardest things she would ever do, she walked with him into the graveyard of ships.

  The destruction was everywhere.

  Everywhere.

  And so were the bodies.

  She hadn’t expected to see those. Her innocent mind had washed that detail away.

  Yet as they’d walked down the side of that hill, she’d seen the charred remains dotted here and there alongside the broken ships.

  Despite her new-found determination, she’d lost it at that point.

  She’d whimpered and cried.

  If it hadn’t been for Carson, she might have turned back. He simply told her in a firm voice to keep going, to block it from her mind. He told her again and again that it would all be okay.

  She held onto that promise.

  It would all be okay.

  If they made it okay.

  When she had walked out of that darkened stairwell onto the surface of Remus 12, she’d known immediately what point in time they’d arrived in.

  Fear had raced up her back and sunk deep into her belly. With a quivering hand, she’d clasped at her neck as she’d looked up.

  Even though she hadn’t been able to see all the way into orbit, she had known instinctively it was scattered with destroyed United Galactic Coalition ships.

  For the feelings that had assailed her had been exactly the same as the ones she’d endured in the entity’s vision.

  Then she’d seen the shadows in the darkness. The jagged shapes that hinted at destruction.

  Well, right now there was no doubting it.

  She’d been right.

  They were in the future.

  A terrible, unimaginable future where it appeared that the majority of the United Galactic Coalition had been destroyed.

  While she’d been the one to muster the strength to come up with a plan, Carson was the one to take charge now.

  And she was more than thankful for him.

  He led her through that graveyard, kept her focused, kept her standing.

  He entered whatever ships he could, or, rather, whatever ships were whole enough.

  He was looking for clues, looking for supplies.

  He collected what he could. Guns, rations, scanners, even a set of armour that he had to pry off a dead body.

  She helped where she could. And slowly, though it was truly horrible, she became accustomed to the destruction around her.

  Accustomed, but not comfortable.

  Never comfortable.

  But she controlled her cloying sorrow long enough to help him. Like a dutiful cadet, she followed the orders of her lieutenant.

  Eventually they came across a ship that was in far better condition than the rest of them. Apart from some minor hull damage, the insides were relatively unharmed.

  The crew, it seems, had all died, leaving the ship to crash land on auto pilot.

  It was a light cruiser, much smaller than the Farsight, but still big enough to have a crew compliment of around 20.

  It was well stocked, and soon enough Carson discovered the engines were still operable.

  They now stood in the small room that accounted for its bridge.

  Carson was covered in soot and muck, his usually handsome face hooded with fatigue and sorrow. There was a yellowish, sickly tinge to his skin, and he kept blinking his eyes as he sighed. ‘With a bit of effort, I can get this flying,’ he said for about the tenth time.

  She nodded her heard. ‘Just tell me what I have to do,’ she forced herself to say.

  He smiled.

  It was a slow and unsure move, and for the first time in hours, he actually appeared to see her. That hooded quality to his gaze lifted.

  ‘You know, I was wrong about you,’ he finally admitted.

  Her eyebrows crinkled down. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Never mind,’ one side of his lips crinkled up as he turned, sighed again, and walked over to a panel beside him.

  Her cheeks flushed.

  She didn’t know why.

  Grief. Trauma. Stress.

  Or something else.

  She was too tired to figure it out though. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked again.

  ‘I thought you weren’t cut out for this,’ Carson said, his back still turned to her.

  She considered it silently.

  Was that what she’d been expecting him to say?

  ‘You are,’ he added as he leaned under the panel, pulled off a section of casing, and got to work pulling the guts out.

  She stood there.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  Was there anything to say?

  . . . .

  He was right.

  A lot of people had assumed she wasn’t cut out for proper space travel, for combat, for the duties of a cadet in the Coalition Academy.

  It was turning out she was though.

  That was a very strange fact to consider.

  Though she’d been through a lot in the past month or so, she still held onto the stigma of being the worst recruit in 1000 years.

  Now that was drifting away though.

  Now it was being replaced by experience, by exposure.

  She’d never been the worst recruit in 1000 years; she’d just been untested.

  She took a step back, her heart lifting.

  She did not once forget the destruction and horror around her; she simply considered herself differently.

  She realised that, no matter how hard this was, she could get through this.

  She turned on her foot. ‘I’m going to inventory what’s in the armoury and galley,’ she announced.

  Carson muttered a brief ‘okay.’

  He didn’t tell her to do something else; he trusted her judgement.

  So Nida marched off through the halls of that small cruiser.

  Though it was hard, she went through with her task.

  Soon enough Carson managed to get the engines running at almost full capacity. Yet it took a whole day for him to gather together the tools to seal the hole in the hull.

  It was made easier by the fact there were innumerable broken ships around them, meaning they had ready access to spare parts.

  For that day, they hardly spoke to each other. They just moved around, fulfilling their separate tasks, and doing what had to be done.

  She didn’t feel lonely. In fact, she felt closer to Carson th
an she ever had.

  And it was a strange feeling.

  Though they’d gone through unimaginable trials, and had been thrust closer together than she could ever have imagined possible, it was only now that she really felt connected to him.

  They felt like companions.

  That was the right word.

  Or maybe it wasn’t. But it was close enough.

  Soon she found herself back on the bridge, sitting in the navigators chair as Carson shifted around under one of the panels to her left.

  ‘Hand me the laser sealer,’ Carson asked.

  Diligently, she handed it over.

  ‘Alright,’ he said after a pause. ‘I think that’s it.’ He was on his back, and shimmied out from under the panel in three quick moves.

  He stood, wiped the back of his hand over his forehead, then stared down at her. ‘Are you ready?’

  She pressed her lips together and nodded.

  They’d talked about what they were to do next.

  They were going to head out into orbit to find out as much information as they could.

  Carson kept telling her this was the most dangerous part of their plan.

  Leaving the planet meant they could garner the attention of the Vex.

  Neither of them knew if the Vex were still around—though they’d been able to decode some information from the broken vessels around them, it was mostly garbled battle plans.

  In other words, they had no idea what would be waiting for them out there.

  ‘Okay, I know you’re sick of this, but I’m going to go over the plan once more,’ Carson crossed his arms in front of his chest and nodded her way. He was back in a United Galactic Coalition uniform. They’d managed to find all the spares they would need. Right now he had the top part of his tunic pulled down and tied around his middle though, and he wore a simple grey shirt on his torso. As he crossed his arms, his soot-covered biceps caught the light. ‘Right, we head into orbit, we scan what we can. Then we try to pick up any incoming United Galactic Coalition coms. Anything,’ he breathed hard, massaging his brow as he did. He was still covered in muck. In fact, he hadn’t taken a shower ever since they’d come across this graveyard. He’d simply worked tirelessly and without break trying to get this vessel flying.

  He was tried. She knew that; she could see it etched deep around his eyes and across his brow.

  She would order him to get some rest later; she understood that right now they both needed to be on their feet though.

  ‘If we discover that some of the United Galactic Coalition is left,’ his voice twisted with emotion, ‘then we go to them, explain ourselves, and learn what we can.’