Ouroboros 3: Repeat (10 page)

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 gates.’

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.

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 than 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.’

‘
And if we don’t,’ she now interrupted in her own emotion-filled tone, ‘we find out what we can from other sources.’

Carson held her in his gaze and nodded once.
‘Then let’s do this.’

Expectation rose like a flare deep within her belly, shooting up towards her throat and forcing her lips open as she hissed through a breath.

This was it.

It was time to find out what the Vex had done.

She had so many questions that desperately needed answers.

In fact, foremost was whether the Vex had done this at all. That was just an assumption based on what they’d done to Carson and what Nida had learnt from them.

For all she knew, the United Galactic Coalition could have been destroyed by the Barbarians or the Kore.

Yet, deep down, she knew it was the Vex.

Everything was down to them.

She had not yet escaped their influence, and even though she was about to escape their planet, she knew they still waited for her beyond it.

She closed her eyes briefly as Carson commanded the computer to initiate its ascent.

The ship shook as its engines turned to full, and she was forced to clutch hold of the console before her.

‘It will be a rocky ride, but we’ll get through,’ Carson promised.

She kept her gaze locked on the view screen before her. At first it showed the mid-morning sun glinting off the field of broken ships around them. Then it lifted up, and she could see the sky above.

As they punched through the atmosphere, she closed her eyes briefly.

She didn’t want to see this, she told herself.

The destruction and desolation that waited for them in orbit.

She knew it would be there; she’d seen it in a vision.

Sure enough, she blinked her eyes open when Carson gave a strangled gasp.

There it was before her; the United Galactic Coalition Fleet in ruins.

The tumbling ships, the bodies, the broken turrets and engine cores.

Carson took heavy breath after heavy breath, and she turned to see how pale his soot-covered skin had become.

Though he’d pushed through his grief and surprise on Remus 12 to get this ship into orbit, now it was all flooding back.

It flooded back into her too.

But she pushed past it, and so did Carson. He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, there was a hard edge to his jaw. ‘Alright,’ he said simply, ‘do you know how to modulate the scanners to pick up secure frequencies without leaving a trace of our activity?’ he whirled on his foot and nodded at her.

She shook her head silently.

‘Then you’ll learn,’ he said determinedly.

And she did. Patiently yet firmly, he walked her through the task.

‘While we could just scan for any frequencies, we can’t run the risk of any Vex picking up our activity,’ Carson explained. ‘So we have to be painstakingly careful to cover our tracks while we look for our friends.’

She shuddered at that explanation.

While they looked for their friends . . . .

Though Nida had been careful not to plunge too far into what it would mean that the United Galactic Coalition had been destroyed, now thoughts rose unbidden from her mind.

Were her parents and sisters dead? What about Alicia? What about Commander Sharpe?

Carson suddenly clamped a hand on her shoulder.
‘Just keep scanning,’ he said in a firm tone.