Ouroboros 3: Repeat

by Odette C. Bell

  Travis forced air through his clenched teeth, and the hissing sound echoed around the large room.

  Still, it could hardly distract Nida from the feeling growing in her left hand. A dense cold that shifted back and forth like a frantically swinging pendulum.

  ‘I know this sounds incredible, but some of the information we managed to decrypt from the Vex ships hinted at . . . ,’ he swallowed wildly, ‘time travel. And they mention the both of you,’ Travis’ gaze swung from Carson to Nida. And as it struck upon Carson, he gave a powerful shudder.

  Despite the strange sensations tearing through Nida’s left hand, she looked up to acknowledge how guilt stricken Carson looked.

  ‘Time travel,’ Travis repeated, now digging his fingers violently into his brow as if the movement could force the thoughts from his mind. ‘I want to say it is not possible, but . . . I have no idea what happened. How could Remus 12 go from being an unpopulated planet consisting of nothing more than dust and rubble to supporting one of the most technologically advanced races I have ever seen?’ He looked up at Carson, and it was clear that Travis’ questioning gaze pleaded with his friend for answers.

  But Carson didn’t have any answers, and neither did Nida.

  What she did have, however, was this growing eerie sense. It was pushing up her left hand, into her arm, and racing through the rest of her body with all the speed and fluidity of blood being pumped by her heart.

  ‘Why were the Vex looking for the entity?’ Carson suddenly questioned.

  Though Nida was beset by her own problems, she suddenly looked up sharply.

  She needed to hear this answer.

  ‘We don’t really know. We have no real idea why the Vex attacked us, but we know in part that they were after the entity, that they were after Nida. They were desperate. They knew they had to get it back for some reason. But what that reason is, we just don’t know,’ Travis repeated, letting his hands fall from his head to reveal deep half-moon circles cut into the flesh.

  Carson gave a truly frustrated sigh that bordered on a snort. ‘It’s not good enough; we need to know,’ he spat.

  She could understand his frustration; she felt it herself. Yet at the same time, she felt something else.

  The entity.

  It was . . . surging. At Travis’ words, at the cobbled together story he was giving, the entity surged. It reacted to every single thing he said.

  ‘Carson,’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘We have to find out as much as we can. Travis, I haven’t told you this yet, because I didn’t want to get your hopes up. But there’s a chance . . . a chance we can stop this.’

  ‘I know, and that’s one of the only things I do know. You can travel through time, right? With the entity, you can skip from one time period to another?’

  ‘We don’t know if it will work,’ Carson began.

  ‘Carson,’ she tried again in that same quiet, almost imperceptible tone.

  ‘But it’s worth a try. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, as three days ago, I thought time travel was impossible. But now . . . .’

  ‘Now we have to do whatever we can to save the United Galactic Coalition,’ Carson noted bravely.

  She couldn’t hold it in.

  The energy. The pain.

  She could not take it any more; she screamed, clutching a hand first on her left wrist, then up to her implant.

  Both Carson and Travis shot to their feet. Yet while Travis hung back, Carson ducked by her side.

  ‘Nida?’ he called, worry forcing his eyes open.

  She tried to breathe through the pain, tried to push the entity back. But it was surging. It was rushing up and trying to drown her, just like it had back on the ship.

  ‘You’ve got to fight it,’ Carson begged. ‘Fight it.’

  ‘What the hell is happening?’ Travis shouted.

  ‘The entity. It’s trying to control her—’ Carson began.

  ‘Get her to the med bay,’ Travis ordered.

  Carson didn’t even wait. Nor did he hesitate for fear of being attacked by the entity—he just swooped down and scooped her up.

  She forced her eyes to close as she tried to control it.

  Then she felt it.

  The surge of power that told her it was about to corrupt. But she understood it for what it was now.

  Fear.

  It was afraid, deathly afraid, and as that fear pulsed through it, it interacted with her implant, interfering with the entity’s energy.

  The entity’s fear kept on surging through her.

  It enabled her to connect to it, to understand it.

  It had to protect itself. Everyone was counting on it. Innumerable souls scattered through time. All praying that it would succeed.

  Yet as soon as she connected to it, she disconnected as she felt something wallop into her side.

  She opened her eyes to see a glass off the table bang into Carson’s shoulder, glance off, and ricochet into her.

  ‘Shit,’ Travis screamed.

  ‘Nida,’ Carson shouted louder than him. ‘Fight it.’

  She gathered his voice towards herself, as if it were tangible enough that she could thread it through her fingers and lock it against her chest.

  It grounded her.

  So she fought.

  She pushed it back.

  As she did, she saw flashes of a vision covering the scene around her.

  It was not stars falling from the sky. It was not the United Galactic Coalition fleet destroyed and floating in orbit of Remus 12.

  It was that same field of golden grain with that same glorious star scape above.

  Though she would not let it distract her, she did not push it away either. For she knew in that moment it was import.

  Unbelievably important.

  She was dimly aware that Carson kept screaming at her, but she could no longer see anything.

  Only the entity.

  It was as if she plunged deep within that glowing mass.

  Again it felt as if it was trying to drown her, yet at the same time calm her as it exerted some controlling influence over her mind and body.

  She almost let it win. She almost gave in.

  Then she fought back in a final push.

  . . . .

  She managed to force it back.

  It took everything.

  And, soon enough, blackness flooded in, replacing that pulsing blue and knocking her out completely.

  Chapter 26

  Cadet Nida Harper

  She dreamt. Instantly she plunged into a vision. But this was unlike any she had ever experienced.

  She still felt connected to the entity; she could still access and understand its fear.

  So much fear and so much guilt.

  Both emotions tied themselves around her as if they were trying to squeeze the very life from her veins and arteries.

  She did not fall though; she kept her eyes open and she watched the vision unfold before her.

  At first, it was that golden field of wheat or some such alien grain. She stood amongst it, letting it brush against her legs as a gentle breeze saw it swaying rhythmically from side to side. Above, swathes of bright stars illuminated the night sky. She stared up at their glory in open-mouthed wonder.

  Then the very ground beneath her feet disappeared and the star scape above changed. Suddenly she was back in the future, back at the exact moment Vex was destroyed. Again she could see the people running in the streets, fleeing the destruction, yet this time, incredibly, intermingled between them she saw United Galactic Coalition cruisers and the dead bodies of Coalition soldiers.

  Just as she realised what she was looking at, the vision melted away. Again she witnessed the destruction of Vex, but this time she saw other alien ships, other alien bodies. She did not recognise them, but they looked old and less technologically advanced than the Galactic Coalition.

  It happened again. The vision of the destruction of Vex was replaced and she saw another, this tim
e with another race, and then another.

  Over and over again, it simply kept repeating until all she could do was kneel there with her hands over her head as shock shattered her.

  Yet through it all, she maintained her connection with the entity. In fact, this was the first time she had been assailed by one of its visions with a full knowledge and sense of it.

  She could feel its grief, repeating over and over again with each destruction of Vex. The guilt, the cloying, powerful, unshakable guilt.

  In a moment of connection, she understood that the entity had done this.

  It had caused what she saw here.

  Just as she realised that, it spoke to her.

  It no longer sounded commanding, and nor could it reach inside her mind to try to forcibly calm her. Instead it sounded weak, grief stricken, and unmistakably remorseful.

  ‘We did this, we did this,’ it kept repeating. ‘We will fix it, we will fix it,’ it added, repeating that phrase over and over again like a prayer.

  ‘What did you do?’ Nida found her voice and used it. She pushed the question from her lips, and as she did, she willed the entity to answer.

  ‘We broke the Vex timeline. We exist in a dimension close to this planet. But the space between us is thin. We were warned to never push our way through, but we did so anyway. And in doing so, we broke Vex. Their time, their past, their present, their future—we forced them to loop. To cycle. To feed into each other in a never-ending circle of history.’

  Though all around her Vex fell in vision after vision, Nida finally forced herself to black it out. Though she stood on a street that had moments ago held screaming people and now was nothing more than blue, crackling dust, she focused on the entity.

  ‘You broke their time? How is that . . . possible?’

  ‘Vex lies too close to my own dimension,’ the entity admitted, ‘its time and space was never stable. All those in my dimension knew not to force ourselves across, yet I did so anyway. And I broke their future. Forever it will cycle back into their past.’

  As the entity acknowledged that, the scene of total destruction around Nida changed. Suddenly that gentle wheat field replaced it. And again Nida stood there with the grain softly beating against her legs and the stars shining brightly above.

  ‘This is the point it begins again,’ the entity explained, ‘the point where their future leads to their past in a never-ending loop.’

  Nida turned slowly on the spot. She held her hands out wide, and felt the heads of the wheat trail lightly over her fingertips.

  Yet though the scene was beautiful, calming even, she could still feel the entity’s overwhelming guilt. It ate through it, burning it, corrupting it.

  Turning it into nothing more than a fearful, reactive creature.

  The same creature that had been capable of murdering those Barbarians in cold blood and that had tried to kill Carson by pushing him against the ceiling.

  ‘We have tried to fix it. We have tried over and over again to repair the damage to their timeline, but we cannot do so on our own,’ the entity spoke, once again talking in second person as if it were trying to share the guilt with Nida.

  She took a step back.

  Though the entity was nowhere around her, and rather inside, she narrowed her eyes at it.

  This was not her fault.

  ‘Why did you infect me?’ Nida asked suddenly.

  ‘To help the Vex. Though they are stuck in this timeline, we are not. I can move freely from their timeline into yours.’

  ‘If that’s the case, then why don’t you take some of them with you?’

  ‘We cannot. The Vex are bound to that timeline. They cannot be taken into ours. Not until the timeline is fixed. Their space is unstable, their bodies are unstable—if anything was to be taken into your timeline, after a day, it would crumble,’ it repeated.

  The passion twisting through the entity’s words stilled Nida. Yet she pushed one question out, ‘how will you save them?’

  ‘By finding a race technologically superior enough that it can repair the damage I wrought. That it can fix the timeline.’

  For a single moment, Nida felt sorry for the entity, then her own grief came billowing up through her stomach and back. ‘But why did you attack the United Galactic Coalition then? Why did you infect me? Why did you pull Carson and me into the past? Why did you lie to us? Why did you manipulate us? Why did you have us running around Vex thinking we had to find a dimensional bridge to send you back home? Why didn’t you just ask?’ She added with a croak.

  The entity appeared to consider her questions in silence before it answered, ‘we cannot run the risk of you not helping. We will do everything to protect the Vex; we will do everything to fix what we have done.’

  ‘So, what, you attacked the Coalition trying to find some technology that can heal your timeline? Only to find out we don’t have any?’ Rage now boiled within her, heating up her blood until she fancied it could turn to steam.

  ‘We had to try,’ the entity answered simply.

  ‘And is that what you have done before?’ Nida now pointed all around her in a great, angry sweep of her arm. ‘Those visions of other dead alien races and their destroyed ships, was that you?’

  In a snap, she was reminded of something Varo had said all of those weeks ago. All touched were aliens.

  She understood that now, and it made her sick to her stomach, a cold, cloying sweat flicking across her brow and down the sides of her temples.

  ‘Yes,’ the entity answered simply. ‘We lure alien races into the Vex timeline. We manipulate them into trusting us. We find out as much as we can about them, we find out how strong their race is. And then, at the appointed time, we attack.’

  Nida shuddered back. The calm note of self-assurance to the entity’s voice was . . . unimaginable.

  Or was it?

  The amount of grief it felt was almost unfathomable; it was on a level Nida had never conceived of as possible. Yet as she conceded that point, she intuitively knew that if somebody or something felt that guilty, they would be willing to do whatever they could to wash away what they had done.

  ‘Every time Vex history repeats, for one single day their timeline aligns with your own. It is the day of the event, the day I came through and destroyed them. Up until that day, I shepherd the Vex, I slowly reveal to them what I know. They refer to me as the Goddess, and here and there throughout their history, I give them visions. Slowly, I let them know of what is to come. And as they gain technological prowess, I guide them to do what they must do. On the day of the event, when their world aligns with your timeline, they go forth to find what technology they can. To search for something to reclaim the future I stole from them.’

  Nida now pressed her sweaty hands against her mouth. Her lips shook against her teeth. In fact, every part of her shuddered as if she were convulsing.

  She felt . . . .

  She didn’t know what she felt. It was as if she now endured every single emotion the human body was capable of feeling. A mess of guilt and sorrow and frustration and disbelief that threatened to snap her.

  Yet through it all, she stood.

  She faced the entity within.

  ‘How could you do that? How could you sacrifice alien race after alien race? Haven’t you already done enough? And wasn’t it clear to you that the United Galactic Coalition didn’t have the technology you wanted? When the Vex of the future manipulated Carson with that simulation, surely they would have found out that the Coalition didn’t have the technology they sought. So why did you attack? Why did you attack?’ She repeated.

  ‘We had to try. They had to try. The event only comes around once in every Vex time loop. No matter the state of the universe in your timeline, and no matter what alien race they come across, I have taught them to attack. For it is the only way. We cannot risk our only chance at redemption slipping away from us.’

  Though Nida wanted to remain standing, she fell to her knees. Instantly she closed her
arms around her stomach, collapsing down as she did. She let her head press into the moist earth below her, flattening the golden grain into a pillow.

  She understood everything now. She understood why the Vex had been such a violent and passionate race; the entity, the Goddess, had manipulated them into being so. It had forced them to develop along the same lines every single time their history had repeated, so, on the day of the event, the Vex would be brutal and desperate enough to steal whatever they could in the hopes it would save them.

  Even though she understood, she repeated, ‘how could you do that? How could you do that?’ She pressed her head harder into the earth below her.

  ‘Because they must be saved. It does not matter what or whom is sacrificed; I will fix my mistake. I will save the Vex.’

  She shook her head over and over again until the rough grains around her scratched at her skin and pressed at her firmly closed eyes. Her arms were wrapped so tightly around her stomach, it was as if they had turned to stone.

  ‘And we will do it again,’ the entity now announced, ‘your United Galactic Coalition did not have the technology we are after. So we will try once more. I will shepherd this new iteration of Vex until they reach the event. And I will continue to do so, over and over again, until we finally find a race with technology advanced enough to fix the timeline.’

  Nida wanted to ask again how the entity could do such a thing, but she could no longer move her lips, and nor was she innocent enough to form the thought.

  She knew exactly what the entity’s motivations were, for she could still feel that burning guilt within. It gave way to such determination, such dogged force, that for the first time, she felt truly terrified and truly trapped, but just as soon as she felt trapped, she thought of Carson.

  She thought of Alicia, of her parents, of Travis, of the Galactic Coalition Academy.

  She couldn’t let them down.

  Suddenly she opened her eyes and she forced herself to sit. She stared above at the sky.

  She couldn’t let this happen.

  And just maybe, she could still stop it.

  She pushed herself to her feet.

  Just as she did, the entity announced, ‘you will take me back to Vex.’