Ouroboros 2: Before (2 page)

It was with these thoughts swirling through his mind that Carson began to drift off.

But one final thought occupied his attention before slumber took him.

That this was the lull before the storm.

And quite possibly the last chance he would get to sleep for some time to come.

Cadet Nida Harper

It didn't take long for Carson to fall asleep. She knew that, because she had surreptitiously set the scanner to monitor his bio signs.

Not that she needed it. Because five minutes later, he started snuffling.

It was categorically the cutest thing she had ever heard. She had to plant a hand hard over her mouth to stifle the giggling. Carson Blake was meant to be a legend, a hero amongst men and women, the poster child of the Galactic Coalition Academy. Yet there he was, conked out on an alien chair, snuffling like a puppy.

After her amusement at his sleeping habits finally ebbed, she got down to the task of investigating this place. Though they had already gone through every room, and had briefly toured the land surrounding the house outside, it was time to do a thorough job.

She checked every room, this time accounting for how much food and other resources the building had.

Using the scanner, she made a list of everything.

She also piled together anything that appeared to have symbols on it.

Though most races in the known galaxy spoke the Standard Galactic Dialect in her own time, she had absolutely no idea what date the entity had transported her back to. So the symbols she stared at now were hopefully the equivalent of this people's language.

She found the symbols written on the sides of wooden boxes, on packets of what she assumed was food in the pantry, and finally on paper-like material that resembled old Earth books and magazines.

She made a pile of them out in the corridor beyond the room Carson was snuffling in. She didn't want to disturb him, after all.

Then she set to work using the scanner to assess each and every symbol. Once she was done with that, she sat there with her back pressed against one of the cold walls, trying to remember some of the lessons Commander Sharpe had given her over the years.

After much head scratching, she recalled what she needed, then set to work forcing the scanner to analyze the airwaves for any kind of coherent information, whether it be radio waves, microwaves, or any of the modern forms of subspace communication.

She needed spoken examples of this language if she wanted to translate it.

After several minutes of waiting, with a thrill she realized the scanner had picked up multiple radio wave frequencies.

She then forced it to record them all, and start on the laborious task of translating them. With the examples of the written alien language she had collected from the house, and the spoken language the scanner would be picking up off the radio waves, in time the scanner would be able to create a coherent language model.

While it was doing that, she set about looking for some clothes.

She found some in one of the upstairs rooms, and now gathered them together.

Using the scanner again, she told it to monitor the airwaves for any kind of visual data, and finally it began to show her images, the pictures appearing just over the bed of the scanner in small 3-D holograms.

Needless to say, it was a confusing mix of colors and forms. She saw what she assumed was the alien race, then examples of technology, plants, animals, rolling hills, and well-lit cities. It was a colorful jumble, and made little sense to her.

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 snuffling 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.’