Chapter 23: An Unexpected Reunion
Glimmer didn't get her shore leave. Not even a little.
Instead, she was deep in space, sat inside one of the private observation booths aboard the Horde Interstellar Vessel Omen-Kador, watching concentric Dyson rings rotate around the star they were orbiting. An emergency communication had come through early in the morning: she had been tapped for a last-minute deployment, non-negotiable, and had needed to scramble just to make it to the ship on time. She hadn't even had time to wake Catra for a proper goodbye, only able to leave a hastily scrawled note behind instead.
The view screen had a powerful dampener activated, making the light from the star come through in a warm orange color, and the rings cast moving shadows inside the booth as the arms eclipsed that star at alternating intervals. She took a deep breath, letting the pattern of shadow dancing with orange almost entrance her.
"Gorgeous, isn't it?" Taline said, speaking from the PDA Glimmer held up in front of her. "That's oddly one of the things I miss about traveling the galaxy. Refueling at one of the Barrier nodes and watching it from your ship is a strangely meditative experience."
"I remember the first time I saw one," Glimmer said. "I didn't want us to jump away after we finished resupplying." She laughed. "I still can't believe the thing keeping the Beast from overwhelming us relies on neutron stars and an AI to power it."
"Algorithm," Taline said. "Not an AI, an algorithm."
"Yeah, that."
Taline sighed across the connection. "No, not 'that'," she said, "You do know the difference, right? I spent hours drilling this into your head, Glimmer."
"Yes, I know the difference," Glimmer said, sidestepping Taline's henpecking with faux indifference.
"Enlighten me."
Glimmer pursed her lips and spoke in a deliberately indifferent tone, as if reading from a teleprompter. "The Barrier keeps the Beast at bay with an incredibly complicated 'pattern' anchored and powered by several hundred neutron stars," she said. "An algorithm changes the 'bars' and 'locks' on the Barrier several thousand times a second in a near perfect oscillating pattern. But because the current algorithm is only nearly-perfect, it's degrading, and slowly letting the Beast back into our reality. Hence the second wave of infections spreading across the Outer Realms."
"If I didn't know any better, I would have guessed you had no idea what it is you just said." Taline sounded exasperated through the feed.
"Yes, well, I have yet to find a single person who doesn't understand all that about the Barrier," Glimmer said, satisfied at having irked her mentor. "It's practically hammered into everyone's heads as part of any compulsory education. I understand having adults who want to matriculate into the Empire take it as part of a citizenship test, but this is included in the curriculum for primary-age schoolkids, Taline. Do you realize how nuts that is?"
Taline laughed and agreed with her, before turning serious. "I'm sorry they cut your shore leave off so quickly by the way," she said. "How are you feeling about the mission?"
"Nervous," Glimmer wrung her hands. "They wouldn't have pulled me out like that for another deployment unless it was serious."
"No, they wouldn't have," Taline said. "I was going to call bullshit if you said you were fine, because I'm nervous for you. Have they given you any details about what's going on?"
Glimmer shook her head. "Only that we're resupplying here before jumping somewhere along the Kaloshi border."
Both of Taline's eyebrows shot up. "The Kaloshi border? That's…that's way closer to the mid rim than any of the previous incursions have been."
"I know," Glimmer said, grimacing. The Barrier was supposed to be stronger the closer to the galactic core one got, alongside the increase in population density. "You haven't heard anything on your end, have you?"
"I'm a disgraced Battlemage, stripped of my prestige and forced to act as a desk jockey on a quiet station," she said with levity in her voice. "The Enclave didn't expel me because they like me, but they're not going to go feeding me classified operational information any time soon."
"I figured as much."
"That didn't stop me from doing my own bit of digging, though," Taline said, a mischievous twinkle sparkling in her eye.
"Why am I not surprised?" Glimmer said, smiling. "And? What did you find?"
"Nothing good," Taline said, the levity from earlier disappearing from her voice. "I got my hands on the operation's deployment plan. The number of ships they've pulled together for this is staggering. In fact, the Omen-Kador is slated to be one of the last vessels to arrive. Check your PDA."
A notification from Taline appeared next to her face in the video stream, and Glimmer tapped it. A list of ships appeared, and she scrolled down as she scanned the names. And scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.
"My god, there must be dozens here."
"Six dozen, to be exact," Taline said. "Ninety-six carriers, cruisers, and dreadnoughts all deployed to one world. It has to be one of the major populations on the border, that's the only reason I could think for them to mobilize like this. I already knew it would be bad just seeing the transit manifest, but I had no idea it was as close as Kaloshi."
"I don't like how this bodes for the war effort," Glimmer said, scanning through the list again. "If the Beast is able to break into an area like that, it may force the analysts to reassess their projections."
"Trust me, no one is happy thinking the Beast might be slipping through faster than anticipated. I'm sure it's the number one thing on all their minds right now." Taline sighed and Glimmer felt a familiar dread build at seeing her mentor's change of tone. "They may tap you for command sooner, too," she said. "Especially if things indeed are moving faster."
"No," Glimmer said.
"Glimmer, we've talked about this. You can't just—"
"We've talked about this a lot, yes," Glimmer said, cutting her off. "The answer is still no."
Taline let out a long breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. A long beat of silence passed between them. "Do you remember what I said to you back on Etheria?" she said. "Back when you first asked me to take you with me off planet?"
Glimmer hadn't expected the question. "Yes," she said, before she recounted to Taline what she remembered of their conversation in the past—how she felt her home had changed too much. How Miri and Narre's deaths, along with her own friends' close calls had affected her. How she wanted to learn how to move past the trauma of that night.
"I said I wanted to learn how to be strong again," she said, nearing the end of her recounting. "And I didn't think I could learn to do that if I stayed behind."
"That wasn't what you told me at first," Taline said. "You told me at first you just wanted to get away without any concrete reason, and I said—"
"That I needed to have a better reason to go than to just run away from my problems, yes I remember," Glimmer said, hoping to rush them past an exchange she found embarrassing and preferred not to revisit.
"You were a model student, Glimmer," Taline said. "You learned everything I had to teach you, and in such a short amount of time, too. You did a magnificent job."
Glimmer blinked. Taline's praise came rarely, and always made an impact when it did. "T-thank you," she said.
"Even if you are not my student any longer, I still hope you'd to abide by what we agreed upon. You are running away from your problems again instead of facing them. The only difference is that I cannot be there and teach you how to overcome whatever is holding you back from confidently leading a team. You have to figure that out on your own, and until you do you will not have the kind of strength you told me you wanted to have when we first left your home."
Glimmer tried to interject, but she couldn't get out from underneath Taline's words fast enough to lessen their impact. By the time she had finished speaking, Glimmer couldn't even pretend to deny that Taline had a very good point.
"You're right," Glimmer said, deflating. "I just don't know how to take that step."
"You'll be ready one day," Taline said. "Maybe not today, but you will be soon. Just don't try and stop it when it you see it coming."
Glimmer scoffed. "When did you turn into a poet philosopher, Taline?"
"Hey, I just took something I heard Salas say once and put my own spin on it," Taline said. A noise suddenly came through the connection—someone speaking—and she looked somewhere offscreen, likely at whoever had interrupted them. "I might have to go soon," she said. "Diallo is on station for one of his quarterly visits and he's going to monopolize a significant chunk of one of my days here pretty soon."
"Again?" Glimmer asked, incredulous.
"Yes, unfortunately. And I can't turn him away either, since I'm technically the reason he has his position in the first place." She stiffened. "He's going to try and get me to buy into another wild goose chase again, you know how it goes. I need to get some work done in advance before he comes or else I'll fall behind."
"You know, hearing you talk about your desk job like that sometimes makes me seriously question whether paperwork or evacuating planets from the Beast is worse."
Taline laughed at that. "I wonder that too, sometimes."
"Before I forget…" Glimmer said, catching an inquisitive look from Taline when she hesitated to speak further. "Catra may or may not come visit you."
"Oh?" Taline looked genuinely surprised. "She's never visited me before. What's going on?"
"She's visited plenty of times," Glimmer said. "Just…you know, never in your office. I'll let her explain it to you, just promise me you'll see her if she does stop by? Don't send her away and reschedule if you're in the middle of something. You know how hard it is to get her to come out of her shell sometimes."
"I do, just as I know she has no qualms about using that shell of hers to bulldoze her way around and make a mess, rather than just come out of it." There was a fondness to Taline's voice that made Glimmer smile. "I'll be sure to see her, even if she has to walk in on Diallo in the middle of one of his ravings again."
"Thank you," Glimmer said. "And let's hope so. I'd love to hear her reaction when she tells me what happened later. She always has a very colorful way of telling stories." Another sound echoed behind Taline. "I'll let you go," she said. "Don't want to keep you from the paperwork."
"Aren't you forgetting something?"
Glimmer blinked, wracking her brain and trying to think of something she may have missed. "No?" she said after coming up short.
"You're supposed to show me your progress on the teleportation spell you've been working at."
Glimmer groaned. Oh yeah, how could she have forgotten?
"Don't give me that," Taline said, making a face. "You asked me to help you dial it in."
"Yeah, but that was back when I thought I'd have two weeks on Phoenix to relax and have you there to help focus me in person."
"No time like the present. You have my undivided attention for the next sixty seconds—show me what you got."
Glimmer sighed and tapped her PDA, opaquing a portion of the observation booth's view screen and casting the video feed to it. With her hands free and Taline now having a full-body view of her, Glimmer stood, stretched her arms far enough that her joints popped, and started to draw a rune in the air in front of her.
"Slow down," Taline said as Glimmer got about a third of the way through the design. "Speed is important on the battlefield, sure, but so is drawing smooth, accurate ley lines. Teleporting only half your squad—and by that, I mean half of each member of your squad and not half the number of them—is just as undesirable as not teleporting out of a sticky situation in time at all."
Taline had deliberately made that example one of Glimmer leading a team to purposely vex her, she just knew it. Still, she redoubled her efforts to slow down and concentrate. Before long, she completed the circuit and a shining, intricate teleportation rune shimmered in front of her.
"Not bad," Taline said. "Your diacritics invite room for interpretation so it may be a rocky transit, but I think you'd be able to get at least yourself through that if you activated it. Good job."
Glimmer breathed a sigh of relief and wiped the rune. She didn't understand why she took so quickly to all the other spells Taline had taught her only to run into hurdle after hurdle getting the teleportation spell correct. It was almost as if being so far away from Etheria and cut off from the Moonstone had made it that much harder for her to do it the 'other' way, rather than just poofing like she had all the other times in her life.
"Get in touch with me as soon as you arrive at your destination," Taline said. "I want to hear you're safe, as often as you can pull away to let me know. The time lag will be nasty even at the Kaloshi border, but please don't forget."
"I won't," Glimmer said. "I promise. Give my best to Catra when you see her, will you? I had to go in a hurry and could only leave a note. I feel bad."
Taline promised she would and they exchanged quick salutes. The feed cut, and Glimmer collapsed onto the couch behind her to stare blankly out at the Barrier node once more.
So much for shore leave, she thought, unable to fully erase the tinge of bitterness that came with it.
She let her thoughts wander while the rings oscillating around the star lulled her into a second daze. Against her better judgement, she pulled up Bow's contact on her PDA and drafted a letter to him. Halfway through the second sentence she bit at her lip in annoyance and deleted what she had written, only to start over fresh. She did the same for a third attempt. Then a fourth.
"Well, I'll be damned," a voice from behind said.
Glimmer swore and spun around on the couch, her heart pounding in her chest. A familiar face standing in the open doorway looked back at her. "Lonnie?" she said, standing. "My god it is you. How did I not even hear you open the door?"
"Hey Glim," she said, cracking a smile. "You look pretty good for someone heading into their fourth straight deployment without a break. That's edging close to Vanguard numbers. Isn't it dangerous for you Battlemage types to go so long without a pause?"
Glimmer gaped at her, still not trusting what she saw. She hadn't seen Lonnie since leaving Etheria, obviously, and seeing her standing there almost convinced Glimmer she had actually fallen asleep and started dreaming in the observation room altogether. Lonnie was dressed in the grey and green service uniform of the Horde standing navy, looking virtually unchanged from when Glimmer last saw her save for a thin line running from her scalp, past her eye, and disappearing under her chin. She must have had some sort of sub-dermal implant installed, but otherwise…
"Holy hell, you look fantastic!" Glimmer said, going in for a hug that was warmly received and enthusiastically returned. "How the heck did you get here? Were you just hanging out as part of an extra garrison or something?"
Lonnie shook her head. "Nope, transferred from my last assignment to yours. Old girl was a beater." She made her way into the private booth and toward the view screen. "In fact," she said, leaning forward and squinting at something in the distance. "If you look really hard, you can see her from here."
Glimmer followed Lonnie's finger where she pointed and squinted too. There, idling in the distance just past one of the rotating arms of the Barrier node, floated a modest-sized carrier.
"She looks like she's seen better days," Glimmer said, noting the blast marks and battle scars across its hull.
"Yeah, she's emptying most of her personnel and traveling to a nearby shipyard on a skeleton crew. Needs heavy repairs and a retrofit."
"Good. It honestly doesn't look like it'd last another assignment." Glimmer glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. "Did I hear you correctly? Did you say something about the Vanguard?"
Lonnie turned to the side and showed off one of the patches on the arm of her service uniform: a stylized crest with the Horde wing motif, combined with the spear and shield graphic made famous by the emperor's personal elite force.
Glimmer whistled. "I shouldn't be surprised, really, considering it's you. But Vanguard is still impressive wherever you see them."
"You're not the only one out here making a name for yourself," Lonnie said, waggling her eyebrows at her. "Angel of Archanas."
Glimmer flushed. "Please, I've heard the story a million times, spare me the spotlight."
Lonnie laughed and thumped Glimmer on the back of the shoulder. "Space has changed you, princess. The old you would have beamed and jumped at the chance to retell the time you saved all those people on Rinne by sprouting—"
"Yes, yes," Glimmer said, waving to cut Lonnie off and beckoning her to take a seat on the couch before joining her. "I thought it was awesome too until I couldn't go three steps anywhere without everyone turning around and whispering about me all excited. I didn't sign on to the Enclave to be a celebrity." She forced a laugh. "Enough about me, what about you? How did you get in with the Vanguard of all things? I didn't even know you had left home."
"Well, speaking of home…you know how after everything got settled and the Enclave made that announcement? How they let every member of Hordak's old group sign up for service with the actual Imperial Horde if they wanted to?"
Glimmer nodded.
"Kyle, Rogelio, and I all signed on. None of us wanted to stay after what happened, and space just seemed so full of opportunities. It was rough at first, but we all promised to stay together as a team no matter what happened. Even turned down assignments if it meant us getting split up."
"You guys always were such good friends." Glimmer said.
"Yeah, and I guess we make a pretty damn good squad too, because we beat all the survival odds together. Nine deployments later, more successful missions than anyone has any right to, a lot of money lost for the people who bet against us, and we officially got scouted by the Vanguard. That was over a year ago."
"Nine deployments?" Glimmer said. "Nine? In three years? Are you serious?"
"Nine in a year and a half, actually," Lonnie said. "They got shorter but more numerous once we actually joined up with the emperor's finest. This is my twenty-second deployment now. Thirteenth in the Vanguard."
When Glimmer's eyes threatened to bulge out of her head, Lonnie laughed. "It's not like your Enclave assignments," she said. "We don't stay behind and help stabilize the worlds once the incursion is taken care of, and we don't help relocate evacuees. For us, as soon as the Beast is pushed back and dealt with, we're off. High impact missions only, then straight on to the next one as soon as the first is done."
"That's insane. I don't know how you haven't gone crazy from the stress yet," Glimmer said. "And did I hear you correctly that it's you and Kyle and Rogelio still together? If you're in the Vanguard then does that mean…?"
Lonnie nodded. "Yep. We're all in the same squad, after all."
"Kyle is a member of the Vanguard?" Glimmer didn't know how many more world-shattering revelations she could take.
"You wouldn't recognize him if you saw him again," Lonnie said, laughing. "He's a hell of a pilot. Nerves of steel, and he's gotten us and hundreds of others out of situations I didn't think we'd make it through."
"I believe you it's just…wow. So much has changed." A thought came to her and Glimmer furrowed her brow. "Hey, Vanguard got its name partially because you guys are almost always the first in on the battlefield, right? But the Omen-Kador is supposed to be one of the last ships arriving to assist. Was there like a mix-up with the transit manifests or something?"
Lonnie shot her a quizzical look. "You mean, you didn't see the orders?"
"I haven't seen anything," Glimmer said, shaking her head. "I got pulled from shore leave last minute as an emergency and barely got myself to my staging zone on time."
Lonnie reached into the breast pocket of her service jacket and handed Glimmer a small silicone chip. Glimmer felt her blood freeze over as she took it, already anticipating what was on the card without having to run it through a reader.
"I've been assigned to you as a section commander," Lonnie said. She stood, clicked her heels together and snapped off a sharp salute. Then she broke decorum by shooting Glimmer a wide smile. "As soon as I found out who I'd be serving under, I couldn't wait to get aboard and find you. I look forward to being a member of your first command, Ma'am."
Glimmer felt like she was about to be sick. The only thing that ran through her mind as she tried to keep from hyperventilating on the spot was one thought:
Oh no.
