Glimmer Sheen's Story

The dusty earth of Blackrock kicked up as a pair of boots stopped. A woman's figure dressed in a red, white, and black leather jumpsuit that clung to her body like a second skin looked through the gold tint of her helmet to scan the area. A ponytail of impossibly long blond hair blew in the hot breeze against her back. The flaps of her black scarf snapped in the wind as it kicked up harder.

A dust storm was blowing in from the east.

There was shelter in the distance and the woman began to move again though this time more quickly. Glimmer broke out into an all out run. She was racing against the storm; a deadly storm that could bury her alive or thicken the air so much it was unbreathable.

The woman cursed loudly as her foot landed on a rock at a bad angle. She went tumbling down hard. Her helmet whipped around to gauge how far she had to go until she reached the relative safety of the building.

She scrambled, digging her gloved hands into the cracked earth until she was able to run on two feet again. The woman limped as the dust storm rolled closer and closer...

The woman slammed the door closed behind her. She pressed her back against the wood and steel structure. The helmet leaned backward to rest. She was out of breath and her ankle was useless. The woman was able to heal herself, albeit over a short period of time. She groaned in pain and leaned forward to hold her ankle.

There was no possibility that she was going to remove her boot. It was keeping the swelling down and if it was fractured, the woman would need the support for her displaced or broken bones.

It was just her luck!

Whoever the mysterious woman was she had crashed landed on Blackrock in the Kreios System. Her spacial navigation had gone on the fritz as she was performing maintenance on her Sheol. Next thing she knew she was being pulled into the gravitation force of Blackrock at an atrocious angle. It had taken every scrap of skill to come out of that one alive.

And now the woman was stranded in the middle of nowhere inside a ramshackle shack on a dusty backwater planet.

The woman grabbed an empty rusted can and threw it against the far wall in her anger and misfortune.

There wasn't really any possible way for the man to tell someone had entered his safehouse, not until the engine of the bike died down under the roaring sandstorm and the figure riding it climbed to the shack itself.

He entered, quick to turn as he did so and close the door before too much of the sand could get inside. As the door shut, the sound of the storm dulled considerably and it was only then that he realized that there was an intruder. If not for the sight of the woman directly, then from the sight of things that were not how he left them.

"Why are you in here?"

The woman's head turned at a sound caught by her keen ears and the amplification systems in her helmet. There was something outside that was not part of the storm. The woman immediately became alert and dragged herself away from the door. She placed as much distance between it and her as she could before it opened.

This was not a good situation. Blackrock was not a place for a woman to be alone, especially if it was unfamiliar territory and she had very little resources. Things were just getting brighter and brighter for the unknown woman.

Pressed up against a corner in the room, the gold tinted helmet looked straight at the white-haired man. He asked a question and she answered in the most calm voice she could muster.

"There is a storm. I crash landed on the planet and I needed shelter. This was the closest building to me," she said in a clear voice despite the helmet on her head.

"Oh," was all he replied, not making any move to force her out of the door or offer her his sympathies. Instead, he removed his wallet from his pocket and took a small roll of a hundred or so credits, swatting it at her like something he couldn't wait to discard.

"There's a town an hour to the west, in the canyon."

He put his wallet away, then kicked the rug from under his feet in order to remove the planks of wood underneath that made up the floor. After five, it became apparent that a trap door had been hidden underneath, and with a strong pull he opened the metal hatch and disappeared into the dark shaft below, closing it behind him.

Beneath the helmet, the woman's face was one of confusion. She reached up and opened the locks that kept her helmet connected to her flight suit. Whoever this woman was it was easy to say that was pretty. She had bright blue eyes with a mischievous gleam, a small nose, a wonderful ivory complexion, and a supple mouth.

Her eyes locked onto the credits that had been rudely thrown at her. Her blond eyebrows drew together into a tight knot. She didn't move to take the currency.

When the man disappeared, the woman dragged herself over to the trap door and tried to open it.

It was out of sheer curiosity that the woman attempted to follow the man. That and she wanted to know why he would have just thrown money at her like that. Did he plan for her to leave or was she allowed to stay until the storm passed?

"So the contract was a success, yes?"

Asked a silhouette behind a computerised screen, hooked up to a large, flat-keyed keyboard and several neon lights by a large amount of cables and other electronics.

"The pay was two thousand credits in cash," the man replied, removing his goggles and headwraps. "Minus one hundred for local expenses."

"Very well. Then that is... One thousand nine hundred times one hundred equals an additional one hundred and ninety thousand credits added to your account."

"Thank you," he replied, removing his boots as he sat back in a chair. "I'm leaving tomorrow, I'm tired of all this sand. What else is there?"

"The Elodisien chancellor. Pays seven hundred thousand."

"How many more jobs in the sector?"

"Half a dozen, maybe. Most pay relatively well, but any thug should be enough."

"I don't want to travel all that way for the sake of one contract," the man replied with a sigh. "But I'll think about it."

"Good. Still, I'll keep the database search running. If anything interesting pops up I'll let you know."

The screen shut off, leaving him in silence.

Oh, shit. An assassin.

The woman scrambled back away from the hatch. Glimmer had closed it before she moved away from it. She couldn't remember if she had made any noise doing so because of her panic. Her heart raced inside her chest and she shoved her helmet back over her head. If anything it would keep the white-haired man from knowing her identity.

The woman locked the helmet back into place and shimmied back into the corner she was in earlier.

Everything seemed the same as it had been before the assassin disappeared down into his secret hole.

"Don't be here tomorrow," he said, as he climbed up out of the hatch and watched the woman in the corner. "At noon the building will self destruct, so I highly suggest leaving before then if you want to live."

He straightened out his wraps, then began to wind them back around his face and hair as protection against the sandstorm outside. Replacing his goggles over his eyes, he took in a deep breath and opened the door a little.

"I'm leaving now, goodbye. There's a hover bike outside that you should be able to use to get to the town I mentioned, if you need it."

With nothing else needing to be said, he stepped out of the shack and ventured into the storm, quickly getting lost in the sand.

Glimmer was perplexed in the least. So far her adventures on the dust cloud of a planet were-... well, Glimmer couldn't exactly describe it, even if she tried.

The assassin had warned her to leave before high sun tomorrow. She looked down at her ankle and then down at the miniature mounds of sand that had formed on the floor from when the man had left into the storm.

How in the hell was she supposed to know when it was noon if the storm didn't pass before then?!

Glimmer groaned and knocked the back of her helmet up against the wall. She did it again and again and again. This was just her luck and it didn't help that she was missing a certain someone.

"Unbelievable," Glimmer said to herself and to the empty room in front of her.

"I see skies of blue. Clouds of white. Bright blessed days. Dark sacred nights. And I think to myself ... what a wonderful world. Yeah right," Glimmer said to herself before she gave up and closed her eyes.

The battle over Blackrock had ended. The Denaili fleet had been repelled, for the time being, and several Nalinathrian warships hung overhead in a low orbit.

This sector of space had never seen the like of either faction before. While they were probably nothing altogether new, technologically speaking, there had not been any incursions from either of them.

The Denaili pressing this far into uncharted territories meant only that the Nalinathrian Legions had to follow. And so they did, pushing them back to whence they had come.

The battle had not been without loss, however. Among the powerful warships of the Nalinathrian Advance Fleet, many crippled wrecks lingered and mingled with those of the Denaili. Salvage efforts would purge the system of any traces of their presence before the Nalinathrians departed.

But there was one matter to attend on Blackrock.

A shuttle burned hard through the scant atmosphere of the planetoid. It was designed for rapid planetary insertion, and bore the sigil of Nalinathris; a blue twin-headed bird of prey, emblazoned over a shield and blades. It was armed with twin pintle-mounted autocannons on either side, and one dual auto-cannon forward facing. It was, simply, meant to drop off a large number of troops in haste.

It came down in the vast expanse of a deserted tract of land. Kicking up dust and debris, landing gear probed outward to settle the ship on a level plane. Nearby, the wreckage of a Nalinathrian fighter craft lay. Salvage teams would eliminate it later, but the sole occupant of the landing craft was more interested in the nearby disabled Battle Armor.

Barely giving the craft time to cool down from entry, the loading ramp hissed and lowered. Striding down the opening portal was a massive man with an almost regal posture.

He wore the fatigues of a Fleet Commander. Multiple badges adorned his figure, telling of his status. Ages of warfare showed on his face through layers upon layers of scars. He bore no weapon, save for a large pistol, which was safely holstered on his hip.

The man was Commander Nachytsm Encaitar. He had one mission here on Blackrock, and that was to find his wife.

Dark brown eyes locked on Teraleen. The assault shuttle that carried the Battle Armor, along with multiple others, had been shot down early into the battle. Nachytsm was furious. Teraleen had been jettisoned, it seemed, but not before it either suffered extensive damage, or was damaged by the fall. The craft carrying the rest of the suits had detonated on impact with a plateau farther down the range.

Nachytsm did not sense his wife nearby, but he could sense her somewhere. Turning back to the shuttle, he charged back inside. “Pilot,” he called out, his voice rough from many years of shouting orders. “Contact Salvage Operations. Tell them they have a retrieval op on a Class Eight B.A.”
“Aff, Sir. Our directive?”
“Take us around. Keep us low. We’ll search through the night if we have to.” Nachytsm’s words brooked no questioning. He’d stay ground-side until the moon exploded if he had to.

Nachytsm sat waiting in the hold as his shuttle pilot flew them around the wasteland. It was a perilous storm. If the craft had not been built to survive rapid entry, it would have likely been torn apart.

The Commander’s eyes were closed. Long ago he had bound himself to the woman he chose as his wife, and through that bond, he could sense her. The only reason he had not found her yet was because it had been so long since he had needed to track her down.

Nachytsm opened his eyes with a start. He had dozed during the night, but when he finally sensed his wife, the man awoke. Standing, he barged into the cockpit and took a look across the landscape.

It was desolate. Most anything that had been out there probably didn’t survive the night. Nachytsm had been through less furious storms that had eaten the flesh off bone.
But he could sense her, and he did not give up.

“Pilot,” the Commander uttered suddenly, pointing to a dot on the horizon. “Heading 0-1-1.”
“Aff,” came the curt reply.
The shuttle made speed for the tiny structure. It was nearing high noon on the small moon, and it was about time the fleet carried on.



Glimmer woke with a start. She did not remember falling asleep. Panic rifled through the woman as she remembered what the assassin had told her. She unlocked her helmet and took it off. There was light pouring in through the boards nailed over the windows of the shack.

The sole fact that Glimmer was still alive meant that it hadn’t yet reached the noon marker. She doubted she had much more time left. Without thinking ahead of herself, Glimmer attempted to stand. She cried out in pain as her ankle gave out beneath her. The woman crashed back down to the floor.

A slew of curses in a foreign tongue flew out of Glimmer’s mouth.

Her silver colored eyes looked toward the door across the room. Perhaps if she scooted her way out of the shack, she could at least make it far enough away from the building. There was light coming into the room so she assumed the storm had passed. Glimmer took stock of the room around her. There was barely anything useable, and nothing she could use as a crutch to help herself out. Glimmer had no other choice but to drag her doomed ass out the door.

And then the woman looked down at her good foot. If she took off the boot then maybe she’d be able to hop out of there, but that wouldn’t get her far. She’d exhaust herself before too long.

“Damn it all,” Glimmer shouted to the room. “My husband is taking me on a cruise after this shit!”

Her husband. Glimmer’s lip trembled as she thought of Nachytsm. She didn’t want to die and leave him behind. No. She wasn’t going to die! Glimmer pulled herself up off the floor using the boards nailed over the windows.

“This is going to hurt,” Glimmer breathed in a whisper to herself. “But you will heal. You always heal.” She placed weight down on her bad ankle and began to hobble towards the door with pained tears running down her face.


“Bring us down there,” Nachytsm demanded of the pilot. He pointed towards the small shack in the middle of nowhere. He could sense his wife there. He could feel her pain, and he gritted his teeth to keep himself from further pressuring the pilot. He was doing his job admirably.

“Aff,” the man replied. The shuttle’s powerful thrusters flared off while the landing jets burned into life. The sound it would make as it came in for a landing could probably be heard for miles.

Nachytsm didn’t even wait for the shuttle to touch the ground before he had opened the loading ramp and jumped out. With a powerful stride, the large man marched up to the door of the shack and nearly ripped the door off its hinges in his haste to open it. “Glimmer!” he shouted into the structure as he did so.

“You don’t have to shout in my face, you big brute!” Glimmer shouted back at Nachytsm. She sighed in relief and threw her arms around her husband. The embrace didn’t last long before she gasped and looked back up at him.

“Nachytsm! What time is it!” Glimmer demanded. The building was set to blow at high noon according to that mysterious assassin. There was another word Glimmer wanted to use to describe that man but he did sort of save her life after all, but only to turn around and abandon her in a giant bomb!

“Pick me up! We have to go. No time to lose!”


Nachytsm’s relief was almost palpable. It didn’t help that he could feel Glimmer’s, as well. He didn’t even mind her shouting at his face. He didn’t expect her to be right in the doorway, but he took her into his arms almost immediately.

“Glimmer,” he said again, softer this time. Her question gave him pause. “My chrono’s not set for this world, but I would say-”
Her words cut him off. Nachytsm widened his eyes at her, but did not hesitate. He trusted her intuition, always.
Well, not exactly always. There were often times where she demanded she be allowed into a particular battle, saying she would be fine, when in fact her transport would get shot down over a desert moon. Nachytsm would give her some flak for that later.

Picking her up, Nachytsm brought her outside, rushing towards the waiting shuttle. “Your armor is safe,” he said conversationally as he charged forward.

Over Nachytsm’s shoulder, Glimmer watched the shack as she was carried away from it. When he mentioned Teraleen, she looked back to her husband.

“She’s safe? That’s wonderful, but you should probably run. I’m not sure when high noon is on this awful satellite but a man told me that shack was going to blow sky high at high noon. I believe him,” Glimmer stated in a dry tone.

“He was a real good conversationalist. You two would have gotten along just fine a few thousand years ago.”


At the mention that the building might explode, Nachytsm hastened his pace considerably. He didn’t fear for himself, particularly, but he wouldn’t see Glimmer come to harm. Besides, she’d ordered him to be more careful. Even though he technically outranked her, these days, he held to that.

Stepping onto the boarding ramp, he shouted into his shuttle. “Pilot! Get us to minimum safe distance for potential nuclear blast!” Glimmer said it was going to explode, and he didn’t want to assume anything less than apocalyptic might occur.

Then, he scoffed at Glimmer as he walked the rest of the way into the shuttle. “Sounds like a real charming gentleman.”

“You bet,” Glimmer said with a grin on her face. “By the way, you owe me a cruise on a resort planet,” she mentioned to Nachytsm. Her face grew somber and her eyes fell away from her husband.

“Did anyone else survive?” Glimmer asked quietly.

Nachytsm chuckled lightly at Glimmer’s attitude. He silently agreed that they could use some quality time. They had, after all, been on the Denaili’s tail for the better part of a year.

The shuttle’s thrusters kicked into life suddenly. Nachytsm kept a firm hold on Glimmer and a steady footing as they blasted away from the ground. He looked out through the still-open ramp hatch, then walked deeper into the shuttle and hit the closing button.

“I’m afraid not,” Nachytsm said, setting Glimmer down on one of the shuttle’s impact seats. It hadn’t been the first time her unit had experienced casualties, but there were seldom cases of complete loss. “Your transport hit a plateau wall.”

Nachytsm had knelt down before her, examining her leg. He was no medic, but many years of tending his own wounds had lent him a basic understanding of how to help others.

Glimmer felt all the air in her lungs disappear as she sighed. She cursed herself some more in a hushed whisper to herself. Her entire unit had been wiped out and she was the sole survivor. Glimmer closed her eyes for a moment as her husband fretted over her injury.

It hadn’t been a spacial navigation issue at all. They had been hit. There was an explosion and screaming. Glimmer had shouted for them to head toward the B.A. They were already burning up in the atmosphere by the time she reached hers. Her memory went blank after that flash.

“You’re going to have to take the boot off. It’s broken or sprained. I’m not sure which,” Glimmer said to Nachytsm. She looked away from him and her bottom lip quivered. She didn’t want to cry but tears formed in her eyes anyway.

There was a high pitched whine from outside the shuttle before the shack imploded in on itself, disappearing completely from Blackrock.

Nachytsm didn’t pay any attention to the blast. The pilot would ensure they were at a minimum safe distance, and then bring them back to the fleet. His focus was on Glimmer. She had sprained her ankle, from what he could tell.

Following her advice he removed her boot and looked over her extremity. The full body jumpsuit covered her from head to toe, very literally, aside from when she took her helmet off.

Nachytsm wasn’t sure what he could do about a sprain. A broken bone he could at least set, but sprains were not his department. Looking up to Glimmer’s face, he could tell she was distraught by the expression and the tears.

The Commander was a hard man. He would seldom be seen in his daily life with anything but a dour, serious expression on his face. He was quick to order his men and was not afraid of anything.

Glimmer was the only person who saw the other side of him. The softer side. The side that cared. She was the only thing that could bring him fear by being lost. Nachytsm raised one of his hands to caress her cheek, trying to comfort her. “I’m glad you are alright,” he said gruffly.

As Nachytsm held her cheek, Glimmer felt a few tears slide down her cheek. She couldn’t look at him while she cried. The woman bit down on her bottom lip and stared at a console until she felt that she could control herself.

“I am alright,” Glimmer said to him and to herself. She cleared her throat and took a few calming breaths. “I’m just glad that I came out alive,” she said to Nachytsm. Fresh tears threatened to spring back up in her silver eyes but she held them back.

“I just have a sprained ankle, is all, Nachytsm,” Glimmer said to her husband in a broken voice. “Everyone else died but I just have a sprained ankle from running to shelter from a sand storm after crashing through the atmosphere and my ship hit a plateau wall.” Her brows drew together. She could have very well died but, no, she escaped without a single scratch.

Glimmer’s fingers tapped a rhythm on her leg out of frustration and uncertainty. “What’s the report on the Denaili?” she asked Commander Encaitar.


Nachytsm stared at Glimmer’s face as she braced herself. He had always admired her strength and tenacity, but he knew the vulnerable side of her as well. He never thought any less of her for it. If anything, he further admired her for being able to show her weaknesses on occasion.

“It is war,” he said to her simply. “People die, many times without a chance. You’re the only one who’s not allowed to,” he rumbled. “If you had died... I’d have had to kill you.” He smiled a little bit to show he was joking.

Standing up, Nachytsm sat in the impact chair next to Glimmer and placed an arm around her shoulders. He wanted to utilize the privacy they had while it lasted. “We’ve pushed them away from the sector, and they’re retreating back into the Contested territories. We should be able to keep them out of this sector until they make another large push.”