The baffler beeped a thank-you.
Rose squeezed herself back out from underneath the awkward machine. Almost immediately she collided with the tail gunner, Spennie, who was wheezing and clutching at her rebreather.
“Took a hit—I got one of the fighters, but it exploded close to the ship and a lot of flying debris hit my turret. The turret’s solid but the darned gunsight shook itself off and came flying at me—it cut one of my air tubes. Take my guns while I seal this thing. You won’t be able to aim with accuracy, just blast away at anything you see—”
Spennie broke off, gasping, and sat down to deal with the torn tube.
Rose climbed past her into the gunner’s seat in the tail turret.
She didn’t even have time to strap herself in before she had to start firing. Through her first volley of random laser blasts, Rose heard Finch call, “Release!”
Seconds later came Nix’s response: “Bombs away!”
Rose hoped that the shells, plummeting planetward in the Atterran night, weren’t obvious to the enemy attackers.
She couldn’t see the shells herself in the dark, and maybe the pilots in the remaining TIEs couldn’t see them, either. Maybe no report about the Resistance bomber squadron would make it back to wherever the enemy starfighters were based.
Rose closed off this line of thought and concentrated on the battle. There seemed to be three of the TIEs still throwing themselves in fury at Hammer. In the heat of the conflict, Finch suddenly hurled the StarFortress forward in a burst of speed.
The sudden surge made Rose feel for a moment as if she were being yanked in half, as if the great ship were as fragile as a little one-seat landspeeder.
Finch banked sharply. Far below her feet, Rose strained for a glimpse of Hammer’s payload of supply canisters. But she couldn’t see a thing, and they must have been gone by then.
“I’ve got Rose’s screen,” Nix told them all—as soon as the bombs were gone he’d taken over Rose’s monitor station.
“Rose has got my guns. And I’ve got air!” Spennie gasped reassuringly.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this, thought Rose.
“Hey, Rose,” came Paige’s calm voice through the headset. “Good to have you up there.”
It wasn’t good, Rose thought. The TIEs whizzed back and forth across the sky, tacking, and came soaring in for another attack on Hammer. Rose blasted at the night randomly, knowing in the pit of her stomach that she didn’t have a hope of hitting anything.
It was terrifying. But at least if she and Paige were going to die, they’d die together….
“I can’t see Treasure anymore,” Nix reported from the monitor.
“Treasure tech, what’s going on?” Rose called anxiously, still connected to the other ship.
There was a moment of crackling interference, and then Cat’s voice came through with confidence, “We’re out of Bravo’s orbit. We’re back in the Atterra Belt. Our baffler’s fine and we’re on course for the hyperspace jump as soon as we clear the asteroid maze.”
“We’ll miss you,” said Rose. Treasure was on its own now, and she had other things to worry about.
Without the gunsight, it was impossible to get a decent fix on any of the attacking TIEs. Outside the tail gun turret, Rose could see them whizzing by in the dark like meteors, swarming around the heavy bomber. Hammer’s shields were holding against the cannon fire, but they couldn’t hold forever.
Paige suddenly gave a whoop that rang in Rose’s head, and below her, Rose saw the lower portions of the bomber light briefly with the sunny glow of an explosion.
“Got you!” Paige yelled. “Got you, you arrogant little space spider!”
“Wow, your competitive streak is showing!” Rose laughed in spite of herself. Paige’s usual calm had been shaken.
Did that mean there were only two of the evil things still flying around out there? Did that mean the Cobalt bomber squadron actually had a chance of winning?
From behind them in the dark, Rose saw a blast of cannon fire slice straight into one of the zooming fighter silhouettes. There was an explosion of radiance in the middle of the night sky. Rose had a perfect view: it was like watching a light show.
Behind Hammer, moving forward to its own drop in the dark, the bomber Cobalt Belle had taken out one of the TIEs.
Seconds later, another blast came from behind Belle—Cobalt Mare had also entered the fray.
“Hang in there, kids,” Finch called. “I’m powering us down until the rest of the squadron have made their drops. The guns will still be active, but don’t fire unless you absolutely have to—I want to use the dark to keep us hidden. The other Forts will cover us. Get ready to wait—we’ll be the last to leave.”
He paused, and added ominously, “If we last that long, that is.”
Rose sat behind her sightless guns in the dark, knowing she’d never be able to target the lone TIE fighter that was swooping around out there. The skin at the back of her neck crawled at the thought that it might fire at her and blow her out of the sky at any moment.
Hammer might survive a direct hit to the tail turret. But Rose wouldn’t.
She sat quietly, not firing at the empty sky. She watched Belle as it flew in below Hammer and emptied its own bomb bays.
Rose wondered where the other TIE fighter was.
The bomber Mare followed Belle into the drop zone.
“Belle, get out of here,” Finch commanded. “Don’t wait around for the rest of us. If that last TIE escaped…”
The pilot let the sentence go unfinished, but Rose thought he was probably thinking exactly what she was thinking.
If the last TIE had retreated—flown back to its base without taking the risk of attacking five armed StarFortress bombers on its own—the pilot of that fighter would without a doubt report the conflict he’d engaged in over Atterra Bravo. And then the First Order would know exactly whom to expect and where to expect them the next time the bombers made the airlift run into Atterra.
It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
But at least for now, there was no one shooting at them.
“Mare is done,” Finch reported from the pilot’s cockpit. “Crimson Dancer is on the way in, and then there’s just Crimson Bolide left. After that we’ll get out of here. Stay where you are, Rose—Spennie’s connected to the main oxygen supply and can’t get back to the tail turret. Nix, you’ve got the tech monitors covered?”
“I’m on it,” Nix confirmed.
Rose suddenly remembered that she wasn’t strapped in. She wriggled into Spennie’s harness and waited for Dancer and Bolide to make their drops. There was no sign of the last TIE fighter.
The last two bombers sailed away into Atterra Bravo’s outer orbit at last, and Finch veered after them and headed toward the Atterra Belt and beyond that the safety of hyperspace.
It didn’t seem to take very long. Maybe Finch was getting the hang of navigating the complex system of explosive mines and asteroids. Soon enough came that breathless moment of the jump to lightspeed. Starlight filled the turret and Rose’s eyes, then disappeared behind them.
They’d made the drop. The ship was intact. All the ships were intact. Nobody was hurt.
From their separate corners of the StarFortress, Rose and the rest of the crew joined voices in a cheer of victory and relief.
They were safe and alone again in the limitless, peaceful mottled blue of hyperspace.
“Get back down here, Rose,” Paige said. “Let’s ride back to Refnu together.”
“How many of those TIE fighters did you actually hit yourself?” Rose asked her sister.
Summer on Refnu meant that the dark blue daylight would last late into the evening, but a sleet storm was lashing the docking bays and the Resistance crews could hardly hear each other’s shouted greetings. All eleven bombers were safely back in port, and their crews were meeting on foot on the wharf for their mission debriefing—including those ships that had been icebreaking and those that had made
the first airlift run to Atterra.
“I got three of ’em. And I’m not even flying a fighter ship!” Paige caught her breath. She didn’t do a lot of boasting. But she was obviously pleased with herself.
“Three TIE fighters!” Rose repeated. “Wow—should I start calling you Master Paige? Are you a Jedi or something?”
Rose only half meant it as a joke. She was in awe of Paige’s gunnery skill—and, really, of every other skill her older sister possessed.
Paige laughed at Rose’s teasing.
“When they’re flying straight at you, it’s not hard to see them.”
It had been hard to aim at them, though, Rose remembered with a shiver. Of course Paige had had a working gunsight, but still…
“Bet it makes you wish you were flying a starfighter,” Rose said.
“I never even think about that when I’m shooting!” Paige said. “But you know what? It explains why I get so frustrated when they fly out of range. I can’t fly after them.”
“You know what that means…” Rose reminded her. “One of them got away.”
Paige turned to Rose and stared at her, alarmed and frowning. “Are we sure about that?”
“No one can confirm shooting it,” Rose said. “Maybe that TIE pilot doesn’t know how many of us there were. But he’s going to make a report, for sure.”
It was a sobering thought.
Fossil had come along to Refnu to manage her squadrons. Casca Panzoro was with her, anxious to hear how the first rescue mission to her homeworld had gone. Casca and Fossil, along with the bomber unit’s flight surgeon, Tiggs Kaiga, met with the StarFortress crews on the wharf.
When they’d begun to gather, Fossil pointed at the supply transport that had come with the squadrons. Five dozen or so bomber crew members plus ground personnel made their way through the service hatch and gathered on the loading floor of the transport, where there were portable heaters set up.
“The rumor is that the first Atterra run turned into quite the adventure,” quipped Fossil. “Tiggs is delighted you’ve brought yourselves back with no more damage than a sound night’s sleep will easily repair.”
Everyone murmured “Of course,” “Yes,” “No problem.” The StarFortress squadron teams adored their Old Lady, despite her terrifying appearance. She managed to make every single one of them feel indispensable.
“Casca Panzoro has a few words with which she would like to grace you,” said Fossil.
The district representative of the Firestone Islands gave Fossil a sober, grateful glance, and stood straight before the gathered assembly.
“Thank you,” said Casca Panzoro. “Thank you.” The gratitude in her voice, and on her face, was warm and full of relief. It made her look younger. “Even if the rest of this mission doesn’t go as planned, thank you for beginning it. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for your lives, your gifts, your generosity—but most of all, your trust.”
Casca paused, and added in a low voice, “May the Force be with you.”
There was an awkward little moment’s silence, and then the bomber crews broke into spontaneous applause.
After a few moments Fossil quieted them down by lifting her large hand.
“Well spoken, Casca,” she said, and Casca moved aside to let Fossil take control of the assembly again.
Fossil set to business straightaway.
“I will be pleased if the baffler technicians can give me full reports on what went wrong,” she told them. “Afterward I will be following the maintenance teams as we make ready for tomorrow’s shipment. There is ample fuel for all ships tomorrow, and the next day, but for our final mission the transport must return for fuel to—”
Fossil paused, and rumbled as if she were clearing her throat. There was to be no mention of D’Qar on this assignment, just in case someone might be listening.
“To the main depot,” she finished blandly. “First, let us discuss today’s events.”
The summer sleet storm was in full howl when Fossil dismissed everybody. Now Rose had to go along with each of the flight engineers to check that all was in place for the next day’s bombing run. She was grateful no one from Refnu seemed to guess that eleven of the five dozen ships moored there had a secret purpose that had nothing to do with excavating ore from the surface of an isolated world.
Before Rose did anything else, though, she went along with Cat to make sure he’d rewired all of Treasure’s baffler plugs correctly.
The Refnu native was a hulking young man so big-boned and bulky that he towered two full heads taller than Rose, and she was surprised to find him huddling against her and hanging on to her elbow as they battled the wind.
Rose wasn’t very big—she couldn’t have been much support in the storm’s deep dusk while they crossed the docks. As they entered the bay where the heavy bomber Treasure loomed, its massive height swaying slightly in the wind as if it couldn’t wait to take off again, Cat ducked his head and shouted into the storm, making an excuse for himself.
“I hate being outside,” he said, turning sheepishly away from Rose but still hanging on to her arm. “I’d rather be sitting in a bomber that’s going up in flames than standing out here in the wind.”
“Are you kidding? You grew up here on Refnu!”
He shook his head, huddling in the shelter of the bomber Treasure while Rose got the hatch open at the bottom of the empty clip that hadn’t been replaced yet.
“I grew up inside. We never went out if we could help it. I don’t mind flying in a storm, but I don’t like being out in it.”
Rose let Cat climb into the bomber first, and she let him sit down for a moment to catch his breath while she powered up the ground-based light and heat systems. They couldn’t get up the ladder past the bomb racks in their bulky outdoor gear, and it would take a minute or so for the interior of the StarFortress to warm up enough for them to take off their parkas.
“Wow,” Rose said, waiting with him. “I guess you usually use the tunnels to get around.”
“I sure do.”
Cat glanced up at her and said in a low voice, “I’ll tell you a secret. When I’m on a bombing run, and we’re skimming the surface of some inner planet—when it’s day, and there aren’t any clouds, and all you can see above you is blue sky and it’s so bright you have to wear filters—I pray to every atom in the galaxy that I won’t ever have to stand outside, unprotected, and look up at an empty sky like that. All that space. It scares me so bad it makes me sick. I don’t even like being in the cockpits when we’re flying. Darn right I grew up on Refnu. We don’t have windows here. I like to see walls.”
Listening to Cat talk, Rose grew suddenly aware of the smooth pendant lying against her skin beneath the layers of protective clothing—the piece of ore from the Otomok system that her parents had given her, the piece of home she shared with her sister—a hard keepsake from a cold, dark world bound with ice clouds.
Like Cat, Rose had grown up on an icebound planet where the living quarters never had windows, and people worked underground or on board insulated ships.
Rose loved her destroyed home fiercely.
But she wasn’t like Cat at all. She longed to stand outside, unprotected, and look up at a bright and empty sky.
She thought about it while she and Cat counted circuit sequences, and she couldn’t understand it at all.
FOSSIL WAS waiting for them when they descended to ground level again.
“All well?” Fossil rumbled. “I know what a responsibility this is for you, Rose Tico.”
“It’s all good,” said Rose, not sure she meant it but knowing that it was what Fossil wanted to hear. She didn’t think Fossil realized how much the responsibility scared her. “We had trouble with Treasure’s power baffler on this run, but Cat knew exactly what to do.”
“I have a request for you, Rose Tico,” said Fossil. “Wasp’s flight engineer is struggling to adjust to the climate here on Refnu. She returned sick and shaking after the journey to the i
ce mines today, and Tiggs wants her to rest for a day under the sunlamps before she flies again. If your bombardier, Nix, were to cover your monitors, could you fly with Wasp on tomorrow’s mission to Atterra in place of their technician?”
Rose nearly said yes. It was such a simple, reasonable request.
But something inside her began to unravel a little and stopped her from answering right away.
Then, when she did answer, Rose found herself trying to make an excuse.
“Leave Nix on his own with the baffler? No way. He doesn’t understand the little monster.”
“I am surprised,” Fossil commented. “You are usually one who obeys commands, yet now, when called upon for support, you criticize another’s skill. You have trained the other flight engineers. You can train your bombardier. You know this. What is your real objection?”
Rose knew that the truth had nothing to do with obeying commands.
She hesitated, then admitted softly, “I’ve never flown without my sister.”
She didn’t think she could fly without Paige.
Cat stood listening, hanging back a step or two without interrupting, a little embarrassed.
“You have always before accommodated my requests,” Fossil said. She seemed curious rather than angry. “You have never refused.”
Aware of Cat listening, Rose flailed to make herself sound less cowardly. “I’m like one of those sonar swallows. I can only fly as one of a pair.” Ugh, she thought, that doesn’t sound funny—just super sentimental. Rose added unhappily, “I know I’m the tech support for the power bafflers. But I just don’t want to fly without Paige.”
Rose thought of Reeve Panzoro, and of how he’d accused her of never being able to make a decision without getting Paige’s okay.
But Rose knew this was different. This had nothing to do with what Paige thought.
The fear that Rose scrunched into a ball in a corner of her brain while she was focused on an operational bombing run—while she was climbing from the bomb bay to the tech monitors, scrambling around in the innards of the baffler, or emerging to take over the damaged guns of the tail turret—that fear stayed put because Rose knew Paige was down there in calm control of the laser cannons beneath the bomb bays.
Cobalt Squadron Page 11