Rose’s headset blocked the sound of the ship’s engines, but with her hands flat on the floor of the metal flight deck beneath her body, she could feel the faint hum of power throbbing reliably against her palms. Everything was still working.
Paige spoke with her usual calm from the lower gun ball turret below the bomb bay. “All right down here. I guess General Leia’s suspicions were right, as usual, huh?”
“Looks like it,” said Finch. “Bombardier? You with us?”
“Hanging on for dear life and on target for surveillance,” confirmed Nix. “That hit me halfway down the access ladder. Pretty happy I’m wearing these traction gloves.” His voice wasn’t as steady as Paige’s as he answered Finch’s roll call—no one’s ever was—but Nix sounded determined, and if he’d been hurt he wasn’t saying so.
It was a nasty shock to discover that there really were defensive weapons mounted on the countless asteroids of the Atterra Belt.
“There’s another of those blasted space rocks coming up at oh-two-oh—I don’t know if it’s armed or not. So brace yourselves,” warned Finch. “Tech, how are you doing?”
Rose realized she was still lying facedown on the flight deck.
ROSE GRABBED for the edge of the chair that was locked in place in front of her flight engineer’s monitors and pulled herself up so she was sitting on the floor.
She could see Finch up front in the cockpit. If he had turned around, he would have seen Rose sitting there, but he didn’t dare look away from the flight path he was negotiating through Atterra’s bizarre planetary system.
“I’m okay,” Rose said shakily, and with another effort pulled herself back to her feet. She glanced at the tech screens. From her console in the ship’s rough, windowless fuselage, there was no outside view except for what showed on the monitors. The images of Atterra’s asteroids showed a navigator’s nightmare, a dazzle of obstacles.
Rose repeated, “I’m okay!”
“Hey, that’s great news,” Finch said. “Because I need your help up here—the starboard rocket won’t stop firing. I think it jammed when I kicked the links. It’s wasting fuel we don’t have and boosting the power that we’re trying so hard to hide and plus—”
He paused to take a breath, and finished, “Plus it’s trying to steer us straight into this blasted asteroid.”
“Maybe you need a refresher in flight training.” Rose kept her voice light as she made the lame joke. She knew Paige was listening, down in her fragile and exposed crystal sphere of a gunner’s turret beneath the belly of the heavy bomber, and a lame joke would reassure Paige that Rose wasn’t hurt.
Rose ran along the flight deck to the cockpit. Hammer wasn’t built for a copilot, so there was only one fixed seat in the cockpit and no room for Rose except to stand behind Finch. From the clear egg-shaped dome of the pilot’s canopy, Rose had a quick look at the real challenge Finch was facing.
It was almost like looking at the rush of starlight that you saw for a moment as you entered hyperspace. But the thousands of lights that glowed all around, as far as the eye could see, weren’t stars; they were the asteroids of the Atterra Belt, lit not by their own energy but by the glow of their shared yellow sun. The farthest appeared as steady stars, those in the middle distance as glowing moons, and way too close for comfort, the nearest appeared to be a mountainous and barren globe of red rock looming above the StarFortress.
“What did you have to go and kick the activator links for?” Rose scolded.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Finch said defensively. “It happened when the cannons got us.”
His guidance of the ship was featherlight even beneath his gloves, one finger hovering over the controls. He didn’t look worried.
But Rose heard the strain in his voice when he said, “I can’t let go of the ship. Can you get at the links if I put my feet up?”
“Cake,” Rose said, as if it were going to be easy.
Finch raised his knees and wedged his boots up against the frame of the cockpit dome. He didn’t look away from the view outside as he assumed the awkward position, or shift his hands a fraction from the controls.
Rose crawled underneath the pilot’s seat. The panel that was supposed to protect the links for the rudder rockets was wedged inward as a result of the kick Finch had given it, obviously jamming the rockets into a permanent on position. It would have been an easy fix if Finch could have moved out of the way.
Rose managed to wedge a lever from her tool belt behind the jammed panel, but she couldn’t get into the right position to apply enough force to loosen it.
“Put your right foot down,” Rose said.
“Seriously? Like this?”
“Just like that.” She took hold of Finch’s boot and guided it to rest on top of the lever she’d wedged in position.
“Now kick down. Just like you did earlier.”
“You want me to give it another kick?” Finch laughed without mirth. “Okay—”
He obeyed cautiously, his eyes on the myriad large and small asteroids ahead of him and the enormous one they were in immediate danger of crashing into.
“Not like that. Use the back of your heel—just one good firm kick,” Rose said.
Finch kicked, and the stuck panel shot out of the wall with a clatter. Rose dodged the metal slab and Finch’s descending boot. She scanned the rocket links, spotted the one that had been forced too far forward, and eased it back into place.
“Perfect!” Finch cheered. “Thank you! Was that so hard?”
Rose banged her headset against the bottom of the pilot’s seat trying to get out.
“Ow! Does this ship hate me?”
She straightened up, holding on to the back of Finch’s seat, and for a moment forgot her outrage. She just watched, riveted by the incredible unfeeling beauty of the glowing system.
Then she remembered why it might be dangerous.
“Be careful about getting close to those big asteroids,” Rose warned the pilot. “The power baffler fails at close range. If there’s anyone there, they’ll be able to see us with their own eyes.”
“We’re back on track,” Finch called to the rest of the crew. “Rose, take your seat in observation. Nix, map that automatic cannon on the asteroid we just passed, will you? Call it Atterra One-Seven-Oh-Six-Four. I don’t want to trigger it a second time. It probably sends a firing report and if we go near it again, whoever put it there will start to get suspicious.”
“Plus it might shoot at us again,” came Paige’s calm voice through Rose’s headset.
“Cannon on Atterra One-Seven-Oh-Six-Four,” Nix said. “Got it.”
“Then get ready to release the probe droids,” Finch added. “Atterra Bravo should be in range in ten.”
“Counting,” Rose heard Nix confirm through her headset.
Rose’s “observation” seat was the upper gun turret, high in the tail of the heavy bomber. Like Finch’s guns and those in Paige’s ball turret far below beneath the bomb bays, the guns in the tail turret were loaded just in case Hammer happened to encounter enemy fire.
Rose hoped she wouldn’t have to use her guns. The baffler might be able to hide the power from the ship’s engine, but it couldn’t disguise the power blast of laser fire.
She gave the baffler a fond pat as she squeezed past it to get to her observation post. The machine chirped at her in reply.
As Rose climbed into the seat in the clear crystal sphere of the tail turret, again she felt she’d been struck through the heart by the unimaginable beauty of Atterra’s thousands of asteroids.
“Wow, what a view!” she exclaimed.
“This is what we wanted to see, right?” Paige’s voice in Rose’s headset was warm as she agreed with her younger sister. “Remember how we missed the stars when the First Order filled our sky with dust and warships? When we used to talk about seeing the galaxy together, it was for this view, right?”
“Sure, this is just like a luxury galactic vacation cruise,” Rose joke
d.
But she had to admit it was beautiful. The asteroids were dazzling, lighting space all around like moons and stars, as far as the eye could see.
“A pilot’s dream!” Paige added.
“Ha ha,” said Finch, who was probably sweating. It had to be nerve-racking flying in this system. “Nix, the release is coming up in two. We’re about to leave the belt. Then it’s easy riding till we enter Atterra Bravo’s inner orbit.”
Paige and Rose, facing backward, hadn’t been able to see the planet as they approached. But as Finch drew alongside Atterra Bravo to release the spy probes, their view changed.
Atterra Bravo was a world of pearly dark gold, seemingly glowing in the sunlight with that superficial serenity many worlds had from a distance. Even Rose’s own cold and twilit home planet, Hays Minor, had had that serene glow when viewed from space.
“We’re in the drop zone,” Finch reported. “Release when ready.”
“Bombs away!” called Nix exuberantly. Rose knew he’d been ready, with his finger on the remote trigger, the whole time she’d been fixing the rudder rockets.
From her seat high in the tail of the StarFortress, Rose couldn’t see the bomb bay doors open. But she could see the probe droids as they jettisoned into Atterra Bravo’s orbit—like a fine storm of dust swirling away from the ship and rapidly disappearing. They’d circle the planet over the course of the next eighteen hours or so, gathering data, and then the ship would go back to collect them.
In the meantime, the bomber would travel to the far side of Atterra’s sun and visit Bravo’s sister planet.
Rose’s heart gave a little jump of excitement at the thought. Just like home, she thought. So far, so good.
“Bomb bay doors shut,” Nix reported. “Ready for the next drop when you are, Captain.”
“All right—we’re on our way.”
Then it was back out to the cover of the myriad asteroids and off to meet Atterra Alpha.
Rose watched the beautiful dark gold pearl of Atterra Bravo grow smaller behind her. She wouldn’t be able to see its sister world, Atterra Alpha, until they were alongside it.
“Keep a good lookout,” Finch said. “If the rumor is true that the First Order is policing traffic between the two Atterras, there are probably more of those guns.”
He added ominously, “And we don’t have any way of guessing where.”
They flew steadily around the sun, dodging celestial bodies along the way, and made the next release at Atterra Alpha without meeting anything out of the ordinary.
Then they had to wait for the probes to do their work. Paige took over the pilot’s controls for a while so Finch could get some rest.
The longer they waited, the more aware they became that the area wasn’t as empty as it seemed.
Ships large and small appeared and disappeared on the monitors, blinking across the screen and winking out again. Some of them seemed to be in orbit around the two inhabited planets. Some of them appeared to be patrolling the complex belt of asteroids.
Rose wondered uneasily if they were looking for intruders.
If General Leia was right about Atterra being forcibly blockaded, then surely someone was trying to keep spy ships like the Resistance heavy bomber Hammer out.
Rose figured it was worth repeating what she’d told Paige earlier.
“The baffler mostly hides how much power we’re giving off, but we can’t stop anyone from seeing us with their own eyes,” she reminded her sister through the comm system as Paige piloted the StarFortress. “If we hide behind something big, those ships are less likely to spot us. Get close to one of the asteroids if you can.”
“You told Finch before not to get close.”
Rose rolled her eyes and sighed. Of course no one could see her.
“Get close but not too close, okay? Not so close we attract another automatic cannon. Just stay in the same place for a while.”
They were lucky. The asteroids did seem to hide the Resistance bomber; at least, no one noticed it. The baffler purred away, reliably doing its job to disguise their power emissions, and the dark side of the protective asteroid kept the light from glancing off Hammer’s reflective surfaces. For several hours the StarFortress lurked out of sight.
For a few minutes Rose actually slept, too, fitfully, lying back in the gunner’s seat beneath the reflected light of the Atterra system’s many asteroids.
Finch woke her when they were ready to gather up the spy probes. Rose had to be back at her flight engineer’s monitors for that, because she was in charge of counting them in like a nerf herder while Nix, below in the open bomb bay, slotted the probe droids back into place in the bomb racks.
“I’ve got a little bad news,” Finch said. “We’re losing a lot of the probes. I had a look at their comm reports and the ones in the most distant orbital paths keep colliding with debris around both planets. Some of the probes activated their own self-destructs.”
“What? Let me take a look.”
Rose and Nix leaned over the monitors together, trying to tally the numbers. Because of their mini-baffler devices, the spy droids didn’t show any trace of energy at all on the tracking screens. But every now and then one of them sent out a communications ping to let the bomber know it was doing its job. They were programmed to send out a “last word” if they exploded.
There was a growing list of last words.
Nix frowned. “I guess we were bound to lose a few.”
“That’s more than a few!” Rose exclaimed. “That’s seven percent and climbing! They’re supposed to act like droids, not a panicking nerf herd!”
“The ones we’ve lost were all in this outer ring at the edge of the planet’s orbit,” said Finch. “They’re running into something. If there is a blockade in place—”
“If?” Rose repeated darkly, remembering the automatic cannons.
Finch ignored her sarcasm and continued, “If there’s a blockade, this looks like part of it must include a minefield around the planet’s outer orbit. Maybe also further in. We’ll have to be careful picking up the probes. We don’t want to run into some kind of booby-trapped explosive device, either.”
Hammer sailed out of hiding and back into orbit around Atterra Alpha, on track to intercept what remained of the first five hundred probe droids that had finished their spying sweep. The probes appeared on the monitors only as dots, lifeless as meteoroids. But they were all programmed to come home to the StarFortress, and Rose and Nix had to make sure they were all accounted for.
Paige and Rose spotted the first of the booby-trapped space mines at the same moment. Rose saw it as a sudden blossom of light on one of her monitors. Paige saw it through the crystal panes of the ball turret.
“There’s a mine!” Paige cried out from the lower turret.
“You see it?” Finch said sharply. “Which way?”
“I didn’t see it. I saw the explosion! One of the returning probes ran into it.”
“Yeah, that one’s gone,” Rose said. The light on her screen had been the energy trace of the explosion. Now the doomed spy droid’s final report flashed before her eyes.
“Look alive, kids,” said Finch. “We’re either in a minefield or we’re right on the edge of it.”
“I do see one!” said Paige. “Behind us, though—sort of silver. You can see them when the sunlight catches them. Smaller than a starfighter.”
Sure enough, mines were scattered like jewels in a ring around Atterra Alpha, silent and shining and deadly. Although loaded with explosives, they weren’t powered devices. They didn’t emit any energy of their own. They just blew up if something ran into them.
Finch slowed the pace of the heavy bomber, looking. The pressure to spot the mines fell mostly on the pilot; Paige could see only behind the ship, and Rose and Nix couldn’t see anything.
“I think we’re outside them,” Finch said. “We’d have hit one already otherwise.”
“There’s one!” yelled Paige. “Underneath me. You mis
sed it by about ten meters.”
Finch jinked, throwing the heavy bomber practically on its side. When it was upright again he said shakily, “That was another.”
“Should we get out?” Nix called.
“Can’t,” Finch said briefly. “Got to pick up the probes or we risk endangering the Resistance.”
Rose counted them down as Finch flew cautiously.
But as the spy droids traveled in a steady stream back to their mother ship, Rose began to feel a bit more confident that the hop might actually be a success.
“Am I the only one who feels like we’re a big old giant bait bird sitting out here in the open, waiting to gather up the baby birds while the predators close in on us?” Finch complained.
“Oh, stop moaning,” said Paige in her matter-of-fact way. “No one’s noticed us yet, and that’s because we’re being careful not to be noticed.”
“Yeah, listen to Paige and stop moaning,” Rose called, then added with satisfaction, “That’s all our baby birds from Atterra Alpha safely back in the nest. Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay, bombardier, close up those bomb bay doors and let’s head back to Atterra Bravo to pick up the rest of our chicks,” Finch commanded.
The flight back to Atterra Bravo didn’t help reduce the crew’s anxiety. They had to dodge no fewer than three other ships that appeared and disappeared from the monitors; there was no way to tell if they were ordinary traffic or armed for the blockade. Instead of making swift progress to the pickup point, Hammer had to waste time hiding in the shadows of asteroids again. The craggy mountains of dark rock loomed like mountains. It was impossible not to imagine enemy ships hiding around every corner.
Then they had another nasty brush with an automatic cannon. But Finch saw it before they triggered its fire, and again swerved wildly away from it.
“I think I speak for us all,” Nix announced, “when I say I will be very glad when we’re back in open space.”
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