Cobalt Squadron

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  For a moment Rose was tempted by the distraction. Then she glanced at Paige, her self-assured, cool-tempered pilot/gunner of a big sister—and recognized disappointment in the wry, sad little smile twisting at the corner of Paige’s mouth.

  Rose knew what her sister was thinking. Paige had been looking forward to their hour alone in the gunner’s ball turret in the quiet blue of hyperspace.

  “Thanks,” Rose said. “But I’ll be okay.” She added lightly, “The trip out is our family time.”

  Cobalt Squadron cleared hyperspace as close to the Atterra Belt as was safe so that they could swing in among the asteroids quickly. The plan was to lurk there in the cover of the maze as long as possible and then venture out in pairs.

  There were two swarms of TIE fighters glittering on Rose’s tech screen when Hammer reached the inner edge of the Atterra Belt.

  “Track along the asteroids so we come into orbit on Bravo’s dark side,” Rose warned the pilot.

  “What are you, my flight instructor?” Finch quipped. “Of course I’m doing that.”

  The TIEs swarmed past like a meteor shower across the top and bottom corners of the monitor, fading off into the darkness on their patrol assignment. They were definitely expecting the heavy bombers to come back, but they hadn’t spotted them yet.

  “Cobalt Belle, are you with us?” called Finch.

  Hammer’s crew held their breath as they waited for the response they couldn’t hear. Then they heard Finch’s confirmation of that response:

  “All right. We’ll be entering Bravo’s orbit at three-five-oh. Watch for us. Don’t head in until we’ve attracted some fire. Then race to the drop point from the other direction. When you’ve finished, come and join us for the fun.”

  For the benefit of Hammer’s crew, Finch repeated the Belle pilot’s reply.

  “Belle says they can’t wait to join the fun.”

  Hammer’s bomb bays were empty.

  The bomber was as light and maneuverable as it was possible for a StarFortress to be. Finch had flown a couple of tight turns on the way out just to prove it. Now they were sailing into the sun over Atterra Bravo’s daylight side, avoiding the brightly winking mines reflecting sunlight, daring the enemy to come chasing after them.

  Meanwhile, the bomber Cobalt Belle was heading through Atterra Bravo’s night toward the second drop point—the one they’d failed to reach two days earlier. It was a once-busy spaceport on the largest of the Firestone Islands. Like the location of the first drop, it was now an abandoned ruin, but it was accessible by makeshift ground transport for the planet’s inhabitants.

  Now that Rose was part of the team that was supposed to distract the enemy from the Resistance bombers’ real purpose, she found herself furious that the TIEs hadn’t reappeared on her screen.

  Come on, come on, you evil little space bugs, she thought at them. COME ON. We’re ready for you this time….

  She shouldn’t have worried. Of course they came back.

  This chase was completely different from the one that had devastated Cobalt Squadron two days earlier.

  Seeing the enemy coming, Hammer managed to race a good distance away from the planet before the squadron of TIEs caught up.

  Rose, at the flight engineer’s monitor, shouted warnings to the gunners.

  “Two more bandits coming in at oh-one-oh, high!”

  It was reassuring to feel the answering cannon fire shuddering through the floor of the flight deck below her feet—and to see the occasional white spark wink out as one of the TIEs was hit.

  It wasn’t long before the outline of another StarFortress appeared on Rose’s screen, emerging from around the edge of Atterra Bravo’s dark side.

  “Belle’s joining us!” she yelled at the rest of her crew.

  “I heard!” Finch answered. “They just called in! Made the drop without any interference! Good to see you, Belle!”

  The bomber Belle, as maneuverable as Hammer now that it had shed its load, came streaking into the Atterran daylight with its laser cannons ablaze.

  For a few minutes they fought together, back-to-back. Rose stopped thinking, stopped anticipating the next moment, stopped worrying even. She was entirely focused on her monitors and her warnings to Spennie and Paige in the gun turrets.

  Then, suddenly, Finch yelled breathlessly, “Mare has made their drop. Belle, we’re going to love you and leave you—you’re on your own now.”

  The whole crew heard him laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Paige called up.

  “Belle told me to shut up and go home,” Finch said.

  He banked and shot forward toward the Atterra Belt, leaving Mare to join the battle with Belle while Treasure took its turn racing to the drop site in secret.

  Rose jumped up from the monitors and ran to check the baffler. She wanted to be sure it was ready to hide their track as they wove among the asteroids. She could tell by the cannon fire coming from Spennie’s turret that there were TIE fighters still on their tail.

  There was a series of thuds against the bomber’s hull as it encountered a handful of small asteroids on the edge of the belt. They bounced off the heavy bomber’s armor plating. But the much smaller TIEs weren’t so lucky. Rose saw bursts of light beyond the pilot’s cockpit as the TIE fighters, overtaking the StarFortress, flew headlong into the invisible space debris and exploded.

  “We did it! We did it!”

  Paige hadn’t waited for Rose to join her in the lower ball turret after the jump to hyperspace; the entire Hammer crew had raced for a reunion on the flight deck, hugging each other and exclaiming in relief and triumph.

  “Okay, okay, cool down, kids….” That was Finch, of course. Every now and then he took over from Paige the role of being the sensible one. “We did it and Belle and Mare did it, but we won’t know until we get home whether they survived—or if Treasure and Bolide and Dancer will, too—”

  “Yes, but it was working, the plan was working!” Paige was jubilant.

  Spennie added, “And if we keep them guessing—”

  “We only have two more runs to make!” Nix finished. He grabbed Rose in a bear hug. “Great work, tech!”

  “Great work yourself!”

  It didn’t look as if any of them were going to calm down any time soon.

  “Another card game?” Finch suggested. “Since we’re all up here, anyway.”

  Nix sighed. “More virtual fathiers! That’s not much of a celebration.”

  “I know! Let’s have a picnic,” said Paige, grinning.

  And from somewhere within her flight suit, she pulled out a slim sealed protein box and pried it open. Inside lay ten thin slices of starberry, still moist and crisp—two slices each.

  “I saved mine,” she said. “I reckoned we’d either need to lift our spirits, or we’d have something to celebrate.”

  This time, Rose savored every bite.

  They felt the blast in hyperspace. There was a cataclysmic jolt, as if the ship had hit a wall, and a shock of blinding white light blazed all around the heavy bomber as if it were flying through a planetary lightning storm.

  But then the mottled peaceful blue resealed itself around them, and Rose could find nothing wrong with the ship apart from two cracked blast shields, which might have happened in the battle earlier. And they still seemed to be on course for Refnu.

  It sobered up their mood, though.

  They didn’t realize the shock hadn’t been connected to their own journey until they reentered realspace.

  When they came back into realspace around Refnu, they found themselves surrounded by light. It flickered around the ship like a titanic electrical fault. But the light wasn’t coming from Refnu’s distant sun. There were strange cosmic shock waves reverberating across the distant reaches of the star system.

  “What in the name of the galaxy is that?” Finch muttered as he set the coordinates for the local flight to Refnu. “It’s messing with the electronics. I have to punch everything in four or
five times before it takes.”

  Nix came to lean over Rose’s shoulder as she scanned through the ship’s confused data log, trying to figure out what was wrong. Everything seemed to be working—it was just jarred.

  “It looks okay….” Rose trailed off.

  “What is going on in the sky?” Paige called up from the lower turret.

  “Wow,” was Spennie’s only comment. “Wow.”

  Rose and Nix couldn’t see a thing that they were able to do, so they went to stand behind Finch and watch the sky as he came into Refnu’s orbit for landing. Paige joined them.

  “That’s the best light show I’ve ever seen,” Nix commented.

  “Can you feel it?” Paige asked. “Is it affecting flight?”

  Finch shook his head slowly. He lifted his hands from the controls and offered them to Paige.

  “Try it.”

  Paige leaned in over his shoulder, taking over from Finch for a moment. Then she shook her head, as well.

  “No, I can’t feel a thing, either. Weird. It looks so big.”

  “If it’s from outside this system, then maybe it’s old light,” Nix said. “A supernova a million years ago—the light is just arriving now. That’s why we don’t feel it, maybe.”

  “We did feel it,” said Rose. “We felt it in hyperspace.”

  “Rose is right,” said Finch slowly. “Also…it’s messing with the electronics, even if it’s not affecting our flying. I don’t think the light is from outside this system. But the disturbance might be.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Paige sharply. “It’d have to be traveling faster than lightspeed. What could have happened that would make shock waves travel that fast?”

  “I don’t know,” Finch answered. “Some kind of electronic disturbance, particle displacement, maybe—things suddenly shifted where they shouldn’t be. Space lightning. I don’t know.”

  He added soberly, “And I’m not sure I want to.”

  For once, the inhabitants of Refnu were gathered outside. The wharfs and windy wastes of the twilit landscape were crowded as people emerged from the tunnels and stared up at the sky.

  One by one, the rest of the Resistance heavy bombers came back to the wharf. Every one of them had successfully made its airlift drop on Atterra Bravo, and only two had been superficially damaged in combat with the TIE fighters as they held up their end of the defensive strategy.

  The transport also came back from D’Qar with fuel and a cargo of refilled clips and airlift supplies for the last two hops.

  The Hammer crew had expected an exuberant debriefing, but the strange shock to the galaxy had sobered the entire squadron.

  “You all felt the disruption?” Fossil asked again, in disbelief. “You all felt it during the journey through hyperspace?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “We felt it, too,” said the captain of the transport. “Like hitting a wall. Like a—a disruption in the space-time continuum, like a disruption in…”

  The transport pilot left his sentence hanging, but Rose thought that everyone there must know what he was thinking: a disruption in the Force.

  They’d all heard the stories of how the Death Star had blown up an entire world, General Leia Organa’s homeworld of Alderaan, in the last years of the Empire. But that had been before most of the bomber squadron crews were born, and the galaxy was essentially at peace now, apart from the rumblings of the First Order as they stretched for sovereignty among the Outer Rim and the independent star systems. And not even the destruction of a planet would have such a stunning and far-reaching impact on the rest of the galaxy. Everyone knew that an old star exploded now and then somewhere across the vast distances of the universe. It didn’t produce a shock like this.

  What had happened?

  “Supernova,” Rose heard a lot of people muttering.

  “Supernova. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “What if it’s some kind of weapon, though?”

  “No way.”

  “Nothing could be that big.”

  “Who’d use something that big, anyway?”

  “Supernova. Has to be.”

  Rose noticed that Casca Panzoro sat silent throughout the heated discussion in the debriefing room. She wondered what Casca was thinking. No one had mentioned calling off the last two hops to Atterra Bravo, but Rose thought that Casca must be worried about it. And worried about her grandson, with whom she had no hope of communicating.

  Paige leaned over to Rose and whispered, “Ready for anything, right?”

  “Yes, but I like to know what’s going on,” Rose whispered back. “I’m not such a fan of unexplained galactic super-explosions.”

  “Nothing’s changed for the Atterra run,” Paige assured her.

  But something did change.

  There were no TIE fighters waiting for them on the next day’s airlift.

  The six Resistance heavy bombers met with clear and empty space all across the Atterra system.

  “It’s too quiet,” Finch growled, flying smoothly out of Atterra’s daylight, leaving Cutter to be met by Hailstorm as backup while Treasure made its drop.

  “Stop complaining,” Paige called calmly up from the lower gun turret. “You sound like Rose.”

  “It’s nice to have nothing to do up here for once,” said Spennie from the tail gunner’s turret.

  “It’s like they’re planning something,” Finch said.

  “No,” Rose said. “It’s like they’ve flown the coop. It’s like the patrols have all been called away to deal with something else, and there’s nothing left of the blockade but the minefield and the automatic cannons in the belt. As if…”

  “As if a few supply runs to a star system already under their control don’t really matter to the First Order anymore?” suggested Nix. “After all that fighting to keep us out, why would they suddenly stop caring?”

  “Maybe they’ve got a bigger fight on their hands somewhere else,” said Spennie.

  “Or maybe,” said Paige quietly, “the rumors about the weapon aren’t just rumors. Maybe the First Order thinks they’ve got a weapon that’s so big they don’t need to worry about a few heavy bombers.”

  HAMMER HAD a different role to play in the final supply drop. It was landing on Atterra Bravo to take Casca Panzoro back to her people on the Firestone Islands.

  Paige, who’d flown in to Atterra Bravo before and had a little experience with its climate and geography, was going to do the piloting. Finch flew as tail gunner so they were both on the flight deck in case Paige needed to consult with him. Spennie took over Paige’s seat in the lower gun turret. Meanwhile, Hammer’s bomb racks were stocked with supplies that would be unloaded once they were on the surface of the planet.

  Rose sat on the floor by Paige’s feet while they sailed through hyperspace. She was self-conscious about sharing Paige’s seat as she’d have done in the lower gun turret, because both Nix and Casca were riding on the flight deck with them. Having Casca aboard changed the whole dynamic of Hammer’s crew. They were all a little more polite, a little more well-behaved than usual.

  It made Rose feel faintly as if she wanted to pick a fight with someone. She was possessive of the quiet, familiar hyperspace time that she was used to sharing with her sister.

  Everything was different on this last trip.

  “How long to realspace?” Rose asked. She wanted to get this particular drop over with—dropping a person seemed much more complicated than dropping shells. But Fossil had insisted that they not risk the attention of launching Casca from an escape pod—or the possibility of landing her in the acid sea—and Casca couldn’t pilot a shuttle. So that meant she had to be delivered in one of the bombers themselves. And of course Hammer’s crew had volunteered.

  “Realspace? Half an hour.”

  “No picnic today?”

  “Seems like the celebration ought to wait for the journey home,” said Paige. “Don’t want to lull ourselves into a false sense of security. I a
lways kind of feel that way on the last assignment of a mission, you know? Like we’ve become invulnerable. If the worst hasn’t already happened, it can’t possibly happen now.”

  Rose fingered her Otomok medallion, thinking of Cat. “Or—the worst has already happened. It can’t possibly happen again.”

  “Or,” Paige said, “the worst is still to come. But it’s not going to happen today.”

  “You’re sounding like me again,” Rose teased.

  “Full of gloom?” Paige laughed softly. “Well…I’m optimistic about this hop.”

  She glanced over at Casca Panzoro, sitting with her knees drawn up and her back against the ducts lining the wall of the fuselage, just as she’d sat when Hammer had first picked her up with her grandson, Reeve, in their desperate escape from Atterra Bravo not much more than a week before. Casca’s eyes were closed. She’d taken off her headset. Her hands moved gracefully as she recited some private prayer or recitation.

  Rose couldn’t imagine being that unselfconscious. But then, neither could she imagine being district representative of anything. She couldn’t imagine commanding people.

  She tried to imagine it—and realized that she’d just spent a week giving commands to all the flight engineers of Cobalt Squadron and half of Crimson.

  Rose laughed at herself. When Casca looked up, Rose gave her a friendly smile.

  Paige followed Rose’s gaze. “Casca’s grateful,” Paige said softly. “More grateful than any of us can understand, I think. And that gives me hope.”

  She paused. Into her moment’s silence, Rose prompted, trying to make Paige laugh: “But you don’t like her hair? Or what?”

  Paige only smiled. She shook her head.

  “I’m glad we’ve helped Atterra Bravo, and I know we might have made a difference. I hope they win their battle. At the very least, we’ve collected some solid evidence for Leia’s case against the First Order—those death transports, and the number of starfighters that have been attacking us without even knowing what our business is….But I’m worried. Whatever happened yesterday…I don’t know what it was. I’m worried that everything we’ve done this week is just too late. That there’s something else going on that is just…more important than what we’ve done this week. That Otomok and Atterra aren’t any more significant than Wasp and Scarab and Hornet…and it won’t matter if we help Atterra or not—”