Cobalt Squadron

by Elizabeth Wein

  “You were not a diplomat,” Rose reminded her. “You were an ore digger pilot for the Central Ridge Mining Company.”

  “I bet they need icebreakers here, too, just like they did on Hays Minor,” Paige said. “And I bet they wouldn’t say no to an experienced bomber squadron who could do it for them. I think we should go eat supper with the other freighters.”

  IT REMINDED Rose so much of Hays Minor that it made her chest hurt. She thought she could actually feel the heartache.

  The freighters’ canteen was a long, windowless hall bright with artificial daylight. There were no windows—just like home. In a world where it was always dark and almost always stormy, windows were pointless. The light from the plasma ceiling reminded Rose piercingly of the heart of her family living pod, the tiny bright space the Ticos had called the “sunroom.” Every residential space on Hays Minor had been equipped with a sunroom of some kind. The artificial light was necessary to sustain life.

  “A snowgrape vine!” Paige gasped, pointing.

  “All this way to see a snowgrape vine!” Rose laughed. But she grasped her older sister’s hand and squeezed hard.

  The vine was big—it must have been over a hundred years old. It was a lot like the one that had twisted around the small domed space of their own sunroom, every tiny sour fruit closely monitored by the pod superintendent and any harvest shared across four communal kitchens. The old vine hadn’t belonged to the Ticos, but they’d been the lucky family who got to sit beneath its pale green foliage and spicy blossoms. Its teardrop-shaped leaves echoed the shape of the pale gold medallions Paige and Rose wore and treasured, the matched gift from their parents just before they’d fled the Otomok system.

  This vine in the freighters’ canteen on Refnu was in a cage—precious enough to warrant protection from anyone who would carelessly or greedily disturb its carefully coaxed fruits.

  Paige and Rose picked up food trays at a serving hatch and managed to get seats at one of the long bench tables not far from the vine’s green fragrance. When they sat down, Paige laughed in delight. “Look—selakale!”

  In narrow trenches down the center of the table, pale sprouts were growing under the artificial light. Back on Hays Minor in the Otomok system, selakale had been a valuable vitamin source, but you had to strip the seeds from it and replant them daily or you’d have nothing to eat the next day. Here, you could help yourself and replant as you ate.

  “I like this place,” said Paige happily, piling the bitter shoots on top of her steaming portion of starch rations and poking the seeds back into the soil trench.

  The other travelers sitting nearby laughed at her enthusiasm.

  “You from around here?” rumbled one of them, humanoid but gigantic. “But no—I don’t think so. You’re too small to be a Refnu native. Look at me, Dario the Nefrian—my extra skin layer keeps me warm. And my bones are bigger to hold the extra weight. Where are you from, then?”

  “Otomok, originally,” said Paige. “A planet called Hays Minor. Same climate. No native intelligent life there, though.”

  This got another laugh.

  “Call Dario intelligent life?” teased another Nefrian.

  “Well, you couldn’t like the climate on this iceberg if you weren’t used to it, that’s for sure!” said someone else.

  Rose saw what Paige had done: attracted attention on purpose by making people interested in her story, but also by putting the strangers at ease right away.

  How does she do it? Rose wondered. And could I ever do it without her—could I ever feel so confident on my own, not knowing any of these people?

  “What brings you to this dark snowball?” asked a scaly, lizard-like humanoid sitting across from them, shivering in his weathersuit with taloned hands wrapped around a hot mug. “Not the climate, for sure.”

  “We’re looking for work. Freelance ice bombers—we fly in a converted StarFortress. Figured this place was as good as any,” Paige said.

  “You’ve worked in frozen ore extraction?” asked Dario, the big guy. “You’re here at a good time. It’s summer.”

  This brought hoots of laughter from the lizard person, who obviously wasn’t from around these parts. “Summer!”

  “Yeah, summer, you sunbug. That means the days are long up north, and you can clear the ice away from the surface for a little while so you can get to the minerals underneath. What’s your name, miss?”

  “Paige. Paige Tico—this is my sister, Rose.”

  The folk around the table nodded greetings.

  “I know that RefnuCorp hires extra workers this time of year,” said Dario. “Check in at their HQ. It’s tunnel seventeen-eighty-two, and you don’t have to go outside to get there. I’m not sure one StarFortress is going to be much good to them, though.”

  “Oh, we’re just the reconnaissance party,” Paige said, grinning.

  Rose kicked her. Paige didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “We’re here in advance of the rest of the crew,” Paige said. “Checking out the lay of the land. What a waste of energy and time and fuel it would have been if we’d all flown out to the back end of nowhere and then discovered we couldn’t get work! We can offer RefnuCorp a full squadron if they want it.”

  Back on D’Qar, Leia was cautiously enthusiastic about the Tico sisters’ report.

  “We can run four supply hops,” she said firmly.

  She and a fellow Resistance officer, Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo, were laying the groundwork for the mission with all the members of the heavy bomber unit: Fossil, sixty crew, and another sixty ground staff who would go along to Refnu to take over the refueling, maintenance, and loading work for the flight crews when they came back to base.

  “Holdo’s had experience with airlift missions before,” Leia explained. “She won’t be going along with you, but I’ve asked her to listen in on our plans.”

  Holdo was a serene woman of about Leia’s age, thin and tall, with purple hair. She was in command of the cruiser Ninka. She stood on one side of Leia while Casca Panzoro stood on the other side as their consultant. The three older women made a formidable trio.

  Leia had spent hours in private conversation with Casca and Holdo, but this was the first time their plans were being revealed.

  “We can’t afford to supply Atterra Bravo with more than four airlift runs,” Leia continued. “We don’t have a contact on Atterra Alpha and we’d better limit ourselves to communicating with Bravo Rising. We’ll have to be careful about the timing, too; we don’t want to attract a lot of attention.

  “We can send eleven StarFortress bombers in all, with eleven full crews. Seven of Cobalt Squadron will go, along with four from Crimson. That way six bombers can head to Atterra and five can work for the Refnu Corporation each day. Finch Dallow of Cobalt will lead both squadrons to Atterra. Finch, you think you have a good idea of how to avoid the minefields?”

  “Well, I hope so,” said Finch.

  “That’s the best we can do,” said Leia. “Are you all with me?”

  She looked around, watching people nod their acknowledgment and understanding.

  “Good,” Leia said. “So. Amilyn, can you add to what I’ve said?”

  “We’ll stock the bombers for the first two runs before you leave, and we’ll send a transport with you with full clips of supplies for the third and fourth runs,” Holdo told them. “You’ll probably need to send the transport back here for your final fuel supply. But you’ll be on your own on Refnu.”

  “Try to juggle things so it doesn’t look like you’re racing off on a rescue mission in your spare time, okay?” Leia added. “Don’t forget you’re supposed to be icebreakers.”

  One of the pilots raised a hand. “Won’t it be obvious what the rest of us are doing while the decoy squadron’s busy mining?”

  “Use a cover story,” Leia told him, ever the diplomat. “You’re making the most of your time and working a delivery service on your days off. Cat, the flight engineer on the bomber Treasure, knows the pla
net and the system; he’s the reason you heard there might be work there.”

  Leia paused and made a face at the questioner.

  “Just don’t make it obvious where you’re heading,” she warned.

  The next forty-eight hours evaporated in a whirl of preparations. Vice-Admiral Holdo and Fossil consulted Casca Panzoro on what was most urgently needed in the bombers’ payloads and in the supplementary supplies carried in the biggest transport available. The bomber crews supervised the ground crews and double-checked all the ships’ equipment in preparation for the mission.

  Rose scarcely slept. She had the task of overseeing eleven teams as they wired up each of the StarFortress bombers with power-reducing bafflers like the one in Hammer.

  “Come on.”

  It was Paige’s voice.

  Paige had found her sister sitting against the grass of the camouflaged bunker wall. Rose was in between power checks, taking a five-minute break to rehydrate and breathe.

  Fresh air. The only way to get at the awkward power bafflers was by crawling underneath and sitting up inside them on the flight decks of the heavy bombers. It was claustrophobic at the best of times; with two people, Rose plus the flight engineer she was supervising, it was stifling. The StarFortresses were on low power for ground maintenance, and it was stuffy and hot inside them. By the end of an hour Rose had stripped down to her tank top, and that was drenched. The Otomok medallion swung free, and kept catching on the baffler plugs.

  Rose was glad of a break after a day of this.

  Paige snagged her by the arm where she was resting against the outside grass-covered wall of the bunker.

  “Come on, let’s take a quick walk.”

  “I haven’t got time. I just wanted to get some air.”

  “If you’ve got time to sit there, you’ve got time for a walk,” Paige said. “It’ll be dark soon anyway. You’ll feel better if you get moving.”

  Rose let herself be led.

  The light was different late in the day than it was in early morning. The birds were quiet.

  “On some planets,” said Paige, “where there’s a huge variety of wildlife and they have big animals as well as little flying things, there are nocturnal animals, too. What animal would you most like to see?”

  “Anything as long as I don’t have to herd it.” Rose didn’t feel like playing this game, and the darkening trees seemed ominous to her.

  “I’d choose fathiers,” Paige said. “If I could only see one animal in the whole galaxy, and I’d never get to see anything else, I’d go for fathiers. I’d like to see them in a race. I’d like to ride one—”

  “Paige,” Rose interrupted, “could you be quiet about animals right now?”

  She shivered. Now that she was out in the open and could feel the wind on her skin, she was no longer sweating. She wished she’d put her overalls back on before she headed off duty.

  Paige laid her arm over Rose’s shoulders and held her close.

  “I thought something was bothering you. What are you worrying about?”

  “You always know.”

  For a moment they stood there, quiet together—it was getting too late now to go any farther into the alien forest. But in another moment they’d have to turn back, and then there would hardly be any more time together until—when? Until they were back in hyperspace on the way to another bombing mission, riding doubled up in the lower gun ball turret?

  “Okay,” Rose said. “Here’s the thing. You know I’m supervising the installation of these power-reducing bafflers in the Forts for this mission? Well, wiring them up is a pain, and I can’t do it all myself. I have to go around and make sure that other people are doing the right thing. And mostly they are. Sometimes I see something that’s out of place, and I point it out, and they fix it.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Paige asked. “Is someone being sloppy? Or aren’t we going to be ready in time?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Everybody’s working really hard. And we’re ahead of schedule.”

  Rose shivered again.

  “Well, what then?”

  “I’m worried the bafflers won’t work,” said Rose.

  “But ours worked fine!”

  “Sure it did.” Rose hesitated again, then finally managed to spit out what was bothering her. “But if one single plug were out of place, and it made the baffler in one of the other Forts fail, and they got spotted by a TIE fighter patrol, it would be my fault if everybody on that bomber ended up dead.”

  Paige was silent.

  “It was bad enough worrying about Reeve—just one person—when we had to take him along. But this is me having to be responsible for the whole squadron.”

  When a few more seconds passed and Paige still didn’t say anything, Rose added brazenly, trying to brush past the moment, “Of course, if our baffler fails first, I guess I won’t have to worry about—”

  Paige stopped her with one word.

  “Rose.”

  Rose didn’t turn to look at her sister, ashamed of her own uncertainty, ashamed of getting anything wrong when Paige was always so calm and controlled.

  “Rose, we’re in this together,” Paige said. “If a pilot doesn’t fly fast enough, or doesn’t get over the drop zone in exactly the right place, or the bombardier is a second late making the release, or the tail gunner doesn’t hit every bandit she fires at, do we all sit around blaming them?”

  She began to walk back toward the base, steering Rose under her warm, familiar arm.

  “You know we don’t,” Paige continued. “That’s what it is to be a soldier. And we’re at war. Maybe it’s not a great big heroic intergalactic conflict like when the Empire was defeated, and maybe we’re not at the center of it. But we’re part of an effort. We’re making a difference. And maybe we’re going to give Atterra a chance that Otomok didn’t get.”

  She squeezed Rose’s shoulder.

  “And that’s something that won’t happen without taking some risks,” Paige finished. “Without taking some responsibility.”

  When Rose still didn’t answer, Paige prompted her.

  “Say I’m right!”

  Rose gave a grudging little laugh. “You’re always right, Pae-Pae.”

  “That’s because I’m older and I know best.”

  “Ha ha.”

  Rose knew that Paige was right. And yet, she also knew that if something went wrong with one of those power bafflers and Rose wasn’t there to fix it herself, she was going to feel guilty about it for the rest of her life.

  It didn’t take the StarFortress unit long to get set up on Refnu. They wasted no more than a day working out a settlement with the Refnu Corporation for the wharf space and the icebreaking work. Then they readied the bombers for their first assignments and collapsed in their bunk space with the other temporary workers.

  Early the next morning, five of the eleven heavy bombers were fitted with bomb clips packed full of icebreaking equipment, and they set off lumbering northward into Refnu’s frozen ore zones for the work mission they’d promised RefnuCorp.

  The other six Resistance bombers, four from the Cobalt Squadron supported by two from Crimson, weren’t carrying magno-charge explosives. They were headed for the Atterra system, and this time, instead of spy equipment, their bomb racks contained shell cases filled with thousands of liters of water and portable condensers; vehicle fuel; flour, protein packs, tins of smoked cloudfish, vitamin supplements, and medical supplies; and an assortment of electronic and mechanical equipment, including several hyperdrive compressors for small ships, lightspeed radio receivers, and energy cells for ammunition.

  The StarFortress bombers carried the first delivery of an airlift that would give Bravo Rising the self-sufficiency it needed to fight for independence for the twin Atterra worlds.

  Paige glanced at the chrono on her wrist. “Ten minutes to realspace. You need to be at the tech monitor when we enter the Atterra system. Go poke Nix and Spennie on your way.”

  �
��Okay,” Rose said. “See you again on the way back to Refnu.”

  She said it casually, as if they weren’t about to sneak six Resistance StarFortresses through a First Order blockade.

  Paige was equally casual. She gave the same response she always gave at the beginning of a bombing run. “See you then, Rose.”

  Rose boosted herself off the back of the gunner’s seat and into the bomb bay. She closed the shield door to the gunner’s turret behind her, sealing Paige in. Then Rose made her way up the long ladder past the bomb racks to the flight deck.

  Rose shivered all over again as she climbed past the thousands of black and shining shells.

  Nuts and bolts, she swore to herself. What’s the matter with you, Rose? They aren’t even bombs! They’re full of protein snacks and antiseptic wipes!

  But of course there was ammunition in there, too, and they still looked like bombs. For a moment, Rose couldn’t help wishing they were all magno-charge explosives after all, and that they were going to be used in a real attack—something that would stop the First Order once and for all.

  Rose waved up at the bombardier. “Hey, Nix. Paige said to give you a poke.”

  Nix was sitting by his computer pedestal with his legs swinging over the edge of the opening to the bomb bay, running a last count of the active racks from the handheld remote detonator. Nix raised his head and nodded in reply to Rose, but he didn’t answer or let go of the remote. Rose knew he was doing his usual careful tally of the shells before he activated their release.

  “Five minutes to entry,” Rose warned him. “Don’t lose count now.”

  Nix nodded again without a word. He was always totally focused on the mission. Rose thought it was probably his way of coping with the lurking coil of fear.

  Everybody coped with it differently. Rose reached the upper deck and went to check on Spennie, the new tail gunner. They’d managed to fill out each bomber with a full crew of five for this hop, which would free up the flight engineer to keep an eye on the power bafflers.

  Hammer’s crew had flown with Spennie once or twice before as a tail gunner, enough that they all knew she spent her time in hyperspace listening to Coruscant space-race broadcasts mostly recorded a hundred years before. Rose squeezed past the grotesque hulk of the baffler and bent down into the tail turret. There Spennie sat, rapt in her own dreamworld, pretending she was speeding across the solar system in a sleek solar yacht of a bygone age.