Cobalt Squadron Read online

  The young pilot looked away from his grandmother, his eyes smoldering with some painful memory.

  “They made all the hits look like accidents—you know, someone crashes into one of these asteroids in the belt.” Casca waved a hand to indicate the complex planetary system quietly shining in miniature in the middle of the room. “Or a couple of patrol ships crash into each other. Or someone’s engine fails on reentry and blows up. There are minefields in orbit around both Atterra planets. We knew it wasn’t accidental, so we stopped flying—we didn’t want to lose any more ships, or any more good pilots, when it was obvious we were going to need people who knew how to fly and how to fight. But the second we stopped flying, they came and rounded up most of the fleet.”

  Casca hesitated, then continued very carefully, “My son, Rendal, was one of a few who made it home to Atterra Bravo after being attacked. He managed to tell us what he’d seen. He’d had an encounter with a pair of TIE fighters. What were two TIE fighters doing in orbit around Atterra Bravo? And why would they have shot down a private law-enforcement starfighter? Rendal made it back alive, and we managed to repair his ship, but he…” Casca paused again, swallowed, and finally finished, “It took him a long time to die.”

  She reached across to touch her grandson lightly on the shoulder; it wasn’t obvious if she did it to reassure the boy or to reassure herself. Maybe both.

  “I’m sorry,” Leia said quietly. “I’m sorry about your son.” She turned to Reeve for a moment, and added, “And he was also your father. I’m sorry.”

  The boy nodded, biting his lip. He turned his face away from her, avoiding having to respond aloud.

  “And I’m sorry about Atterra,” Leia finished. She gazed at the miniature planets and then asked Casca another pointed question. “Do you know where you are now?”

  Casca looked around as if she expected the room might give her a clue. At last she turned back to Leia and said wearily, “No, I don’t. I—I don’t know who you are, either.”

  Leia nodded in wry agreement. She paced away from the two strangers. “Again, I apologize. My name is Leia Organa.”

  Casca’s eyes flew wide. She obviously knew the name. “You were part of the old Rebel Alliance,” she said. “And if I’m not mistaken, you do have connections in the Senate. Have we come to the right place entirely by accident?”

  “Maybe not entirely by accident,” said Leia, shaking her head. “As for the place, I can’t tell you where you are without having to keep you imprisoned here. And I don’t really want to have to do that. But—”

  She turned back.

  “But I can assure you, if you are who you say you are, you’ve come to the right place. So if you’re willing to cooperate with me—to wait here, perhaps, while I follow up on your story—then maybe I can find a way to help you.”

  Casca Panzoro and her grandson turned to look at each other once again. This time, they held each other’s eyes. For the first time, Rose saw some expression other than fear or pain in their faces.

  She saw hope.

  The soldier Leia had sent out earlier came back then, carrying a tray with two mugs and a pile of protein portions.

  “All right, everybody get back to work. And, Sergeant, find these two travelers someplace where they can eat in peace,” Leia ordered. “But keep them strictly under guard. I want to talk to Fossil.”

  Hammer’s crew started to file out after the others. Leia said quickly, “Not you four. I want to talk to you, too.”

  LEIA SURVEYED the bomber crew, her expression giving away nothing.

  They all stood at attention. After a moment Leia laughed.

  “You are all so serious.”

  “Only when I’m around,” Fossil rumbled ominously.

  “You can sit down,” Leia told the bomber crew. “I know you’re tired. And you still haven’t had your routine debriefing. You don’t need to oversee the unpacking of the probe droids—we’ll turn that over to the intelligence team.”

  Paige, Rose, and the rest of the crew all looked to Fossil, their commander, for confirmation that they could sit. The Old Lady gave them a slow blink of approval, her crystalline eyes folding shut for a long second.

  When they’d taken their seats, Leia came straight to the point.

  “How did you pick up your hitchhikers?”

  Hammer’s pilot, Finch Dallow, acted as spokesman for the crew. He told Leia and Fossil how the two Atterran refugees had come to be aboard the StarFortress as it made the jump to lightspeed.

  “Casca Panzoro’s story is very convincing,” Leia said. “But…”

  “They could be First Order spies,” Fossil acknowledged in her deep, sonorous voice. “I find it most difficult to believe the elaborate tale of how that cobweb of a human boy managed to outfly a patrol of six TIE fighters.”

  Finch shrugged. “His aerobatics were pretty extraordinary. You don’t have to be a beefy hero to fly like a crackerjack.”

  Privately, Rose agreed with Fossil. Reeve Panzoro seemed much too easy to scare. He’d covered up his fear with rude defiance, but that wasn’t the same as mastering it. Rose knew that all too well. Reeve had managed to make a daring escape, but Rose wouldn’t want to have to depend on him in a fight.

  Paige backed Finch. “Reeve’s exactly the pilot I’d have taken with me if I were Casca Panzoro—someone I already knew and trusted. Someone I cared about.” She threw Rose a grin. “Family.”

  “It is a beautiful distraction, their family relationship,” Fossil pointed out. “And it may all be part of the perfect ruse—a careful plan for boarding unknown ships and tracing them to the source. You cannot follow or track a ship through lightspeed. But if you place a witness aboard the ship and lull the ship’s crew into believing that witness’s story…”

  “It’s something we have to consider,” Leia agreed. “But I think it’s unlikely—they don’t know that we are a movement in opposition to the First Order. They think we’re a sympathetic military outpost that might help them. And I feel they’re telling the truth.”

  “You are always feeling things,” said Fossil disapprovingly.

  Rose was frowning. She didn’t realize it until she found Leia looking straight at her, singling her out.

  “You feel it, too?” the general asked her mildly.

  Rose swallowed. She glanced at Fossil for approval to speak.

  “Answer her question,” Rose’s commander directed.

  Rose felt Paige’s hand touch her lightly on the arm, quick and reassuring.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Rose said. “Not in the way you mean. Not through anything like…like the Force. But I think that boy was telling the truth. He was scared.” And a bit sassy, she added privately in her head. “I could see he was scared when we first met him.”

  “A good spy would have pulled that off easily,” Leia said. “You reported that you were all pointing blasters at him as he got out of his ship.”

  “He wasn’t scared of the blasters,” Rose said. “He was scared of the flight he’d just made. He was relieved to be out of his ship.”

  Leia frowned. “What makes you think that?”

  “I feel that way all the time after a hop,” Rose admitted. Then she added quickly, in her own defense, “I’m better at controlling it.”

  Paige suddenly agreed. “Rose is right. I saw it, too.”

  At that moment the sensor at the entrance to the room lit up, and Leia moved to answer the door. Vober Dand came in, the big bearded Tarsunt who was the Resistance base’s controller. He’d been on hand when the heavy bomber had landed.

  “Here’s the report you requested,” Vober told the general, handing her a datapad.

  Hammer’s crew didn’t expect Leia to share with them whatever she was reading, and were surprised when she looked up and said frankly, “Well, their ship’s no doubt from Atterra Bravo. The electronic log shows it’s never been outside the system before—it’s equipped for lightspeed but has only ever made short cross-system hops
. And there’s a corporate imprint saying it was built for the Outside Unit Radicore Elements Mining Company, whatever that is. It’s a very old registration but it could well still be valid. They did say they’d stolen the ship.”

  She passed the datapad to Fossil.

  “So far their story remains plausible,” Fossil said.

  She didn’t say anything else, and Hammer’s crew waited awkwardly, wondering where their commander and general were going to take this next.

  “They wanted supplies,” Fossil said. Her glittering platelike eyes were unreadable. “We could provide that.”

  “How could we provide that?” Vober grumbled.

  “We, the heavy bombers of the Cobalt and Crimson Squadrons, could make such a delivery,” said Fossil. “We could make a series of runs to their planet and drop what they need in canister rockets carried in our bomb racks. It would be of little difficulty and we could do it quickly.”

  Fossil turned her gigantic, unreadable crystalline eyes directly on Rose.

  “You found your power baffler worked successfully?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s not the prettiest thing I ever put together,” Rose said. “But the little monster did work. I kept worrying that the links would disconnect, but even when we took a couple of direct hits from automatic cannon fire, everything held together.”

  Paige added spontaneously, “Part of the reason the baffler worked so well is because of the Atterra system itself. Having all those asteroids to hide behind in the Atterra Belt meant that no one could see us a lot of the time. And because we didn’t seem to be emitting any power, we were completely hidden right up until we entered each planet’s orbit.”

  “Apart from the direct hits from the automatic cannon we mapped,” Nix corrected.

  Rose jumped to Paige’s defense. “Well, we’ll never go there again.”

  General Leia Organa held up one hand, and the bomber crew all immediately stopped arguing.

  Leia shook her head. “It sounds like it’s a mission we might be able to pull off.” She turned to Vober to reassure him. “But I’m not authorizing anything until we’ve taken a look at some of the data they brought back.”

  Finally, she turned to Fossil. “This crew’s all yours now,” she said. “You can take over with your usual operational debriefing. But I’d like to listen in if it’s all right with you.”

  Leia didn’t say a single word while Fossil questioned the bomber crew about the details of their recent mission. She waited until the debriefing was over. Then, as the crew began to leave, she walked across to Paige and laid one friendly hand on her shoulder.

  “The Atterra crisis must really make you think of home,” she said.

  Paige nodded. She was still seated, and with Leia’s hand resting on her shoulder, it would have been awkward for Paige to stand up. Rose didn’t get up, either, waiting for her sister.

  “I know just how that feels,” Leia said. “I think of Alderaan every time I hear a story like this. I think of home, and all these years later, I still think of Alderaan as home. When I hear a story like yours, or like Reeve and Casca’s, in a flash I think, If we win this time, I’ll be able to go back—and an instant later I remember it’s gone. We can’t let it keep happening.”

  She paused.

  “I want to help them,” she said. “And Casca’s right: if we don’t help now, the First Order will grow bolder and do it again and again. And then it will be too late to avoid war. But my own Resistance movement isn’t large enough to act as a galactic security force, and I can’t just rush into a rescue mission. We need a plan.”

  Leia put a hand on Rose’s shoulder, too, so that the general was standing between the Tico sisters and including them both in her request.

  “I’d like to send you to Atterra Bravo as advance scouts,” Leia said. “I’d like to get a couple of real live people on the ground there to confirm Casca Panzoro’s story. If what she tells us is true, I’ll also need someone on the ground to establish a link with the Bravo Rising organizers before we begin smuggling in the supplies they need so desperately.”

  “An intelligence mission?” Paige asked with interest.

  Leia shook her head. “Scouting, not spying. Reconnaissance. Think it over. Talk about it together. If you don’t want to do it yourselves, I can ask someone more experienced in this line of work. But it’s a mission that you’ve a right to, so I’m offering it to you first.”

  Leia lifted her hands, freeing Rose and Paige so they could go.

  “Take twenty-four hours,” Leia said. “With people already dying of thirst there, this will have to be a quick decision. But it’ll take us a day to equip an appropriate ship. So you’ve got a day. Think about it. Talk it over. Get back to me tomorrow.”

  Rose thought about it all the rest of that day—all through the report she had to make in the technicians’ assembly about the success of the baffler, and all through the hours she then spent checking the baffler’s plugs while below her the StarFortress crew chief, Hadeen Bissel, directed a repair team as they removed the bomb clip that had been damaged when the Atterran ship had made its awkward crash landing.

  Rose thought about it, and there was no doubt in her mind that she wanted to do it.

  But she and Paige hadn’t talked about it yet.

  They’d scarcely had a moment together since their return to D’Qar. When they’d finally been able to collapse in their shared bunk block that night, Rose had fallen asleep instantly, completely exhausted as she always was after a hop.

  Paige woke her early the next morning. “Come on,” she said to Rose. “Let’s go look at the forest.”

  The wilderness of D’Qar, just after sunrise, was a place of unsettling loveliness. You couldn’t walk far into the unspoiled forest; the only trails were those made by Resistance hunters and foragers. Paige was always hoping for a glimpse of wildlife in this lush jungle, though she and Rose had never encountered anything other than birds and insects.

  Some of these were big enough—or small enough, in the case of the swarms of stinging midges—to make Rose wary. There had been no animal life at all on her icebound, twilit planet home of Hays Minor, so far from the sun that all foodstuffs had to be grown under artificial light.

  Two sonar swallows, no bigger than Rose’s hand and iridescent as an oil slick, swooped down and sat on Paige’s shoulder. These little birds, which always traveled in pairs or flocks, seemed to find noise of any kind irresistible and were fascinated by human speech.

  “I love it here,” said Paige. “You know what I’d like to do? Come out here every day and just study all of D’Qar’s birds. Take holos and record their songs and the way they fly, and make a catalogue that lists them all.”

  The birds on D’Qar were the first real animals the Tico sisters had ever seen.

  Back home, when they were younger and before their world had been devastated, Paige had been obsessed with animals. Her enthusiasm had infected her younger sister, too. Though Hays Minor had been too cold to support native wildlife on its surface, the walls of the Tico family pod had been vibrant with images of steeds and wildcats and herds of livestock and giant sea bulls. All the games Paige had made up as a child had involved taking care of animals, or riding them, or healing them. And Rose had followed along, as she always did.

  “Seems like the only birds we ever get to count are the spy droid variety,” Rose grumbled. “Why are you so absolutely optimistic all the time?”

  Paige laid her arm along Rose’s shoulders and leaned over to hum in her ear. The two sonar swallows hopped along Paige’s arm, following the sound of her voice, until they had hopped onto Rose’s shoulder. When Paige backed away, the beautiful glimmering creatures were fluttering their tinkling feathers by the side of Rose’s head.

  “I do it to keep your spirits up, of course,” said Paige. “I promised Dad I’d look after you.”

  Paige touched the pale gold medallion around her neck.

  “We always said we were going to
travel the galaxy together, and we’re doing it, right?”

  Rose nearly responded with natural sarcasm: Yeah, we’re on a luxury cruise.

  But Paige was serious and joyful, and it seemed mean to shoot her down. They’d both wanted it so badly while they were growing up in the cold and the dark—to walk in the sun together on some green-and-blue planet warmed by a bright star.

  Rose let Paige have the last word this time.

  “We’re doing it,” Rose repeated slowly, aware that Paige didn’t just mean D’Qar. “So what do you think? You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”

  “Thought about what?” Paige said.

  “Oh, nuts and bolts,” Rose exclaimed. “What do you think I mean, opening an interplanetary zoo? Selling Haysian jewelry to rich senators? About Leia’s mission, of course! About going spying on Atterra Bravo!”

  “Reconnaissance,” Paige said. “Not spying. Not intelligence work—just cross-checking information.”

  “Well? She told us to think about it. Have you thought about it?”

  “Someone needs to do it,” Paige said. “But I’m not sure it should be us.”

  Rose frowned at her sister in the cool half light of the sunrise and asteroid shadow.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I’m responsible for you.”

  “We’re pretty much up to our ears in it together already,” Rose pointed out.

  “I always get second thoughts when I’m out here in the early morning,” Paige admitted. “It’s so peaceful. And it makes me long for an ordinary life.”

  “Peaceful isn’t really in the Resistance heavy bomber job description,” Rose said.

  “Of course not. It’s what we’re working on,” Paige answered.

  They walked a little farther along the trail.

  “Have you thought about it?” Paige asked suddenly.