Cobalt Squadron Read online

  Rose screamed, “Keep going! Keep going! They’re still looping back….”

  The light of the Vixen’s engines would be visible to their pursuer from below.

  “Don’t stop climbing till I tell you to!” Rose cried. If they could just get enough height before the searchlight beam caught them again—

  The attack ship’s beams swept around in a tight circle and then pointed skyward as it, too, began to climb, much faster than the small Resistance reconnaissance ship.

  “Lights out,” Rose said, and Paige and Reeve switched everything off.

  The patrol ship soared past them in the sky without seeing them. Their pursuer obviously thought they were climbing away into space a lot faster than they were capable of climbing.

  “YES!” they cheered together.

  “Now we just glide away into the dark,” Paige said, her voice shaking, but with something of its usual calm command back in it.

  “Wow,” Rose breathed, giddy with the success of the trick. “Hey, we all worked together pretty well there! Sorry I shouted at you, Paige.” She choked back a laugh. “That’s the first time you’ve ever let me boss you around like that.”

  “South,” Reeve yelled wildly. “Head south.”

  The pursuing ship was circling above them with its searchlight on, hunting for them in the wrong place.

  It looked like their desperate bid for freedom was going to work.

  Paige had taken the Vixen high enough that they were going to be able to glide for several kilometers with their engines idling. When they had to start up the power again, the baffler would mask the low emission it would take to keep going. And now it was dark enough that they couldn’t be seen unless the terrible searchlight caught them by accident.

  “What do you think, Paige?” Rose panted. “Is it safe to get back on course yet?”

  “I don’t see any sign of them….”

  “South,” insisted Reeve.

  Paige swung the Little Vixen around and headed south.

  He was right, in the end.

  After another hour of flying, without encountering any more patrol ships, they found the outlying uninhabited islets of the Firestone Islands.

  Paige let Reeve take over for the landing in the dark; he was obviously at home in this inhospitable terrain.

  And this time, they managed to get some sleep.

  Within two hours of waking the next morning, they had located the main island of the Firestone archipelago.

  They were all nervous about flying in daylight now. It was likely that the ship that had spotted them the night before would come back to try to track them down. Their little Resistance reconnaissance ship was still operating under the cover of Rose’s power baffler, but of course that wasn’t going to stop them from being seen in broad daylight.

  But Reeve was excited as well as nervous. He was home. It was kind of painful to watch; Rose could see how much he loved this barren place.

  “See the pipelines down there?” Reeve pointed sweepingly. “That’s where the big hydro farms begin. Keep going! We can land in the pumice forest. It’s not far now. Ms. Casca says no off-worlders ever go there, and from there you can hike along the beach to the Big Settlement. The rock formations give you good cover. I can guide you.”

  “Sure you can,” said Rose drily.

  But they did what Reeve suggested.

  When they touched down and climbed out of the Little Vixen, they were clearly in a different kind of landscape from the one where they’d set down the night before.

  Here the ground was no longer glassy, but porous. The towering columns of pumice were worn flat at the tide line where the acidic seas had ebbed and flowed. It was an eerie place, and the fluting of the wind as it whistled through the holes in the pumice stone and between the columns didn’t help. It sounded like the air was full of ghosts.

  But it wasn’t bad walking. Paige and Rose carried blasters, just in case, in addition to their light packs. They had hidden the ship under a camouflage sheet that blended in with its surroundings. So far the hydro pipelines were the only evidence they’d seen of intelligent life on this barren, bright, and hostile world.

  Reeve was eager and anxious all at the same time. “It’ll take us a few hours to walk to the settlement. Atterra Bravo’s a safe place for walking—there isn’t any native wildlife here.”

  “No native wildlife!” Rose echoed. “There goes our safari! So the only thing we have to worry about is the First Order invaders?”

  Reeve was instantly sober. “Well, yes. They’ve taken over the hydro farms, and they have a lot of ships here. There’s a trickle of water still allowed to the administrators, like Ms. Casca, so they have someone on site who knows the farms.”

  Reeve paused.

  “We’ve tried to share the water,” he added in a low voice. “A lot of people have their own condensers. But—but most of the settlement died of thirst in the first two weeks of the blockade.”

  He turned his face away abruptly, as he often did when emotion hit him hard.

  After a quiet moment, Paige said, “I’m sorry.”

  After another pause, Rose added, “And me. I’m sorry, too.”

  It wasn’t exactly what had happened back in Otomok, Paige and Rose’s home star system. The destruction there had happened differently. But the end result had been the same.

  “Let’s get going,” said Paige.

  “Yeah, let’s get going,” Rose repeated gruffly. “Let’s get this safari over with.”

  They started walking along the harsh, porous beach.

  They marched without speaking for the first half hour or so. There was no sound but the acidic waves, which were too dangerous to get close to. After about five kilometers they came to a small curving bay, so sheltered from the wind that the surface of the sea lay flat and still.

  They stopped there, out of the wind, and paused to take careful sips of their water supply. Warned about the peculiarities of the Firestone Islands, they’d come from D’Qar with a portable condenser, but they still had to be sparing with their water. As they stood looking over the ominous beauty of the golden bay, Reeve fretted, “I wonder if we should have flown straight to the Big Settlement. It’s dangerous flying in daylight, but it would be faster. Ms. Casca would have had a better plan than me….”

  “You need to start thinking for yourself,” Rose advised him. “You’re the safari guide, not Ms. Casca!”

  Reeve’s face clouded. “Well, what’s wrong with relying on someone who knows better than you? You do the same thing.”

  “Since when?” Rose challenged.

  “Do you even hear yourself? ‘Yeah, let’s get going.’ ‘Me too, Big Sister.’ You don’t do anything without making sure it’s okay with Paige. You even apologized for telling her how to hide from that First Order ship last night!”

  Paige laughed. “That’s true, you did.”

  “I only apologized for yelling at you!” Rose started to protest.

  It wasn’t true that she needed Paige’s say-so to get things done. Rose had her own skills, her own accomplishments, her own projects and assignments. People trusted her. Leia trusted her. Rose had invented the power baffler herself, and she was in charge of the tracking equipment that told the Resistance back on D’Qar that they’d landed safely three times since they arrived on Atterra Bravo.

  But it was true that Rose hadn’t wanted to take responsibility for Reeve.

  “We’re on this hop together because we’re sisters,” Rose said defensively. “Not because I can’t do anything without Paige! We work well together—”

  She stopped suddenly. He’s just a kid, Rose reminded herself. A scared kid puffing himself up at the expense of someone he’s sure isn’t going to hurt him. And he can’t stop thinking about his grandmother, who’s been left behind in another star system.

  With a huge effort, Rose reined herself in. She turned quickly to Paige with a different question. “How long can we stay on this planet?”

/>   “We can stay here three days, if we’re going to be self-sufficient,” Paige answered.

  “So,” said Rose.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Paige. “The air’s cool and the walking’s easy. So let’s enjoy the safari!”

  Rose gave her older sister a dirty look. But she didn’t answer. She screwed the lid back on her water flask.

  Then Reeve hissed suddenly, “Get back behind the stone columns—fast.”

  IT WAS the first time Rose had ever heard Reeve Panzoro say anything that sounded like a command rather than a protest.

  She swung around to look at him. He grabbed her by the elbow. The jolt made Rose let go of her flask. Before she could pick it up, Reeve was dragging her away from the beach, toward the shelter of the rock formations.

  “Hey, wait—”

  “Just get under cover.”

  With his other hand, he gave Paige a push, as well.

  In Reeve’s voice there was something so urgent, and so terrified, that neither one of the Tico sisters argued with him. All three of them ran for the protective camouflage of the volcanic columns.

  When they’d nearly reached the tall rock formations, the terrain underfoot becoming more uneven, Rose looked back over her shoulder.

  There was another ship approaching the beach. Rose couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t look to her like the one that had been chasing them the night before. This one seemed a lot bigger. It was skimming low along the surface of the yellow sea but not close enough to damage its hull, just the way Paige and Reeve had been flying when they’d first arrived on Atterra Bravo. But it rode closer to the surface than Paige and Reeve had, because the water of the sheltered bay was so still.

  It was an enormous ship. It wasn’t a privately owned launch or even a police cruiser. It was a big freighter or a transport of some kind. There wasn’t room for it to set down on the beach, but it hovered closer and closer over the bay, almost as if it were about to land there.

  “Get back—we’re dead if someone sees us,” panted Reeve. They were among the towering pumice formations, but the columns weren’t close enough or wide enough to hide them completely.

  “We’d better stop moving,” Reeve said suddenly in a low voice.

  The three of them crouched low, wedged tightly into a cluster of treelike tilted rocks that leaned against each other at the top, forming a sort of cave. Paige knelt and, leaning with her elbows against a stone, focused on the approaching ship through her macrobinoculars.

  “What is it?” Rose asked.

  “Death transport,” the young Atterran pilot gasped. “They do sweeps to gather people up—”

  The ship’s repulsorlifts grew louder as it crept dangerously near to the surface of the acidic bay.

  Rose raised her own macrobinoculars to her eyes to get a better look, fascinated and horrified as a wide, ramp-like hatch yawned open on the hovering transport. Rose could see half a dozen First Order stormtroopers, wearing the menacing white armor that was so similar to that of the former Imperial stormtroopers. They struggled with crates and pulleys and other equipment at the entrance to the transport.

  “What are they doing here?” she whispered to Reeve. “You said off-worlders stay away from this part of the planet. And what did you mean—death transport?”

  “I said the pumice forest was safe,” Reeve answered distractedly. “I didn’t mean—I meant our world is safe. I mean, it used to be safe. This—this transport is full of dead prisoners. They gather people up and fly them into orbit, but their holding cells aren’t atmospherically controlled, so the prisoners die in space. Then they dump them off in our oceans—”

  Reeve swallowed before he continued.

  “It’s an easy way to dispose of bodies. They’ve got a couple of big transports they keep on Atterra Alpha, and they bring them over here and round people up. It’s the perfect place to get rid of the evidence…the acid sea doesn’t leave much behind.”

  Rose wondered if he’d seen this happen before.

  Then she wondered how many times he’d seen it happen.

  Reeve gulped again. He was no longer watching. He whispered, “Ms. Casca thinks—”

  Reeve coughed, and corrected himself.

  “We think they might be bringing prisoner transports here from other systems, too. It’s just so easy to get rid of people here, and then there’s no trace of what’s happened to them.”

  Even through her macrobinoculars Rose couldn’t tell what was being tipped out of the massive container that had shunted forward through the hatch of the transport. The angle was wrong. And she didn’t really want to confirm Reeve’s story with her own eyes anyway.

  But it seemed pretty obvious that he wasn’t making it up.

  Reeve was crouched with his face turned aside. “They haven’t used this part of Firestone before,” he said. “They don’t always land in the same spot.”

  Paige answered quietly, “Let’s hope they haven’t raided your settlement.”

  It wasn’t the large-scale destruction of a city or a planet. But it was murder all the same.

  Sick at heart, Rose didn’t want to watch the ship anymore.

  But just as she started to lower her macrobinoculars, her eyes were drawn from the transport to the beach. She’d spotted a small thing that stood out against the porous rock.

  It was her water flask.

  Rose’s mouth felt dry just looking at it. She swallowed. Silently, she cursed Reeve for making her drop the flask in the first place, and then she cursed herself for failing to pick it up right away. If anyone on the transport noticed it…

  Rose gazed through the macrobinoculars again. No one was looking toward the shore; the stormtroopers closest to the end of the ramp were hosing down the now-empty container. They wore thick, lightweight armor that seemed to be treated with some kind of protective coating to withstand splashes from Atterra Bravo’s acidic sea.

  Suddenly, Rose saw Reeve, appearing much closer through the telescopic lenses than he actually was, darting forward across the open beach.

  For twenty seconds, he was completely vulnerable, moving in plain sight out in the open in front of the First Order death transport.

  He ran hunkered down, bent low, as near to the ground as he could get without crawling.

  “What is he doing?” Paige gasped.

  Reeve grabbed Rose’s water flask. He looked up quickly through his own macrobinoculars toward the hovering transport, checking to make sure no one had noticed him.

  No one had. They were still working on cleaning out the container.

  Reeve crept backward toward where Paige and Rose were still hidden.

  He went more carefully now than he had when he’d so quickly darted forward. He stared through the macrobinoculars as he moved, keeping his eyes on the transport.

  Rose held her breath.

  “Made it,” Reeve panted, slipping back into the protective shadow of the rock formations. He held out Rose’s flask to her.

  “You should have waited!” she hissed. “They’re nearly done—they’ll leave in a minute!”

  “It was a time bomb lying there. When they’ve finished, they always make a low pass to patrol the area in case someone’s seen them. They’d have spotted it for sure, and then they’d have dropped someone out to do a search. Especially after that chase in the dark last night, they’re bound to make the connection.”

  “But if they’d seen you now?”

  “They’d have just got me.” He drew in a ragged breath. “You two might have been all right.”

  Paige stared at him, frowning.

  Reeve was good at running away, but Rose could hardly believe he’d jumped forward into danger like that. It seemed completely out of character to her. She spoke aloud what she knew her sister was thinking. “You’re either very, very brave, or very, very stupid.”

  Reeve shrugged. “I know I’m not brave, but I’m not stupid, either. It was just what I had to do, right? It was my fault in the first place, and I
knew the risks and you didn’t. So there wasn’t really any choice.”

  The wide hatch on the transport ship began to close up.

  “Shhh,” Reeve warned. “Sit close against the rocks and don’t move. They’re going to do their scan of the landscape now.”

  The whole procedure had taken less than an hour. Less than an hour to get rid of the bodies of a few thousand people and completely wipe any trace of them from the face of the planet. With its doors closed, the transport rumbled slowly up and down the beach. Reeve had been right about them sweeping the area.

  By the time the ship had roared away into the sky, Paige and Rose and their guide were all thirsty again, as well as stiff and sore from having to crouch for so long among the rough and uneven rock columns.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Rose passed her canteen to Reeve.

  He had his own canteen, of course. But this shared drink was a tribute. It was a tribute to what his world had suffered and was suffering—and to the danger he’d risked to save Rose and Paige a few minutes before.

  Reeve drank briefly—ceremoniously. He understood.

  Then he handed the canteen back to Rose and stood up.

  “Well, come on,” he said. “What about our safari?”

  They made it to Reeve Panzoro’s settlement without encountering another ship, though they did see an assortment of craft crossing the sky while they walked. They traveled close to the pumice columns in case they needed to take cover again.

  The outer living quarters of the Big Settlement stood empty. The first sign of habitation that the Tico sisters saw in the Firestone Islands was a collection of domed, glittering white saltstone huts with no one inside. Broken doors hung open, swinging gently in the sea wind, and empty water condensers trailed wires in the walled yards around the empty houses. The Big Settlement of Firestone Main Island had become a ghost town.

  “There are never any bodies,” said Reeve. “When people die, we send them out to sea. It’s clean. It’s what we’ve always done.”

  He choked.

  “But we don’t—we don’t murder them first.”