Cobalt Squadron

  “Don’t worry. We get you,” Rose told him.

  There was an inner circle to the compound that was surrounded by a makeshift barricade. It was there that Reeve led Paige and Rose. The way behind the barricade was through a complicated system of tunnels beginning in one of the abandoned houses.

  The three of them were greeted, as they emerged, with deep suspicion—by half a dozen gaunt and exhausted-looking people holding an assortment of deadly-looking weapons.

  Before anyone could challenge them, one of the Atterran fighters cried out, “Hold fire! It’s Reeve! It’s Reeve Panzoro!”

  A man and a woman not much older than Reeve rushed forward to hug him. Another, older man kept a solar crossbow ready to fire; three other seasoned-looking settlers held electric staffs that could clearly do some damage in a fight. There was no reason yet for these people to put their trust in Rose and Paige.

  “It’s all right—it’s all right,” Reeve promised. “They’re with me.”

  “Where’s Casca?” asked the man with the crossbow.

  “She’s safe. We made it out. I’ll tell you in a minute—she sent me with these…”

  He hesitated, struggling to come up with the right word, and Rose resisted a wild urge to put in, Pirates!

  “Emissaries,” Reeve came up with triumphantly. He gestured toward Paige and Rose, with a glance into their faces. “These are Paige Tico, pilot, and Rose Tico, flight engineer, representatives of General Leia Organa. General Organa has connections with the New Republic Senate.”

  He turned to Rose and Paige, with a sweep of his arm to indicate the local settlers. “And this is the Bravo Rising resistance team of Atterra Bravo. My uncle Orion Chalk. The foreman of the Big Settlement hydro farm before it was taken away from us, Darrus Rantarovo. And this is the chief instructor from the Firestone Technical Academy, Tanya Helios.”

  The chief instructor of the Technical Academy stepped forward. She held out her hand to Paige, and then to Rose. “Thank you. Thank you for being here.” Darrus, following Tanya, shook their hands, as well, but didn’t say anything. He seemed too choked up to speak.

  Paige and Rose gave each other sideways glances. After what they’d seen that day, there wasn’t any doubt in their minds. They knew they would do whatever they could to help these people.

  PAIGE WAS worried about the Big Settlement’s desperate lack of water. She didn’t want to have to count on the Firestone Islands to provide for her or Rose when the Atterrans clearly could barely manage to provide for themselves. So she agreed to stay with them one day only, and they had to make plans right away for how the Resistance could help them.

  The assembly was Reeve Panzoro’s idea.

  Bravo Rising called a group meeting in a covered market area in the center of the settlement. They held it in the evening to allow time to send messengers several kilometers across the landscape on pedal-powered veloflyers. There was next to no fuel for generating power in the Firestone Islands anymore. All the solar and wind power went toward condensing and recycling water; any other fuel was hoarded for Bravo Rising’s weapons and their small fleet of starfighters, stolen or borrowed from Atterra’s disbanded security forces.

  Rose and Paige and their pilot guide sat in the center of the wide atrium as the focus of the gathering, along with Orion Chalk. Rose wondered if they’d have to make a speech to the people there. This was not something she felt confident about. She didn’t think Paige did, either.

  But Reeve Panzoro, running on adrenaline, was proving himself fiercely in control.

  “We need a plan to take back to General Organa,” he said. “A specific plan. Ms. Casca’s convinced Leia to give us help, and the general has sent Paige and Rose as her emissaries to work out how they’ll get through the blockade and where they should land.”

  “Slow down. You just blasted from zero to lightspeed,” Rose protested. “We’re only here to make sure your story’s true. And if it is, Leia might be able to send support.”

  “You know it’s true,” Reeve insisted. “You saw the death transport! And now that you’re here—”

  “Now that we’re here, it’s clearer how we can help,” Paige said. “We can offer you a plan.”

  Rose backed her up, teasing, “Paige likes to plan parties.”

  “Sure I do,” said Paige. “The Old Lady had a suggestion that would work. We can use the StarFortress bombers to make supply runs here.”

  Rose, remembering what Fossil had said, agreed. “We wouldn’t even have to land. We could send loaded shells in as a drop to a few designated sites.” She turned to look at Paige. “We could rig other StarFortresses with power bafflers like the one in Hammer. If we got other people besides me working on it, we could set them up pretty quickly. It’s not hard to do; it’s just tedious wiring up all the circuits. Those asteroids in the Atterra Belt mean it’s really easy to stay out of sight, and if all the bombers get their power covered up, we should be able to come and go pretty safely—”

  “Just as long as we don’t run into too many of those automatic cannons,” Paige reminded her.

  “But we can help with those,” said Orion Chalk, Reeve’s uncle, the one who’d threatened them with the solar crossbow when they’d first arrived. “We’ve mapped hundreds of them. Reeve Panzoro’s father was part of the team that works on that. And we can show you how to avoid the minefields.”

  “The only thing is, it might have to be a very short party,” Rose said apologetically. She knew how slender the Resistance resources were, and she didn’t think that Leia would be able to keep this blockade-running plan going for long. It was going to have to be an operation that enabled the Atterrans to mount their own defense, just as Casca Panzoro had suggested.

  Paige was thinking the same thing.

  “What do you need most?” she asked.

  All around her voices began to speak up. She heard several different answers, but Rose could tell that the Bravo Rising assembly was unanimous about one thing in particular.

  “Water.”

  “What we need most is water.”

  “Fuel—weapons—power to fight back. But we can’t do anything without water. What we need most is water.”

  “We’ve always farmed it ourselves on Bravo,” explained Orion Chalk. “But when the gas extraction industry began here, the population expanded so much that it’s been hundreds of years since we’ve been self-sufficient in drinkable water. We count on shipments from Atterra Alpha. Since our water’s been blockaded, at least half the planet has died—quickly. It only took a week or two after the water started to run out.”

  “Where do you get it now?”

  “The Firestone Islands contain most of Bravo’s hydro farms. Until the large ones were taken over by the First Order, we supplied water to townships all over the northern quadrant. We may not have access to those farms anymore, but several people in the Big Settlement are self-sufficient backyard water farmers. That’s why Bravo Rising is centered here.” Chalk took a deep breath. “We’ve been smuggling water to other settlements, but we’ve barely got enough to keep the survivors alive. If we could take out the patrols that blockade this section, we’d be able to take back the main Firestone Island water supply.”

  “We need to arrange drop points,” said Paige. “If you can provide us with those locations, information about the automatic cannons and minefields, and a list of other supplies that will help you pull off your defense, we can take those back to our crew and get this ball rolling within a week. We’ll find a way to run through this blockade.”

  And suddenly, it looked like it was really going to happen. Paige and Rose were going to become blockade runners.

  Armed with information that all the probe droids in the galaxy could not have uncovered for them, Paige and Rose left late the following morning to head back to the Little Vixen.

  They’d expected Reeve to come with them. Reeve had expected to go with them. But apparently no one else had expected it.

  “Reeve
Panzoro!” Orion Chalk stopped him in the middle of strapping up his pack. “You’re not leaving? But you—”

  “I’ve got to get back to Ms. Casca,” Reeve objected quickly. “I’ve got to report to her.”

  “The emissaries will report to her. That’s what they came to do—to check out her story. But we need you here—without Ms. Casca, you’re the only Panzoro we’ve got!”

  “But—” Reeve sounded panicked. Rose could tell that he’d been expecting to be reunited with his grandmother the moment they returned to D’Qar.

  “She’s our leader, and you’re her representative,” said Chalk. “Of course you’re free to make your own decision, but I hope you’ll stay. We need you here.”

  Reeve had been separated from Casca Panzoro forcefully; he hadn’t chosen to leave her on D’Qar. But now he was being given a choice.

  Reeve’s face twisted. He looked torn apart. “But she thinks I’m coming back,” he said.

  “You’re our only link with this bomber group,” Chalk insisted. “They’ll need you here as a contact. Your experience with their leaders and equipment will be vital to us if anything goes wrong with their mission.”

  Rose watched Reeve Panzoro with the familiar feeling of sympathy. She knew he was terrified of the blockade. He was terrified of dying of thirst, or worse, in this hostile place that had once been his home. She remembered the fearful relief on his face when he’d climbed out of the ship he’d crash-landed in the belly of the StarFortress.

  But she knew that he was bolder and more determined than she’d taken him for when she’d first met him. She remembered how he’d come up with the ruse that had helped them escape the ship that was hunting them when they’d arrived on Atterra Bravo. She remembered how he’d run into the open on the pumice beach, risking his life to bring back her canteen so that the First Order transport wouldn’t notice it.

  Rose kept her lips clamped shut. She couldn’t blame him for being loyal to his grandmother. She knew that if she were Reeve and Casca were Paige, Rose would choose to go back to her sister every time.

  Rose saw now, uncomfortably, that this might not be the right choice.

  She didn’t dare join in this debate.

  But Paige suddenly did.

  “You’re always thinking about your grandmother’s instructions,” she said to Reeve. “What would she tell you now?”

  Chalk turned to look at her with respect. Reeve, when he looked at Paige himself, still wore an expression of unhappy indecision.

  “What would Casca want you to do?” Paige asked in her calm, fearless, tail-gunner-under-fire voice.

  Reeve Panzoro swallowed. Then, suddenly, he gave a sharp nod.

  “She’d want me to do the job I was needed for.” He paused. “So would my father.”

  “Well, then,” Paige said with satisfaction. “There you go.”

  Reeve took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. Rose could imagine what he was thinking.

  She’s the only one I have left. If I do this, I might never see her again.

  And then he made his decision, knowing that now he was going to be able to navigate new uncharted stars alone.

  “All right. I’ll stay. I’ll do it.”

  Nothing, Rose thought, is as peaceful as the limitless blue of hyperspace.

  She and Paige hadn’t wasted any time getting out of the Atterra system. They’d taken off as soon as they reached the Vixen, and before the end of a twenty-four-hour time block, Rose and Paige were once again alone in the suspended reality following the jump to lightspeed.

  Paige leaned back in the pilot’s seat, stretching. “Wow—what a terrible place. Not really what we meant about seeing the galaxy.” She touched her Haysian ore medallion.

  Seeing Paige’s fingers straying to her throat, Rose mirrored her sister’s action. The familiar wave of love and connection washed over her. They were both touching a little bit of Otomok at the same time—two halves that made a whole—a reminder of the cause they were fighting for, and a physical link to their lost home.

  “Do you think there is any place out there that’s beautiful and…” Rose paused. She’d been going to say peaceful, but it didn’t really seem to be the right word. Without human habitation, Atterra Bravo would have been a place of beauty and peace. But adding people into the mix changed it completely.

  “And what?”

  “A good place for a picnic,” Rose said. “Never mind. There must be somewhere. It was a stupid question.”

  Paige set the autopilot. Hyperspace was a relief after Atterra. She stood up in the little cabin and unrolled a couple of blankets. She grinned at Rose.

  “Hyperspace is beautiful,” said Paige. “And we can picnic right here.”

  She spread out the blankets and arranged the insulated mug and protein packets as if she and Rose were galactic nobility on a feast day. “Come on, Rose—sit down and let’s look at the map. Let’s plan our interstellar vacation.”

  “You are ridiculous,” Rose grumbled.

  They wrapped up close together in the blankets, sharing each other’s warmth. Right now, this was home.

  Rose had a sudden mental image of the pair of them cocooned together all alone, surrounded by light-years and light-years of empty space, as if they were the only two people alive in the entire galaxy—or at least the only two people who mattered.

  But of course there were a lot of other desperate people out there. As if to remind them, Paige pulled up a miniature map of the Outer Rim.

  “D’Qar is too far from Atterra to make a regular series of supply runs efficiently,” she said. “We need to find a place to use as an intermediate base for the heavy bomber unit. Leia had a suggestion for a planet we could check out, just in case. There.”

  Paige pointed.

  Only a short hyperspace jump from Atterra, there was a world on the edge of a mostly uninhabited star system. It was marked “Industrial” and “Independent.”

  “‘Refnu,’” Rose read aloud. “How come Leia tells you all this extra stuff?”

  “Insurance. If we’re both caught, only one of us knows anything.”

  The implication made Rose shiver. “That’s not exactly reassuring,” she said, uncomfortably glad to let her older sister take on the burden of being the one who risked having information tortured out of her. In defense of her own secret selfishness, Rose said quickly, “Now we both know.”

  “But we won’t get caught,” Paige said, squeezing Rose’s hand. “One of the other StarFortress techs suggested it to us—he grew up on Refnu. Cat, the big guy. You know which one I mean, the bomber Treasure’s flight engineer? Anyway, Leia thinks that operating out of Refnu will be good cover. It won’t be too far for our Forts to go back and forth between Refnu and Atterra. It’s in a good position for us to load the supplies we’ll need. And there’s no real reason for anyone to trace the bombers back to D’Qar or to the Resistance. It’ll look like someone on Refnu is being a good neighbor to Atterra. Shall we stop in on our way home?”

  “What, without even asking Leia? Or Fossil? Just drop in on a strange planet and say hi?”

  “Traveling the galaxy together,” Paige reminded her. “I’ve been given a pile of credits to negotiate some docking berths for the Forts if we’re going to go ahead with this.”

  Rose couldn’t help laughing. “Traveling with you is not turning out like I expected. But then, neither is the galaxy.”

  “The galaxy’s great,” said Paige, and they both laughed.

  Neither Paige nor Rose was prepared for the deep, agonizing homesickness that slammed them during their brief trip to Refnu.

  It wasn’t exactly like Hays Minor in the Otomok system. But it was the most like it of any place they’d been since they left home.

  Rose had felt a kind of fierce loyalty to the Atterras just because they were twin worlds. Now she found herself feeling the same kind of loyalty to Refnu, because she understood it.

  Cold and dark, Refnu was as far out on the edge of its ha
bitable zone as the Hays worlds had been, and—like Hays Minor—Refnu was barely warm enough to support life. The planet was so far from its sun that it existed in perpetual twilight. From the minute Paige set down their craft on the windy, frost-rimmed spaceport on Refnu, both she and Rose had felt as though they were finally coming home.

  They couldn’t get out of their little Resistance ship at first. They weren’t dressed for it. After a bit of wrangling over the comm with someone who called himself the “harbormaster” in a puffed-up way, a crane trundled over to them through the purple twilight and deposited a thermal dome over the Vixen so they wouldn’t freeze to death when they climbed out. Then a couple of dockworkers brought them weathersuits.

  It was exactly the way a strange ship would have been welcomed on Hays Minor. Paige caught Rose’s eye as they climbed into the weathersuits and gave her a bright little encouraging half smile. Rose knew her sister was feeling the same sense of bittersweet nostalgia.

  Life had never been easy on Hays Minor—but that was no reason for it to be destroyed.

  Paige and Rose spent only one night on Refnu. They weren’t exactly welcomed, as they’d been on Atterra Bravo. They had to rent their weathersuits by the hour and pay for a bunk in the freighters’ barracks in order to stay on the planet’s surface. It seemed strange to be back in a place where paying for services from strangers was a normal thing to do.

  Leia’s New Republic credits were welcomed, and Paige reluctantly spent them. The weathersuits and a place to sleep were necessities if they wanted to survive the harshness of Refnu’s climate.

  “But you can’t just slap down a pile of cash and buy docking space for a couple of squadrons of heavy Fort bombers,” Rose pointed out to her older sister.

  “Of course not. The Resistance can’t afford it, for one thing. And for another, it would look incredibly suspicious.”

  “So what are you going to do, Intelligence?”

  Paige laughed. “Reconnaissance! I said we’ll negotiate. Remember my job back home on Hays Minor?”