But instead they ran into a new problem.
The first batch of spy droids they’d released had been out in the wild longer, and as a result they took more time to gather up.
The probes had spread out and were coming back to the ship in random groups—a handful at a time, sometimes only one or two, never more than a dozen together. Counting them in took longer than anyone had calculated.
“Eight just got back safe and sound,” Nix called up to Rose from the bomb racks. “Can you see any more of them?”
“Here comes another bunch completing an orbit,” Rose reported from the monitors. “Looks like six or seven, but it might just be space garbage—get ready in case they’re ours. My gosh, it’s worse than nerf herding.”
She didn’t actually know what nerf herding was like. But it couldn’t be as bad as this.
“How many are still out there?” Finch called.
“After we scoop up this next bunch—if these belong to us—there’s still another fifty or so to grab,” Rose said. “Not counting the ones that have already blown up.”
“Okay, nearly there,” Finch said encouragingly.
It was at that moment that a strange dazzle of light appeared on the screen Rose was watching, as if someone had thrown a handful of illuminated snow crystals across the monitor.
And just as if the crystals had instantly melted, they swept in a line across the upper corner of her screen and vanished.
It looked like a squadron of starfighters.
ROSE BLINKED hard. She stared at the screen, wondering if she’d imagined it—or if her tired eyes were fooling her.
As she gazed, wide-eyed, two of the gleaming pinpricks swept teasingly back into the upper corner and out of sight again.
“Um, Finch,” Rose called, “I don’t want to scare anybody, but I think there are a bunch of small ships out there—ahead of us, zero-one-three sector oh-nine, moving. They’re out of range now but not far out of range. Look for them when they move—you’ll see the sunlight on them.”
She added, “Paige, keep your eyes peeled, but I don’t think you can see them from the lower turret—they’re ahead of us and high.”
There was a long, heavy silence while Rose continued to tally the probe droids and Nix continued to shunt them back into the racks.
Then Finch suddenly said, “Got ’em. I mean, I see your bunch of ships, Rose—there are seven of ’em. In formation. They’re sort of scanning back and forth across that sector—must be some kind of patrol. Could be bandits.”
He meant an enemy, anyone who might attack them.
The pilot paused.
“How many of the droids are we missing?” he asked at last.
Rose checked the list. “Only seven left. They’re just completing an orbit. If we sit here and wait for them, those patrol ships might see us….”
Nix called up, “If we go hide in the asteroid maze again, we’ll miss the rendezvous with the probes and have to wait an hour and a half for them to make another orbit.”
“Or we could turn the engines on and go meet them now,” Paige offered in her calm voice.
Finch gave a quick and bitter laugh. As if that weren’t the most dangerous option available—the option that most risked the StarFortress getting noticed by the patrol of speedy ships that were zigzagging in and out of the top of Rose’s screen and Finch’s field of vision.
“Might as well get it over with,” said Finch. “Nix—Rose—are you in?”
“Always willing to get it over with,” said Nix. “I’m in.”
Rose sighed audibly over everybody’s headset. “Yeah, whatever Paige says.”
“Ready for anything, right? Cool. Let me know what those speedy little patrol guys are up to, Rose,” Finch said. “You’ve got the best view of them.”
“Let me know if you need help getting rid of them,” Rose said. From the flight monitors, she could keep an eye on what the patrol ships were doing, but she’d have to get into the tail gunner’s turret if she needed to shoot at them.
“That’s all but the last three probes in,” Nix announced.
Rose’s attention was still riveted to her screens.
She was beginning to see a pattern to what the patrol of small ships was doing, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
She was also itching to check on the baffler to make sure it was doing its job. She didn’t like to think what might happen if the speedy ships that glittered across her screens were to notice the Resistance StarFortress sailing quietly along in Atterra Bravo’s orbit, scooping up data-gathering spy droids full of information about what was going on at the planet’s surface.
“Finch, when we’ve picked up all the probes, head straight back into the asteroid maze,” Rose said.
“Got it,” Finch said. Rose couldn’t hear any nervousness in his tone, but she guessed he had to be coming to the same conclusion that she was about the patrol. And it was getting closer and brighter all the time.
The patrol was chasing someone.
The starfighters were growing near enough that if their pilots had been able to take the time to look, they’d have easily spotted sunlight glinting off the heavy bomber, even if its power trace wasn’t visible.
But they were obviously focused on something else.
They weren’t just routinely tracking back and forth; they were dodging and weaving, their formation breaking and reforming, following a glint of sunlight that streaked ahead of them.
The leading light wasn’t part of the rest of the formation. The sparkle on the screen that led the handful of moving stars wasn’t following the same pattern as the others. It was racing ahead, jinking wildly backward, and then somersaulting suddenly up or down when its path was cut off by one of the other lights.
It was trying to escape.
“How are we doing, Nix?” Finch called anxiously, because the dogfight, or whatever it was, was getting dangerously close. On its current path, Hammer was heading directly into the fray. “Aren’t those probes in yet?”
“One left. One left.”
“Is it in range?”
“Not yet—”
“Can we just leave it? It’ll run into one of those mines eventually and blow itself up.”
Rose gritted her teeth. “Or maybe we could activate its self-destruct…”
If any of the probes were caught with the information they now carried, it would raise diplomatic questions that could have huge consequences in the New Republic Senate. Who’d sent the spy probes, and why? They were in First Order territory without authorization. The First Order could claim some kind of treaty violation, and Leia’s case against them could be ruined.
Paige reminded the rest of the crew, “If Nix activates that probe’s self-destruct now, the explosion guarantees we’ll get the attention of those ships. It was probably the exploding mines that brought the patrol out here.”
If the Resistance bomber were caught, now carrying nearly a thousand times the cargo of information that a single probe droid carried, they’d have to blow themselves up.
Finch sped with determination toward the last probe, and also toward the strange ships. With each second it seemed more likely that they were going to have to engage with them.
“Here comes that droid!” Rose yelled. “Nix, you ready?”
She stared at the screen. She could tell the droid by its shape. The other ships, closer now, were also beginning to show distinct outlines on the monitor.
Finch, watching the ships at a distance from the pilot’s cockpit, couldn’t see the fine detail that Rose was able to zoom in on.
She called a warning in a low voice.
“They’re TIE fighters. The patrol. They’re First Order TIE fighters.”
“Thanks for the good news,” said Finch. “All of them?”
“I don’t recognize the shape of the thing they’re chasing. It’s like a tube. But tiny—some kind of starfighter? Even smaller than a TIE.”
“Doesn’t look like he’s going t
o shake them, though,” Finch observed.
“Can we pick up our cargo and get the heck out of here?” Paige called up.
“Wise words from the lower gun turret,” Rose called back.
“Closing on the last probe now,” said Finch. “Nix, let me know as soon as it’s in. I’m going to make a sharp turn out into the belt to get behind those asteroids while I initiate the lightspeed sequence. Then tell me the second the bomb bay doors are shut, because we can’t enter hyperspace until they’re closed.”
“Understood,” said Nix.
“Rose,” Finch continued, “take your place in the tail gun turret—just in case.”
Rose left the monitors and squeezed her way to the tail guns back past the baffler. The big machine hummed steadily. But Rose knew it couldn’t hide them if they were seen.
She settled behind the laser cannon with her hands on the controls.
“Paige?” Rose said.
“I’m flying with you,” her sister answered from below.
Facing back the way they’d come, Rose couldn’t see what was going on as the last of the Atterra Bravo probes sailed home and Nix locked it in place.
“Let’s go,” came Nix’s call, and Finch veered the StarFortress away from the planet’s inner orbit and the sun.
The rockets blazed as Finch used full power. The moment they were flying perpendicular to the planet, Rose suddenly had a good view of the ships they’d been trying to avoid.
The TIE fighters were racing toward Atterra Bravo, all six flying in formation. Mostly they just appeared as speeding balls of light as the sun caught their surfaces, but for a split second they came close enough that Rose could see their distinctive shapes before they wheeled away again after their prey.
Rose began to hope that, if the TIE pilots had seen Hammer and its payload of spy droids, they were assuming it was part of their own blockade. They certainly weren’t paying any attention to it; they were completely focused on the desperate ship they were pursuing.
Then, suddenly, all the hunting ships soared upward toward the heavy bomber.
“Are those doors shut yet?” Finch yelled.
“Not yet—I’m on it!” Nix yelled back.
Rose didn’t dare fire at the TIE fighters. If they hadn’t already noticed Hammer themselves, she sure wasn’t going to attract their attention, not when they were so close to entering lightspeed.
What would Paige do? Rose asked herself.
Down below, Paige wasn’t firing, either. Rose was sure she was doing the right thing. Don’t attack, she told herself. Defend yourself if you have to, but don’t attack.
Rose waited breathlessly as the seconds dragged by and the hunt grew nearer.
Just as the shadowy pockmarked surface of the nearest asteroid in the Atterra Belt obscured the view of space beyond the StarFortress, Rose saw the tiny ship that was the TIE fighters’ prey. For most of the chase, it had appeared as nothing but a wayward and desperate pinpoint of light drawing acrobatic spirals in its effort to escape the TIEs. But now it made another quick turn away from its pursuers and streaked like a comet straight toward the Resistance bomber.
Simultaneously, Rose and Paige yelled warnings.
“Finch, behind you!”
“Nix, close the doors!”
“I’m trying!” Nix called. “We’re moving at full power and it slows their operational speed!”
Rose’s hands gripped the controls of her laser cannons. The fleeing ship’s path as it sped toward her was a twisted corkscrew of feints and dodges—expert flying that was almost impossible to fix in her gunsight.
“Paige, can you nail him?”
“I don’t—” The hesitation in Paige’s voice was urgent, and held something Rose couldn’t quite identify. And then Paige yelled again, without her usual calm, “Are the doors closed?”
Nix swore. “Give me a few more seconds—”
Rose knew what was holding Paige back. It was obvious the fleeing ship wasn’t armed. It had never tried to fight back. It was just trying desperately to get away, and Paige didn’t want to shoot at it. She didn’t want to fire on a defenseless ship that was clearly trying to escape from a patrol of armed starfighters.
The little ship abruptly slowed as it closed in on Hammer. Rose took careful aim and held the craft in her gunsight. She got a good look at it—a worn and battered interplanetary starfighter of an unfamiliar design, slim and slender as a duct tube and just big enough to seat two people back-to-back with their legs straight out in front of them.
But Rose didn’t fire. Paige wasn’t firing in the ball turret below her, and that made Rose hold off also.
Suddenly, the strange ship put on a brief burst of speed, and a second later vanished beneath Rose’s line of sight. And a split second after that, there was a tremendous crash and a thud that rocked the entire bomber.
A stream of obscenities from Nix poured into Rose’s headset.
“What just happened?” yelled Finch.
“That crazy starfighter boarded us!” Paige yelled, all sign of her usual cool gone. “They flew straight into the bomb bay!”
“Nix?” cried Finch as he guided the heavy bomber at top speed into the maze of asteroids that circled Atterra’s sun.
The bombardier was shaken, but answered the call: “I’m okay. Ship’s okay. Doors shut. Good thing we aren’t carrying real bombs! Looks like we’ve got a hitchhiker.”
The TIE fighters came screaming after them, laser cannons blasting. Rose stopped worrying about whether or not firing back was the right thing to do. She leaned into the gun controls in the tail turret and fired. It was a relief to be doing something after all that waiting. Below her, the light of Paige’s cannon fire paralleled her own. As if in a dream, without really paying attention to what they were saying, Rose heard Nix and Finch shouting at each other through the comm headsets.
“Doors are shut, you said?” That was Finch. “Everybody strap in for lightspeed—the second we’re clear of these asteroids I’m going to jump.”
“Um, is there something wrong with your headset, flyboy?” Nix growled furiously. “We’ve got a hitchhiker.”
“And we’ve got a bunch of First Order TIE fighters on our tail,” Finch snarled back. “Strap yourself in and get out your blaster and we’ll deal with the stowaway when we’re safe in hyperspace.”
And with that, Finch left the Atterra Belt. The view around Rose in the crystal sphere of the tail gunner’s turret sparkled with the light of the jump to lightspeed.
So much for the limitless peace of hyperspace, thought Rose.
Finch’s deadpan drawl came through Rose’s headset: “That was not standard galactic intercept procedure.” She could hear him panting with the effort it must have taken to fly at full power through the maze of asteroids. “Rose, get down there and give Nix and Paige some backup.”
Rose scrambled out of the tail turret and ran back to the access ladder that led down through the bomb bay.
Finch swung around on his chair to hail her. “Here, take one of my blasters. I’m just setting up the autopilot—I’ll be right behind you.”
Rose started down the ladder with Finch’s blaster tucked into her tool belt.
She couldn’t help looking down as she climbed.
Far below her, she could see the slender little starfighter wedged almost upright against the bomb racks in the foot of the StarFortress. One of the supports for the lower catwalk had twisted itself around the nose of the starfighter as it came to a sudden stop in a very small space that really wasn’t designed to contain a ship. Several of the probe droids had been crushed in the impact.
Rose was halfway down the ladder when one of the twin canopies of the small starfighter began to open. She paused, double-checked her footing, and took aim with Finch’s blaster just in case.
Finch paused on the ladder above Rose. Nix stood on the damaged lower catwalk, and Paige crouched by the hatch to her gun turret. Both of them had blasters raised.
Hammer’s crew held their breath as they waited to see whom they’d caught.
The figure who climbed out of the cockpit was short and slender. The fugitive took a quick look around, saw Paige and Nix with their threatening blasters, and held up gloved hands in surrender. Looking higher, the intruder saw Rose and Finch and gave a sort of despairing shrug.
Finch dialed in the universal comm on his headset. “Can you hear me?”
The other pilot didn’t answer aloud at first—just gave a frightened nod. Then, speaking in a rush, the fugitive pointed to the other cockpit, whose inhabitant was struggling to get the canopy open from the craft’s awkward wedged position. “I need to get her out—let me help her out!”
It was a youthful voice, a boy’s voice, and it caught with emotion that nearly stopped the boy from finishing his sentence. Rose recognized that catch. It was connected to the reaction you had at the end of a battle—when you hoped you were safe again, for the time being, and your hands started to shake and your limbs felt like they were full of hot water.
“You can help her out if you don’t try any funny business,” Finch told him.
Nix climbed a little way up the ladder to get out of the way. Paige covered the young pilot with her weapon as he struggled awkwardly with the other canopy and finally managed to pry it up.
There was barely room for the starfighter’s second occupant to crawl out. Paige finally put down her blaster and held out her hands so the stranger could hang on to her and pull.
“Ma’am? Are you all right?” the pilot cried, frantically trying to fight his way past the wedged ship to get to his passenger.
“I’m fine, boy,” said the other, an older woman whose voice was breathless but practical. “Settle down. Don’t scare anyone who’s pointing a blaster at you.”
Rose lifted her eyebrows in disbelief. She’d expected hostility—or, at the least, fear. This woman sounded like nothing could surprise her.
“Where are you headed?” Finch asked, with deadpan politeness.
“Out,” the woman said. “Out of Atterra.”