Flaming Water, Frozen Earth
Chapter Five
-DOCUMENT START-
INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:
DOCUMENT#: TOA52314
ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT
ALLIANCE MILITARY WEATHER REPORT for the SOUTHERN RIDGE of the CLABBURN MOUNTAIN RANGE, in the EQUATORIAL region (6.8 DEGREES LATITUDE NORTH) of the planetoid HOTH in the HOTH SYSTEM
ON THE FOLLOWING GSC DATE (Galactic Standard Calendar):
38:6:7
(LOCAL SUMMER)
SUNNY with CIRRIFORM CLOUDS at 6,700 METERS until 1650 HOURS.
After 1650 HOURS: OVERCAST with ALTOSTRATUS CLOUDS at 3,600 METERS (BREAK at 4,200 meters) and CIRRIFORM CLOUDS at 6,000 METERS.
TEMPERATURE at -22.6 DEGREES CENTIGRADE (H) and
-50.7 DEGREES CENTIGRADE (L).
WINDS at 22 km/hr from 310 DEGREES TRUE throughout the day.
ATM PRESSURE of 0.97 ATMOSPHERES
VISIBILITY of 21.8 KILOMETERS at 3,500 METERS.
HUMIDITY at 56.2 PERCENT
ZERO PERCENT chance of PRECIPITATION
ULTRAVIOLET index NEGLIGIBLE
COLD WEATHER WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE: All personnel engaged in outside surface operations are required to wear Class III arctic protective clothing or greater at all times.
REMARK:
ECHO BASE UNDER PRIORITY EVACUATION ORDERS
NEXT FORECAST POSTPONED INDEFINETLY.
-END OF DOCUMENT—
OOOOO
It was a sight that made Armin's heart swell with pride.
The snowscape below was teeming with more activity than Armin had ever seen. Companies of Alliance infantrymen in gray uniforms issued forth from hidden entrances, rushing to take up their positions in the trenches and fortifications of the defensive perimeter. Transport vehicles, moving singly or in pairs, loaded with ammunition and supplies for the battle, followed the foot soldiers like obedient beasts of burden. Laser turrets swiveled in their mounts as their gunners tested their arcs of traverse. On the south edge of the base, another transport and its two escorting X-wing fighters lifted off from the flat terrain, their thrusters throwing up billowing clouds of snow powder as they left the ground. In the blue sky above them, a few clusters of dark silhouettes inched higher towards the clouds—the twelve snowspeeders of Rogue Squadron, flying northwest at full throttle.
Green Squadron, however, was turning south, led by Erwin's veteran flight. The mid-morning sun behind their backs and to the left, they sped towards the horizon as though chasing their own faint shadows across the ice.
In many ways, though, it almost felt like just another routine patrol. The same wind whipped around the outside of the airspeeder. The same whine of powerful engines filled the cockpit. The buzz of intermittent comm chatter, the squeak of the pilot's harness when he moved, the clicks of noise as Mina flipped switches and adjusted system settings from the back seat—Armin had long lost count of how many hours he had spent listening to the familiar sounds.
And below stretched the same peaceful, pristine wonderland that he had soared over dozens of times.
"How you feeling, Armin?" asked Mina from the seat behind Armin's, her restraints rustling in the same way as always as she turned to look over her shoulder at him.
"Fine!" he replied. "You, Mina?"
"Doing great!"
And from her tone, Armin knew from experience that she had smiled as she'd said that.
Indeed, all trace of Armin's doubts and worries seemed to have evaporated. He felt, if anything, relatively confident—even a little restless. Maybe he really was deceiving himself, imagining that this was just another uneventful day on patrol. Or perhaps his sense of ease was from the reassuring touch of the control yoke in his palms, from its reminder that, if he flew, banked, and turned just right, presenting the right firing opportunities for Mina to capitalize on, he could have a real, tangible impact on the battle to come.
"It's been fun," Mina added, "but somehow I don't think I'll miss it here much."
Armin wondered if he was the only one in the squadron who felt a strange sense of regret that, one way or another, this was his last flight over the surface of Hoth.
He wasn't quite sure why he was sad to leave, either. It wasn't that he'd grown used to the quiet, or to their peaceful routine here. Many of the Alliance's other base worlds had been just as remote and tranquil. Hoth, certainly, hadn't treated him kindly. The dry, cold air made him susceptible to nosebleeds, and the interior of the base corridors felt dark and claustrophobic, making him feel like some kind of underground digging creature.
"I wonder if some groups are heading elsewhere besides the rendezvous," Armin mused aloud.
"What makes you think that?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if some units have been assigned other missions. Like Annie's team, for example, or—…"
"Ah, I see…" Mina interrupted, laughing knowingly.
"What?" exclaimed Armin, nonplussed.
"Never mind…" she said, and Armin, turning in his seat, saw her wave a gloved hand dismissively.
Returning his head to face the front, Armin scanned the skyline from east to west. He saw no sign of the inbound Imperial ground forces—only the same craggy mountains, the same frozen dune sea of blue and white, the same wild clouds of snow powder racing and tumbling across the plain.
A part of him felt that it could be no coincidence that the Alliance—the defiant, the bold, the freedom-championing Alliance—had chosen this ice planet as their home. In a way, their stand at Hoth represented the dream of all soldiers of the Alliance to Restore the Republic to dare the unthinkable even in the face of opposition that seemed invincible.
Hoth could be colonized. The galaxy could be reformed.
In the end, Armin knew, what they were attempting might truly be impossible, but they would go to their graves with the comfort of knowing that at least they had tried.
"Green Group. Any improvement on scanners?"
Armin looked down at his dashboard displays as a chorus of negative responses filled the squadron's comm channel in response to the commander's query.
Hanji's voice stood out. "Negative, Erwin. I've boosted friendly IFF codes to help our craft stand out better, but there's no hope of cleaning up the other interference."
It appeared that the Imperials had substantially improved their sensor jamming capabilities since the last time Armin had flown in battle. Armin stared at his sensor screens and saw nothing but the same cloud of red dots that had been filling the monitor since takeoff—fake hostile signals generated by the enemy to conceal their true numbers and locations. Only the interspersed green blips were real, signifying the twelve aircraft of the Scouting Corps squadron as well as the gun positions, missile batteries, and ground vehicles of the base defenses that they were flying over.
"Understood," came the commander's resigned reply. "Pilots—climb to one thousand meters. We'll have to use visual scanning."
They followed Erwin's lead, rising higher into the bright morning sun. To either side of him, Armin could see the heads of his fellow squadron mates turning from side to side as they ignored their sensor readings to peer down at the ground below.
Through the tinted transparisteel of his cockpit canopy, Armin allowed himself a quick glance up at the heavens, wondering if he'd be able to catch a flash or two from the space battle in orbit. Up above, the sky was brilliant and clear, with only a canopy of light, puffy cirrocumulus clouds, hanging in clumps at high altitude as though sitting atop a plate of glass.
A peaceful picture—but even as Armin watched, he spotted a burst of bright crimson dart upwards from the planet's surface, vanishing into the upper atmosphere.
He looked back briefly over his shoulder at the hills behind them. Those shots had come from the base's heavy ion cannon. Armin imagined Hannes in a control room somewhere, leaning over a sensor display as he barked out the order to fire.
He remembered the defiant cheers that the ground crewmen had raised upon the announcement, just as Armin had been about to lower and lock his airspeeder's cockpit, that the first transport had successfully jumped into hyperspace. Since then, text transmissions had updated them all on the progress of the evacuation. So far, four transports had escaped to lightspeed right under the noses of the Imperial fleet, with no losses so far.
Perhaps they would make it off this planet more smoothly than he'd thought.
Suddenly, Mikasa's voice filled Armin's headset. "Enemy group sighted at 11 o'clock, distance fifteen kilometers!"
"I see them too," Reiner added, "I count four AT-ATs and a picket of AT-STs. I don't see air cover or any other vehicles."
Armin squinted in the direction that Mikasa had indicated, and then he saw them.
Almost invisible among the black outcrops of a bare, rocky ridge, four blocky silhouettes moved across the high ground, surrounded by shorter, faint shadows that were only barely visible to the naked eye.
"Good eyes, Mikasa," Hanji transmitted. "Report it in to headquarters."
As planned, the snowspeeders slowed, banking into a languid horizontal circle that took them away from the distant enemy. Reaching forward, Armin hauled back on the throttle controls before following the speeder in front of him into the gradual turn.
As they left their former flight path, Armin turned his head, eyeing the group of walkers traversing the ridge below. For now, the four-legged and two-legged steel beasts resembled harmless grazing creatures as they strode laboriously over the broken terrain.
He wondered if any of the walker pilots were looking back up at them. Were they feeling nervous too, as they watched the wing of aircraft circling far above them?
"No Imperial air cover?" Mina wondered aloud, her voice disbelieving.
"Probably scared of our missile batteries," Armin explained. "They can still acquire targets by detecting engine emissions."
"All flights!" the commander suddenly ordered. "Base command has acknowledged our sighting and has ordered us to attack. Form up on Green Two. Attack Pattern Mu."
"Flights Two and Three will target the auxiliary light walkers to the east and west of the heavy walker group. Flight One—maintain current altitude. We will assist as needed before moving to neutralize the AT-ATs." Commander Erwin continued outlining the assault even as Armin wrestled with the control yoke, joining his squadron mates in a frantic but organized aerial ballet as they rushed to assume the chosen ground attack formation.
Like a squadron of cavalrymen racing into a charge, the Scouting Corps aircraft pointed their noses down at the crest of the ridge, bearing down at full speed towards the Imperial formation.
"Here we go!" Auruo whooped over the comm.
"Cut the chatter, Green Four," Levi's voice chided, unamused.
Armin felt his own surge of exhilaration as he eased his snowspeeder deeper into the dive. He took a deep breath, exhaling over several seconds as he watched the ground growing larger in his windscreen. There it was again—the same sense of apprehension mixed with eagerness, a cocktail of hope and worry stirred up by his mind's desperate efforts to grapple with the unforeseeable consequences of imminent battle.
Armin clenched his teeth in determination, fighting the flurry of nervous thoughts with the practiced litany that he'd developed through experience. Gripping his pilot's yoke with resolution, he ran through the well-worn list of stern self-admonishments. Don't do anything stupid. Think before you act. Don't panic. Stay gentle with your flight controls. Watch your instruments. Stay aware of what's happening around you.
"Weapons powered, all systems green," Mina reported, her own voice tense but steady.
Calm. He took another deep breath. Now he could hear the pitch of the snowspeeder's engines changing ever so slightly as they descended into gradually thicker air. He could feel his stomach drop as he nosed down harder into their attack dive.
As they neared the enemy vehicles, Armin's tactical display highlighted four of the light walkers in yellow—the targets that had been assigned to his flight.
"Mikasa," he spoke up. "You and Connie hit the two AT-STs in front. Hannah and I will take out the ones to the rear."
"Understood," came her reply, formal and focused. From the tone of her voice, Armin might as well have been a total stranger rather than a childhood friend.
"Everyone, make sure to keep up your airspeed, and watch your flight paths once we're in range of their return fire," Armin reminded the crews of the three snowspeeders under his command.
He glanced to both sides, checking the integrity of their formation through the cockpit glass. There, directly to the left, was Mikasa and Eren's T-47, with Connie and Sasha's craft just beyond. To the right, maintaining perfect position, flew Hannah and Franz's snowspeeder, Franz's determined face visible through the rear window of their speeder's cockpit.
This would be their first battle. Thinking back to his own terrible introduction to the chaos of combat, Armin fervently wished them the best of luck.
"Eyes open Green Group," Hanji cautioned them all over the squadron channel. "We've just entered their effective range."
"All flights," Erwin added, "split off and engage your designated targets as soon as we clear the ridgeline."
Armin's fingers tensed on his flight controls as he focused intently on the boxy gray silhouettes ahead, poised to dodge as soon as he saw the first flash of their guns.
Yet for what seemed like several long minutes, the Imperial vehicles did not open fire. The walkers, black against the snow and sky, simply marched forward without turning to face the incoming threat. Passive and innocuous, like pieces on a game board, they gave no indication that they had even sighted the airspeeders heading straight for them.
In that final moment of silence and peace, Armin permitted himself one last stray thought—that he would not die here on Hoth, at the farthest, most barren edges of the galaxy, nor would he allow any of his friends to die here.
Before them, the black rock outcropping loomed larger and larger until Armin could see every boulder, every fissure in the wall of dark stone. Still, the commander's T-47 led them closer and closer as they hurtled towards the face of the ridge, to the point where every piloting instinct in Armin's body was urging him insistently to pull away or risk dashing his aircraft against the bare rock…
Then, at what must have been the last possible instant, Erwin's snowspeeder swerved into a sharp climb. Yanking back hard on the control yoke, Armin followed, feeling the force of gravity push him hard into his cockpit seat as his T-47 rose to clear the ridgeline by less than twenty meters. With screams of protest from their repulsorlift engines, the squadron soared over and past the ridge's crest.
The day's hue turned a flashing red.
Armin saw it a second too late. A whole line of AT-STs, concealed behind the ridge, invisible to their scanners even now. Over a dozen pairs of twin viewports stared pitilessly back at the Alliance squadron like gaping black eyes as fire spat forth from countless chin-mounted blaster cannons.
Crimson bolts seared the very sky. A continuous barrage of flashes bombarded Armin's retinas, burning them white with the sheer volume of laser fire.
Operating on instinct, mind hijacked by a gripping fear, Armin moved desperately to evade, but no patch of air was free from the hurricane of energy. Caught in the river of death, he floundered upstream blind and naked, expecting the end to arrive at any instant. What could possibly survive in the face of heat and light so deadly that it seemed like some force of nature?
A part of Armin rose up in anger and helpless frustration as he stared oblivion in the face. He glared at the oncoming storm of blaster bolts even as primal terror drowned his body in adrenaline and ice. This was not a battle, but an execution by firing squad.
"Ten is hit! Ten is hit!"
Brilliant orange flame was issuing forth from the starboard engine of Christa and Ymir's T-47 as it slowed and lost altitude, wavering as Ymir fought to regain control.
The blaster cannon fire flew at them like horizontal rain.
He became aware that the squadron's communications channel had filled with panicked chatter. Mina was yelling violently from the gunner's seat behind him. Armin could feel his lips moving, his throat straining as his vocal cords manipulated the air in his lungs, but somehow he couldn't hear a word of what his own voice were shouting.
"Shoot back! Damn it!" Jean bellowed.
"Heavy fire! Heavy fire!" Thomas Wagner was screaming.
"Shit, I've got major damage!"
"Take evasive action!"
"All units, break off now!" Erwin's command was grim, but resolute and almost chillingly poised.
With his fellow pilots, Armin pulled back and to the side on his control stick, and suddenly the laser bolts diminished as the Imperial gunners were too slow to adjust their aim. As the airspeeders broke from their attack run, scattering like the spreading petals of a flower, the concentrated shower of red-orange beams dissipated into individual streams as each scout walker attempted to track a different T-47.
Panic continued to choke the squadron comm.
"We've taken multiple hits—we can't maneuver!" someone was yelling.
"They got me! Aaargh it burns!" another voice shrieked in agony, piercing their ears.
"Are you wounded!? Bertholt, are you all right!?" exclaimed Connie or Marco.
Suddenly, and with an urgency that immediately stilled the commotion, Levi's voice cut in over the turmoil. "Four, respond!"
Instantly, twenty-some heads spun to look at the T-47 airspeeder that had flying in formation behind and to the left of Erwin's craft.
There was no reply. Petra and Auruo must have been killed instantaneously. Their once-sleek airspeeder a shapeless, smoking wreck, it flew onwards towards the enemy without turning, plummeting earthwards through the hail of incoming fire before impacting the ice below in a shower of black and white.
A long moment passed in which nobody spoke, even as blaster bolts continued to flash past them, pursuing them as they raced away from the ambush.
"Ten, status!" Levi was the first to bark, breaking the silence, a harsh edge to his voice the only audible sign that he had even acknowledged the loss of Petra and Auruo.
The captain's words jolted Armin's attention back to their flight. He glanced down at his instruments, vaguely aware of a feeling that the person flying this T-47 was somehow different from the pilot who had occupied the cockpit's seat just one minute before.
Pushing the unwelcome sensation aside, he focused on the displays before him. All flight systems fully functional. Gaining altitude. Airspeed stable. Threat indicator red. Sensors still jammed. Christa and Ymir's damaged speeder had been the last to complete the turn, and Armin's instruments indicated that Green Ten had lost almost six hundred meters of altitude.
"Starboard engine's gone, sir!" Ymir was reporting. "I'm keeping her in the air for now, but we can't fight!"
"Understood, Ten," replied Erwin's voice. The commander did not hesitate. "Head back to Echo Base at once."
"Yessir." Ymir acknowledged. On the sensor screens, Armin saw the blip representing the damaged speeder break away from the squadron's formation, flying back towards the main base through a cloud of false red dots.
"Good luck, everyone! See you at the rendezvous!" Christa exclaimed. Even over the comm, Armin could hear the countless system alarms filling the cockpit of the other speeder.
At least they sounded healthy and uninjured.
He frowned, reflecting privately on the misfortune that had struck them. Ironic, wasn't it? Had he been among the ambushers, he might well have cheered at the sight of the stricken T-47 crashing earthwards, with another crippled and belching flame as a result of their brilliant surprise attack.
A tactical masterstroke. A cowardly sneak attack. Opposing labels for the same battlefield strategem. Tyrants. Terrorists. So strange, the sweeping labels and psychological tricks by which those separated only by subtly different perspectives could be compelled to entrap and kill one another…
"Any other damage?" Levi asked the squadron.
Gunther let out a sigh. "Port blaster cannon is out of commission. I've de-linked it from the starboard gun and shut it down. Got some landing strut damage. All other systems fine. We can fight."
"A couple shots went into our cockpit…" Bertholt reported with a groan of pain, "I've got some superficial burns, and my fire control systems are out… but Reiner can still engage targets manually."
"Don't be a fool." Levi stated bluntly, "If you require medical attention, then return to base at once."
"I'll be fine," Bertholt insisted, and, imagining the other youth sitting in a blasted cockpit, tending to his burns through blackened holes in his flight suit, Armin felt a deep admiration for his fellow pilot. The tall youth might have cultivated a reputation for timidity, but in truth, he was capable of a tenacity that rivaled any of theirs.
From the seat behind his, Mina spoke softly. "Armin, we're fine—no damage."
"Ok…"Armin shook his head, half-amazed, half-mournful. Incredibly, he and several of the others had escaped without sustaining even a single hit in the ambush.
Luck. Nothing but luck. Poor Petra. Poor Auruo.
He could feel his heartbeat stabilizing, sweat cooling on his skin beneath his flight suit.
"All fighters," Erwin barked, "re-orient on Beacon Zeta, then reform by flights in Pattern Gamma behind me!"
Like a swarm of swallows, the squadron of aircraft rushed to follow the commander's orders. Spinning his head from side to side, checking the position of his fellow pilots, Armin found Erd and Gunther's T-47 up ahead of him and settled into position behind them before signaling for the rest of his flight to follow.
The scattered speeders converged across the open air, reuniting first in pairs, then in flights, gradually assuming the form of a broad arrowhead pointed directly at the line of Imperial walkers that had just disabled two of their kin. Once again, air rushed around Armin's cockpit as they accelerated in a dive, fully alert this time, fingers poised on firing controls.
Like ten vengeful birds of prey, they dropped earthwards.
"Target the AT-ST group and annihilate it!" Erwin roared. "FOR THE ALLIANCE!"
Unlike the protocol-bound Imperial military, the Rebel Alliance permitted some liberties with discipline, and so a chorus of battle yells rose up in unison, their anger and energy expressing emotions that could not be resolved into words.
The impact happened in a flash. One moment, they had been soaring towards the enemy walkers, ignoring the array of blazing-red beams rising to greet them. The next moment, they were past the enemy, wheeling for a second pass as three of the two-legged vehicles collapsed in flames.
Armin remembered only the most fleeting images from the attack. He remembered a bright explosion as Levi's first salvo found his target. He remembered seeing Mikasa's craft zoom dangerously low as it delivered a flurry of shots that severed an AT-ST's leg at the knee.
He'd come so close to an enemy walker that he had heard its drive motors whining as it tried to aim at him.
There was no time to dwell on any of it. He moved instinctively, guided by intuition and experience. His mind was filled with numbers—airspeed, throttle percentage, rate of climb—juggling, calculating, and recalculating as he made snap decisions, juking to avoid blaster fire, swerving to change targets.
Flashing geysers of steam as snow and ice evaporated from laser impacts, the ever-present bright flashes from blaster cannons, friendly and hostile, the scream of engines near and far, the urgent, excited babble of their comm chatter… somehow, he saw and heard it all as they wove through the chaos.
From the back seat, Mina's gunner controls gave her a small degree of control over the T-47's flight direction. While Armin maneuvered, she could concentrate on making small aiming adjustments, using five, maybe ten degrees of turn to fire off precise snap shots with an accuracy that a lone pilot would have found difficult to emulate.
He dove on another AT-ST even as it turned, adjusting its footing to face him in return. He felt Mina assume control. He saw the targeting reticule center on the light walker's main body. Two pairs of deafening blasts and bright flashes told him that she had fired, and he saw blaster bolts flashing into the Imperial vehicle's crew compartment. One pair of beams merely blackened the AT-ST's thick frontal armor, but the next pair of bright rays flew directly into its dark viewports. Instantly, the stream of return fire issuing forth from the walker's chin guns ceased.
Armin pulled away, lifting their T-47 back into the air. As they turned, he glanced at the AT-ST they had attacked and caught a glimpse of it standing, dead and motionless, as smoke and flame poured from its hatches.
They dove and climbed, dove and climbed. Sometimes, when the spray of lethal crimson bolts seemed too thick, they broke away, dodging and gyrating madly across the sky in a dance with death.
His windscreen blackened as soot from the pillars of smoke on the ground below accumulated on the transparisteel canopy. His head began to pound with a dull pain as he pulled the T-47 into sharp turn after turn, subjecting his body again and again to the harsh grip of g-forces. His throat became hoarse as he shouted orders to Mikasa, Connie, and Hannah over the cacophony of laser blasts, engines, and explosions.
At some point, unfamiliar voices began speaking through his helmet headphones, and he became aware that the commander had broadened the squadron comm reception to pick up transmissions from the entire air battle.
"Rogue Three?"
"Copy, Rogue Leader."
"Wedge? I've lost my gunner—you'll have to take the shot! I'll cover for you..."
From the tone of what he could hear, it appeared that things were not going much better to the north.
Imperceptibly but irreversibly, the battle was drifting into a disorganized general melee. Erwin had long ago turned over tactical control of the battle to individual flight pair leaders, and so the combat devolved into a series of bitter duels as duos of T-47s and small groups of Imperial walkers challenged one another, filling the skies and peppering the snow with red death as each sought to blast the another into oblivion.
As their own dueling partner tracked their T-47 mercilessly, Armin threw the snowspeeder into a rolling scissors that defied the incoming blaster fire. His stomach roiling and his vision blurring as he came close to blacking out from the force of his own maneuvering, Armin hung onto the control yoke stoically, keeping the aircraft aloft by sheer will, waiting for just the right moment…
"Now, Mina!"
"Harpoon away!" she cried. "Hit!"
Armin pulled out from their defensive spiral, sending the T-47 careening sideways in a tight horizontal circle. He could not see the AT-ST or where the harpoon had struck it, but he placed all of his trust in Mina's marksmanship as he strained to keep the airspeeder in the sharpest turn possible. If she had miscalculated, this maneuver might just pull their aircraft into the ground from the cable's tension, but if she had aimed perfectly…
He was barely ready for the sharp deceleration that gripped the airspeeder as the wire caught, throwing the vehicle violently off of its former flight path. He threw every bit of force in his body behind the control yoke, regaining control just in time to swerve upwards away from the icy ground.
"Cable detached!" Mina crowed. "Armin, he's ours!"
Immediately, Armin threw their speeder into a climbing turn, banking until they hung, poised in the air, facing their adversary.
Even as the AT-ST's head strained against the cable tangled haphazardly around its legs and command cabin, struggling to bring its blaster cannon to bear on them in time, Armin centered it in his windscreen and watched as Mina blew it in two at the waist with a shower of lethal energy.
He exhaled in relief. That Imperial gunner had been too skilled for his liking.
At that moment, Mikasa's voice blared out over the comm. "Armin, We're in position to trip one of the heavy walkers! Can you cover us?"
Armin swung in the cockpit to check the other T-47's location.
"Negative, Mikasa! Wait! There are still too many AT-STs around it!" he exclaimed.
"Understood. We'll hit the two at point-oh-seven then." Eren replied.
For the first time since the battle had begun, a wayward thought broke Armin's focused concentration on the battle, as a part of him wondered if this, or some other stiff and formal comm exchange, would be the last conversation he would ever have with his closest friends.
At that instant, a high-pitched alarm began blaring insistently in Armin's cockpit, and his blood froze in dread.
Missile locks!
"Green Group! Multiple missile locks! Ready countermeasures!" Hanji was bellowing over the squadron channel.
"It's another platoon of walkers!" Mike reported, "They've got missile launchers fitted!"
Armin saw motion out of the corner of his eye. Moving faster than Armin had ever seen her move, Mina was shooting her arm forward, smacking the activation switch for their airspeeder's smart defense system. He felt the airspeeder shudder as it released chaff canisters and decoy flares, and half a second later, the entire aircraft was rocked by a fierce concussion as the incoming concussion missile detonated just a dozen meters in their wake.
"By the Force…" Armin breathed, "Thanks Mina…"
Mina's next words, however, were filled with urgency instead of triumph. "Reiner! Evade!"
Armin's head whirled to look just in time to see a fireball bloom across the aft quarter of Reiner and Bertholt's T-47, smearing a patch of black smoke against the sky. As they looked on in horror, the airspeeder emerged from the cloud, its cockpit engulfed in flames even as it flew onwards, perfectly straight.
"Eleven's been hit! Eleven's been hit!"
"Reiner! Do you copy!?"
Multiple voices filled the communications channel, but from the stricken speeder came not a word in response.
Armin clenched his teeth. Perhaps the two of them had underestimated the incoming projectile's rate of closure. Perhaps Bertholt had been too badly wounded to deploy chaff and flares in time. Perhaps their missile warning system or their countermeasures had been disabled by the same blaster bolts that had injured Bertholt. They would probably never know.
More missiles streaked across the sky, most of them detonating harmlessly just behind their intended targets, others forcing their prey to maneuver wildly at the last second.
"Flights, reprioritize your targets! Take out those missile-bearing walkers!" Hanji ordered. "Approach at random and—!"
Suddenly, Erwin's voice overpowered her, cutting her off. "Belay that order! The Imperials are nearing Perimeter Rose. We can no longer ignore the troop carriers! Flights One and Three will attack the AT-ATs with harpoons and tow cables! Flight Two will be responsible for eliminating the missile threat!"
Hearing the commander's words, Armin felt his throat constrict. He knew precisely why his flight had been tasked with eliminating the missile-equipped AT-STs. After all, their four fighters had not yet suffered any casualties or sustained any serious damage.
His flight of four T-47s was the only flight still at full strength.
"Oh… that's not fair…" Mina groaned, coming to the same conclusion.
Taking his eyes off of their flight path, Armin turned his head to look south to where six grey silhouettes stood against the horizon, seven kilometers away. Even as he watched, his heads-up display highlighted the sextet of Imperial walkers in gold, indicating that Commander Erwin had just designated them as targets.
He narrowed his eyes. Conventional doctrine held that a two-to-one numerical advantage was required for fighters engaging missile-based anti-aircraft systems. For four airspeeders to engage six missile-fitted AT-STs… The commander's orders were not even a gamble. This was a sacrifice.
In tactical terms, their flight had just been ordered to draw the concussion missile fire that would otherwise target the rest of the squadron.
"Flight Two, form up on me," he directed, reaching out to toggle his comm transmissions to their flight's own channel, his voice surprisingly calm despite the whirling worry and fear inside him. "All gunners—turn over fire control to your pilots and focus everything on missile countermeasures."
The missile lock warning continued blaring in his cockpit even as he swung the T-47 towards the south, slowing down to allow his wingmen to take up formation around him. He watched as thin trails of exhaust flew towards them from the distant enemy.
Franz's voice carried a nervous tremor as he spoke over the comm. "Armin… we can't possibly take on those missile launchers…"
At the last possible moment, their airspeeders shook as they deployed chaff canisters and flares, and the delicate vapor trails swerved away as the incoming projectiles followed the decoys, detonating harmlessly in midair.
Inside Armin, something snapped in response to Franz's words.
"WE HAVE TO!" Armin screamed. His voice reverberated around the cockpit, and he could only imagine how loud his words were ringing in his squadron mates' headphones, but he did not care. "WE HAVE TO DESTROY THEM OR THIS ENTIRE IMPERIAL FORCE WILL REACH THE MAIN BASE!"
The comm was dead silent with shock.
Armin felt a deep, irresistible anger seizing him, taking control of his features and contorting his expression into a snarl. His hands closed tighter around the control column until he was strangling it in a death grip. With the image of the Death Star looming opposite the blue-green world of Aldaraan firmly in his mind, his voice shook and broke as he commanded, "COMMENCE ATTACK!"
The enemy walkers grew ever larger in his front windscreen.
As if by unspoken consensus, in the last moment before they dove upon the enemy, Armin and Eren took up a battle cry that was soon joined by six other voices in a roar that seemed to shake the sky.
"REMEMBER ALDARAAN!"
Again, Armin remembered nothing from the moment of impact—nothing aside from the incessant scream of the missile-lock warning tone in their cockpit as they rose out of the attack dive.
Once again, he fought by instinct. Armin lined up firing pass after firing pass on the two-legged vehicles, interspersing his attacks with wildly unpredictable evasive maneuvers as missiles screamed at him from all directions. Behind him, Mina worked furiously from the back seat, yelling to alert him to missile launches as she struggled to manage the countermeasures suite in the face of the unrelenting enemy fire. All the while, Armin could hear himself shouting commands into his headset with a voice that sounded wholly unlike his own.
A surge of elation rippled through his body as one of the missile-equipped AT-STs collapsed, its drive system afire. It was followed immediately by a spike of panic as a burst of blaster cannon fire passed though the air directly in front of their snowspeeder, and he threw the aircraft into another hairpin corkscrew.
The interior of the cockpit blazed with sudden sunlight, then fell instantly into shadow as they spun and gyrated over the battlefield. Outside, the horizon rolled, clearest blue and blinding white swapping places over and over as the world inverted at dizzying speed around Armin's head.
Then, without warning, he brought the T-47 out of its defensive spiral and screamed earthwards to blast away at another target. The light walker's armor shrugged off his attacks, and he climbed towards the heavens once again, senses primed to react to the next threat.
Ahead, Mikasa's snowspeeder struck another AT-ST from the rear, detonating its armored head with a colossal blast as the light vehicle's fuel and munitions ignited, exploding.
Every conscious thought in his mind was focused on keeping his speeder as close as possible to the enemy. At short range, the walkers would find it close to impossible to acquire and track them with missiles as the T-47s flew circles around them, but if they strayed just a few hundred meters too far away…
"Shit!"
It was Connie.
"Controls are hit!"
Armin whirled in his cockpit to look. There to his left flew Connie and Sasha's T-47, its flight surfaces shredded and blackened by a missile explosion, headed in an increasingly fast dive towards the ground.
With a genuine panic, Sasha added, "I can't cut engine power!"
"You have to pull up!" Mina exclaimed. "Can you still pull up!?"
"Damn it…!" Connie's voice was filled with anger, fear, and a firm note of resignation.
Armin saw every moment. He watched the other T-47 banking towards the ground, tumbling as Connie wrestled with the pilot's yoke, banking still further until suddenly it was heading straight for one of the missile AT-STs marching across the ice below.
From above, helpless with horror, he saw the airspeeder inverting as it neared the snow, crumpling as it collided head-on with the light Imperial walker, tumbling as the two vehicles collapsed together before vanishing in a boiling cloud of smoke, steam, and flame that sent debris and fragments of metal cartwheeling through the air to bounce upon Hoth's gray surface.
His friends' last burst of comm chatter, as though delayed, lingered in Armin's ears:
"Connie, I—!" Sasha had begun.
"TAKE THIS!" Connie had roared.
A second later, Armin's airspeeder flew over the cloud of smoke and fire, and the scene was suddenly behind them. Armin felt an emptiness inside him that had not been there a moment before, as though his friends had taken something from him with their passing. He strained in his flight harness to look behind him, an irrational, stubborn part of him still hoping to see two orange-clad pilots emerging from the wreckage below against all odds.
He saw nothing. Only another pillar of smoke rising skywards, carrying the souls of yet another two friends towards the heavens.
Only Mina's shriek of warning and the red flash of a near miss across his windscreen brought Armin's attention back to the present, and he hauled back sharply on the yoke, bringing their T-47 out of a descent that had almost sent them into the ground as well.
He scanned the horizon with eyes that had briefly begun to water.
Three targets remaining. Three aircraft in his flight still flying.
All things considered, they were trading evenly… better than Commander Erwin could ever have expected from them, but to Armin, those they had lost had meant far more to him than anything that they had gained…
His body had returned to the battle, piloting the snowspeeder aggressively through the fray once more. Armin's mind, however, was filled with that last image of that uncontrolled collision that had transformed two war machines into a single misshapen tangle of lifeless metal—an ugly, blackened tomb with the bodies of his two friends still trapped inside.
A pang of guilt. He had been in command. He had survived for now, where they had not.
A panorama of the battlefield slid across his windscreen as he pushed the T-47 through another turn. In most places, the snowscape remained pristine, gleaming where it lay untouched and unmarked. At the same time, the fighting had left its grim mark upon the plain, littering the frozen ground with smoking wrecks and the craters left by the wayward missiles, the vaporizing impact of blaster bolts, and the heavy weight of walker legs.
Hoth.
Nobody, he knew, would ever return here to this forsaken battle plain to provide Connie and Sasha, Reiner and Bertholt, Petra Ral, or Auruo Bossard with the dignity of a formal burial. The planet that had been their home would now also serve as their grave.
Looking towards his next target, Armin grimly pushed his thoughts aside as he began considering how he would execute an attack run. How would he approach that walker? What part of it would he target as he dove on it, seeking to disable its systems and kill or injure its operators? He saw a flash as another missile entered the air, and he spoke up to alert Mina to its launch.
What else could he do? Connie and Sasha had deserved more. They had deserved so much better in life that their fate felt worse to Armin than any crime or injustice… but such was the nature of the war that they had chosen to fight in.
Good luck… and may the Force be with you…
After all, this was the only comfort that the Alliance could spare for its dead—the promise that those left behind would fight on, to give some meaning to the lives of those lost.
OOOOO
Well, that's another chapter (and a nice long one, at that) for all of you!
It makes intuitive sense to me that Armin would be a capable starfighter/airspeeder pilot. He has the mind for the complexities and decision-making involved in combat flight, and the job doesn't demand as much from him physically.
I also feel like Mina and Bertholt often aren't given enough credit for their guts by most people, so I did my part to do them justice!
As always, thanks for reading, and don't forget to review, favorite, and follow!