Flaming Water, Frozen Earth
Chapter Six
-DOCUMENT START-
INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:
DOCUMENT#: GMP99647
ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT
RECORD OF MEDICAL TREATMENT PERFORMED
PRIMARY MEDICAL BAY
ALLIANCE GALLOFREE-CLASS TRANSPORT GALAXY HERO
TREATMENT DATE: 38:6:7 GALACTIC STANDARD CALENDAR, 1513 HOURS LOCAL TIME (HOTH SYSTEM)
MEDICAL PATIENT: FLIGHT OFFICER CHRISTA LENZ (57TH SCTAS)
ADMINISTERING SURGEON: FOUR-TWO-EM-SEVEN (2-1B TYPE SURGICAL DROID)
TRIAGE PRIORITY: LIGHT
SUMMARY OF INJURIES:
SECOND-DEGREE FLASH BURNS ON FACE AND NECK
LIGHT SHRAPNEL WOUNDS NEAR COLLARBONE AND AROUND UPPER LEFT ARM
SMOKE INHALATION, MILD CASE
TREATMENTS ADMINISTERED :
BACTA MIST INHALATION REGIMEN
REMOVAL OF EMBEDDED SHRAPNEL UNDER ANESTHESIA
BACTA PATCH APPLICATION TO SHRAPNEL WOULD AND BURN AREAS
POST-TREATMENT PROGNOSIS:
TREATMENT SUCCESSFUL, SCARRING UNLIKELY
FULL RECOVERY IN SEVEN TO TEN DAYS
AVAILABILITY FOR ACTIVE DUTY IN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS
PATIENT NOTES:
PATIENT TO BE TRANSFERRED TO ALLIANCE CENTRAL MEDICAL FRIGATE REDEMPTION UPON RENDEZVOUS AT APPOINTED FLEET RALLY POINT
-END OF DOCUMENT—
OOOOO
He had not seen Gunther and Erd die.
It had happened too fast. Armin had been occupied, coordinating with Mikasa to distract a walker threatening Hannah and Franz's snowspeeder with its missile targeting array. He had not even paused to look up when Thomas had suddenly cried out, "Three is down! I repeat, Three is down!"
He pieced together the details from his squadron mates' chatter. It had been another missile strike, and the two veteran pilots had simply vanished in the explosion.
Letting himself sink further into his pilot's seat, Armin felt another pang of sadness ripple through his body at the realization that reality had taken yet another terrible step away from the naïve, hopeful fantasy that he had once imagined would await them at the battle's end. Now, he thought, yet another two friends would be absent from the squadron's ranks at the reunion of those who had survived.
Armin had only lived twenty years, but there—flying across that empty wasteland of ice—he felt as though each of those years hung from his shoulders with double their true weight.
Nor had Armin seen the commander's death. The last thing he had heard was Erwin, straining to make himself heard over the damage alarms wailing in his cockpit.
"Hanji—you have command!" he had growled into his headset.
Over the last two years, Armin had heard Commander Erwin's voice assume countless inflections of tone and spirit—subdued following a mission with heavy casualties, thoughtful during squadron meetings, amused in the midst of carefree cafeteria banter, or blunt and direct when delivering battle orders… But at the very end, Erwin's voice had simply sounded pained, as though he regretted having to leave his squadron while they faced such desperate circumstances.
"Erwin!" Hanji had exclaimed over the comm, to no response.
"Damn it!" Jean had cursed. "Armin, why the hell haven't you dealt with those missile launchers yet? Can't you see we're getting slaughtered!?"
Bitter bile rising in his throat, Armin had bitten back the violent urge to retort, to point out to Jean that Connie and Sasha had already sacrificed themselves to destroy just a single walker, that his flight was doing its very best...
They had finally destroyed two-thirds of the missile AT-ST platoon… only for a second platoon to materialize out of nowhere as Imperial reinforcements had arrived.
Jean had not meant to say what he had said, Armin knew. Jean never meant it. He was just lashing out as he tended to do, expressing in his own way the same grief and horror that they all felt.
Hanji had assumed Erwin's duties with determination, rallying the remaining half of the squadron as she led them in attack after attack with a determination that bordered on fanaticism. The change in command had occurred seamlessly, Hanji's leadership just as natural to the surviving Scouting Corps pilots as Erwin's had been.
Hanji's commands ringing in his ears, Armin had flown over the toppled walkers and the smoking, wrecked speeders, conscious that the skies felt emptier and emptier as time passed.
He seemed to perceive time too slowly, as if space and time inside the confines of his cockpit lagged behind the events taking place outside it. When the battle had moved to the open plain, and the laser turret batteries of the southern Perimeter Rose defenses had opened fire, Armin had soared above the crisscrossing red and gold blaster fire for several whole minutes before he realized that the site of the fighting had moved. When the crackle of communications transmissions through his headset had intensified, filling his head with a constant stream of seemingly meaningless words, an hour seemed to pass before he had finally perceived the growing tone of frustration and defeat.
The continuous chatter—snatches of conversation from the other battle fronts, almost all of it tinged with alarm and desperation—told a story of an irresistible tide of battle advancing against them. At the same time, a note of fatalism had crept into the multitude of voices, as soldier after soldier began to conclude that, perhaps, the outcome of the battle had been preordained from the outset.
"They're debarking troops! Light repeater crews, target enemy infantry in the open!"
"Beta Company—fall back with the wounded to the second line! All gunners—stay at your posts and cover them!"
Everywhere, it seemed, the Imperials were pressing forward with implacable force.
From the air, Armin saw everything.
He watched helplessly as the great AT-ATs slowed to a stop. He looked on, as squad after squad of white-clad troops slid down wires from underneath the giant vehicles to the surface of the snowscape below. He saw Alliance trenches and emplacements shuddering beneath the flash of blaster cannon impacts, heavy and light laser turrets burning as they were hit one after another. He saw bedraggled knots of Alliance soldiers leaving their positions, struggling to the rear with their wounded and what equipment they could carry.
Here and now, truly, the icy battlefield no longer bore any resemblance to the peaceful hinterland that Armin had once known. The ice bled under the heat of the rain of blaster bolts, melting to flow in rivulets across the surface until even the meltwater steamed beneath the barrage as though aflame. Smoke and soot pouring from dozens of ruined vehicles belched thick clouds into the sky—a fog of dark particles that Hoth's winds scattered across the snow, slowly turning the ground grey and black. Yet, despite the blanket of ash, the shining film covering the melting plains still flickered with crimson reflections as deadly beams filled the sky, just as the frozen ground had once caught the sun's light.
Armin could feel the battle's ferocity wearing away at his body with the same persistence that it was attacking the landscape below. His mind had been operating under the constant threat of death for so many hours that even his sense of fear had dulled, until he felt as though he were dodging concussion missiles and bursts of laser fire out of habit rather than terror. His back now ached where it met the pilot's seat, and his flight suit and boots suddenly felt tight and constrictive. Beneath his hands, even the controls felt heavy as he hauled the yoke back, twisted it sideways, and pushed it forward again in an unending cycle. With every hard turn, he could feel the g-forces pushing him closer and closer towards blacking out completely.
All the while, his ears rang with the insistent, incessant tone of the missile lock alarm filling the cockpit, its pitch changing every time a new missile entered the air.
He could tell that his reactions were slowing along with his mind. Compared to his piloting earlier that day, he was now flying as though drunk. Vaguely, he cursed the nerves that had kept him awake for most of the previous night.
What was more, he'd never fought in a sustained battle for this length of time…
Focus, he told himself. Concentrate. You have a mission. You have three—no, two—aircraft under your command to protect.
Licking his cracked lips, Armin forced the whole of his awareness towards the fighting raging all around and below him, redoubling his attention on his surroundings.
He took in the battle lines at a glance. The armored fist of the Imperial force was just a few hundred meters from the battered first line of Alliance trenches now. The breakthrough there was inevitable. But the second line…
Armin scanned the distant ground, noting the flash of blaster cannon, the steady sparkle of dozens of the lighter blaster rifles firing steadily from the zigzagging dugouts.
The second line might yet hold.
He blinked. There. Still highlighted in his heads-up display, bracketed in yellow, two of the deadly missile walkers walked north. Their cannon and missile launch rails pointing ever skywards, they crossed the open ice with a stride that reminded Armin strongly of carrion birds. He gave them a long, bitter glare.
He sighed. "How are we holding up, Mina?"
From behind him, Mina replied with a voice that was similarly heavy with fatigue. "No new problems. Fuel is at half. Blaster cannon actuator charge at full strength."
In his weary state of mind, Armin had stopped listening to her report as soon as he had heard the positive tone of her answer. He nodded, his hands still manipulating the flight controls as though with a mind of their own.
His headset came to life at that moment, crackling fiercely with the whine of blaster fire in the near vicinity of whoever was speaking.
"Green Group, this is Rose South! Imperial troops have taken the first line! They're advancing in the open towards the second trench, but my battalion can't force them back on their own… " Colonel Rico Brzenska's voice snarled over the clamor of the ground battle. "We need support—can you spare a few speeders for lawnmowing?"
"Rose South, I've only got six T-47s left, but we'll give you everything we have!" Hanji responded, her own transmission contaminated by the missile lwarning tone filling her T-47's cockpit.
"Acknowledged, Green Leader. Make it fast—Rose South out."
Armin imagined the white-haired colonel standing, unflinching, among her troops even as blasts from the heavy walkers confronting them shook the ground around their trench. For the second time that day, he recalled that, out of all the Alliance personnel on Hoth, the infantry defending their positions outside Echo Base were facing the lowest chance of being successfully evacuated.
"Armin!" Hanji exclaimed. "I need you and the rest of your flight to disengage and come north now!"
Armin frowned, hesitant to acknowledge the order. What was Hanji planning? If she pulled his flight away from the missile AT-STs, that would leave the walkers free to fire unopposed at the entire squadron. Without his three airspeeders keeping those gunners busy, the Scouting Corps would not last much longer in the air.
"I count eight missile batteries still out there," he pointed out in reply. "If we keep engaging them directly, we should be able to keep drawing most of their fire away from you!"
Their T-47 shuddered as Mina launched yet another countermeasures package, and Armin heard the hiss of the incoming missile's ion engine as it missed, flashing past before disintegrating harmlessly in the open air to his right.
"Armin," Hanji explained grimly. "Erwin was right. We can't keep our airpower split, and if we don't prioritize slowing that ground attack down, it won't matter if we still have speeders flying or not."
With a ripple of guilt, Armin realized that she was right. Amidst everything that had happened, he had completely forgotten. His mission today was not to protect his fellow pilots, or even the squadron as a whole. That had never been their objective.
Our ability to cover their withdrawal will be crucial. You must buy their safety—with your lives if you must!
It was strange, how he could easily accept the knowledge that his own life was expendable, while wholeheartedly rejecting the idea of sending any of his friends to their deaths. Armin thought of the dead Commander Erwin, and wondered if ordering good comrades into peril was a lesson that the man had learned with ease or with difficulty.
"I'm giving you five minutes," Hanji added. "Destroy as much of their anti-aircraft force as you can, then link up immediately with my flight above the first trench line!"
"Copy, Green Leader," he acknowledged, biting his lip.
Switching to his flight's comm channel, he spoke. "Flight Two, form up on me. Attack Pattern Epsilon. We'll make one more pass on that anti-air."
A burst of familiar voices confirmed his orders, and Armin was silent as he noticed the absence of Connie's tone of bravado among them.
As the battle on the ground had raged ever hotter, more and more of the Imperial vehicles had lowered their guns from the sky to bring them to bear on the Alliance's surface defenses. Only the anti-aircraft AT-STs had kept their weapons trained on the Scouting Corps squadron. This time, only a few trails of bright blaster fire rose to meet them in place of what had been a concentrated barrage just ten minutes earlier. They dove earthwards in a reverse arrowhead formation, with Armin and Mikasa's T-47s side-by-side, Hannah's craft trailing between them just to the rear.
Gauging the targets' distance and his approach angle intently, Armin brought their three airspeeders lower and lower. The altitude reading displayed in his visor dropped to sixty meters, then thirty, then twenty… His squadron mates, trusting his judgment, followed him down until it felt as though they were barely skimming across the surface of the gray snow.
Through the transparisteel canopy, Armin stared at the two nearby AT-STs, and their dark eyes stared back at him. The time had come.
In an instant, he had turned the control yoke to the right as far as it would go. The airspeeder rolled onto its side, and without missing a beat, Armin pulled the yoke towards him, sending them into a daringly tight turn that threatened to send him and Mina into the icy ground with the slightest maneuvering error. The T-47's directional flaps squealed with the stress of the inertial change, and once again darkness crept inwards along the edges of Armin's field of vision as blood rushed towards his feet.
Now. Obeying his pilot's intuition, Armin centered the controls, bringing the snowspeeder out of its reckless turn. There, six hundred meters distant, centered in the front of his windscreen, stood the two enemy walkers, lined up in a perfect row.
Too slow, the front walker was still turning to aim at the three airspeeders barreling towards it in tight formation. Armin gently manipulated the controls as the distance closed, centering the boxy twin-legged vehicle in his targeting reticule.
Simultaneously, he and Mikasa opened fire, their combined blaster cannon salvo ripping through the AT-ST and sending it keeling over to the ground. A second later, they had flown just meters over the walker's disabled wreck as they zoomed towards its partner.
The second AT-ST had held its fire for fear of hitting the other light walker. It finally began shooting at Armin's speeder, sending a long burst of crimson energy flying towards him. Reacting quickly, Armin pulled the T-47 upwards and away and out of the line of fire. The scream of the repulsorlift engines from Mikasa and Hannah's snowspeeders died away below him as his squadron mates continued onwards.
With the nose of the aircraft aimed towards the sky, Armin did not see what happened. A moment later, a cataclysmic explosion erupted to his rear, followed by Mina's relieved report.
"Both targets down, Armin," she informed him.
"Everyone disengage!" he exclaimed. "Flight Two, regroup on my T-47 and follow me."
Armin exhaled, moisture from his breath of relief briefly fogging his helmet visor. He swung their snowspeeder to face north.
As he led the others in a shallow climb, Armin's relief gradually turned to grimness. In choosing to ignore the remaining missile batteries, the Scouting Corps had just relinquished total control of the air battle to the enemy. Resolving to endure the rain of missiles rising to meet them, they were gambling on the hope that what they had done so far would suffice to keep the squadron in the air—at least long enough to accomplish their mission. How long, he wondered, would they last against relentless attrition and the overwhelming weight of the enemy's numbers?
Ahead, towards the base, the battlefield was a storm of blaster fire flashing back and forth across the ground, shrouded beneath a thickening cloud of water vapor that had grown to cover the entire frontline. Yet, above the turmoil, above the columns of smoke twisting upwards, the brilliant sky still stretched across the horizon in swaths of purest white and blue.
Armin's body moved stiffly, his muscles weary, but he managed to straighten once more in his pilot's harness.
OOOOO
"Armin, I'm detecting more targeting sensor arrays—they have to be shoulder-fired launchers!" Mina cried out.
He saw it—a bright gout of flame bursting from the side of the nearest AT-AT. As the flash subsided, Armin noticed the snowtrooper standing in an opened escape hatch along the walker's body, a launcher tube resting on his shoulder.
The small missile flew upwards, zeroing in on Levi and Hanji's T-47, but Levi outmaneuvered it almost effortlessly, snapping into a hammerhead turn that left the deadly device far behind. With no hope of catching up to its target before exhausting its onboard fuel cells, the missile's internal computer triggered its self-destruct signal, detonating the warhead and scattering metal and polymer fragments across a small patch of sky.
"They're firing portable missile units from the AT-ATs!" Jean exclaimed in alarm.
"I noticed, Kirschtien," Levi quipped sarcastically.
Seeing the Imperial soldier taking aim at him next, Armin banked their speeder, passing over the heavy walker's bulk to shield himself from the launcher below. Turning to look back over his shoulder as he leveled the speeder, he saw to his dismay that another two hatches had been opened along the AT-AT's other side, two more troopers waiting in the openings. Armin threw the aircraft into another hasty turn, taking them behind the walker's rear and out of the line of fire.
He grimaced. With portable missiles guarding the heavy vehicles' flanks, any snowspeeder flying past at low speed would likely be shot down before it could react. Attempting to entangle them with harpoons and tow cables would now be utterly suicidal.
"Armin…" Mina murmured, her voice worried. "We only have four countermeasures packages remaining…"
He winced and was about to reply when the howl of nearby engines diverted his attention.
Levi's speeder was plummeting past them in a power dive. As Armin watched in awe, the veteran pilot dove upon the AT-AT that had fired the missile and sent a bright lance of blaster energy into the nape of the heavy walker's neck. Immediately, a small fire burst to life behind the AT-AT's armored head, and its leg movements slowed before coming to a complete stop.
"Target neutralized," Levi muttered. "Leave it alone. Its driver control link to the main body should be cut."
"Can that thing still fire?" Mina asked aloud.
"Perhaps. Keep your distance!"
At Hanji's order, they climbed higher to exit the effective range of the portable launchers. Blaster bolts and missile trails chased them, but at last, they reached the foot of the clouds, beyond the maximum traverse of the enemy guns below.
Armin checked his altimeter. Three thousand meters.
He treated himself to a panorama of the sky that stretched from shoulder to shoulder. Here and there, other battered speeders flew, just tickling the underside of the cloud carpet. The six of them hovered, drifting with the windstream as their twelve crewmen enjoyed a brief breath of peace.
"Rose South, Green Leader. How you holding up down there?" Hanji transmitted.
"Rose South here," Colonel Brzenska growled in reply. "It's getting hopeless… we're taking heavy casualties from the other three heavy walkers, and they're massing light armor in front of us. We don't have enough anti-vehicle options left to hold them back once they decide to advance…"
An explosion interrupted the Alliance officer, and she paused before continuing grimly, "Your last strafing run cut up their lead infantry elements nicely, but they're already regrouping. We'll likely need another firing pass from your squadron in five minutes or less."
Armin half-listened as Hanji conferred further with Colonel Brzenska over the details of the next attack. He shook his head slightly, clearing his fatigue for a moment. Reaching down, he flipped a switch on the T-47's instrument panel.
"I'm turning fire control back over to you, Mina. You're shooting well today."
Mina let out a short laugh. "Thanks, Armin. I was beginning to get bored back here."
Armin chuckled. What a typical response from her. Reflecting on their time on Hoth, he counted himself grateful that he'd been teamed up with a copilot who was so friendly and easy to work with. Then, a sudden thought occurred to him, and he fell silent.
Detecting that something was amiss, Mina turned in her gunner's seat to look at him. Her grey eyes gave him a searching glance, her round face fixed with a concerned expression. "Is everything all right, Armin?"
"I'm fine." He gave her a small smile, then added. "I was just thinking…"
He felt a small lump in his throat as he continued. "I was thinking that… in case something happens to me… I just wanted to tell you that I'm really glad to have been your wingmate..."
His smile turned crooked with a slight sadness. "…and your friend."
Mina's eyes widened beneath the orange visor of her flight helmet, and she raised a gloved hand to brush her hair to the side. She looked deeply disturbed, and her voice quieted. "Armin, that's… you shouldn't… don't say things like that yet…"
"Don't worry…" Armin shrugged. "I know what you're thinking. It's just that, after Aldaraan, I guess I learned that there were a lot of things that I never got the chance to say to people I cared about before it was too late…"
Mina did not look particularly reassured. Then, her own expression changed, and she averted her gaze, staring through the cockpit canopy at the passing clouds.
"I understand," she finally said. "Thanks, Armin."
They were silent for a few seconds before Mina added, "I feel the same way. The squadron means a lot to me."
She smiled slightly too. "You're a good leader and a good friend."
Abruptly, she faced him again. "Armin—I thought I should tell you… You should know that Annie's pretty fond of you. Just in case, you know…"
For a second, he saw her eyes shining and read the worry, the fear, the hope, and the deep and sincere friendship written in them. He looked into her expression and saw the same terror that he too had felt as he had confronted the possibility of his own mortality. The next moment, Mina had spun away to avoid his glance, resuming her position at her gunner's controls.
"If we all make it out of here in one piece, you should make some time to go talk to her," she concluded, her voice trembling.
Armin turned back to face his instrument panel, his heart pounding and dozens of thoughts somersaulting through his mind as he digested what Mina had just told him. It seemed so clear to him now… but at the same time, the mystery that had just been wiped away—a mystery that he had not even been aware of—had been simultaneously replaced by several more. And amidst his turmoil, an image was materializing in his mind's eye: a flash of gold, lines that defined her cheek, her chin… His heart seemed to leap even as it raced.
He gripped his flight controls and he realized to his shock that a fresh, burning feeling of life was pouring back into his body, reinvigorating his tired muscles, reigniting his will, banishing every lingering trance of weariness and doubt. When Hanji broadcast their new attack orders, he felt, once more, the same intensity of nervous apprehension that had fluttered inside him in the hours leading up to the battle that morning.
Suddenly, his urge to survive had never felt stronger.
OOOOO
Mina's fire tore up the squads of advancing Imperial troopers, scything them down to the gray snow as flashing needles of energy exploded among them. As Armin kept the T-47 flying level, just twenty to thirty meters above the surface, he watched with wide eyes as white-clad snowtroopers disintegrated in front of him, limbs flying and lifeless bodies falling and tumbling as the frozen earth around them erupted into boiling steam. Those still living dove to the ice for cover as their neighbors died around them. The most foolish soldiers remained standing, firing back vainly at Armin's windscreen as the snowspeeder screamed towards them. They died where they stood, their body armor erupting in flame as it met the inevitable blaster bolt.
This was their fourth strafing run over the flat ground before the second trench line.
Yet, as Armin pulled their speeder into a climb and looked back over one shoulder to survey the result of their attack, he stared in astonishment. Though one in three, perhaps even one in two of their comrades lay dead or dying, the Imperial soldiers were mechanically rising to their feet, raising their blaster rifles as they resumed the advance. Not one retreated, not one ran, and not one even showed a sign of fear as Hannah and Franz followed in Armin's wake, cutting a fiery swath through the survivors.
With a chill that ran down his spine, Armin realized that even the snowtroopers diving for shelter were doing so not out of the natural instinct for self-preservation, but with the mindless intention of preserving the strength of the attacking force.
Indeed, Armin watched as a last handful of white-clad infantrymen rose in the aftermath of Hannah's attack run, only to fall anew as Mikasa's blaster cannon cut them down.
Perhaps even more than the horror of Aldaraan's destruction, this hive-like, single-minded devotion to the Empire's cause seemed to Armin like the ultimate proof of the evil of the galactic power that he was fighting. It was a robotic, inhuman display of indifference that terrified him to his core.
He pulled at his control yoke, bringing the aircraft around for a fifth pass.
Suddenly, Mina let out a cry of horror. "The shield generator just went down!"
Pulling them up and out of the turn, Armin reached with his left hand for his comm receiver, configuring it again to pick up transmissions from across the entire battle. Clamoring orders and battle reports immediately filled his ears, and he took in the cacophony of shouts overwhelming all Alliance communications.
"Trauma teams! We need trauma teams at the generator base, now!"
"All noncombat personnel, assist with evacuating the secondary aid post!"
"Begin retreat! Eighth Battalion, fall back!"
There was no doubt about it. The generator had been destroyed, and the entirety of the base was now open to direct bombardment from space. The battle had now entered the final, chaotic phase of a total rout. He listened on with growing pessimism as unit after unit withdrew or was overrun, as voice after voice reported new Imperial advances. Then… a brief flurry of frantic conversation stood out to Armin among the competing voices in his headset.
"Rogue Three, this is Command. What happened to Rogue Leader, over!?"
"He was hit and went down a minute ago—I lost contact…"
"Wedge, this is Rogue Six! I saw him hit the dirt right in front of the walker formation!" another pilot exclaimed.
Armin felt his eyes widen. Did that mean… did that mean that they had even lost Commander Skywalker? Had the battle managed to claim a Jedi—the hero of Yavin, the destroyer of the Death Star, the rescuer of Princess Leia Organa of Aldaraan?
Good luck, and may the Force be with you.
Where, then, was the Force?
Tendrils of sorrow reached towards his heart, and he grasped his flight controls as though he were wrapping his fingers around the Emperor's own throat. Not wanting to hear more, Armin returned his comm receiver to the squadron channel. It, too, was abuzz with the news of the shield generator's loss.
"Everyone, stay calm!" Hanji urged them all, talking over Thomas and Franz's panicked chatter.
"Command just sent the evacuation signal," she told them. "Most of our friends on the ground have to walk to the transports, but we don't have to—we can fly straight to the evacuation point. It's our mission to make—"
Her transmission devolved into a mangled yell of surprise, and Armin's heart stopped.
Wildly, he scanned the sky, craning his neck and back as he searched, his breath caught tight in his throat.
He finally saw it. Behind him and to his right, rolling at a dizzying rate, engulfed in fire, Hanji and Levi's T-47 was dropping rapidly towards the earth. Like a discarded toy, it fell in a nearly straight descent to the ground before landing with an impact that sent broken fragments skipping across the snow for hundreds of meters.
Moments later, several laser blasts lit the surface around the crash site, hiding the terrible spectacle from view behind a roiling cloud of vapor. Tracing the beams along their path of travel, Armin found himself staring at the AT-AT that they had thought disabled. Dark and mighty, it towered above the ground without moving, its neck still smoking from the damage that Levi had inflicted. As Armin stared, its head traversed several degrees, then fired another volley of energy just past Mikasa's speeder.
It wasn't fair. Armin felt his vision blur as his eyes welled up with tears. Hanji… Captain Levi… An instant ago, the idea that they might die had subconsciously seemed absurd and unthinkable. Yet, with their deaths, he felt newly aware of the passing of every other fellow pilot and friend that had fallen today.
Reiner, Bertholt, Petra…
Auruo… Connie…
Sasha, Erd, and Gunther…
Mike Zacharius and Commander Erwin…
For the second time in his life, he felt as though everything he knew was being taken away from him. Just as he had back then, Armin felt overwhelmed, unable to even comprehend the magnitude of how his world had changed on this day, much less begin to accept it.
A part of him felt as though he ought to cry out in anger and grief… yet his emotional response felt delayed, as though his mind had not yet realized that Auruo's tasteless posturing, Sasha's inane antics, or Commander Erwin's reassuring presence were forever things of the past now.
If anything, he reflected, losing them felt worse than losing his family had. This time, his friends and comrades had died right in front of him, just before his eyes, yet he had been equally unable to save them…
In that moment, an Imperial walker could have easily lined him up in its sights and swatted him from the sky, and Armin might not have batted an eye. Even as his headset filled with shocked exclamations as his squadron mates reacted to what had happened, Armin sat in his cockpit, motionless, his hands resting on the control yoke in a pantomime of manned flight, but his mind a light-year away.
Commander Erwin Smith had been lost. Lieutenant Commander Hanji Zoë was dead. Captains Levi, Mike Zacharius, Gunther Schultz, and Erd Jinn were dead. The senior flight lieutenants—Petra, Auruo, and Reiner—had all been killed.
Jean's lieutenancy postdated Armin's, while Mikasa's promotion had not yet been formally approved, which meant that of the remaining squadron pilots…
…he, Armin, was now the commander of the 57th Scouting Corps Tactical Air Squadron.
The sky around him, blue and gray, punctuated by columns of dirty smoke, had never felt lonelier.
Faces appeared in his mind. Mina's, Thomas's, Eren's, Marco's… Their lives were now his to command, and it frightened him. Feeling the weight of his new duty resting heavily upon his shoulders, a part of him wanted to reject the mantle of authority. He was no Erwin Smith. He was no Hanji Zoë.
Abruptly, he recalled the promotion ceremony where he'd first received his lieutenant's bars. He'd long forgotten the presiding Mon Calamari Rear Admiral's name, but the fleet officer's words had stayed with him.
The responsibilities of a leader have now been added to your responsibilities as a pilot. In our galactic struggle, you are no longer just a brave soldier, but an instrument of the Alliance's ideals and will, entrusted to guide it along the path to victory! We charge you to nurture and safeguard those placed under your command, to guide and wield them capably in battle, and to lead them by example in all things…
Though every bone and muscle in his body yearned to remain still, to let the Imperial fire claim him as well and free him from his overpowering fatigue, Armin mustered the strength to return his mind to the fighting around him.
He surveyed the battlefield with new eyes, scrutinizing each corner of the fighting below with a new kind of attention. He evaluated each segment of the frontline, noting where Alliance troops were in full retreat and where they were holding firm.
The picture he saw through his cockpit's transparisteel canopy was bleak indeed. The defense line smoked and burned, its laser turrets in ruins, all but naked before the oncoming mass of Imperial infantry and walkers.
Everywhere he looked, the tan and gray winter parkas of withdrawing Alliance soldiers covered the snowy slopes. They struggled towards the rear under fire, abandoning their equipment, pausing only to help those who had been hit. Behind them, a wave of white-clad snowtroopers pushed forward, leaping into the cratered trenches to grapple with the defenders hand-to-hand.
Here and there, Armin could see groups of surrounded Alliance infantry fighting on in disorganized knots, trapped hopelessly within the sea of attacking Imperial soldiers. He searched the ground beneath their snowspeeders with urgency, scanning desperately for any vulnerable enemy target, any weak point that he could throw the squadron against and have a real impact…
His heart sank at what he saw. Arrayed against them stood no less than three battalions of elite Imperial forces—a force so vast that Armin doubted the squadron could hurt it meaningfully even if the enemy conducted the most amateurishly inept antiaircraft defense possible.
If the Scouting Corps kept fighting, Armin calculated, they might at best, with luck, destroy a handful of light walkers, perhaps even eliminate one of the AT-ATs… but those paltry losses would be insignificant to a galactic empire that boasted unimaginable wealth and resources.
As he flew over the battling troops, he felt as though he was watching a surging flood from the air, bearing witness to the destruction while powerless to intervene. Continuing to attack would be no less pointless than dropping stones in the path of the deluge.
There was no longer any room for doubt—Line Rose had finally fallen. The ground battle was lost.
"We're falling back." he declared.
"What!?" Mikasa exclaimed, "Armin!"
Eren's reaction was filled with a similar degree of shock. "Armin, Hanji ordered us to hold position here!"
She had. Armin could still see the wreck of her destroyed T-47 from here. It rested less than fifty meters from the nearest trench, and had Armin not witnessed the crash himself, he would have had difficulty distinguishing the smoking ruin from the skeletal remains of the blasted laser batteries around it.
For the most part, the Alliance troops on the ground were already dead. For now, his squadron lived. His obligation was to fight for those still living.
"I know she did," he explained. "But we've already lost Perimeter Rose. Look around you… there's just nothing more we can do to help."
"Those are our comrades down there!" Eren protested. "They'll get massacred if we don't do something!"
To his right, Armin could see Mikasa and Eren's T-47 wavering visibly, slipping slightly further from the rest of the formation as Mikasa readied herself to dive to the aid of their fellow soldiers.
Armin bit his lip before replying. "We can't help them now even if we tried."
He closed his eyes and continued, even though his words felt bitter to the taste. "What the Alliance will need most in the coming weeks are starfighters and starfighter pilots. There are ten of us left—ten trained pilots. Almost enough for a full squadron. We have to get to our X-wings and evacuate with the rest of the transports. That's our responsibility."
For a moment, silence reigned in the wake of Armin's words. Flying at just a hundred meters, they passed over the war-torn frontline. From their altitude, Armin could see every flash of blaster rifle fire, every blazing-white explosion of a thermal detonator as the pockets of Alliance troops fought to the bitter end.
"Understood," Jean finally said. "And Armin—I'm sorry about earlier…"
"It's all right," Armin replied wearily. "Form up on me. We'll head for the eastern hangar entrance and land near our fighters."
Four airspeeders. Four out of the eleven other T-47s that had taken off that morning alongside Armin's still remained, and they assumed their positions in a loose formation in the air around him. Swinging to face the northeast, they turned their backs on the sorrowful scene behind and below them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Armin suddenly perceived a bright flash from the ground below, followed by a rapidly climbing vapor trail. Adrenaline suddenly surged through his veins, and his head snapped to that side to look.
A portable missile fired from the surface!
"Missile launch! Missile launch!" he cried, alerting the others.
Armin followed the rising rocket with his gaze, frantically attempting to predict the identity of its target. As he watched, it turned, closing in at a blinding rate towards one of the snowspeeders flying alongside his…
Armin's world seemed to come to a crashing stop.
"MIKASA! DODGE!" he bellowed.
Shouts from Jean, Mina, and Hannah filled the comm as the other pilots realized what was happening. As one, they ignored the flight controls in their hands, the battle raging around them, and even the threat of other missiles below. They watched instead with trembling hearts as the two airborne objects moved ever closer and closer together in the sky beside them.
Mikasa reacted in the blink of an eye at what seemed like the last possible second, inverting the airspeeder before throwing the aircraft into a screaming dive precisely calculated to draw the projectile chasing them into the ground. Armin inhaled sharply as he watched both prey and predator descend, praying with all his might to the Force and to every and any deity that he had ever heard of that he was not about to witness yet another blood-red explosion, yet another airspeeder falling in flames…
The missile, to his great relief, failed to follow Mikasa through the maneuver and smashed itself impotently against the ice without exploding.
For once, however, Mikasa had miscalculated.
As her T-47 pulled out of the dive, its belly briefly met and scraped the surface of Hoth. Instantly, the snowspeeder rocked from the force of the collision, and Armin saw several metal parts shear away from the aircraft as the entire vehicle bounced against the frozen plain. A plume of displaced ice and snow powder materialized in the T-47's wake as Mikasa wrenched it back towards the air, struggling to recover. A moment later, the twin repulsorlift engines powering the speeder failed, and the vehicle descended once more, plowing into the earth and sliding several dozen meters before coming to a stop.
The force of the impact seemed to twist Armin's own stomach.
He tried to stand in the cockpit, straining against his pilot's harness to lean over to the side for a better view of the crash as he yelled out.
"Eren! Mikasa! Are you OK!?"
To his infinite relief, he heard Mikasa cough before she replied, "I'm fine. Eren?"
"I'm allright!" Eren exclaimed, before commenting unnecessarily, "We've crashed."
Armin moved to circle his snowspeeder above Mikasa's landing site. He saw the canopy of the crashed snowspeeder rise, and at the sight of the two orange-clad pilots moving inside the cockpit, he let out a grateful sigh.
Then, he saw a lance of bright energy fly across the ground and bury itself in the earth next to the crash site, and his pace quickened again.
Mikasa and Eren had landed directly between the Imperial infantry and the withdrawing Alliance forces.
Suddenly, the snow below lit up with flying blaster bolts as the Imperial troops realized what had happened. Below, all he could make out were flares of red ricocheting and sparking off of the crashed speeder's armor. From the disabled vehicle's cockpit came answering flashes as Mikasa and Eren drew their blaster pistols and fired back.
"Mikasa, Eren!" Armin yelled, bringing his speeder into a diving turn. "Fall back to the base now! We'll cover for you!"
"Damn it!" Jean exclaimed upon seeing his maneuver. "Armin, get back here! We can't stick around—I'm reading locks from another half-dozen portable launchers!"
Armin knew he was right. Every rational bone in his body was telling him that he was just endangering himself and Mina, putting them at risk of the same fate as Mikasa and Eren or worse. All the same, he hesitated to return the airspeeder to level flight.
They were his friends. They were from Shiganshina. They were some of the last people alive that he had grown up knowing.
"Armin…" Mina began, her own voice choked as she, too, was torn over the question of staying to help their friends.
"Armin, we're fine here!" Mikasa snarled. "Hurry up and get back to the hangars before more of you get hit!"
He closed his eyes tightly as he pulled out of the dive, climbing back towards the other three aircraft above and ahead of him.
He looked earthwards one last time as they passed over the fallen snowspeeder. Still, sporadic bursts of light were flying outwards across the snow as Mikasa and Eren returned fire, their defiant shooting paling in comparison to the flurry of red darts converging on the T-47 from seemingly all sides, bouncing off its durasteel plating or winking out in the snow around it.
"Popping a smoke grenade!" Eren called out, blaster fire ringing in the background.
"Armin, we'll withdraw with the garrison forces," Mikasa stated. "We probably won't have time to make it to the X-Wings, so we'll catch a ride out on one of the transports and meet up with the rest of you at the rally point."
"Mikasa, don't forget to wipe the computer and destroy the cockpit!" Eren shouted. He addressed Armin next, shouting over the chaos on the ground. "Armin, get out of here! We'll be fine on our own—see you at the rendezvous!"
Their comm went dead with a click as Mikasa shut down the T-47's systems.
There was nothing more that Armin could do. Nothing but trust Mikasa and Eren and believe in their ability to hold off their attackers and escape to meet up with him again. Below, he could already see a squad of Alliance infantry pushing towards the crash site, exchanging fire with the advancing Imperial troops opposite them.
"Let's go!" he cried, forcing the harsh words through clenched teeth.
With his left hand, he reached for the throttle and pushed it wide open.
OOOOO
Whether their airspeeders had been caught by Imperial aircraft, or by missile walkers, or by man-portable launchers firing from the ground below, Armin would never know for sure.
Their four T-47s had been descending slowly, approaching the main base, when the missile lock warning had roared to life again, piercing their ears with its insistent shriek.
"Shit!" Mina cursed. "We're out of chaff and flares! Armin, evade!"
Armin moved to throw them into a rolling spiral, but before the T-47 had begun to turn, the missile had caught up to them.
A powerful blast rocked the aircraft, buffeting it furiously as though it had been caught in a giant's fist. The earpieces built into Armin's headset deflected the worst of the concussive blast, but his eardrums shrieked with pain as the pressure wave from the missile's detonation caught him. He felt transparisteel fragments fly sideways through the cockpit, gashing his cheek and jaw in passing, and the control yoke bucked violently in his hand. Suddenly, what sounded like a dozen alarms began filling his ears, and the acid aroma of smoke met his nostrils.
He opened his eyes. The instrument panel shone before him, several of the displays cracked or nonfunctional. The status symbols he saw screamed yellow and red at him—port engine failure, loss of secondary electrical power, loss of cockpit pressurization, loss of rudder control…
He gasped, "Mina! Are you all right!?"
Mina groaned. "Ugh… caught a piece of shrapnel, but I'm fine…"
He heard her struggle into action despite her wound, punching at buttons and switches. At the same time, Armin became conscious of the wind, whistling and howling through the gaping holes in their shattered cockpit canopy.
He checked his instruments again. They had lost half of their altitude and much of their airspeed, and their engine power was dropping at a worrying rate. He pulled at the control yoke, and realized with a start that it felt sluggish and unresponsive.
"Armin, our hydraulic fluid is leaking," Mina reported. "We might lose flight controls any second… I'm restoring communications—now!"
Armin hadn't even realized that his headset had gone silent. Suddenly, voices appeared in his helmet once more.
"—all engine power! I don't think we can make it there!"
"Green Five, do you copy!?"
Continuing to yank at the control yoke as he tried to bring the speeder's nose up, Armin spoke. "Five here. Mina and I are fine but badly damaged. All pilots report!"
"Six here! We're fine with no damage!" Hannah cried.
Jean's voice was next. "This is Nine. Mild damage, nothing serious. No injuries."
From Thomas's tone, Armin immediately sensed that something was wrong.
"Twelve here! I—we've been hit bad… I've lost power in… in both engines! And Dazz—he's not responding!"
Armin grimaced. In his hands, his control yoke felt as though the bearings had been coated in gluepaste. Even as he watched, another red light appeared on his dashboard, indicating an engine coolant leak.
"We've been hit too," he said with a sigh. "No injuries… but we're losing flight controls."
Armin raised his head to look towards the horizon. The skyline dipped and rose erratically as he wrestled with his controls. Ahead, the white slopes of the hill containing Echo Base loomed in front of them. For some reason, it had never appeared so formidable, so insurmountable to him before this moment.
He sighed a second time as the reality of their situation dawned on him.
"Jean," he declared. "You have command. Head with Hannah to the evacuation point from the air and get to your X-Wings."
Armin looked back towards the southeastern slope of the base and saw what he was looking for—a series of small doors that opened out onto the hillside. "Thomas and I will land here and travel through Echo Base to reach the hangars. Don't wait for us."
Jean's voice was grim but focused. "Roger that, Armin. See you at the rally point."
"Yeah," Armin replied. He loosened his grip on the control yoke, and the T-47 immediately sank, descending towards their new landing side. He glanced to his left and saw Thomas's speeder trailing smoke as it moved to follow him. Returning his attention to the ground below them, he gauged their rate of descent. Given his current degree of flight control, this landing would not be difficult… but he would only have one opportunity.
Abruptly, Jean added, "You'll make it out, right? Don't disappoint me."
Sitting amidst his ruined cockpit, surrounded by warning lights and system alarms, Armin managed a laugh. "Roger that, Nine."
OOOOO
They landed gently on the snow outside one of the base entrances.
Without hydraulic power, Armin hadn't even been able to deploy the T-47's landing struts, and so he had simply allowed the crippled aircraft to pancake to the earth in the last few meters of its descent. They had arrived on the surface with a jarring jolt, and several more banks of status lights had instantly lit up, announcing the failure of another half-dozen systems.
Well, he reflected with dark humor, the Alliance had never planned on evacuating the snowspeeders anyway.
Moving quickly, he and Mina unbuckled their flight restraints. Armin hit the canopy control, raising and opening the ruined cockpit. Immediately, the freezing wind rushed in to meet them, numbing his neck and cheeks almost instantly with its kiss.
He looked around as Mina busied herself with wiping the T-47's computer.
The exterior of the base was eerily quiet, despite the signs of fighting that had scarred the hillside around them. Several bodies, both Alliance and Imperial, lay scattered around the group of entrances, and blaster charring marked the half-open durasteel doors. Discarded equipment littered the snow, and Armin's eyes rested in turn upon a dead tauntaun, an abandoned hoversled, and the blackened remains of a utility droid. Flanking the nearest set of doors stood two small laser turrets—unoccupied by Alliance soldiers, yet strangely left undamaged. He felt a shudder travel down his spine as he realized that he wasn't even sure if this area of the base had been occupied by the enemy.
"All set," Mina announced next to him as she stood up and climbed out of the speeder's cockpit. "I primed the grenade to go off in three minutes."
Armin nodded.
They looked over to where Thomas's snowspeeder had landed, and Armin's eyes suddenly narrowed. He could see that Thomas had opened his cockpit canopy, and the young pilot had left his speeder and was walking around towards its rear half as though in a daze.
Dazz, however, had not moved from his seat.
In a second, both Mina and Armin were racing across the snow as fast as their tired legs could carry them. Thomas looked up at the sound of their footsteps nearing, and they saw that his face was streaked with tears. His devastated expression as he stared back at them revealed a guilt beyond words.
The two of them slowed to a stop just a few paces from the downed aircraft. Mina's mouth opened wordlessly, and she reached up to her head to remove her helmet.
Armin looked over to Thomas, scanning the other pilot's tattered flight suit, the scorch marks scored across the ruined life support unit hanging from his chest. Thomas caught Armin's eye, his lip trembling.
"I…" was all Thomas could say.
He closed his eyes, sending more teardrops rolling down his cheeks, and turned away to face their fallen comrade. Together, they stood silently for a moment next to the charred airspeeder, averting their gaze from the worst of the wounds across Dazz's head and upper body.
Dazz deserved a better eulogy, Armin knew, but in his current state, all he could manage was a callous, impersonal, trite statement.
"He's gone, Thomas. There's nothing we can do."
"May the Force be with him," Mina added silently, to Armin's great gratitude.
A part of Armin began to recalculate the squadron's tally of fatalities, adding Dazz to the list of the dead. Forcefully, Armin shunted that consciousness aside, revolting at the idea of counting all those who had been lost.
They had been friends and fellow pilots, and a number could not possibly do them the justice they deserved.
His eyes stung painfully, and Armin realized that the cold of Hoth's exposed surface was threatening to freeze his tears solid from the moment his eyes had even begun to water.
"We should move," Mina finally said. "That grenade is going to go off any second now."
Thomas wiped his face with a tattered sleeve. "Damn… that's right, I forgot—"
At that moment, a commanding voice that sounded almost mechanical rang out across the open ground.
"Rebels! Halt! Raise your hands above your heads!"
They spun. There, just forty paces downslope, a squad of Imperial infantry was approaching them, their blaster rifles aimed squarely at the three pilots. Except for their cold, black eye lenses, they looked like phantoms, pitiless and ethereal.
At the sight of the enemy so close to them, something inside Armin snapped. He reacted so quickly that he surprised even himself as he darted to Thomas's side, snatching the unused concussion grenade from the youth's equipment belt. A second later, the cylinder was primed, flying through the air in a gentle arc straight towards the group of snowtroopers.
The white-clad troopers scattered, yelling warnings to one another as the grenade sailed towards them. The phantoms drifted across the snow as they moved out of the projectile's path.
Armin was already making his next move. The grenade from his own equipment belt was in his hands and primed for a ten-second fuse, and he lobbed it with an underhand throw into the cockpit of the nearby speeder. The explosive bounced off the back of the pilot's seat with its warning lights flashing before falling out of view.
At that moment, a sharp, percussive blast from downslope announced the detonation of Thomas's grenade.
"Follow me!" Armin roared.
Mina had already drawn her blaster, and she rapidly overtook him as they raced for the nearby doors. Thomas ran close behind them, crying out in surprise as the first blaster bolts flew just over their heads.
Armin ducked as he ran. The wind buffeting them had never felt stronger; his flight boots had never felt heavier. The snow beneath their feet seemed to tug at them, holding them back with an icy grip. He stared up ahead at the open entrance doors, blinking as another blaster rifle bolt flew just feet in front of his face. A part of him imagined what easy targets they were presenting to their attackers, and he braced himself with the full expectation that the next crimson beam would catch him squarely in the back of his head…
A second later, both crashed airspeeders exploded simultaneously, erupting with such coordination that Armin couldn't have planned it any better even if he'd intended to from the start.
Around them, the day seemed to brighten twofold as the T-47s' stores of fuel and blaster actuator gas ignited in a single massive roar. The concussion of the blast almost knocked them over as they ran, pursued by flying debris that fell all around them like rain.
Not a single further blaster bolt flew towards them as they made it through the half-opened doors into the base.
At the threshold, Armin stood aside to let Thomas pass, pausing to look back behind them at the scene outside. There, the snowspeeder that had carried him and Mina for the last few months burned brightly, spitting breaths of orange fire as it died where it lay. To the other side, the other airspeeder had all but vanished amongst the flames—a bright funeral pyre for yet another fallen friend. Bracketed by the two blazing wrecks, the squad of Imperial soldiers was regrouping, charging up the hill after them.
Before he turned away to run deeper inside the base after the others, Armin's eyes flickered for one last instant to the stunning backdrop behind it all, to that sweeping landscape of mountains and ice painted across the horizon from east to west.
Again at peace, the great snow plain slept dreamlessly beneath the late-afternoon sun.
OOOOO
Another mammoth chapter complete! Whew! (I just know I'm going to notice fourteen embarrassing typos as soon as I post this…)
Next chapter: a thrilling foot chase through the corridors of Echo Base! It's all outlined already, and I've written a couple pages in advance, so hopefully it will be ready soon.
As you might have noticed, I don't kid around with character deaths, haha. After all, an Attack on Titan story wouldn't be complete without the threat of mortal danger. War is serious business, and as Jean would say, "Seems not everyone gets a dramatic death." Fear not, though, there's still more than enough of the 104th trainee corps left to work with!
I bet a few of you might have assumed that I would kill off the usual suspects first—Mina, Hannah, Franz, Thomas, etc… Not so! Besides, I kind of think they deserve more attention and time in the limelight than they often get in fanfics.
Yet again, I find myself delighted with how appropriate the Star Wars setting is for exploring our SnK characters. This story has been a pleasure to write so far. I hope you've enjoyed the read, and as always, don't forget to favorite, follow, and review!