Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 5}

CASSIAN WAS BLIND BENEATH HIS hood, but although he lacked Chirrut’s preternatural senses, he knew how to listen.

During the long march from the Holy City, he listened to his captors. He listened to the code words they murmured to unseen allies who granted them passage out of the settlement and into the desert. He listened to their confusion, the short-lived cheering and then the grim silence, as the Star Destroyer above Jedha shrank into the twilight sky. He listened to the Tognath state coolly, “Saw will know what it means.”

He listened to Chirrut’s endless chanting (May the Force of others be with you. May the Force of others be with you.), muffled by the cloth sack. The combined effect seemed simultaneously profound and absurd.

Most of all, he listened for Jyn. He listened for her struggles. He listened for her voice. He tried to determine which steady tread on the sand was hers.

For all Cassian heard, she might have vanished from the face of Jedha.

Was it concern that made him fixate on her? His mission was to find Saw and, through Saw, find the pilot; find proof of an Imperial weapon that could mutilate the galaxy. If possible, he was also to find and eliminate Galen Erso—a man very likely culpable in that weapon’s creation. Jyn was first and foremost a means of finding Saw. She’d already served that purpose, which meant she was now expendable.

She dominated his thinking nonetheless. Cassian believed neither pity nor pragmatism explained it.

He had sacrificed Tivik without hesitation.

Maybe it was the need he’d seen in Jyn, the fire that had carried her through the fighting in the Holy Quarter. It seemed obscene to leave that need unanswered, abandoned to the dust.

It was late into the night when the band left the desert for the rocky slopes of a mountainside, then on from the mountain to the echoing corridors of a stone shelter. Cassian recognized the heavier tread of Chirrut’s partner at his side and risked a low murmur. “We’re half a day out. A shrine?”

“A monastery,” the man said. “The Catacombs of Cadera, down among the dead.”

The name meant nothing to Cassian.

He tried to count rebel voices in the distance, but he rapidly lost track. They’d reached a base of some kind: Weapons clattered and heaters hummed, and heavy doors opened and slammed shut. Shouts of triumph and the click of wooden game pieces suggested the presence of bored guards or off-duty soldiers. Without prelude, Cassian’s hood was torn off and a solid kick delivered to his lower back. He pivoted in time to see the blurred shadow of a cell door slam shut. He blinked furiously to adjust to the dim light.

The cell was little more than a cramped alcove in the rock. Chirrut and his partner shared the space with Cassian. The former man chanted softly (May the Force of others be with you…) in one corner, while the latter stood with arms folded across his chest, staring into the darkness of the cavern beyond the door.

Jyn was missing.

“Hey!” Cassian called. He rushed to the bars, cried out, “Jyn Erso! Where is she?”

No one answered.

You’re a fool, Cassian told himself. They won’t talk to you. But they’ll try to spot your weakness.

He mollified himself with the dubious pleasure of inhaling musty air unencumbered by a hood. The walls of the catacombs were inlaid with humanoid skulls—thousands of them, from what had to have been generations of monks—and draped with power cables leading from generators to heaters to comm stations. A handful of rebel guards sat on squat stools nearby, not far from where the group’s gear had been splayed on a table. Other cells neighbored Cassian’s own, silent and dark.

He turned his attention to the door itself and pushed himself against the bars to peer at its outer control panel. The lock was mechanical, but wired into the systems of the rebel hideout. He could definitely reach it, suspected he could pick it, but not without triggering an alarm.

“You pray?” Chirrut’s partner asked.

Cassian turned to find the man speaking to the still-chanting Chirrut.

“You pray,” the man said, and barked a laugh. He glanced at Cassian. “He’s praying for the door to open.”

“Pray I get a chance to work,” Cassian murmured, but both men seemed to ignore him.

Chirrut stopped his chant abruptly. “It bothers him,” he said, “because he knows it is possible.”

Chirrut’s partner laughed again. The sound was brief and ugly, but Chirrut only shrugged and told Cassian, “Baze Malbus was once the most devoted Guardian of us all.”

Baze Malbus. Cassian ran the name through his mental database and came up empty. “Now he’s just your guardian?” he asked.

Neither man took the bait. Cassian ran his hands over his face, scratched at his beard. Both of the Guardians were formidable fighters, to be sure; and Chirrut, Jedi or not, half mad or overzealous or sincere, was an echo of an era the Empire had nearly erased.

Even the leaders of the Rebellion rarely spoke about the Jedi. Had men like Chirrut been common? Men so certain in their faith that they wielded it like a shield? Men so disciplined that, even blind, they could down a dozen stormtroopers with nothing more than a stick?

How many people were alive to remember?

Before the rise of the Empire, Cassian would have considered the Jedi his enemies. But he’d been so young, too young to understand who he’d been fighting or who he’d been fighting for. Now the Separatists were as forgotten as their Jedi foes.

“Why did you save us?” he asked.

“Maybe I only saved her,” Chirrut said.

Cassian grunted. “I’m beginning to think the Force and I have different priorities.”

“Relax, Captain,” Chirrut answered. “We’ve been in worse cages than this one.”

“Yeah? Well, this is a first for me.”

“There is more than one sort of prison, Captain,” Chirrut said. “I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.”

Baze laughed again, but there was no boisterousness this time—just a coarse, hollow sound.

Cassian frowned and turned back to the lock and the cavern. It was some minutes later that he realized no one had told Chirrut he was a captain.

Jyn recognized the soldiers in the monastery, though she’d never met most of them. She knew their scars: the burn marks on their palms from overheated blasters, the short, jagged lines on cheeks and neck drawn by slivers of shrapnel. She knew their carriage: the proud, compact manner they maintained that readied them to take or return a blow. She recognized these things, recognized the soldiers not only as rebels but as Saw’s rebels, trained in his image, and she instinctively mirrored their posture, reflected their mistrustful glares.

All these years later, she was still one of them—and they hated her for it.

She couldn’t really blame them. They were mourning casualties in the Holy City because of her. They were mourning their brothers and sisters, dead at her hand (or close enough).

She waited in the central chamber of the monastery, a place stacked with cots and cook stations attended by Saw’s people. The Tognath had left her there after guiding her away from Cassian, her hood off and her hands bound. The question of where Cassian might be now was no more than a distant distraction to Jyn—like the sound of a rat scuttling along rafters.

She had other concerns on her mind. Saw Gerrera was somewhere close. She could almost smell the oil on his favorite rifle. For years, she had anticipated, fantasized about confronting him; picked hurtful words and braced herself for the wrath of the first, last, and only true warrior to stand against the Empire.

That confrontation had never come, and she’d let the fantasy die. Now she wasn’t sure she was ready for the fight.

“I remember you.”

Jyn turned to see a woman approaching. She was pale, almost chalk-skinned, but human, dressed in an armored jacket two sizes too large. Her speech was slurred. One of her arms hung limp.

“Were you on Fashinder Prime?” the woman asked, as if trying to place an acquaintance.

“No,” Jyn said, and furrowed her brow. “Must’ve been after my time.”

Jyn tried to recall the woman’s face and caught other memories instead. She saw comrades she hadn’t thought about in a lifetime.

“Is Staven still alive?” Jyn asked.

Staven, who’d lectured her for hours one night for miswiring a detonator. Staven, who’d given Jyn her first sip of fermented bantha milk and let her sit with the adults telling dirty jokes before anyone else.

“No,” the woman said.

“What about Codo?”

Codo, who’d taught Jyn how to swim in the mudhole they’d called a grotto. Codo, who’d tried to kiss her, and who wouldn’t talk to her after she refused.

In response, the woman lifted her good hand, put an imaginary blaster to her head, and pulled the trigger.

“Maia?” Jyn asked. But that was stupid; she remembered now, she had been there when Maia died. Jyn had been the one to inherit—and promptly lose—Maia’s synthskin gloves, the gloves that had been so soft and smelled like carbon scoring.

People didn’t talk about the dead much among Saw’s rebels. It made it easy to forget when someone was gone.

The woman grunted and drifted away. The Tognath emerged from a doorway and returned to Jyn’s side. With a swift, unkind motion, he cut the bonds around her wrists.

“He’ll see you now,” the Tognath said.

No more distractions, Jyn thought.

Saw Gerrera had recruited hard soldiers and made them heartless. Staven and Codo and Maia, everything Jyn had loved and hated about them—all of it was shadow in Saw’s fiery light.

She shut down a tremor and steeled herself to meet the man who’d saved her from the cave.

“In there,” the Tognath said, and gestured at a curtained doorway. Jyn stepped through the ragged fabric, which parted like a cobweb. The Tognath did not follow.

The small chamber beyond was a spartan living area built for a lonely abbot. It peered onto the valley of the Holy City through a window in the rock. A pale-gray dawn had crept up behind the horizon, and Jyn realized that she was no longer tired; sometime during the night, during the march across the desert, she had lost the capacity for ordinary exhaustion and taken on a deeper weariness.

She heard a harsh metallic clank. She shifted her weight instinctively, ready to take a fighting stance.

“Is it really you?” a hoarse voice asked.

She was ready, she told herself.

Jyn turned her head and looked at Saw Gerrera.

The wreck that had been Saw Gerrera.

Where she had once known a soldier, scarred but strong, now she saw an old man held together by the scaffolding of armor and braces. His dark hair was frosted with white, grown wild and unkempt about his face. His eyes were keen as ever, but they were trapped inside a rusting cage.

Saw Gerrera had been the strongest person Jyn had ever known. Even sealed within the hatch in her mind, buried in the darkness, he had shouted to be heard.

She loathed him for so many reasons. She had been prepared to fight. Witnessing him like this, she wanted to cry.

“I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “Jyn…”

He strode toward her, the metallic rhythm of his leg echoing in the chamber.

“Must be quite a surprise,” she said. She spoke in the voice of the Jyn who wanted a battle. It was the voice of a soldier, the voice that terrified prisoners and demanded cold, merciless retribution.

It was supposed to be Saw’s voice.

But there was no harshness in his rasp. “Are we not still friends?” he asked.

“The last time I saw you,” Jyn uttered, as casual as if she were butchering a rat on a spit, “you gave me a knife and loaded blaster and told me to wait in a shell turret until daylight.”

“I knew you were safe,” Saw said. He sounded wounded.

“You left me behind.”

“You were already the best soldier in my cadre.” Saw shook his head. “You were ready, and I saw that, even if you did not.”

Her words came too fast, too hot. “I was sixteen.”

“I was protecting you.” Her error seemed to give strength to Saw. His rasp became sharper, a swift slap of correction.

“You dumped me,” Jyn sneered, but it wasn’t much more than a murmur. She had come full of savagery, ready to pit her fire against his; instead he’d stolen her heat, and all either of them had now was embers.

“You were the daughter of an Imperial science officer,” Saw said. He spoke more gently than Jyn could bear. “People were starting to figure that out. People who wanted to—to use you as a hostage.

“Not a day goes by I don’t think of you…”

“Stop,” she said. She didn’t want this. The kind Saw Gerrera, the gentle Saw Gerrera, who could afford to look at the girl he raised and pity her. Fight me, she wanted to beg.

Then Saw’s eyes narrowed, and Jyn caught a glimpse of the warrior she knew.

“But today, of all days?” he asked.

He took another step forward, stared at her, unblinking.

“It’s a trap,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“What?”

The soldier was somewhere in the wreck of the man, inside the armor and the braces, gasping defiance against his dying body. “The pilot,” Saw said, with impotent urgency. “The message. All of it.” He grasped at the oxygen mask built into his armor, pulled it to his face and sucked in a mouthful of air before resuming. “Did they send you? Have you come here to kill me?” There was no humor in his voice as he added: “There’s not much left.”

Jyn shook her head slowly. The words drifted like motes of dust, like ash, and she began to comprehend. This was still the Saw Gerrera she knew, albeit enfeebled and drained of life. This was the man who knew compassion, who cared for Jyn as his own daughter, only so long as there was no battle to fight; no paranoid fantasy of traitors or Imperial plots to lure him astray.

“I don’t care enough to kill you, Saw,” she said.

“So what is it, Jyn? Why come to Jedha in the name of the Rebel Alliance?”

He’d done his research, apparently. He wanted to talk about her mission? About the pilot? Fine.

“The Alliance wants my father,” she said. “They think he’s sent you a message about a weapon. I guess they think by sending me you might actually help them out.”

“Who sent you?” he asked, as if he’d caught her at a lie. “Was it Draven?”

“General Draven, Mon Mothma, the whole damn council,” Jyn snapped. “I don’t know them, Saw. I’m doing this job because I have to.”

Saw turned away, snatched up a cane, and leaned heavily against it. His hand was trembling. “So what is it that you want, Jyn? Did you expect I could welcome you back? Ignore the deaths in the city?”

She almost laughed. She held it in, smiled bitterly instead. “I want to be left alone. They wanted an introduction, they’ve got it—you should be talking to your prisoners, not me.” Again, that distant, distracted thought of Cassian. “I’m out now. The rest of you can do what you want.”

The cane wobbled in Saw’s hand. She saw him lurch, catch himself. “You care not about the cause?”

Jyn tried to find words to respond. Do you think you’re testing me? Do you think I’ve been hiding anything from you? “The cause?” she finally managed. “Seriously?”

“You were the best soldier in my cadre,” Saw hissed. “Not because of your skill, but because you believed.” The cane rose and snapped back to the floor, the sound bellowing through the room. “Because you knew our enemy like I did. Because you were willing to die for our cause and our army.”

She had believed. Saw was right about that. But that belief hadn’t been preserved in the dark cave in her mind. It had withered there, dried and cracked and turned to dust.

“The Alliance?” she said. “The rebels? Whatever it is you’re calling yourself these days? All it’s ever brought me is pain.”

Saw’s throat worked with effort. His nostrils flared. He didn’t reach for the oxygen mask. “You can stand to see the Imperial flag reign across the galaxy?” he asked.

Jyn shrugged.

She could have walked away then; turned her back on the shadow of the man she’d known, walked into the desert and called an end to her obligations.

But Saw had hurt her.

“It’s not a problem if you don’t look up,” she said.

She had seen Saw Gerrera face disloyalty before. She had seen him spill blood over worse offenses than her own, seen him bind and blindfold a would-be deserter and toss him from an airspeeder in front of an Imperial barracks. She knew, too, that he had hidden the worst from her—secret methods of torment and interrogation that he hadn’t wished to show a fifteen-year-old girl.

She wanted to hurt him.

She wanted his old fire back, in the hope that it might rekindle her own. She had come into his chamber prepared to fight and found herself suffocating, her rage perishing without fuel. The exhaustion of the night’s trek, of the battle in the Holy Quarter, rose to reclaim her after all.

You taught me to survive.

But Saw only took a drag from his oxygen mask and closed his eyes. The trembling of the cane ceased. When he looked at her again, he seemed to have found a new clarity.

“I have something to show you,” he said.

So much could go wrong, Orson Krennic thought, but in the moment before action—in the instant when both triumph and defeat remained possible—the galaxy seemed wondrous.

He observed the evacuation of Jedha on a dozen viewscreens across the Death Star’s overbridge. The smaller craft, the personal shuttles of high-ranking officers and the transports of specialized stormtrooper units, were the last to lift off. The Star Destroyer Dauntless, once stationed above Jedha City, had already repositioned itself some distance from the moon. Despite the protests of local garrison commanders, the forces assigned to Jedha would be safe from whatever followed.

One of the bridge officers called out a number: 97 percent. Krennic amended the thought: 97 percent of Jedha’s assigned military forces would be safe.

That would suffice. Jedha was a meat grinder. A 3 percent loss in return for total victory would win any general a commendation.

“It’s past time, Director.” The unctuous voice came from the direction of the turbolift.

Krennic pivoted on his heel and smiled a broad, respectful smile at Wilhuff Tarkin as the old man eyed the bustle of officers and technicians. “I couldn’t agree more,” Krennic said, and inclined his head. “But under the circumstances, it seems only respectful to await the Emperor’s command.”

“The Emperor is awaiting my report,” Tarkin retorted.

Krennic’s smile faded only a touch. “One had hoped that he and Lord Vader might have been here for such an occasion.”

Tarkin’s voice was laced with irritation and feigned exasperation. “And I thought it prudent to save you from any potential embarrassment.”

My embarrassment, or your own?

Tarkin’s objective was transparent: The man believed (with typical grandiose certainty) that a demonstration on Jedha would diminish, rather than enhance, Krennic’s stature. Yet why remained an open question. Krennic had turned up no evidence of sabotage; nor had his contacts close to Tarkin revealed anything of use regarding the governor’s plot. And while Tarkin’s disdain for Krennic was supreme, he would surely have arranged for the Emperor to bear witness if he assumed Krennic’s “incompetence” would result in the station’s failure.

No. The most likely possibility was that Krennic’s precautions against sabotage or failure had shaken Tarkin’s confidence. The man was now hedging his bets. If Krennic succeeded in annihilating Jedha, Tarkin would attempt to take credit in the eyes of the Emperor. If Krennic failed, all the better.

But Krennic would not fail. The Death Star was ready. Once Jedha was destroyed, he would receive his private audience with Emperor Palpatine—and he was confident he could persuade the Emperor that it was he, not Tarkin, who deserved the accolades.

It even happened to be true.

“Your concern is hardly warranted,” Krennic said. “The finest scientists and engineers in the Empire have dedicated their lives to this project. You will not find our faith in them misplaced.”

“If saying it would only make it so,” Tarkin murmured, just loud enough for the officers to hear him above the din.

Krennic barely withheld a snarl. “All Imperial forces,” he announced, striding along the command stations, “have been evacuated, and I stand ready to destroy the entire moon.” The officers faced him, uniformly at attention; the technicians slowed but did not cease working, as Krennic had earlier instructed.

“What we do today was once inconceivable—a scientific heresy. Yet our Empire and our Emperor have ensured our success and granted us the moral authority required to take this step toward peace. The death of a world—”

He stopped at the sound of brisk applause from Tarkin. “Inspiring,” he said, “but that won’t be necessary. We need a statement, not a manifesto.”

Krennic’s smile twisted into a grimace. “What is it,” he asked, “that you suggest?”

Tarkin shrugged. “The Holy City will be enough for the day.”

Krennic tugged at his gloves, felt sweat on his palms as his ire grew. His assessment of Tarkin had been incomplete: The old man was hedging against both success and failure, ensuring that even a perfect performance would be unspectacular at best.

Could he subvert Tarkin’s orders? Arrange the destruction of the moon regardless and claim that the station’s sheer power had been unanticipated? He glanced from a control console to Tarkin and back.

Not with him watching. Not on short notice.

He would find another way.

“Target Jedha City,” he snapped. “Prepare single reactor ignition.”

Krennic concealed his resentment, calmed himself with the sounds of his breath and the tidal rush of the station reactor. This wasn’t how he’d imagined the culmination of twenty years’ work—a diminished attack, a grand moff’s power play—but it was the reality he contended with.

“Fire when ready.” His voice was steady. He had earned his pride, no matter the outcome.