Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 16}

THE CARGO INSPECTION WENT AS well as Jyn could have hoped.

The shuttle hadn’t been built to carry two dozen armed rebels laden with gear, let alone conceal them from a curious Imperial security team. But the inspection, Bodhi had assured them, was unavoidable. All they could do was try to take advantage of it.

So Jyn had secreted herself in the cockpit, squeezed in tight between Cassian’s shoulder (smelling of blaster oil and Eadu’s dirt) and the main console. She listened to the boarding ramp descend, heard booted feet against the metal deck and Bodhi making quick, awkward introductions in the main cabin. She listened to the murmurs of the inspection team. She listened for the sound of two dozen men and women crammed into cargo stores and crawl spaces like refugees.

“Hey, you’re probably looking for a manifest…” Bodhi said, sounding less convincing all the time.

“That would be helpful.” Another voice, curt and officious.

“It’s just down here.”

Jyn wrapped her fingers around her blaster’s grip. She could spring out of the cockpit in one leap if she had to. Maybe even land at the base of the ladder without breaking her legs.

She heard the creak of a cargo hatch swinging open. There was one brief, muffled cry and then the sounds of multiple impacts against the deck. No shots fired. She scrambled forward, fumbled her way down the ladder in time to see Baze emerging from the cargo compartment with a terrifying smile.

Bodhi stood wide-eyed among the bodies of the inspection team.

“Off to a good start,” Jyn said, as the rest of the rebels emerged.

Three minutes later, she had managed to fit a too-large Imperial security uniform over her clothes. The black chest plate looked too large on her, and the sleeves felt too long over her gloves, but it would have to suffice. She almost winced when she looked at Cassian, wearing an officer’s suit and cap like they were perfectly tailored. Even the code cylinder in his pocket was at a regulation angle. “You’ve done this before,” she murmured, and he ignored her. The rest of the soldiers were stowing the bodies and passing around stripped weapons and comlinks.

She checked her blaster one final time, strapped on her helmet, and looked to the boarding ramp. Melshi made what she took as a ready signal from a cluster of soldiers. She started to move toward Cassian and the exit before she felt a great shadow at her side. Baze, with a touch as light as a windblown leaf, touched her shoulder.

“Good luck, little sister,” he said. He spoke with warmth and gravity, as if the words were a Jedha custom or an honor of the Guardians of the Whills.

Jyn didn’t know. She didn’t have to know. She smiled at him, searched for words and found none. She hoped he understood her gratitude.

Cassian waited for her at the ramp. Together, in the garb of the enemy, they stepped out onto Scarif.

Scarif was bright as a desert, bright as her cave was now. Jyn could taste salt water in the air. The warmth of the sun might have been unbearable under her black uniform if the breeze hadn’t been in constant motion, swelling and ebbing as if jealous of the tides. She tried not to look at the shuttles thundering overhead, to keep her chin up and her eyes forward like a proper guard. She wasn’t sure how well she managed the act; twice she had to slow her pace to allow Cassian, her “superior officer,” to take the lead. K-2SO trailed them both, servos whirring with every step.

They marched down off the shuttle pad cramped with consoles and cargo crates and power stations. From there, they followed a short trail to an aboveground bunker linked to the repulsor rail system that would lead to the Citadel. Jyn blinked away the sunlight and a sudden, distant drowsiness.

“Sir!” As they reached the terminal, a guard tapped a button and the doors of a car slid open, admitting Cassian, Jyn, and K-2.

Stay focused, Jyn.

“Our odds of failure have gone up,” K-2 said. “I have a bad feeling about—”

“Kay!” Cassian hissed.

“Quiet,” Jyn added.

The doors closed in time to deny entry to a pair of stormtroopers. Jyn shook her head briskly and shifted her weight as the car hummed into motion.

“What?” K-2 asked.

Neither she nor Cassian answered. Focus, Jyn told herself again, even as she shifted her weight back and forth, found no outlet for either her nervous energy or the tension building in her mind. She thought of Baze’s smile, of her promotion by Lieutenant Sefla, of what her comrades were preparing to do outside.

“What is it?” Cassian asked. His voice was low, and sun and shadows danced across his features as the car raced over the water. Jyn waved a hand dismissively, but he only asked again more sternly: “What is it?”

She twisted and peered through the window. The Citadel Tower was growing larger, dark against the shining sky. “Just—what I told them all back there. About what Saw Gerrera said?”

“What about it?” Cassian asked.

She tugged awkwardly at one glove’s fingers. “We never fought like this with him. I never did. With Saw, missions were usually about hitting the Empire hard—hitting back for revenge, slowly bleeding them to death.”

“And what we’re doing now is different.” Cassian was being careful, showing nothing of his thoughts.

“Yes,” Jyn said. “If we don’t win this, people out there—” She waved at the unseen stars. “—don’t just ignore it. We have to get those plans. I’m not sure I know how to fight to accomplish something.”

All of it was true. None of it was what troubled Jyn most. None of it was what she wanted to hide from herself, now that she’d seen the truth.

“You’re going to do fine,” Cassian said. And he was trying, speaking with a gentleness and compassion Jyn had barely seen echoes of, but it wasn’t the answer she needed.

She would fight to find the plans. She would trust Cassian and Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi and Melshi and all the others to push her down the course she needed to go. But if the mission began to go wrong, what then? If she lost them in the chaos…

She’d fought all her life. But even in Saw’s cadre, she’d fought—more than anything, more than for vengeance or ferocity—for her own survival.

If she fell back on old instincts, what then? She could risk herself for a person. Wrestle an innocent girl out of the crossfire. But if she found herself alone, she didn’t know if she could risk herself for the cause.

“We’re slowing down,” Cassian said.

Just focus, Jyn.

The railcar’s hum changed in pitch and the dancing shadows relaxed their frenzy. “We need a map,” Cassian went on. “This place is too big and we’re too vulnerable to wander around looking for the vault.”

K-2 swiveled his head but didn’t look toward Cassian. “I’m sure there’s one just lying about.”

“You know what you have to do,” Cassian answered.

Jyn frowned. Before she could ask what Cassian meant, the railcar doors were sliding open. They emerged into the Scarif Citadel, where the light that had permeated the outdoors was gone—replaced by rows of illumination strips embedded in dark metal walls. Corridors branched off from the rail station and officers, guards, and the occasional stormtrooper moved at an unhurried pace down the line.

Cassian was right. Without a map, they were helpless. Jyn tugged at her uniform, which felt more ill fitting than ever.

A security droid identical to K-2SO strolled past. Cassian nodded toward K-2 and they started a leisurely pursuit. Jyn forced herself not to reach for her weapon, reminded herself to stay calm. If they’d been detected, an alarm would have gone out. If the others had been detected, the whole complex would have been in a frenzy.

They tracked the droid down a long corridor. When it ducked into a terminal alcove lined with machinery, Cassian stationed himself against the wall to one side. Jyn took the other side and watched K-2 follow his twin.

With a single motion, K-2 reached out with a fist, ejected a retractable data spike from his wrist joint, and plunged it into the back of his twin’s metal head. The second droid let out a garbled, electronic wail that lasted no more than half a second; then he dropped to his knees as K-2 stood over him, maintaining the connection.

“Do it fast,” Cassian urged. He stepped in front of the alcove, still watching down the corridor, as if his body could block a view of the two towering droids. Jyn joined him, glancing between her end of the corridor and K-2.

The droid’s head was swinging on his neck, back and forth like a weather vane. “Is he all right?” Jyn asked.

“KX-series droids are hardened against intrusion,” Cassian said brusquely. “Getting past their programming is a challenge.”

After nearly a minute, he asked, “Kay?”

K-2SO lifted his head and extracted his data spike from his twin.

“Our optimal route to the data vault places only eighty-nine stormtroopers in our path,” he said. “We will make it one-third of the way before we are killed.”

The second droid limply tumbled to the floor.

“All right,” Jyn said. “Let’s hope everyone’s in position.”

Baze Malbus neither knew nor trusted the rebel soldiers around him. He did not respect their loyalties. He could not rely upon their skills. He would fight alongside them because Jyn Erso had accepted them into her own revolution—not the revolution of the Alliance, but one that had risen from the ashes of the Holy City to bring retribution where resurrection was impossible.

He trusted Jyn’s fury and her fire. Most of all—though he was loath to admit it—he trusted Jyn because of Chirrut Îmwe. Those whom Chirrut trusted, Baze could find a reason to trust as well.

Life was more convenient that way. Even Baze found eternal wariness exhausting.

“Go!” Bodhi cried from the cockpit of the cargo shuttle. “Now! You’re clear!”

Together the soldiers poured onto the landing pad. Baze kept his cannon up and walked in Chirrut’s shadow, letting the blind man choose their pace and sweep the ground with his staff. They followed the rebels off the platform and between the broad-leafed trees of the jungle, away from the eyes of stormtrooper patrols and starfighters.

Five soldiers had remained aboard the shuttle to protect the extraction point and Bodhi Rook. In another life, Baze might have prayed for the pilot; in this life, Baze knew that Bodhi would live or die according to skill and chance. More likely the latter than the former.

One of the rebels, a clean-shaven spotter, fell back to Baze’s side. “Can he keep up?” he asked softly, nodding toward Chirrut.

Baze snorted and didn’t bother turning toward the spotter. “Hide your trail better. Then he can keep up.” He flicked a finger at the white sand and Chirrut’s feet. Where Chirrut tapped at the ground with his staff, he flung the sand aside and half-covered the soldiers’ tracks. Where the skirts of his robes trailed, they occluded what markings remained.

“He can hear you,” Chirrut snapped.

The spotter nodded briskly. Chagrined, he offered Chirrut a crisp “Sorry, sir,” and shuffled toward the fore. Baze noted that this time, the rebel took care to obscure his footprints.

“At least he didn’t ask if you were a Jedi,” Baze muttered, but Chirrut had begun chanting. May the Force of others be with you.

They wound their way deeper into the jungle, the vivid green canopy never thick enough to obscure the sun. As sand began to give way to richer soil, Baze knelt and, mid-stride, swept up a few pale grains between thumb and forefinger. He raised the pinch of sand to his nose; it smelled of sea salt and loam. He touched the grains to his tongue and spat them out.

Even the dirt tastes different, he thought. Dirt was all that was left of Jedha, but he did not think he would ever return there. Scarif—with its trees the gaudy emerald of cantina lights, with its tepid oceans and sand like crushed bones—was as much his home now as anywhere.

The city is gone, old man. NiJedha is gone.

He reached an arm behind him, clasped the exhaust vent on his portable generator. In the warmth of Scarif, he would need to mind how he strained his cannon. It wouldn’t do to quit shooting at the wrong moment.

The soldiers drew to a halt near a low hillock. Sergeant Melshi, who commanded the team, peered over the crest with a set of quadnocs. Baze squinted through the sun and saw a squat Imperial structure and two squads of stormtroopers across the way. “Barracks,” he murmured, and Chirrut nodded in acknowledgment.

Melshi scrambled to the base of the hillock and signaled one of his subordinates. The second man walked among the rebels, briskly but deliberately handing out magnetized detonators. “This is as far as we get,” Melshi said. “Fan out. One detonator per landing pad. You see a better target, take it, but there’s no resupplying so pick your spots.”

The rebel carrying the detonators held out one each to Baze and Chirrut. Baze shook his head, and the boy moved on. Melshi was still talking. “We want to draw them out, so keep moving once we start and don’t let them pull back to the bunkers. I’ll call the timing.” He scanned the group and nodded sharply. “Go!”

The rebels scattered in ones, twos, and threes. Melshi looked to Baze and Chirrut. “You too good for demolitions duty?” His tone was good-humored but puzzled.

“Someone must keep your soldiers alive,” Baze said. He smiled, showing teeth.

Melshi appeared unamused. “Well?” Baze asked, flapping a hand at Chirrut.

Chirrut’s lips were moving. When he finished his chant (The Force is with me, and I am with the Force…), the Guardian strode after one pack of rebels. “We won’t be long,” Chirrut said, and looked back to cast a blind glance at Melshi.

As Chirrut followed the rebel soldiers, Baze followed Chirrut. Together, they hunted.

Among the stormtroopers who roamed the dirt paths and landing pads and bunkers were many dressed in specialized armor the color of rotting teeth. The uniform was evidently lightweight and flexible, appropriate to heat and to wading along the beaches. Vulnerable, Baze thought, to hard, swift strikes that broke legs and necks.

Chirrut downed the first two stormtroopers of the day, sweeping them off their feet before they could complete their patrol around a landing pad and catch a glimpse of the rebel spotter planting his detonator. Baze claimed another trooper soon after, bursting out of the vegetation to wrap his hands around a neck encased in a black bodysuit; he dug his fingers beneath the rim of the struggling stormtrooper’s helmet as he dragged the man back between the trees and denied him air until the helmet tumbled off and Baze could slam his face against a rock. The stormtrooper did not move again.

They hunted in sync, Chirrut always prowling near the rebels and Baze always prowling near Chirrut. Baze did not limit his targets to those who might spot the blind man, but he kept Chirrut under observation nonetheless; where the Force would fail Chirrut, Baze would not.

His hands and arms quickly grew sore. Baze was strong, but he was aging, and he didn’t have the luxury of using his cannon. He mopped his brow with a sleeve and took a swallow from his canteen as the rebels regrouped near Melshi, now closer to the barracks than ever. Chirrut crouched between trees a dozen meters away.

The soldiers looked anxious. They looked resolved. They watched the barracks and their surroundings, their rifles ready as they lay prone in the sand or pressed tight against trees for camouflage.

Maybe, Baze thought, he could trust them after all.

He heard Melshi’s voice over his comlink. “Ready, ready. Standing by.”

He listened to the hiss of sea foam spilling over sand and the faraway howl of shuttles.

Eventually, Cassian’s response came over the comm:

“Light it up.”

“Director Krennic, we are entering the Scarif shield gate. General Ramda has been informed of your arrival.”

Orson Krennic grunted in acknowledgment and touched a forefinger to his throat, worrying at the soreness and the bruising. Darth Vader’s assault would take a day or more to heal; in the meantime, a lingering ache brought Krennic a reminder of the precariousness of his position.

He stood at a metaphorical cliff’s edge, stamping his foot in an effort to cause an avalanche. With Galen Erso’s treachery undone, he would gain the allegiance of Vader. With Vader’s backing, he would expose the incompetence of Tarkin—the revelation of rebel survivors from Jedha. With Tarkin humiliated, Krennic’s command of the Death Star would be uncontested, and he would confer with the Emperor himself as to how it might best be used.

Krennic would be, in every way that mattered, the most powerful and decorated man in the Empire.

Or he would fall from the cliff and bash his skull open on the rocks. And his Death Star would fall into the fumbling hands of Wilhuff Tarkin.

Tarkin, Erso, Vader—how had so many men conspired against him for so long?

“Beginning final descent now,” the pilot’s voice called.

Sulk like a child another day. Solve your Erso problem first.

He disembarked with his escort of death troopers, waved a brusque acknowledgment at the lieutenant who’d come to guide him off the Citadel’s executive landing pad, and ignored the seductive caress of the warm Scarif air. Galen had possessed nearly unrestricted access to the Citadel; under the supervision of Imperial minders, yes, but Scarif’s overseers lacked rigor, earning their assignments on the tropical world largely through cronyism. They trusted to the stormtrooper garrison, the planetary shield, and the Star Destroyers in orbit; they relied too much on the Citadel’s automated security measures. The damage Galen could have done was considerable.

Krennic overtook his guide as he disembarked the turbolift and made for the Citadel command center. General Ramda and his people were waiting at attention as Krennic descended into the control pit. “Director,” Ramda declared. “What brings you to Scarif?”

Krennic bristled at the voice, at the tone of a man who’d prepared a facility tour and an official dinner instead of foreseeing the crisis at hand. Ramda was another officer whose incompetence exceeded his vision.

“Galen Erso,” Krennic snapped. “I want every dispatch, every transmission he’s ever sent called up for inspection.”

“I’ll put three men on it immediately.” Ramda hid his confusion poorly as Krennic brushed past him, heading for a console. “What are they looking for?”

Krennic stopped, pivoted, and stared at the general with curdled disgust. “I’m inspecting them myself. That’s why I’m here.”

“Every one?”

“Yes. All of them. Get started.”

Maybe, Krennic thought, he’d managed to overestimate Ramda’s competence. Maybe he’d accepted too much responsibility himself for Galen’s treachery. Not that shifting the blame—no matter the justification—would mollify Vader.

He had a plan for the task ahead. He would start by checking any outsized transmissions. In all likelihood, Galen hadn’t dared to broadcast complete files from the data vault—even Scarif’s lax security should have detected that—but it was best to be sure. After that, Krennic could look for the names of anyone inside the Empire Galen might have drawn into a conspiracy; the Galen Krennic knew lacked the charisma to win allies and the guts to attempt blackmail, but the Galen Krennic knew wouldn’t have abandoned his life’s work in the first place.

He took a seat at a duty station by the windows as officers shuffled nervously behind him. Once he was through with the obvious possibilities, he’d need to start culling through messages by hand. He’d need to look for code words, for anything off kilter.

Galen knew too much, had seen too much. If he’d sent the rebels intelligence on Imperial defenses, on hyperspace routes, it could leave more than one planet vulnerable to a well-coordinated attack. If he’d authorized shipments of equipment or weaponry, he might have supplied his allies somehow. But if he’d sent information about the Death Star just a little at a time, “forgetting” to properly encrypt the data so that the Rebellion could eavesdrop—

—then what? What could the Rebel Alliance do? There was no defense against the battle station.

You’ll never win.

The brief bass rumble that interrupted Krennic’s thoughts seemed to him an irritation: another failure on the part of Ramda and his men to provide him with what he needed. But then another rumble followed, and others swiftly in sequence. Krennic snapped to a stand, stared out onto the Scarif landscape as smoke and fire rippled up from a dozen points out of the green.

The officers were yammering behind him. He heard no words, but recognized a shared tone of surprise and confusion. Were they truly so oblivious?

“Are we blind?” he shouted, spinning to face the command center and ignoring the roughness in his throat. “The rebels are here!”

He had the attention of the room. Attention was not what he required.

“Deploy the garrison!” he screamed. “Move!”

And they did move, at last, Ramda barking orders and his subordinates pulling up aerial maps and holograms. Ramda was ignorant, of course, of the enemy’s true objective, but Krennic knew this was Galen’s work. One more consequence of his sabotage, of his secret messages. Krennic cursed the man before seeking to put the news into context.

Rebels (almost certainly rebels) were attempting to reach the data vault. They were attempting to steal the schematics for the battle station.

Why? To build their own?

To search for a weakness.

There was no weakness.

Even the possibility was unacceptable.

And another thought crawled through the back of Krennic’s brain—a thought that should not have frightened him, one that meant nothing at this juncture, had no implications for the reality on the ground, but which made his clenched fist tremble nonetheless.

The survivors of Jedha had struck on Eadu—and he had seen one of them, there on the platform as the bombs fell, though he could not remember his enemy’s face. From Eadu, they had followed him to Scarif.

He vowed not to let them escape a third time.