Cassian held the quadnocs out to Bodhi without taking his own eyes off the platform. “Take a look,” he said. “You see Erso out there?”
Bodhi raised the quadnocs, shook his head incrementally, and then stilled. “That’s him,” he said after a moment. “That’s him, Galen, in the dark suit—”
His voice hitched in excitement. Cassian snatched the quadnocs and scanned the platform again. Among the engineers was a man in gray and blue, with a sharp, angular face and a scalp covered in wisps of frosted hair. Cassian sought a resemblance to Jyn and found it in the man’s eyes, deep-set and staring.
Galen was speaking to the other engineers. The rain made them all look sodden and haggard, displeased at being brought outside so late.
Cassian frowned. Why were they there? Had he and Bodhi tripped some alarm? Were they waiting for evacuation?
He almost didn’t notice the rumbling in the distance, wrote it off as part of the storm. But the sound was too even in pitch and grew louder too fast. He wrapped an arm around Bodhi and pulled the pilot flat onto the ground as a broad-winged Imperial shuttle swooped overhead and made for the platform.
“Do they ever bring the engineers out for deliveries?” Cassian hissed.
Bodhi coughed as rainwater caught in his nostrils, then shook his head vigorously. “Not like this. Not this time of night.”
Then something’s off. Maybe it wasn’t related to the arrival of the U-wing. Maybe it was connected to Jedha—the Empire cleaning up its production facilities now that the Death Star was operational. The shuttle was a Delta-class long-range model, used for passengers more than cargo. Whatever was happening, now might be the only opportunity to act.
Cassian put the quadnocs to one side and unslung his rifle. He checked its settings, balanced it on the rocks, and shifted his position as he spoke to Bodhi. “You need to get back down there,” he said, “and find us a ride out of here. You understand?”
“What are you doing?”
Cassian put an eye to the rifle’s scope, saw nothing but a blur atop the platform. He adjusted his magnification and filters, let the internal computer compensate for the sheets of rain.
“You heard me,” he said. He made his voice hard, tried to erase any warmth that had sparked between him and the pilot. He couldn’t afford an argument now.
“You said we came up here just to have a look,” Bodhi snapped back.
Lie to him. Tell him you need to keep Galen alive and on Eadu, and you don’t know what that shuttle could mean.
“I’m here,” Cassian said. “I’m looking. Go.”
The platform crystallized. More Imperials were emerging from the buildings. He adjusted his aim and began seeking the face of Galen Erso. He heard Bodhi’s soft, rapid breathing at his side. “Hurry!” Cassian snarled.
Bodhi’s boots tossed flecks of stone onto Cassian’s jacket as he ran.
—
During the flight to Eadu, Krennic had stoked the fury in his heart. Fueled by outrage and humiliation, its fire burned bright enough to warm him in the chill that swept through the shuttle; to ward off the ice of the raindrops that assailed him as he descended the boarding ramp onto the landing platform.
The boots of his death squad squealed against wet metal as he drew to a stop and surveyed the assortment of stormtroopers, officers, and engineers before him. The troopers had corralled the engineers—miserable as wet hounds, standing in a loose, indecorous cluster—at one end, while the facility’s senior officers were aligned about the shuttle, doing their best to ignore their indignity in the presence of their director. The garrison commander stepped forward to offer a welcome, but Krennic waved her off. He had no interest in delaying what he had come to do.
The engineers looked nervously at one another. Krennic noted each in turn, recalled his name, studied his posture. Most he did not know overly well. He had hand-selected Uyohn out of the Brentaal Futures Program—the same program Krennic and Galen had completed together—and been mildly disappointed in the results ever since. Uyohn stood straight-backed, expression vacillating between fear and deluded, desperate hope. Onopin, conversely, looked ready to curse loudly about bureaucratic interference and bury his obvious worry beneath a thin layer of professional pride. Krennic liked Onopin, but he hoped he would remain silent this once.
None of them showed any hint of defiance.
Krennic looked to Galen Erso. The man stepped forward, blinking the raindrops out of his eyes. He held himself as if Krennic’s presence neither surprised nor concerned him.
“Well, Galen,” Krennic said. “At last it’s complete. You must be very proud.”
“Proud as I can be, Krennic.”
It was false humility, of course. Krennic was certain of that. “Gather your engineers,” he said. “I have an announcement to make.”
Galen barely gestured. The engineers drifted, herdlike, from one side of the platform to the other until they stood before Krennic and Galen together. They huddled as if to share heat in the spitting storm and ward off their collective dread. “Is that all of them?” Krennic asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Yes,” Galen said.
Krennic smiled acidly and said the words he had selected with care aboard the shuttle: “Gentlemen. One of you has betrayed the Empire. One of you conspired with a pilot to send messages to the Rebellion. I urge that traitor to step forward.”
On cue, Krennic’s death squad took position and leveled its weapons at the engineers.
—
There were too many people on the landing pad. Cassian kept his rifle propped against the stone, ignored the trickle of rain like sweat down his spine, and tried to draw a bead on Galen. But there were stormtroopers in the way now, and his shot became no clearer once the shuttle landed and the crowd reconfigured itself. He swore to himself and waited.
He dredged his memory to try and identify the officer in the white cape and found the name Orson Krennic—some sort of project director apparently attached to the planet killer. If by some miracle Cassian got off a second shot, he decided Krennic would make an excellent target. The Empire could only be improved by the loss of another high-ranking blowhard.
But that would be a bonus. He had his mission. He just needed a few inconvenient stormtroopers and engineers to get out of the way.
At least Bodhi was gone. No one to witness what happened next.
Krennic and Galen were speaking. Still too many people in the line of fire.
Cassian would need a story for Jyn. He knew that. She wouldn’t believe him no matter what he told her, but if he offered her something plausible and Bodhi backed the portions of his tale that were true, she might not act rashly. She’d suspect Cassian in the back of her mind, and he’d need to watch himself so long as they were together; but the uncertainty might suffice to drag her down. Without her father and without a target, her obsession and need would drain out of her like pus.
If they made it off Eadu, if she survived to return to Yavin, he would be done with her then. Even with her fire gone cold, she’d be better off than she was in prison.
Galen was gesturing. The crowd was reconfiguring again, the other engineers stepping forward. Still no shot.
Destroying Jyn—that’s what it would be, you can admit that much—was his best option. If she did realize what he’d done, she’d turn that feral need against him. She’d want him dead, probably sway the Guardians of the Whills and Bodhi against him as well.
The engineers were arrayed in front of Krennic and Galen. Krennic’s retinue of black-clad troopers fanned out. A few more steps…
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a terrible way to go. He’d assassinated better men than Galen—an Imperial collaborator, the man who’d built a planet killer, remorse be damned. And if Jyn came after Cassian, he’d die for his crimes. There were worse deaths.
Was that what it had come
to?
Galen stepped forward. Cassian had the shot.
But he was breathing too hard now. The rifle rose and fell. He clamped a hand on the barrel, lodged it firmly against the rocks.
He was tired of crimes he never answered for.
The Death Star is your answer. Finish this mission, and all is forgiven.
He looked at Galen Erso through his scope and saw his daughter’s eyes.
With a hoarse and ragged cry, he swept the rifle away from the rocks and set it in the mud at his side.
—
None of the engineers answered Krennic’s accusation. He hadn’t really expected them to.
“No one?” he asked. “The traitor will still be executed, but at least he can die making a stand. Maybe he’ll convert someone here”—he swept a gloved hand around the platform—“with his dying words.”
Onopin was opening and closing his mouth, as if caught between begging for the traitor to step forth and attempting a show of silent indignation. Two of the other engineers were looking at their fellows intently, as if frantically conducting their own investigations.
Galen, standing beside Krennic, took a single step forward and did nothing else.
“Very well,” Krennic said. “I’ll consider it a group effort, then.”
The words were cruel and sweet. Krennic felt no shame in deriving satisfaction from justice ruthlessly applied. “Ready,” he said, and his troops checked the settings on their rifles with a metallic click.
“Aim,” he said, and the death squad took aim.
“And—”
Galen took action at last.
He dashed between Krennic and the engineers, spun about and nearly slipped on the wet platform. “Stop,” he cried, again and again, spreading his arms as if he could block the troopers’ shots. “Krennic, stop. It was me. It was me. They have nothing to do with it.”
Krennic looked into the face of the man he’d befriended long ago. He waited.
“Spare them,” Galen said. Drenched and tired and wild-eyed, he looked like a man whose genius had deserted him.
Krennic crooked a finger at Galen. As if reluctant, the begging man stepped back toward Krennic.
“Fire,” Krennic spat.
He didn’t watch the crimson bolts flare from his troopers’ rifles, didn’t bother glancing at the bodies of engineers tumbling to the ground and sizzling in the rain. His eyes were on Galen, and he saw the explosion of shock and fury in the scientist’s face—saw him try to hide it the next instant behind a mask of iron.
But they were long past hiding things, and Galen should have known better. Krennic swung his fist in a tight arc and felt the back of his hand strike Galen’s cheek and chin. Galen staggered and dropped to his knees.
“I fired your weapon,” Krennic said. “Jedha. Saw Gerrera. His band of fanatics. The Holy City. The last reminder of the Jedi.” He paused. “An entire planet will be next.”
Galen stared up and neither trembled nor shouted.
“You’ll never win,” he said softly.
Such a perfect delusion. It was almost beautiful.
“Now where,” Krennic asked, “have I heard that before?”
—
Somewhere in the mud and the rain and the dark, Jyn had lost track of Cassian and Bodhi. That wasn’t important; she’d found her way down the canyon by the lights of the research facility and on to the base of a landing pad. It was where she needed to be, where her mission to find her father had guided her. It was the answer to the recording that played in the blackness of her mind, and the words of Galen Erso became clearer and louder with every step.
She’d needed time to find a way up—there was no unguarded path to reach the platform or the abutting structures from the bottom of the canyon—but she’d located a service ladder built against the canyon wall and begun to climb. The rungs were half slick with water sprayed against them by the breeze, and where she couldn’t get a strong grip, she hooked her arm over the metal and pulled, straining her shoulders and kicking until she found purchase. She did this again and again, driving thought and hope and despair blessedly from her mind, until she was only the body of Jyn, who would climb to the top or who would fall. She did not return to herself until the platform was within reach and she heard soft voices muffled by the patter of rain.
She didn’t hesitate to pull herself up and over. It wasn’t a safe choice, but her gloved hands had gone numb and she’d begun slipping a bit more with each rung. She preferred to die moving than to die out of caution.
The platform’s cold metal felt comforting against her prone body. She had no time to rest, however. A pair of white boots stepped in front of her and the barrel of a rifle lowered at her head. She reached up to twist the blaster away, lunged to wrest it from the stormtrooper’s grasp. In a single motion she was up and spinning, sweeping the trooper off the platform’s edge and sending him into the abyss. His head struck the rock wall instantly. He never screamed.
Jyn nestled the rifle under her arm and looked around. She could still hear voices, but she’d been lucky; she’d ascended behind a row of cargo crates, and her skirmishing had gone unnoticed. She crept forward, head low, and peered around a crate at the gathering on the platform.
What she saw was this:
Stormtroopers in white, spread across the platform and observing the proceedings with their weapons at their sides.
Imperial officers of various ranks, standing unhappily in the rain.
Half a dozen corpses, freshly killed with wounds still smoking.
Stormtroopers in black, like the ones who had executed her mother on Lah’mu.
The man in white who had ordered her mother’s execution.
And her father, on his knees before the man in white and looking up with pity in his eyes.
It was a scene out of her memory playacted on a new stage—an impossible, nightmare re-creation for the benefit of the little girl who had run to the cave.
But that girl was buried in the wet dirt below the hatch in Jyn’s mind. Her wails of anguish and terror were muted.
With shaking hands, Jyn raised her rifle and aimed for the man in white.
—
Cassian sat among the rocks on the ridge and watched.
He had chosen to watch. By setting aside his rifle, he had forfeited his mission, betrayed his oaths—spoken and implicit—to Draven and Alliance Intelligence. Under other circumstances, such a betrayal might have felt freeing. As it was, he could do nothing while the man he’d spared was readied for execution.
He’d been powerless to stop the slaughter of the engineers. If he’d fired into the crowd, he might have picked off a stormtrooper but done no lasting good. Not that intervention was necessarily in his interests—the lives of Imperial researchers weren’t lives that roused emotion in his chest.
But it seemed obscene for fate or the Force or ancient Eadu gods to slay Galen Erso so soon after Cassian had made his choice. He watched the scene on the platform through his quadnocs, scanned the vicinity for anything that might disrupt what seemed likely to happen next.
What he found, to his shock, was Jyn—hoisting herself over the edge of the platform and throwing a stormtrooper to his doom.
What was she doing there?
He guessed the answer the moment he posed the question.
He didn’t have time to consider how he could act on the information before his comlink hissed with static and K-2’s urgent voice came through. “Cassian, can you hear me?”
He snatched up the comlink in one hand, brought it to his mouth. “I’m here.” He tried to keep watch on Jyn as she crept along the cargo crates stacked at the side of the platform. “You got the comms working.”
“Affirmative, but we have a problem! There’s an Alliance squadron approaching.” Cassian struggled to hear the words through the distortion
and the rain. “Clear the area!”
His brain filtered the meaning from the noise a second later. “No,” he spat. “No, no, no—tell them to hold up! Jyn’s on that platform!”
If Draven had sent a fighter squadron, he’d done so in order to complete the mission—to eliminate Galen Erso by leveling the research facility and picking off any soft targets on the ground.
The pilots wouldn’t know about Cassian and the others. Draven likely wouldn’t have bothered informing them; wouldn’t have sent them out if he’d thought Cassian was still alive.
Cassian looked at the platform, at the shadowy figure of Jyn, and thought to himself: I’ve killed us all.
—
Draven’s countdown was nearing zero. There were rumors spreading around Base One that something had happened on Jedha, and if rumors were spreading on Yavin, they’d certainly crept to more civilized regions of the galaxy. He had to brief the Alliance High Command council on the planet killer and the mission to Eadu.
More precisely, he had to brief Mon Mothma. He didn’t have time for the council as a whole, and Mothma—much as Draven vigorously disagreed with her strategies—could be brutally straightforward when backed into a corner. The ex-senator and current Alliance chief of state wasn’t above playing dirty politics, and Draven had occasionally caught her playing dirtier than she liked to admit; but in the matter of the planet killer, he trusted her to put pragmatism above brinksmanship.
He was halfway to Mothma’s office on the upper levels of the ziggurat when he was summoned back to the comm center. He hustled down two flights of stairs; his uniform was clinging to the sweat on his back when he arrived.
“General!” Private Weems saluted and gestured him to a terminal. “Faint signal from Eadu. It’s Captain Andor’s U-wing—full voice, no encryption.”
“What?” They must have lost the whole comm array, jury-rigged something in its place. He took a seat and hunched over the console. “Put it through.”
A faint, tinny voice spoke. The tone was almost relaxed. “Captain Andor requesting a delay on squadron support.” Andor’s pet droid. Draven leaned closer to the console speaker, clenched his jaw as he heard the remainder of the message: “Alliance forces onsite. Please confirm.”
Rogue One Page 16
