Star Wars: Guardians of the Whills (Star Wars: Rogue One)

by Greg Rucka

  Wernad started to turn away, lifting his voice to carry to the others. “They’re killing us, they’re—”

  “How long were you in the mines?” Chirrut asked.

  That stopped him. Baze, past Chirrut’s shoulder, grunted again.

  “They brought you to work in the mines,” Chirrut said. “But not alone.”

  He heard Wernad turn back to face him, the sound of his boots on the ground.

  “Was it your family?” Chirrut asked.

  There was a long pause. It seemed very quiet, suddenly, though Chirrut understood it was an illusion brought about by the stillness around them. Everyone, the pilgrims, Angber Trel, Silvanie Phest, even Baze, was focused on Chirrut and Wernad.

  When Wernad answered, it was almost in a whisper. “My clutchmates,” he said. “They are…they are one with the Force, now.”

  “Then they are at peace.”

  Wernad inhaled, a ragged noise, and Chirrut understood, could almost feel, if not imagine, the intensity of the man’s grief.

  “I have to…the Imperials, they have to…”

  “Pay,” Chirrut said.

  “Yes.” It was a hiss.

  “Not with the innocent,” Chirrut said.

  “If they follow me, if they believe I am a Jedi, if there are enough of us—”

  “Not with the innocent,” Chirrut repeated.

  “I have to do something!”

  Chirrut nodded, then lowered himself to the ground, felt its chill climbing through his robes and into his body. He set his staff across his lap, motioned for Wernad to follow suit. There was another hesitation, then the sound of movement. First Silvanie, then Trel, and then the handful of pilgrims gathered, all of them sitting in the Old Shadows. Chirrut turned his head to where Baze stood, and after another breath—and with a sound that Chirrut could only describe as surly—the big man lowered himself to the ground, as well. Then Wernad was the only one of them still standing.

  “Sit,” Chirrut said.

  “I have to do something,” Wernad repeated.

  “We are doing something,” Chirrut said. “We are keeping faith.”

  I perceive, in all things, this truth:

  That we are forever bound to the Force,

  And that the Force forever binds us together.

  What we do to one, we therefore do to all.

  And thus it is upon us to grant to all

  What we would wish for ourselves.

  —Karyn I’Yin, Sisters of Sarrav

  From Collected Poems, Prayers, and Meditations on the Force,

  Edited by Kozem Pel, Disciple of the Whills

  IT WAS AFTER SUNDOWN when they returned to the room they shared off the Old Market, and Baze hit the release on his chest plate and caught the body armor as it fell away from him, tossed it with a flick of his wrist into one corner as he made his way to the sink at the counter. He unhooked the bandolier he used as a belt and sent that after the body armor, shook the shock-stick up his left sleeve free and into his palm, set it down on the surface in easy reach, propped the battered E-5 carbine he carried against the wall. Then he ran the tap, impatiently waiting the requisite thirty seconds before the water turned from rust red to charcoal and then, finally, to something approximating clear. He washed his face, blew dust out of his nose. He wiped his face, then his hands, on his tunic.

  Chirrut had taken his accustomed place on the floor near their bedrolls, his legs crossed, hands resting upturned on his knees. His eyes were closed. He had the same small, self-satisfied smile he’d worn since leaving the gathering at the Temple of the Kyber.

  “Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Baze said.

  Chirrut didn’t answer.

  Baze glared at him, then turned and began yanking open the few cabinets over the counter, searching for something they could have for dinner. On an ordinary day—insofar as there were ordinary days—they would have picked something up just as the Old Market was closing, either a donation from one of the vendors or, just as frequently, purchased leftovers. But while they’d been occupied at the Old Shadows, one of the scattered groups of insurgents had set off an explosive near Gesh’s, and while the tapcafe hadn’t sustained any damage, the off-duty stormtroopers within had taken it personally. In response, raids had been launched in the Old and New Markets, and the ensuing violence had left stalls wrecked and people scattered. From what Baze had heard on their way back, perhaps as many as a half dozen people had been killed or injured.

  It did not help his mood.

  “Tea in the middle left drawer,” Chirrut said.

  Baze shot him another glare, but Chirrut hadn’t moved and his expression hadn’t changed. Baze hit the release on the indicated drawer harder than he needed to, and the drawer popped open as if afraid of him. This gave him a small moment of satisfaction, which left him just as quickly when he realized the tea in question was Tarine. He put the kettle on, anyway.

  “Nothing to eat,” Baze said.

  “There are those more unfortunate than we.”

  “That does not make me feel any better.”

  “Perhaps it should.”

  Baze started a retort, then stopped. Chirrut was, of course, right, as he so often was about so many things. But that didn’t make Baze feel any less angry in the moment, or any less frustrated, and so he set about finding their teacups and slammed each of them down on the counter loud enough to annoy Chirrut but not so hard as to shatter either cup. He stared at the kettle, as if by doing so he could compel the water to reach its boil faster, and when it finally did he filled each cup, put one in Chirrut’s waiting hand, then sank down beside Chirrut and sipped at his own. Some people loved Tarine tea. Baze Malbus was not one of them, and he thought it tasted foul. Its sole benefit, as far as he could determine, was that it was hot and washed the taste of dust and exhaust from his mouth.

  “You should sleep,” Chirrut said. “We have a couple of hours before we have to go.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  Chirrut, who still had not really moved from his meditative pose, brought his cup to his mouth and sipped. His eyes remained closed.

  “He was not wrong,” Baze said.

  “You speak of Wernad, the one in the Old Shadows.”

  “Yes. He was not wrong.”

  “Perhaps he was the wrong man to do it.”

  “Is that your place? To say who will fight and who will not?”

  “No more than it is yours to watch over me.”

  Baze finished his tea, made a face at his empty cup, set it aside.

  “They have destroyed our home,” Baze said. “They have destroyed the homes of so many others. I understand his rage.”

  “I know,” Chirrut said, and Baze thought that was the end of it, but then Chirrut added, “So do I.”

  Stormtroopers were garrisoned primarily aboard the Star Destroyer currently in high orbit above Jedha. The massive ship had declared the Empire’s arrival, remained above ever since. At night, when the Holy City went dark, Baze could look up and find it in the sky, distant and glowing and constant—an unmoving satellite, like an omniscient, distant eye keeping watch.

  The stormtroopers on deployment were shuttled down to the surface either on troop transports or with returning cargo ships after they’d delivered their payloads. The Holy City itself had only a single spaceport, but the facility was overcrowded and out-of-date, built long ago to sustain the pilgrim and tourist traffic to the planet. The very geography of the Holy City made expansion or additional upgrades to the port impossible—the city, built on a mesa rising out of the desert, simply had no room to expand.

  The Empire, of course, had assumed control of the spaceport upon arrival. Finding it inadequate to their needs, the Imperials promptly set about clearing an additional four separate locations within the city to use as landing zones and staging areas for their operations. To do this they simply leveled the buildings that stood in their way, with no regard to those residents or businesses they displaced.
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  Of these landing zones, the largest had been designated LZ-Aurek, and it saw the majority of Imperial military traffic to and from the Star Destroyer parked in orbit. The three other sites were smaller, far more makeshift, and used exclusively to resupply the stormtroopers on the ground, and to load and unload the cargo vessels for their kyber runs.

  The Imperial machine never stopped working, and that meant the mines never closed. Even now, well past midnight, Baze watched as the floodlights of one of the smaller landing zones—LZ-Cresh—painted the hull of yet another Zeta -class cargo hauler coming in to land. The subsonic rumble of its repulsors kicking over as it came off its main thrusters made dust jump from where it coated the nearby buildings, caught like tiny, briefly lived stars in the reflected glow of the lights.

  “That’s the one,” Chirrut said.

  “We’ll wait until it’s unloaded to be sure.” Baze went to one of the pouches on his makeshift belt, pulled out his set of macrobinoculars.

  “That’s the one.”

  “And if it isn’t, we’ll end up surprising a platoon of stormtroopers.”

  Baze raised the binocs and adjusted their focus, zeroing in. From their angle—well, more precisely from his angle, as Chirrut had no concern for such things as line of sight—atop one of the nearby buildings, Baze could see past the barricades and into the landing zone. A combat assault tank had pulled in only a couple of moments earlier, stormtroopers taking up position to protect its load of kyber crystals. Baze counted another dozen of the troopers patrolling the perimeter, and an Imperial in an olive-colored uniform whom he took to be the supply master directing operations.

  The Zeta completed its landing cycle, sinking down on its landing gear as if the ship were capable of expressing fatigue. Baze moved his gaze to the rear of the hauler, watched the blast of compressed air and steam rise from the rear vents as pressure equalized between the inside and out of the ship. The rear door opened, dropping to the ground with a clang he could hear even from their distance, and which he was certain Chirrut not only heard but felt, as well.

  “Well?” Chirrut asked.

  “For a man who preaches patience, you could stand to learn some more,” Baze said.

  “I already told you, that’s the ship. You’re the one who doesn’t believe me.”

  “Chirrut,” Baze said.

  “Baze?”

  “Stop talking now.”

  “That,” Chirrut said, “is the ship.”

  There was motion, now, around the Zeta. Stormtroopers and uniformed personnel bustling around, using handheld gravhooks to unload crates emblazoned with the Imperial symbol on their sides. Baze saw a uniformed crew member, presumably the pilot, speaking to the deck officer. One of the towering Imperial security droids lumbered out of the back of the ship, and the three appeared to have a brief conversation. More of the uniformed personnel were at the tank, now, unloading the kyber-laden cylinders.

  Baze saw no additional security, no additional stormtroopers.

  “That’s the ship,” he told Chirrut.

  “I know.”

  Baze stowed his macrobinoculars and took hold of the E-5. “You are being particularly annoying tonight.”

  “And there is still so much night left.”

  Baze grunted. “Can you get down from here alone or should I throw you?”

  Chirrut rose, passing his walking stick from one hand to the other.

  “I think I can manage,” he said.

  The reason the Imperials garrisoned their troops aboard the Star Destroyer was for security, nothing more. A garrison on the ground gave any insurgency a possible target; a garrison floating in orbit was untouchable, a sign that opposition to the Empire was futile, and doomed to ultimate failure.

  But this created its own set of problems. Troops on deployment needed to be supplied. They needed water, and water was in short supply on Jedha. They needed food, and local food could be poisoned, could be tainted, or could simply be inedible. They needed medical supplies to tend their wounded, be those wounds courtesy of the fledgling and scattered—and, many said, highly ineffective—insurgency or any of a myriad of other hazards. They needed ammunition, because a stormtrooper whose blaster ran dry was as useful as another kilogram of sand in the Jedha desert.

  This meant that the Empire needed supply caches throughout the Holy City, secured locations that could serve as depots to reequip and rearm troopers on patrol. Thus, the Empire had exchanged one obvious target—a garrison—for multiple smaller ones, with the logic being that the loss of an occasional cache was insignificant in the face of the continued existence of the larger Imperial presence.

  The Zeta that Baze watched land was on a resupply run for these caches, or so Denic, Baze’s contact, had assured him. The information hadn’t been given out of the goodness of Denic’s heart. She’d made it very clear that should any of the resupply cargo, say, fall off the back of a speeder, she expected a cut. Specifically, she wanted any weapons and ammunition that might be recovered.

  This was fine by Baze. Weapons and ammunition weren’t what he and Chirrut were after.

  He waited until Chirrut was off the roof and down on the street before moving himself. Baze was a big man, a strong man, but he knew how to move himself with speed when needed, and with purpose at every moment. While Chirrut’s movements had flow, Baze’s had direction. He vaulted from rooftop to rooftop, clearing one block and then the next, pausing only for an instant to check on the progress of the resupply. The Imperials had loaded the cargo crates onto the back of an armored landspeeder, a contingent of five stormtroopers responsible for its security. One had the driver’s yoke, with another crewing the mounted repeating blaster; the remaining three rode outboard, weapons at the ready, keeping watch.

  Baze reached the edge of another rooftop and leapt without breaking stride, this time not to the roof of the adjacent building but instead down to the street. He landed heavy and hard, felt the ground stab back at him, sending pain through his legs to his knees. There had been a time when such a jump wouldn’t have given him even the slightest discomfort. There had been a time when he had called himself a Guardian of the Whills, and others had, too. There had been a time when his faith in the Force had been as unshakable and constant as Chirrut’s.

  He had been a younger man, then.

  He drew himself back up to his full height and checked the E-5 in his hands. He’d modified the weapon himself, trying to draw more power from it, and his efforts had been successful enough that even a glancing shot from the carbine would send a stormtrooper to the ground, and a direct hit could punch a hole through armor and the soldier within it. The trade-off had come in two parts. The first was its ammo capacity. The weapon ate charges, and ate them quickly.

  The second was that there was no longer a stun setting.

  There was a time when this would have bothered him. He had been a younger man, then, too. These were Imperials, these were the people who had destroyed his city, his home. These were Imperials, who had taken that which was beautiful and made it profane, and it didn’t matter if Baze Malbus still believed or not; it mattered to him that others did, and he saw the pain the Imperials caused every single day. He saw it in friends and strangers. He saw it in hungry children in the streets, and hiding beneath the smile of Chirrut Îmwe.

  It made him angry, but there was still enough Guardian of the Whills in him that he did not want to kill in anger. His balance had been lost long ago, and whether or not the Force was still truly with him, Baze knew that he was no longer with the Force. But he would not kill in anger, not if he could at all help it.

  The Imperials made it very hard to commit to that, sometimes.

  He drew himself back into the shadows, beneath the covered alleyway between two buildings. He could hear the speeder slowly coming closer, but that was only part of what he was listening for. Then he heard it: the regular beat of Chirrut’s walking stick against the road, the tap-tap-tap of the uneti wood striking stone.
/>   The speeder lumbered into the street on Baze’s right, swaying slightly beneath its load. He pressed himself farther into the shadows, willed himself into stillness as the vehicle passed by. The whine from its engines drowned out the sound of Chirrut’s approach, but Baze barely had time to worry before he heard the pitch on the speeder change, the repulsors quieting to an idle. He slid from the alley, looking down the street, and now he was behind the vehicle, and he could see the stormtroopers aboard all facing front, even the one posted at the rear whose job it was to watch their backs.

  Chirrut stood in front of the speeder, in the middle of the road. Baze could hear the stormtroopers.

  “What’s the holdup?”

  “The guy’s blind.”

  “Move. Move or we’ll run you down, citizen.”

  “My apologies, my apologies,” Chirrut said. He bent out of view, apparently searching the ground in front of him. “My stick, I seem to have dropped it. You surprised me, you are on the street so late.”

  Baze settled the E-5 at his shoulder, exhaled half his air through his nose. The stormtrooper on the mounted gun ran the charger, the clack and whine of the weapon being made ready audible even from where Baze stood.

  “Insurgent tricks,” the gunner said. He pivoted the weapon down at Chirrut.

  Baze fired four times. Four stormtroopers dropped. He sighted on the last, but Chirrut had already moved, had done something with the recovered walking stick, and the last trooper was falling off the side of the speeder.

  Baze closed the distance at a run, vaulting into the speeder to find Chirrut sitting at the control yoke.

  “Shall I drive?” Chirrut asked.

  Denic stood between Baze and Chirrut, watching closely as her crew unloaded the speeder, not speaking. Chirrut stood patiently, hands on his staff. Baze divided his attention between the cargo coming off the speeder and the E-5, which had gone hot where it rested against his leg during the drive to Denic’s garage. He’d handed it over to Chirrut, who’d promptly unplugged the charging module without explanation. Now the reason was evident; the whole capacitor system had melted down. Instead of a blaster, Baze now owned a very ineffective club.