Rogue One Page 3

  That was good enough. If there were stormtroopers hunting him, they weren’t ready to shoot.

  “I came as fast as I could,” Cassian said. He stashed his paranoia in the back of his brain—out of the way but within easy reach.

  Tivik started toward Cassian and the alley mouth, wiping one palm on his hip. “I have to get back on board. Walk with me.”

  “Where’s your ship heading?” Cassian asked. “Back to Jedha?”

  Tivik didn’t stop moving. In another moment, he’d have to squeeze past Cassian to continue. “They won’t wait for me,” he said. “We’re here stealing ammo—”

  Cassian shifted his weight and broadened his stance, blocking Tivik’s path; he wasn’t a large man, but he knew how to feign presence. Tivik flinched and took an abrupt step backward.

  As informants went, Tivik was one of the more maddening Cassian had worked with: He was, for all his faults, a true believer; he was also an abject coward, forever looking to escape the moral responsibilities he assigned himself. He responded well to pressure. And after the past few days, after rushing to extricate himself from Corulag based on Tivik’s oblique message, Cassian was in the mood to press.

  “You have news from Jedha?” he growled. “Come on…I came across the galaxy for this.”

  Tivik met Cassian’s gaze, then relented. “An Imperial pilot—one of the cargo drivers on the Jedha run? He defected yesterday.”

  “So?” Low-level defectors from the Empire weren’t uncommon. They made up half the Rebellion’s foot soldiers, give or take. Tivik knew that as well as Cassian.

  “This pilot? He says he knows what the Jedha mining operation is all about. He’s telling people they’re making a weapon.” Tivik spat the words out like bitter rind. “The kyber crystals, that’s what they’re for. He’s brought a message, says he’s got proof—”

  Cassian sorted through the barrage of information, cross-referenced against what he already knew, and reprioritized his concerns. This was why he’d come, but it wasn’t what he’d expected. There had been leads about a weapon before, and every one—on Adalog, in Zemiah’s Den—had turned to dross.

  His pulse was quickening. Maybe he wouldn’t return to Base One empty-handed after all.

  “What kind of weapon?” he asked.

  Voices rose in the street, distorted by echoes down the alleyways. Tivik somehow shrank into himself, the small man making himself smaller. “Look, I have to go.”

  “You called me. You knew this was important—”

  “You shouldn’t have come late!” Tivik snapped. His eyes were glassy with distress.

  Cassian hoisted Tivik under both arms, dug his fingers into the sling and coarse cloth and soft flesh. The man’s breath had the scent of cinnamon. “What kind of weapon?” Cassian repeated, louder than he’d intended.

  “A planet killer,” Tivik whispered. “That’s what he called it.”

  Cold crept down Cassian’s spine.

  He tried to bring to mind old reports, speculative intelligence documents, tech readouts, anything to put the lie to Tivik’s words. A planet killer was a myth, a fantasy, an obscenity dreamed up by zealots who viewed the Emperor as a wrathful deity instead of a corrupt tyrant.

  Along with the cold came a shameful mix of excitement and revulsion. Maybe for this, any price would be justified.

  He set Tivik down as gently as he could. “A planet killer?”

  “Someone named Erso sent him, sent the pilot. Some old friend of Saw’s.”

  That much fit the puzzle. “Galen Erso?” Cassian asked, trying to tamp down his own intensity. “Was it?”

  “I don’t know! I shouldn’t even have said this much.” Tivik shook his head. “The pilot, the guys who found him, they were looking for Saw when we left.”

  Saw Gerrera. A defector pilot. Jedha. Kyber crystals. A weapon. A planet killer. Galen Erso. Cassian sorted through them and found it was too much to deal with, a hand built of too many playing cards. Tivik was on the verge of bolting, and Cassian didn’t have time to figure out the right questions. “Who else knows this?” he asked.

  “I have no idea!” Tivik leaned in, his cinnamon breath coming in quick little bursts. “It’s all falling apart. Saw’s right—you guys keep talking and stalling and dealing and we’re on fumes out there, there’re spies everywhere—”

  Tivik didn’t finish the sentiment. As he stared past Cassian’s shoulder, Cassian heard movement behind him and turned to face the alley mouth. Positioned to block the entrance, as Cassian had blocked Tivik, were two figures in white armor with helmets like stylized skulls: Imperial stormtroopers, rifles hoisted casually and aimed in Cassian’s direction.

  Cassian cursed silently and made himself smile.

  “What’s all this?” The stormtrooper’s voice buzzed with distortion. He was curt, authoritative, but not scared. Cassian could use that.

  “Hey,” Cassian said, and gave an exaggerated shrug. “Just me and my friend. If we’re bothering someone, we’ll get out of the way—”

  “You’re not leaving.” The second stormtrooper spoke now, impatient. “Come on, let’s see some scandocs.”

  Cassian kept his eyes off Tivik. There was nothing he could do to coax the man into playing along, to urge him to make no move. He kept smiling his small, reassuring smile at the stormtroopers, even as his blood pumped fiercely with the promise of a weapon, a planet killer. “Yeah, of course,” he said. “My gloves?”

  He indicated a pocket with a gesture. The stormtroopers didn’t object. Thieves were common on Kafrene, and they’d doubtless seen stranger hiding spots.

  Neither stormtrooper reacted in time as Cassian reached down and touched the cool metal of his pistol’s grip. He barely moved his wrist and squeezed the trigger twice, averting his gaze just enough to avoid the glare of the energy discharge. The electric noise was low and sickly, muffled by an illegal silencing device that was almost effective.

  A moment later the stormtroopers lay dead in the alleyway. It was a miracle, Cassian thought, that the silenced blaster bolts had penetrated their armor. In a fairer world, he would be the one lying in filth with a burning hole instead of a heart.

  “No…” Tivik was shaking his head. “What’ve you done?”

  Cassian caught another glimpse of white, heard a garbled voice beyond the alley mouth. There would be more troopers coming, many more, and next time they wouldn’t hesitate to fire. He seized Tivik by the elbow, hurried deeper into the alley, and scanned the walls. There were no exits, no air shafts or back doors, but the rooftops weren’t more than a meter or two out of reach. Unaided climbing wasn’t his specialty; still, he could be up and over in seconds, and he’d disappear in the labyrinthine depths of the Ring of Kafrene.

  Tivik recognized his intent. “Are you crazy? I’ll never climb out of here.” He tugged himself away from Cassian’s grip—Cassian released him after a moment—and adjusted his sling. “My arm…” He rotated his body awkwardly to watch the alley mouth.

  Cassian heard footsteps and a distant, distorted yell. He looked Tivik up and down and realized that, in all likelihood, the man was right: He really couldn’t make it up the wall, not without help and not swiftly. In the best-case scenario, by the time both he and Cassian were up on the roofs, the stormtroopers would already have identified them and initiated a cordon.

  “Hey,” Cassian said, and touched Tivik’s shoulder—gently now, his voice stripped of all force. “Calm down. Calm down. You did good—everything you told me, it’s real?”

  “It’s real,” Tivik said. His voice was the voice of a confused child.

  One more payment.

  “We’ll be all right,” Cassian said. And for the third time that day, he squeezed the trigger on his blaster. He heard the sickly electric squawk, smelled burning fibers and worse as Tivik fell to the ground. The informant let out one last little g
roan, like he’d been troubled in his sleep, and lay still.

  They would’ve caught you, Tivik. You would’ve broken. You would’ve died. And neither of us would deliver your message.

  Cassian’s hands were shaking as he pulled himself up and over the wall, grabbing at handholds along pipes and stained sills, kicking at the surface for support. He heard the stormtroopers behind him counting bodies and hurried on, chest flat against the rooftop.

  Less than an hour later, he was on a shuttle departing the Ring of Kafrene. His face and beard were dripping where he’d wiped them with a cold sponge in the sanitation station—not just to hide the sweat on his brow, but to shock himself back into focus. He had a lot to occupy his mind, and farther to go before he could transmit it to Draven and Alliance Intelligence.

  He closed his eyes and sorted the cards in his hand:

  Jedha. The pilgrim moon. A wasteland world intimately linked to a vast Imperial project only visible through its ripple effects.

  The kyber crystals. Jedha’s only natural resource of any value. The Empire had been shipping crystals offworld, their ultimate destination unknown.

  A defecting pilot carrying a message to Saw Gerrera. Possibly trustworthy, possibly not.

  Saw Gerrera. Nominally part of the Rebellion. In practice, not so easily categorized.

  Galen Erso. The legendary scientist, connected—again—to the Imperial mega-project whose existence the Alliance could only speculate about. The man whose message the pilot supposedly carried.

  And the weapon. The planet killer. The galaxy’s nightmare, designed and built and polished to shine by Erso and his cronies.

  It was more than Cassian had hoped to bring back from this mission; a treasure hoard of facts and speculation and possible connections, enough to keep the analysts busy for weeks or months or years.

  If he was lucky, it would even be enough to keep him from replaying—over and over in his head, on the long shuttle ride to safety—the last dying groan of the man he’d murdered.

  —

  Bodhi Rook had only ever doubted himself, and today was no exception.

  His captors hadn’t hurt him. Threatened him, yes; refused him food and water and left him with a headache that seemed to squeeze his skull tight around his swollen brain, yes; but they treated him more like an object than a man. They rarely spoke as they dragged him across the frigid Jedha desert, grasping him by the arms and marching at a pace that he—insulated by the Imperial flight suit he wore under a loose kaftan—couldn’t quite match. His soles touched sand twice for every three steps his captors took; and so every three steps he flew, and their grip became painfully tight.

  He could survive this, he told himself. He’d chosen right, found the right people. And when he delivered his message, they would all understand. They would accept him as a good man, a brave man.

  He could only hope that was all true.

  “How much farther?” he asked.

  His captors stayed close around him, so close he couldn’t see much of the wasteland: just pale and freezing sun, low mountains that formed the borders of the valley, and the occasional crumbling monolith of one of Jedha’s great statues—a stern humanoid head with lips worn smooth over millennia, or a pair of broken legs embedded in the cracked and rusty valley floor. When the wind rose, loose wisps of long, dark hair drifted before his eyes.

  “I know you’re being careful,” he said, struggling to sound reasonable. “I know that’s smart—you think I could be a spy, and spies have to be a worry for people like you.”

  Don’t make them think about spies! He told himself that, even as another part of his brain assured him: Hide nothing. Only honesty will save you.

  He fought to regain his train of thought. “But—but!” He spat air through dry lips. “You also have to give me a chance. Not for my sake, but for yours. I want to help you…”

  His captors—five revolutionaries in ragged local attire, each armed with an illegal blaster rifle—yanked him hard, and he scrabbled over the dust. No one met his gaze. Instead scarred, unwashed faces watched Bodhi’s bound hands or the endless desert.

  An interminable time passed before he spoke again.

  “Do you have a family?” he asked a towering man with a blade half concealed in his boot.

  For his troubles, he got the briefest of glances.

  “I have a family,” Bodhi said, though it was only somewhat true.

  The revolutionaries began to spread apart, wordlessly changing formation to put Bodhi at the center of a broad semicircle. With his newly expanded field of vision, Bodhi now saw a second group standing ahead of them in the wastes—small, dark figures on a bright horizon.

  “Is that him?” Bodhi asked, and received no reply.

  The semicircle closed the distance to the second band. The newcomers resembled Bodhi’s captors but carried their ordnance more conspicuously: A white-furred Gigoran hoisted a rotary cannon, while the humans wore bandoliers and detonator belts. At the fore of the newcomers was a Tognath: a lanky figure dressed in dark leathers, whose pale, skull-like head was set in the vise grip of a mechanical respirator. The Tognath turned his sockets onto Bodhi and said in a thickly accented dialect, “It’s the pilot. Look alive!”

  The Tognath gestured once, and the two bands merged with swift and soldierly precision. Bodhi flinched under the Gigoran’s glower and felt a flush of shame; nonhumans hadn’t made him nervous before he’d signed on with the Empire.

  He made himself focus. “Okay, so you’re—you’re Saw Gerrera?” he asked, more in hope than genuine belief.

  Someone snickered. The Tognath examined Bodhi with an expression that might have been disdain.

  “No?” Bodhi shook his head. “Okay, we’re just wasting time that we don’t have. I need to speak to Saw Gerrera! I keep telling them—” He lifted a shoulder at one of his original captors. “—before, before it’s too late.”

  He thought he heard another snicker. It might have been the wind playing on sand, but it was enough to raise his ire.

  They need you. You need to make them understand.

  “We need to get to Jedha City. We’re out here in the middle of nowhere—” His voice rose to a shout, thick with frustration. “What part of urgent message do you guys not understand?”

  He saw the shadow above him, then felt coarse cloth drag over his hair, catch on the goggles perched on his forehead, and slide tight against his nose, mustache, and beard. He saw the glow of the sun through the stitching of the sack over his head. “Hey!” he said, trying not to bite the fabric. “Hey—we’re all on the same side, if you just see past the uniform for a minute…”

  You always talk, his mother had said, but you say so little! Learn to listen, Bodhi Rook.

  Talking was all he could do now.

  “I’ve got to speak to Saw Gerrera,” he cried. He was pleading as one set of hands released his arms and new hands, the terribly strong hands of the Gigoran, took their place. “You know what? Just tell him—tell him what I told you, and then he’ll want to speak to me.”

  I gave up everything to come here. I’m here to help!

  Someone pulled the sack tight around his neck. It scraped at his throat when he breathed.

  Bodhi Rook thought about the reason he’d come back to Jedha and found himself hating Galen Erso.

  —

  Jyn had been at the Empire’s mercy before. Sometimes she’d even deserved her troubles—she couldn’t blame some petty dictator for ordering her dragged off the street and slammed into holding when she really, truly was planning to blow up his ship and steal his guns. She’d had rifles pointed at her, felt stun prods deliver jolts to her spine, and generally suffered the worst a stormtrooper was authorized to deal out.

  What made her circumstances different now was that, for the first time, Jyn had no escape route. No partners outside the pris
on walls waiting to bust down the doors; no in with a greedy security officer she could promise (lying or not) to pay off; not even a knife she could hide where the guards wouldn’t find it.

  She’d run out of friends. She’d come to Wobani Labor Camp alone. She expected to die there that way and, very likely, it wouldn’t take long at all.

  She opened her eyes, flinched away her thoughts as a drop of filthy water smacked into her forehead and took a circuitous route down the side of her nose. She smeared it away with her palm and glanced about her cell as if it might have changed since lights-out. But there was no gap in the wall, no blaster tucked discreetly beside her slab. The blanket-draped lump of her cellmate moaned and wheezed, loud enough to wake Jyn even if she did manage to sleep.

  She waited for the stormtrooper on patrol to pass her door, counted to five, then slid to her feet and crept to the bars. Outside was an endless march of more cell doors, more prisoners sleeping or, in a few cases, feeding their own private demons—clawing their arms or sketching invisible mandalas on the floor. Wobani didn’t care about treatment or rehabilitation any more than it did about punishment. Order and obedience were the priority; everything else was left to rot.

  “Bad dreams?” The moaning and wheezing had stopped. The voice sounded like claws on slate.

  “Not really,” Jyn said.

  “Then you should not be up,” her cellmate huffed. The tentacles protruding from her pinched, wormlike face writhed in irritation.

  The woman called herself Nail. The other prisoners at Wobani called her Kennel, for the parasites she hosted in the filthy cloth jacket that half covered her leathery chest. Only the guards called her by her real name, which—along with her species and actual gender—Jyn hadn’t bothered to learn.

  They both fell silent as the patrol came around again. Jyn returned to the slab that served as her bed, considered rising a second time solely to irritate Kennel, then decided against it. If she was going to pick a fight, better to be awake enough to enjoy it.