Rogue One
Page 4
“Do you want a warning?” Kennel asked. “Before I do it?”
“Not really,” Jyn repeated.
Kennel grunted and rolled from one side to the other. “I will give you one anyway. Next work crew we are on together. I will kill you then.”
Jyn laughed breathily and without humor. “Who’s going to keep you company?”
“I like a quiet cell,” Kennel said.
“What if I kill you first?” Jyn asked.
“Then I hope you like a quiet cell, Liana Hallik.”
Liana Hallik. Not Jyn’s favorite name, but probably her last. She twisted her lips into a smile that her cellmate wouldn’t see.
“Were you always like this?” she asked after the stormtrooper had passed by. “Before Wobani? Back to when you were a kid?”
“Yes,” Kennel replied.
“Me, too,” Jyn said.
Neither of them spoke again. Jyn lay on her slab and didn’t sleep and toyed with the necklace tucked under her shirt—the crystal she’d managed to keep, smuggled into the prison when she should have been worried about weapons or a comlink. She didn’t think much about her would-be murderer, knowing that if Kennel didn’t kill her something else would.
No one survived Wobani for long. Jyn was supposed to serve twenty years, but anything more than five was a death sentence. All she could do was try to pick the most interesting end possible.
The next morning, the stormtroopers gathered up the work crews, selecting prisoners at random (supposedly at random, though everyone knew the guards had favorites) for their day on the farms. Jyn preferred work to sitting in her cell—she handled strained and quivering muscles better than agonizing boredom—and she’d almost given up hope when a guard waved a rifle at her cell door. A short while later she and Kennel were chained by the arms to a bench in the back of a rusting turbo-tank, bouncing and rocking with three other convicts as a trio of stormtroopers looked on from the front.
None of the prisoners looked at one another. Jyn took that as a good sign: If Kennel was planning to kill her, at least she didn’t have allies.
The transport stopped so suddenly that Jyn whipped forward, the metal of her shackles raking the flesh of her wrists. There was shouting outside. Curiosity wormed its way into Jyn’s brain; they’d been in transit too little time to be at the farms. The other prisoners shifted restively, glancing at the stormtroopers and the forward door.
“Nobody moves!” a trooper snapped. His two partners had their weapons up. All three turned to face front.
Jyn heard the dull thunk of something metallic and a faint, high-pitched whine. One of the other prisoners was looking up now, grinning with excitement like he’d figured it all out.
Then the front of the transport exploded.
The roar of the detonating grenade—it had to be a grenade, Jyn knew the noise too well—made her ears throb and turned the screams and shouts and blaster shots that followed into a tinny, incomprehensible buzz. Smoke carrying the odor of ash and burning circuits flooded the rear compartment, stinging Jyn’s eyes and nostrils. She tried to follow what was happening, watch the movements of the stormtroopers, but it hurt to look and she had to blink away grit. She kept her gaze on the floor. In her peripheral vision she saw the stormtroopers die one by one, felled by a barrage of particle bolts that burned through their armor and sparked against the transport walls.
“Hallik!” a muffled voice called, barely audible above the ringing in her ears.
Jyn lifted her chin with a jolt and turned toward the front of the turbo-tank. Three armed figures in battle-stained attire picked their way among the bodies. They wore no insignia, but she knew them by their movements, by their uniformity of manner and their scowls.
They were professionals. Soldiers.
They weren’t with the Empire; that made them rebels.
They’d found her.
She couldn’t stop the thought. It leapt into her head, demanded that she fight, that she run. But it made no sense. Why would they even be looking for her? Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe they were after a different prisoner and she’d misheard…
“Liana Hallik!” the leader—a man so thoroughly covered in gear that his exposed face seemed out of place among the cloth and leather—called again.
Jyn slowly lowered her gaze to the chains around her wrists. Her hands were shaking. She gripped her seat to make them stop.
“Her,” another rebel said, and gestured in Jyn’s direction.
Her deafness was abating. She waited, half expecting a blaster bolt to the head. She wondered how it would feel. People died fast from blaster bolts; she’d seen it enough. She didn’t think it would hurt much.
“You want to get out of here?” the rebel leader asked. His tone was neutral, guarded—as if he was as cautious of Jyn as Jyn was of him.
Jyn tried to imagine what had brought the rebels to her. Had Saw decided to bring her back? Had one of his people decided she knew too much?
She nodded at the man, lacking any better option.
One of the rebel grunts fumbled with her shackles, finally unlocking them with a key from a stormtrooper’s corpse. Jyn snapped upright, dizzy from the smoke and the blood rushing to her head but determined not to show it. Her rescuer started to say something when, from the other side of the transport, a prisoner called, “Hey! What about me?”
The rebel standing over her turned away. Jyn recognized it as an opening.
She was halfway across the transport floor in a second, her foot driving firmly into the leader’s soft gut to slam him against the wall. Momentum kept Jyn upright as she spun toward a second body closing in. She swung a fist, landed a solid blow to the newcomer’s face, felt his teeth through his cheek. She stumbled forward, still light-headed, and grabbed the first weapon she could find among the farming tools stored nearby: a shovel, solid and long enough to give her reach. She’d seen the damage a shovel could do in a prisoner’s hands.
She let the shovel’s weight carry her through her first swing, gave a solid, fleshy smack to the leader as the man bounced back from where she’d kicked him into the wall. She swung again to strike the rebel who’d unshackled her as he came up from behind. Jyn saw a clear path to the front of the transport and dashed for the twisted and broken doors.
The world was a blur, but she was out, feet striking the gravel trail.
She could find a way off Wobani. Forge new scandocs. Retire Liana Hallik and start over yet again, pick whatever name she wanted, one the Empire wouldn’t care about and the Rebel Alliance would never find—
“You are being rescued,” a voice said. It was electronically distorted, but too high-pitched to be a stormtrooper. A cold metal hand snagged her collar, hoisting Jyn until she was wriggling half a meter in the air. Before her towered the spindly chassis of a sunlit security droid, black as night save for the Imperial insignia on its shoulder plates and the dead white bulbs of its eyes. “Congratulations.”
The droid flicked its arm and tossed her to the ground. Pain flashed up Jyn’s spine, crashed through her skull. Tilting her head back, she saw an angry, bloody-mouthed rebel pointing a rifle at her chest.
Damn Saw Gerrera anyway. Damn the whole Rebel Alliance.
SOMEWHERE INSIDE JYN’S BRAIN THERE was a cave sealed shut by a heavy metal hatch. The cave wasn’t for her protection. Instead it was where she locked away the things she was done with but couldn’t altogether forget: The Rebellion. Saw Gerrera. People and places buried in the dark for so long that she barely recognized their names as more than cruel, hurtful impulses.
She loathed the cave and everything inside it. Everyone who knew about it. It wasn’t real, of course, though she’d described it to someone once—someone she trusted—and admitted what the image meant to her. She’d immediately regretted it and sworn to keep it hidden forever after. Now the grenade that had ruined the prison
er transport had exposed the hatch—blasted away the concealing soil, put it in open view of Jyn and the world.
On the long, harrowing flight from Wobani, the U-wing’s navigation computer malfunctioned, forcing her rescuers to hail a fleet of Rebellion fighters for help. Although the X-wings were meant to defend them, Jyn felt herself trapped between the armed rebels surrounding her and the hatch inside her mind.
Once again, she had no escape.
—
A moist film swaddled Jyn as she disembarked onto the jungle moon of a red gas giant. Warm breezes carried the aroma of rotting vegetation from the forest floor, masking the subtler stench of mildew. The shadow and shelter of a great stone ziggurat provided only a semblance of relief—just enough to remind a person how pervasive the heat and humidity and stink really were.
It wasn’t the most uncomfortable rebel outpost Jyn had ever visited. But it was the first she’d seen while under armed guard or without knowing where she was. Maybe the star system was too obscure to even have a name.
“Keep walking.” The man who’d led the raid on Wobani marched Jyn down the outdoor tarmac and onto the slick stone floor of the ziggurat’s makeshift hangar. The man’s name was Ruescott Melshi. He hadn’t bothered to introduce himself, but she’d overheard him talking to the pilot.
“You’re still mad, aren’t you?” she said.
“About what?”
“Being hit with a shovel.”
Melshi grunted. “They’re waiting,” he said, and she didn’t ask Who? because she knew it was what he expected.
If it was Saw who was waiting, she knew how to deal with him.
They walked together, past pilots in jumpsuits chattering at technicians; past starfighters and freighters and transports sitting in orderly rows. It was more than a mere rebel outpost should have had. Wherever Jyn was, it was important. Even without knowing what system they’d arrived in, she suspected she’d seen too much to be allowed to ever regain her freedom.
She fantasized about tripping Melshi on the wet stone, smashing his face into the rock, grabbing his weapon, dragging him bodily back to the hangar entrance, and using him as a human shield. The rebels wouldn’t let her offworld, but she could escape to the jungle where she would—what?
Poison herself trying to live off the local flora?
She let Melshi guide her deeper into the ziggurat.
A troubling thought came to her: Saw would never let a prisoner see all this.
The rebels hadn’t built the ziggurat. That much was obvious. But they’d made it their own, strung cables across ancient etchings and set flashing consoles like offerings on the slabs of altars. Melshi seemed unmoved; Jyn recalled her mother’s love of history with the faintest of pangs and banished the memory. When they arrived at a chamber deep below the surface—a bunker, maybe, fortified to withstand an attack while the ziggurat crumbled above it—Melshi gestured her inside.
“Try what you tried on Wobani—” he began.
She finished for him. “—and I’d better succeed.”
The bunker was dimly lit and subdivided by a conference table. Melshi steered Jyn to a chair, and she surveyed the faces arrayed against her: Two men wearing the insignia of rebel generals—one elderly, pale and soft-eyed; the second a decade or more the first man’s junior, wearing a perpetual scowl under hair like rust. A third man—dark-haired, mustached, closer to Jyn’s age—stood to one side as if unconcerned with the role he’d been assigned in the rebels’ drama. He looked at Jyn with an expression of dispassionate curiosity.
Saw Gerrera was not present.
“You’re currently calling yourself—” The rust-haired general stepped forward, glancing deliberately between Jyn and the datapad in his hand. “—Liana Hallik. Is that correct?”
He stood above her as if he could intimidate her.
Jyn waited. Let him try.
“Possession of unsanctioned weapons, forgery of Imperial documents, aggravated assault, escape from custody, resisting arrest…” He lowered the datapad and cocked his head smugly. “Imagine if the Imperial authorities had found out who you really were.
“Jyn Erso? That’s your given name, is it not?”
She flinched.
She felt as much as saw the general’s smile at his petty victory. Nothing about his words surprised her—the rebels wouldn’t kidnap Liana—but hearing Jyn Erso aloud for the first time in years felt like a violation. The general had taken a cutting torch to the hatch in her brain, crudely attempting to burn through the barrier.
He kept talking. “Jyn Erso? Daughter of Galen Erso. A known Imperial collaborator in weapons development.”
She could have struck him once, maybe twice, to stop him from saying Erso, Erso. The mention of Galen sent a black, charred crack through the hatch, and she felt her pulse quicken in response.
Before Jyn could act, however, she saw movement from the bunker’s far entrance. A woman in white robes emerged from the shadows, at once tired and steely. Her face was lined and her copper hair impeccably styled—not like a soldier’s or a general’s at all. The men, nearly in unison, took half a step away as she claimed the head of the table.
“What is this?” Jyn hissed at the newcomer.
“It’s a chance for you to make a fresh start,” the woman said. “We think you might be able to help us.” The words were gentle, but her voice was unforgiving.
“Who are you?”
“You know who she is.” The rust-haired general again. A fleck of spittle touched Jyn’s forehead, but she kept her attention where it was. The woman gestured at the general, and he fell silent.
“My name is Mon Mothma,” the woman said. “I sit on the council of Alliance High Command, and I approved your extraction from Wobani.”
Mothma. The Alliance chief of state. That made the ziggurat rebel headquarters. The place where decisions were made, where orders were given while people far away died—
Why was she here? Where was Saw?
“There’s a bounty on your head,” Jyn said, because it was better than not speaking; because she’d spotted a vulnerability she could jab like an unprotected eye.
Mon Mothma didn’t laugh, but Jyn caught her smiling before she gestured to the third man. “This is Captain Cassian Andor,” Mothma said. “Rebel Alliance Intelligence.”
Cassian moved toward Jyn but feigned a respectful distance—one that would also give him space to maneuver if she lunged. The rust-haired general retreated to the edge of the room with a shake of his head.
“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?” Cassian asked.
Jyn didn’t flinch this time. A second crack spread through the hatch. Sparks poured from the cutting torch.
“Fifteen years ago,” she said. It was a guess, but close enough.
“Any idea where he’s been all that time?” While the general had tried to intimidate, Cassian’s tone was casual and his eyes were keen. As if these were questions he’d ask over dinner to show he was interested in you as a person.
“I like to think he’s dead,” Jyn said. “Makes things easier.”
“Makes things easier,” Cassian echoed. “Easier than what? Than him being a tool of the Imperial war machine?” Despite the baiting, he kept the same casual tone.
“I’ve never had the luxury of political opinions.”
Jyn spotted another trace of a smile from Mothma. But Cassian became sterner. “Really? When was your last contact with Saw Gerrera?”
Shouldn’t you know?
If Saw wasn’t here—if Saw hadn’t helped the rebels find her—then what was any of this about?
“It’s been a long time,” she said.
Cassian’s warmth was all spent. His keenness was the keenness of an interrogator. “He’d remember you, though, wouldn’t he? He might agree to meet you, if you came as a friend.�
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Jyn opened her mouth to argue, to swear, but she said nothing. She needed time to figure out an approach, time to decide who she was ready to betray to save herself.
“We’re up against the clock here, girl,” the rust-haired general snarled. “So if there’s nothing to talk about, we’ll just put you back where we found you.”
Fine. The simple answer, the honest one. The one you already know. “I was a child,” she said. “Saw Gerrera saved my life. He raised me. But I’ve no idea where he is. I haven’t seen him in years.”
The elderly general nodded as if this confirmed something he had suspected. He exchanged a glance with Mothma, yet Cassian was the one who spoke next. “We know how to find him,” Cassian said. “That’s not our problem. What we need is someone who gets us through the door without being killed.”
Jyn fought down a smirk. “You’re all rebels, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but Saw Gerrera’s an extremist. He’s been fighting his own war for quite some time,” Mothma said. “We have no choice but to try to mend that broken trust.”
So that was it? Even when Jyn had first met Saw, he’d been on the fringes of the Rebellion. If he’d parted ways with the Alliance altogether, it meant his course had held steady. And now the rebels had kidnapped her from the labor camp to use her as a peace offering.
Only that didn’t explain everything.
She dug her nails into her palms and asked the question she didn’t want answered. “What does this have to do with my father?”
Mon Mothma gave Cassian a prompting look.
“There’s an Imperial defector in the Holy City of Jedha. A pilot. He’s being held by Saw Gerrera.” Cassian paused, sought Jyn’s eyes as if to emphasize the gravity of what he said next. “He’s claiming the Emperor is creating a weapon with the power to destroy entire planets.”
This time, Jyn couldn’t help but laugh.