Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  He was in a sour mood when he marched back into the cabin. He looked at the faces before him—the zealots, the defector, the madwoman, and K-2—and felt a new rush of ire. They’d had opinions on the mission until it had gone south; now they expected a solution from him.

  The only one he even trusted was the Imperial droid.

  “Bodhi,” he snapped. Rainwater streamed down his forehead onto the cabin floor. “Where’s the lab?”

  Bodhi straightened and took an awkward step forward, like a soldier being called to attention. “The research facility?”

  “The place you made deliveries and met Galen Erso. Where is it?”

  Bodhi trembled for a moment. Cassian debated whether to push harder or coddle the man; but then the pilot stilled and said crisply, “It’s just over the ridge.”

  “And that’s a shuttle depot straight ahead of us? You are sure of that?”

  “Yes,” Bodhi said.

  A satellite image would have been preferable, but Cassian had worked with worse than the word of a scared traitor. “We’ll have to hope there’s still an Imperial ship left to steal. The U-wing is scrap.”

  No one looked surprised. Baze smiled sardonically.

  “Grab anything that might be useful,” he went on. “K-2 will burn anything sensitive.” Alliance ships were programmed not to keep navi records, and all identification had been scrubbed long ago. Cleanup wouldn’t be hard. “After that, here’s what we’re doing.”

  He waited for an argument that didn’t come. Bodhi still stood at attention. Baze regarded Cassian like he was judging him at trial. Chirrut looked distracted, cocking his head as if listening to the rain.

  And Jyn? Jyn seemed pale and gaunt compared to the woman he’d met on Yavin. Even her momentary zeal after leaving Jedha was gone, revealed as a pretense to drag them into her madness. She watched him somberly, sadly, like she was sure he would disappoint her.

  She was probably right about that.

  “Hopefully,” he said, “the storm keeps up and keeps us hidden down here. Bodhi, you’re coming with me. We’ll go up the ridge and check out the research facility.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Jyn said.

  That didn’t take long. But he’d planned for it.

  “No,” he said. “Your father’s message—we can’t risk it. You’re the messenger.”

  Jyn scowled. “That’s ridiculous. We all got the message. Everyone here knows it.”

  K-2 spoke for the first time. “One blast to the reactor module and the whole system goes down. That’s how you said it. The whole system goes down.”

  “You”—Cassian shot toward K-2—“get to work fixing our comms.” He forced himself to moderate his voice, to sound reasonable, before returning to Jyn. “All I want to do right now is get a handle on what we’re up against. And even if I were ready to extract your father, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to try on my own. I need you for firepower; and at this moment, I need you protecting the ship.”

  She returned to that intense, somber stare. Good enough.

  “So,” he said, and nodded at Bodhi, “we’re going to go very small and very carefully up the rise and see what’s what. Let’s get out of here.”

  There were no questions, and Cassian kept his eyes on his gear as he checked his equipment and reconfigured his blaster, slapping scope and extended barrel into place with rapid, familiar motions. At least, he thought, the weaponry survived the crash. He heard Bodhi’s footsteps behind him as he trudged back out into the rain and the mud, his soles sucking noisily at the drenched soil.

  “Do I need one, too?” Bodhi called. Cassian cast a look backward at the man as he crept down the slick boarding ramp. “A weapon?”

  “You sound like my droid,” Cassian said. Then he grunted, and shook his head. “We won’t be long. You’ll be fine.”

  It was probably true. And there was a fringe benefit: If Bodhi sided with Jyn over Cassian, it meant one fewer person who might shoot him in the back.

  —

  Jyn hadn’t spoken to the others during the journey from Jedha. When Bodhi had approached her, tried to ask about Galen, she’d managed a gentle smile before waving him off. Chirrut and Baze had known better than to try talking; or perhaps they, like Jyn, wrestled with truths too difficult to express in words.

  So she had listened to the hologram of her father in her mind and watched the dark of the cave become the darkness of Eadu.

  The fact that she had no way to leave the planet lay discarded in her consciousness, untouched and irrelevent.

  “Does he look like a killer?”

  She was watching Cassian and Bodhi descend into the mud when she heard Chirrut’s voice. She turned to look and saw he was speaking to Baze.

  “No,” Baze said, after a moment of thought. “He has the face of a friend.”

  “Who are you talking about?” she asked.

  Baze eyed her appraisingly. “Captain Andor,” he said, flat.

  She should have been irritated by the curt explanation. Instead she could muster only vague confusion. “Why do you ask that?” she said, looking to Chirrut now. “What do you mean, Does he look like a killer?”

  “The Force moves darkly near a creature that’s about to kill,” Chirrut answered. He might have added, As simple as that.

  “Fascinating,” K-2SO called, heading for the cockpit. “His weapon was in the sniper configuration.”

  Jyn pictured Cassian assembling his weapon and exiting the ship. She remembered the first time she’d held a sniper rifle, staring down the scope under Saw Gerrera’s direction, measuring her breath so she could confidently, quietly, kill a man from a kilometer away.

  It might have meant nothing.

  Her heartbeat quickened. She spun toward the boarding ramp and started down into the mud. The chill crept through her boots, up her legs and her spine. She couldn’t see the path Cassian and Bodhi had taken, couldn’t hear them over the steady rain, but she could see the dim, distant light of the Imperial compound.

  There, she would find her father.

  —

  Baze Malbus watched a gust of wind spatter raindrops across the cabin floor, discoloring the metal in a thousand pinpoints like bleak stars in a gray sky. The rain smelled like fecund soil with an undertone of acrid stink.

  Baze was not a young man. He had seen rain before. But Jedha’s rains—rare, powerful torrents that were cause for celebration, that he had taken such joy in as a child—had never smelled like this.

  Soon, Baze thought, he would forget the smell of Jedha’s rain altogether.

  Chirrut rose abruptly, swept his staff before him, and marched toward the boarding ramp.

  “Where are you going?” Baze growled.

  Chirrut paused but kept his back to Baze. “I’m going to follow Jyn. Her path is clear.”

  “Alone?” Baze asked. The word was volatile with meaning. “Good luck.”

  He was certain Chirrut understood his warning. But the blind man, once brother to Baze among the Guardians of the Whills and now the fool Baze was cursed to entertain, started forward again. “I don’t need luck,” Chirrut said. “I have you.”

  Baze watched Chirrut descend the ramp. He listened to the foot of the staff rap on metal. When the rapping ended and Chirrut stepped onto soft ground, Baze heaved himself to his feet. Without a glance at the cabin, he followed his brother into the storm of an alien world.

  —

  The tragedy of K-2SO’s existence was this: The skills he most cherished were skills his rebel masters disdained; and the skills he considered crude and trivial were skills his masters were helpless to learn.

  Thus, his present circumstances: Instead of traveling to the research lab to manhandle, capture, restrain, and extract the scientist Galen Erso—a mission virtually requiring the talents of an Imperial security droid, and wh
ich might (if handled delicately) permit the exercise of multiple underutilized procedures hardcoded into K-2SO—he was rewiring a communications array and locating faults in each of eighty-four connectors by touch.

  Such a task required a bare minimum of computational power. K-2SO had more than enough to spare to listen to the goings-on in the cabin and observe the landscape from the half-buried cockpit viewport.

  He watched Jyn depart with disinterest. The woman had always verged on disrespectful toward him.

  He watched Baze and Chirrut depart with more robust disapproval. He posited an array of scenarios involving their separation from the U-wing, few of which ended in their continued well-being.

  “What are they doing?” he asked sharply.

  K-2SO was not a protocol droid, but he was designed for biological interaction. He found that verbal discussion, even with himself, spurred his creativity.

  He soon came to a solution he was satisfied with.

  “If Cassian comes back,” he said, “we’re leaving without them.”

  CAPTAIN CASSIAN ANDOR HAD FAILED. That was the assumption Draven had to make.

  He had activated the homing beacon aboard Andor’s U-wing immediately after receiving his agent’s supposed confirmation of the planet killer. The beacon was a risk, but a minor one—its signal was disguised as pulsar radiation and relayed through a dozen unstaffed rebel outposts before reaching Base One—and under the circumstances, Draven thought it wise to keep tabs on Andor.

  He had the utmost respect for his agent—for Cassian—but only a fool would stake the fate of the Alliance on a single man. Much as Draven detested the fact, this mission had taken on such unlikely proportions.

  “Try them again,” he said.

  He stood behind Private Weems in the communications room, looking over the man’s shoulder as he tapped at his console. Two of Draven’s captains stood with him—officers he trusted as well as Andor, albeit for different reasons.

  “I am trying, sir,” Weems said. “The signal’s gone dead.”

  “Guess wildly for me. Why?” He turned toward his captains. Better to get the speculation over with.

  “We know Andor made it to the Eadu star system.” It was Captain Nioma who spoke first: analyst and technical adviser for Alliance Intelligence, a mumbling genius who hadn’t slept since she’d first heard rumors about the planet killer. “Could’ve been shot down. Could’ve been shot at, though the beacon’s rugged enough to survive a lot of damage. We don’t have much intel on Eadu, though, so for all we know the signal’s blocked by a high-energy thermosphere—”

  “How likely is that?” Draven asked.

  “Not likely.”

  He grunted, leaned his weight against the back of Weems’s chair. “Say we wanted to send in Blue Squadron. How long to Eadu?”

  Captain Vienaris had been, of all things, a spaceport control officer before joining the Rebellion. He had the numbers for half a dozen hyperspace routes at hand; he factored in variable atmospheric conditions and rapidly ran through the lot with Draven. “Short version: We’re in striking range, but if the Empire’s begun to evacuate we won’t catch them. Best case, Blue Squadron arrives just in time to see the Imperials jump out.”

  But would the Empire bother to evacuate at all? Draven tried to put himself in the mind of the commander in charge of Eadu’s garrison. I just caught a transport—a Rebel Alliance Intelligence U-wing—making a recon run over my base. I shot the ship down and even took prisoners…

  It was only one ship. It was a threat to operational security, but it wasn’t cause for panic. If the Alliance knew for certain what was on Eadu, they’d come en masse. And the work being done on Eadu was vital; if the decision was made to uproot, the base’s chief scientist would need to be the last to go to ensure everything was safely relocated. You couldn’t trust stormtroopers with the delicate equipment.

  So Galen Erso was still onsite. The planet killer might not die with him, but—if Erso really was responsible for its main weapon—it would be a hell of a lot harder to keep operational after he was gone.

  “Squadron up,” Draven said. “Target Eadu. We must take out Galen Erso if we have the chance.”

  Captain Vienaris was running from the room, speaking into his comlink almost before Draven had finished. Nioma was looking at him with bloodshot eyes. “Do you have authorization?” she asked. “A full-scale attack on a major Imperial installation…”

  Anyone else, Draven would have taken aside and rebuked for questioning him in public. But Nioma had never possessed a military mindset, and she looked like she’d turn to dust at a stern word. “The mission’s under my department,” he said. “I don’t need the council’s sign-off.”

  That was true. What he didn’t tell Nioma was that, authorized or not, the mission had crept well outside the council’s intended parameters.

  He’d been hoping to withhold Andor’s report of the planet killer over Jedha until after debriefing the captain himself; revealing the truth (if it was true) to the council members without context would only encourage them to pursue their own leads, activate their own contingencies, all without coordination or strategy. Half the Alliance would run and hide while the other half would take the offensive. Word would spread outside the council in a matter of hours, inciting panic. Any hope of using knowledge of the planet killer as a form of leverage—to manipulate a vote in the Senate, to bring Saw Gerrera’s zealots back on-side—would be lost.

  Draven worked for Alliance Intelligence. His job wasn’t to share every secret he came across. It was to explain what secrets meant, if and when they were safe to share. He couldn’t do that yet.

  But the council was going to hear about his activation of Blue Squadron. Mon Mothma was going to want to know when the mission had become about assassination rather than extraction.

  Blue Squadron would be en route to Eadu in a matter of minutes. Draven had until it arrived to prepare for the conversation.

  —

  “No, no,” Bodhi called, rivers of rainwater dribbling off his hair and beard. “We’ve got to go up.”

  Cassian frowned at Bodhi, then glanced down the slope of the muddy canyon at the distant shine of the laboratory lights. He could have questioned the pilot, but his mood was still sour and he didn’t see the use. Either Bodhi knew the topography or he didn’t; either he was lying or he wasn’t.

  He shrugged and followed Bodhi up the rocky, rain-slick slope. At least it took them out of the worst of the mud.

  As they trudged up the ridge, Bodhi nattered on about his time on Eadu. Cassian half listened to the pilot’s stories of running cargo flights, delivering kyber crystal from Jedha to the local scientists. Bodhi had barely been authorized (he claimed) to access the mess hall while onsite, to refresh himself and refuel before heading back to Jedha. “If I hadn’t started a conversation with Galen in the meal line, asked him which droid to grab a bite from, maybe I never would’ve wondered what was going on here. What they were working on…”

  It sounded too much like a lie for Cassian to really believe it. But it also sounded like a lie for Bodhi’s benefit, not Cassian’s. If that was the story he wanted to tell about meeting Galen, so be it. If Bodhi was scared of Cassian, desperate to convince him his defection was genuine, that was fine with Cassian, too.

  Eventually Bodhi stopped talking as the path grew narrower. Cassian saw the pilot stumble and noticed the stiffness in the man’s legs—the way he bent his knees as little as possible, more so the longer the hike went on. He noticed, too, the dark bruises and the raw, scraped flesh at the base of Bodhi’s neck. These were largely concealed by the collar of his flight suit, but the rain had tamped the suit down and left them more evident than before.

  “How long did Saw Gerrera’s people hold you?” Cassian called.

  Bodhi flinched but kept walking. “What?”

  Cassian repeated his
question.

  “A few days, maybe,” Bodhi said, not looking back.

  Cassian thought back to the rumpled pile of a man he had found in the catacombs, malnourished and battered and deranged with trauma. Less than a day later, the man leading him through the canyons of Eadu was transparently terrified and far too eager to chat; but he was also doing his damnedest to feign normalcy on what looked likely to be a suicide mission. He was even doing a decent job of it.

  Cassian laughed. It was a brief, guttural sound that seemed drowned in the rain. Bodhi did look back now, surprised and a touch alarmed. “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Cassian said. Then he added, blunt and almost humbled: “Must’ve been a hell of a few days.”

  Bodhi smiled—just a twitch of his lips—for the first time since Cassian had known him.

  They climbed higher. Cassian could make out a platform across a narrow valley now—a raised landing pad separate from the shuttle depot. But the path up the ridge was turning increasingly treacherous. Soon it almost disappeared altogether, and Bodhi drew up against the rock face as scree poured from beneath his feet.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Cassian said, with as much reassurance as he could muster.

  Bodhi looked sickly, but he nodded. “Come on.”

  They crossed the next switchback with agonizing care. Beyond, the path widened again, and after a final ascent they crested the ridge and looked down onto the Imperial installation from above. The flat metal sweep of the landing pad abutted a series of military-spec housing and laboratory stations. Cassian recognized the prefab designs, but the labs, at least, looked heavily customized—he spotted whole swaths of unfamiliar antenna equipment and generators.

  He shuffled forward and knelt behind a boulder, felt the cool jab of damp pebbles against his knees. Next, he pulled Bodhi down beside him and fished out his quadnocs, magnifying and surveying the installation. There was activity on the landing pad—stormtroopers emerging in formation from one of the buildings, followed by figures in blue-and-white engineering jumpsuits.