“But did I?”
He spun toward Chirrut and Baze, flashed a look of fury at Bodhi. “Did I?”
No one spoke. Jyn hadn’t expected them to.
She stabbed at Cassian again, letting resentment bolster her while her teeth chattered. “You might as well have. My father was living proof and you put him at risk. Those were Alliance bombs that killed him!”
She was right. She tried to find the pleasure in being right. There was none; not in the cave in the dark.
“I had orders! Orders that I disobeyed!” There was nothing calm about the man who stood before Jyn. The spy’s face had been torn away, leaving something vicious and raw. “But you wouldn’t understand that.”
“Orders? When you know they’re wrong?” The memory of a fourteen-year-old Jyn and her solo mission from Saw flashed through her mind; she banished the painful shade, searched for a spike to drive straight through Cassian’s heart. “You might as well be a stormtrooper.”
Yet Cassian didn’t back down, didn’t flinch anymore. He marched toward her, stopping a handspan distant and nearly yelling, “What do you know? We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something.” He matched her earlier sneer. “Suddenly the Rebellion is real for you? Now that you’ve got a stake in it, and—and—now that you don’t have another life to go back to?” He raised a clenched hand. Jyn readied herself for a fight, but he put his arm down again just as quickly.
“Some of us live this Rebellion,” he said. “I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old. You’re not the only one who lost everything.” His breathing was swift, but his words were deliberate. “Some of us just decided to do something about it.”
Jyn stared into the face of her betrayer.
You lied to me, she wanted to say again. You went up there to kill my father. But the cold was deep in her bones now, biting at the marrow.
“You can’t talk your way around this,” she said.
“I don’t have to,” Cassian snarled.
She didn’t look away. Nor did Cassian. They stood locked together until at last the cold and the dark became too much for Jyn to bear; until she had no words to hurl, no weapon left to stab with, and all that remained was for her to drive a fist against his ribs, dig her knee into his chest, and watch him fall.
But that wouldn’t make him beg forgiveness for killing her father. It wouldn’t make her feel any less petty.
She turned around.
“Yavin Four!” Cassian yelled toward the cockpit. “Make sure they know we’re coming in with a stolen ship.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him whirl, fix Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze with a stare. “Anybody else?”
Nobody spoke. What more was there to say?
—
“You should have told me,” Mon Mothma said. But there was no venom in it.
She stood at her office window: a broad aperture in the ziggurat overlooking the endless jungle, its antiquity refuted by the hung plastic tarp Mothma used as a shade during rainstorms. General Draven watched her from his seat at her desk, periodically glancing at the clock on her console.
“None of it would have made a difference,” he said. His voice was bitter, but the bitterness wasn’t directed at Mothma. “We didn’t hear about Jedha until too late. As for Galen Erso, once we lost Captain Andor—once we thought we’d lost Captain Andor—I had to make the call on the spot. Assassination instead of extraction.”
That was a lie, but Mothma didn’t need to know assassination had been the plan all along. Draven wasn’t afraid of defending his choices, yet there were larger issues at play, and it was best not to muddy the waters.
“You don’t know what would have made a difference.” Mothma spun, brow crinkled in dismay. “You have no idea what I’ve been doing these past days, General. Since we first heard rumors of the planet killer, I’ve been straining to organize our allies in the Senate so they might push through a vote: a declaration of intent for the Empire’s demilitarization and a reconciliation with the Rebel Alliance.”
Draven hadn’t known that, though such a vote had always been part of Mothma’s long-term plan. He should have known, certainly. It was a humbling, unwanted reminder of Alliance Intelligence’s blind spots.
Mothma wasn’t finished. “I could make do with uncertainty. The possibility, the rumors of a planet killer months or years from completion could have driven votes our way. Galen’s testimony regarding its power and purpose might have been even better. But this…” She sighed and sat on the windowsill, smoothing the folds in her white robe. “A fully operating planet killer, ready to deploy, and the Alliance has next to nothing? If I revealed that, half the senators wouldn’t believe us, and the others would panic. I can’t control panic.”
Draven digested the statements, filed parts away for later investigation, and did his best to separate what was aimed at him from what was simply a cry of frustration.
“Does that mean,” he asked, careful to show no judgment, “that you’re giving up on a political solution?”
“Never,” Mothma said quietly. “But peace may be deferred a little longer.”
Draven barked a laugh and immediately regretted it. After a moment, Mothma gave one of her rare, self-deprecating smiles.
“We’ll need to gather the Alliance council, of course,” she said. “As soon as possible. Brief everyone together and determine our strategy in the face of a crisis.”
Draven had anticipated that. A gathering of Alliance leaders was a bad idea on the face of it—one traitor with a thermal detonator or one careless transmission would put an end to the Rebellion—but he didn’t have a better option. The military commanders were used to traveling covertly, despite the danger; the civilian council members, the scattered Alliance agents in the Imperial Senate and elsewhere, would be more difficult to summon discreetly to Base One.
“I’ll handle it,” he said. It would be like moving a mountain on short notice, but he would handle it. “There’s a good chance we’ll have Captain Andor and Erso’s daughter back in time for the meet.”
“Good. Captain Andor’s testimony might help calm and persuade the more skeptical councilors.” She didn’t sound like she believed it.
“Andor may not have a lot to say. Turns out the message that kicked this whole thing off? The one from Galen Erso?” Mothma nodded and cocked her head. Draven sighed. “Erso’s daughter is the only one alive who saw it. She saw Erso, too, before he died. We’ll debrief her, but I don’t know how calming she’s going to be in front of a crowd.”
Mothma smoothed her robes again, examined them for half a minute or more. Then she stood. “I want Jyn Erso in that conference,” she said. “Make sure of it.”
More than anything else she’d said, that surprised Draven. Jyn Erso?
“The girl’s a thief and a liar,” Draven said. “She was in prison for a reason. Practically bit the heads off my extraction team.” Mothma had pushed to get Jyn off Wobani from the start; anyone else, Draven would have assumed she didn’t want to admit to a bad call. “You really see something in her?”
“Fire,” Mothma said, as if that explained anything.
“Sure.” Draven hesitated, thought of ending the conversation while he was on comparatively firm ground and decided to take another chance instead. “Whatever the council decides,” he said, “we’ll need to move fast. I’ll see if I can recall some specialists, air and ground troops; they’ll be in reserve if we need them.”
“Thank you, General,” Mothma said.
“When I say whatever the council decides…” He stood from her desk, released a slow breath. “I can’t promise to be on your side once that meeting starts.”
“I know,” Mothma said. “I imagine we’ll both be trying to make up for our mistakes.”
Draven had no retort for that, so he nodded brusquely and left the room
. He had enough to keep him busy without resorting to self-reflection.
—
Mustafar burned like an ember in the dark, seething with oceans of lava and spotted with continents of black rock. Krennic looked upon it and thought of the Death Star, wondered if the power of his weapon tempered just so could reduce a world to such a state; crack its skin and bleed it until it died in its own heart’s fire.
The power of planets failed to rival Krennic’s creation. But the Death Star was not with him today.
His shuttle pitched and rolled as it entered the atmosphere, riding rivers of black clouds tossed by howling winds. The shuttle’s stabilizers and gravity units maintained an interior equilibrium, but Krennic found the experience no less unsettling for the relative lack of discomfort. He grasped his chair tight, kept his chin raised, and reviewed for the sixth time everything he knew about Darth Vader, recounted every one of a dozen tactics he might use in conference with the man who had made Mustafar his base of operations.
The shuttle dipped beneath the clouds. The life support units clicked softly as they switched from warming to cooling the air. Through the viewport, Krennic glimpsed a geyser of molten rock dancing a dozen meters from the ship.
Was Vader mad? Was this his homeworld? Perhaps he wasn’t human beneath his armor; perhaps that forbidding black suit did more than replace lungs and limbs damaged in battle, and instead allowed a creature born in magma to survive the chill of space.
Or maybe he lived on Mustafar because he enjoyed burning his victims alive.
What did it say about Emperor Palpatine that he chose such a man as his enforcer?
No. Krennic shook his head, refusing to nurture that thought. The Emperor was vindictive, but not mad. He was a gamesman, a being of vast vision and vaster ambitions who’d begun his life as an ordinary politician and seized extraordinary opportunities as they arose; used each to its utmost advantage. Palpatine had tamed Vader, but he had not created the self-styled mystic and lord of the dead Sith cult.
That gave Krennic hope. If a senator from Naboo could leash Vader, then surely Krennic could as well. Whether he was here for accolades or castigation, he could creep into Vader’s inner circle and break the alliance between Vader and Tarkin. He had the means: The seed planted in his mind at Jedha had reached maturity on Eadu, and he had found Tarkin’s weakness. He only needed a chance to exploit it.
The shuttle swept toward a stark black mountain against the blazing sea: an obsidian monolith bound in metal, towering over fiery oblivion. When the shuttle landed, Krennic disembarked into the heat and was greeted with a gesture by a black-cloaked aide. As the aide led him through the monolith, Krennic wondered how many visitors the man had led to execution. No wonder he’s not talkative.
But such thoughts were self-indulgent. Krennic reproached himself for his morbidity and suspected Galen was to blame—the demise of a man Krennic had known for decades made him aware of his own mortality at the worst possible time. He smoothed down his uniform, tugged at the hem of his shirt, assured himself he was presentable. In a rotunda deep within the monolith, he was bade to wait while the aide proceeded through the iris of a door.
The scent came to Krennic first—chemical, medicinal, like ointment on a scrubbed droid. Then came the sound of fluid draining from a vast enclosure and the mechanical whining of a hundred gleaming manipulators. Steam spilled from the iris, and as Krennic’s eyes adjusted he heard a new sound: a hollow, metallic rasp that resonated in the chamber; the desperate, hungry breathing of a creature that should not have been alive.
Krennic’s guide reemerged and disappeared into the corridor. Krennic barely noted his departure, trying to assemble the glimpses of shadow before him into an image he could recognize.
“Director Krennic.” The words of the thing that breathed in the dark, deep and puissant as the voice of an abyss. Krennic felt his teeth vibrate, forced himself to bow.
“Lord Vader.” His voice did not tremble, and he was grateful.
The steam was dissipating. Shadows coalesced into a silhouette and stepped forward. Before Krennic loomed a black-cloaked figure in ebon armor, lights glimmering on a chest plate engraved with controls and readouts. The helmet was a skeletal horror, polished to a gleam and colorless save for crimson lenses in the place of eyes.
“You seem unsettled.” Vader had no face to read. Krennic tried to assess him by his posture, by the cadence of that agonized breath, and failed on both counts.
But he speaks like any other man, Krennic told himself. This will be a game of words. And the Sith Lord did not strike Krennic as a man apt to waste time prior to an execution; he had already revealed more than he intended.
“No,” Krennic said. “Not unsettled. Just pressed for time. There’re a great many things to attend to.”
“My apologies.” Vader stepped forward. The red eyes stared out of steam and darkness. “You do have a great many things to explain.”
Such as? he could have asked, but better to present his victories upfront. “I’ve delivered the weapon the Emperor requested,” Krennic said. “The test on Jedha has proven its power. Yet I fear Governor Tarkin may have—as a relative stranger to the project—failed to articulate to the Emperor the essence of our success.”
Vader is a warrior at heart. He’ll respect boldness.
Krennic finished: “I deserve an audience to make certain he understands its remarkable potential.”
The terrible mask looked down upon Krennic. The voice spoke. “Its power to create problems has certainly been confirmed. A city destroyed. An Imperial facility openly attacked.” A swift step forward and to Krennic’s side, like a hunter circling his prey.
An Imperial facility openly attacked. Vader blamed Krennic for the strike on Eadu. Was this, then, the opportunity Krennic had sought? The chance to reveal Tarkin’s error so soon?
“It was Governor Tarkin that suggested the test,” he began.
But the voice spoke again, resonating in Krennic’s skull: “You were not summoned here to grovel, Director Krennic.”
Krennic swore inwardly. He’d been too transparent. “No, I—”
“There is no Death Star,” the voice said. “We are informing the Senate that Jedha was destroyed in a mining disaster.”
“Surely the Senate—”
“—is not without uses, so long as it remains pacified. It will be dealt with by the Emperor according to his timetable.”
“Yes, my lord,” Krennic said. He straightened his back, took the rebuke with dignity.
Vader had completed his circuit. He didn’t deign to glance at Krennic as he strode toward the door. “I expect you to not rest until you can assure the Emperor that Erso has not compromised this weapon.”
Was that all? A swift interrogation and a warning?
“So I’m—” Krennic began. The words sounded faint and he found himself suddenly parched, his throat raw. “I’m still in command of the station? You’ll speak to the Emperor about—”
Vader gestured, his back still to Krennic. Krennic tried to swallow and discovered the act was difficult—as if an unseen hand had grasped his neck and, in utter control of the pressure it exerted, begun to squeeze.
As he coughed and then stopped coughing, fighting desperately for air, Krennic thought of the stories he’d heard of Vader, the time at a military conference when he’d seen Vader strangle an officer. He’d told himself in the days after that Vader had wrapped his hands around the man’s neck until it cracked, but Krennic had lied to himself.
The Jedi were dead, but their power persisted. Mad cultist or not, the Sith Lord’s sorcery was real.
The unseen hand clenched Krennic’s throat for a final moment—long enough for him to believe that somehow, death had found him after all—then released. Krennic fell to his knees, caught himself on his hands, felt the cold floor through his gloves.
“B
e careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director,” the voice from the abyss said.
Then Vader was gone and Krennic was panting as he scrambled backward, not even fully upright by the time he left the rotunda. The cloaked aide was waiting. With a tip of his head the man indicated for Krennic to follow, retracing the paths they’d walked earlier.
Krennic smiled a giddy, unpleasant smile as he limped away.
Vader had let him live. Vader had judged him too valuable to kill—and by extension, the Emperor recognized his value as well. Tarkin’s mutiny, his seizure of the Death Star, had been forestalled. And Krennic had yet to reveal Tarkin’s greatest error—how in destroying Jedha City, Tarkin had failed to blockade the moon, failed to ensure against survivors. For how else could the rebels have infiltrated Eadu? The traitorous pilot had come from Eadu and fled to Jedha; his message had escaped.
Only Tarkin could be held responsible for that.
Krennic could wait to deploy that weapon against Tarkin, though. Vader was correct that the extent of Galen’s treachery remained unclear.
Could Galen—not Krennic or the facility—have been the rebels’ true target on Eadu? Had the rebels feared Galen would submit to Imperial interrogation and reveal even greater betrayals and sabotage?
Krennic needed to know. He needed to be certain.
The cloaked aide spoke for the first time, jolting Krennic from his thoughts. “Few people have the honor of seeing Lord Vader in his sanctum.” They had reached the door to the landing pad. “I suggest you keep all you witnessed to yourself.”
Krennic drew himself up, studied the aide, and found him as unreadable as Vader’s mask. He said nothing as he stepped back into the heat.
He was ready to leave the madhouse that was Mustafar, but he was suddenly uncertain he could ever escape Vader’s shadow.
Aboard his shuttle, he ordered a course set for Scarif.
—
Jyn huddled in the cramped engine compartment of the Imperial cargo shuttle and waited for the mechanisms’ heat to warm her. She was beginning to believe it never would.
Rogue One Page 19