Rogue One
Page 21
New voices rose in affirmation and dispute. Pamlo was undaunted. “I say this with sincere regret and moral certainty: We cannot in good conscience risk entire worlds for our cause. The Death Star’s existence is an ultimatum we cannot refuse. Until we know that the Empire will not use it on a populated planet, we must scatter the fleet and disband our military units. We have no recourse but to surrender—”
The gathering’s pretense of civility evaporated like water droplets on an engine block. Arguments and murmuring erupted into bedlam. At once, twenty grand speeches began and rabid voices competed to be heard. Generals loosed rhetorical volleys they’d been preparing since the briefing had begun.
Jyn stood openmouthed, uncomprehending. She found herself awaiting the end of Pamlo’s speech, as if it might pivot and become a rallying cry.
She caught fragments of fervent inquiries and proclamations:
“Are we really talking about disbanding something that we’ve worked so hard to create?”
“We can’t just give in—”
One of the civilians and Admiral Raddus, their fury immediately matched and countered by a haughty man in a heavy blue cape:
“We joined an Alliance, not a suicide pact!”
Jyn swore—aloud or silent, she wasn’t sure—and spun hard enough to jostle her closest neighbor as she sought to see and absorb the will of the mob. Of all the outcomes she’d anticipated, all the ways she’d expected the Rebellion to be useless, surrender hadn’t been one of them.
“We’ve only now managed to gather our forces,” Raddus’s civilian ally—a middle-aged man entirely in brown, who seemed to command attention disproportionate to his simple garb—was saying. “If we coordinate at last—”
Finance Minister Jebel interrupted and made no attempt to hide his mockery. “Gather our forces? General Draven’s already blown up an Imperial base! I thought the Alliance was disavowing Gerrera’s tactics—”
“A decision needed to be made,” Draven snarled from across the room. “You know how this works. By the time we finish talking today there’ll be nothing left to defend!”
Jyn’s breaths became rapid hisses through clenched teeth. The briefing room was too small. The sweaty mob was crushing her. The darkness that had been the cave was creeping in at the edges of her vision, compressing her, compressing everything.
Pamlo reentered the fray. “The blood of all Taris will not be on my hands. If it’s war you want, you’ll fight alone!”
“If that’s the way it’s going, why have an Alliance at all?” asked the haughty man in blue.
“If she’s telling the truth, we need to act now!”
If.
And that from Admiral Raddus, one of the councilors Jyn had thought was listening.
What had she done wrong? What had she said wrong?
“Councilors, please!” Mon Mothma was trying to regain control. “We are all troubled by our situation, but I beg you to open yourselves to solutions from your colleagues instead of—”
Mothma’s effort did nothing. More shouting, more arguments:
“It is simple,” a general in a flight suit declared. “The Empire has the means of mass destruction. The Rebellion does not.”
“The Death Star,” Jebel sneered. “This is nonsense.”
If she’s telling the truth.
Jyn was shouting before she realized it, shoving her way back toward the projector. “What reason would my father have to lie? What benefit would it bring him?” She was mimicking the cadence, the language of the senators. She sounded awkward to herself, but she saw Mon Mothma—the woman who’d been practicing her speech for a week—nod surreptitiously in her direction.
“Your father,” Draven said, steady and hard, “may have been an Imperial or a fool until the end. Everything he said could have been bait, knowingly or not, to lure our forces into a final battle. To destroy us once and for all.”
Jyn fumbled for a reply. “That’s insane,” she snapped. She’d lost her senatorial poise already. “You know the Death Star exists—”
But Draven was ready. “We know a dangerous battle station exists, able to destroy a city. We have no confirmation of its full capabilities or weaknesses. This is how the Emperor has always operated, back to the time of the Republic—the gun is less threatening than the lie.”
The man in blue ignored Jyn altogether, stalking toward Admiral Raddus. “You want us to risk everything—based on what? The testimony of a criminal? The dying words of her father—an Imperial scientist?”
Jebel laughed in anger and frustration. “Don’t forget the Imperial pilot.”
Jyn sought Bodhi and found him, back in the room again and forlorn against the wall. He didn’t speak up, didn’t defend himself. Jyn might have screamed at him if he’d been closer. If the darkness hadn’t been closing in so fast.
She squeezed her eyes shut and thought of the girl in her arms from the Holy Quarter. She thought of the broken temple and the Guardians of the Whills and her mother’s whispers.
She had delivered her father’s message, and it wasn’t enough.
“My father,” Jyn said, “gave his life so that we might have a chance to defeat this.”
“So you’ve told us,” a deep, steady voice replied. She saw the white-haired general she’d met her first time on Yavin; the man who hadn’t said a thing.
He seemed to be prompting her.
She wasn’t just Galen’s daughter. This wasn’t just his mission.
“If the Empire has this kind of power,” Senator Pamlo called, “what chance do we have?”
“What chance do we have?” Jyn echoed. She wanted to scream, Who the hell cares? But she needed a better answer. “The question is What choice? You want to run? Hide? Plead for mercy? Scatter your forces?” Her breathing was too fast and loud. Her skin felt hot. The councilors were falling silent one by one. Mon Mothma watched her, lips parted as if she could feed Jyn the right words.
She heard Saw Gerrera instead. You can stand to see the Imperial flag reign across the galaxy?
She didn’t stop speaking, wrapped herself in her own momentum and found the senators’ language again, backed it with ferocity. “You give way to an enemy this evil with this much power and you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of submission. The Empire doesn’t care if you surrender. The Empire doesn’t care if you’re hopeless. I’ve given up before, and it doesn’t help. It doesn’t stop. I’ve seen people lose everything because they happened to be in the way.
“The time to fight is now, while we’re still alive to try. Every moment you waste is another step closer to the ashes of Jedha.”
There were new voices rising in the room. She saw none of the speakers, recognized no one:
“What is she proposing?”
“Just let the girl speak!”
So Jyn spoke. “Send your best troops to Scarif.” The crowd was an undifferentiated blur behind a veil of sweat or tears. “Send the whole rebel fleet if you have to. We need to capture the Death Star plans if there is any hope of destroying it.”
She strained to breathe again. As she did, a smeared ivory figure parted the crowd and approached. Through the blur, Jyn recognized her voice as belonging to Senator Pamlo.
Pamlo was very nearly pleading. “You’re asking us to invade an Imperial installation based on nothing but hope?”
Jyn shrugged, unable to feign a senator’s diction any longer. “Rebellions are built on hope.”
“There is no hope,” the man in blue said, like a preacher pronouncing an omen.
With that, the arguing began anew. Calls to fight and calls to surrender filled the chamber. The movement of dozens of bodies struggling for a place near the projector pushed Jyn back and she limply permitted it. The momentum was gone and her strength with it. She waited for the darkness to return.
She’d tried.
I won’t forget what we did to you.
Jyn said nothing and walked out of the briefing room.
—
Jyn spotted Bodhi hurrying after her in the dank maze of hallways beyond the briefing room. She was trying to retrace her path out of the ziggurat—not really sure of her ultimate destination, but set on putting distance between herself and the council. Maybe she’d keep walking into the jungle; if Bodhi wanted to follow, she wouldn’t argue. She’d kept worse company.
She thought about apologizing to him. She’d blamed him for not speaking up during the chaos, which on reflection hardly seemed fair. He wouldn’t have changed anything.
They stepped into the hangar bay before she could decide whether to say anything. Jyn shielded her face from a shower of sparks as a technician and her astromech welded armor plating onto a nearby X-wing. When she lowered her arm she saw Chirrut and Baze standing before her.
“They didn’t lock you up?” she asked. “The debrief really was just a debrief?” She tried to force levity into her voice. It came out bitter.
“You don’t look happy,” Baze said.
Jyn shrugged. “They prefer to surrender.” It wasn’t true—not for every councilor—but it was close enough.
“And you?” Baze was as somber as ever.
Chirrut gestured toward Jyn with his staff. “She wants to fight.”
It’s all I’ve ever done, she thought. It’s the only answer I have.
Only this time, she believed it was the right one.
“So do I,” Bodhi said, stepping around to her side. “We all do.”
“The Force is strong,” Chirrut said, and it sounded like a promise.
She looked at the blind man, the killer, and the coward in front of her in wonder and confusion.
She didn’t know them—not really, not when they’d barely spoken outside of shouting matches aboard the U-wing. She’d half expected to never see them again after the briefing.
But in front of the councilors, she had wrestled with the words to convey the horrors of the past days. Tried to express all that had happened, all the Empire had taken, without exposing her wounds to the rebels’ eyes—without revealing the shame of her most pitiable, contemptible moments, when she’d been shaken by loss and trapped in her own fears.
Bodhi and the Guardians already knew the horrors and her shame. They’d fought and nearly died together. They’d seen Jyn fall and claw her way back. And they were still with her.
They looked willing to take on the galaxy, no matter that they didn’t have a chance. She couldn’t help but smile, small and sad and sincere.
“I’m not sure four of us is quite enough,” she said.
Baze grunted dismissively and looked to Bodhi. “How many do we need?”
“What are you talking about?” Jyn asked.
Baze jutted a finger, pointing behind Jyn. When she turned around, she saw more than a dozen rebel soldiers marching down the corridor, pouring out into the hangar and blocking the entrance to the ziggurat. She recognized Melshi, the rebel she’d hit with a shovel on Wobani; the others were strangers, young and old men dressed in sandy combat fatigues too patchwork to be called uniforms. Their weapons gleamed with well-oiled care. An amphibious Drabatan with skin worn and gray as baked leather showed a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth; a bald-headed man with bright, dangerous eyes offered a nod. Towering in the back was K-2SO; emerging at the fore came Cassian, chin high and back straight.
He looked like he was ready to arrest her.
“They were never going to believe you,” Cassian said. “Not the council. Not today.”
“I appreciate the support,” she said. Her voice was frigid. Her hands balled into fists. She was surprised how little she wanted this fight.
She positioned herself between Bodhi and Cassian. After what the pilot and the Guardians had said, she was ready to do what was necessary to save them from the Alliance’s goons.
“But I do,” Cassian said. “I believe you.”
Her eyes flickered from Cassian to the soldiers. They were armed, but their postures were relaxed. Their weapons were down. A few even looked amused.
“We’d like to volunteer,” Cassian said.
She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anything the galaxy could throw at her. “Why?”
He smiled, and it died on his face. “Some of us—” He hesitated, waited until Jyn’s gaze had met his. “—most of us, we’ve done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if it were the most obvious truth in the world. “We’re spies. Saboteurs. Assassins.”
Jyn spared another glance at the soldiers. They were looking at her, one and all, as if awaiting judgment.
Was this a confession?
“Everything I did,” Cassian said, “I did for the Rebellion. And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it.” He was almost stumbling over his sentences, forcing each out before he lost his nerve. Like a man wrenching a dislocated limb into place, one agonizing pull at a time.
He went on: “Without that—without a cause—we’re lost. Everything we’ve done would have been for nothing. I couldn’t face myself if I gave up now. None of us could.”
Don’t do this, she wanted to say. I can’t give you absolution.
Instead she looked at the band he’d assembled and whispered with a sort of awe, “How did you find them?”
“It’s been a busy day,” he said, too dry to be devoid of humor. “I didn’t need to see the whole briefing to know where it was going.”
“I can’t—” she started. I can’t give you a cause. But she stepped back unsteadily and saw the ferocity, the need in Cassian’s eyes mirrored in each of the soldiers. Whatever they’d seized on, it was no longer hers to give. She could no more refuse them than Cassian could have refused her after Jedha.
She gave a curt nod. Someone in the group laughed.
“It won’t be comfortable.” Bodhi was speaking behind her, looking between the soldiers and the tarmac where the cargo shuttle sat. “It’ll be a bit cramped, but we’ll all fit. We could go.”
“Okay,” Cassian said. The emotion was gone from his voice, the confession done. He turned to the soldiers. “Gear up. Grab anything that’s not nailed down—we don’t know what we’ll find on Scarif and we don’t have long to prep. Go!”
The soldiers scattered, moving with purpose and surety. Bodhi and the Guardians joined them. Only Cassian and K-2 remained. The droid looked down at her. “Jyn,” he said. “I’ll be there for you. Cassian said I had to.”
She held back a laugh and looked to Cassian. The man who’d betrayed her. The man who’d admitted his guilt and decided to fight for her. He saw her staring and looked back at her quizzically.
It wasn’t how betrayals were supposed to go.
And she remembered that while Cassian—and Bodhi and the Guardians—had seen her at her worst, she had seen them broken, too. Bodhi, who had been tortured; the Guardians, who had lost their home; and Cassian, who had betrayed himself as easily as he had Jyn. They all had their shame.
With one another, at least, they had no vulnerabilities left.
She thought of Wobani again, when she’d been alone among a thousand other prisoners.
“I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad,” she said, by way of explanation.
She didn’t know if Cassian really understood, but he said, “Welcome home,” and she knew she was.
Twenty minutes later, weighed down with weapons and duffels full of stolen gear, Jyn and Cassian stepped out of the bright Yavin sunlight and into the cabin of the cargo sh
uttle. There were, Jyn thought, even more faces than before, more scarred and sweaty and determined soldiers than she’d seen in the hangar. She realized with a pang that she likely wouldn’t have time to learn their names before they arrived on Scarif—that soon they’d all be fighting for their lives together on a mission that was very likely to fail.
Jyn spotted Baze and Chirrut among the rebels. Chirrut’s head was turned toward her, and he raised his staff like a salute or a toast. She remembered a saying from her days with Saw Gerrera and spoke loud enough to be heard through the shuffling of the unit.
“May the Force be with us.”
—
“Cargo shuttle, we have a pushback request here. Read back, please: Request denied. You are not cleared for takeoff.”
Bodhi winced at the comm and peered out the viewport at the tarmac. The flight droids had already tugged the shuttle away from the ziggurat hangar; that gave him room to initiate a vertical liftoff without worrying about igniting an inconveniently placed fuel tank.
“Yes, yes we are cleared,” he said. “Affirmative. Requesting a recheck.”
It was a bad plan. It had all been a bad plan, of course, starting with Galen’s message and ending with this unauthorized raid on Scarif. Now he was, what—defecting from his defection? If he survived, he’d be an Imperial traitor and a rebel mutineer. He’d be lucky to see the inside of a Yavin prison cell.
He wondered if there was a Bor Gullet on Yavin, too. He doubted it. He could take comfort in that.
“I’m not seeing this request here,” the comm said.
He thought about his passengers. Like him, they were going rogue, courting treason by defying the Alliance council. They’d already pilfered enough Alliance weapons and gear to supply an army; and Bodhi had seen enough of the operation on Yavin to know equipment was in short supply.
He wasn’t sure if that made the personnel on-base more or less likely to shoot the shuttle down. They’d want to recover the stolen gear, at least…
“Are you sure everything’s been processed?” Bodhi tried. “Someone should’ve authorized it by now.”