“So,” he said with a smile he hoped wasn’t too forced, “if this is how you’re meeting me…Hi, sweetheart. I’m your dad. I’m thirty-eight standard years old right now, and you’re almost two. I can’t give you a lot of specific information, because if the Empire ever sees this, it could put us all in danger, but right now, we are on a rebel base, and you are sleeping right over there.” He grabbed the camera and pointed it at her. “That’s you! You’re so little right now!” He looked at her, listened to her soft breaths. He could feel that he was about to lose his nerve, keep her with him at a place that he knew wasn’t safe, but would at least keep them together, but if the reports about the Empire’s battle station were true…He refocused his courage, and turned the camera back on himself. “You and I came here when you were just six months old, right after your mother died. I’ll tell you about her in a second, but first I want you to know where you’re from.
“You were born in an underground mining colony on a moon, in a place called the Outer Rim. There’s no atmosphere on the moon, so some folks who live there now have never even been above the surface, and they’ll never see the stars. But where you’re going, you’ll get to see the stars every night. Your mother and I aren’t from there, and it probably isn’t safe to tell you where we both came from (if we’re watching this together, I’ll tell you right now. Pause this and ask me!) but we were both mechanics—I still am, I work on Y-wings instead of extractors now—and we met there when we worked in the same sector.”
He held up a holo of Fiona and showed it to the camera. “This is your mom. Her name was Fiona, and she was my favorite human in the whole galaxy, until you came along. She was clever and kind. She understood how machines worked better than the people who designed them, and she could fix them faster than anyone I’ve ever met. I loved her as much as she loved you, and she loved you more than anything.”
“You have your mother’s beautiful eyes, but it looks like you got my big dumb ears. Sorry about that.” He chuckled. “Your mom loved math and music, and when you were a tiny, tiny baby, she sang ‘Mama Moon’ to you every single day.” His voice caught in his throat and his eyes watered. He missed Fiona so much.
“Okay. So. The Empire came to our colony a few months before you were born. An Imperial officer assembled us in the core and told us that the company we worked for had been taken over by the Empire. He said it was because the company wasn’t meeting safety regulations, but that was a lie. He knew it and we knew it. The Empire needed doonium, and we had a lot of it. And if there’s one thing you need to know and understand about the Empire it is that it will take whatever it wants, whenever it wants it. The Empire will take everything you care about, everything and everyone you love, if you let them.”
He realized that he had clenched his fists and tightened up his shoulders. He willed himself to relax, looked down and opened his hands. He touched the ring he still wore on his left hand as blood pumped back into his fingers.
“The Empire took your mom away from us, honey. An Imperial officer named Duggan killed her, just because he could. I want you to know this, so you never forget what we are fighting against, and why I’m sending you away.
“I also want you to know that not everyone is courageous enough to stand up to the Empire, and those people, who we call collaborators, are just as bad as the Empire is. They may even be worse, because they should know better. It’s because of a collaborator that your mom isn’t here. His name was Corbin, and he had been our friend for years, until the Empire arrived. It happens so fast, Laina, you don’t even realize it’s happening. One day, your friends are eating breakfast with you in the canteen, and when it’s time for dinner, they’re wearing an Imperial uniform.”
Outside their room, a muffled voice announced the duty change. He would have to wake her up soon, dress her for travel. Say goodbye.
“Corbin’s new uniform fit him too well. It was like he’d always wanted to wear one, because it was how he could feel important. But he wasn’t important. He wasn’t any more important than the blaster Duggan used to kill your mom. I know I’m talking about him a lot, but I need you to know that the Empire exists because of people like Corbin, who are too weak or ambitious to stand up to people like Duggan, and the Rebellion exists because of people like your mom, who are willing to risk their freedom and their lives to stand up to them both.
“Corbin didn’t have a family before the Empire came, and when he saw how happy your mom and I were to have you, it made him jealous. He started doing little things to bother us, like making me work extra shifts, and yelling at your mom that she couldn’t have you with her in the canteen, even though everyone on our crew loved it when you were around.
“This went on until one day your mom just ran out of patience with him and she told him to stop being a bully. Well, later that night, Corbin showed up at our quarters with Duggan, the Imperial officer in charge. Corbin had told Duggan that your mom and I were secretly rebel spies. We weren’t rebels then, and Corbin knew it. We were just parents trying to take care of our family, who were tired of being pushed around by someone with a little bit of power.
“I still don’t know if Duggan believed Corbin, or if he just wanted to use your mom and me to frighten and intimidate the rest of our crew. But he and his Loyalty Officers ordered your mom and me to confess to being rebel spies in front of everyone, and when we didn’t have anything to confess to, Duggan killed her. He just shot her, right in front of me, as casually as turning off a light.”
Ryland reached out and stopped recording. Did Laina really need to know all of that? If this was the only recording of him she would ever have, if she was going to watch this as she grew up, did he want to make her relive the death of her mother the way he did, night after night? He played the recording back, watched himself say the Rebellion exists because of people like your mom, who are willing to risk their freedom and their lives to stand up to them both, and tapped Record again.
“All of us who joined the Rebel Alliance have lost something, or someone, or someplace we loved. I’ve lost all three, and it isn’t easy for me to say goodbye to you today. But I have to send you someplace where you’ll be safe, where you’ll get to grow up and have a family, if you want one. I hope that we don’t need the Rebel Alliance by the time you’re old enough to join it, but if we do, I want you to know that it’s in your blood to fight back. You are your mother’s daughter.
“I will miss you every day, but I know that you’ll be safe with your Aunt Rhee and Aunt Eron. They helped our family escape from the Empire, and they introduced me to the rebels. I don’t have time to tell you that part of the story, but you can ask them to tell it to you, when you’re ready to know. They love you very much, and they’re going to take you to a planet called Alderaan, which is far away from any fighting. You’ll be safe there. You can grow up and make friends, and have the kind of life I always wanted you to have. I’ll fight for you as long as I have to, and I’ll see you soon.
“I love you so much, Laina, and I miss you already.”
He stopped recording, and saved the file.
Ryland walked over to his daughter’s bed and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Sweetheart,” he said gently, “it’s time to wake up.”
Eighteen hours later
When his watch was over, Ryland declined an invitation to join some of the pilots from Blue Squadron in the canteen and took a transport back to his quarters. He lingered at the door, his hand heavy as he lifted it to key the entry code. For the first time since they had arrived from Burnin Konn a year ago, he would open it to find an empty room on the other side.
He’d been standing there for several minutes when Mol Hastur, their neighbor, walked by. She paused and put her hand on his shoulder. “You did the right thing, Ry,” she said.
“I know,” he answered.
“The Force is with her,” Mol said. “It’s with us all.”
“Thanks, Mol. I hope you’re right.” He typed in h
is code and went inside. The door hissed closed heavily behind him.
A weapon was meant to be fired.
Every military man could tell you that. Treat all weapons as charged; never assume a blaster was set simply to stun and not kill.
General Cassio Tagge, Chief of the Imperial Army, knew that. As he walked the corridors of the greatest battle station ever built in this or any galaxy, he was deeply aware that he walked through the heart of a weapon. Power simmered beneath the doonium.
He had not been aboard the Death Star when it had gone through its initial test firing on Jedha, but he’d joined soon after and witnessed Scarif. He paused now, a hand on the sleek metal wall, remembering the rumble of power as the Death Star charged and fired. It had been a subtle vibration, something he might not have noticed had he not been looking for it. That was a mark of how big the battle station was—it could kill off half a planet, and most of the people who resided within the station wouldn’t even notice.
A credit to Director Orson Krennic, to be sure. Even when the Joint Chiefs had questioned the validity of such an enormous—and expensive—weapon, Krennic had insisted it was both possible and needed. Tagge had never really liked Krennic. He’d found the man obsessive, but perhaps it took a man obsessed with firepower to make something like the Death Star.
And a man such as Grand Moff Tarkin to take it.
Tagge paused now, his hand still brushing the metal wall of the corridor. He straightened. Without meaning to, he’d arrived at the meeting room early. His thoughts, lingering on Krennic, recalled the last Joint Chiefs meeting in this room, the one where Krennic had insisted the Death Star could do more than destroy a small city like Jedha. Krennic had shoved his chair aside, standing up and beating a fist on the table. Tagge, two seats down, had both admired the man’s passion for the battle station and been disgusted by the childish way in which he presented it.
In the end, Krennic got what he’d wanted. Another test fire, a larger one. Now the seat two chairs down from Tagge’s was empty.
A weapon was meant to be fired. You just had to make sure you were on the correct end of it.
Tagge continued past the meeting room door with purpose in his strides. He had a private office that branched off the tactical room, and there he brought up the reports and footage of Scarif.
Krennic had ever been a man too mercurial for a leadership position. He had guts, true, but he’d relied too heavily on them. Tagge was a man of graphs, of data, of facts and information. They were cold, but they were true.
And the truth of the matter was that the Empire had a problem.
The surveillance droids had been able to transmit some of the rebel activity on the surface of Scarif prior to being destroyed, and Tagge had carefully compiled the data. Unlike the little partisan units scattered throughout the galaxy that caused middling annoyance at best, Scarif showed a concentrated effort. It showed communication. Take ten black hive ants and put them in separate jars, and they could do nothing. But put them in the same jar and they vibrated in harmony until the glass shattered. Hive ants weren’t sentient, exactly, but they were destructive.
The same could be said of the rebels.
Tagge waved his hand, dismissing the Scarif footage. He turned his attention to the list of names in the Imperial Senate that he had compiled. Some were obvious—Mon Mothma had a price on her head for being too blatantly treasonous, and Bail Organa would soon as well, if he did not curb his rebellious tendencies. The man slipped through the political world like oil over water, skimming close to insurgency and relying on legalese and luck. Malicious compliance was still compliance, but it wouldn’t be long before the senator slipped on his own sharp edge. But there were others. Lingering opinions, doubts against the Emperor…they were separated in their little jars now, but Mon Mothma’s dramatic escape from the Senate had opened the lids.
The Senate was abuzz.
And then there was Scarif. Tagge kept coming back to it. The transmission that had leaked. The Death Star plans. The stolen data somewhere out there in the galaxy, a threat hidden in the vast emptiness of space.
It was hard to think that the very battle station he now stood in, so solid, so powerful, could have any weakness. But Tagge forced himself to look at his data, not the solid walls around him. A restless Senate here, a group of targeted, communicating rebels there, and that damn data tape…it wasn’t hard to connect the pieces.
Tagge stared at the data, sorting it in his mind. He debated whether or not he dared ask the Emperor for access to the plans stolen on Scarif. All other copies had been sealed under the highest security—security so high that even he, as Chief of the Imperial Army, was denied access. He understood the concern but knew if he could examine the data there, he might find something before the rebels did…
“General Tagge?” A junior officer’s voice sounded through the intercom.
“Yes?” Tagge replied impatiently.
“Admiral Motti to see you.”
Tagge grunted his affirmation, and the door to his office slid open.
“Thought I’d find you here,” Admiral Conan Antonio Motti said. His gaze swung over the room. He took in the screens Tagge had been examining and, although he said nothing, the sneer on his face indicated his dismissal of Tagge’s concerns.
“Let’s go,” Tagge said gruffly. The two men didn’t talk as they strode down the corridor to the Joint Chiefs’ meeting room. A few of the senior officers were already seated, chatting among themselves. Idle conversations. Meaningless words. Tagge took his seat without speaking, a scowl growing on his face. These men were old. They’d had their war, and they believed they’d ended all war with the finality of it. They leaned in their chairs, comfortable, firm in the safety of the battle station around them.
Tagge swore to himself that he would never slip into passivity like that. He would inevitably grow old and gray like the senior chiefs, he would have his wars behind him as they did, but he would never lean back in his chair and sip his caf and ignore the looming threat merely because he didn’t want to believe it to be there.
“Is something wrong?” one of the senior advisers asked at Tagge’s scowl.
Before he could answer, Motti burst in. “He’s being paranoid,” he said in a dismissive tone.
Tagge swallowed down his anger, but he couldn’t help but insist on the truth. “Until this battle station is fully operational, we are vulnerable.” He caught a glimpse of Motti’s gleam of triumph for having successfully baited him, but he continued anyway. “The Rebel Alliance is too well equipped. They’re more dangerous than you realize!”
“Dangerous to your starfleet, Commander. Not to this battle station.”
Motti was so quick to respond that Tagge was certain he’d been crafting this comeback since he stopped by the tactical room.
Tagge cast a surreptitious look around the room. The senior advisers clearly agreed with Motti. They were comfortable, Tagge realized. Made lenient by the protection they felt inside the doonium walls. Soft. Weak.
Unwilling to see that the large round laser at the heart of the Death Star was just as easily a target as a weapon.
An image of Director Orson Krennic flashed in Tagge’s mind, and he had to resist the urge to look at the seat the man had once occupied in this very room. He thought of the enraged way the director had insisted the Death Star was ready, that it would revolutionize the galaxy and quell even the most fleeting thought of rebellion.
Would it take the veins popping out of my neck, spittle flying from my lips, a crazed look in my eye before these men would listen? Tagge thought.
And then he remembered Krennic’s fate, and thought, Was that what happened to men who argued in this room?
Still. He needed them to see. To understand.
“The Rebellion will continue to gain support in the Imperial Senate until—”
Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin strode into the room, and Tagge’s words died in his throat. “The Imperial Senate will no longer be
of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Republic have been swept away.”
A sliver of ice ran down Tagge’s back. No Senate? he thought. He imagined the hive ants, each in individual jars, and then he imagined the lids on each of them disappearing, and the swarm rising up.
“That’s impossible!” Tagge exclaimed. “How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?”
He caught a disapproving look from one of the senior advisers, but he disregarded it. It wasn’t weapons that kept people obedient, despite what Motti, what Krennic, what Tarkin himself believed. Weapons riled people up, reminded them that they could fight. It was bureaucratic mediocrity that made them accept their fate. Show a man a blaster, and he looked for a way to take it for himself and turn it on you. Tell a man he can fight in court, and nine times out of ten he’ll disappear just to avoid the tediousness.
“The regional governors now have direct control over their territories,” Tarkin continued, his voice almost idle. “Fear will keep the systems in line.” He shot a quick glance at Tagge. “Fear of this battle station,” he continued, speaking to the rest of the group.
Tagge ignored the subtle dig and the way Motti reveled in it. “And what of the Rebellion?” he insisted. “If the rebels have obtained a complete technical readout of this station, it is possible—however unlikely—that they might find a weakness and exploit it.”
Tagge had intended Tarkin to answer him. Instead the gravelly, deep voice of Lord Vader filled the room. “The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands.”
Tagge thought for a moment that he heard the sounds of distant screams and shouting, the clatter of a battle in a small area, the swish of a weapon he didn’t recognize. But before his brain could fully process the phantom sounds, they were gone.
When he looked up, Lord Vader faced him. Not for the first time, Tagge wondered what was behind the mask, and then he questioned whether he truly wanted to know. He ground his teeth, unwilling to show the way Lord Vader’s gaze intimidated him.