Private Jessuk Ordan, Second Class, had mouthed off to the wrong person and got put on grunt work. While most of the base scrambled around in after-battle madness, he was stuck cleaning out the rooms and bunks of people who had died at Scarif.
Traditionally, battle buddies or superior officers picked up this duty. But today, nobody had the time except for a couple of wet-behind-the-ears privates who didn't know enough to help anywhere else.
It was dull, brainless work, packing and folding and discarding. Morbid, too, he supposed, but only for the first few rooms. After that, you got used to it - filling bags of trash for the huge industrial recycler and boxing up personal effects to be sent home.
For her part, Private Doriya Argita, also Second Class, thought it was interesting to see the things that got left behind. The holos of family or buddies, the notes scribbled on pieces of paper, the mementos of missions long-over, the cheap, broken necklace tangled up in dust in the corner, the coin or two that had sneaked under the bed, all of them last touched by hands that were gone.
"Just things," he said, tossing the necklace into the bin bound for the recycler, and making a note of the coins before stashing them in the valuable-objects envelope.
She was a very new private, her enlistment papers barely registered in the Alliance's heavily coded databanks.
(She had decided to join the Alliance six months ago after seeing the assassination of the Imperial governor whose policies had crushed her family's farm and livelihood. She'd watched him crumple from a sniper's gun during a live broadcast, and something like life, or rage, had flickered awake in the hopeless ashes of her heart. The Empire could be hurt. Stabbed. And she had decided in that moment that she was going to be one of the knives.
Nobody ever learned who the sniper was.)
Jessuk shook his head at her shiny-eyed idealism. A few more duty rounds like this one would knock some of that out of her, he thought world-wearily, ignoring the minor point that the clothes he'd packed up in the last room had seen more action than he had.
He checked his datapad for the next room number as they wended their way through the barracks. "Okay, it's this one."
"Private quarters," she noted with envy. "Must've been an officer."
"Yeah, it says captain here." He tapped the code into the door and it zipped open.
She stepped in, brows raising at the plain, neat room. Their little helper droid trundled after them, supplies swaying on its back. No personal effects, no holos or notes or clutter. "Huh. Are you sure we haven't been here already?"
"This one was Intelligence. They're never here, anyway."
Her eyes brightened. "Intelligence?"
He snorted at her. "You won't find any spy secrets, newbie. Draven's people have already been through." He surveyed the small room, eyes flicking over the desk with a couple of books and a few pencils stacked up, the bed neatly made, the drawers in the chest tightly closed. "Shouldn't take long."
She unfolded a sheet of plastic from the droid's bin, folding edges and fitting tabs together until it stood up into a cheap, flimsy box that she set on the desk. He printed out a label from his datapad and stuck it on the lid. Quartermaster, she noted. It meant the dead man hadn't had anybody to leave his things to.
That wasn't uncommon. People who joined the Rebel Alliance often broke all ties with home, and while every attempt was made to return possessions to the survivors, where security permitted, this room wasn't even the first one this hour to be labeled with that destination. The box would go to the quartermaster's depot, where the contents would be cleaned, sorted, and the ones with use in them still would go to Rebels who needed them.
They stripped the bed, which was all Alliance-issue - no worn quilt or knitted blanket - and bagged it up for the laundry. There was a small, dark stain high up on the left side of the mattress, Doriya noted, and eventually decided it wasn't quite large enough to get special attention. She wondered what had happened.
(He had come back with a less-minor-than-he-wanted-to-admit blaster wound in his shoulder. He'd broken the scab open when he rolled onto his side in his sleep. He'd been so tired that blood had seeped quietly into the sheets for several hours before he woke up and went to get it tended to.)
Jessuk pulled the drawers open and tugged out worn shirts, patched here and there, the collars and the underarms starting to go yellow from old sweat. Most of them were borderline. A few tended toward new, still unstained and crisp. One particularly ragged one went right into the recycler.
(He had worn it to the Ring of Kafrene. The freshest tear, in one of the cuffs, was from where a rough edge of the ladder had caught the cloth as he was scrambling up and away from the stormtroopers, Tivik's body cooling on the plascrete below.)
Pants fared better, only a few of them frayed around the cuffs or worn at the knees. Most of them could be used again. On the other hand, several of the socks were so full of holes you could see daylight through. Most of them went into the recycler after the shirt. The underwear followed.
Doriya cleared the shelves of equipment, packing them into the box. A few extra blaster packs, each of them for a different make and model of weapon. A vibroblade ankle sheath, one strap broken. It could be repaired, probably.
(It would be, but not well. In a few years, it would break again and fall off a soldier's ankle, to be left behind in the icy corridors of Echo Base as the Rebels evacuated.)
A flask. A backpack with a few ration bars and a half-depleted medpac inside. Heavy leather gloves. An infantry helmet, the metal scarred and dull.
(In three years, it would be vaporized, when its wearer would be struck full-on from an AT-ST's cannon in the forests of Endor.)
She moved to the hooks on the wall and took down a dull brown jacket with a few fresh tears in odd places. She poked at them before folding it into the box, wondering if secret spy equipment had been sewn into the jacket, then removed by Draven's people sweeping the room.
(They had.)
Next was a long, heavy blue coat with a thick fur collar. It smelled damp and musty and a little smoky, from rain and explosions on a distant planet.
(After a thorough washing, it would go to a SpecForces sharpshooter, who had always coveted it but hadn't wanted to get it like that. Still, he would wear it through years of missions. Many, many years later, long after the Empire was gone, his daughter would cut the tattered mess of a coat into pieces. Most of it would go to rags, but the fur around the collar was sewn into a stuffed animal for her first baby, who would love it to pieces.)
Jessuk checked the shelf at the base of the nightstand and found a metal can full of pebbles. He looked up at Doriya. "Rocks?"
She shrugged. "Paperweights?"
(One from each planet he visited, in his early days. He'd always picked up the most colorful, interesting pebble he could find. He would line them up on sleepless nights, remembering the planets he'd been to.
He'd stopped doing that somewhere around his nineteenth year, when the pebbles became too numerous, too heavy, and he could no longer remember where they were all from, and he no longer cared to.
He kept the old ones, though.)
Jessuk started to drop the can into the bag for the recycler, and the droid made a little warning sound. The recycler's mechanisms couldn't handle stone.
He dumped it out the window instead. The pebbles pattered to the ground outside, soon lost in the gravel at the base of the building. He dropped the empty can in the recycler bag and the droid let it go by.
She checked the drawers at the desk. "You think it's true?" she asked. "About the Death Star?"
"The higher-ups seem to think so." He shrugged, as if to say that whatever the higher-ups thought was above his head, although he'd been listening to the gossip as avidly as she had.
She pulled out a toolkit with tiny, delicate screwdrivers, pinky-nail-sized gears, and welding torches that produced a pinpoint flame. She eyed it for a moment, then dropped it into the half-full box. She'd ask the quartermaster for it later. Maybe if she bought them a drink.
(He'd used it to work on Kay-Too, tinkering with mechanisms, adding some features, taking others away, repairing what got broken. The edges of the kit were worn shiny from living in his pocket. He'd left it because he hadn't foreseen any use for it, and thought somebody might be able to use it.
Doriya would.)
"They say that's why the fleet went to Scarif," she told Jessuk. She squinted up into the sky, still vaguely envious of the people who'd seen battle. But the edge of that envy had grown duller and duller today, as she packed up the remnants of peoples' lives.
"To see the Death Star?"
She dropped her voice. "To get the plans."
(How many people in the Rebellion really know that a rogue band of deserters went there first? How many people remember the man who pulled strings, called in favors, whispered in ears for a few feverish hours, just days ago?
In twenty years, the Republic's official history will call Scarif a planned and coordinated attack, because reality is a far messier thing than histories would like to admit.)
"Did they?"
"I heard yes."
(Deep in the bowels of the tower, listening to Kay-Too die over comms, flinging himself out into the dark, the burn of a blaster shot to his side, falling, lying on the cold steel grating dizzy with shock. Then, climbing, climbing through the cloud of pain that his body had become. His finger slippery with his own blood on the trigger, his arm trembling with exertion, but his aim true as he fired into Krennic's back. Holding himself up against a steel strut and watching Jyn throw the lever to transmit, then turn to him with the light of triumph in her eyes, and feeling peace well up like a cool, clear spring in his gut.
Yes.
They had got the plans.)
"And they say there's a weakness," Doriya went on. "That it can be defeated."
"If there's a weakness, why aren't we hitting it now?" Jessuk asked.
"Because the Princess received the plans, and she's been captured." She gave a little nod. "But we'll get her back. There's already missions in the stars to find her and retrieve her. That's what I hear."
Jessuk shook his head at her. "People say a lot of things around you, don't they?"
She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. "I listen."
(In about six months, when she'd added the skill of silence to her aptitude for listening, Draven would offer her a position. She would accept.)
Doriya looked around. "Miss anything?"
He checked under the bed, in the drawers, behind the desk. "All clear."
(He would survive the war and retire gratefully to civilian life, telling stories of his time in the Rebel Alliance to get free drinks at bars and snare the attention of good-looking men. After his marriage, he would take a government job, on Hosnian Prime.)
She closed the box and sealed it, setting it outside the door. A cargo droid would be along to scoop the box up, scan the label, and convey it to the quartermaster. He added the bag for trash (black) and the bag for the laundry (white).
They departed, leaving the door open. The helper droid whirred around for a few moments, sucking up dust and dirt, before it trundled out the door too. The faint whine of its motors faded into the distance.
The air in the room stirred and settled. The glare of the gas giant spilled orange light across the clean floor and the bare desk, the stripped bed and the empty drawers.
Like all good spies, Cassian Andor was gone, as if he'd never been there in the first place.
(The Death Star will explode.
The Rebellion will fight on.
The Empire's banner will be torn down.
This is not too high a price to pay.)
FINIS