.
"So you're all done with the debrief?"
They are walking from their quarters toward their respective offices at Alliance Command. Since these are less than a hundred meters apart on board the Home One, it practically means a joint commute to work on the days when both of them are at HQ – if commute is the right word for a 10-minute walk. This particular morning they each received summons from their respective superiors to attend briefings – she from Cracken, he from Madine; hers is not unexpected, being the usual time reserved for regular update meetings, but she thought Cassian and Winter, his most recent travelling companion, would still be talking to others about their trip to Thyferra. After all, they only came back yesterday afternoon. Then again, she and Cassian had more important things on their minds since his return than discussing the timing of debriefing sessions.
Cassian flashes her a grin. "It's easy when one of us has a holographic memory." Travelling with Leia may by now have the easy feel of old acquaintance, but Winter, a relative newcomer to these missions as her main job is still within Cracken's domain as semi-independent spymaster – has the rare gift of a perfect memory that, in fact, made her the perfect field agent and a valued intelligence analyst. She holds no official rank within Intel, but it does not make her unofficial status any less respected. "Whatever this is," Cassian goes on, "I suppose it's about something else." By then they are only a couple of hundred meters away from her office. "You expect to be working long today?"
A corner of her mouth twitches up. "Not if I can help it." They've done their best to make up for his absence yesterday, but she sure would not mind another early night… night being, of course, a relative term in more ways than one.
The cheeky grin returns. "Me neither. So I guess I'll see you back at quarters and then we can decide what to do." Neither his suggestive side-eyed glance nor her salacious smirk leave much doubt as to the outcome of that decision.
"Guess so. Wait, that's my briefing room you're going – "
He turns back toward her, then looks down at his datapad, then back up at her. "Delta 9?"
"Yeah, that's our usual – " Her voice trails off and his eyes go momentarily wide and stay fixed on her as the meaning hits them. "Oh sith."
x x x
It should not really come as a surprise, after their last-moment discovery, to see a relatively unusual array of attendees at the briefing room. It does not even look like Cracken is chairing it this time, seeing how the assembly looks more like an impromptu session of the newly-constituted Provisional Council than a normal weekly update meeting he runs, starting with Mon Mothma and including Leia, Winter, and, yes, Madine, besides her superior; and no one else. The only people needed to make this a full-on top-level strategy briefing are Ackbar and, perhaps, Wedge, considering how Solo, the other recent addition to the line-up, has been in carbonite the past three months or thereabouts.
"Colonel. Captain. Glad you can join us." She was right; it is not Cracken but Mon Mothma who greets them on behalf of the assembly. "We are also expecting that Admiral Ackbar and Commander Antilles will be joining us at a later point."
Jyn hopes that her mental scowl is not immediately apparent. She was right on this count, too, which does nothing to dispel the proverbial bad feeling about this that has been gnawing at the back of her mind since Cassian discovered the not-really-coincidental briefing room location. Had this been a matter of a normal strategy discussion, there would have been no need for this secrecy that saw them called separately into the same meeting. She wonders who among those present knew the full list of participants.
"Due to the highly sensitive subject matter, we have sent out individual invitations rather than a group notice for this meeting," Mon Mothma continues by way of explanation as they take their seats; at least whoever was supervising the seating arrangements made sure that there were two vacant seats side-by-side around the table. Jyn knows what such invitations mean: the top ten or so people in the Alliance have two messaging accounts, one that is read by their aides and one that is for their eyes only; and the intention was obviously to keep it strictly to those involved. While it would have made no difference in the case of her and Cassian, they ended up being summoned in the same fashion unbeknownst to one another. "And I need not remind any of you present that whatever discussion we have today should not be continued outside this room."
Seeing the nodding heads around the table, she goes on. "The Generals and Admiral Ackbar and Senator Organa and myself have recently met to review our strategic priorities going forward, and the tactics that may bring us closer to achieving them. Our deliberations were greatly informed by Captain Andor's recent analysis, for which I would like to express my thanks."
Jyn is caught unawares by this; she is no stranger to seeing her work appreciated, but usually the praise comes from Cracken, and occasionally Leia and always Cassian when they are on the receiving end of her briefing notes. But she did not expect her latest reports, which are presumably what Mon Mothma is referring to, to have been the subject of an extensive top-level discussion. "Thank you."
"The gratitude is ours, believe me. It was an excellent summary analysis of how our recent advances have been perceived throughout the galaxy and what next likely targets we can concentrate on. Taken together with Colonel Andor's review of the state of affairs within the Alliance military, it has given us a comprehensive sense of where we are and where we should be going."
Surely this august assembly did not summon the two of them here simply to shower praise.
"Our conclusion based on your findings and recommendations is that the moment has come to capitalize on our gains. Our ultimate goal is restoring democracy and reinstating the Republic. To do so, we need a minimal critical mass of worlds supporting the Alliance, located within feasible distances and reasonably safe trade and supply routes from one another, to make sure that the new Republic is not crushed by a concentrated Imperial assault."
"In the recent months, Senator Organa and Winter and Colonel Andor," she shifts her gaze to each of the named participants as she speaks, "have made considerable advances on this front in terms of provisional alliances and supply arrangements, so we believe that we are very close to our minimal target. However, this alone may not be enough to guarantee us a lasting victory; we also need the moral support of at least a significant part of the Core Worlds, and the key Outer Rim sectors, that will safeguard against these worlds continuing to actively support the Empire. It is less important at this stage if this takes the form of open opposition or insidious sabotage, but for either to take root, the respective governments and populations need to see that the Empire is not invincible. We need a highly visible game-changer that will tilt things to our advantage."
"As I mentioned in my report, Senator," Cassian cuts in, "the most significant and effective game-changer would be…"
"Taking Coruscant, I know," Mon Mothma picks up. "But you also admit that we are not yet ready to make it an immediate priority. Apart from the constraint that Captain Andor discusses in her analysis, that of the current lack of likely dissenter worlds in the Deep Core region near Coruscant that can serve as stepping stones to a concentrated attack, there are other constraints that I shall leave it to General Madine to discuss. Coruscant remains our medium-term objective, however, and taking the necessary steps to make its eventual liberation possible is one of the reasons for today's meeting. General?" She tips her head to Madine, who sits up as his keen blue eyes survey the group around the table.
"As the Senator says, we are indeed looking at retaking Coruscant, though not right now. But it remains the long game plan, and in order to be able to take it in one or two years' time from now, we need to start laying the groundwork today. Senator Organa just came back from a trip to Imperial City looking for leads concerning Captain Solo's whereabouts," he goes on.
Jyn steals a glance at Leia and sees her barely-concealed wince. One of the reasons most of Cassian's recent diplomatic trips were taken in Winter's company was because in the past few weeks Leia got lured onto what turned out to be a wild bantha chase after being promised information on where to find Han; in reality it only got her entangled with the conniving reptilian leader of Coruscant's underworld, but on the upside, she managed to escape and the crime lord met a grisly end at Vader's hands.
"And she reports that the Empire and the Emperor personally have instituted significant changes in spacecraft access protocols, security perimeters and the like, since the Senate was disbanded. Things we have next to no information about, and things that it will be crucial for us to know in preparing for a planetary offensive. I'll leave it to General Cracken to speak about it in more detail."
There is no mistaking the drier tone as he says this; it is not the best-kept secret that Cracken and Madine are not exactly bosom buddies, and the old business of stealing Cassian away did little to improve that, but they have worked together quite well since long before Hoth; and anyway, it should be Cracken to hold a grudge against Madine in that affair, not vice versa. Jyn wonders what else is at play, but has to leave that trail of thought hearing Madine continue.
"But there is another target we can concentrate on in the immediate future that is nothing if not high-profile."
Next to her, she sees Cassian raise a skeptical eyebrow. "You mean killing Palpatine."
"Exactly. Now the Colonel and I have been over it several times," he continues, stroking his short beard to conceal a mini-smirk; and Jyn remembers how annoyed Cassian was on those occasions at Madine harping on the subject, despite the fact that their working relationship otherwise is practically excellent. "And we have our differences of opinion, but what cannot be denied is that he is a potent symbol."
"He's a crazy old dictator," Cassian mutters; in a normal military this blatant insubordination would be an invitation to a reprimand from his superior, but Madine lets it slip.
"That too, Cassian, but as the Captain – your wife – points out in her observations, he still carries considerable clout on the smaller worlds and on the few worlds he has recently visited, mostly by virtue of instilling fear rather than inspiring respect; these worlds could sever their Imperial allegiance and even declare themselves in favour of the Alliance if the Emperor were known to be dead."
"Do we even know if he's mortal?" Leia muses quietly from across the table.
Winter, seated next to her, looks up, slender fingers twirling a strand of platinum hair. "Well, technically he's known to be human. His strong command of the Force renders him less vulnerable to most conventional threats, and likely means that he can't be taken down in a firearms assault or by detonating a contained charge. But given a powerful enough explosion, such as a proton torpedo, or targeting him with a direct ion cannon salvo, it is likely that he will die." And as Leia's childhood friend and fellow Alderaanian, Jyn figures, Winter will shed no tears on the occasion.
"I agree, but what are the chances of luring him off Coruscant?" Leia counters. Seeing her drawn face and the set lines around her mouth, Jyn suspects that her grave mood may have something, or rather a lot, to do with her fruitless trip to the capital planet and with the continued uncertainty regarding Han's survival.
"As I mention in my report, Senator," Jyn speaks up, "he has been known to travel to a number of Core worlds in the past year. He has even taken three trips to Inner Rim and Corporate Sector planets where he apparently considered it a strategic priority to maintain Imperial hold on local governments and industry. He sees such travel as an opportunity to demonstrate his total control over and exhaustive knowledge of the state of affairs throughout the galaxy, whether or not it is borne out by popular sentiment at those places."
"So what do we do, incite a revolt?" Cassian asks; the question is not so much addressed to her as to Madine, continuing their long-running argument.
"First, we need to see where it is that he is planning to go to, and when. It may be that the attendant risks of dealing with his powers, or the collateral damage, may be too high on a given occasion to justify an attack, but until we know where it is he plans to go we won't be able to complete that assessment."
"And until we have a secure information channel from Coruscant that will inform us as to his upcoming whereabouts, we cannot even start it," Cracken joins in. "General, may I?" The last part is addressed to Madine, who nods and leans back in his chair.
"As General Madine was saying," Cracken begins, "our immediate challenge is that the intelligence gathering we have in place on Coruscant is woefully inadequate."
Do we even have one? Jyn bites down on her quip; Cracken would let her get away with the acerbic comment, but the one certain to take offence would be Winter, who has spent many frustrating weeks sifting through contacts and travelling to Coruscant and back under two different cover identities trying to drum up contacts with very little progress to show for it through no fault of her own.
"Such is the all-pervasive nature of the surveillance put in place over the past four years, and previously since the formation of the Empire, that it takes a particularly courageous citizen to wish to risk certain discovery, and their life as a consequence, by relaying information to the Alliance. All important Coruscant public spaces and a significant proportion of private venues are under holocam surveillance that is monitored by Imperial data scanner droids. We have had numerous reports of citizens' homes being bugged using audio devices; these are much cheaper than holocams and easier to install, so for an Empire desperate to eavesdrop and having the droid-powered data processing capacity, the possibilities are practically unlimited. It can be assumed that the majority of Holonet traffic to and from private datapads is also vulnerable to Imperial backdoors. As a result, such courageous citizens as we have been able to find have not managed to stay active for long before being apprehended or killed."
The sullen look Winter is directing at him confirms Jyn's earlier wisdom in holding her tongue, but does nothing to change the truth. "And such courageous citizens have tended to be from civilian ranks rather than the military or the administration," Winter cuts in, "so the data they have had access to have, on the average, been of relatively limited value, to the point that the gain often does not justify the cost in their safety and lives."
"Exactly." Cracken's green eyes flash; had it not been for the streaks of grey beginning to show in his thick red hair, he could almost pass for a thirtysomething, barely a couple of years older than Cassian. "So one of our urgent priorities is recruiting assets within the Imperial government and military, in order to be able to collect higher-value data."
So this must be where Cassian comes in, she figures morosely; given that he had started his Intel career as a recruiter before either Madine or Cracken had come to hold their present positions, they might just want to pull him into it again.
Sure enough, Cracken's next words confirm her guess.
"Knowing your extensive background in this kind of activity, Colonel, I took it upon myself to ask General Madine to lend me your services for this mission. Provided that you agree to take it."
So this is why Madine was glaring at Cracken earlier; objectively he could find no reason to oppose Cracken's plan, but surely he would not have been terribly keen on agreeing to risk his right-hand man's life. And it must be also why they waited until this late stage to tell Cassian himself; plainly put, it is quite likely that they bickered about it until the last minute.
To Cassian's credit, his first reaction upon hearing this is directed at neither Madine nor Cracken, but at her. He turns to her with a quick sideways look; she looks back at him, with a fractionally-raised eyebrow for an answer. Your call; I may not be happy about it but I won't stand in the way.
"I will be happy to do my best." He may not sound particularly happy, but he surely sounds ready.
"Thank you. As it happens," Cracken goes on, the relief making him talkative in justifying the fait accompli. "Colonel Andor is one of the very few people if not the only one, be it in Alliance Intelligence or in other branches, who would qualify for this assignment, by virtue of the years he spent undercover at the Imperial Academy."
"Other than yourself, General," Cassian shoots back, the smirk doing little to disguise the respect. She has long suspected that Cassian is just the tiniest bit jealous of Cracken's unprecedented ten-year tenure in the Imperial military, but it would never stop him from giving credit where due.
Cracken's response is a broad grin. "Well, I disqualified myself from any nostalgia trips back into Imperial ranks by virtue of being here, but thank you for the call-out. My being recalled to the Alliance was staged as a casualty rather than an open defection," he goes on, "but by the same token, coming back from the Imperial dead to suddenly resurface on Coruscant would raise too many alarms."
"Others who openly defected from high-ranking positions," he adds with a sly glance at Madine, "and even from junior positions, so long as it was known as a defection, are disqualified for obvious reasons. We have a number of promising young candidates coming up," he says with another grin; Jyn knows the reason to be paternal pride, as one of those promising young candidates is his son Pash about to graduate from Carida as a top-of-the-class TIE fighter pilot, "who nonetheless are too junior to be able to assume high-profile positions that will give them sufficient access to sensitive data and important contacts."
"Unlike all of them," he sums up, extending a hand in Cassian's direction, as if introducing a holodrama star to an eager audience, "Colonel Andor has successfully completed Imperial training but was not known to defect; he simply disappeared. And by virtue of being, say, a couple of years older than my son," he goes on with a wink; in reality Cassian is about ten years older, what with him having just turned thirty and Pash being just over twenty, "he can be credible in a mid-rank position in the Imperial hierarchy. I doubt they'd accept him as a Colonel, but perhaps a demotion to Captain, as it were, would not stretch their credibility beyond what is necessary." It is true that Imperial hierarchy is notoriously slow in promoting officers, even at this time of war.
"So long as you don't shave off the moustache," Jyn mutters under her breath. She still remembers the embarrassing moment, a few weeks after they were married, when she flat-out failed to recognise his clean-shaven self from a distance of ten meters.
Cassian turns to her, his grin from Cracken's shameless flattery turning to a look of mock offence. "The fact that you didn't recognize me…" he begins.
"…because you looked to be about seventeen…" she continues for him.
"That's nonsense," he protests, but she can tell he is playing along.
"You're right, it's nonsense. You looked to be about sixteen."
"Now I'd like to see that," Leia mutters from across the table, and Jyn is pleased to see her finally smiling. Must be the pretend bickering, she figures; it must remind her of her banter with Han.
"I am sure the Colonel will be happy to oblige. After he comes back from the mission," Jyn adds, with a mock-triumphant look at Cassian. "But before then," she turns serious as she looks over at Cracken, "I would like to ask you, General, to let me scan through what I can remotely access of Imperial archives so as to be reasonably certain that they have not flagged Cassian's disappearance as suspicious, and that there are no recent records of his identity."
"I will gladly let you do it, Captain, first and foremost for your peace of mind," Cracken assures her, "but just so you know, I have already taken the liberty of doing so. It never hurts to double-check, but over the past couple of days since our plan was first discussed in a restricted group, I tasked a team of slicers to do just that. The conclusion they came away with after analyzing the most recent image of the Carida archives database relayed to me by Pash, and after doing a broad search in Imperial data traffic to see if his name came up either as a long-missing Imperial cadet or as an Alliance operative, was that as far as the Empire is concerned, a human Corellian male named Cassian Andor graduated from Carida eleven years ago and was never heard of since. Which fits in perfectly with his mission here, as him resurfacing alive can only mean…"
"That I was a deep-undercover spy in the Rebellion," Cassian finishes for him.
"Exactly. Or at least that you were involved in some kind of top-secret operation that was run on a strictly need-to-know basis. So all my team has had to do was insert the missing records, as it were, showing that you never left active Imperial service and received your respective promotions from Ensign to Lieutenant and on to Captain, and add the transfer orders calling you to Coruscant. The background records are already in place. I've been waiting for the outcome of this meeting to finalise the transfer order splice."
At least he had the decency to wait for Cassian's decision before doing it, Jyn figures. As if that decision was in much doubt.
"But the transfer orders would presume a vacancy, Sir," Cassian points out.
"And courtesy of your former charges the commando team working for General Madine, we now have just that." She notices a shadow of a wistful smile cross Cassian's face; despite being quite at home, as it were, on the strategy side, he cannot help missing the time when he led that team. "By killing a Captain in His Imperial Majesty's Diplomatic Corps Protection Service less than a standard day ago. The slicer team, in the meantime, has done some work on the candidate roster so that your name is now in the top position as the replacement."
Ah, the advantages of dealing with a huge, faceless bureaucracy, she muses, what with most Imperial reassignment orders being decided by computer rather than based on personal preference.
"Who is he going to work for in there? Ravann?" Winter speaks up. Jyn would have been impressed by the other woman's seemingly offhand knowledge of the staffing of a Coruscant-based unit, but by now she has seen so many instances of Winter's flawless memory so as to take it for a given.
Cracken's answer may not be particularly informative as to the relative merits of Cassian's commanding officer, but his scowl says it all. "Merkon."
"My condolences," Winter shakes her head at Cassian.
"That bad?" he ventures.
"Well, on the plus side, he is, shall we say, a man of limited intelligence. Ravann is more of a human being, but he has a brain that goes beyond following orders, and as such can be a risk should he start wondering about your appointment and should he become curious about your character. With Merkon there is no such danger. Which is, I presume, Generals, the reason that you wanted to kill an officer under his command?"
"There's that," Cracken agrees, "and there's the fact that Merkon's duties, or shall I say the duties of his unit, are better suited to our purposes. Where Ravann is in charge of actual security, as in, ensuring the physical safety of the visiting diplomats and their surroundings, Merkon heads what they call the liaison unit, which is basically a spying operation. They use the pretence of protocol arrangements and the like to shadow their charges, and use every opportunity to eavesdrop on what they report back to their homeworlds."
"How charming," Jyn mutters under her breath.
"On the plus side, I've done this before," Cassian mutters back. "Well, not spying on diplomats, but spying in general. So maybe I'll be feeling right at home," he finishes, his raised eyebrow a sweet if not particularly effective attempt to lift her spirits. The worst thing is, she knows it all makes perfect sense; but it does not make the idea of him going into that Sarlacc pit alone any more appealing.
"Home or not," Cracken cuts in, "you'll be at the right place at the right time, with the best access you can get to the range of information we need, and with relative flexibility as regards the assignment locations and hours." That much is certainly true; the "security proper" unit, to say nothing of most conventional Imperial Army units, would not afford him anywhere near the same degree of freedom of access and movement. "Which is particularly important in view of the range of tasks you will be undertaking on this mission."
"Which, if I understand correctly, are to consist of recruiting a network of potential assets and – " Cassian shoots a sly look at Madine, "finding out what I can about Palpatine's travel diary."
"Correct. There is one more crucial aspect that we need to cover, however," Cracken continues, and Jyn is momentarily nonplussed as to why it looks as if the General were addressing her, or at least them both. "In addition to the two mission priorities you mentioned, our third priority is setting up an automated data relay system to transfer such data to the Alliance. We have been able to receive occasional information from several mid-level administration officials that was useful, but the haphazard nature of such communications limits their usefulness; we never know if we'll manage to get a timely update when we need one."
"The greatest risks, as always, have to do with dealing with physical handover of datacards to get the information offplanet, which frequently involves face-to-face meetings between a number of intermediaries; and as all of you know, the more intermediaries there are, the greater the risk of failure. What we need is to put in place a system that will allow our intelligence sources to submit the information as impersonally as possible, through dead drops and code backdoors in the comm encryption protocols, without the need to expose themselves with risky meetings."
"One of the local assets Winter has recruited, one of the few who have managed so far to avoid discovery, is working at Coruscant Imperial University in a post-graduate researcher capacity specializing in computer science, and the provisional plan is to liaise with her to set up a form of an automated relay that can take the intelligence gathered planetside on Coruscant and retransmit it to us without the need for any being's involvement."
This sounds like a brilliant idea, except for a fairly obvious catch; and before she can bring it up, Cassian does the honours.
"With all due respect, Sir, it would be difficult to explain any meetings I might have with her beyond the first one or two, and assuming I am under near-constant surveillance myself, which is likely…"
"Precisely." Where in blazes is Cracken going with this? "Which is why we believe that you need a wife."
.
TBC
.
I do not think I would be far from the truth in claiming that most people who have heard of Star Wars mythology will have snickered at the anagram of the term Sith; and I shamelessly played on it above. As Exhibit A in my defence, I bring up Michael Stackpole's preferred swearword Sithspawn from the X-Wing books, so I have a precedent, of sorts. I'd have gone with that one, but it seems rather unpronounceable to me; hence the shorter, more familiar version.
And in Jyn's defence, I present not one but four exhibits, namely, two clean-shaven screencaps from when Diego Luna was Cassian's canon Rogue age of 26, and two more from a year later. I apologise for the cross-link since FFnet won't allow html, but I put them into the comment at the end of the AO3 version of this chapter at archiveofourown*org/works/9317003/chapters/21115490 [you need to replace the asterisks with a dot for the link to work; FFnet can be rather nasty]. He is unbearably handsome but I'd challenge anyone to say he looks a day older than sixteen in any of these ;)