Chapter 10: Last of the Light

"What happened?" Cassian demanded from the top of the ladder as Mara scrambled her way up to the cockpit.

"He got mouthy, so I shot him."

Cassian's gaze was stern, but Mara shoved past him. "We needed him alive," he hissed as she took the pilot's chair.

Mara found the controls she needed even as she retrieved the com that linked her with Kay-Too from her jacket pocket. "We need no such thing. He's told us all we need to know."

Cassian came up behind her to lean heavily on the back of her chair. "We could have bartered his life back at the anarchist's camp."

"I doubt his life was worth that much to them. Besides, we're not going back to the camp."

"We're-"

"Look." She spun around, finally facing him. "The only person we need right now is Kay-Too. If you'll give me a minute, I'll contact him and have him rendezvous with us on Alderaan. Then we can figure out how to sort this whole mess. Happy?"

He wasn't. His eyes had narrowed. "What happened back there."

She turned back to the controls. "Nothing. Like I said, he talked too much. We don't have the time, and I don't have the patience. If we'd kept him alive, he'd only have done everything he could to lead us off course." She looked up at him. "You wouldn't have gotten anything else out of him. Not anything useful. Now will you let me call Kay-Too? As previously stated, we don't have a lot of time."

Clearly not satisfied, Cassian backed away. "I'll see to the body."

When he had gone down the ladder, Mara rested her forehead on the consul and tried not to cry.

**RogueLegends**

Alderaan itself was too busy a place to actually rendezvous. Kay-Too suggested a moon orbiting an uninhabitable outlying planet. There was nothing wrong with the moon itself, per se. It was just that it was barren, and why live there when you could live on Alderaan?

Mara practically sprang from the ship when they landed, Cassian frowning at her as she passed him, still attending to Rian's remains. He would bury him on the moon, she knew, but just then she only cared about finding her droid.

"Mistress Jade-" Kay-Too began as she entered her ship.

"Shut up," she said. "I need you to pull up anything you can on a Captain Cassian Andor. You'll most likely find it in anything we have on the Rebellion's shoddy intelligence network."

Droids couldn't look thoughtful, and there was nothing in her training that suggested they could be connected to the Force. In fact, the Emperor would have vehemently rejected the notion. But Mara couldn't help feeling her droid was studying her, and she felt the scrutiny like the touch of a friend.

He did was he was told however, and Mara didn't need to do more than skim the few details compiled on the man to have Rian's story confirmed. Kay-Too, to his credit, kept his mouth shut, and let her finish and sink into the pilot's chair, her pilot's chair, where she told him the rest. He listened through the anarchist's story and the bits they'd surmised themselves, and then he let the cool silence of the moon hang around them a moment before saying at last, "May I make a strategic point?"

Mara nodded.

"You have a four thousand three hundred and seventy-five percent better chance at stopping the anarchist plot with him than without."

Mara blinked. She'd known this. She'd felt it deep down. It was the reason Cassian wasn't dead already.

That and…

"I can't trust him," she said to herself as much as Kay-Too.

"While all available data would point to the probability that you cannot, in fact, trust anybody you encounter in your line of work, in this matter exclusively, I believe you can trust Captain Andor," Kay-Too said authoritatively. "You have the same goal. Whatever his true allegiances, whatever his reasons for seeking you out in the first place, in this, he will not betray you. But I would suggest, when it's done, that you get as far away from him as possible."

Mara thought of the senators. She thought of their seconds. She thought of those still further down the line of succession. She thought of the aids lined up to betray them all, of the detonation that would be the dramatic background for the more precise and personal poisoning.

"Not before," she amended. "Now."