It looks like wild banthas cannot keep me away from writing this story; and there are certain benefits to being [almost] alone in an empty office...
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One down, four to go.
Carefully, her finger releases the detonator, and the tiny glowing light at its base comes on as she steps deftly away to her next chosen spot along the wall of the data vault. She re-ran the positions of the charges on her datapad at the cantina the previous evening, fine-tuning their positions based on the results of the scan to make sure the directional blasts did the maximum desired damage, fusing the metal and plastic of the databank storage inside at all the sensitive link-up points.
Two down, three to go.
The crucial part of her careful set-up is to make sure that the devices all go off simultaneously; that way, the cumulative damage is greater than the sum of single blasts. With that in mind, she has synched the detonators, programming them to go off a minute after the last one is set. This should give her plenty of time to sneak or, in the worst case, to run out of the alley, around either corner of the vault back into the cramped little square that the bank office is facing. Should she somehow become distracted, her in-ear comlink tag is synched to the same timer, sounding a series of ten warning beeps, one per second until the countdown is over.
Three down, two to go.
Before she left Nawara's compound on her way to the spaceport less than an hour earlier, she took the time to re-run a check on all the detonators, seeing that the electronics worked as expected and that the spark was released without fail. She even went so far as to take a grain of the plastic explosive she is now using and do a chemical probe to see that its composition and grade were exactly as labelled, so as to deliver the desired blast force. She checked that the in-ear comlink worked, asking both Malloc and Krey'lya to hail her from the far end of the hangar, and making certain that they both received the signal transmitting her position – her friend-or-foe identifier, of sorts; she would have to trust their marksmanship to spare her from being fired on, but she did what was in her power to ascertain that at least the technical side of it was glitch-free.
Four down, one to go.
She even tried to chat up the cantina waiter, doing her best to ignore his salacious insinuations about what a pretty lady like her was doing in a place like that, to pry out as much information as she could about Imperial street patrols in the area under the innocent pretext of being concerned for the safety of her speeder bike parked nearby; and while that conversation on the whole was something she'd rather have done without, she was comforted to learn that the two-trooper foot patrols usually pass on their rounds no more than five times a day, three of which tend to fall on the night-time hours. And she made sure that she had now parked her bike on a relatively busy corner where it would arouse no suspicion.
She has considered every eventuality that came to mind, and double-checked every potential variable that was, to any extent, under her control.
Her finger releases the last detonator, the quiet click goes off, the tiny light comes on, and the countdown begins.
She picks up the empty satchel, glances around to ascertain that she has left nothing behind that is not supposed to be left behind, and heads out of the alley– "
"Halt!"
Her first incongruous thought is wondering why the trooper's barked command hits her in stereo. Must be the weird mountainous valley acoustics, she figures, as she turns to run in the opposite direction from the white figure with the blaster rifle – and belatedly understands the real reason when she sees the second trooper approaching her from the other end of the alley, rifle at the ready, a uniformed Imperial officer armed with a blaster pistol trailing behind him.
They close in on her, and she has nowhere left to run.
"Unidentified loiterer, state your name and show your identification," the first trooper demands, and her mind races to come up with a name that might magically see her out of trouble. The glaring irony is that her real name could do just that; but while revealing herself as Jyn Erso could go a long way to dispelling their immediate hostility, she stood no hope that they would simply let her go. They would march her out of here, unarmed as her blaster is back at the bike, and by the time they made it past the square at the front the explosions would go off, and she would be handcuffed and taken to the Imperial base for interrogation and detention.
"Liana Ha– Hallik," she stumbles.
"Identification?" the officer snaps.
"I left it– back at the– " If she acts contrite enough, perhaps she can persuade them to accompany her to the bike on the pretext of retrieving her ID… but even as the thought occurs to her, it is rendered moot by the reminder that the imminent explosion will reveal her crime to them long before they reach it.
Worst of all, they show no interest in budging from this spot.
And Nawara's lookouts are nowhere to be found, she muses darkly, belatedly remembering the silent comlink in her ear.
"What were you doing here?" is the officer's next question.
Preparing to blow this place to pieces, you pompous ass. "I– I walked through here by mistake a little while ago and then I lost my comlink and I thought I'd dropped it back here so I came back looking– "
She realizes in the middle of this that her babbling will do nothing to help her get out alive. Her purpose this time is not to stall but to get as far away as possible from this spot, and the only way she would be likely to accomplish it is, in fact, by telling them what exactly is going on; and then when they make it out of the alley there will come the call for reinforcements and the quick trip to the Imperial detention block and torture sessions with interrogation droids, and the inevitable revelation somewhere down the line that she is really the rebellious Jyn Erso, and relentless attempts to extract information from her about her fellow Rebels and the location of their base. A Jedi might perhaps resist that, but she wishes she could trust her body that far.
She is out of options.
She will die here, in this dingy back alley, not incinerated by a planetary-scale explosion but blown to bits by puny explosive charges she herself planted. Had it not been for the sake of saving Cassian's life, she would have been better off dying on Scarif; at least the cause was a good deal more deserving.
Nawara has set her up for this; he and Naroon both have. They must have recalled the lookouts and tipped the Imperials off to her being here, or else they would have no reason to check this spot. All that talk at yesterday's meeting must have been the cover story they fed her; perhaps their real plan was not merely to avoid being linked to the explosion, but to finger her as a convenient offworld culprit and ingratiate themselves with Imperial authorities by virtue of their tip-off, even if they purposely let it arrive too late so as to still get their precious transaction records erased. All that lekku-twitching at their meeting could have been the two of them mocking the gullible human stupid enough to have jumped into their carefully constructed net. And she is shot through with fresh dread thinking what this means for Cassian. She wishes she could warn him.
The comlink in her ear begins to beep its countdown.
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TBC
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