Star Wars: Rebel Rising(20)
The turbo tank rumbled to life as soon as it was full, clattering over the rough ground of Wobani as it made its way to the panels factory. The work detail filed out after the short trip and droids instructed them on their tasks for the day.
That was part of the indignity of it all; this was work droids could do more easily and more efficiently. In fact, droids did most of the work in the factories during the night shifts while the prisoners slept. But the Empire was willing to sacrifice some of that efficiency to make the prisoners fulfill a negligible quota.
Jyn’s job that day was to notch the bottom of a series of wall panels in two-meter-by-half-meter sections. She stood in front of a production line with her accelerated particle cutter, slicing down twice and across once, letting the metal bits fall from the notches with bone-clattering thunks. The hair on her arms had long been burned away by the work, and although the tempered helmet she was given fit poorly, at least it protected her head from the full brunt of the heat.
Jyn lifted, sliced, and moved the metal panels down the line. A small part of her wondered just what the Empire wanted with this many notched wall panels. She hadn’t been the first to wonder at their production line. Common assumption was that the Empire was building a larger fleet, but the sheer quantity of pieces the prisoners had worked on over the years, since long before Jyn arrived, sparked a rumor that the Empire was simply remelting the finished metal pieces and forcing the prisoners to do the same work on the same metal over and over and over again.
Jyn had long before quit bothering to figure out why the Empire did what it did.
Why did the Empire bother killing her mother and taking her father? If they were doing anything with his research, she had yet to see it. Saw had driven himself half-mad, spending most of Jyn’s childhood chasing down ghosts of her father in an attempt to figure out the Empire’s plans. In the end, he had found nothing.
Inexplicably, Saw’s words filtered through Jyn’s tired mind. One fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can take the day. Her finger twitched over the accelerated particle cutter. Even if she could rip it from its mounting, there was no way she could take out more than a single stormtrooper before she was cut down. The prisoners were given tools that could easily destroy their captors, but there was no escape.
The metal piece she’d notched from the main panel she was working on dropped to the ground. Rather than thunking, it shattered, metal shards splintering around her.
“Halt production!” a stormtrooper called. Red lights flared and the bone-jarring grinding of metal echoed throughout the factory. All the prisoners dropped to their knees, hands up, as they had been trained. Jyn wanted to brush away the metal shavings digging into her legs, but she knew better than to move out of position.
Stormtroopers and a few Imperial engineers swarmed to Jyn’s section of the line. Jyn kept her head down.
“Something wrong with this duralium-enforced steel,” one of the engineers said. “This panel is far too brittle.”
“Look at the striation lines,” another engineer said, kneeling. An RA-7 inventory droid picked up one of the larger pieces of the shattered metal so the others could more easily examine it.
“Initial scan indicates an improper combination of alloys,” the droid said. “This was from batch three-two-four-three; four hundred other units were poured from that batch.”
The head Imperial officer cursed and turned to a datapad, punching up information. Jyn’s arms ached from being raised for so long, but she didn’t move as the officers, stormtroopers, and droids stood around, talking about the tensile strength of the metal alloy and ignoring her completely, as if she were nothing but another bit of scrap metal.
“We’ll have to halt production and pull every panel made from that batch,” the head officer finally said, turning on his heel and marching back toward his office. “And it will be tedious to find them; they’re scattered throughout the factories.”
“Looks like your lucky day,” a stormtrooper near Jyn said as the crowd around her dispersed. In a moment, an announcement blared through the factory, calling Jyn’s work unit back to the prison transport for an early shift dismissal.
Jyn finally dropped her arms, letting them sag by her body as the blood tingled back to her fingers. She pushed her hands into the floor to stand, wincing as a sharp piece of shattered metal pressed against her palm. Jyn shifted her hand.
The metal shard was roughly twelve centimeters long, one end squared and the other sharp as a blade. It could not have looked more like a knife if it had been purposefully made to be one. Jyn stared at it for a long moment.
One fighter with a sharp stick…
It was impossible. It was stupid. But it was there.
A chance.
Without letting herself think any further, Jyn palmed the sharpened piece of metal. Just wrapping her fingers around the square base made her feel stronger, more powerful than she had since she’d come to Wobani. Since before then. Hope surged through her, straightening her spine, clearing her eyes.
“You, there,” came a voice through a stormtrooper helmet.
Jyn’s fingers turned to ice, and the metal shard dropped, clattering so loudly against the cement floor of the factory that it seemed as if every single person and droid in the building heard it.
“Unsanctioned weapon found on a prisoner,” the stormtrooper said. Another stormtrooper rushed Jyn, slamming her against the wall.