Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  She knew better. So long as Krennic was in control, Galen would stay alive long after the rest of them were dead. He would have no choice but to work for that man until he was old and feeble, until his intellect began to fail him and the Empire determined he was no longer useful.

  Lyra realized she’d made a decision.

  She unslung her bag, rooted through the contents until she found what she needed. She set a bundle of clothes in the grass and placed her hands on Jyn’s shoulders. The girl was trembling. She met her mother’s gaze.

  “You know where to go, don’t you?” Lyra asked. “Wait for me there. Don’t come out for anyone but me.”

  Jyn didn’t answer. Lyra saw the moisture in her eyes. A voice told Lyra, If you leave her now, she’s done. You’ve taken all her strength away.

  But Lyra had committed herself to a path. Her husband needed her more than her daughter.

  She hurriedly reached to her own throat, pushing away coarse cloth until her fingers caught a fraying string. She pulled off her necklace, watched the pendant swing in the breeze. The jagged, cloudy crystal was etched with writing on one side. Gently, she put the necklace over Jyn’s head. The girl didn’t move.

  “Trust the Force,” Lyra said, and made herself smile.

  “Mama—”

  “I’ll be there,” Lyra whispered. “Now go.”

  She wrapped Jyn in her arms—Don’t hold her too long, don’t give her time to think—and turned the girl around, pushed her away. Lyra watched her daughter stumble amid the rocks, disappearing out of sight.

  It was time to refocus. Jyn would be safe. Safer if Lyra did this, safer still if she succeeded, but safe either way. She looked back to the farmhouse and the group gathered around the doorstep, lifted the bundle of clothes, and walked back the way she came. She kept her body low, picked up her pace as she saw four troopers enter the house and reveal Galen and Krennic standing together. She heard their voices, faintly. Krennic unctuously declaring We have to start somewhere.

  She hadn’t expected to see an opening so quickly. She’d wanted more time to plan. But there was no guarantee she’d catch Krennic with fewer bodyguards anytime soon. She straightened and hurried, kept the bundle clutched close.

  Krennic saw her first, though he spoke only to Galen. “Oh, look! Here’s Lyra. Back from the dead. It’s a miracle.”

  Galen turned in her direction. She’d rarely seen such pain on his face. “Lyra…” But he was looking past her, searching the fields for Jyn.

  Lyra almost wanted to smile.

  The black-clad troopers raised their weapons. “Stop!” Krennic snapped.

  Lyra let the clothes fall from her arms and raised the blaster she’d concealed beneath the pile. She aimed the barrel at Krennic, felt the chill metal of the trigger under her finger. She didn’t look at the troopers. If they killed her, all she needed to do was twitch.

  The troopers kept their weapons low. Krennic smirked at Lyra. “Troublesome as ever.”

  “You’re not taking him,” Lyra said.

  “No, of course I’m not. I’m taking you all. You, your child. You’ll all live in comfort.”

  “As hostages.”

  She’d lived that life before, or close enough. She had no desire to do it again.

  Krennic seemed unperturbed. “As ‘heroes of the Empire.’ ”

  Lyra heard Galen’s voice to one side. “Lyra. Put it down.” The concern in his tone felt like a weight on her arm, a hand on her wrist. She kept the blaster up anyway, ignoring her husband.

  Krennic wasn’t smiling anymore. Lyra let the words, the threats, roll out. She’d imagined this before, made speeches in her mind to the man who’d ruined her life again and again, and the actuality felt, in turn, dreamlike. “You’re going to let us go,” she said. “You’re going to do it because you’re an egomaniacal coward. And I’m sure if your superiors let you live you’ll come after us again, and that’s fine. But right now we go free. Do you understand?”

  Krennic merely nodded and said, “Think very carefully.”

  She sensed the troopers tensing. She knew, somehow, that Galen was staring at her in horror. And she suddenly realized that she’d misjudged Orson Krennic’s cowardice—that he’d changed in the years since she’d known him, or she’d never understood him even in the old days.

  Jyn would still be safe.

  Maybe she could still save her husband.

  “You’ll never win,” she said.

  Krennic cocked his head. A patronizing gesture to an outmatched opponent.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Lyra pulled the trigger, felt the blaster jump even as light flashed nearby and hot pulses ravaged her chest. She heard the troopers’ shots only after she felt the pain—dull, almost numb pinpricks up and down her body, each surrounded by a halo of excruciation. Her muscles seemed to vibrate like plucked strings. Galen was shouting her name, rushing toward her as she fell, but she couldn’t see him. All she saw was Krennic, clutching a black and smoking shoulder as he snarled through pain.

  If Lyra could have screamed, she would have screamed not in agony, but in rage. She could not scream, however, and she went into darkness bitterly.

  Her last thought was: I wish Galen weren’t here to see.

  The last things she heard were Galen shouting her name and a furious voice calling, “They have a child. Find it!” But she was too far gone to understand the words.

  —

  Jyn wasn’t a bad girl. Jyn didn’t like to misbehave. When her parents told her to do something, she almost always did it. Not fast, but eventually (almost always eventually). She didn’t deserve to be punished.

  She knew she shouldn’t have stayed to watch her mother talk to Papa and the man in white. But she couldn’t have known what would happen. She couldn’t have known what the troopers would do…

  Had they been talking about her? Was it her fault?

  Mama wasn’t moving. Papa held her in his arms. Jyn couldn’t stop herself from crying, but she held back a scream because she had to be brave. She had to be.

  She’d seen how scared Mama had been. Whoever the strangers were, Jyn knew they would hurt her, too.

  And she knew what she was supposed to do. She needed to behave now. She needed to make things better.

  She had trouble breathing as she ran. Her nose and eyes streamed, and her throat felt swollen and clogged. She heard voices in the distance, electronic voices like droids or garbled comms. The troopers were coming after her.

  She was wheezing with a high-pitched sound that would give her away. Her face felt like it burned hot enough to see for kilometers. She knew where she was going, though. Papa had tried to pretend it was a game, all those times he asked her to race and find the hiding spot, but she’d known better. She’d asked Mama about it once; she’d held Jyn’s hand and smiled and said, “Just pretend it’s a game anyway. It’ll make your father feel better.”

  She wanted to pretend now, but it was hard.

  She found the spot Papa had showed her among the piled rocks. She dragged open the hatch cover embedded in the hillside, almost shaking too hard to tug it free. Inside, a ladder led to the lower compartment, but Jyn stayed by the cover and pulled it shut. A sliver of light escaped through the hatch, illuminating the dusty gloom.

  She pulled her knees to her chest and sang one of her mother’s songs, rocking back and forth, ignoring her tear-streaked face and filthy hands. This was part of pretending, too. All she had to do was wait. That was all she’d ever been told to do in the hiding spot.

  Mama or Papa would come for her.

  She smelled smoke, and the smoke stung her eyes worse than her tears. She could see the shapes of troopers moving among the rocks, but even though they went back and forth and back and forth they never noticed the hatch. Never saw her shelter. When the daylight began to fade, they
left and Jyn climbed down the ladder.

  The lower compartment was too small for comfort, made cramped by stockpiles of food and machines and containers, but she could sit. She found a lantern and watched its feeble light wax and wane through the night as she listened to the rumble of a storm outside and the splashing of rainwater down the hill above her. She tried to sleep, but she never slept for long—raindrops crept into the cave and tapped at her forehead and sleeves no matter how she arranged herself.

  Even her dreams were about that insistent tapping. Those wet, random strikes. In her dreams, sometimes Mama fell down when the raindrops hit Jyn.

  When morning came, she woke to the sound of metal scraping above her. For an instant she confused dreams with reality and thought Mama or Papa had arrived at last—she believed what she’d seen the day before was a nightmare, and that this was another of Papa’s games.

  But only for an instant.

  She looked up. The hatch opened, and silhouetted above her was an armored figure with a dark face graven with scars. The man looked down at Jyn with eyes that gleamed in the lantern’s light and spoke in a voice of command:

  “Come, my child. We have a long ride ahead of us.”

  —

  Orson Krennic observed Galen aboard the shuttlecraft and wondered when the man would finally pry himself from the gurney where his wife’s corpse sprawled. “We’ll bring her home,” Krennic said. “I promise.”

  Galen said nothing and stroked his wife’s hand.

  What more did I expect? Krennic wondered.

  Lyra would have survived if not for her own foolishness. Krennic had risked his life for Galen and his family, given Lyra every opportunity to stand down rather than immediately signaling his troops to fire. That would have been the safest bet—his death trooper elites were unkind men who, given their druthers, would have ended the standoff far less mercifully.

  She’d shot him!

  He’d tried to spare Lyra for Galen’s own comfort, out of an understanding that genius worked best without distractions—and yes, out of a desire to honor the cordiality, if not friendship, he and Galen had once shared. Yet self-imposed exile had changed Galen: He was no longer a man of dispassionate contemplation, able to interpret facts without prejudice. Whatever Krennic said, every action he took, was to be interpreted by Galen as the ruthless ploy of a scheming powermonger.

  This irked Krennic—of course it irked him, to have the rapport of years so neatly dismissed—but he could use it. If Galen refused to readjust (perhaps a man who changed so swiftly once could swiftly change again?), then Krennic could play the monster to ensure his cooperation.

  The bandage around his shoulder rendered his arm immobile. He’d need weeks, if not months to fully recover, with who-knew-how-many hours spent immersed in medicinal bacta tanks. The pain would be considerable once the analgesics wore off, yet he could forgive that; not so the loss of time.

  Any debt he owed Galen was now repaid.

  “We will find the child,” he said, more insistent.

  Galen did not look away from Lyra’s body (another gift from Krennic—who else would have brought her home for a proper funeral?). “I think if you haven’t found her already,” Galen murmured, “you are very unlikely to succeed.”

  Krennic bristled, but there was truth to the words. Jyn had clearly received outside aid—the signal sent from the farmhouse suggested as much—and Krennic was not prepared to underestimate her rescuer’s competence. He hoped investigation of the comm stations, no matter how badly Galen had damaged them, would reveal the particulars; the results would determine how he turned the situation to his advantage.

  If Galen was unsure of his daughter’s fate—if he’d sent out a general distress call or offered a reward for retrieval to every smuggler or bounty hunter in receiving range—then Krennic’s dogged pursuit of the girl would incentivize Galen to cooperate. Galen would never admit to it, of course, but he would be soothed by the certainty of knowing his daughter was in Imperial hands.

  Conversely, if Galen knew exactly who had rescued Jyn, then perhaps it was best to leave well enough alone and use the threat of Imperial interference as impetus for cooperation.

  All of which, Krennic realized with a start, was a worry for another day. He’d been so consumed by his mission that he had failed to appreciate his own victory.

  After a long search, Galen was back in his hands. The scientific setbacks, the engineering problems plaguing Krennic’s teams would soon vanish. The constant needling from men like Wilhuff Tarkin—bureaucrats without any true sense for the scope of Krennic’s accomplishments—would soon be over. These were truths worth celebrating.

  Krennic smiled at Galen and shook his head fondly. “Your wife will be honored. We’ll have the service as soon as we reach Coruscant. But meanwhile…shall we discuss the work?”

  Galen finally turned and looked at Krennic with loathing.

  Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

  SUPPLEMENTAL DATA: REBEL ALLIANCE INTELLIGENCE UPDATE

  [Document #NI3814 (“Situational Analysis Regarding Jedha, et al.”), timestamped approximately thirteen years after the conscription of Galen Erso by Orson Krennic; from the personal files of Mon Mothma.]

  There is no hard evidence of an interplanetary engineering project consuming Imperial resources (living, financial, and material) on a massive scale. That remains the bottom line, as it has since our investigation began.

  Yet as before, we consider this statement insufficient and our situation grave.

  Major tactical deployments of Imperial forces to strategically insignificant worlds continue on Jedha, Patriim, Eadu, Horuz, and twelve others of note. Frequent communications blackouts make analysis of these deployments exceedingly difficult, and we strongly suspect our list is neither accurate nor complete. Nonetheless, we know that a majority of the worlds in question contain facilities for resource harvesting, manufacturing, or scientific research and development. More recently, we have learned that several of these worlds share a set of nonstandard security protocols far exceeding the Imperial norm.

  We have intercepted multiple communiqués sent to Orson Krennic, the Empire’s advanced weapons research director, from these worlds. We are not yet able to decrypt them.

  We have intercepted multiple communiqués sent to one “Galen Erso” from these worlds. We are not yet able to decrypt them or confirm that the “Galen Erso” referenced is the former head of multiple high-energy research projects (including “Celestial Power”—see notes) once housed on Coruscant.

  We have intercepted multiple communiqués referencing a future weapons test of indeterminate scale.

  Our attempts to surveil Imperial activities related to this matter have resulted in the loss of several operatives. We request additional personnel. Attempts to obtain the cooperation of Saw Gerrera on Jedha have been ended at the recommendation of General Jan Dodonna.

  We understand that our concerns are considered controversial inside Alliance council leadership. We do not dispute that intelligence resources should be focused on the Senate if there is to be any hope of a peaceful political resolution to the larger struggle. Several analysts have declined to attach their names to this document for fear of giving it “undue credibility.”

  But this is not a conspiracy theory, and ignorance will not protect us from whatever the Galactic Empire is building.

  Full report is attached.

  THE RING OF KAFRENE WAS a monumental span of durasteel and plastoid anchored by a pair of malformed planetoids within the Kafrene asteroid belt. It had been founded as a mining colony by Old Republic nobility, built for the purpose of stripping every rock within ten million kilometers of whatever mineral resources the galaxy might covet; its founders’ disappointment, upon realizing that such valuable minerals were scarce at best in the Kafrene belt, had earned it the unofficial slogan that arced over it
s aft docking bay in lurid, phosphorescent graffiti: WHERE GOOD DREAMS GO BAD.

  Now the Ring of Kafrene was a deep-space trading post and stopover for the sector’s most desperate travelers. Cassian Andor counted himself among that number.

  He was already behind schedule, and he knew that if he hadn’t drawn attention during disembarkation he was certainly doing so now. He moved too quickly down the throughway, shouldering aside men and women and nonhumans of indeterminate gender who had the proper, plodding gait of people sentenced to live in a place like Kafrene. Between the road and the distant rock warrens stood a thousand sheet-metal shacks and shoddy prefabricated housing units recycled from foreign colonies; outside the main throughways there was no plan, no layout that didn’t change almost daily, and even the workers proceeding home in the artificial twilight stuck to the major arteries. Cassian tried to moderate his pace, to ride the crowd’s momentum rather than apply force. He failed and imagined his mentor’s disappointment: The Rebel Alliance taught you better than that.

  But he had been traveling too long, from Coruscant to Corulag and onward, tugging at the loose threads of an elaborate tapestry that was outside the scope of his vision. He had paid dearly in time and credits and blood for precious little intelligence, for the reiteration of facts he’d already confirmed. He’d spent too much to return to Base One empty-handed. His frustration was starting to show.

  He cut across the street and smelled ammonia wafting from a ventilation shaft—exhaust from an alien housing complex. He suppressed a cough and stepped into the gap between one tenement and another, working his way through a maze of corridors until he reached a dead-end alleyway barely wider than his arm span.

  “I was about to leave,” a voice said, full of nervous irritation. The speaker emerged from the shadows: a human with a soft round face and hard eyes, dressed in stained and fading garb. His right arm hung limply in a sling. Cassian’s gaze locked on the man even as he sorted through the distant sounds of the street: voices, clattering merchandise, something sizzling, someone screaming. But no commotion, no squawking comlinks.