Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  “That’s a terrible lie,” she said.

  She expected Mon Mothma to offer another wan smile. Instead, the woman looked at Jyn for a long while before saying, “I believe it’s the truth. I may be wrong, and I pray that I am—but I believe a weapon that murders worlds is the natural culmination of everything the Emperor has done.”

  You’re all crazy, Jyn wanted to say. Yet she held back.

  “You’re right, though,” Mothma continued. “If this were just about Saw Gerrera, we would have other approaches.”

  Cassian resumed, apparently untroubled by the interruption and Jyn’s mockery. “The pilot,” he said, “the one Gerrera has in custody?”

  “What about him?” Jyn asked.

  “He says he was sent by your father.”

  The hatch inside Jyn’s mind shattered like baked clay.

  The things inside the cave, damp and soiled by darkness, seeped unwelcome into her brain. Foreign thoughts spread like stains, obscuring everything else: My father is alive. My father is a traitor. My father is building a weapon to destroy worlds.

  My father is a hero. My father is a coward. My father is a bastard.

  Galen Erso is not my father. Galen Erso didn’t raise me…

  Her palms were bleeding where she’d dug in her fingernails. She wiped her hands on her hips, looked around the suddenly vertiginous room, barely heard Mothma say, “We need to stop this weapon before it is finished,” or the condescending tone of the rust-haired general:

  “Captain Andor’s mission is to authenticate the pilot’s story and then, if possible, find your father.”

  It was too much. Too much to think about now, maybe too much to think about ever. But the others were watching her. Jyn focused on the sensation of her breath, her clammy skin against the metal chair, the awful stinking humid air. She forced her mind’s eye away from the broken hatch above the cave, forced revulsion and loathing and doubt down like bile.

  Mon Mothma was speaking again. “It would appear Galen Erso is critical to the development of this superweapon. Given the gravity of the situation and your history with Saw, we’re hoping that Saw will help us locate your father and return him to the Senate for testimony.”

  “And if I do it?” Jyn asked. She spat the words out bitterly, though she didn’t hear them.

  “We’ll make sure you go free,” Mon Mothma said.

  It was the best answer Jyn could hope for.

  —

  She wasn’t calm by the time she walked out of the hangar and onto the tarmac, but she was calmer. Her body felt bruised and sore, like the morning after a fight, but she breathed without struggle. If she didn’t think about it—the mission, the meaning behind the mission—she’d be okay.

  And when it was over, she could go back to her old life. Make a new life. Find somewhere away from the Rebel Alliance, away from Saw Gerrera and Galen Erso and—

  Just don’t think about it.

  “Captain Andor!” a voice called.

  Cassian halted mid-stride beside Jyn, glanced toward the hangar, and spotted the source of the yell—the rust-haired general from the bunker, who’d been all snide remarks and grunts instead of mute senility like his partner. “General Draven,” Cassian murmured. “Give me a moment.”

  “No rush,” Jyn said.

  Cassian dashed ahead to the boarding ramp of a battered U-wing transport, unslung the duffel he carried over his shoulder, then hurried back in Draven’s direction. Jyn followed his path to the ship, giving the vessel a cursory once-over. While the base as a whole was larger, busier, and better equipped than anything she’d seen from the Rebel Alliance before, the U-wing was in line with her expectations. Like the one that had retrieved her from Wobani, it looked like a set of engines with a cargo bay strapped to it, maintained and repaired over the years by a droid with pistons for hands.

  She’d been aboard worse.

  “Jyn Erso! Alias Liana Hallik, prisoner six-two-nine-five-alpha!”

  She flinched—again—at the sound of her name. She would have to get used to it.

  She looked up the boarding ramp to the main cabin. Towering above the communications console stood the security droid emblazoned with Imperial symbols that had captured her on Wobani. “I’m Kay-Tuesso,” he went on, with a cheerfulness Jyn could only interpret as threatening. “I’m a reprogrammed Imperial droid.”

  “I remember you,” she said.

  She’d heard stories about reprogrammed droids going wrong—about safeguards reasserting themselves, about old code suddenly resurfacing for reasons no one could explain. She wasn’t overly concerned; if K-2SO reverted to type, the ranking members of the Rebel Alliance would be his top priority. Jyn, an escaped convict drafted into the mission, wouldn’t be strangled until second or third, at least.

  “I assume your presence indicates that you will be joining us on our trip to Jedha,” the droid went on. A statement, not a question.

  “Apparently so.”

  “That is a bad idea. I think so, and so does Cassian. What do I know? My specialty is just strategic analysis.”

  Jyn was barely listening. She’d turned away from the droid, looking across the hangar to where Draven and Cassian huddled together. They stood too near each other, leaning in to avoid being overheard by passing pilots and technicians.

  To her surprise, Jyn realized she trusted Draven: He was an ass, but that made him predictable. Cassian—the intelligence operative, the spy, the casual liar—could be trouble.

  “Can you tell what they’re saying?” she asked K-2SO, with a glance over her shoulder.

  “Yes,” the droid said, and retreated to the cockpit.

  Fair enough, she thought. Left alone in the cabin, she took the opportunity to examine Cassian’s duffel and its contents: nothing but gear. Weapons and portable medpacs and signal boosters. No holoimage of a dutiful wife or tattered childhood security blanket. He packed impersonal and he packed light.

  Jyn pulled out a blaster pistol, tested its heft and grip, and strapped it on her hip. A BlasTech A-180 wasn’t her weapon of choice, but it was sturdy and low-profile. By the time Cassian had turned back to the U-wing, Jyn was moving to peer into the cockpit herself. The droid, adjusting one setting or another on the flight console, ignored her.

  She heard the exterior door shut and seal. “You met Kay-Tu?” Cassian asked.

  “Charming,” Jyn said.

  Cassian lifted his shoulders in a boyish, what-can-you-do? shrug. “He tends to say whatever comes into his circuits. It’s a by-product of the reprogram.”

  The droid’s vocabulator increased in volume, loud enough to hear in the cabin. “Why does she get a blaster,” he asked, “and I don’t?”

  Jyn kept her hand off her weapon but shifted her weight into a defensive stance as Cassian shot her a look. “I know how to use it,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Cassian answered. Jyn watched the humor, the warmth, evaporate in a flash. The expression of the calculating spy emerged. She felt a certain sour satisfaction. “Give it to me,” he said.

  “We’re going to Jedha. That’s a war zone. You want me to risk my life to help find Saw?” She shrugged. “Trust goes both ways.”

  Cassian stared a moment longer. The look of calculation, too, vanished, and Jyn could no longer read him at all. He returned her shrug and hauled himself into the cockpit.

  Off to a grand start, Jyn thought, and went to find a bunk or, at worst, a half-comfortable surface. She hadn’t slept since Wobani, on the night her cellmate had promised to kill her.

  —

  “You’re letting her keep it? The blaster?”

  Cassian Andor pulled himself into the pilot’s seat of the U-wing—worn, thinly padded, stained by the sweat of a dozen species—and swept a hand over the controls, refamiliarizing himself as best he could. It had been a whil
e since he’d flown a transport.

  K-2 waited for a reply that didn’t come, then asked: “Are you interested in the probability of her using it against you?”

  Humidity had fogged the cockpit viewport, rendering the jungle a green smear. Cassian sketched out a course in his head. Flight control recommended skirting the canopy briefly before attempting full ascent from the moon of Yavin 4—a halfhearted attempt at disguising Base One’s exact location from any Imperial probes.

  “It’s high,” the droid said.

  Cassian shook his head. “Let’s get going.”

  “It’s very high.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Cassian nearly said.

  He thought back to his conversation with General Draven in the hangar. The assurances of trust, of confidence in Cassian’s judgment, were swiftly being pulled into the amorphous eddies of his memory, but Draven’s orders were etched in steel:

  Galen Erso is vital to the Empire’s weapons program. There will be no “extraction.”

  You find him, you kill him. Then and there.

  Draven wasn’t wrong to want Galen Erso dead. It would be a righteous killing as well as a practical one, the execution of a man surely responsible for the deaths of countless civilians. Erso’s years inside the Imperial war machine could have no innocent outcome. If killing Erso saved a single life, then that was cause to celebrate—but if not, his assassination was no less justified.

  Nor did the contradiction between Mon Mothma’s orders and those of General Draven trouble Cassian. The notion of bringing Galen Erso to a Senate hearing—of exposing the Empire’s planet killer, of creating such an uproar inside the civilian government that the Senate would move openly against the Galactic Emperor—was absurd on the face of it.

  Mothma desired a leveraged détente—a political solution made possible through rebel military action—that was, to Draven and Cassian, self-evidently impossible. The Imperial military was loyal to its commanders, and its commanders believed that they, rather than the Senate, already effected complete control over the Empire. They were right. No peaceful transfer of power could occur.

  Yet Mothma was an idealist. Cassian suspected she wanted a Senate hearing not because she thought it would work, but because she felt obligated to try.

  Cassian admired Mothma. Galen Erso’s assassination would free her from the obligation of a doomed peace effort.

  And yet Cassian was troubled nonetheless.

  He was escorting a girl not much older than a teenager to see the father she had believed she’d lost. A girl who—genetics notwithstanding—had clearly inherited Saw Gerrera’s burning rage and icy competence. The need in her eyes frightened Cassian.

  Had the others seen it? Had he imagined it?

  He wasn’t sure what troubled him more: what he was doing to Jyn Erso, or what she would do to him if she ever learned the truth.

  BODHI BELIEVED HIS SUFFERING WOULD end soon. That Saw Gerrera would hear him out and set him free. That the weeping sores on his feet would be treated and his wrists would be unbound and the coarse cloth hood torn from his face so that he could see and hear and breathe again.

  If he didn’t believe these things, he knew he would go mad.

  He had marched with the rebels for most of the day, only sure of the passage of time by virtue of the sunlight that passed through the fabric of his hood. From the desert they’d entered a shelter of some kind—a building or a cave where the feeble warmth of the sun vanished. Now he knelt on a rough stone floor and waited. He heard bodies shuffle nearby, distant footsteps, voices in adjacent rooms. He didn’t try to speak. His mouth was parched.

  These were not the rebels Galen Erso had described: gallant men and women whose righteous hearts led them to oppose the horrors Bodhi had seen, the deeds in which he’d been complicit. Instead, these were the rebels the Empire had always warned of: the murderers, the criminals and terrorists who concealed their viciousness in a patriotic wrapping. The ones who saw the deaths involved in spaceport bombings as a small cost for smaller victories.

  Saw Gerrera would be different, though. He had to be different.

  “Lies!”

  The hoarse, ghostly bellow echoed in the chamber. Along with the voice came a rhythmic metallic clanking, like the firing of a piston.

  “Deceptions!”

  There was nothing but fury in the voice.

  “Let’s see it.”

  A demand, hissed from terrible depths.

  Bodhi listened to more shuffling and scraping, craned his neck and strained to see something other than silhouettes and stitching.

  “Bodhi Rook. Cargo pilot.” Hands suddenly grasped Bodhi and yanked him to his feet. He would have fallen if the hands hadn’t clamped his shoulders. “Local boy,” the ghost scoffed. “Anything else?”

  “There was this.” A second voice in another language. Bodhi recognized the speaker as the Tognath with the respirator. “A holochip. Unencrypted. It was found in his boot when he was captured.”

  Bodhi jerked forward in the hands that held him—not to escape, but to demand attention. “I can hear you! You made your point! I’m scared, you made me scared, but he didn’t capture me—I came here myself.” He couldn’t tell if they understood him through the cloth. “I defected,” he called around a mouthful of fabric. “I defected!”

  “Lies,” the ghost repeated. “Every day, more lies.”

  “Lies?” Bodhi was almost screaming now, violently sucking in breath through the sack to give his fury strength. “Would I risk everything for a lie? We don’t have time for this!

  “I have to speak to Saw Gerrera before it’s too—”

  Someone grabbed the sack and tugged, yanking the hood free and scraping the work goggles back on Bodhi’s scalp.

  Bodhi could see again. He almost wished he was still blind.

  He was in a room—not a cave, but a chamber hewn from ancient stone and sparsely appointed as a living space. Three of his captors stood nearby, while a fourth man, a stranger, stood before him. This man—the ghost, Bodhi assumed, the hoarse and chilling voice—had wild, graying hair and a face knotted with scars. He leaned on a thick, metal-shod cane to support the weight his artificial leg could not.

  “Saw Gerrera?” Bodhi asked.

  This time no one snickered.

  Saw pinched a holochip between two fingers. Bodhi nodded toward it. “That’s for you,” he said. He heard himself babbling, protesting, couldn’t stop the flood of words: “And I gave it to them, they did not find it. I gave it to them.

  “Galen Erso. He told me to find you.”

  Saw Gerrera laid his cane aside and grasped an oxygen mask attached to his armored chest plate. Without looking from Bodhi, he brought the mask to his face, inhaled, and returned the mask to its place.

  Please believe me, Bodhi thought. Or maybe he said it aloud; he wasn’t entirely sure.

  I did this for you. I did this to do something right.

  Saw turned his head to signal the Tognath. “Bor Gullet,” Saw said.

  “Bor Gullet?” Bodhi asked.

  Then the cloth scraped over his forehead and nose and lips again, and arms dragged him backward, spun him away from Saw—away from the man he’d been sent to find, away from salvation and vindication and redemption. “Galen Erso sent me!” he cried through the sack. “He told me to find you!” He said it, and things like it, over and over, and it did him no good at all.

  —

  Orson Krennic, advanced weapons research director of the first Galactic Empire, had never received the respect he was due.

  This was not an accident of fate, nor a symptom of some personal weakness. While Krennic could acknowledge that he lacked the scientific prowess of a man like Galen Erso, even the most arrogant researchers under his command largely accepted that genius, when bound to Krennic’s vision, accomplished more tha
n genius could alone. It was Krennic who, across two decades, had directed a thousand brilliant minds like a maestro with his symphony; Krennic who had focused the energies of a million scientists and engineers and strategists and laborers into a singular creation; and this, all while playing the games of the Emperor’s Ruling Council, all while assuaging the petty jealousies of admirals and Joint Chiefs.

  Orson Krennic had built the Death Star—the greatest technological achievement in galactic history, a feat of engineering that rivaled the transformation of the city-world of Coruscant or the invention of the hyperdrive; his achievement as much as anyone’s. If that extraordinary and all-consuming venture had left him vulnerable, it was no failing on his part.

  Instead, responsibility for his circumstances rested squarely on one man—the very man who had summoned him to meet aboard the Star Destroyer Executrix.

  Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin was Krennic’s true bane. While Krennic created, Tarkin fought to keep Krennic from rising above his station. From earning the attention of the Emperor himself.

  The old governor’s back was to Krennic as Krennic strode onto the Executrix’s bridge. Behind Krennic came an escort of his personal troops; an intimidation tactic lost on Tarkin as he stared out a viewport toward the massive Death Star battle station.

  Today the firing array of the station’s primary weapon was scheduled to dock. Six thousand detachable thrusters were maneuvering the colossal dish above the spherical superstructure of the station, where droids, technicians, and mechanical arrays awaited; once the dish descended, they would lock it permanently into place. The operation had taken months of planning, and required the shutdown of many of the Death Star’s power systems to eliminate any risk of an energy surge. Krennic should have been there, sealed in a full environment suit in the temporarily airless corridors of the battle station, to supervise and observe the final stages.

  “Most unfortunate about the security breach on Jedha, Director Krennic,” Tarkin said, and turned his frail body around at last. He gave Krennic’s death trooper escort not a glance, and reserved his most withering look for the hem of Krennic’s white cloak.