Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  If Cassian replied, Jyn lost the words in the bedlam. She tried to read the battlefield, pinpoint every combatant, and found the chaos overwhelming. This wasn’t her kind of fight anymore; there were too many people on each side deploying tactics she hadn’t thought about in too long. All of Saw’s training, the long months staring at holographic carnage and the years of staging ambushes with his soldiers, churned wildly in her brain. She spied only moments: a stormtrooper shot in the visor while swapping blaster packs; a rebel bleeding on the stairs and desperately searching for cover; the guns of the tank elevating, aiming toward a shop whose rooftop supported a trio of rebel attackers.

  Beneath the awning of the shop stood a girl, ten years old at the most. Probably a pilgrim, Jyn thought. The girl was trembling, staring at the battle. Utterly paralyzed.

  Jyn left the cover of the doorway and ran for the shop. Cassian called her name, but it meant nothing.

  Jyn didn’t see the tank open fire. She grabbed the girl, scooped up her too-light body, and didn’t stop running as stone burst and sparks spattered her back like rain. Fury drove her forward, a sudden revulsion that had lain buried and forgotten under the hatch in her brain: a violent horror at Saw Gerrera and his people, and the cost of his tactics.

  Jyn might have kicked the woman who stepped forward to intercept her if the girl she carried hadn’t writhed and twisted, almost leapt into the woman’s outstretched arms. Jyn let the girl go, ignored the woman’s babbling and waved her off.

  You cluster together, you die, she thought. The old training was resurfacing after all.

  She was too exposed. She knew that. She searched the plaza for cover and for Cassian. She spotted him out of the shelter of the doorframe, stupidly, dangerously near the tank, and realized he’d already seen her. He had his own blaster out and fired a cluster of tight shots above her head. She craned her neck around in time to see Cassian’s target: a rebel stationed on another rooftop behind her.

  An instant later Cassian’s target and his rebel comrades disappeared in the fiery bloom of a grenade. Jyn could only guess one of the rebels had been aiming the explosive her way.

  Cassian had shot one of Saw’s rebels to save her life. Jyn supposed she should have been anguished, torn at the thought.

  She wasn’t.

  She sprinted toward Cassian. Clustering would get them killed, but she didn’t plan on staying in the plaza and she didn’t relish the thought of escaping Jedha on her own. She bowled into Cassian as another grenade impacted the tank. She slammed him to the ground and shielded him as metal shredded the air.

  Cassian dragged her to her feet and uttered a breathless “Come on!” He didn’t thank her, and Jyn was grateful for it.

  —

  They made it fifty meters from the plaza before hitting another stormtrooper squad. Half a dozen soldiers obstructed the alley Jyn and Cassian had turned down, advancing gingerly through the Holy Quarter like they expected the streets to be mined.

  Jyn swore to herself. Cassian pivoted around, but the stormtroopers reacted faster, turning their rifles on the man. One might miss; together they’d cut him down in seconds. Jyn called Cassian’s name and barreled forward, pulling her truncheons from her coat.

  The fight in the plaza had numbed her senses. Her body had acclimated to the roar of explosions, the glare of particle bolts, the heat of flames, and the blasts of demolished stone across her face. The brief respite from combat had let her feel again, and now her cheeks prickled and her legs throbbed with fatigue. She gripped her truncheons too tight, afraid she’d lose one as she slammed the metal rods into the joints of stormtrooper armor. She targeted throats and behind knees, felt the cushion of bodysuits underneath the troopers’ plating and struck again, again, crushing her own fingernails bloody in the pressure of her grasp. She knocked aside rifles with her shoulders, wedged herself into the fray to deny her opponents the opportunity to aim. She let her strikes determine her balance, moved from blow to blow, and ignored the flat smack of a rifle butt against her rib cage. When her truncheon found air, when no foe stood within reach, she stumbled back against the alley wall and exchanged a truncheon for a blaster.

  She fired two shots, dispatched two more troopers bringing their weapons to bear on her. She kicked one of the men she’d left on the ground and turned in time to see Cassian execute their last upright opponent.

  She was ready to drop from exhaustion. The blow to her ribs made her want to vomit. But she saw a long, spindly shadow extend down the length of the alley and forced herself to turn. In the stormtroopers’ wake came the black metal body of an Imperial security droid, marching on thin, titanium-strong legs.

  She dropped her second truncheon, gripped her blaster in both hands, and felt her aim waver as she fired. Despite her unsteady hands, the shot hit its mark. The droid’s chest sparked and something internal popped. It tumbled to the ground, only to reveal a second, identical droid marching behind it.

  The second droid shuffled to a halt. The heat of the blaster barrel warmed Jyn’s cold fingers. She took aim.

  The second droid bent his head to study his fallen comrade. “Did you know that wasn’t me?” he asked.

  Jyn furiously searched her memory and recognized the voice of K-2SO.

  “Of course!” she snapped.

  Cassian joined them as she tucked away her blaster and recovered her truncheon. “I thought I told you to stay with the ship,” he growled.

  “You did,” K-2SO replied. “But I thought it was boring, and you were in trouble. There are a lot of explosions for two people blending in.”

  A series of short, resonant blasts echoed from the direction of the plaza. A new column of smoke, threads of blue mixed in with the black, wafted above the rooftops. Another assault tank? Jyn wondered. Maybe a walker?

  “We could find one of Saw’s people,” Cassian said. Jyn noticed he was sweating despite the cold; despite his matter-of-fact tone. “Preferably someone down but still breathing. Maybe he could help us.”

  “If you want to drag someone out of that death trap”—Jyn jutted a thumb toward the plaza—“you’re welcome to try. But I’m guessing the rebels here aren’t feeling trusting right now.”

  “Just keep an eye out,” Cassian said.

  K-2SO turned his head. Jyn couldn’t tell if he was listening to something—concentrating on whatever sorts of frequencies an Imperial security droid might pick up—or looking at Cassian askance.

  “The Imperial forces are converging on our present location,” K-2SO said.

  The droid’s head jerked again, and Jyn followed the machine’s gaze to the stormtroopers left sprawled on the ground. One trooper had risen to a knee, a small metallic cylinder in his left hand. He threw the grenade limply; before Jyn could move, as she tensed to leap away, K-2 extended an inhumanly long arm and caught the cylinder in one hand. A moment later the grenade retraced its arc perfectly.

  Jyn winced and turned away from the explosion. A cold voice inside her said, No more witnesses.

  “I suggest we leave immediately,” K-2 declared, and they left.

  —

  For the first time since crossing the desert to the Holy City, Cassian noticed the cold. The insulating press of bodies in the street had kept him warm much of the day; then, during the fighting, the chill hadn’t registered at all. Now that sunset was approaching and his undershirt was soaked with sweat, he found himself shivering and watching his breath steam from his lips.

  If it was this bad for him, he couldn’t imagine how Jyn was still standing.

  The need in her eyes had been subsumed by an almost feral anger, a survival instinct that guided her with frightening surety through the chaos. But while he didn’t doubt her alertness, she was slowing physically. The bruises she’d sustained brawling with the stormtroopers left her wincing with every other step. Cassian wondered, too, if she’d been concussed when she�
�d saved his life in the plaza—the grenade had gone off with stunning force, and she’d shielded him from the brunt of the blow.

  She needed a medical droid. A chance to recuperate. Instead she traveled with Cassian and K-2 through the maze of the Holy Quarter, her head low and her breathing strained.

  “We’ll find shelter soon,” he said. He kept his eyes averted and his tone matter-of-fact. He doubted she would respond well to pity.

  Even so, she didn’t argue. That struck Cassian as a bad sign.

  He tried to focus on practicalities. They had to escape the Holy Quarter before it was cordoned off. They would need to reach Saw Gerrera—and the pilot—without the help of Cassian’s contact. And while Jyn was right that Saw’s people wouldn’t be trusting right now, Cassian couldn’t see any other leads.

  Could Saw Gerrera put aside bad blood in the face of a planet killer? It seemed madness to have to ask. But by all accounts, the rift between Saw and the Alliance was profound, nurtured by years of bitterness that had curdled into violence; and Saw Gerrera was not a man who knew how to forgive.

  He’d passed that on to his adopted daughter. Or maybe she’d taught it to him.

  Jyn blocked Cassian’s path with an outstretched arm. From a passageway too narrow to be called an alley, they watched a dozen stormtroopers pass through an intersection.

  Cassian recognized a side street across the way. “That should bring us out of the quarter,” he said.

  Jyn waited for the patrol to move on, then promptly sprinted through the crossroads. Cassian and K-2 followed, only to stumble to a halt as Jyn abruptly stopped. Blocking the side street, nested in a pile of rubble, was the dusty wreck of an X-wing starfighter.

  Cassian swore. It wouldn’t be difficult to climb across, but it would leave them exposed for precious seconds—

  “Halt! Stop right there!”

  The trio turned together toward the voice. The stormtroopers who’d passed by were now spread out to block their retreat.

  Too many to fight, Cassian thought, and his hand drifted to his blaster anyway. His power pack was almost empty, but there was no point in saving his bolts. Jyn’s shoulders sagged, yet she stared at the stormtroopers like she was eager to enter the fray, glad to have nowhere to run.

  The squad leader nodded to K-2SO. “Where are you taking these prisoners?”

  Cassian felt something very similar to hope.

  The droid stared back at the squad leader as if struggling to process a response. “These are prisoners,” he said.

  Cassian winced. The feeling like hope evaporated.

  He flicked through a deck of possibilities. Maybe K-2 was trying to access Imperial behavioral programming and coming up short. Maybe overwritten Imperial loyalty protocols were coming back to life, thanks to hardware damage or some personal memory of the squad leader.

  Most likely, and worst of all: K-2 was that bad at lying. He always had been, since the reprogram. Relentless honesty was his natural state.

  “Yes,” the squad leader said. “Where are you taking the prisoners?”

  “I am taking them”—K-2 spoke with stilted care—“to imprison them. In prison.”

  Cassian channeled his irritation into a growl of anger—a sound he prayed resembled something a defiant captive might make. “He’s taking us to—”

  The droid swung a metal arm into Cassian’s face. “Quiet!” The blow nearly took Cassian off his feet and left his nose and chin throbbing painfully, his lip stinging. K-2 loomed over him. “And there’s a fresh one if you mouth off again!”

  “We’ll take them from here.” The squad leader again. Cassian tried to refocus as the stormtroopers approached the trio. They kept their weapons out, maintained a tight formation, demonstrated all the discipline Imperial soldiers were supposed to. As one retrieved two sets of stun cuffs, the others watched Jyn, Cassian, and the droid.

  K-2 was babbling now. “That’s okay. If you could just point me in the right direction, I can take them, I’m sure. I’ve taken them this far—”

  Jyn looked to Cassian and reached for her truncheons as the trooper with the cuffs approached. Cassian shook his head. Wait for a chance, he mouthed, and Jyn looked ready to bite as the trooper snapped the restraints onto her wrists. A few seconds later Cassian, too, was cuffed.

  “Hey,” he murmured. “Hey, droid. Wait a second.”

  Whatever the troopers’ suspicions, they clearly didn’t believe K-2 had been subverted. If Cassian could make his intentions known, the droid could locate them in holding, access the Imperial database to free them.

  It wasn’t a good plan, but it was a plan.

  “Take them away,” the squad leader called. The stormtroopers circled and moved in unison. Cassian felt a rifle muzzle nudge at his back.

  “You can’t take them away!” K-2 protested.

  “You stay here,” the squad leader said. “We need to check your diagnostics.”

  “Diagnostics? I’m capable of running my own diagnostics, thank you very much.”

  Don’t argue, Cassian wanted to snap. He gave the droid as intent a look as he dared, but K-2 was too invested in his debate with the squad leader. A stormtrooper shoved Cassian from behind and he stumbled forward.

  If they were taken captive and K-2’s reprogramming was discovered, then they truly had no way out. They could claim they were residents of Jedha City, but that would fall apart on a cursory investigation. They could say they were deserters from Saw’s band, but they’d gain no leniency.

  You messed up bad, Cassian told himself. This time, you get to pay the price yourself.

  Then a voice cried out, steady and commanding, and everyone—stormtroopers, captives, and droid—stopped to look.

  “Let them pass in peace!”

  —

  Chirrut Îmwe stood in an archway staring at the stormtroopers with blind eyes. Jyn wanted to laugh.

  Cassian had called him a Guardian of the Whills, whatever that really meant. He’d played games with Jyn to try to buy her necklace. And now he was, what? Martyring himself?

  Maybe he was more zealot than con man after all.

  “Let them pass in peace,” he said again, leaning lightly on his staff. The stormtroopers were repositioning themselves, fanning out to defend against Chirrut or another rebel ambush.

  Chirrut began chanting, and the words throbbed in Jyn’s aching skull: “The Force is with me, and I am with the Force.” He emerged from the archway, stepped toward the stormtroopers. He was in the middle of the street now, separating most of the squad from Jyn, Cassian, and K-2SO. “And I fear nothing, for all is as the Force wills it.”

  “Hey! Stop right there!” The squad leader’s voice was angry. Not used to being ignored by civilians, Jyn thought, and smiled grimly.

  “He’s blind,” a second trooper called.

  “Is he deaf?” the squad leader asked. “I said: Stop right there!”

  Chirrut raised one foot from the pavement, and the squad leader fired a single shot. It was too late to shout a warning, too late for anyone to intervene, and Jyn felt an unexpected ache, a pang of guilt over the death of a man who had tried to save them.

  But Chirrut was not dead. The bolt had been aimed with precision, yet Chirrut was not dead. The merest twitch of his head, a glance to one side, had saved him and sent the energy flashing by, toward the captives and over Cassian’s shoulder.

  Stormtroopers who had previously hesitated to shoot a blind man adjusted their weapons with nervous hands and a renewed sense of duty. Jyn shifted her wrists in her cuffs, glancing at the two stormtroopers who remained within her reach.

  Chirrut was inside the bulk of the squad in two strides. His staff was suddenly in motion, sweeping behind legs and twisting arms back unnaturally. Jyn felt clumsy and graceless—where she had thrown her whole body into every strike with her truncheons, Chirru
t dropped stormtroopers with a delicate whirl, a flick of his wrist.

  He was mocking them now, in a voice full of gentle mirth. “Is your foot all right?” Like a dancer, he leapt a step to the side as another stormtrooper fired his rifle. The bolt found one of the trooper’s squad mates, and Chirrut only shook his head sadly.

  The two stormtroopers by Jyn were staring at the melee, as if debating whether to join their squad. Jyn chose her moment and swung her cuffed hands into the helmet of the trooper nearest. The metal bit fiercely into her wrists as she impacted. Graceless or not, exhausted and cold and hurting or not, she’d do what she could.

  She’d caught the stormtrooper by surprise. She took advantage of the man’s shock by throwing her shoulder into his chest, forcing him to his knees. She heard Cassian and K-2SO fighting, too, heard continued shouting from Chirrut’s direction, but she focused on her own opponent. She brought her shackles down on the back of the trooper’s head, pounded at his helmet, drove him low—drove the plastoid against his skull again and again, until he finally slumped to the ground. If she’d been sure of his unconsciousness, Jyn might have stopped there; instead she kicked him fiercely, viciously, three times, until she was certain he couldn’t rise.

  Cassian and K-2SO’s opponent was down as well. Chirrut stood calmly over a pile of bodies. Jyn rolled aching shoulders and felt blood on her raw wrists.

  But the fight wasn’t over. A second squad of stormtroopers—reinforcements, maybe, or just drawn by the noise—rushed in from the intersection. Chirrut was too far away to intercept them before they could take aim. Jyn scanned for cover, saw none within reach, and prepared to drop flat onto the dust.

  She heard the crackling snap of a particle bolt, but none of the stormtroopers had discharged his or her weapon. One collapsed, then another, as sniper fire struck them faster than Jyn would have thought possible. When the last was dead, the shooter emerged from across the way.

  Jyn recognized him: Chirrut’s silent partner from the alley, the one with wild hair and red armor. In one hand, he bore his repeating cannon. In the other was an ornate, gold-trimmed bowcaster at odds with his battered and practical gear; this, the man passed to Chirrut.