Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  She stood and listened.

  “Perhaps there’s a chance to explain myself and, though I don’t dare hope for too much, a chance for Jyn, if she’s alive, if you can possibly find her…” He trailed off, shook his head briskly. “A chance to let her know that my love for her has never faded and how desperately I’ve missed her.”

  From the ruin of the hatch, from the cave in her mind came images, sounds, scents: Jyn’s father holding her, declaring I love you, smelling as sour as his Imperial uniform.

  She wanted to shout at the hologram, Your love? Who gives a damn about your love? You sent me to Saw.

  You let my mother die.

  You did this to me.

  She didn’t say anything, and the recording kept speaking.

  “Jyn, my Stardust, I can’t imagine what you think of me.

  “When I was taken, I faced some bitter truths. I was told that, soon enough, Krennic would have you. He toyed with me that way; for months, he would pretend to forget you, and then act in conversation as if he’d slipped up—make mention of a new lead on you or Saw. Part of me longed for those mentions. I realize now it was a kind of torture.

  “As time went by, I knew that you were either dead or so well hidden that he would never find you. But I knew if I refused to work, if I took my own life, it would only be a matter of time before Krennic realized he no longer needed me to complete the project.” He spoke these words swiftly, almost slurring them in his haste. In the silence that followed, his mouth worked noiselessly. Then he began again. “You may think that’s an excuse. That I was fearful, and should have died. In the interests of objectivity—” Here, for the first time, he smiled. It was an ugly, effortful thing. “—I should admit the possibility. History will forgive me or excoriate me, as is appropriate. I only wish it would forget me.”

  Jyn listened to her father’s explanations—his justifications— as they piled on, one after another. Too many to consider, too many to argue against, years of Galen’s personal analyses and self-recriminations spat out in the space of seconds. He was trying to answer her every question, anticipate every response, and the torrent denied her any opportunity for logic or fury.

  How could she not loathe him?

  How could her heart not break?

  She needed to sit. Her legs were swaying beneath her, as unstable as Saw’s cane.

  She stood and watched.

  “So I did the one thing that nobody expected: I lied.” His voice grew steadier, as if here he stood on sure ground. “Or I learned to lie. I played the part of a beaten man resigned to the sanctuary of his work. I made myself indispensable, and all the while I laid the groundwork of my revenge.

  “You may have heard rumors by now, leaks regarding a battle station integrating an advanced laser prototype. The battle station is real. Its primary weapon has been built to penetrate the crust of a planetary object, to pour energy into a world until the bonds of matter fray and break. The ultimate result, we believe, would be the planet’s violent obliteration. Nothing would survive. Nothing could ever be rebuilt.

  “This battle station…we call it the Death Star. There is no better name.”

  Jyn heard the horrors her father described, but it was only his spellbound tone that allowed her to notice at all; her thoughts were fixed on his simple presence, his story of years of desperation and labor and doubt.

  My father is alive. My father is a traitor. My father is building a weapon to destroy worlds.

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

  She looked in vain to Saw, looked for the compassion she had derided and defied minutes before. Yet he, too, was watching the message, his expression cold and somber—as if for the first time, he was hearing Galen’s words and dwelling on their implications instead of searching for a trap.

  “My colleagues,” Galen said, “many of them, have fooled themselves into thinking they are creating something so terrible and powerful it will never be used. But they’re wrong. No weapon has ever been left on the shelf. And the day is coming soon when it will be unleashed.”

  His head turned from the recorder as if what he said next, more than anything, he feared to say aloud.

  “I’ve placed a flaw deep within the system.

  “A scar so small and powerful, they’ll never find it.”

  Jyn knew the words mattered. Her father spoke with the breathless agony of a man baring his soul.

  It wasn’t what she needed to hear. Not now.

  She no longer felt the swaying of her legs. Darkness crept around the edges of her vision, as if the hatch in her mind and the cave where the hatch had been were rising up to engulf her. As if she were descending, falling, to be locked away in her own skull with everything she’d denied.

  Galen shivered like a man dying in icy rain. The confession appeared to have been too much. “Jyn, if you’re listening…” He was slurring again, stumbling and urgent. “My beloved, so much of my life has been wasted. I try to think of you only in the moments when I’m strong, because the pain of not having you with me…Your mother. Our family.” He paused, seemed to try to refocus with limited effect. “The pain of that loss is so overwhelming I risk failing even now. It’s just so hard not to think of you. Think of where you are.

  “I assume logically, rationally, that you fight with the Rebellion. It’s difficult to imagine Saw steering you any other way, and you always had the same anger—” He smiled for a second time. Here it was unforced, without self-mockery or bitterness. “—the same insistent sense of righteousness as your mother. It frightens me to imagine you grown, somehow working to oppose injustice in the galaxy, whether from a laboratory or a starfighter; it frightens me, and I think the Rebellion could ask for no better friend.

  “Yet if it isn’t so? If I’m wrong, and you left the Rebellion and Saw behind but this message still finds you? You make me no less proud, Jyn. If you found a place in the galaxy untouched by war—a quiet life, maybe with a family—if you’re happy, Jyn, then that’s more than enough.”

  Jyn’s jaw ached, clamped shut to hold in her screams. She couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe. The cave walls rose around her until the only light in the blackness was the sapphire glow of the hologram.

  If you’re happy, Jyn…

  Galen snapped back into focus, no longer hesitant or soft. “Saw, the reactor system, that’s the key. That’s the place I’ve laid my trap. It’s unstable, so one blast to any part of it will destroy the entire station.”

  She was losing her balance. Her legs shook and her head swam. Galen’s words were fading behind a roar, like the rush of blood in her ears. She tried to concentrate on his voice as if it were a lifeline to haul her out of oblivion.

  “You’ll need the plans, the structural plans, to find your way, but they exist. Sabotage from the inside is impossible: Krennic is too paranoid. But I’ve thought about this, Saw, prepared everything for you I could.”

  The roar was growing louder. The stone seemed to tremble and Jyn fell to her knees, a shock of pain driving back the darkness of the cave long enough for her to realize that Saw, too, was shaking. His cane tapped rapidly on the floor.

  “I know there’s at least one complete engineering archive in the data vault at the Citadel Tower on Scarif. Use what I’ve told you, run the analysis, and you’ll be able to plan your attack. Any pressurized explosion to the reactor module will set off a chain reaction that will—”

  Without prelude, the hologram vanished. Not even the control lights on the console still gleamed. The voice was gone. Saw Gerrera cried out something as the monastery lurched and a choking wave of dust billowed through the window.

  Something terrible was happening on Jedha. Jyn knew that.

  But she’d lost her father. The cave beneath the ruined hatch swallowed her, enveloped her in night.

  KRENNIC PACED THE OVERBRIDGE UNDE
R Tarkin’s watch, observing the technicians and referencing every step against the control protocols he’d memorized long ago. Levers were flipped, rotating focusing lenses deep within the station’s core. Engineers adjusted radiation baffles and ventilation pumps as the main reactor shook with effort and its comforting roar turned to an eerie scream. Krennic saw more than one hand shaking, more than one face flushed or daubed with sweat. But his officers knew their duty. They would do everything necessary to destroy Jedha City at the bidding of their commander.

  Obedience and skill, of course, might not be enough.

  Eight separate beam generators came online in the Death Star’s heart. Here the process became too much for Krennic to observe in its entirety—a dozen officers on the overbridge alone chattered into their comms, relaying information through a dozen more teams responsible for monitoring and controlling the primary weapon’s final ignition. Krennic turned from the technicians to the monitor screens, saw readings gently crest as the eight beams reached minimum coherency.

  From the focusing dish on the station’s outer shell, the beams of light and charged particles poured into a single vertex controlled and suspended by the kyber fields. The overbridge’s main display blazed with green fire set against the void of space, and Krennic stepped forward, staring in awe at the conflagration. The radiance of the display splashed over his white uniform, over the black helmets of the technicians, over Tarkin’s grave face, and rendered the room in carved emerald.

  For a moment, the blazing nexus of energy hung in the void. Krennic tensed involuntarily. This was the moment where so many tests and computer simulations had failed him. He had seen the nexus sputter and die, or expand to consume the station itself. He had seen calculations collapse under their own weight as predictions gave way to haphazard guesswork. He had seen successes, too, but they gave him no confidence now.

  Then the last stage was triggered: From the center of the focusing dish came another particle beam, invisible to the human eye. It carved through the nexus and tunneled a path for the energy’s release, funneled the conflagration away from the battle station and toward the rust-brown sphere of the Jedha moon.

  The atmosphere seemed to flare where the beam struck. Krennic tried to imagine the incineration of the Holy City and the ensuing shock wave. He found his mind failed him.

  Surely no one could imagine such a thing.

  He had killed a city.

  He could kill a world.

  —

  Every morning, Meggone ate her breakfast before the smoke ceremony. According to certain ancient customs, this was an act of heresy; but she’d done it every day for sixty-odd years and no cosmic power had ever smacked the eggs from her withered hands or turned the water in her canteen to blood.

  Besides—it seemed to Meggone that a dollop of heresy kept a person from getting too wrapped up in the particulars of tradition. “Smoke ceremonies and pilgrimages don’t put one in touch with the Force,” she’d once told a disappointed visitor to her shrine. “Best they can do is focus head and heart.”

  It was while making breakfast over her portable stove, just outside her tiny shrine in the mountains beyond the city, that Meggone noticed the dark silhouette in the sky. It was no more than a smear to her rheumy eyes, and she tried to rub it from her vision with her knuckles. It remained despite her efforts, a blemish on the dim gray heavens.

  She trembled as she adjusted the stove’s heat. Her body had been failing her more and more lately. The dull pain in her ankles had worsened the past few weeks, and the mole she could feel on the nape of her neck had gotten larger. “Admit it, Meggone,” she mumbled. “You’re finally getting old.”

  She looked back to the smudge in the sky. It wore a fiery halo now, and the world seemed darker, as if the smudge had eclipsed the sun itself. Mixed with her confusion was the elated thought: Maybe it’s not my sight after all. Then the smudge flashed a brilliant emerald, and her vision spotted as if she’d been staring into a fire.

  Meggone felt the heat wash over her body but she felt no pain. She ignited in an incandescent burst of burning air, turned to ash and less than ash in an instant.

  At the age of ninety-three, she was not ready to die.

  —

  Pendra was pouting. Larn was praying the pout didn’t sour and become a full-blown tantrum. He loved his daughter, but he’d seen her shriek for an hour straight and he was late for work already. “You’re going to stay with Aunt Jola today,” he said. “She has those toys you like, remember? The ones that belonged to Cousin Ked?”

  Larn knew very well that his daughter had ignored the toy starship models the last time they’d gathered at Jola’s. Still, if he lied in a soothing enough voice there was always the chance Pendra would believe him.

  Instead, his daughter ignored his words as he adjusted her boots. “I want to go with Mom,” she whimpered.

  So do I, Larn thought, then cursed aloud as he tried to stand and banged his shoulders against the kitchen table. Pendra was continuing her protests, but he wasn’t listening anymore. He scooped her up in both arms, glancing about the cramped apartment to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  So far as he could tell, Pendra didn’t remember the fight in the Holy Quarter. She didn’t remember nearly dying and being saved by the whim of—who had it been? Not a rebel and not an Imperial, but, according to Huika, some woman caught in the crossfire.

  When had Jedha become such a death trap? It hadn’t always been this way. And now they were going to work, doing their shopping, like nothing had happened. Maybe, Larn thought, he could talk to Huika. Maybe she was right about finding a way offworld…

  But not tonight. Tonight he just wanted her home safe.

  Larn and Pendra Sillu didn’t see the emerald light or hear the thunder before they died. Pendra never left her father’s arms.

  —

  The order to evacuate had come while JN-093 was in the outlands doing recon on suspected rebel hiding spots. All she and her squad had turned up was a shallow cave packed with empty supply crates. Now she was waiting for pickup; so far from the city, they’d never make it back on foot in time for liftoff.

  “You know why we’re being moved offworld?” JN-092 asked. He was pacing awkwardly by the edge of a long-dry lakebed, occasionally digging the toe of his boot into the dust.

  “I don’t,” JN-093 said, though she doubted she would have told Two if she did know. He was a stormtrooper; he should’ve known better than to ask.

  JK-027 laughed into the comm in his resonant bass. He was nearly out of sight, scanning the horizon from atop a boulder. “You getting cozy here? Afraid to leave?”

  Two grumbled something insulting that didn’t quite cut through the static. JN-093 shook her head in irritation. There was something going on between Kay and Two—she wasn’t sure what, but it had started after they’d come back from a night at the cantina. She made a note to question them if they didn’t reconcile soon; she didn’t need her squad members at one another’s throats.

  Where was the blasted pickup, anyway?

  Kay was looking at the sky now. JN-093 felt a shadow fall across the valley, allowed her helmet visor to automatically compensate. She scowled as she tried to contact transport control. The comms seemed to be working, but no one was answering.

  Two prized off his helmet and tossed it to the ground. He, too, craned his neck to look skyward. JN-093 prepared to scold him when a surprised voice finally came through: “Jayen-Oh-Nine-Three, please confirm. Your squad’s still on the ground?”

  You forgot us? she wanted to ask. “Affirmative,” she said. “Still waiting for pickup.”

  “Sorry, Oh-Nine-Three. You may be stuck out there awhile. Just got—” A pause. “I’m really sorry.”

  The voice cut out. The comm hissed. JN-093 kicked at the dirt. Kay and Two were standing by the lakebed together now, both with their helmets
off, still staring at the sky. She started to stroll toward them. Maybe they’re making up, she thought, and Two started laughing when the sky turned emerald.

  JN-093 was thrown into the dirt as the ground bucked and a gale whipped across the valley. In the direction of Jedha City, the horizon glowed as if a new sun were rising—a sun of white and green fire that swelled and burst, spilling forth destruction. JN-093 instinctively screamed orders into her comm, though no one was listening. She pushed herself to crawl toward her team as the gale grew stronger and black clouds rose and shrouded the distant fire.

  She fought against the battering wind and dust for what felt like minutes. The next time she could think and see, she was behind a ridge of boulders dragging Two by one arm. He was coughing and brushing sand from his face. A wall of churning ruin filled the horizon, rapidly marching closer. Kay was nowhere in sight.

  JN-093 finally thought to look at the shadow in the sky. She stared at the structure, indefinably large and eclipsing the sun.

  She knew a weapon when she saw one, no matter how incomprehensible. “They did it,” she murmured. “The rebels finally did it.”

  Two sputtered weak laughter.

  “I don’t think that’s the rebels,” he said.

  When the storm front hit them, JN-093’s armor protected her just long enough to make her death painful. In her last flicker of brain activity, she felt she’d failed her squad.

  —

  Saw Gerrera looked from the window of the Cadera Monastery and saw his death on the horizon.

  The Holy City was gone. In its place was a roiling storm of sand and fire, like the work of some primal deity. The bed of the valley flowed like an ocean, save where fissures opened and drew the land into itself. The wind battered him, burning with heat and stinking of ozone; he inhaled one scorching lungful of dust then clamped his oxygen mask to his face.

  He found himself transfixed by the monstrosity before him. Saw had seen many terrible weapons over the years: disruptor beams that tore soldiers apart; screamers that left the residents of whole city blocks hallucinating and bleeding from their ears; viruses that spread on the wind and adapted to every species imaginable. He had used those same weapons and numbed himself to the outrage of the Rebel Alliance. Yet now he saw something beyond all his dark dreams, and he remembered fear.