Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  The hull shrieked as something heavy bounced off the top of the U-wing. The deck dropped, sent Bodhi onto his hands and knees and drove spikes of pain into his wrists. He went sliding as the ship banked. He recognized the sound of the engine (an Incom Corporation rebuild of their 9XR standby…) as it strained against the storm.

  Bodhi dragged himself forward and clambered into the cockpit. He’d never seen a U-wing cockpit before.

  Seated at the controls were a droid and the man who’d passed by him before. (Cassian? Was that his name?) They were adjusting thrust madly, trying to ride the waves of the dust storm, trying to turn the ship away from the epicenter and maneuver through the mountains as they cracked and shattered.

  Bodhi didn’t interrupt. He watched their hands play over the controls. He read the instruments and the scanners (nearly useless, never meant for these conditions). He felt the U-wing rise on a crest of the storm, shuddering all the way as it tried to match speed, and saw a shadow creep over the cockpit as a heavier, hotter cloud raced overhead and began to fall.

  He was going to die after all. His rescue was over. And it was his own fault. If he’d been faster, the rebels might have stopped the planet killer.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Cassian and the droid didn’t hear him.

  He understood that Bor Gullet was gone from his mind. Yet the memory that seized him was every bit as vivid as those the creature had evinced. Bodhi looked out the viewport and saw, instead of the dust storm, the emerald and turquoise hues of titanic gas clouds. Lightning volleys like alien dancers leapt from one cloud to the next, causing each to ignite and burst. Bodhi was laughing as his shuttle, a Nu-class transport barely viable for training runs, bounced and twirled, and his classmates cheered him on…

  It was a memory of utter serenity. Then his flight through the gas giant of Bamayar IX was over and he was gazing into the dust storm again as darkness closed around the U-wing.

  “Look!” he cried, and reached toward the viewport—toward a speck of light, a gateway through the dust, collapsing as the wave above them crashed down.

  Cassian didn’t turn toward Bodhi. Maybe he hadn’t heard. But the rebel snarled “Come on!” as he diverted power again, urged the ship through that speck of light as oblivion raged around them. And the sky turned blue, then black, and the viewport filled with stars.

  The U-wing leapt into hyperspace, and Bodhi laughed on the floor of the cockpit in giddy joy.

  THE DEATH STAR’S OVERBRIDGE WAS dark except for the lit rows of instrumentation and the glow of the main display. Dominating that vast screen was what remained of the valley of the Holy City of Jedha: a churning, whirling, burning storm of sand and rock shards. The air, ionized by the energy of the Death Star’s weapon, flashed with lightning. At the storm’s epicenter, the crater of the incinerated city smoldered where the beam had sublimed the outermost layer of the moon’s crust.

  This was not the fate Krennic had envisioned for Jedha. The Death Star was designed to obliterate worlds, not maim them. Yet he wondered if the moon would ever recover from such an attack, or whether the cascading effects of a burning atmosphere and broken crust would result in a tortuous death played out across millennia. He felt in his bones that his weapon had exposed something profound—about the nature of worlds, about their lifeblood and their death throes—though he could not have put it into words. Maybe, he thought, that’s what poets are for.

  “It’s beautiful,” he murmured, breaking minutes of near-silence on the bridge. Even Tarkin had respected the crewmembers’ shared awe as they spoke in whispers and muffled their keystrokes.

  “I believe I owe you an apology, Director Krennic,” Tarkin replied. “Your work exceeds all expectations.”

  Krennic did his best to conceal his surprise. “And you’ll tell the Emperor as much?” Too eager. He moderated his tone; he could afford humility if it would comfort Tarkin. “After all, this is his triumph—the triumph of his insight and will—more than any other single man’s.” There. Enough for you to save face, but not enough to deny me credit.

  Tarkin cut the air with a dismissive gesture. “The Emperor desires facts, not flattery. Your tenure on this project has been rife with setbacks—setbacks you have, it seems, overcome. I will tell him his patience with your misadventures has been rewarded with a weapon that will bring a swift end to the Rebellion.”

  “You’re too kind, Governor.” Condescending bastard. “But you express my hopes as well. We’ve seen that the Death Star might destroy a city or a rebel base unimpeded by planetary shields or defense grids. And what you witnessed today? That is only an inkling of the destructive potential—”

  The same gesture as before: a demand for silence. Smiling acidly, contritely, Krennic obliged.

  “I will tell him,” Tarkin said, “that I will be taking control over the weapon I first spoke of years ago…effective immediately.”

  Taking control?

  Krennic curled gloved fingers into fists and looked about the overbridge as he quelled his first and most vicious response. The duty officers were not watching the confrontation; they remained busy at their stations, checking and rechecking the Death Star’s primary weapon status and scanning the system for survivors.

  That was a very small comfort.

  Krennic stepped as close as he dared to Wilhuff Tarkin and snapped, “We are standing here amid my achievement—not yours!” He forced his voice into a hiss. “My people are loyal. And my people are the only ones capable of operating this station.”

  He knew it was unwise to threaten Tarkin openly. He could berate a subordinate without repercussions, but not the grand moff. And there was no imminent scenario in which Krennic could remove or replace Tarkin; he would need to suffer the man’s existence for some time to come.

  But Krennic was not a man to smile meekly forever.

  Tarkin shrugged as if he hadn’t heard the threat; as if he were certain that the officers’ loyalty was far too malleable to be a problem. He might have been right. “I’m afraid these recent security breaches have laid bare your inadequacies as a military director. Your place, I think, is among the engineers; there are many initiatives that could benefit from your organizational skills—”

  “The security breaches have been filled,” Krennic retorted. “Jedha has been silenced.”

  There was a flaw in that argument, too, Krennic knew. The ignition of the weapon and the ensuing storm had left the Death Star’s sensors momentarily blind. It was conceivable that survivors had escaped the moon; conceivable, but unlikely.

  Tarkin had a different countermove in mind. “You think this pilot acted alone?” He let out a wheezing half laugh. “He was dispatched from the installation on Eadu. Galen Erso’s facility.”

  Galen Erso.

  Galen Erso.

  Fury made a fool of Krennic. This time, he could not hide his surprise.

  “We’ll see about this,” he snarled, and turned to leave the overbridge.

  —

  General Davits Draven was the bane of his peers and a hero to his subordinates. It wasn’t the role he wanted to play, but he believed it was a necessary one.

  As an organization, the Rebel Alliance was held together more by external pressure than by internal bonds. Mon Mothma’s almost pathological need to make political overtures toward peace—regardless of their success—was a poor match for General Jan Dodonna’s policy of covert strikes that minimized attention from the Empire and its Senate. Dodonna’s approach, in turn, was incompatible with Bail Organa’s desire to rapidly intervene wherever Imperial atrocities occurred. Saw Gerrera had effectively withdrawn from the Alliance over strategic disagreements; but there were other council members who shared his more aggressive agenda. If not for the Empire’s overwhelming strength—if not for the need for the rebels to work together to even survive—the Alliance would have fractured in a matter
of months.

  If not for the Empire’s strength…and if not for General Draven.

  While his peers argued and mapped out roads to an imaginary ultimate victory, Draven maintained a singular focus on protecting the Alliance itself—on ruthlessly defending the organization and its people while correcting their mistakes. If that earned him a reputation for arrogance or intrusiveness, it was a small price to pay.

  In the matter of the supposed planet killer, Draven feared there was nothing but mistakes to correct. A few of those mistakes were even his own. Yet he had no intention of shirking his duties.

  He marched into the comm center on Yavin 4 with his head held high and his shoulders stiff, the way soldiers imagined a general. He hoped the rebels on duty would forgive the sweat on his brow from the jungle heat. “What do you have?” he demanded.

  Private Weems leapt to his feet. “A coded message from Captain Andor, sir,” he said.

  That was fast. Andor was smart, thorough, and not particularly inclined to make contact during the course of a mission. This time around, he also had the Erso girl to contend with. Draven hadn’t expected to hear from him for a week, at best.

  “What’s he got for us?” Draven asked.

  Weems read in the deliberate tone of a man pretending not to see what he was seeing. “ ‘Weapon confirmed. Jedha City destroyed. Mission target located on Eadu. Please advise.’ ”

  “Destroyed?” Draven echoed. Weems only nodded.

  The planet killer is real.

  Doubt followed instantly in the wake of that thought. Andor was a fine agent but not flawless. His message was vague. The transmission could have been intercepted and altered en route. There were a thousand reasons why weapon confirmed might not be confirmation at all.

  But Draven had seen too many commanders use doubt as an excuse to deny the obvious.

  He hadn’t really believed in the planet killer before—not rationally, not in the cold, strategic part of his mind that was (he could admit, if to no one but himself) his only true value to the Rebel Alliance. If the weapon was active, then the strategic framework of the entire galaxy was in flux. Everything the Rebellion had built, every scheme from every council member, would have to adapt.

  But urgent decisions had to be made first.

  Andor’s message contained nothing new on Galen Erso. Those assumptions remained intact, and if Erso was instrumental in the planet killer project then maybe Draven could give the Alliance breathing room. A chance to evolve before worlds instead of cities started dying.

  “Proceed,” he told Weems. “Tell him my orders still stand. Tell him to proceed with haste and keep to the plan. We have to kill Galen Erso while we have the chance.”

  —

  The first time Jyn had been orphaned was on a farm on a shoreline of the planet Lah’mu. She had seen her mother shot by a death squad and watched her father surrender to the man responsible, abandon her to a soldier he barely knew.

  The second time had been in the deserts of Jedha, when she had seen the man who raised her—the man who had taught her everything, whom she hated more than almost anyone—buried beneath a mountain after being nothing but kind. Or as kind as he knew how to be.

  Perhaps she’d never been orphaned at all, however. Galen Erso was alive. Not the gentle farmer she remembered; nor the coward and monster who’d left her behind to become an Imperial weaponeer, earning years of spite. Both of those men had died on Jedha as well.

  There was another Galen Erso. All she knew of him was a sapphire light in the cave in her mind—the cave where she lived now—repeating the same words over and over. Words about love and happiness and loneliness. Excuses for deeds done long ago. Plans and lies about a Death Star, a planet killer…

  My love for her has never faded.

  She couldn’t stop the words. Each one tore at her, and she clung to them for solace.

  She sat in the cabin of the U-wing and stared out at her companions from the cave’s depths. She watched their faces through the distant pinpoint of the broken hatch. A very small part of her was aware of how she must have looked—a disheveled and battered and dirt-encrusted creature, all but catatonic as she observed the room blankly—and hated herself for her weakness.

  “Baze, tell me.” Chirrut’s voice. The blind Guardian of the Whills who had saved her life. “All of it? The whole city?”

  Baze. Chirrut’s partner had a name. He sat beside the blind man with his eyes on the bulkhead. The strobing blue-white light of hyperspace splashed on his cheeks from out of the cockpit.

  “Tell me,” Chirrut said again.

  “All of it,” Baze answered, short and bitter.

  Jedha City is gone. Jyn examined the thought numbly. The death of Jedha City meant the death of Saw; the deaths of many or all of his soldiers; the deaths of red-robed pilgrims and blustering water vendors. It meant the death of the girl she’d swept into her arms during the fighting in the plaza—the brutal, pointless death of the only person she’d helped in any way since this mission began…

  We call it the Death Star. There is no better name.

  The planet killer was real. She had mocked it, mocked the Alliance for believing in it, and it was real.

  If she had believed sooner, kept faith in her father, would anything have been different? Would they have found Saw faster, acted in time to do—what?

  Was Jedha City her fault? Even a little?

  “Understood.” It was Cassian speaking now, a murmur into the comm unit. Then, calling to the droid in the cockpit: “Set course for Eadu.”

  Jyn repeated Cassian’s phrase in her head, tried to hear it over her father’s words in the dark of the cave.

  “Eadu?” she asked. Her voice sounded thick and hoarse.

  “Sodden lump of a world, according to the files,” Cassian said. He looked at her with a hint of surprise, swiftly hidden. “Small native population, mostly rural nerf herders. Officially, the Empire designates the planet for research and chemical processing.”

  “Is that where my father is?” Jyn raised her chin, tried to force out the hoarseness.

  She tried to picture the reunion. Tried to picture meeting the man in the hologram for the first time and telling him who she was. Telling him I saw your message. She should have felt joy at the idea. Her father was a hero.

  But who she was was Liana Hallik and Tanith Ponta and Kestrel Dawn, a bloodstained fighter and a thief and a prisoner who had spent nearly fifteen years loathing Galen. Locking him in a prison of contempt until, when he needed her, she hadn’t believed his warnings about the Death Star at all. She’d have to tell him that, too. The thought brought bile up from her stomach.

  Could she have been someone else, if she’d only known?

  I try to think of you only in the moments when I’m strong.

  “I didn’t have a lot of time to question our friend Bodhi,” Cassian said. He gestured at the fifth occupant of the cabin—a long-haired man dressed in a stained Imperial flight suit and wearing battered goggles, weaving and unweaving his fingers together. Occasionally, the pilot whispered something without looking up. “But Eadu’s where he said his message came from. So is your father there? I think so, yes.”

  Jyn nodded distantly. Bodhi’s whispers became louder—a stuttered, indecipherable series of sounds. Then he leaned forward in his seat, fully intent on Jyn. “You’re Galen’s daughter?” he asked.

  He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Like he expected everything nearby—Baze, the seats, the bulkhead—to clamp jaws around his neck if he dared to blink. He looked almost as pathetic as she did.

  “You know him?” she asked.

  What did he think of the stranger in her hologram?

  “Yes.”

  She had a hundred questions, none of which she wanted the answers to. “Did he tell you anything?”

  “He said�
�” Bodhi ducked his head. “He said I could get right by myself. He said I could make it right, if I was brave enough and listened to what was in my heart. Do something about it.” His lips worked, over and over again, forming and swallowing whole sentences before he stilled.

  “Guess it was too late,” he said at last.

  Jedha City was gone. Saw was gone. His people were gone. The little girl was gone.

  “It wasn’t too late,” she said. At least the pilot had tried.

  “Seems pretty late to me,” Baze growled.

  In the silence of the cabin, in the darkness of the cave, Jyn listened to her father’s recording. That’s the place I’ve laid my trap…

  Saw’s dying howl echoed, Save the dream!

  Galen and Saw tore at her together now, asking for what she’d refused them already, demanding recompense for every way she’d failed them and every day Liana and Tanith and Kestrel had lived their own glorious, petty existences. But she had nothing to give them—she was hollow, and even what she’d kept in the cave was lost to darkness. All she had left was the voice of a hologram.

  Yet she broke anyway. She gave in to the demands, because her shame was too great to do otherwise.

  “No,” she whispered. The single word demanded the attention of the ship. “We can beat the people who did this. We can stop them.”

  She would make a deal with the hologram of Galen Erso. She would obey his demand, and he would—if not forgive her—cease to remind her of her failures and her guilt and her loathing.

  And by the time she met the true Galen Erso on Eadu, she would have something to show for it.

  She spoke evenly, slowly, enunciating each word like she was whetting a blade. “My father’s message,” she said. “I’ve seen it. They call it the Death Star. But they have no idea there’s a way to defeat it.”

  The tension in Cassian’s expression dissipated as he donned his spy’s face, his innocently cerebral face. Jyn caught it and knew exactly what it meant. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “You think he’s still working for the Empire.”