Krennic shook his head. “The shield is up. Your signal will never reach the rebel base.” He leveled his blaster at her. “I’ve lost nothing but time. You, on the other hand, will die with the Rebellion.”
Jyn braced herself for the shot. She was ready to die, but like this? At the hands of the man who’d killed her mother and stolen her father away? And without actually transmitting the plans?
A shot rang out, and for a moment Jyn couldn’t understand why she hadn’t fallen over in pain. Then Krennic collapsed instead.
She looked beyond the Imperial and saw Cassian standing there, his blaster in hand.
She was thrilled to see that Cassian had survived the fall from the data tower. He must have caught himself before he hit the floor. She wanted to tell him how relieved she was, but she had a job to finish first.
Jyn ran for the control console, grabbed the transmission lever, and hauled it down. The screen began to fill with the data it was preparing to send out. “Transmitting,” it said.
They’d done it! Jyn looked to Cassian and gave him the biggest smile she could manage.
She went to his side and put his arm around her shoulders. He could barely walk, but together they made it to the elevator Krennic had taken to the top of the tower.
“You think…anybody’s listening?” Cassian asked.
“I do.” She looked into the sky. “Someone’s out there….”
FAR ABOVE, near the shield gate, a communications computer made an announcement to the lieutenant who had been monitoring it. “Transmissions received.”
The lieutenant turned to shout a report to the rebel cruiser’s commander. “Admiral, we have the plans!”
“She did it!” Admiral Raddus said.
He was thrilled. Their desperate gamble—the only shot they had left—had paid off.
Unfortunately, it had come through so late there wasn’t anything he could do for the brave people who had stolen the plans for him. As he watched, the dish array on the Death Star charged up. Green lights flashed all around the rim.
The lights became lasers that fired off together. The thin beams coalesced into a single, massive beam of ultimate destruction aimed straight at the planet.
The blast blew through the shield and began cutting into the planet. Raddus and the rest of the rebel fleet still outside the shield could do nothing but gape at it in horror.
“Rogue One,” he said. “May the Force be with you.”
Then he turned to his bridge crew and began barking out orders. “All ships, prepare for jump to hyperspace!”
Some of the ships managed to get away in no time at all. They must have already planned their escape before they’d gotten their orders. But before they could all get clear, a new ship arrived on the scene.
Raddus recognized it instantly. It was the Star Destroyer assigned to the Emperor’s right hand, the Sith Lord known as Darth Vader.
It opened fire immediately. The barrage of fresh blasts slammed into Raddus’s ship, rocking it all the way to the bridge.
Raddus called for a damage report, but he didn’t need one. The ship’s engines had been disabled, and its hyperspace drive had been knocked offline. They weren’t going anywhere.
As Vader’s Star Destroyer loomed ever closer, Raddus cast about for a way to get the Death Star plans off his ship and back to Yavin 4, where the Rebel Alliance could analyze them and find the battle station’s weakness.
He might not live to see it happen, but that didn’t mean the Rebellion was dead yet.
JYN AND CASSIAN made it down to the ground level of the tower and outside of the building without anyone trying to stop them. The rebel commandos were all dead. Bodhi’s stolen cargo shuttle was still burning out on landing pad nine.
Anyone who had survived the battle on the main island had already taken to the skies if they could. There would be no escape for anyone else.
Jyn helped Cassian limp away from the tower and toward an unspoiled stretch of beach. When they reached the shore, his legs finally gave out on him, and he fell to the sand.
Jyn knelt down beside him, and they gave each other weary smiles. Cassian looked out at the water and the wave of destruction heading for them.
“I’m glad you came,” Jyn told him.
As they watched the Death Star’s massive beam cut toward them, trailing a wake of world-shattering destruction, they held each other’s hands. Soon they found themselves embracing as they waited for their end.
“Your father would be proud of you, Jyn,” Cassian said.
Those were the exact words she needed to hear at that moment. They’d done what they set out to do, and with luck their efforts would give the Rebellion a chance to take the Empire down.
They couldn’t ask for anything more than that—and there was nothing they could do to stop what would happen next.
The green beam fluoresced brighter and brighter as it approached, driving the front edge of a spreading explosion before it. The last thing Jyn saw before the blast enveloped her was the color transforming into a cleansing white.
ABOARD RADDUS’S rebel cruiser, a crewman downloaded the Death Star plans onto a data card, just as Raddus had ordered. He then took the card and sprinted off the bridge on his mission.
The corridors of the ship swam with other crew members on various missions of their own. Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer had already pulled alongside their vessel, and it would be only a matter of minutes before the Sith Lord’s boarding party arrived on the rebel cruiser.
The crewman ran into a security door that had been locked down prematurely. Normally, he would have tried to go around it, down another path in the ship, but he had already run out of time. He began banging on the door to get his crewmates on the other side to open it, but the controls for the door were jammed.
He grabbed a few people passing by and had them help him try to pry the door open with their hands. People on the other side did the same, working as hard as they could.
The time they wished they still had vanished when Darth Vader entered the corridor.
The crewman heard the Sith Lord’s horrible breathing first. He glanced back to see a red lightsaber beam leap from its hilt.
Some of the people with the crewman turned and fired at Vader, but he deflected their shots with his blade. Then he held up his hand, and one of the rebels had his blaster torn from his grip by an unseen force.
The crewman set to the door with terror-fueled strength. It slid to the side, although just a crack.
The crewman took the data card and slid it through the sliver of an opening. Someone on the other side grabbed it, and the crewman could hear the man running for his life. Before the crewman could even turn around, though, something yanked him away from the door.
The man who had taken the data card—Toshma Jefkin—charged through the corridors of the ship until he reached the cruiser’s docking bay. There he spotted his goal: an Alderaanian blockade runner called the Tantive IV.
The moment Toshma boarded the ship, it zoomed away, leaving the docking bay behind. Out of breath, he handed the data card off to a woman who then took it to the ship’s captain, Raymus Antilles.
Captain Antilles was happy to be made the custodian of the card for a moment, but he knew it wasn’t ultimately for him. “Make sure you secure the airlock,” he barked to his junior officers on the bridge. “And prepare the escape pods.”
As his people moved off to fulfill their orders, Raymus approached a young woman dressed in a simple white gown. “Your Highness,” he said as he presented her with the data card. “The transmission we received.”
Bail Organa’s daughter, Princess Leia Organa, turned around to accept the card from the captain. She examined it with a quiet look of raw determination.
“What is it they’ve sent us?” Raymus asked, unable to suppress his curiosity. What, in other words, h
ad Admiral Raddus ordered them to get to the Alliance high council at all costs?
The princess looked at him. Her dark eyes sparkled as she summed up the contents of the data card in a single word.
“Hope.”
Rogue One Junior Novel Page 14
