Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  She had gone there after the shouting match with Cassian. She’d needed a place to be alone, away from him and away from the pity of the others. As the shuttle thrummed, the engine pulsing steadily as it propelled the vessel through hyperspace, she let her mind wander in her personal endless dark.

  For a while, she fantasized about revenge.

  She could wait until Yavin. Find a way to collapse the whole ziggurat on Cassian and General Draven and Mon Mothma and everyone who had been complicit in the murder of her father. She’d told Saw that all the Rebellion had ever brought her was pain; since it had come crashing back into her life, stolen her from Wobani prison, that was more true than ever. It seemed only right to return the favor.

  She luxuriated in thoughts of retribution awhile. Then she stopped. Whatever else she was, whatever she’d done in her short, brutal life, she wasn’t a murderer. She’d killed, yes; to save her life, to save others, and in war. But she wasn’t Cassian, and she didn’t want to be. Even the fantasy of hurting the people behind her father’s death couldn’t sustain her; after the initial rush, the notion left her exhausted and empty.

  She thought of her father’s recording: 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.

  Was that correct? She didn’t know if she remembered it anymore. The words had stopped replaying when she’d seen her father die, and she hadn’t been able to bring them back.

  So if her choice was not revenge, was it better to walk away? Steal a few credits and hunker down out of the line of fire? She could scrape by as she’d done before, while the Empire went around blowing up planet after planet, burning the Rebellion to the ground.

  It can be destroyed. Someone has to destroy it.

  Her father’s final words. Not a declaration of love, not I missed you. When he was dying and seeing his daughter for the first time in years, all he could think about was the machine that had taken over his life. The machine he’d spent decades building and then sabotaging; the machine that had led the Rebel Alliance to kill him.

  Jyn should have been angry at him for that. Angry that she had gone to Eadu for nothing, for less than what his message had given her. Instead of remembering the man overcome with emotion, the man who struggled to say my love for her has never faded, the image in Jyn’s mind of her father was the heap of a body in her arms; a confused old man who was as mortal as anyone.

  She wasn’t angry at him. She was angry at the Rebellion and Cassian. And even that anger, it seemed, was pointless; it only brought her back to the beginning, to the revenge she didn’t want.

  She had no answers. Eventually the thrum of the engine lulled her to sleep.

  In her sleep, Jyn dreamed.

  She dreamed of Saw Gerrera, the man who’d raised her for just as long as her father and barely smiled for the length of it. She dreamed of being a scared eight-year-old girl in the care of a soldier who wouldn’t take fear as an excuse for anything; a soldier whose roar left Gamorreans twice his size quaking and who’d never encountered a fight he hadn’t known how to win. She dreamed of the time she’d come home to Saw with a bloody face and a broken leg; of the dozen scars she’d earned during her time with his cadre. She still wore those scars today.

  Saw had given her fire. Saw had given her teeth. And she’d never thanked him before his death.

  Jyn dreamed of Galen, too. She dreamed of their apartment on Coruscant and the farm and her father presenting her with toys, so many toys, all of which she would name and whose names he would somehow remember: Beeny and Stormy and Lucky Hazz Obluebitt and more, others who were only shadows in her mind. So many nights he’d come into her room—wherever her room was, it didn’t matter the planet—and place a toy in her arms. His love had never been extravagant. Always simple. Always unmistakable. She’d hated him for so many years.

  She dreamed of Galen dying, executed on Lah’mu by black-clad stormtroopers and burning in a hail of TIE fighter bombs. She dreamed of the light of the Death Star, his Death Star, incinerating buildings and canopies and people in the Holy City of Jedha. She raced forward in a plaza, reaching to scoop up a tiny girl, and she didn’t make it in time. By the time her arms were around the child, all she held were bones. Then the bones turned to dust. She dreamed of more stormtroopers—stormtroopers dragging people out of doorways, stormtroopers patrolling cell blocks, stormtroopers shooting at blind men, rows and rows of stormtroopers marching endlessly, firing at her now and burning a thousand holes through her chest.

  She dreamed of the man in white surveying the work of the stormtroopers, their execution of Jyn, and speaking words Jyn could not hear. He looked pleased. He never spared her a glance. He had more important things to do. The stormtroopers, now clad in black again, continued to shoot her.

  And when Jyn felt she could endure the nightmare no longer, felt she had to wake up, she dreamed of her mother.

  Jyn lay on her back, dead, in their Coruscant apartment while Lyra diligently packed gear for some one-woman planetary survey mission. Lyra nearly stepped on Jyn as she grabbed a portable scanner off the dessert table.

  “Oh, for—” Lyra shook her head, reached down, and pulled Jyn upright.

  Was this a memory? Jyn didn’t know anymore. Her hand was shaking in her mother’s grip.

  “Mama?” she said.

  Lyra laughed and poked Jyn on the forehead with one finger. “You need to not lie down in the middle of the floor. I’m going to trip and fall and land on you, and your father’s going to blame me when you bruise.”

  She went back to packing. Jyn watched her. “Mama,” Jyn whispered again. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Lyra held up a hand for silence. She reviewed the contents of her duffel, nodded with satisfaction, then walked slowly to Jyn’s side. She smiled gently, sadly. “I know, sweetheart,” she said. “But you’re a big girl. You have to decide for yourself.”

  They were no longer in the apartment. They were in the endless dark that had once been the cave.

  “I don’t know how,” Jyn whispered, though she was ashamed to say it aloud.

  Lyra glanced over her shoulder conspiratorially, then looked back to Jyn. “I’ll give you one hint, okay?”

  Jyn nodded awkwardly.

  Lyra leaned in until her nose brushed Jyn’s. “You’re your father’s daughter,” she said. “But you’re not just that.

  “It’s okay. We all trust you.”

  Jyn felt small. She was four years old again, and her mother was so much bigger than her.

  Lyra whispered in her ear, so soft Jyn had to strain to hear it: “The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.”

  Lyra’s necklace seemed to burn around Jyn’s neck.

  Then the dream was over, and Jyn was awake in the engine compartment of an Imperial cargo shuttle, weeping harder than she had since she’d been a child—weeping until her face was red and her nose was stuffed; weeping until the dark that had been the cave seemed to be growing brighter; weeping until the tears wiped away the rain of Eadu and she felt clean at last.

  JYN FELT READY IN A way she hadn’t for as long as she could remember. She sped toward Yavin 4 with a purpose; and not simply a purpose, but a plan, flimsy and delicate as a petal. She had emerged from the shuttle’s engine compartment with only a single answer, and she had found it was enough.

  Her anger and resentment toward the Rebellion remained. But left unstoked, they diminished. They were both as real and as irrelevant as her old anger toward Saw Gerrera and his people.

  Besides, she needed the Rebellion for what came next.

  She would tell them all the truth. It can be destroyed. Someone has to destroy it.

  —

  As she stepped off the shuttle, Jyn was struck again by Yavin 4’s oppressive perfume of mildew and rotting vegetation. She was near the back
of the group of her shipmates, close beside Bodhi and behind the Guardians of the Whills; Cassian had taken the lead, hurrying ahead to consult with a cluster of Intelligence officers waiting inside the hangar. K-2SO observed them all from the rear, as if he expected everyone but his master to attempt an escape.

  During their landing, they’d seen other starships thundering through the atmosphere toward the ziggurat. “They’re bringing in everyone for an Alliance council meeting,” Cassian had warned them—brusquely, eyes averted. Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze were to be interviewed by Alliance Intelligence while Cassian and Jyn spoke to the council directly. Baze had shown his teeth, but Chirrut had said something about showing courtesy as guests in the rebels’ home.

  Now armed rebel soldiers hustled ornately dressed aristocrats off the tarmac and toward the temple interior. Bodhi looked overwhelmed, craning his neck to watch each ship come in to land. “That’s a Firefeather starcutter,” he murmured, pointing to a black dot in the blue-gray sky. “You can tell by the whistling sound. They’re really rare—someone important must be aboard.”

  “You don’t get on the council without money, guns, or influence,” Jyn answered.

  Bodhi laughed nervously. After a moment, he scraped the sole of his boot against the stone and turned halfway to Jyn. “I’m sorry about Galen,” he said.

  It took Jyn by surprise, though she couldn’t say why. “Thanks,” she returned.

  Bodhi shrugged. “I liked him a lot. Not that I knew him very well, but I did like him—”

  “You probably knew him better than me.”

  Bodhi’s smile was smaller now, but there was no nervousness to it. “I don’t think so.”

  Jyn was starting to sweat in the heat. She shifted uncomfortably and watched an astromech droid drift from one starship to the next without apparent purpose. Bodhi seemed to be trying to keep silent—for her benefit, probably, given his usual habit of running on.

  Jyn took pity on him and gestured at his Imperial flight suit. “Bet you’ll be glad to get out of that. Got to be a change of clothes somewhere here.”

  “What?” Bodhi glanced down at his arms, eyed the Imperial emblems on his shoulders. “No. No, I—I’m thinking I’ll keep it. As a reminder.”

  “A reminder of what?” she asked.

  Bodhi leaned in, as if embarrassed to be heard. “That I volunteered for all this. You know?”

  Jyn was saved from answering by a yell from the cluster of Intelligence officers. The rebels rapidly arranged themselves around Baze, Chirrut, and Bodhi. “I’ll see you around,” Jyn called as a lieutenant gently led Bodhi away.

  Cassian signaled Jyn to follow him, and they joined the stream of life flowing deep inside the ziggurat. “Come on,” Cassian said. “They’re about to start.”

  —

  The briefing room was as crude as the rest of the rebel base. Stone walls wept moisture onto bolted pipes and cabling that led between consoles and a central holoprojector. The chairs arrayed inside were far too few for the crowd: Admirals and generals in boldly stenciled uniforms stood shoulder-to-shoulder with guerrillas in piecemeal armor; nobles and civilian bureaucrats (dressed in simple clothes made of more expensive fabric than Jyn had ever owned) huddled in compact cliques. Jyn overheard murmurs suggesting some of the councilors present were Imperial senators; if she’d bothered to follow politics, she might have recognized them.

  She let the bulk of an Ithorian militia commander wedge her into a corner and lost sight of Cassian. A short while later, Mon Mothma—the grave, robed woman Jyn had met days and a lifetime ago—stepped up to the holoprojector and drew the mob’s attention.

  “I want to thank you all,” Mothma said, “for coming on short notice. Many of you undertook journeys whose dangers I cannot begin to appreciate. You risked exposure, crossing Imperial lines because you believe in our Alliance. Because you believed what you were told when we informed you of an unprecedented crisis.

  “I wish I could say the crisis isn’t real. I wish I could say you came all this way for nothing.” Mothma offered a ghost of a smile. Someone in the audience laughed gruffly and tried to hide it in a cough.

  “But the evidence we will present is not speculative. It is secretive, yes—and by showing it here, we must reveal certain sources and methods used by Alliance Intelligence; sources and methods we cannot take to the public or the Senate. You will hear testimony from both trusted rebel operatives and newfound allies. If you doubt their word, remember that all of them are marked for death by the Empire.” There were murmurs in the crowd, shuffling feet and skeptical faces. “I would ask all of you to refrain from speculation until the end of the briefing. At that time, we may discuss what we have all seen and determine the future of our organization and our galaxy together.”

  Mothma hesitated. Jyn spotted General Draven shouldering his way toward the center, but he stilled when Mothma spoke again. “What we face,” she said, “is the natural culmination of all the Emperor’s evils.”

  Jyn recognized the words, amended from her first encounter with Mothma. You’ve been working on this speech awhile, she thought.

  “It is a weapon designed to murder planets,” Mothma went on. “To turn thriving worlds and billions-strong populations to dust. You will see today that it is not intended for use solely against military outposts, but as a weapon of absolute destruction and absolute fear.

  “We believe the Empire has code-named it Death Star.”

  Now Mothma did step aside. Draven took her place and began the briefing proper. Jyn tuned out his voice, the series of reports about kyber crystal mining and Imperial research credit trails, and observed the councilors instead. With few exceptions, the military officers were rapt—they had faith in Draven, for whatever reason, and they took his words as truth. The politicians maintained, as a whole, an air of neutrality, as if they’d spent their lives learning how to look open-minded.

  Mon Mothma was speaking in a hushed voice with the councilors in her immediate vicinity. The woman kept busy.

  Soon Draven turned the briefing over to a series of Alliance Intelligence officers. Bodhi was brought in for terse questioning about Galen Erso and the construction he’d personally witnessed. Cassian came next, every bit the professional, reporting the story of “Operation Fracture.” It was a story whose broad strokes—an attempt to contact Saw Gerrera regarding an Imperial defector, an attack on the Holy City by the Death Star itself—resembled the truth Jyn knew. The holoprojector showed the crater and the dust storm left behind on Jedha.

  “The Empire is saying it was a mining accident,” a man muttered, two rows ahead of Jyn. “They’re not ready to go public, either.”

  Then Cassian was lying about Eadu, calling it an aborted attempt to extract Galen. The councilors started interrupting, asking for specifics about the Empire’s plans that Cassian couldn’t provide. Jyn looked away in disgust and almost jumped when she saw that Mon Mothma had crept to her side. In the packed crowd, she felt intimately close.

  “Am I up next?” Jyn asked. She laughed caustically as she guessed why Mothma had approached. “You here to prompt me?”

  There had to be versions of Jyn’s story that Mon Mothma, chief of state of the Rebel Alliance, wanted told—and others she wanted silenced.

  But Mothma shook her head. “No. I wanted to say…” Her gaze held on Jyn’s face as she searched for words. Jyn thought through all the trite, meaningless statements the woman might make: I’m sorry for your loss. The Rebellion is proud of you. Good luck with the crowd.

  “I won’t forget what we did to you,” Mothma said.

  Jyn stared and tried to comprehend the sadness in her voice.

  She might have asked a question, but then Jyn heard her name being called and a gloved hand was escorting her to the front. She squared her shoulders and readied herself. She knew what she’d come to say.

  —

 
; Jyn told her story as concisely, as bluntly, as honestly as she was able. She recited all she could recall of Galen’s message, though the words had continued disappearing from her mind one by one. She suffered the questioning of a red-shirted senator (someone called him Rebel Finance Minister Jebel, which struck her as a title rich in potential for mockery) who seized on her extraction from Wobani; he asked whether she’d been bribed with freedom to serve as a witness, and she snapped “Yes” before spotting a grimacing Bodhi in the crowd and amending her answer. Admiral Raddus—a Mon Calamari with skin mottled like storm clouds and unblinking amber eyes—sternly asked her about her initial parting from Saw Gerrera; she made up a lie about her discomfort with Saw’s methods that seemed to satisfy him.

  She spoke too softly one moment and too loud the next, unsure how well her voice carried in the briefing room. Her eyes skimmed the crowd, never landing anywhere for long. Over the course of an hour, then two, then three, she saw the councilors grow restless. Cassian and Bodhi slipped out into the depths of the ziggurat. Jyn finished by telling what had transpired on Eadu and repeating her father’s dying words.

  “It can be destroyed,” she said. “It was the last thing he thought. It was the most important thing in his life.”

  She felt a huskiness in her throat and stepped away from the projector before anyone could shout another question. Vague disappointment settled onto her; a sense that her words should have carried more weight, or that she should have felt the same rush from testimony as she did firing a blaster.

  No one stepped up to take her place. The briefing was over.

  “Senator Tynnra Pamlo of Taris.” A woman in an ivory hood and a ceremonial medallion announced herself and seized the floor, despite soft murmuring within a dozen subgroups intent on their own discussions. “It seems clear that Senator Mothma’s description of this situation as a crisis was an underexaggeration by half. General Draven and his people make a convincing case: This Death Star is an existential threat not only to our Alliance but to all life as we know it.”