Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  Tonc was staring at him, evidently torn between duty and bewilderment. He opened his mouth and Bodhi spoke over him, answering the question Tonc was least likely to ask. “You don’t build a comm tower just anyone can access. There’s mechanical, physical connections controlled by the switches, and the switches are like the data vault—totally off the computer network. I only know all this because—” But he realized the last time he’d thought of those days was in the lair of Bor Gullet, and he hurried on. “Get one of the soldiers, Baze or Chirrut, someone, to activate the connection between us and that comm tower. Otherwise, we’re not going anywhere and that data tape stays on Scarif. Okay?”

  Tonc stiffened, suddenly sure of himself. He glanced to the other rebels in the cabin, who offered curt nods of acknowledgment.

  “Then go!” Bodhi cried. “Call them!”

  Before anyone could answer he was pocketing the tools and heaving the spool over his shoulders, where it could be harnessed like a backpack. Shifting the weight awkwardly, Bodhi hurried to the boarding ramp and peered around the doorway onto the landing pad. He could hear Tonc behind him, talking through his comlink: “Melshi, listen up! You guys have to open up the line…”

  He couldn’t see blasterfire. But then, he couldn’t see very far at all. The landing pad was cluttered with cargo crates and substations, and the shuttle’s undercarriage blocked much of his view. He could smell so much smoke, like the whole jungle was burning.

  The network console you need is only ten meters out. Maybe twenty. You run, you hook up the cable, you head back. Think of it like a race. You used to bet a lot on racing…

  He wanted to ask Tonc to do it, but Tonc couldn’t adjust the connector if something went wrong, wouldn’t know how to run a diagnostic. And Tonc wasn’t dressed like an Imperial pilot; that might buy Bodhi an extra minute or two.

  He had to go. He’d risked his life before. Just never quite like this.

  The Rebellion needed him. Jyn needed him. Her father, who’d set him on this path, needed him. He braced his legs and got ready to run.

  “What does it look like?” Tonc called, and Bodhi’s urgent determination was shattered. He straightened, looked back at Tonc in confusion.

  Tonc was holding up his comlink. “The master switch!” he said. “What’s it look like? Where is it?”

  Bodhi tried not to choke on a laugh and stepped back inside, tugging at the straps of the cable spool. “Let me talk to Melshi,” he said.

  Apparently, he had a few more moments to dread his mission.

  —

  An X-wing pilot, dashed against the shield gate, was among the first to die above Scarif. But fatalities mounted rapidly after that, first one starfighter at a time and then by the dozen. Raddus watched, cold as the waters of his homeland, as a rebel gunship was reduced by turbolaser fire to a spreading globule of molten metal.

  A great commander, Raddus believed, felt each loss among his people but did not act on it. Mon Mothma might have disagreed, but she was no soldier. General Merrick, too, might have disagreed, but he had led Blue Squadron through the gate to Scarif, and now starfighter command fell to Raddus as well.

  “What’s going on down there, Lieutenant?” Raddus called.

  “Unknown, sir,” came the reply. “The shield jams all communications.”

  Raddus swore to himself. Victory in Scarif’s orbit meant nothing if Rogue One failed. “We’ve got to buy Erso and her team some time,” he said. “Throw our weight at those Star Destroyers and let’s start probing that shield.”

  If the Alliance was lucky, Erso had an exfiltration route already planned. If not, the burden was on Raddus. “Yes, sir!” he heard, and kept his eyes in their steady rotation between viewport and tactical displays.

  A wing of Red Squadron fighters strafed the orbital gate station, maneuvering among clusters of sensor towers and laser turrets. The attack did little damage, but inflicting damage hadn’t been the goal—the fighters had claimed the station gunners’ attention, left a few turbolaser platforms in burning ruin, and given Gold Squadron’s Y-wings the opportunity for a bombing run. The impacts of the Y-wings’ proton torpedoes winked out the viewport even as the scanners revealed swarms of TIE fighters pouring from the station hangars.

  The command ships were faring better against the Star Destroyers. Any single vessel in the rebel fleet compared poorly with the Empire’s mighty warships, but Raddus—speaking only a word here and there—kept the Destroyers boxed in, unable to turn their full firepower on one target without exposing a flank to concentrated volleys. It was, in a sense, a delaying tactic, but delay defeat long enough, and a triumph might eventually find its way home.

  “Sir!” The lieutenant again. “Enemy fighters coming in!”

  Red and Gold Squadrons were busily engaged against the gate or the Destroyers. Pulling them back to defend the Profundity was no option worth considering.

  “Withdraw to fifty thousand kilometers from the shield gate,” Raddus said. “Stay in the TIE fighters’ range but force them to stretch their line. If they don’t think to regroup, the point-defense gunners can handle the bulk of them.”

  Even as he spoke, the Profundity’s shields coruscated with energy as cannon fire struck home. The ship rumbled and its generators strained. But it could hold.

  Another X-wing blinked out of existence on the tactical display, then another. A rebel freighter, desperately evading TIE fire, skimmed the Scarif shield until its hull crumpled and its burning components rolled and bounced across the energy field. One of the Hammerheads, caught between the two Star Destroyers, momentarily lost its overtaxed deflectors and signaled for help as turbolasers left blackened, burning holes in its sides. Raddus observed the carnage patiently and waited for an opportunity to change the course of the battle; waited for an insight that he could apply with the precision of a knife.

  He thought again about the dead, and how Mothma and Merrick might react. Maybe humans felt loss more keenly. They spawned so rarely and so few. His own grandchildren numbered in the dozens, and though he loved each he knew some would never come of age.

  The death of individuals was no tragedy in battle. It was the death of hundreds that would haunt him.

  He listened to cries of despair on the starfighters’ frequency and an anguished scream as Red Five was torn apart. The Profundity’s shields flashed constantly now. The chatter among the bridge crewmembers was growing louder and more frantic.

  “We’re having no effect on the shield gate,” the lieutenant said. “And we’re sustaining heavy losses, Admiral.”

  “I’m aware,” Raddus said. And he was, but the state of the battle had not changed. He had to assume Erso was still on the ground, still working to obtain the Death Star schematics that would reveal the weakness she’d promised.

  He could not withdraw. He could expect no allied reinforcements. His fleet was crewed by the best officers the Rebellion could provide.

  He waited for opportunity. For insight. For an error.

  Then he saw it, and cried orders so swiftly it seemed to stun the crew. “All ships nearby, close to support the Heartbound and Deviant! Match current trajectories! Demand that Destroyer’s attention!”

  One of the Star Destroyers had allowed itself to be flanked on two sides while leaving its forward firing arc empty. Its weapons had been almost entirely diverted to port and starboard. Raddus was ready to shout another command, but Gold Squadron recognized the opening and he heard a voice on the comm: “Y-wings, on me! Path is clear!”

  The bomber wing, barely out of its last attack run against the shield gate, altered course and powered directly toward the exposed front of the Destroyer. TIE fighters pursued, faster than the bombers but unprepared to pull away from their defense of the gate. The Destroyer itself recognized the danger, attempted to swing away and simultaneously bring its guns to bear, but far too late. The Y-wings converg
ed and flew so close to the Imperial vessel that the tactical displays couldn’t differentiate them from the Destroyer’s mass.

  “Ion torpedoes away,” the wing leader declared. Raddus called up a visual and watched the Y-wings climb out of the attack, illuminated by bright electric bursts that crawled across the Destroyer’s surface. Lightning silently ravaged Imperial deflector dishes and weapon emplacements. The glow of mighty ion engines went dark.

  “They’re down, sir!” the lieutenant called. “The Destroyer has lost power!”

  “Press the attack,” Raddus said, calm as ever. “Maintain fire against the remaining Destroyer, but divert available ships to the orbital station. Let’s see how much the shield gate can take.”

  Now the state of the battle had changed. But time was still working against them. Sooner or later, Imperial reinforcements would come. Rebels would continue to die.

  What are you doing, Rogue One?

  —

  Tonc had insisted on dispersing his troops around the landing pad. “If you get caught out there, we’re not going to do any good guarding the shuttle. You say you need to talk to the fleet to get the data tape offworld? Fine. That means we protect you like we would the tape.”

  Bodhi had tried to argue, but he’d mumbled only a few words before Tonc’s people had hurried out. “Wait for our signal,” Tonc had said, gripping Bodhi tight by the shoulder. “When the way is clear, run fast as you can.” Then he, too, had gone.

  Now Bodhi adjusted the straps of the cable spool, looking out from the boarding ramp and listening to the thunder of starfighters overhead. A momentary fancy put him in a world where he’d scored higher, much higher at the Imperial flight academy; a world where he’d been assigned to TIE duty, and where he was the one shooting at invading X-wings on Scarif.

  His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. He wasn’t a soldier.

  One of the rebels gave a hand signal from across the landing pad. Bodhi ran.

  Heat hit him like a wall—not just the heat of the sun, but the hot flecks carried by the smoke of the battle. The shuttle had filtered out the worst of it before; now Bodhi felt sweat dampen his flight suit, had to breathe openmouthed to draw in enough of the stinking air. Each impact of his boots on metal jostled the spool on his back, caused the straps to slip a little lower until he was fumbling to right them as he moved. He’d meant to keep his head down to avoid being spotted, but he couldn’t stay low and manage the spool at the same time. He could only hope that no one but Tonc and the rebels was watching.

  He turned a corner around a stack of cargo crates and crouched beside the network console. He didn’t take the time to look around; he tugged the end of the cable in one hand, slammed it into place, and stayed in position only as long as it took for the console to register and accept the connection. After that, he spun about and charged back the way he’d come.

  His legs were already sore, but each step became easier as the cable unspooled behind him. He was almost at the shuttle when he was suddenly jerked back; he nearly lost his balance, stumbled around, and saw that the spool had run out.

  No. No, no, no. He’d checked the length beforehand. He’d been careful. Which meant the cable had snagged somewhere, probably on one of the cargo crates. He almost laughed. He saved the energy for the run.

  With cable wriggling behind him, still attached to his back, he retraced his steps until he found the kink—as he’d expected, under the corner of a crate. He knelt to prize out the cable, intending to run it over the crate to give him the extra length he needed.

  He didn’t get the chance. “Hey, you!” an electronic voice called. Bodhi squeezed the cable tight in his hands. “Identify yourself!”

  He unclenched his hands and let the cable drop. He stood slowly and faced the stormtrooper closest to him as others nearby observed. “I can explain—” he started, but he never got a chance to finish. Red blaster bolts flashed around him and the stormtroopers staggered and fell.

  The stream of bolts didn’t stop, however. Bodhi dropped to his knees and saw more troopers racing toward the landing pad, firing in the direction of Tonc and his men. He lifted the cable again and looked toward the shuttle. It seemed as far away as the Citadel or the stars.

  —

  The broad shaft of the data vault rose half a dozen stories inside the Citadel. In the center of the shaft stood multiple towers of stacked data banks, each bank aglow with dim red lights indicating the storage status of ten thousand cartridges. Each cartridge, in turn, contained enough data for a lifetime of perusal—scientific treatises and bureaucratic memoranda and schematics detailed to a microscopic level. Jyn hadn’t known what to imagine when her father and Bodhi had talked about the data vault, but it hadn’t been this—not a library too vast to comprehend, not a monument to Imperial atrocities grander than anything she’d ever encountered.

  Every book Jyn’s father had ever read to her, every history of every planet she’d ever visited, could have fit on one of those tapes. And every one of them held some dark secret of the Empire.

  The vault shaft proper was divided from a control room by a broad glass viewport. Cassian suppressed his awe and his vertigo faster than Jyn and headed straight for the main console. Jyn shivered at the icy air, like a refrigeration unit or a morgue. She followed Cassian and tried to think of worse places to die.

  “Schematics bank,” K-2’s voice announced through the console. “Data tower two.”

  “How do I find that?” Cassian asked.

  “Searching,” K-2 replied. “I can locate the tape, but you’ll need the handles for extraction.”

  Handles? Jyn scanned the console, spotted a bewildering set of mechanical manipulators.

  Cassian looked equally nonplussed. “What are we supposed to do with these?”

  Jyn leaned over the console, propping herself with a knee and peering through the viewport into the upper reaches of the vault. Cassian doffed his officer’s cap and tugged off his gloves before fumbling with the manipulators; once he began, Jyn spotted a mechanical arm rising rapidly through the tower, turning to one bank of tapes after the next. “Figure it out fast,” she muttered, and slid back to the control room floor. “There’s a whole fleet waiting on us.”

  “Schematics bank,” Cassian muttered. “Data tower two.”

  Servos whined loudly and metal roared. Jyn turned in time to see the vault door clamp shut. The air seemed more frigid than before. K-2’s voice came through the comm only faintly, as if he were speaking at a distance: “The rebels! They went…over there.”

  Jyn remembered the droid’s awkward, unconvincing dissembling in the Holy Quarter on Jedha. Damn. Had the Imperials found them? If they were trapped now, everything happening outside would be for nothing…

  “K-2?” Cassian grimaced, looking from the manipulator controls to the comm. “What’s going on out there?”

  The comm growled with indecipherable static. Jyn saw something new flash across Cassian’s expression. He was afraid—not intellectually afraid, not afraid of failing the mission, but afraid for K-2.

  Afraid for his friend.

  “Keep moving the arm,” she murmured, and searched the console for a readout. She tapped a key and found it: a registry of cartridges in each bank. “You fly, I’ll navigate.”

  Cassian’s grip visibly tensed as they heard a series of noises very much like blaster shots.

  Was this hope? Facing fear after fear, for oneself and for friends and for the galaxy, all out of some desperate need to accomplish the impossible?

  Maybe, Jyn thought, she’d been better off without it. If you were alive, Papa, I’d have a lot to blame you for.

  “Hyperspace Tracking,” she read off the screen as the arm whirred about the tower. “Navigational Systems, Deep Core Cartography—” The vault was arranged by subject, clearly; beyond that she hadn’t a clue how to search. Maybe there wa
s an index somewhere, but Saw Gerrera’s training hadn’t prepared her to serve as a data librarian.

  “Two screens down,” K-2’s voice announced, as if he’d never stopped speaking. Cassian parted his lips and Jyn raised a hand, silenced him and urged him back to the controls. The catalog scrolled rapidly on her screen as the arm kept moving. “Structural Engineering,” the droid said. “Open that!”

  “Kay-Tu!” Cassian snapped. The arm stationed itself at a cartridge bank. “Tell me what’s happening!”

  Jyn’s screen switched to a listing of tapes, once again organized in no fashion she could discern. Maybe they had identification tags she wasn’t seeing. Or maybe it was yet another layer of security; hard to rob the vault if you couldn’t find what you were looking for.

  “My riot control protocols are now active,” K-2 said. “But the situation is well in hand?”

  Jyn winced at the self-conscious lie of a question. There was nothing she could do from the control room.

  She spoke sternly, demanding Cassian’s attention as she read from the screen. “Project code names: Stellarsphere. Mark Omega. Pax Aurora…” Were all of them weapons like the Death Star, designed for terror and genocide? Had her father known about the others? She couldn’t afford to think about it—there were too many horrors down that road. “War-Mantle. Cluster-Prism. Black-Saber.”

  And she stopped.

  The next name stood out with burning intensity, so obvious she might have found it by touch.

  “What?” Cassian asked.

  “Stardust,” Jyn said. “It’s that one.”

  “How do you know that?” Curiosity and urgency mixed in his voice, as if he wanted to say: Be sure.

  Jyn was sure. “I know because it’s me.”

  Cassian looked at her with astonishment. Then he turned back to the console, gripped the controls fiercely. “Kay, we need the file for Stardust!”