Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  He heard multiple voices murmur in swift consultation before one of Ramda’s lieutenants finally answered. “Minor damage from the aerial battle, Director. Do you require assistance—?”

  “I’ve already signaled my security team,” Krennic growled. He regretted sending so much of his detail to the battlefield, but the deed was done; and he’d chosen not to wait for them outside the data vault. “Get me full power to the lift immediately.”

  Even if his foe had retrieved the DS-1 technical schematics, she would surely be unable to beam them to a ship in orbit. There was nothing she could do. Yet Krennic found little consolation in that thought.

  “At once, sir. Also, we haven’t received an update from Admiral Gorin—” Krennic snarled and prepared to close the link; before he could, Ramda broke in: “Visual confirmation! The Death Star has entered orbit—the rebel fleet is doomed!”

  Heat rose up Krennic’s face. His Death Star had been commandeered? But if it had come to assist against the rebels, Ramda was right—nothing the Alliance could field could possibly stand against the battle station.

  If it had come to assist. An alternative crossed Krennic’s brain that he did not wish to contemplate. As the lights flickered on, he severed the link and reactivated the lift. The carriage hummed into motion then quickly jolted to a stop.

  He gripped his pistol and squared his shoulders. The Death Star’s presence was one more reason to put a halt to Galen’s interference.

  He stepped out onto the platform to kill the last of the Jedha survivors, and silenced Lyra’s inexplicable taunting inside his head:

  You’ll never win.

  —

  Clinging to the ruined catwalk, Jyn stared at the planet killer lodged in the bright sky.

  Cassian was dead. K-2SO was gone. Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze might have been alive, but it was hard to imagine anyone surviving the war zone she saw below the tower. No one had called her comlink for a long while. If she wasn’t the last of the men and women who’d come from Yavin 4, she suspected she was close to it.

  She’d done better than most; it would take the Empire a whole battle station to end her.

  With ragged, whimpering breaths, she shimmied up the last stretch of the catwalk. She wrapped her legs tight around metal to steady herself, then raised one gloved hand and slapped the rim of the platform, working sore and half-numb fingers until she located a grip. She mirrored the motion with her other arm and forced torn muscles to pull her weight up, up and over the edge, until she was on her knees on steady ground and quivering from the effort.

  When she looked at the sky again, the Death Star was still there.

  Kill me, you bastard, she thought, because there’s nothing I can do to stop you.

  Maybe her mission to Scarif had been doomed from the start; maybe she’d even known it; but the Death Star made it impossible to pretend.

  She had been afraid of losing her way. Afraid that fearing for her allies would distract her. Afraid that losing her allies would regress her to the survivor she’d been all her life, ready to abandon everything she’d come to Scarif for. Now surviving wasn’t an option and no one was left as a distraction. Her fears had been laughably naïve. Nauseated and racked with pain, she took greedy gulps of air and waited to see what would come.

  By the time she felt she could move again, the Death Star still hadn’t killed her.

  She realized nothing had changed. Nothing.

  The thing that had brought her to Scarif—not her father, not her comrades, not some impulse buried below the cave, but the monstrosity that killed and killed and killed until every little girl and pilgrim and mother in the galaxy was dead—was staring down at her, as real as ever.

  Her mission was the same. She just had less time to finish.

  She propped herself on one leg and rose to a stand. The platform sputtered with flame where the TIE’s cannons had struck, and ashes wafted in dense clouds between Jyn and the control panel. She took a tottering step and lurched to a stop as a silhouette appeared in the smoke.

  A man in a cape. The man in white.

  Not now. Not now!

  The Death Star was, for all its apocalyptic might, a comprehensible threat—a machine built by her father to kill planets. The man in white was a nightmare, an impossible creature that had followed her across her life.

  She reached for her blaster, but she’d dropped the weapon off the catwalk. It was somewhere in pieces at the base of the tower.

  The man in white was alone. He held a pistol in one black-gloved hand and aimed steadily at Jyn’s chest. Eyes the same color as the ash that drifted around him fixed on her with a strange mixture of rage and bafflement. Jyn parted her lips, unable to speak, barely able to keep from shaking in terror or fury or both.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  He had ruined her father and killed her mother and killed Cassian. He had stolen her home and forced her into the arms of Saw Gerrera. He had whittled her with a knife out of a block of flesh. She almost screamed, How can you ask that?

  But as the words penetrated and the implications heated her skin, she met those wild eyes. His breathing was haggard, and not merely from the smoke.

  “Who are you?” he repeated. His hand twitched. The blaster barrel jerked up to point at Jyn’s collar.

  He was afraid.

  He was not the Empire—not every moment of oppression and indignity and torment she had ever suffered. He was an Imperial, a petty, spiteful, scared little man who’d forgotten his own atrocities.

  And he didn’t know her at all.

  She decided to make him remember.

  “You know who I am,” she said, and though her body felt brittle her voice was steady. “I’m Jyn Erso. Daughter of Galen and Lyra.”

  She couldn’t remember ever saying that before, let alone with pride.

  The man in white stared. “The child,” he finally said.

  “The child,” Jyn agreed. She tried to shrug; the agony in her shoulders kept her from lifting them.

  He straightened his firing arm. She couldn’t rush him, couldn’t possibly close the distance and disarm him; not in her condition, not without a delay or a distraction. Panic and wild indignation rose inside her at the prospect of this man—diminished or not—bringing about her ultimate failure, but she tamped it down. If she could control her fear, she could control his, too.

  “You’ve lost,” she told him.

  If she could keep him from shooting, her opportunity might come. And if he was going to kill her—if she couldn’t claw his face or punch him in the gut or put a blaster to his skull; if he stopped her mission, loosed the Death Star on the galaxy—she would damn well make him never forget her again.

  “Oh, I have, have I?” the man in white asked, unctuous and cruel. He didn’t lower his weapon; he didn’t shoot, either.

  “My father’s revenge,” Jyn said. She resisted the urge to sneer. Her voice came out proud and defiant. “He built a flaw in the Death Star. He put a fuse in the middle of your machine and I’ve just told the entire galaxy how to light it.”

  The man in white scowled. His head twitched toward the great communications dish.

  This is your chance. Go! Go!

  But her legs wouldn’t move. If she leapt at him now she’d sprawl on the platform utterly defeated.

  “The shield is up,” the man in white snarled. He was burying his fear, his fear of her, beneath patronizing disdain and venom. “Your signal will never reach the rebel base.”

  Maybe he was right. But he couldn’t know. “Your shield is—”

  He cut her off, enraptured by his own words. “I’ve lost nothing but time. You, on the other hand, will die with the Rebellion.”

  He checked his aim. Jyn prepared a desperate lunge; she wouldn’t die, refused to die holding still. If he caught her in the side, maybe she could
stop him, crawl the rest of the way to the control panel and transmit with her last breath…

  She planned it, fantasized it. Yet when the blast came, she wasn’t ready.

  She heard the electric echo of the bolt rip the air.

  She saw the man in white drop to his knees and fall prone, his expression nothing short of astonished. A black hole was burned in the fabric of his ivory cape.

  Like that, her nightmare was over.

  Behind the man in white, stepping out of the smoke, came a bloody and limping Cassian Andor. He looked like a man who’d fallen twelve stories and clawed his way back to the top. He looked as beautiful as anyone Jyn had ever known, but she couldn’t spare a moment to even shout his name.

  Instead she ran. Somehow she ran, thinking through the motion of each leg and certain she would slip on the platform; certain, too, she would scrabble up again and keep running. She tried to draw a lungful of air and found her mouth and nostrils raked by burning cinders. She heard a distant rumble, an explosion from a faraway battle, and pushed on. Soon her hands were on the control panel, fumbling as she looked to the screen in incomprehension. She forced herself to slow, to focus.

  She pulled the broadcast lever.

  She watched the screen flash. She couldn’t read it through the haze, but she heard the voice: “Transmitting.”

  Her breath came in racked, tearless sobs of relief and elation. She had to grip the panel to keep from falling as vertigo stronger than anything she’d suffered in her climbs overtook her. She wanted to shout, but she lacked the strength. She wanted to laugh at the heavens, at the fleet and the Death Star, but she lacked the strength for that, too. Instead she turned to Cassian, who still waited in the smoke.

  She stumbled to him, smiling like a child, and did not speak.

  “ADMIRAL! RECEIVING A TRANSMISSION FROM Scarif!”

  The Profundity trembled under the onslaught of TIE fighters. Its shields burst, re-formed, and burst again as emerald volleys struck. Three decks had already been forced to evacuate due to radiation leakage. But the Profundity endured where other vessels had been torn apart; in geostationary orbit above the Scarif Citadel, it was the center of a storm of molten metal and rent ships.

  The Death Star had not turned its weapons against the rebel fleet, but it carried enough fighter squadrons to swiftly achieve battlefield supremacy. Admiral Raddus was not prone to awe or terror, yet he had not imagined the scale of the horror he faced.

  Thus, he knew wonder at the words of his comm officer.

  “Confirm!” Raddus snapped, and hid his need as best he could.

  “Checking the data,” came the reply. “We have the plans!”

  “She did it,” Raddus hissed. The deck lurched and he caught his balance, barely noticed. He watched his displays and began issuing orders to reconfigure the fleet.

  “The battle station, sir,” his lieutenant called. “Massive energy buildup—”

  Raddus cut his man off with a gesture. Jyn Erso had made the station’s power clear on Yavin 4. Stopping it over Scarif was a task for nobler fools than he.

  “Rogue One—may the Force be with you,” he said. Then he straightened and inhaled a mouthful of humid air. “All ships,” he cried, “prepare for jump to hyperspace!”

  He made a show of confidence for his people. But he saw the tactical display flicker and register a new vessel entering the system.

  A third Star Destroyer had finally arrived.

  —

  In a haze of smoke like thunderheads, Orson Krennic searched his memories for a time before he had met Galen Erso.

  He thought back to Eadu, to the squeal of wet boots on metal and his attempts to commiserate with the scientist in the early days after Lyra’s death; his efforts to soothe Galen regarding the fate of his daughter and to remind him of the magnificence of the work.

  He thought back further, to Coruscant, where he’d been inspired to pluck Galen out of obscurity for “Project Celestial Power.” He thought to the games he’d been forced to play, knowing Lyra’s provincial interests would distract Galen from his focus.

  Back still further, to the Futures Program, when he’d drawn Galen into his circle and recognized with wonder—not jealousy, but unadulterated wonder—the galaxy-changing potential of the man’s genius.

  And before then?

  He could follow Galen Erso’s thread through his life. He could see the full extent of the tragedy, the waste of effort on a wasted man. But what about before? He sought refuge in his childhood, tried to recall an Orson whose hopes had not yet been cast in shadow…

  Instead he heard a peal of thunder, and he raised his chin and left his memories and saw that the thunder was the roar of fire atop the Scarif comm tower. His body was full of pain.

  He found he could move his limbs if he ignored their weight. He dragged himself forward—for what purpose, he wasn’t entirely sure. Survival? The work?

  The child!

  He gasped thin, whistling gasps as he tried to rise, failed, crawled forward a few more meters. He looked for the child—for Jyn Erso—but she was gone. He raised himself higher, rolled back his eyes until his skull hurt, and recognized the penumbra of the Death Star in the sky.

  It was Wilhuff Tarkin who had commandeered his battle station. Tarkin alone would have the arrogance. Tarkin alone would have the spite to loom over Scarif and threaten the wellspring of all his own triumphs.

  The Death Star’s focusing dish glittered with emerald light. Krennic’s fury built in key with the station’s energies and sought purpose, an outlet, a target. But Krennic’s body was ruined. His enemies were far from him. He had no one to command and no one to master, no one to sway into sharing his vision for the future or the Empire or his personal aggrandizement.

  My father’s revenge.

  Krennic was doomed, then, though it galled him to admit it. Yet while he might die at Tarkin’s hands, he would die in the fires of his creation. The Death Star would endure. He licked blood and spittle from his lips and imagined world after world consumed by his station’s power. Even the Emperor would not leave such a mark on the galaxy. The Death Star, his Death Star, would alter star systems and civilizations, be remembered a thousand generations after Tarkin had been erased from history.

  And while Tarkin did live? He would know that every victory he eked out would be due to Krennic’s work. He would fumble his way through battle after battle, not truly understanding the weapon he wielded, until his arrogance destroyed him.

  He built a flaw in the Death Star.

  The focusing dish glowed brighter.

  Krennic squeezed his eyes shut and used the last glimmerings of his mind to see the station as it was meant to be seen: to stand on the overbridge of his behemoth creation; listen to the reactor’s muffled roar turn to a shriek; feel the tremors in the deck plating turn violent as the kyber core exerted its strength. Jyn Erso had given her life to steal the Death Star schematics, but those schematics were etched in his heart.

  You’ll never win.

  He would die not on Scarif, but inside the Death Star.

  And as he envisioned the cataclysmic energies building within the vast station, he saw it—a detail he had overlooked and forgotten, some trivial adjustment of Galen’s: a single exhaust port leading from a narrow trench down and down, down kilometers of blackness, past conduits and hatches and radiation plating, down and down—

  —and into the main reactor.

  The primary weapon of the Death Star battle station fired.

  Orson Krennic, advanced weapons research director and father of the Death Star, died alone on Scarif, screaming in fury at Galen Erso, at Jyn Erso, at Wilhuff Tarkin, and at all the galaxy.

  —

  The last time Cassian had hurt so bad, K-2SO had carried him to a safe house and along the way enumerated his every injury, thoroughly assessed the li
kelihoods of infection and permanent nerve damage. It had been the droid’s way of showing he cared—or at least the droid’s way of showing he was invested in his master’s fate.

  K-2SO hadn’t been there for Cassian at the top of the Citadel communications tower. But Jyn had turned to him from the control panel looking like the last survivor of a war, and she’d smiled in a way he’d never seen before. It hadn’t been a smile predicated on anticipation or courage, or one touched by sadness or doubt; just a smile so ordinary it seemed to change Jyn from a hero out of myth into a woman he might have known and understood.

  He hadn’t known her, didn’t know her, of course. There wasn’t the time.

  She’d half stumbled to his side and gingerly wrapped an arm around him, led him toward the maintenance turbolift. He’d tried not to show the extent of his pain (standing still was bad; moving was worse) but had given up after a moment or two, leaning heavily on her. Somehow she’d carried his weight.

  “Do you think,” he’d asked, “anybody’s listening?”

  He hadn’t been able to raise an arm, to point skyward after her transmission, but she’d seemed to understand.

  “I do,” she’d said, soft and—to his ears—earnest. “Someone’s out there.”

  And she’d brought him into the turbolift and supported him as he leaned against the metal wall. He was there now, one arm draped around Jyn, feeling her impossibly frail and human form.

  He didn’t know whether she was right. Didn’t know whether, in fact, someone really was out there or if the Empire had seized victory. As he turned the question over in his mind, he was surprised to realize he wasn’t worried about the answer.

  Maybe it was his injuries. Hurt and exhaustion narrowed his reality, made it difficult to envision anything outside his sight line. When he thought about the people he cared about, the people who would have to carry on the fight against the Empire and the Death Star (the ones who hadn’t volunteered to come to Scarif), he could picture no one; and that couldn’t be right. Could it?

  The more he thought about it, though, the less he believed the fog in his brain explained his lack of worry.