Rogue One

by Alexander Freed

  He’d told Jyn: We’ve done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion. Some he remembered now—Tivik, who’d made all this possible and been rewarded with death—but most, to Cassian’s shame, he couldn’t bring to mind. He’d bartered his ideals and the lives of others away, one by one, to find a victory that would make it all worthwhile. Yet as he watched the pulsing lights of the turbolift he felt keenly that neither victory nor defeat would change the terrible things in his past. Jyn couldn’t give him what he’d come for.

  That was the crux of it, really.

  Because he’d given her what she needed, and he’d done the mission right, and he found that was enough.

  She believed someone was out there. Maybe it was even true.

  He did want it to be true. With all his heart, he did.

  Her faith carried him with her.

  He didn’t say any of it. He didn’t want to disturb the silence as they rested against each other, hurting and relaxed, listening to the hum of machinery and the distant billowing of fires. He stowed thoughts of old missions and thoughts of the future away; decided to focus on what he could see and hear and smell for the last moments of his life on Scarif.

  When Cassian Andor died, he would be ready, and he would be content.

  —

  The Citadel had evacuated. Its officers and troops had panicked once they’d realized the Death Star’s purpose. Jyn didn’t know that for sure, but it would explain why she and Cassian encountered no one on their departure from the tower, heard only distant shouts and the rumble of shuttles. If the shield gate was open, a few Imperials might possibly make it offworld before the end.

  She tried her comlink, just to see if anyone answered. No one did, which was as she’d expected.

  Even if there were shuttles left, she knew she wouldn’t make it to a landing pad in time. Every step was an effort, and Cassian’s grip was growing weaker. His strides faltered. She kept propping him up. But he was warm, and his breathing was regular, and it felt good to have life close to her. It wasn’t at all like cradling Galen, who’d seemed apt to wash away in the rain as he died.

  Without anywhere better to go, she led them toward the beach.

  There had been beaches on Lah’mu, protected by jagged boulders that had—to a child, at least—seemed like mighty cliffs. She’d sent Stormy on harrowing adventures there, recounted them at night to her mother. Scarif’s placid waters and white sands seemed a pale imitation of Lah’mu’s grandeur, but they would have to do.

  They passed the body of a rebel soldier along the tree line. Jyn positioned herself in Cassian’s way so he wouldn’t have to see.

  When they reached the beach itself, Cassian struggled with his footing in the sand. He dropped to both knees and Jyn crouched beside him. They’d gone far enough, she decided; a breeze was clearing the air of ash and smoke, and they could no longer hear shouting.

  For an instant, Jyn looked up, expecting against reason to see the glimmering of the rebel fleet among the stars. But of course she couldn’t see anything—the sky was blue and bright, and the only artificial construct in sight was the battle station. In all likelihood, the rebels had already fled, setting course away from Scarif the moment they’d received her transmission.

  Instead she looked to Cassian.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  When the words finally touched him, he gently smiled and took her hand. She entwined her fingers with his so that they didn’t drop away.

  The Death Star was pulsing with emerald light. Jyn tried not to tense. She wasn’t afraid of what would happen, but she didn’t want to suffer. Somehow she found herself closer to Cassian than before. Her breathing matched his, or his matched hers, deep and steady.

  The Death Star flared too bright to watch and a tremor went through the beach. The placid waves rolled higher, spraying flecks of warm seawater over Jyn’s cheeks like tears. An unfathomable rumble echoed ten or a thousand kilometers away.

  “Your father would be proud of you,” Cassian said, so soft Jyn barely heard. She thought it was true, even though it wasn’t why she’d come to Scarif—not entirely, not really.

  It was good to hear aloud, from the lips of someone close.

  The rumbling overwhelmed all other sound. Jyn tightened her grip on Cassian, and he found the strength to hold her. The world grew brighter, emerald at first and then a clean, purifying white. In Jyn’s mind, the cave below the broken hatch was illuminated with the strength of a sun, and then the walls turned to dust and there was no longer a cave but only her spirit and heart and everything she had ever been: the daughter of Galen and Lyra and Saw, the angry fighter and the shattered prisoner and the champion and the friend.

  Soon all those things, too, burned away, and Jyn Erso—finally at peace—became one with the Force.

  EPILOGUE

  THE IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER DEVASTATOR cut through an ocean of ships and trailed a wake of burning gases and crackling particles. The light of Scarif reflected dully on the vessel’s hull as it swung into the planet’s gravity well, coursing toward the damaged Mon Calamari cruiser positioned above the Citadel.

  Darth Vader observed the chaos surrounding the Devastator and reordered it behind the red glow of his mask. He recognized the maneuvers of fighter squadrons on both sides, identified pilots who broke from their formations to better or worse effect. He saw the battle in microcosm and macrocosm, was instinctively aware of how each shot could contribute to ultimate victory or defeat.

  Yet only the cruiser concerned him. He made a single stroke of his hand as the enemy came into firing range.

  The ensuing echoes of turbolasers were garbled static in his helmet. Streams of energy poured from the Devastator toward its foe, illuminating the darkness like lightning. Starfighters—friend and foe—caught between the two massive ships suffered instant obliteration. The cruiser’s shields shimmered with iridescence then vanished in a flash. Fires flared along its port side as hull plating shattered or melted and venting oxygen combusted.

  “The rebel flagship is disabled, my lord,” the Devastator’s captain reported crisply at Vader’s side. Darth Vader did not turn to him as he spoke. “But it has received transmissions from the surface.”

  Vader stared at the burning ship. There was death at play, suffering and fear, yes—and something entirely different. Something that repelled his withered, agonized flesh.

  “Prepare a boarding party,” he said.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The destruction of the Citadel—the lancing of Scarif with the Death Star’s superlaser, the evaporation of a sea and the disintegration of archipelagos—sent a tremor through Vader’s shuttle as Vader and his squad rode to the flagship. Vader felt fear then, too, vast and powerful and purer than that which emanated from the cruiser. When his vessel reached the flagship and his stormtroopers burned their way through the hull, he started toward the rebel bridge and then pivoted.

  Perhaps instinct guided him. Perhaps something more. It did not occur to him to wonder. He sent his troops to continue on his prior path and moved on alone.

  The corridor lights flickered while alarms blared. Trapped in the blood-red chamber of his helmet, Vader was troubled by neither. He attuned himself to emanations of panic and desperation and followed their trail. When he encountered rebels reaching for their blasters or dashing to seal blast doors, he drew his weapon and cut them down with unhurried strokes of his crimson blade.

  The voice of a stormtrooper spoke to him through his comlink. “A data tape was recorded on the bridge just before we boarded. No sign of it here.”

  Vader did not answer, but he bolstered his pace.

  He wound through the cruiser leaving corpses behind him. He found his prey at last in a corridor thick with rebels backed against a security door. As particle bolts shot toward him, he watched a data tape pass between desperate soldiers. He knock
ed the bolts aside with his blade, tore a blaster from one foe with a might that defied nature and gravity, and marched on. He delivered killing stroke after killing stroke, awakened and relentless.

  The security door opened a mere crack and rebel hands shoved the tape through. Vader reached through life and matter and air and by will alone he pulled. He fueled his will with rage and fear and need. It was enough to tear the rebel from the door and drop him at Vader’s feet.

  But it was not enough to claim the tape.

  He grasped the rebel sprawled before him by the throat, lifted him and stared at him through bloody lenses. “Where,” Vader demanded, “are they taking it?”

  The reply was a strangled whisper. “Away from here,” the rebel said. “Away from you.”

  Vader clenched his gloved hand until the man’s neck snapped. Then he tossed the body aside. He activated his comlink and barked to his stormtroopers, “Find their escape vessel.”

  The prospect of failure crept over his skin like fire. The supremacy of the Death Star could not be jeopardized. The total obliteration of the Rebellion remained possible; that it was in question at all was unthinkable.

  Darth Vader chased his quarry, seeking solace in the final triumph of the Emperor.

  —

  The Tantive IV wasn’t ready to fly, let alone fight. It had been the subject of frantic repairs during the lightspeed voyage from Yavin to Scarif, secure in the hangar of the Profundity where it had lain, stubbornly malingering, since its last mission. Even after its host vessel had arrived in-system and joined the battle against the Imperial armada, Captain Raymus Antilles and his engineers and droids had worked desperately to make the corvette spaceworthy—to seal the leak in its hyperdrive motivator and clean the buildup in its exhaust ports. Admiral Raddus had made the situation clear: Every ship in the fleet had a part to play.

  Raymus loved his ship. He’d nearly lost it once. For the Rebel Alliance, he would risk losing it again.

  But the battle over Scarif had ended before the Tantive IV could join the fray. Just as the corvette’s reactor had come to life, the Profundity had screamed with punctured metal lungs. The Tantive IV had rocked in the hangar bay, nearly dislodging the boarding ramps clamped to its air locks. Instead of ordering it to flee its burning host, Raymus had called for his crew to prepare for takeoff and then departed his own vessel. Under flickering emergency lights, breathing air thick with smoke and poison, Raymus had waved Raddus’s crew aboard the corvette, hauled friends and strangers alike to safety.

  He’d recognized one of Raddus’s technical chiefs—a middle-aged woman who lurched into his arms. Her face was burned, but she pressed a data tape into Raymus’s hand and pulled away. “We got what we came for,” the woman said. “You need to go. Admiral’s orders.”

  He wanted to argue. Instead, he made sure the burned woman boarded the Tantive IV. Then he turned his back on the brave rebels who remained on the Profundity and made for the bridge.

  The Tantive IV wasn’t ready to fly, but it flew. It emerged from the burning wreck of the cruiser and sped away from Scarif. For a blessed few seconds it moved swiftly, confidently through space. Then the ship rocked again and echoed with thunder and sparks. From his station on the bridge, Raymus could smell circuits melting.

  “Star Destroyer closing!” called the officer at the tactical console. Raymus didn’t recognize the face—one of Raddus’s men.

  He erased the fear from his own expression. “Get us into hyperspace,” he said. “Make sure you secure the air lock. And prepare the escape pods.”

  The Tantive IV might jump out of the system, but it was hurt and it would be pursued. Best not to take chances.

  He saw a figure in white robes near the bridge entrance and turned the tape over in his hand. He approached the woman and said, his tone respectful, “Your Highness. The transmission we received…”

  The woman looked toward him. He’d seen her face many times before, knew it well. She was young, seemed younger every day, even as her responsibilities grew and grew.

  He held out his hand. Childlike fingers took the data tape.

  “What is it they’ve sent us?” he asked.

  Princess Leia Organa looked at him as if he’d placed another burden on her shoulders—another responsibility to add to a count of thousands—and she was proud to bear it.

  “Hope,” she said.

  Raymus believed her.

  SUPPLEMENTAL DATA: IN MEMORIAM

  [Document #MS8619 (“Unpublished Reflections on Jyn Erso”), from the personal files of Mon Mothma (via the Hextrophon Collection).]

  I regret to say I only met Jyn twice. To claim I knew her well would be an insult to the young woman whose fervor captivated so many. Conversely, to speak only of her effect on our movement—to recount yet again the rallying of the Rebellion and our transformation from a wary coalition into a unified nation—would be both redundant and insulting.

  So put no stock in my words. I can tell you of those two meetings and what I saw in her—or what, looking back, I remember seeing in her, which may be far removed from the truth. You may find more of a weary ex-senator than Jyn Erso in all this.

  Jyn was in chains when we met before Operation Fracture. I’d seen her file and chosen her for the mission for reasons I wish I could be proud of. I expected to meet a troubled girl who had been failed by the Alliance in a hundred different ways: failed by Saw, failed by those of us who knew Saw, failed when she went out on her own, and failed by our inability to save her father or mother. I expected she could be persuaded (by which I suppose I meant manipulated) into helping us, and that in doing so we might help her, too.

  But the woman I met at Base One could not be manipulated. There are a very few people whose will and ferocity are so great that they pull other people in their wake. I’ve known some who cultivated that talent as politicians and generals, for good or ill. Jyn, I think, never knew the effect she had on others—never realized the intensity of her own humanity or the presence she brought to a room. She was, as expected, troubled and quarrelsome; she was also impossible to ignore or forget.

  In her short life, she had seen relentless hardship and become hard herself. But her fire shone bright.

  If our first meeting was brief, our second was even briefer. We exchanged a handful of private words when she briefed Alliance High Command on the threat of the Death Star, and the woman I met then was far different from the one we’d chained. Was she at peace? I don’t believe so. But she held herself with a newfound certainty.

  It’s become fashionable in some quarters to claim Jyn Erso went to Scarif intending to die a martyr—that she realized she had lost everything and chose her path by its inevitable end. I will dispute this claim until my own dying days. I think Jyn fully recognized who she was and sought a way to channel her best and worst impulses, her darkest moments and her brightest, toward a cause worthy of her true incandescence.

  In a kinder universe, she would have walked away from Scarif. I cannot imagine who she would have become, but I think she would have been extraordinary.

  I am grateful I knew her, no matter how short the time.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALEXANDER MARSH FREED is the author of Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company, as well as many short stories, comic books, and videogames. Born near Philadelphia, he endeavors to bring the city’s dour charm with him to his current home of Austin, Texas.

 

 

 
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