Rogue One Junior Novel
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ISBN 978-1-4847-9960-4
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
A long time ago in a galaxy far,
far away….
JYN ERSO REMEMBERED the exact day the Empire destroyed her life. She was only eight years old, and she and her parents—Galen and Lyra—were living on Lah’mu, a backwater planet far from the luxurious home they’d once known on the Imperial capital world, Coruscant.
Jyn spotted the Imperial shuttle scudding through the sky and knew it meant trouble. She raced home from where she’d been playing alone in the thick lush grass to warn her parents, but they were already packing.
“Jyn,” her father told her, “gather your things. It’s time.”
They’d drilled countless times for this. While Jyn followed Galen’s orders, Lyra activated the family’s comm unit. “Saw,” she said. “It’s happened. He’s come for us.”
Before Lyra took Jyn from their home, Galen gave his daughter one last kiss.
“I love you, Stardust,” he said.
“I love you, too, Papa.”
The shuttle landed outside, and six death troopers emerged in their shiny black armor, along with an Imperial officer in a white uniform and cape. Jyn recognized him. He had worked with her father back on Coruscant. His name was Orson Krennic.
Lyra took her by the arm and led her through the back door while her father went to greet their visitors. Once they were out of sight, Lyra took off her necklace and put it on Jyn. The kyber crystal pendant sparkled in the light.
“You know where to go, don’t you?” Lyra asked.
Jyn nodded.
“Trust the Force,” Lyra said as she hugged her daughter, and somehow Jyn knew she meant good-bye.
Despite her orders to run and hide, Jyn refused to leave her parents behind. She covertly trailed her mother back to the house and watched as her father confronted Krennic.
“What is it you want?” Galen demanded.
“The work has stalled,” Krennic said. “I need you to come back.”
“I won’t do it.”
“We were on the verge of greatness. We were this close to providing peace. Security for the galaxy.”
“You’re confusing peace with terror. You lied about what we were building. You wanted to kill people.”
Krennic shrugged. “You have to start somewhere.”
Lyra stepped forward then. Mystified why she would show herself—against the plan they’d drilled—Jyn watched in horror. When the death troopers spotted Lyra, they turned their weapons on her, but Krennic ordered them to hold their fire.
That’s when Lyra revealed the blaster she was carrying and leveled it at Krennic.
“You’re not taking him,” she said.
“Of course not.” Krennic smiled. “I’m taking you all. You, your child. You’ll all live in comfort.”
“As hostages,” Lyra said.
“As ‘heroes of the Empire.’”
Lyra refused to lower her weapon. “You’ll never win,” she said.
Krennic came to a decision. “Do it,” he ordered the death troopers.
The elite Imperial soldiers shot Lyra down, but not before she got off a shot of her own, which struck Krennic in the shoulder. Jyn knew, though, that the Imperial officer would recover. Her mother never would.
Galen caught Lyra as she fell. Her weight and his grief brought him to his knees.
“They have a child,” Krennic said to the death troopers, through teeth gritted in pain. “Find it.”
Jyn fled.
She knew where to go, just like they’d done in their drills. But she didn’t know if she could get there before the death troopers found her.
She ran without looking back. She reached a cave in the rocky hills behind her house, and she dashed into it. There she lifted a concealed hatch and slipped through, closing it behind her.
She stayed there, gazing out at the daylight through a crack in the hatch. When the death troopers hunting for her came close, she held her breath and went as still as a statue. When they finally passed by, she crept deeper into her hidey-hole and waited, just as she’d been told.
She remained there for hours, alone. She smelled smoke in the air, from a fire she later learned was consuming her home. At one point, she thought she heard the shuttle leave, but she knew that she was to stay put until one of her parents came for her.
But what if that never happened? If her mother was already dead and the death troopers had taken her father, no one would ever come for her. She would be on her own.
She huddled in the dark as night fell, terrified and unsure what to do. A storm came raging through, and she startled at the sound of thunder.
She lit a lantern and tried to keep her spirits up. Eventually, she would have to defy her parents’ orders, but when? Not until the storm had passed, for sure.
Before that happened, though, she heard a noise above and froze. This was not thunder but footsteps, coming closer. Someone had entered the cave.
A moment later, the hatch opened, and the man Lyra had been talking to on the comm unit stared down at Jyn. Saw Gerrera.
“Come, my child,” he said as he offered her his hand. “We have a long ride ahead of us.”
That had been many years before. A lot of things had happened since then. More things than Jyn cared to count. They’d all added up to put her where she was now: rotting away in an Imperial prison and wondering how she’d fought so hard and long just to wind up there.
CASSIAN ANDOR had done a lot of horrible things as a member of the Rebel Alliance, all in the name of helping put an end to the Galactic Empire. Rather than tossing him in prison for those crimes, his Alliance commanders had promoted him to the rank of captain and given him even more impossible missions. He sometimes wondered if they secretly wanted him to fail so they could wash their hands of him, but he remained too determined to give in to such wishes.
For his latest assignment, they’d sent him to Kafrene, a pair of gigantic asteroids that spun in tandem through a field of smaller rocks floating in space. Long before, someone had joined them and used them to establish the scummiest trading post in that horrible part of the galaxy. There, Cassian met a spy named Tivik, who supposedly had some explosive news the Alliance needed from Jedha, an ancient place known for worship of the Force.
They met in a dead-end alley. Every bit of Tivik twitched, except for his bad arm, which hung limp at his side. He seemed so nervous that Cassian wondered if he might bolt before he started talking, but once he began, everything spilled out.
“An Imperial pilot—one of the cargo drivers—he defected yesterday,” Tivik reported. “He’s telling people they’re making a weapon. The kyber crystals? That’s what they’re for. He brought a message. He’s got proof.”
Suspicious, Cassian squared off against the man. “What kind of weapon?”
Tivik glanced around, searching for a way out. “Look, I have to go.”
Cassian grabbed him. “What kind of weapon?”
“A planet killer.” Tivik cringed beneath Cassian’s glare. “That’s what he called it.”
Tivik went on to explain that Galen Erso—an old friend of Saw Gerrera’s—had sent the pilot. Tivik was angry about the Alliance and how little it had done to help Saw in his fight.
“Saw’s right! You guys keep talking and stalling and dealing, and we’re on fumes out there! There’s spies everywhere….”
Tivik trailed off as he spotted a pair of stormtroopers entering the alley. They walked toward Cassian and Tivik, demanding to see their scandocs.
Cassian wasn’t about to let anyone take him in. He reached into his pocket, but instead of producing identification, he grabbed his silenced blaster and used it to put a hole straight through each of the stormtroopers.
Tivik recoiled in horror. “No! What have you done?”
A third stormtrooper appeared at the far end of the alley. Rather than charge in to be shot, he called for backup. “Troopers down. Section nine.”
Cassian scanned the alley for a means of escape and spotted some easy handholds he could use to climb out. With Tivik’s damaged arm, though, he’d never make it.
Cassian couldn’t leave him there to be captured. The man would crack for sure, and if he told the Empire what he knew…
Cassian had no choice. He leveled his blaster and shot Tivik dead. The stormtrooper stood there, stunned, and watched the man fall.
Cassian took advantage of that moment to throw himself against the nearest wall and start climbing. He had to move fast, or he’d have to shoot himself, too.
JYN HAD resigned herself to prison. After running from place to place for so long, it was something of a relief to finally be able to stop.
Besides, as far as she could see, there was no way out of this one, at least not on her own. Not yet.
She was on a work detail, riding with a few other hard cases to a site where they’d be set to breaking rocks or shoveling garbage out of a compactor—whatever nasty work the Empire needed done. They had three stormtroopers in the back of their ride to guard just five prisoners, which seemed like overkill, but Jyn didn’t care to tell the Imperial Prison Service how to do its job.
The transport ground to a halt, and a moment later, a magnetic grenade blew the front door open. Blaster fire took down the three troopers fast, and an armed man stormed in shouting for Liana Hallik.
Jyn recognized the name. It was the one she’d been using when she was arrested. Still, she remained quiet.
It didn’t matter. The next soldier who came through the door recognized her.
“You want to get out of here?” the first one said.
Jyn gave him a hesitant nod, and a third soldier moved up and removed her shackles. One of her fellow prisoners lifted his own shackled arms and shouted, “Hey! What about me?”
Jyn used the distraction to kick the first soldier in the gut, knocking him against the far wall. Then she punched out the second soldier and fought past the third one. If those fools were going to give her a means to escape, she planned to use it—but she didn’t want to wind up stuck with them.
Jyn charged for the transport’s open door, but a large Imperial security droid blocked her way. Tall and made of sturdy black metal, it stared down at her with glowing eyes. Before she could stop it, it grabbed her by the collar, then threw her hard onto the ground.
“Congratulations,” it said in a synthetic male voice. “You are being rescued. Please do not resist.”
Jyn decided she would listen to the droid. For now.
AS JYN soon found out, the soldiers who’d “rescued” her were working for the Rebel Alliance. It seemed, however, that they hadn’t come to free her but to imprison her someplace else. Not even a day later, they delivered her to the headquarters of the Rebel Alliance on a green moon orbiting a gas giant called Yavin. There they hauled her in front of what she guessed must have been their version of a court-martial.
A man who identified himself as General Draven oversaw the proceedings, along with another rebel leader, the gravelly voiced General Dodonna. A third man stood nearby. Dark-haired and slim with a mustache and a stubbled chin, he had the hard eyes of a man who stood ready to do whatever it took for the Alliance to win.
Draven rattled off the list of offenses the Imperials had arrested Jyn for, which impressed her not at all. She knew the crimes she’d committed.
When that was done, though, he continued. “Imagine if the Imperial authorities had found out who you really were. Jyn Erso?”
Jyn tried not to flinch at the use of her real name. If they knew that, there was no telling what else they might have on her.
“That’s your given name, is it not? Jyn Erso? Daughter of Galen Erso? A known Imperial collaborator in weapons development.”
That shocked her. She’d spent most of her life trying to run away from her father’s reputation, and she feared what the Alliance might want from her now that they’d learned her secret.
“What is this?” she asked.
Mon Mothma—a human woman with short red hair, the one-time senator from Chandrila—stepped from the shadows to answer. “It’s a chance for you to make a fresh start. We think you might be able to help us.”
She turned toward the mysterious man. “This is Captain Cassian Andor, Rebel Intelligence.”
Cassian stepped forward and sized Jyn up with flinty eyes. “When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”
The question surprised Jyn, and she had lost track after a lifetime on the run. “Fifteen years ago,” she estimated.
“Any idea where he’s been all that time?”
Jyn didn’t care for where this was heading. “I like to think he’s dead. Makes things easier.”
“Easier than what? That he’s a tool of the Imperial war machine?”
She refused to let the man rattle her. “I’ve never had the luxury of political opinions.”
Cassian grunted at that. “Really? When was your last cont
act with Saw Gerrera?”
Jyn stiffened as she wondered how large their file on her was. “It’s been a long time.”
“He might remember you, though, wouldn’t he? He might agree to meet you if you came as a friend.”
Jyn decided that she was better off keeping her mouth shut. No sense in giving them more reasons to hang her.
General Draven stepped forward though and said, “We’re up against the clock here, girl. So if there’s nothing to talk about, we’ll just put you back where we found you….”
That prodded Jyn’s lips open. “I was a child. Saw Gerrera saved my life. He raised me. But I’ve no idea where he is. I haven’t seen him in years.”
“We know where to find him,” said Cassian. “That’s not our problem. What we need is someone who gets us through the door without being killed.”
Jyn gave him a hard look, confused. “You’re all rebels, aren’t you?”
“Saw Gerrera’s been fighting his own war for quite some time,” said Mon Mothma. “He’s created a great many problems for the Rebellion. We have no choice now but to try and mend that broken trust.”
“What does this have to do with my father?”
The ever dignified Mon Mothma gave Cassian a go-ahead nod.
“There’s an Imperial defector on Jedha, a pilot. He’s been held by Saw Gerrera. He’s claiming the Emperor is creating a weapon with the power to destroy planets.”
Cassian hesitated for a moment before driving home his final point. “The pilot says he was sent by your father.”
Try as she might, Jyn could not conjure up any response to that. She didn’t even hear what the rest of them said. The next thing she knew, Mon Mothma was addressing her directly.
“It would appear your father is critical to the development of this superweapon. Given the gravity of the situation and your history with Saw, we’re hoping that he’ll help us locate your father and return him to the Senate for testimony.”
As she spoke, Mon Mothma glanced at another person Jyn recognized from the news: Bail Organa, the senator from Alderaan. Jyn had heard rumors that Organa was secretly working with the Alliance, and she supposed his presence confirmed it.