Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 6}

CASSIAN HAD A PLAN. HE’D tested the cell door’s locking mechanism while the guards were fixated on a game of dejarik, pressing against the metal with his thumb and probing the limits of its tamper alarm. He’d feigned fatigue, leaning against the door’s bars so he could inspect the lock visually and find its make and model. He’d mentally cataloged the picks hidden in his boot and selected the tools he intended to use. He guessed he could escape the cell in under three minutes.

As soon as the guards were gone, anyway. But the guards weren’t moving, and now he was stuck with two thoughts he had no desire to dwell upon:

Had killing Saw Gerrera’s people ruined any chance of reconciliation with the Rebel Alliance? Even against the threat of a planet killer?

And where was Jyn?

“Who’s the one in the next cell?”

Cassian tore his eyes from the guards and glanced over to Chirrut. It was the first time the blind man had spoken for nearly an hour.

Baze grunted and shuffled to his feet. “What? Where?” He crossed the alcove, lightly shouldering Cassian aside to make room at the door. He peered into the darkness of the cell across the way; all Cassian could see was shadows, but Baze pulled back abruptly, snarling. “An Imperial pilot.”

Cassian scowled and leaned in, trying to see what Baze saw. “What pilot?”

“Imperial.” Baze shrugged, squinted, seemed to assess the distance between himself and the ragged pile Cassian was starting to discern. “I’ll kill him.”

Cassian tried to interpose his body between Baze and the cell door as the Guardian straightened with purpose. “No—wait!” Damn religious crazies. He wasn’t sure what Baze could do from behind bars, and he wasn’t keen on learning. “Back off!” He tapped the larger man’s chest with his hands, tried to seem insistent without starting a brawl. Baze shoved Cassian once but then returned to his corner, slumping to the floor.

Cassian crouched at the bars. The ragged pile shifted awkwardly. Shadows crystallized into limbs, hair, a dirt-encrusted face, and a battered uniform with Imperial markings on the arms. The man didn’t seem to see Cassian, staring between his knees, huddled as if in fear of the dark and the cold.

Even from a few meters distant, he stank of sweat and filth.

Is this what Saw does to prisoners?

Is this what he’s doing to Jyn?

“Are you the pilot?” Cassian called. The man didn’t look up. “Hey, hey—are you the pilot? The shuttle pilot?”

The man blinked. Cassian watched dim lights from the guards’ chamber gleam in wet eyes. Then the man made a noise, a groan, that Cassian had trouble interpreting as a word: “Pilot?”

Chirrut spoke softly. “What’s wrong with him?”

Cassian shook his head and tried to recall the words of the Imperial holograms in the city. “Bodhi Rook?” he asked.

The man squeezed his eyes shut and shrank back. Cassian swore to himself.

If he’s broken, he’s no good to us anyway.

“Galen Erso,” Cassian tried. He meant to sound gentle, but he heard urgency slip into his voice. “You know that name?”

The man hissed, turned his cheek as if he’d been slapped. His breath picked up, swift and loud like a hound’s panting.

Cassian held still.

Come on…

The man opened his eyes again. His breathing slowed.

“I brought the message,” he said. “I’m the pilot.”

Then, in surprise and horror and hope:

“I’m the pilot. I’m the pilot.”

Saw Gerrera clenched one trembling hand around the edge of his console. The other hand moved assuredly, inserting a holochip into the comm unit and tapping in a command. “This is the message from the pilot,” he said. “For what it’s worth, he believed it was real.”

Jyn’s throat seemed to tighten. She rocked half a step backward, as if to withdraw from the chamber. She hadn’t wanted to see Saw. She didn’t want to see this.

For reasons she couldn’t justify, she stood still and watched.

The holoprojector flared and a man she didn’t recognize appeared etched in sapphire light. He was gaunt, but not haggard, like someone dying under the gentlest of care, and his eyes looked beyond the recorder instead of at it. His face stirred something in Jyn she couldn’t verbalize—some primordial recollection warped by the weight of years.

When he spoke, she knew his voice.

“Saw, if you’re watching this,” Galen Erso said, “then perhaps there is a chance to save the Alliance.” The words had the air of a deathbed confession.

My father is alive. My father is a coward. My father is a bastard.

Galen Erso is not my father. Galen Erso didn’t raise me…

Jyn wanted (madly, childishly) to rush to Saw’s side, to cling to him for protection. She wanted to drive her fist into the holoprojector, to bleed from shards embedded in her knuckles and then tear the holochip out, crush it under her heel.

She stood and listened.

“Perhaps there’s a chance to explain myself and, though I don’t dare hope for too much, a chance for Jyn, if she’s alive, if you can possibly find her…” He trailed off, shook his head briskly. “A chance to let her know that my love for her has never faded and how desperately I’ve missed her.”

From the ruin of the hatch, from the cave in her mind came images, sounds, scents: Jyn’s father holding her, declaring I love you, smelling as sour as his Imperial uniform.

She wanted to shout at the hologram, Your love? Who gives a damn about your love? You sent me to Saw.

You let my mother die.

You did this to me.

She didn’t say anything, and the recording kept speaking.

“Jyn, my Stardust, I can’t imagine what you think of me.

“When I was taken, I faced some bitter truths. I was told that, soon enough, Krennic would have you. He toyed with me that way; for months, he would pretend to forget you, and then act in conversation as if he’d slipped up—make mention of a new lead on you or Saw. Part of me longed for those mentions. I realize now it was a kind of torture.

“As time went by, I knew that you were either dead or so well hidden that he would never find you. But I knew if I refused to work, if I took my own life, it would only be a matter of time before Krennic realized he no longer needed me to complete the project.” He spoke these words swiftly, almost slurring them in his haste. In the silence that followed, his mouth worked noiselessly. Then he began again. “You may think that’s an excuse. That I was fearful, and should have died. In the interests of objectivity—” Here, for the first time, he smiled. It was an ugly, effortful thing. “—I should admit the possibility. History will forgive me or excoriate me, as is appropriate. I only wish it would forget me.”

Jyn listened to her father’s explanations—his justifications— as they piled on, one after another. Too many to consider, too many to argue against, years of Galen’s personal analyses and self-recriminations spat out in the space of seconds. He was trying to answer her every question, anticipate every response, and the torrent denied her any opportunity for logic or fury.

How could she not loathe him?

How could her heart not break?

She needed to sit. Her legs were swaying beneath her, as unstable as Saw’s cane.

She stood and watched.

“So I did the one thing that nobody expected: I lied.” His voice grew steadier, as if here he stood on sure ground. “Or I learned to lie. I played the part of a beaten man resigned to the sanctuary of his work. I made myself indispensable, and all the while I laid the groundwork of my revenge.

“You may have heard rumors by now, leaks regarding a battle station integrating an advanced laser prototype. The battle station is real. Its primary weapon has been built to penetrate the crust of a planetary object, to pour energy into a world until the bonds of matter fray and break. The ultimate result, we believe, would be the planet’s violent obliteration. Nothing would survive. Nothing could ever be rebuilt.

“This battle station… we call it the Death Star. There is no better name.”

Jyn heard the horrors her father described, but it was only his spellbound tone that allowed her to notice at all; her thoughts were fixed on his simple presence, his story of years of desperation and labor and doubt.

My father is alive. My father is a traitor. My father is building a weapon to destroy worlds.

Galen Erso is not my father. Galen Erso didn’t raise me…

She looked in vain to Saw, looked for the compassion she had derided and defied minutes before. Yet he, too, was watching the message, his expression cold and somber—as if for the first time, he was hearing Galen’s words and dwelling on their implications instead of searching for a trap.

“My colleagues,” Galen said, “many of them, have fooled themselves into thinking they are creating something so terrible and powerful it will never be used. But they’re wrong. No weapon has ever been left on the shelf. And the day is coming soon when it will be unleashed.”

His head turned from the recorder as if what he said next, more than anything, he feared to say aloud.

“I’ve placed a flaw deep within the system.

“A scar so small and powerful, they’ll never find it.”

Jyn knew the words mattered. Her father spoke with the breathless agony of a man baring his soul.

It wasn’t what she needed to hear. Not now.

She no longer felt the swaying of her legs. Darkness crept around the edges of her vision, as if the hatch in her mind and the cave where the hatch had been were rising up to engulf her. As if she were descending, falling, to be locked away in her own skull with everything she’d denied.

Galen shivered like a man dying in icy rain. The confession appeared to have been too much. “Jyn, if you’re listening…” He was slurring again, stumbling and urgent. “My beloved, so much of my life has been wasted. I try to think of you only in the moments when I’m strong, because the pain of not having you with me… Your mother. Our family.” He paused, seemed to try to refocus with limited effect. “The pain of that loss is so overwhelming I risk failing even now. It’s just so hard not to think of you. Think of where you are.

“I assume logically, rationally, that you fight with the Rebellion. It’s difficult to imagine Saw steering you any other way, and you always had the same anger—” He smiled for a second time. Here it was unforced, without self-mockery or bitterness. “—the same insistent sense of righteousness as your mother. It frightens me to imagine you grown, somehow working to oppose injustice in the galaxy, whether from a laboratory or a starfighter; it frightens me, and I think the Rebellion could ask for no better friend.

“Yet if it isn’t so? If I’m wrong, and you left the Rebellion and Saw behind but this message still finds you? You make me no less proud, Jyn. 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.”

Jyn’s jaw ached, clamped shut to hold in her screams. She couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe. The cave walls rose around her until the only light in the blackness was the sapphire glow of the hologram.

If you’re happy, Jyn…

Galen snapped back into focus, no longer hesitant or soft. “Saw, the reactor system, that’s the key. That’s the place I’ve laid my trap. It’s unstable, so one blast to any part of it will destroy the entire station.”

She was losing her balance. Her legs shook and her head swam. Galen’s words were fading behind a roar, like the rush of blood in her ears. She tried to concentrate on his voice as if it were a lifeline to haul her out of oblivion.

“You’ll need the plans, the structural plans, to find your way, but they exist. Sabotage from the inside is impossible: Krennic is too paranoid. But I’ve thought about this, Saw, prepared everything for you I could.”

The roar was growing louder. The stone seemed to tremble and Jyn fell to her knees, a shock of pain driving back the darkness of the cave long enough for her to realize that Saw, too, was shaking. His cane tapped rapidly on the floor.

“I know there’s at least one complete engineering archive in the data vault at the Citadel Tower on Scarif. Use what I’ve told you, run the analysis, and you’ll be able to plan your attack. Any pressurized explosion to the reactor module will set off a chain reaction that will—”

Without prelude, the hologram vanished. Not even the control lights on the console still gleamed. The voice was gone. Saw Gerrera cried out something as the monastery lurched and a choking wave of dust billowed through the window.

Something terrible was happening on Jedha. Jyn knew that.

But she’d lost her father. The cave beneath the ruined hatch swallowed her, enveloped her in night.