Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 9}

THE DEATH STAR’S OVERBRIDGE WAS dark except for the lit rows of instrumentation and the glow of the main display. Dominating that vast screen was what remained of the valley of the Holy City of Jedha: a churning, whirling, burning storm of sand and rock shards. The air, ionized by the energy of the Death Star’s weapon, flashed with lightning. At the storm’s epicenter, the crater of the incinerated city smoldered where the beam had sublimed the outermost layer of the moon’s crust.

This was not the fate Krennic had envisioned for Jedha. The Death Star was designed to obliterate worlds, not maim them. Yet he wondered if the moon would ever recover from such an attack, or whether the cascading effects of a burning atmosphere and broken crust would result in a tortuous death played out across millennia. He felt in his bones that his weapon had exposed something profound—about the nature of worlds, about their lifeblood and their death throes—though he could not have put it into words. Maybe, he thought, that’s what poets are for.

“It’s beautiful,” he murmured, breaking minutes of near-silence on the bridge. Even Tarkin had respected the crewmembers’ shared awe as they spoke in whispers and muffled their keystrokes.

“I believe I owe you an apology, Director Krennic,” Tarkin replied. “Your work exceeds all expectations.”

Krennic did his best to conceal his surprise. “And you’ll tell the Emperor as much?” Too eager. He moderated his tone; he could afford humility if it would comfort Tarkin. “After all, this is his triumph—the triumph of his insight and will—more than any other single man’s.” There. Enough for you to save face, but not enough to deny me credit.

Tarkin cut the air with a dismissive gesture. “The Emperor desires facts, not flattery. Your tenure on this project has been rife with setbacks—setbacks you have, it seems, overcome. I will tell him his patience with your misadventures has been rewarded with a weapon that will bring a swift end to the Rebellion.”

“You’re too kind, Governor.” Condescending bastard. “But you express my hopes as well. We’ve seen that the Death Star might destroy a city or a rebel base unimpeded by planetary shields or defense grids. And what you witnessed today? That is only an inkling of the destructive potential—”

The same gesture as before: a demand for silence. Smiling acidly, contritely, Krennic obliged.

“I will tell him,” Tarkin said, “that I will be taking control over the weapon I first spoke of years ago… effective immediately.”

Taking control?

Krennic curled gloved fingers into fists and looked about the overbridge as he quelled his first and most vicious response. The duty officers were not watching the confrontation; they remained busy at their stations, checking and rechecking the Death Star’s primary weapon status and scanning the system for survivors.

That was a very small comfort.

Krennic stepped as close as he dared to Wilhuff Tarkin and snapped, “We are standing here amid my achievement—not yours!” He forced his voice into a hiss. “My people are loyal. And my people are the only ones capable of operating this station.”

He knew it was unwise to threaten Tarkin openly. He could berate a subordinate without repercussions, but not the grand moff. And there was no imminent scenario in which Krennic could remove or replace Tarkin; he would need to suffer the man’s existence for some time to come.

But Krennic was not a man to smile meekly forever.

Tarkin shrugged as if he hadn’t heard the threat; as if he were certain that the officers’ loyalty was far too malleable to be a problem. He might have been right. “I’m afraid these recent security breaches have laid bare your inadequacies as a military director. Your place, I think, is among the engineers; there are many initiatives that could benefit from your organizational skills—”

“The security breaches have been filled,” Krennic retorted. “Jedha has been silenced.”

There was a flaw in that argument, too, Krennic knew. The ignition of the weapon and the ensuing storm had left the Death Star’s sensors momentarily blind. It was conceivable that survivors had escaped the moon; conceivable, but unlikely.

Tarkin had a different countermove in mind. “You think this pilot acted alone?” He let out a wheezing half laugh. “He was dispatched from the installation on Eadu. Galen Erso’s facility.”

Galen Erso.

Galen Erso.

Fury made a fool of Krennic. This time, he could not hide his surprise.

“We’ll see about this,” he snarled, and turned to leave the overbridge.

General Davits Draven was the bane of his peers and a hero to his subordinates. It wasn’t the role he wanted to play, but he believed it was a necessary one.

As an organization, the Rebel Alliance was held together more by external pressure than by internal bonds. Mon Mothma’s almost pathological need to make political overtures toward peace—regardless of their success—was a poor match for General Jan Dodonna’s policy of covert strikes that minimized attention from the Empire and its Senate. Dodonna’s approach, in turn, was incompatible with Bail Organa’s desire to rapidly intervene wherever Imperial atrocities occurred. Saw Gerrera had effectively withdrawn from the Alliance over strategic disagreements; but there were other council members who shared his more aggressive agenda. If not for the Empire’s overwhelming strength—if not for the need for the rebels to work together to even survive—the Alliance would have fractured in a matter of months.

If not for the Empire’s strength… and if not for General Draven.

While his peers argued and mapped out roads to an imaginary ultimate victory, Draven maintained a singular focus on protecting the Alliance itself—on ruthlessly defending the organization and its people while correcting their mistakes. If that earned him a reputation for arrogance or intrusiveness, it was a small price to pay.

In the matter of the supposed planet killer, Draven feared there was nothing but mistakes to correct. A few of those mistakes were even his own. Yet he had no intention of shirking his duties.

He marched into the comm center on Yavin 4 with his head held high and his shoulders stiff, the way soldiers imagined a general. He hoped the rebels on duty would forgive the sweat on his brow from the jungle heat. “What do you have?” he demanded.

Private Weems leapt to his feet. “A coded message from Captain Andor, sir,” he said.

That was fast. Andor was smart, thorough, and not particularly inclined to make contact during the course of a mission. This time around, he also had the Erso girl to contend with. Draven hadn’t expected to hear from him for a week, at best.

“What’s he got for us?” Draven asked.

Weems read in the deliberate tone of a man pretending not to see what he was seeing. “ ‘Weapon confirmed. Jedha City destroyed. Mission target located on Eadu. Please advise.’ ”

“Destroyed?” Draven echoed. Weems only nodded.

The planet killer is real.

Doubt followed instantly in the wake of that thought. Andor was a fine agent but not flawless. His message was vague. The transmission could have been intercepted and altered en route. There were a thousand reasons why weapon confirmed might not be confirmation at all.

But Draven had seen too many commanders use doubt as an excuse to deny the obvious.

He hadn’t really believed in the planet killer before—not rationally, not in the cold, strategic part of his mind that was (he could admit, if to no one but himself) his only true value to the Rebel Alliance. If the weapon was active, then the strategic framework of the entire galaxy was in flux. Everything the Rebellion had built, every scheme from every council member, would have to adapt.

But urgent decisions had to be made first.

Andor’s message contained nothing new on Galen Erso. Those assumptions remained intact, and if Erso was instrumental in the planet killer project then maybe Draven could give the Alliance breathing room. A chance to evolve before worlds instead of cities started dying.

“Proceed,” he told Weems. “Tell him my orders still stand. Tell him to proceed with haste and keep to the plan. We have to kill Galen Erso while we have the chance.”

The first time Jyn had been orphaned was on a farm on a shoreline of the planet Lah’mu. She had seen her mother shot by a death squad and watched her father surrender to the man responsible, abandon her to a soldier he barely knew.

The second time had been in the deserts of Jedha, when she had seen the man who raised her—the man who had taught her everything, whom she hated more than almost anyone—buried beneath a mountain after being nothing but kind. Or as kind as he knew how to be.

Perhaps she’d never been orphaned at all, however. Galen Erso was alive. Not the gentle farmer she remembered; nor the coward and monster who’d left her behind to become an Imperial weaponeer, earning years of spite. Both of those men had died on Jedha as well.

There was another Galen Erso. All she knew of him was a sapphire light in the cave in her mind—the cave where she lived now—repeating the same words over and over. Words about love and happiness and loneliness. Excuses for deeds done long ago. Plans and lies about a Death Star, a planet killer…

My love for her has never faded.

She couldn’t stop the words. Each one tore at her, and she clung to them for solace.

She sat in the cabin of the U-wing and stared out at her companions from the cave’s depths. She watched their faces through the distant pinpoint of the broken hatch. A very small part of her was aware of how she must have looked—a disheveled and battered and dirt-encrusted creature, all but catatonic as she observed the room blankly—and hated herself for her weakness.

“Baze, tell me.” Chirrut’s voice. The blind Guardian of the Whills who had saved her life. “All of it? The whole city?”

Baze. Chirrut’s partner had a name. He sat beside the blind man with his eyes on the bulkhead. The strobing blue-white light of hyperspace splashed on his cheeks from out of the cockpit.

“Tell me,” Chirrut said again.

“All of it,” Baze answered, short and bitter.

Jedha City is gone. Jyn examined the thought numbly. The death of Jedha City meant the death of Saw; the deaths of many or all of his soldiers; the deaths of red-robed pilgrims and blustering water vendors. It meant the death of the girl she’d swept into her arms during the fighting in the plaza—the brutal, pointless death of the only person she’d helped in any way since this mission began…

We call it the Death Star. There is no better name.

The planet killer was real. She had mocked it, mocked the Alliance for believing in it, and it was real.

If she had believed sooner, kept faith in her father, would anything have been different? Would they have found Saw faster, acted in time to do—what?

Was Jedha City her fault? Even a little?

“Understood.” It was Cassian speaking now, a murmur into the comm unit. Then, calling to the droid in the cockpit: “Set course for Eadu.”

Jyn repeated Cassian’s phrase in her head, tried to hear it over her father’s words in the dark of the cave.

“Eadu?” she asked. Her voice sounded thick and hoarse.

“Sodden lump of a world, according to the files,” Cassian said. He looked at her with a hint of surprise, swiftly hidden. “Small native population, mostly rural nerf herders. Officially, the Empire designates the planet for research and chemical processing.”

“Is that where my father is?” Jyn raised her chin, tried to force out the hoarseness.

She tried to picture the reunion. Tried to picture meeting the man in the hologram for the first time and telling him who she was. Telling him I saw your message. She should have felt joy at the idea. Her father was a hero.

But who she was was Liana Hallik and Tanith Ponta and Kestrel Dawn, a bloodstained fighter and a thief and a prisoner who had spent nearly fifteen years loathing Galen. Locking him in a prison of contempt until, when he needed her, she hadn’t believed his warnings about the Death Star at all. She’d have to tell him that, too. The thought brought bile up from her stomach.

Could she have been someone else, if she’d only known?

I try to think of you only in the moments when I’m strong.

“I didn’t have a lot of time to question our friend Bodhi,” Cassian said. He gestured at the fifth occupant of the cabin—a long-haired man dressed in a stained Imperial flight suit and wearing battered goggles, weaving and unweaving his fingers together. Occasionally, the pilot whispered something without looking up. “But Eadu’s where he said his message came from. So is your father there? I think so, yes.”

Jyn nodded distantly. Bodhi’s whispers became louder—a stuttered, indecipherable series of sounds. Then he leaned forward in his seat, fully intent on Jyn. “You’re Galen’s daughter?” he asked.

He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Like he expected everything nearby—Baze, the seats, the bulkhead—to clamp jaws around his neck if he dared to blink. He looked almost as pathetic as she did.

“You know him?” she asked.

What did he think of the stranger in her hologram?

“Yes.”

She had a hundred questions, none of which she wanted the answers to. “Did he tell you anything?”

“He said—” Bodhi ducked his head. “He said I could get right by myself. He said I could make it right, if I was brave enough and listened to what was in my heart. Do something about it.” His lips worked, over and over again, forming and swallowing whole sentences before he stilled.

“Guess it was too late,” he said at last.

Jedha City was gone. Saw was gone. His people were gone. The little girl was gone.

“It wasn’t too late,” she said. At least the pilot had tried.

“Seems pretty late to me,” Baze growled.

In the silence of the cabin, in the darkness of the cave, Jyn listened to her father’s recording. That’s the place I’ve laid my trap…

Saw’s dying howl echoed, Save the dream!

Galen and Saw tore at her together now, asking for what she’d refused them already, demanding recompense for every way she’d failed them and every day Liana and Tanith and Kestrel had lived their own glorious, petty existences. But she had nothing to give them—she was hollow, and even what she’d kept in the cave was lost to darkness. All she had left was the voice of a hologram.

Yet she broke anyway. She gave in to the demands, because her shame was too great to do otherwise.

“No,” she whispered. The single word demanded the attention of the ship. “We can beat the people who did this. We can stop them.”

She would make a deal with the hologram of Galen Erso. She would obey his demand, and he would—if not forgive her—cease to remind her of her failures and her guilt and her loathing.

And by the time she met the true Galen Erso on Eadu, she would have something to show for it.

She spoke evenly, slowly, enunciating each word like she was whetting a blade. “My father’s message,” she said. “I’ve seen it. They call it the Death Star. But they have no idea there’s a way to defeat it.”

The tension in Cassian’s expression dissipated as he donned his spy’s face, his innocently cerebral face. Jyn caught it and knew exactly what it meant. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “You think he’s still working for the Empire.”

“He did build it,” Cassian said. As if that fact changed everything, and only he was clear-eyed enough to see it.

“Because he knew they’d do it without him.” She dragged a breath between her teeth and waited for Cassian to object again. She might not know the true Galen Erso, but she spoke with the hologram’s voice now; echoed his claims in submission to his cause. To Saw’s cause.

“My father made a choice,” she said, steadying her intonation. “He sacrificed himself for the Rebellion. He’s rigged a trap inside it, inside the Death Star.” She spoke only to Bodhi now. “That’s why he sent you. To bring that message.”

“Where is it?” Cassian asked.

Everyone turned to face him.

“Where’s the message?” he asked.

“It was a hologram,” Jyn said, sharp and fragile as glass.

Cassian didn’t back down. “You have that message, right?”

“What do you think?” she snapped. He knew what had happened to her; he’d witnessed her state in Saw’s chambers. She wanted to lunge across the cabin, slam him against the bulkhead, force the calm from his demeanor. She wanted to crack open her skull, let the light and sound of the hologram pour from the cave. “Everything happened so fast. But I’ve just seen it!” She heard her own ragged insistence as petulant. Childish. You were better off catatonic.

Cassian looked to Bodhi now. “Did you see it?”

The pilot shook his head and avoided Cassian’s gaze.

“You don’t believe me,” Jyn said.

Cassian almost laughed. “I’m not the one you’ve got to convince. I’m not the one who can authorize a strike against a Death Star because it might have a weakness. Maybe Mon Mothma—”

“I believe her,” Chirrut interjected.

Cassian shook his head in a show of exasperation. “That’s good to know. You’re also not part of the Alliance.”

Throughout the exchange, Baze had been slumped forward, as if drowsing. Now he righted himself, spoke past Cassian and Chirrut. “What kind of trap?” he asked. “You said your father made a trap.”

“The reactor.” On this point Jyn was utterly certain. “He’s placed a weakness there. He’s been hiding it for years. He said if you can blow the reactor—the module—the whole system goes down.”

She fixed her gaze on Cassian. “You need to send word to the Alliance,” she said.

“I’ve done that.”

She said the words the hologram needed her to say, bolstered its voice with her own zeal. “Then they have to know there’s a way to destroy this thing. My father said we could find the weakness in the structural plans—”

“We don’t have those.” Firm but gentle. Patronizing.

“He said we can find the plans,” she insisted, “that they’re in a data vault on the planet Scarif. Tell the Alliance: They have to go to Scarif and get the plans.”

Cassian was silent long enough that Jyn thought she had a chance.

“I can’t risk sending that,” he answered at last. “Even if everything you say is true, we’re in the heart of Imperial territory. If the message were intercepted, the whole Alliance fleet could be lured into a trap.”

He might have been lying, so far as Jyn knew. Avoiding further argument by positing a threat she couldn’t disprove and couldn’t counter.

In the darkness of the cave, Jyn heard her father’s recording repeat. If she’s alive, if you can possibly find her…

“You still want to go to Eadu?” she asked.

“Yes,” Cassian said.

There would be no redemption, then. No ameliorating her choices or hiding her sins. She would, after all, tell the Galen Erso she’d never met exactly who she was and exactly what the Death Star had done. The only balm would be whatever he did after; whatever they both managed, with whatever deal they struck.

That would have to be enough to keep her sane in the dark.

She had nothing to guide her but the sapphire hologram. Everything else was gone.

“Then we’ll find him,” she said. “My father. And we’ll bring him back, and he can tell the whole Alliance himself.”

She spoke with conviction she did not feel. Cassian nodded—but he wore his spy’s face, and Jyn couldn’t read him at all.

Orson Krennic toured the corridors of the Death Star as he had so often before. He listened to the main reactor’s muffled roar, like the ebb and flow of a distant ocean’s tide; he felt the gentle tremors in the deck plating as the station reconfigured for hyperspace transport; he could even trace the power couplings through the walls, imagine their end points in vast artificial caverns.

He walked and he could not focus. Tarkin was taking control of his masterwork.

Perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps Krennic had spent too long fettered to a single place, a single project. Let Tarkin have the Death Star—he’d soon find the responsibility overwhelming and fail to grasp the battle station’s subtle potential. Meanwhile, freed from the behemoth, Krennic would have a flexibility he’d formerly lacked. A hundred small victories across the course of a year might be preferable to one great work over decades. He would have his audience with the Emperor soon enough.

But this rosiest of scenarios was only possible because Tarkin had outmaneuvered him over Jedha.

And Tarkin had outmaneuvered him thanks to the betrayal of Galen Erso.

That the grand moff had become aware of Erso’s treason before Krennic had was unforgivable. Krennic had already determined how his people inside Tarkin’s organization had been kept in the dark; leaks and obfuscation were the nature of the game. But how had he not personally seen the betrayal in Galen? For all Galen’s faults, he had never been an equivocator. Nor had he ever failed to take pride in his own genius.

For him to disrupt the work—to disrupt their work, all they had built these past decades? To have somehow hidden his motives from Krennic, who knew him so well? How was it possible?

Had he miscalculated? Could another scientist at the Eadu laboratory be responsible instead?

Have I become blind?

But no. While Galen was a fluke, Krennic had not failed to spot Tarkin’s greed; only failed to anticipate its precise manifestation, thanks to Galen’s interference. Therefore, Galen was the priority and needed to be dealt with swiftly. Much as Krennic loathed to leave the Death Star now, he could not afford to let his problems accrue. He would eliminate them in sequence, leaving Tarkin for last.

He had found weapons he might use against Tarkin already. He only needed an opportunity.

He boarded his shuttle, accompanied by his death troopers, just after midnight station time. He’d settled himself in his seat with a glass of wine and a datapad by the time they’d left the docking bay.

“Course set for Eadu, sir,” his pilot announced.

Krennic barely heard.

Galen Erso.

Galen Erso, whom he’d given every chance. Galen Erso, whom he’d nearly died for once on that sad scrap of farmland.

“I thought we were past this,” Krennic murmured to himself, with a bitter smile. And his thumb dug into the screen of his datapad until the surface cracked and he began to bleed.