Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 18}

BODHI ROOK SHOULD HAVE FELT guilty. From inside the cockpit of shuttle SW-0608, he watched black smoke rise from half a dozen landing pads—the sort of smoke that spilled like blood from a crashed cargo ship or a burning speeder. He’d seen Saw Gerrera’s rebels blow up installations before. He recognized himself in the black-clad figures that raced to extinguish fires or who took cover behind patrolling stormtroopers.

Bodhi had never thought of himself as a soldier or a killer. He should have felt guilty. But he’d picked a side when Galen Erso had told him of the crimes he was enabling. He’d felt his last doubts burn away in the fire that had consumed Jedha City.

“Troopers!” It was Corporal Tonc’s voice, from down the cockpit ladder and outside the ship. “Troopers on the left!”

Bodhi heard boots ring against deck plating as the five rebel fighters who’d stayed with the shuttle hurried inside. Through the viewport he spotted a squad of stormtroopers racing across the landing pad, sprinting past cargo crates and control consoles. None of them gave the shuttle more than a glance.

For the moment, at least, Bodhi could keep hiding.

Tonc scrambled noisily up the cockpit ladder, the barrel of his shoulder-slung rifle striking each rung as he went. Bodhi tried to look confident, tough in the man’s presence—Tonc had spent most of the flight to Scarif interrogating Bodhi before volunteering to guard the shuttle. Bodhi still wasn’t sure what the corporal thought of him.

Tonc struck Bodhi with the flat of his hand, square between the shoulders. “How’re we doing up here?” he growled.

Bodhi winced at the force of the blow. “Looks like they’ve grounded noncombat vessels, but overall they’re ignoring the shuttles. I can’t really tell what’s going on…” He gestured vaguely at the viewport and the smoke. Occasionally he made out the crimson flash of a blaster bolt, but the trees obscured his view of the pads, bunkers, and barracks closer to the Citadel.

“What’s going on is fighting,” Tonc said. “That’s the Pathfinders for you.”

Bodhi was adjusting his instruments, head down over his console. But the admiration in Tonc’s voice caught his attention. “I thought you were a Pathfinder?” he asked.

Tonc laughed. “I can’t do half what those SpecForce guys do. But I heard Captain Andor needed volunteers, so I volunteered.” His voice took on a gruffer quality as he added, “Still a better shot than you.”

Bodhi didn’t doubt that.

The comm crackled and a voice came through, urgent and angry. “Pad twelve! Close it down!”

Bodhi slapped his thighs in triumph. “I’ve found the main security channel. We can track their movements from here.”

Tonc pursed his lips and nodded approvingly. The chatter was fast and overlapping: The Citadel demanded status reports and assessments of rebel troop numbers while stormtroopers called for emergency reinforcements. “We have rebels everywhere!” one voice called, and Bodhi couldn’t help but smile.

“We just going to sit here and be smug? Or are you going to help out?” Tonc asked.

Bodhi bristled, though the words were more friendly than challenging. He reached for the comm controls again and bit his lip.

Baze and Chirrut were out there, probably shooting and getting shot at along with all the rebel soldiers. Cassian and Jyn and K-2 were inside the Citadel by now. If everything went well, even if everything went perfectly, not everyone would make it back alive.

They weren’t his friends. They hadn’t gone drinking with Bodhi after his crush on Bamayar had rejected him, or helped him reassemble his astromech after he’d stupidly taken the droid apart on a dare. But they had saved him from Saw Gerrera, believed him when Saw and his people hadn’t. They’d never once put him in cuffs. They’d needed him on Eadu and never once pretended they hadn’t.

They wanted to stop the Death Star.

They didn’t deserve to be hurt.

Bodhi should have felt guilty.

You don’t have to feel guilty.

He punched a button, lifted the link, and shouted into the open comm, “Pad two! This is pad two! We count forty rebel soldiers running west off pad two!”

Then he muted the comm and adjusted the settings with one shaking hand. He felt a rush of energy, terrifying and invigorating, as he passed the link to Tonc. “Tell them you’re pinned down by rebels on pad five,” he said.

Tonc grinned broadly and took the link. “Who needs SpecForce?” he asked. “We can do this all by ourselves.”

For an instant Bodhi felt sure that was true. But he was glad not to be fighting alone.

Jyn’s fears had begun to multiply. In the starkly revealing light of the cave in her mind, she seemed to find another with every moment that passed. Fear for her companions, and the danger they were in; fear for how she might fail or abandon them; fear of what the Death Star would do if not stopped; fear of failing to deliver the redemption her father sought.

It was fear that guided her hand to her blaster as she walked with Cassian and K-2 down a Citadel subcorridor and saw thirty stormtroopers rush toward her in formation. It was fear that made her eager for a fight, eager to channel her dread into pitiless blows and the pain of bruised ribs.

Eadu and Jedha had given her numbing solace in the form of endless marches and racking storms and sunlight gone cold. Scarif’s comforts let her think too much. And when the stormtrooper platoon passed by without a glance, footsteps in sync as they made for the main entrance to the Citadel, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

“Guess our distraction’s working,” Cassian murmured.

Jyn forced herself to look approving. “It was a good plan.”

They hadn’t heard from Melshi or the others since the detonators had gone off. The rebels were supposed to signal if they had anything Jyn or Cassian needed to know.

Unless, of course, they all died.

Stay focused, Jyn.

She tried to remember how she’d kept radio silent during runs for Saw; how she’d managed to wait back at base for comrades like Maia and Staven to return. But the vague, inchoate memories made her feel ill. And even then she hadn’t needed those people the way she needed Bodhi and the Guardians and Cassian: to keep her on-task, to keep her from just surviving.

Stay focused and do your damn job.

“This way to the data vault,” K-2 said.

They moved as swiftly as they could without drawing attention. The corridors emptied while they traveled, officers withdrawing to their stations and troopers racing for the perimeter. At last they reached a heavy blast door. “Inside,” K-2 said. The door opened without a code.

The antechamber to the vault was as starkly appointed as the rest of the facility. A single squat lieutenant sat behind a console, guarding entry into a brightly illuminated tube ringed with devices Jyn didn’t recognize.

“Can I help you?” the lieutenant asked.

“That won’t be necessary,” K-2 replied, and brought a metal fist down onto the man’s skull. The lieutenant slumped onto the console as the droid maneuvered around him, shoving the unconscious body aside and plugging into a dataport.

Cassian rushed to drag the man out of view of the doorway. Jyn stood in the circular frame of the tube, blinking at the light and peering at the massive vault door at the far end. A long-forgotten recollection of a bad night in the crawl space of an Imperial treasury flashed in her mind; she could still feel the sparks burning on her cheeks, the calluses from four hours working a plasma cutter. Carving through the metal, she decided, wasn’t an option.

“How does it open?” she called.

“Biometric identification. Lieutenant Putna should do.” K-2 gestured absently at the body in Cassian’s arms. “I must remain here.”

“What for?” Cassian asked. Jyn repositioned herself to help grapple the unconscious lieutenant, lifting his legs as Cassian hoisted him beneath the shoulders.

“No data tape can be removed from the vault without authorization and assistance from this console,” K-2 said. “In this way, any single would-be thief is denied success.

“In the event of a security breach,” the droid added, “the screening tunnel can also be energized to wipe all data storage. I prefer to keep my memory intact.”

Jyn craned her neck as Cassian led the way down the tube. The rings of equipment seemed no less threatening, even knowing they were designed to thwart electronics instead of people.

Cassian grunted at Jyn. She dropped the lieutenant’s legs and Cassian rolled the man over, slapping his hand against the scanner in the vault door. For several seconds, nothing happened; then a short, low buzz indicated rejection of the scan.

Jyn swore to herself and felt her skin prickle with heat.

“It’s not working,” Cassian called.

K-2’s voice came echoing through the tunnel: “Right hand.”

“You’re a terrible spy,” Jyn hissed. She was surprised by her own intensity, the easy jibe laced with frustration.

Cassian ignored her and rearranged the body. The vault door chimed swiftly this time. Metal locks disengaged and a current of vibration ran through the floor.

Slowly—excruciatingly slowly—the door opened.

For the better part of five minutes, the rebels held the advantage. The stormtroopers who survived the initial detonations were stunned, deafened, blinded, injured by the blasts and thunder and shrapnel. They did not panic—they raced dutifully to their posts and clustered their shots in well-timed volleys—but they were scrambling to compensate for casualties before they had even spotted the enemy. They were easy to kill and easy to herd.

Baze took satisfaction in the cries of alarm and the tumbling of bodies as his companions caught Imperial squads in particle barrages; he took no less satisfaction each time Chirrut emerged from the shadows to send a stormtrooper sprawling, or when his own meticulous cannon shots burst through one suit of armor after the next.

Baze had heard once—he could not recall from whom—that the Jedi considered anger an abomination; a path to what they called the dark side of the Force. But the Guardians of the Whills were not Jedi; and Baze’s anger was righteous, able to guide his shots where the Force would not.

And if anger had not sufficed to save the holy city? Then Baze would need to be twice as fierce on Scarif to give Jyn Erso the distraction she required.

Baze, Chirrut, and the rebels swarmed and regrouped, separated the squads of their enemies and picked off the reinforcements who arrived one by one. But soon the stormtroopers regained their strength and their reinforcements came by tens and twenties.

That was when the rebels began to die.

Baze did not know their names. He did not hear their wails over the endless reverberations of blaster bolts and the lower thrumming of his cannon. He left smoking bodies behind as he fell back. The fallen would not receive proper death rites, but Baze decided that if anyone lived through the day, he would honor the dead with his fellow survivors.

The air smelled like ashes. It was better than the tang of sea salt.

Squads of stormtroopers crept away from the barracks, forming a spearhead aimed at the hillock where the rebels were attempting to hold ground. Baze saw the opportunity when Melshi did—one brief chance to break the enemy—and as Melshi cried, “Forward!” Baze provided cover for the rebels to shatter the spearhead. An allied rocket blasted armored bodies through the air; then the moment was gone, and as one the rebels scampered into the cover of the jungle, allowing the stormtroopers to give chase.

In the relative shade of the trees, Baze’s eyes spotted with streaks of color as blaster volleys flashed by. His back had begun to ache from the weight of his generator, and sweat plastered his beard to his chin. He did not stop moving until he realized, with a start, that he had not seen Chirrut in some moments.

He spat a curse, spun about, and fired at a stormtrooper over the head of a rebel half crawling through the underbrush. If he yelled for the blind man now, a dozen guns would be aimed his way. But if he’d lost Chirrut…

The smoke was everywhere. Trees burned as their trunks absorbed bolt after bolt. Baze stalked back the way he had come, concentrating his focus, narrowing his cone of vision as if sheer intensity would allow him to penetrate the haze.

“Baze! Baze!”

He heard Chirrut before he saw him. The blind man’s robes were marred with soot and soil and his expression was wild with alarm, but he appeared uninjured. Baze felt a rush of fury and an equal rush of relief.

“What?” he snapped. “What is it?”

“Run,” Chirrut said. “Run!”

With those words, as Chirrut grasped Baze by the arm and pulled him toward the shoreline, Baze’s senses expanded again. He heard the heavy snapping of wood—not burning wood, not wood ravaged by a grenade, but the broad-leafed trees of the jungle being compressed beneath an unfathomable weight until they broke and burst.

He turned and saw the towering metal forms of Imperial walkers on the march. Their legs dwarfed the trees, and the laser cannons attached to their cockpits pumped ruin toward the scattering rebel soldiers. The stormtroopers had slowed their pursuit, staying out of the crossfire as they attempted to cut off the rebels’ routes to escape.

The rebels had already begun to die. But death was not failure.

Failure lay in the shadow of the metal beasts.

Go, little sister, Baze thought. Go!

Dozens of vessels winked into existence against the shroud of space, filling the void as if some mythological deity had upturned a bottle of fresh stars over the heavens. Admiral Raddus—Raddus of Mon Cala, Raddus of the Floes, Raddus of the Clutch of Zadasurr and the Spear of Tryphar—knew many of the ships by their silhouettes: X-wing and Y-wing starfighters, U-wing and Gallofree transports, Dornean gunships and Hammerhead corvettes. All of them had served the Rebellion well.

It was a tremendous sight, unique in the history of the Rebellion. If the fleet had a vulnerability, it was that selfsame uniqueness: We fight as siblings who have never known a shared home, Raddus thought, against an Empire that knows naught but tyrannical discipline.

Raddus did not avert his gaze from the main display as he gestured to his comm officer. “Are all capital ships accounted for?”

“Yes, Admiral,” came the answer in that rasping, human voice.

Raddus had yet to adjust to keeping aliens aboard his bridge, no matter how skilled; the Profundity had been built by Mon Calamari and only recently refitted for war by the Rebellion. With the refit had come unexpected diversity. “Very good. And General Merrick?”

The general’s proud bellow came through the comm with a burst of static. “Ready to fight, Admiral—sending possible attack runs now.” There was a brief pause before the voice continued, “This is Blue Leader. All squadron leaders, report in.”

Raddus turned from the viewport to the tactical holodisplays, scanning the battlefield as the squadron leaders replied.

“Blue Leader, this is Gold Leader.”

“Red Leader, standing by.”

“Green Leader, standing by.”

The Profundity had detected—and its crew or its allies had visually confirmed—two Star Destroyers, at least nine distinct TIE starfighter squadrons, and innumerable midsized vessels ranging from shuttles to patrol cruisers, all situated between the rebels and Scarif. Other enemy craft, as yet undetected, could have been hidden behind planets and moons or running dark on auxiliary power. On its own, the Imperial fleet would pose a formidable challenge—but not a dispiriting one.

Yet Scarif’s planetary defenses were considerable. Draven’s spies had reported an energy shield built to withstand massive bombardment, and the orbital gate station appeared to be festooned with turrets and starfighter hangars. Combined with the Imperial fleet, the battle would be—at the very least—memorable.

For all that, the decimation of the Alliance navy was the least of Raddus’s concerns.

On Yavin 4, Jyn Erso had described a battle station capable of destroying whole worlds. Raddus had never known the Empire to be restrained in its use of weapons, and of all the planets in its grasp he could think of few as defiant as his own homeworld.

Mon Cala had resisted. Mon Cala had been punished. Mon Cala had, time and again, offered its warriors and resources to the Rebellion.

If the Rebellion failed to stop the Death Star, Mon Cala would be obliterated. For this reason—and for a hundred others—Raddus would fight as long as the Profundity endured.

General Ramda was a fool, and Krennic had already decided to have him tried and imprisoned for gross incompetence. Still, there was no one on Scarif whom Krennic trusted to replace him, and Krennic himself knew too little of the Citadel’s vulnerabilities. So he allowed the general to race about the command center while Krennic seethed, listening to cries and reports from troopers in the field. Krennic was not, at heart, a military man; he believed that if a battle had to be waged, something had already gone wrong.

The enemy’s numbers at first seemed impossibly strong—surely a product of confusion and disarray, but no less obfuscating for all that. Yet as the fighting proceeded, no breaches in the base’s defenses were reported and the conflict remained at some distance from the Citadel Tower. Soon a lieutenant shouted triumphantly and declared that walkers had routed the rebels and pushed them to the shore.

Krennic had no words of praise for the officers of Scarif, but this was enough to dampen his ire. The data vault was pristine. The Citadel was safe. The Jedha survivors would be sifted as ashes from the sand.

Again, he tried to recall the face of his attacker on Eadu. Had it been a woman? Would he recognize her if the troopers cataloged the dead? He’d give the order to sort the bodies once the battle was over. And he would interrogate any captives himself—if they were Galen’s revenge, he would learn the truth.

One of Ramda’s aides signaled the general. “Transmission from Admiral Gorin,” he called. Krennic watched Ramda hurry to a console and tap frantically at the screen. When Ramda approached Krennic, his jaw was set to defy a fresh terror.

“Sir,” Ramda said, “part of the rebel fleet has arrived from hyperspace and amassed outside the shield. However, the admiral believes they are no threat to the planet—”

“They aren’t trying to take the planet,” Krennic snapped. He would have struck the man if he hadn’t needed Ramda so. “Lock down the base. Lock down everything!” He was shouting full-bore into the general’s face.

Ramda stood, his breath hitching but otherwise unaffected. “And close the shield?” he asked.

“Do it!” Krennic roared, and Ramda and his men scurried to act. When the orders had been given, Krennic lowered his voice but still heard himself quivering with fury. “Is there any way,” he asked, “that the rebel fleet can break through the shield? Think before you answer.”

“The shield gate itself,” Ramda said with deliberate care, “is the only weak point. With massive amounts of firepower, an enemy could conceivably punch through the field contained by the ring. But Admiral Gorin is positioning his ships to prevent even that unlikely occurrence.”

Krennic nodded briskly and waved Ramda off. He fought down his blinding rage and updated his reconstruction of the attack: A team of rebels had infiltrated the planet somehow in an attempt to penetrate the Citadel and steal the Death Star schematics. When the attack had gone poorly, the rebels had brought in their fleet—if not in its entirety, then in irreplaceable force—fighting a battle they couldn’t possibly hope to win.

Was it an act of true desperation? Had some rebel commander decided that it was worth losing everything for even a chance at extracting the team seeking the plans?

There was logic in it, given certain premises. The Death Star was an existential threat to the Alliance. If the rebels believed—if Galen had made them believe—there was a weakness in the station, then they were taking the only conceivable path to avoid doom.

It hadn’t occurred to Krennic that the rebels might sacrifice so many lives for such an unlikely gain. He’d known they were individually suicidal; a mass death wish was something new.

He slammed a fist onto the nearest console and ignored the frightened looks of the officers.

You must have told quite a story, Galen.

“This is Admiral Raddus. Red and Gold Squadrons, engage those two Star Destroyers. Blue Squadron, get to the surface before they close that gate!”

Merrick’s answer crackled through the comm on the bridge of the Profundity. “Copy you, Admiral.”

Raddus pressed his palms together and let his mouth hang open, allowing the thick, artificially humid air to condense inside his mouth and throat. Then he wet his lips and barked new orders to his crew. “I want one-third of the fleet each supporting Red and Gold Squadrons. That should force those Destroyers to engage. The remainder will protect our flank; when the Empire brings in reinforcements, I don’t want our escape route cut off.” It was an almost simplistic plan, cobbled together from skirmishes at Nexator and Carsanza, but there was no time to compose anything more elaborate; this was an opening gambit, not a strategy to win the day.

And improvisation had always been one of Raddus’s talents.

“What about Profundity, Admiral?” the tactical officer called.

“We cover Blue Squadron,” Raddus said, and jutted a finger at the viewport. “We target the shield gate.”

The battle was joined, and chaos ensued.

Raddus moved his attention calmly, surely, between the tactical holodisplays and the viewport. The former revealed the state of the battlefield; the latter revealed its timbre. He saw the motes of light signifying Blue Squadron bearing toward the shield gate; and he saw the first wild emerald volleys unleashed by the Star Destroyers, spattering and rippling against the deflectors of rebel Hammerheads. He said nothing during the opening moments of violence—he trusted his gunners and his captains to swim as the tide demanded.

Barely aware of his own motions, he rose from his seat and crept toward the viewport as the shield gate came into full view. The iridescent flicker of energy outside the ring had begun to diminish as—like water in a river lock—the gate regulated the energy flow and permitted the gap in the shield to close. It would take only moments before the shield was fully reestablished.

A wave of Blue Squadron fighters and U-wing transports hurtled toward the closing gate, flashing through before entering Scarif’s atmosphere. A second wave continued forward, and Raddus heard a panicked cry through the comm station: “Pull up!”

A single starfighter vanished in a burst of sparks and metal, battered into oblivion against the energy shield. The first Alliance loss of the battle.

Raddus turned back to the tactical displays.

Jyn Erso and her colleagues—Rogue One—had their ground support.

But delivering Blue Squadron had been the simple part. Now things would become more difficult.

The walkers stalked the rebels like hunting hounds, relentless and unafraid. Their blasts splintered trees and showered Baze with burning dirt and sand. They did far worse to the soldiers struck with any precision. A quick death, Baze thought, did not make a good death.

He emerged with Chirrut and the dozen rebel survivors onto the beach, racing along the shore as the mechanical grinding of walker legs drowned out the ragged gasps of his breathing, the beat of his boots on sand. A long trench ran near the water—built by the stormtroopers, he supposed, to help repel an invasion by sea—and one after the next the rebels leapt or swung inside. As if a mound of sand would stop the walkers for a fraction of an instant.

But then, if a fraction of an instant was all Baze had left to give Jyn Erso, it was better than no gift at all.

Besides, he had nowhere else to run.

He scrambled into the trench near Chirrut and didn’t pause to glance toward the walkers before dropping his cannon and seizing a rocket launcher from a rebel who hastily passed the weapon his way. If he aimed well, he might be able to shatter one walker’s cockpit—kill or expose the pilot, damage its controls, make the vehicle useless.

He would not have the time or the ammunition for a second shot. But he might earn the rebels a few instants more before the other walker buried them all.

He rose from the trench, turned to face the foremost walker—maybe fifty meters distant now, at the edge of the tree line. He set the launcher on his shoulder, lined up a shot while the rebels alongside him fired blasters uselessly. His body lurched as the rocket leapt forward, soaring toward the terrible machine.

The explosion nearly deafened him. Fire and smoke streamed from one side of the walker’s cockpit, and the machine twisted its head away as if in pain. One of its temple-mounted cannons was a wreck. But Baze’s aim had not been true. The walker was not disabled. It turned back toward the soldiers.

Death had chased Baze for a long time. He bared his teeth at it in defiance.

The burning walker targeted the trench. Before it could fire, the sky above Baze wailed and a shadow crossed the sea. Pulses of light hotter and faster than the rocket impacted the walker’s cockpit and a second blast of fire tore the mechanical head asunder, sent sheets of smoking metal tumbling through the air and onto the beach. As the walker’s body began to topple, its attacker sped above it and over the green of the jungle: an X-wing starfighter.

The Alliance had come to fight after all.

Baze’s comrades were cheering, raising fists in the air and shouting in triumph. To his surprise, he heard himself laughing with them.