Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 19}

THE DATA VAULT WAS UNLOCKED. Jyn wanted nothing more than to rush inside, to snatch the tape containing the Death Star’s schematics, and race back to Bodhi and the shuttle. Every moment they delayed was another chance for the Imperials to catch them inside the Citadel; and out on the beaches and in the jungles, people were surely dying by now.

How many rebels were even left? How many stormtroopers could they hold off?

Would anyone have told her if Baze and Chirrut were gone?

Instead, Jyn was helping Cassian drag the unconscious lieutenant out of the screening tunnel and back to the antechamber. “In case there’s another biometric lock on the console,” Cassian had muttered. “I don’t want Kay-Tu to have to unplug.”

He was sweating under his officer’s cap, and she’d seen him reach reflexively for his comlink more than once. He wanted to know what was happening outside as much as she did.

They dropped the body roughly by K-2, still linked to the console port. “I’ve accessed internal Citadel communications,” the droid said. “The rebel fleet has arrived.”

“What?” Jyn shook her head in confusion.

“Admiral Gorin has engaged them.” The droid went on, as if reading from a list: “There’s fighting on the beach, they’ve locked down the base, they’ve closed the shield gate, they’ve alerted—”

“Wait—what does that mean?” Jyn cut him off, trying to comprehend the implications, to sort positive from negative. They’ve closed the shield gate? “We’re trapped?”

She looked to Cassian. His expression was grim, his mouth tight. It was answer enough for her.

She swore under her breath, a parade of every obscenity she’d ever heard uttered. She saw the walls of the cave closing in, darkness creeping at the edges of the bright hope that had brought her this far. She racked her brain for a plan, and found nothing—locked down or not, they could find a way out of the Citadel, but if they had no way off Scarif…

“We have to tell them we’re down here,” she spat. “We’re close!”

“They wouldn’t be here,” Cassian said, “if they didn’t know.”

Jyn leaned in close enough to smell the cleaning chemicals on his Imperial uniform. “Last we saw those people, they didn’t want to be here at all. I’m not giving them an excuse to leave, and if they’ve got a way to get us out I’d like to know.”

Cassian held his ground, staring down at her until his lips finally twitched into something like a smile. His eyes remained hard and troubled. Jyn wasn’t sure if he’d gotten worse at hiding things or if she was simply getting to know him too well.

She was ready to call him on it, to ask what he knew that she didn’t, when K-2 interrupted. “We could transmit the plans to the rebel fleet. We’d have to get a signal out to tell them it’s coming. It’s the size of the data files. That’s the problem. They’ll never get through. Someone has to take the shield gate down.”

Cassian brought his comlink up. “Bodhi. Bodhi, can you hear me?” The moment of reflection, of confusion was over—he was all tense action again. “Tell me you’re out there. Bodhi!”

Be alive, Jyn thought. All of you, be alive.

“I’m here!” Bodhi’s voice came through, rapid and short of breath. “We’re standing by. They’ve started fighting—the base is on lockdown!”

“I know,” Cassian said. “Listen to me! The rebel fleet is up there. You’ve got to get a message out.” He squeezed his eyes shut, mouthed something to himself, and then spoke aloud again. “You’ve got to tell them they’ve got to blow a hole in the shield gate so we can transmit the plans—”

“I can’t.” Bodhi sounded aghast. “I’m not tied into the comm tower. We’re not tied in—”

“Find a way.” Cassian cut off his link and pocketed it. “Good enough?” he asked Jyn.

“Good enough,” she agreed. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t; but she tried to pretend the arrival of the fleet was good news. Their escape plan hadn’t exactly been foolproof before, and if the Alliance couldn’t punch through Scarif’s shield, what hope did it have against a Death Star?

If nothing else, someone was finally on their side.

Cassian looked between the door to the antechamber and K-2. “Cover our backs,” he told the droid, and started toward the screening tunnel.

Jyn pictured stormtroopers rushing inside and spotting the body of the unconscious lieutenant. Out of instinct more than reason, she pulled the sidearm she’d taken from the lieutenant out of her belt, checked its readings—fully charged, no stun setting, hard to work wrong—and held it grip-first toward K-2. “You’ll need this,” she said. “You wanted one, right?”

K-2 snatched the blaster with a disconcerting eagerness. His other hand remained plugged into the console as he turned the weapon about and placed a finger on the trigger. He kept the barrel pointed at the ceiling. “Your behavior, Jyn Erso, is continually unexpected.”

I couldn’t ask for a nicer compliment, she wanted to say. But she decided she could do without the inevitable correction.

“Jyn.” Cassian stood framed in the entrance of the screening tunnel. “Come on.”

She flashed a vicious grin at the droid and went to steal what she’d come for.

Bodhi hadn’t cheered when the Alliance had arrived. He’d managed a sickly little smile for Tonc’s sake, but he’d known immediately how the Empire would respond. By the time X-wings were blazing over the jungle and U-wings were delivering SpecForce troops to the beach, the shield gate had already closed.

There was no way off Scarif.

He didn’t blame the Rebellion, but that gave Bodhi little solace. Maybe it was his fault for not suggesting an infiltration of the orbital gate station. Maybe he’d explained the planet’s defenses poorly to Jyn and Cassian and the soldiers, hurrying through it all in the excitement of the flight to Scarif. Maybe he should’ve been up there instead of down here.

Or maybe Cassian was right, and they had to tell their new allies exactly what they needed. Somehow.

The technical details swam in Bodhi’s mind as he climbed down the cockpit ladder. They were a distraction, a welcome distraction, from what he was about to do—though the sounds of distant explosions and blasterfire from outside and the angry shouts of Imperial troops from the comm were equally distracting and far less welcome. Tonc and the others were spread around the cabin with their weapons aimed at the boarding ramp, but they looked his way as he hurried to the equipment hold. “All right,” Bodhi said. “Listen up.” Breathe deep and sound like a flight instructor. “We’re going to have to go out there.”

He wasn’t afraid the rebels would refuse. He was afraid they wouldn’t believe him. And afraid of dying, of course. He knelt by the hold and started sorting gear, hoping for the best. He needed KS-12 cable, or anything L-series with a connection adapter. A signal booster, if he could find one. A multitool for the hookup…

“What’re you doing?” Tonc asked.

Bodhi hauled a spool of cable out and grimaced at the weight. He set it aside and forced himself to face Tonc. “They closed the shield gate,” he said. “We’re stuck here.” Tonc knew that much already, but it meant Bodhi could delay the rest a little longer. “But—the rebel fleet is pulling in. We just have to get a signal strong enough to get through to them and let them know we’re trapped down here.”

“Fine,” Tonc said. “I won’t complain about planning a rescue. But why do you need to go out there?”

The emphasis wasn’t lost on Bodhi; he just ignored it. “For that?” he said. “To get a signal out, with the shield gate shut? We need to connect to the communications tower; that’s the whole point of the thing, to let the Citadel keep talking to the rest of the Empire without opening the defenses.” A deep breath. “Now, I can patch us in over here, out on the landing pad—” If I’m not cut down in the crossfire, or crushed by a falling starfighter. “—but you have to get on the radio, get one of the guys out there to find a master switch.”

Tonc was staring at him, evidently torn between duty and bewilderment. He opened his mouth and Bodhi spoke over him, answering the question Tonc was least likely to ask. “You don’t build a comm tower just anyone can access. There’s mechanical, physical connections controlled by the switches, and the switches are like the data vault—totally off the computer network. I only know all this because—” But he realized the last time he’d thought of those days was in the lair of Bor Gullet, and he hurried on. “Get one of the soldiers, Baze or Chirrut, someone, to activate the connection between us and that comm tower. Otherwise, we’re not going anywhere and that data tape stays on Scarif. Okay?”

Tonc stiffened, suddenly sure of himself. He glanced to the other rebels in the cabin, who offered curt nods of acknowledgment.

“Then go!” Bodhi cried. “Call them!”

Before anyone could answer he was pocketing the tools and heaving the spool over his shoulders, where it could be harnessed like a backpack. Shifting the weight awkwardly, Bodhi hurried to the boarding ramp and peered around the doorway onto the landing pad. He could hear Tonc behind him, talking through his comlink: “Melshi, listen up! You guys have to open up the line…”

He couldn’t see blasterfire. But then, he couldn’t see very far at all. The landing pad was cluttered with cargo crates and substations, and the shuttle’s undercarriage blocked much of his view. He could smell so much smoke, like the whole jungle was burning.

The network console you need is only ten meters out. Maybe twenty. You run, you hook up the cable, you head back. Think of it like a race. You used to bet a lot on racing…

He wanted to ask Tonc to do it, but Tonc couldn’t adjust the connector if something went wrong, wouldn’t know how to run a diagnostic. And Tonc wasn’t dressed like an Imperial pilot; that might buy Bodhi an extra minute or two.

He had to go. He’d risked his life before. Just never quite like this.

The Rebellion needed him. Jyn needed him. Her father, who’d set him on this path, needed him. He braced his legs and got ready to run.

“What does it look like?” Tonc called, and Bodhi’s urgent determination was shattered. He straightened, looked back at Tonc in confusion.

Tonc was holding up his comlink. “The master switch!” he said. “What’s it look like? Where is it?”

Bodhi tried not to choke on a laugh and stepped back inside, tugging at the straps of the cable spool. “Let me talk to Melshi,” he said.

Apparently, he had a few more moments to dread his mission.

An X-wing pilot, dashed against the shield gate, was among the first to die above Scarif. But fatalities mounted rapidly after that, first one starfighter at a time and then by the dozen. Raddus watched, cold as the waters of his homeland, as a rebel gunship was reduced by turbolaser fire to a spreading globule of molten metal.

A great commander, Raddus believed, felt each loss among his people but did not act on it. Mon Mothma might have disagreed, but she was no soldier. General Merrick, too, might have disagreed, but he had led Blue Squadron through the gate to Scarif, and now starfighter command fell to Raddus as well.

“What’s going on down there, Lieutenant?” Raddus called.

“Unknown, sir,” came the reply. “The shield jams all communications.”

Raddus swore to himself. Victory in Scarif’s orbit meant nothing if Rogue One failed. “We’ve got to buy Erso and her team some time,” he said. “Throw our weight at those Star Destroyers and let’s start probing that shield.”

If the Alliance was lucky, Erso had an exfiltration route already planned. If not, the burden was on Raddus. “Yes, sir!” he heard, and kept his eyes in their steady rotation between viewport and tactical displays.

A wing of Red Squadron fighters strafed the orbital gate station, maneuvering among clusters of sensor towers and laser turrets. The attack did little damage, but inflicting damage hadn’t been the goal—the fighters had claimed the station gunners’ attention, left a few turbolaser platforms in burning ruin, and given Gold Squadron’s Y-wings the opportunity for a bombing run. The impacts of the Y-wings’ proton torpedoes winked out the viewport even as the scanners revealed swarms of TIE fighters pouring from the station hangars.

The command ships were faring better against the Star Destroyers. Any single vessel in the rebel fleet compared poorly with the Empire’s mighty warships, but Raddus—speaking only a word here and there—kept the Destroyers boxed in, unable to turn their full firepower on one target without exposing a flank to concentrated volleys. It was, in a sense, a delaying tactic, but delay defeat long enough, and a triumph might eventually find its way home.

“Sir!” The lieutenant again. “Enemy fighters coming in!”

Red and Gold Squadrons were busily engaged against the gate or the Destroyers. Pulling them back to defend the Profundity was no option worth considering.

“Withdraw to fifty thousand kilometers from the shield gate,” Raddus said. “Stay in the TIE fighters’ range but force them to stretch their line. If they don’t think to regroup, the point-defense gunners can handle the bulk of them.”

Even as he spoke, the Profundity’s shields coruscated with energy as cannon fire struck home. The ship rumbled and its generators strained. But it could hold.

Another X-wing blinked out of existence on the tactical display, then another. A rebel freighter, desperately evading TIE fire, skimmed the Scarif shield until its hull crumpled and its burning components rolled and bounced across the energy field. One of the Hammerheads, caught between the two Star Destroyers, momentarily lost its overtaxed deflectors and signaled for help as turbolasers left blackened, burning holes in its sides. Raddus observed the carnage patiently and waited for an opportunity to change the course of the battle; waited for an insight that he could apply with the precision of a knife.

He thought again about the dead, and how Mothma and Merrick might react. Maybe humans felt loss more keenly. They spawned so rarely and so few. His own grandchildren numbered in the dozens, and though he loved each he knew some would never come of age.

The death of individuals was no tragedy in battle. It was the death of hundreds that would haunt him.

He listened to cries of despair on the starfighters’ frequency and an anguished scream as Red Five was torn apart. The Profundity’s shields flashed constantly now. The chatter among the bridge crewmembers was growing louder and more frantic.

“We’re having no effect on the shield gate,” the lieutenant said. “And we’re sustaining heavy losses, Admiral.”

“I’m aware,” Raddus said. And he was, but the state of the battle had not changed. He had to assume Erso was still on the ground, still working to obtain the Death Star schematics that would reveal the weakness she’d promised.

He could not withdraw. He could expect no allied reinforcements. His fleet was crewed by the best officers the Rebellion could provide.

He waited for opportunity. For insight. For an error.

Then he saw it, and cried orders so swiftly it seemed to stun the crew. “All ships nearby, close to support the Heartbound and Deviant! Match current trajectories! Demand that Destroyer’s attention!”

One of the Star Destroyers had allowed itself to be flanked on two sides while leaving its forward firing arc empty. Its weapons had been almost entirely diverted to port and starboard. Raddus was ready to shout another command, but Gold Squadron recognized the opening and he heard a voice on the comm: “Y-wings, on me! Path is clear!”

The bomber wing, barely out of its last attack run against the shield gate, altered course and powered directly toward the exposed front of the Destroyer. TIE fighters pursued, faster than the bombers but unprepared to pull away from their defense of the gate. The Destroyer itself recognized the danger, attempted to swing away and simultaneously bring its guns to bear, but far too late. The Y-wings converged and flew so close to the Imperial vessel that the tactical displays couldn’t differentiate them from the Destroyer’s mass.

“Ion torpedoes away,” the wing leader declared. Raddus called up a visual and watched the Y-wings climb out of the attack, illuminated by bright electric bursts that crawled across the Destroyer’s surface. Lightning silently ravaged Imperial deflector dishes and weapon emplacements. The glow of mighty ion engines went dark.

“They’re down, sir!” the lieutenant called. “The Destroyer has lost power!”

“Press the attack,” Raddus said, calm as ever. “Maintain fire against the remaining Destroyer, but divert available ships to the orbital station. Let’s see how much the shield gate can take.”

Now the state of the battle had changed. But time was still working against them. Sooner or later, Imperial reinforcements would come. Rebels would continue to die.

What are you doing, Rogue One?

Tonc had insisted on dispersing his troops around the landing pad. “If you get caught out there, we’re not going to do any good guarding the shuttle. You say you need to talk to the fleet to get the data tape offworld? Fine. That means we protect you like we would the tape.”

Bodhi had tried to argue, but he’d mumbled only a few words before Tonc’s people had hurried out. “Wait for our signal,” Tonc had said, gripping Bodhi tight by the shoulder. “When the way is clear, run fast as you can.” Then he, too, had gone.

Now Bodhi adjusted the straps of the cable spool, looking out from the boarding ramp and listening to the thunder of starfighters overhead. A momentary fancy put him in a world where he’d scored higher, much higher at the Imperial flight academy; a world where he’d been assigned to TIE duty, and where he was the one shooting at invading X-wings on Scarif.

His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. He wasn’t a soldier.

One of the rebels gave a hand signal from across the landing pad. Bodhi ran.

Heat hit him like a wall—not just the heat of the sun, but the hot flecks carried by the smoke of the battle. The shuttle had filtered out the worst of it before; now Bodhi felt sweat dampen his flight suit, had to breathe openmouthed to draw in enough of the stinking air. Each impact of his boots on metal jostled the spool on his back, caused the straps to slip a little lower until he was fumbling to right them as he moved. He’d meant to keep his head down to avoid being spotted, but he couldn’t stay low and manage the spool at the same time. He could only hope that no one but Tonc and the rebels was watching.

He turned a corner around a stack of cargo crates and crouched beside the network console. He didn’t take the time to look around; he tugged the end of the cable in one hand, slammed it into place, and stayed in position only as long as it took for the console to register and accept the connection. After that, he spun about and charged back the way he’d come.

His legs were already sore, but each step became easier as the cable unspooled behind him. He was almost at the shuttle when he was suddenly jerked back; he nearly lost his balance, stumbled around, and saw that the spool had run out.

No. No, no, no. He’d checked the length beforehand. He’d been careful. Which meant the cable had snagged somewhere, probably on one of the cargo crates. He almost laughed. He saved the energy for the run.

With cable wriggling behind him, still attached to his back, he retraced his steps until he found the kink—as he’d expected, under the corner of a crate. He knelt to prize out the cable, intending to run it over the crate to give him the extra length he needed.

He didn’t get the chance. “Hey, you!” an electronic voice called. Bodhi squeezed the cable tight in his hands. “Identify yourself!”

He unclenched his hands and let the cable drop. He stood slowly and faced the stormtrooper closest to him as others nearby observed. “I can explain—” he started, but he never got a chance to finish. Red blaster bolts flashed around him and the stormtroopers staggered and fell.

The stream of bolts didn’t stop, however. Bodhi dropped to his knees and saw more troopers racing toward the landing pad, firing in the direction of Tonc and his men. He lifted the cable again and looked toward the shuttle. It seemed as far away as the Citadel or the stars.

The broad shaft of the data vault rose half a dozen stories inside the Citadel. In the center of the shaft stood multiple towers of stacked data banks, each bank aglow with dim red lights indicating the storage status of ten thousand cartridges. Each cartridge, in turn, contained enough data for a lifetime of perusal—scientific treatises and bureaucratic memoranda and schematics detailed to a microscopic level. Jyn hadn’t known what to imagine when her father and Bodhi had talked about the data vault, but it hadn’t been this—not a library too vast to comprehend, not a monument to Imperial atrocities grander than anything she’d ever encountered.

Every book Jyn’s father had ever read to her, every history of every planet she’d ever visited, could have fit on one of those tapes. And every one of them held some dark secret of the Empire.

The vault shaft proper was divided from a control room by a broad glass viewport. Cassian suppressed his awe and his vertigo faster than Jyn and headed straight for the main console. Jyn shivered at the icy air, like a refrigeration unit or a morgue. She followed Cassian and tried to think of worse places to die.

“Schematics bank,” K-2’s voice announced through the console. “Data tower two.”

“How do I find that?” Cassian asked.

“Searching,” K-2 replied. “I can locate the tape, but you’ll need the handles for extraction.”

Handles? Jyn scanned the console, spotted a bewildering set of mechanical manipulators.

Cassian looked equally nonplussed. “What are we supposed to do with these?”

Jyn leaned over the console, propping herself with a knee and peering through the viewport into the upper reaches of the vault. Cassian doffed his officer’s cap and tugged off his gloves before fumbling with the manipulators; once he began, Jyn spotted a mechanical arm rising rapidly through the tower, turning to one bank of tapes after the next. “Figure it out fast,” she muttered, and slid back to the control room floor. “There’s a whole fleet waiting on us.”

“Schematics bank,” Cassian muttered. “Data tower two.”

Servos whined loudly and metal roared. Jyn turned in time to see the vault door clamp shut. The air seemed more frigid than before. K-2’s voice came through the comm only faintly, as if he were speaking at a distance: “The rebels! They went… over there.”

Jyn remembered the droid’s awkward, unconvincing dissembling in the Holy Quarter on Jedha. Damn. Had the Imperials found them? If they were trapped now, everything happening outside would be for nothing…

“K-2?” Cassian grimaced, looking from the manipulator controls to the comm. “What’s going on out there?”

The comm growled with indecipherable static. Jyn saw something new flash across Cassian’s expression. He was afraid—not intellectually afraid, not afraid of failing the mission, but afraid for K-2.

Afraid for his friend.

“Keep moving the arm,” she murmured, and searched the console for a readout. She tapped a key and found it: a registry of cartridges in each bank. “You fly, I’ll navigate.”

Cassian’s grip visibly tensed as they heard a series of noises very much like blaster shots.

Was this hope? Facing fear after fear, for oneself and for friends and for the galaxy, all out of some desperate need to accomplish the impossible?

Maybe, Jyn thought, she’d been better off without it. If you were alive, Papa, I’d have a lot to blame you for.

“Hyperspace Tracking,” she read off the screen as the arm whirred about the tower. “Navigational Systems, Deep Core Cartography—” The vault was arranged by subject, clearly; beyond that she hadn’t a clue how to search. Maybe there was an index somewhere, but Saw Gerrera’s training hadn’t prepared her to serve as a data librarian.

“Two screens down,” K-2’s voice announced, as if he’d never stopped speaking. Cassian parted his lips and Jyn raised a hand, silenced him and urged him back to the controls. The catalog scrolled rapidly on her screen as the arm kept moving. “Structural Engineering,” the droid said. “Open that!”

“Kay-Tu!” Cassian snapped. The arm stationed itself at a cartridge bank. “Tell me what’s happening!”

Jyn’s screen switched to a listing of tapes, once again organized in no fashion she could discern. Maybe they had identification tags she wasn’t seeing. Or maybe it was yet another layer of security; hard to rob the vault if you couldn’t find what you were looking for.

“My riot control protocols are now active,” K-2 said. “But the situation is well in hand?”

Jyn winced at the self-conscious lie of a question. There was nothing she could do from the control room.

She spoke sternly, demanding Cassian’s attention as she read from the screen. “Project code names: Stellarsphere. Mark Omega. Pax Aurora…” Were all of them weapons like the Death Star, designed for terror and genocide? Had her father known about the others? She couldn’t afford to think about it—there were too many horrors down that road. “War-Mantle. Cluster-Prism. Black-Saber.”

And she stopped.

The next name stood out with burning intensity, so obvious she might have found it by touch.

“What?” Cassian asked.

“Stardust,” Jyn said. “It’s that one.”

“How do you know that?” Curiosity and urgency mixed in his voice, as if he wanted to say: Be sure.

Jyn was sure. “I know because it’s me.”

Cassian looked at her with astonishment. Then he turned back to the console, gripped the controls fiercely. “Kay, we need the file for Stardust!”

The comm was full of noise, inchoate and intermixed, like a war zone filtered through a downpour. No sound came through the solid vault door. The arm, already stationed at its proper data bank, maneuvered among the cartridges and reached out needfully. “Stardust,” K-2 said, and Jyn heard strain in the droid’s voice.

Cassian still clutched the handles. Jyn couldn’t tell whether Cassian or K-2SO was performing the final maneuver. “That’s it,” she said. “You almost have it…”

The arm’s manipulators closed around the cartridge and pulled.

Then the lights of the control room went out, leaving the console, Cassian, and Jyn illuminated only by the sinister red glow of the vault shaft through the viewport. The refrigerated air pricked at Jyn’s skin, arousing gooseflesh down her arms and spine. The comm didn’t stop its static shrieking—until a moment and an eternity later, it did.

“Kay!” Cassian screamed into the silence, hunched over the console.

Jyn stared up at the rigid arm clinging to its data cartridge high above. In the artificial midnight of the control room, the tower shaft seemed very much like a cave.

K-2SO’s reprogramming by Cassian Andor had stripped the droid of certain ineffable qualities. He remembered, as if at a great distance, a sort of conviction that had come with serving the Galactic Empire. He remembered, too, the pride and confidence that had come with fulfilling exactly the duties he was designed for—with knowing that every servomotor and every processing cycle contributed to enforcing his Imperial masters’ edicts. Cassian had denied him that exquisite sense of purpose and replaced it with individuality. With individuality came doubt and cynicism: an awareness not only of the odds of success or failure but of those outcomes’ repercussions.

Cassian had killed K-2SO (whose true designation was far longer and far grander, rich with meaning and history that described his factory of origin, the date and time of his initialization, and more) and brought him back both smaller and larger than he had been. K-2SO did not mourn for his old self, but there were times he grew wistful over what he had been.

When the first stormtroopers had entered the antechamber to the data vault, K-2SO had suppressed his hardcoded obedience instinct, forced himself to attempt deceit (to little effect, despite having watched Cassian lie masterfully time and again), and finally resorted to activating his enforcement protocols. He had severed his connection to the console while leaving the comm open, and—after eliminating his opponents through force and a superbly aimed blaster bolt—spent twenty-seven milliseconds considering whether to return to the console at all. K-2SO was not a data pilot. He was not an astromech unit. The joyful rush of utilizing long-neglected skills was, in its way, intoxicating.

He could have abandoned Cassian and Jyn to proceed with further enforcement. He chose not to.

During this initial skirmish, K-2SO also suffered damage to the carboplast-composite casing of his midsection. The blaster shot itself did not harm anything vital, but the heat of the burnt casing melted a length of interior wiring. He rerouted his functions and continued.

He had attempted to comfort Cassian when his master asked for an update. This particular dissemblance was, on reflection, a poor use of resources; it diverted K-2SO’s attention from an increasingly variable combat situation as well as his attempt to locate the Death Star technical schematics. As additional stormtroopers entered the antechamber, K-2SO had deactivated his self-preservation warnings, maintained his connection to the console, and savored the pleasures of wielding a personal energy weapon.

At that time, he also took several additional blaster shots to nonvital sections of his chassis. Rerouting his functions was becoming more difficult.

After this, two equally unavoidable complications arose nearly simultaneously:

First, a stormtrooper (K-2SO identified her as TK-4012 but resisted the urge to download her Citadel personnel file) fired a blaster bolt that impacted just over four centimeters off K-2SO’s programming port access door—a normally nonvital area through which K-2SO had rerouted multiple vital functions. The irony was not lost on him. He estimated he now had well over twelve seconds before a cascade failure resulted in his permanent deactivation.

Second, another stormtrooper (unidentified) fired a poorly aimed burst that delivered multiple particle bolts into the control console. Despite the Citadel’s unusually redundant systems, K-2SO found himself unable to access various vault mechanisms.

With approximately twelve seconds until total shutdown, K-2SO considered his options while Cassian screamed his name.

He loosely projected eighty-nine ways to prolong his own existence (for periods ranging from point-eight milliseconds to forty-three days). Suspecting all of them would involve the capture or execution of Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso, he dismissed them without detailed study.

He reexamined his mission parameters and projected only two ways that Cassian and Jyn might retrieve their desired data cartridge and escape Scarif. Upon refinement, both appeared infinitesimally unlikely. K-2SO reexamined his parameters a second time (at a cost of several milliseconds) and deprioritized the survival of Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso.

He actively denied himself any opportunity to mourn or reflect. He chose to eschew further loose projections and estimations in favor of detailed simulations and hypotheticals.

He began with this premise: Cassian and Jyn now had the opportunity to manually recover the data cartridge.

With approximately nine seconds until total shutdown, K-2SO activated his vocoder assembly and spoke into the comm: “Climb!”

Retrieving the cartridge was not sufficient for mission success; the Death Star technical schematics needed to be relayed to rebel agents off Scarif.

This would be difficult so long as Cassian and Jyn were trapped. K-2SO had no way to free them.

He made internal inquiries. Could the data be transmitted to the Rebellion directly? The amount of data stored on a single cartridge was vast; secure transmission to Yavin 4 was out of the question under even ideal circumstances. These circumstances were not ideal, but a communications system was available.

“Climb the tower!” K-2SO said. He did not take conscious note of the blaster bolts blazing around him. “Send the plans to the fleet!”

Even the Citadel’s communications tower could not transmit an entire data cartridge with the shield gate in place. But Cassian had already taken measures, through Bodhi Rook, to open the gate.

Had Cassian foreseen this scenario?

“If they open the shield gate—” K-2SO’s protocol systems endowed his words with extreme emphasis. “—you can broadcast from the tower!”

With approximately three seconds until total shutdown, K-2SO listened to Cassian’s voice cry his name one last time. Then, without regret, the droid turned his weapon on the console. The comm cut out. With the controls now reduced to a melted plastoid-metal compound, the stormtroopers would have considerable difficulty entering the vault.

With one second left until total shutdown, K-2SO chose to mentally simulate an impossible scenario in which Cassian Andor escaped alive.

The simulation pleased him.