Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

^{Chapter 21}

CASSIAN WAS DEAD—ALONG WITH how many others, Jyn didn’t know. The man in white who had been there for the worst moments of her life was present again. The darkness enveloped her, broken by the thousand red eyes of the data cartridges. Her arms trembled violently every time she pulled herself higher, as if ready to wrench loose from their sockets.

But she could see light above her.

Climb!

Her gloves were soaked in sweat turned cold by the data vault’s refrigeration. Wedging her boots into narrow footholds over and over had left her toes numb from compression. The cartridge on her belt felt heavy enough to drag her down below the crust of Scarif.

She could see the pulsing aperture in the ceiling clearly now. A series of vents opened and shut in sequence, suctioning the warmest air from the tower. It seemed to buoy her as it wafted free.

Climb!

She caught glimpses of blue sky. She was at the top of the data stack, close enough to the first vent to put her arm through. She pictured herself making the attempt and being crushed and bloodied and broken by the pulsing door. For a single despairing moment, she couldn’t bear the thought of another climb. Then the moment passed and she counted one, two, three, to time the movements of the vents.

Liana Hallik and Tanith and Kestrel—old names, old lives—had done braver, bolder things than this. Jyn Erso could, too.

She scrambled through a vent, leapt to the next; climbed and waited. Resting was as agonizing as motion. While she paused between apertures, counting seconds, her muscles begged for momentum or eternal stillness—not a tortuous stop-and-go. One, two, three, go! Wait, two, three… She barely noticed the air turn from frigid to warm, the balmy humidity moistening her lips and throat. One, two, three, go! Then there was nowhere for her to climb and she was sprawled on metal plating, the surface uncomfortably hot in the sunlight as she crawled forward.

She was out of the data vault. Out of the dark.

She lacked the strength to feel triumphant. She forced herself to stand, fumbled at her blaster as she searched for stormtroopers, for black-clad killers or the man in white. But she was alone atop the tower, on a broad platform in the shadow of an enormous antenna dish. Her knees knocked as she surveyed the bright sky, dense with white clouds that met the sea at the horizon.

The serenity was marred by the scream of starfighters, cannons blazing in fiery red and sickly green as rebel pursued Imperial and Imperial pursued rebel. The smell of ashes rose from somewhere far below.

Yet she was alone.

You don’t have long, she told herself, and coaxed her body into motion.

She spotted a control panel built into the outer railing across from a turbolift and hobbled over to it, trying to kick life back into her legs. She didn’t recognize the layout—it looked like a comm terminal, but there was no audio input and a dozen toggles she didn’t recognize. She found a slot for a data cartridge, however; half disbelieving, she probed it with her fingers before loading the Stardust tape.

The screen flashed with options and technical jargon. An authoritative, electronic voice repeated sternly: “Reset antenna alignment.”

She swore and slammed a fist against the panel. She wanted to kick K-2SO for sending her here, kick him until the droid fell to pieces; and immediately, she felt sick with guilt at the image. Back aching, she leaned in to examine the screen.

She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for. Had K-2SO configured the dish to send to the fleet? Had Bodhi, if he’d made contact? Was the shield down, so the antenna had to be reset in response? She didn’t know, and the panel didn’t tell her. But images flashed on the screen indicating another control unit off a catwalk extending from the tower platform.

Fine. We’ll reset the antenna alignment.

She wasn’t going to be the woman who doomed the Alliance because she couldn’t figure out a damn comm panel.

Clutching her blaster tight, she made her way to the catwalk and spotted the cylindrical control unit rising at the far end. The wind sent her swaying as she stepped onto the plank, and the guardrails looked much too low to do any good. She hurried to the unit, found a dial, and turned it awkwardly between her fingers, one way and then the next, until the voice announced again: “Dish aligning.”

She heard servos grind and turned to see the great antenna dish in motion. It rose and adjusted until it pointed straight overhead. “Dish aligned,” the voice said. “Ready to transmit.”

Please be right.

She started back along the catwalk. The shriek of a TIE fighter rose on the wind, but at first she ignored it. Then the vessel itself swept into view, descending toward the platform with its great cockpit eye fixed on her. She froze, unsure whether to run or to drop to the catwalk in the hope of hiding.

She ran, and the fighter’s cannons pulsed.

Emerald light and fire stained her vision. The catwalk undulated like a flag in the wind, then dropped away altogether. The sound of ripping metal filled her ears as shrapnel tore at her legs and sleeves. Her face felt like it was aflame. She reached out desperately, felt her fingers close around something—the remnants of a guardrail or the underside of the twisted and dangling plank—and she screamed a breathless, silent scream as the muscles in her overtaxed shoulders seemed to tear.

The broken catwalk swung haltingly in the wind. Jyn clung as tight as she could and tried to slither upward as her sight began to return. Through a smeared and smoky filter she made out the blackened edge of the platform, barely an arm’s length away.

Climb!

There were no data cartridge handles this time. No convenient footholds. The burning and sunbaked metal felt blisteringly hot against Jyn’s body. She dragged herself upward a centimeter, a millimeter at a time, as the wind tried to prize her fingers free. She was close enough to touch the rim of the platform when she felt a shadow pass over her. She raised her eyes from the catwalk and saw a smudge against the blue sky that she tried to blink away.

Her eyes stung as ash mixed with tears, but the smudge only grew clearer. A perfect gray sphere hung high above the planet, its surface etched with lines like circuitry.

She hadn’t seen it on Jedha. Not really, not in the state she’d been. But she recognized it anyway, knew it with her subconscious mind, and felt no surprise.

The Death Star had come to Scarif.

The deck shuddered lovingly as the battle station dropped out of lightspeed. Dozens of objects flashed onto the overbridge’s tactical displays—Imperial and rebel vessels in conflict throughout the system—and Wilhuff Tarkin made his assessment after seconds of perusal.

The Empire was losing over Scarif, but that was about to change.

Duty officers called out status reports for their assigned sections of the Death Star. The hyperspace journey had gone smoothly and the station was ready for war. Its gunners and fighter pilots were at full alert; more Imperial ships were on their way.

“Sir, shall I begin targeting their fleet?”

There was proud enthusiasm in General Romodi’s voice. Tarkin looked to the old warhorse, then shook his head. It might be amusing—even illuminating—to test the station’s capabilities against a rebel armada, but now was not the day to toy with the enemy. Director Krennic, General Ramda, and Admiral Gorin had all failed to solve the problem at hand, granting the rebels opportunity after opportunity to seize the schematics from the Citadel.

At last report, the data vault itself had been breached. It was a show of incompetence so great that Tarkin was almost curious to know how Krennic might explain it away.

Almost curious.

No. Best to start fresh—to eliminate the threat of the rebels, however slight, and clear away the deadwood of the Imperial military.

“Lord Vader will handle the fleet,” Tarkin said. “The plans must not be allowed to leave Scarif, at any cost.”

Romodi understood. “Yes, sir,” he replied, and began calling orders to his aides.

Tarkin looked to the viewscreen and to Scarif: an ocean-drenched sphere of islands rich with rare metals, useful as a construction outpost and research incubator away from the Senate’s prying eyes. But Tarkin would not miss it. Over the years, too many officers had treated it as a place for unofficial retirement; a tropical paradise where they could neglect their duty in comfort. The loss of the Citadel and the planetary shield would be a pity—but no more than that.

“Single reactor ignition,” Tarkin said. “You may fire when ready.”

Orson Krennic turned his pistol over in his left hand, tracing the ridges of the grip through his glove. He rarely ever drew the weapon—his custom DT-29, maintained with exquisite care over the years—but he had chosen it for the brutal force it delivered in a single shot. It was a killing tool, meant to end a foe at close quarters.

The circumstances in the vault had negated its effectiveness. Even his death troopers had been unable to fell the woman. Her accomplice didn’t concern him—the man was a stranger, and a dead one at that—but the woman…

She’d looked at him.

From her perch among the data cartridges, with wide eyes full of mockery and hatred, she’d looked at Krennic. The same woman who had come for him on Eadu; who had, he did not doubt, received Galen Erso’s message on Jedha and escaped the destruction of the Holy City. She had recognized him, and he now felt with wrenching certainty that he had seen her long before her infiltration of the research facility.

He could not say when or where. But he knew.

Whoever she was, Galen had selected her to be his vengeance from beyond the grave—turned her into his weapon. Krennic wanted to scream at Erso, to rage at the injustice of a dead man placing fresh obstacles in his path. You were a hypocrite and a coward in life. There is no changing that now!

But exorcising Galen would require more than words. So Krennic rode the maintenance turbolift to the top of the communications tower, where he might put an end to the man’s last act of sabotage.

As it approached the top, the lift shuddered violently and its lights went dim. Krennic nearly dropped his pistol as he set a palm against the wall for balance. The carriage had halted. Once it steadied, he raised a fist to strike the door before thinking better of the choice. He did not know how precarious his situation was.

He activated the control panel comlink and adjusted its settings. “General!” he snapped. “What’s going on at the top of the tower?”

He heard multiple voices murmur in swift consultation before one of Ramda’s lieutenants finally answered. “Minor damage from the aerial battle, Director. Do you require assistance—?”

“I’ve already signaled my security team,” Krennic growled. He regretted sending so much of his detail to the battlefield, but the deed was done; and he’d chosen not to wait for them outside the data vault. “Get me full power to the lift immediately.”

Even if his foe had retrieved the DS-1 technical schematics, she would surely be unable to beam them to a ship in orbit. There was nothing she could do. Yet Krennic found little consolation in that thought.

“At once, sir. Also, we haven’t received an update from Admiral Gorin—” Krennic snarled and prepared to close the link; before he could, Ramda broke in: “Visual confirmation! The Death Star has entered orbit—the rebel fleet is doomed!”

Heat rose up Krennic’s face. His Death Star had been commandeered? But if it had come to assist against the rebels, Ramda was right—nothing the Alliance could field could possibly stand against the battle station.

If it had come to assist. An alternative crossed Krennic’s brain that he did not wish to contemplate. As the lights flickered on, he severed the link and reactivated the lift. The carriage hummed into motion then quickly jolted to a stop.

He gripped his pistol and squared his shoulders. The Death Star’s presence was one more reason to put a halt to Galen’s interference.

He stepped out onto the platform to kill the last of the Jedha survivors, and silenced Lyra’s inexplicable taunting inside his head:

You’ll never win.

Clinging to the ruined catwalk, Jyn stared at the planet killer lodged in the bright sky.

Cassian was dead. K-2SO was gone. Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze might have been alive, but it was hard to imagine anyone surviving the war zone she saw below the tower. No one had called her comlink for a long while. If she wasn’t the last of the men and women who’d come from Yavin 4, she suspected she was close to it.

She’d done better than most; it would take the Empire a whole battle station to end her.

With ragged, whimpering breaths, she shimmied up the last stretch of the catwalk. She wrapped her legs tight around metal to steady herself, then raised one gloved hand and slapped the rim of the platform, working sore and half-numb fingers until she located a grip. She mirrored the motion with her other arm and forced torn muscles to pull her weight up, up and over the edge, until she was on her knees on steady ground and quivering from the effort.

When she looked at the sky again, the Death Star was still there.

Kill me, you bastard, she thought, because there’s nothing I can do to stop you.

Maybe her mission to Scarif had been doomed from the start; maybe she’d even known it; but the Death Star made it impossible to pretend.

She had been afraid of losing her way. Afraid that fearing for her allies would distract her. Afraid that losing her allies would regress her to the survivor she’d been all her life, ready to abandon everything she’d come to Scarif for. Now surviving wasn’t an option and no one was left as a distraction. Her fears had been laughably naïve. Nauseated and racked with pain, she took greedy gulps of air and waited to see what would come.

By the time she felt she could move again, the Death Star still hadn’t killed her.

She realized nothing had changed. Nothing.

The thing that had brought her to Scarif—not her father, not her comrades, not some impulse buried below the cave, but the monstrosity that killed and killed and killed until every little girl and pilgrim and mother in the galaxy was dead—was staring down at her, as real as ever.

Her mission was the same. She just had less time to finish.

She propped herself on one leg and rose to a stand. The platform sputtered with flame where the TIE’s cannons had struck, and ashes wafted in dense clouds between Jyn and the control panel. She took a tottering step and lurched to a stop as a silhouette appeared in the smoke.

A man in a cape. The man in white.

Not now. Not now!

The Death Star was, for all its apocalyptic might, a comprehensible threat—a machine built by her father to kill planets. The man in white was a nightmare, an impossible creature that had followed her across her life.

She reached for her blaster, but she’d dropped the weapon off the catwalk. It was somewhere in pieces at the base of the tower.

The man in white was alone. He held a pistol in one black-gloved hand and aimed steadily at Jyn’s chest. Eyes the same color as the ash that drifted around him fixed on her with a strange mixture of rage and bafflement. Jyn parted her lips, unable to speak, barely able to keep from shaking in terror or fury or both.

“Who are you?” he asked.

He had ruined her father and killed her mother and killed Cassian. He had stolen her home and forced her into the arms of Saw Gerrera. He had whittled her with a knife out of a block of flesh. She almost screamed, How can you ask that?

But as the words penetrated and the implications heated her skin, she met those wild eyes. His breathing was haggard, and not merely from the smoke.

“Who are you?” he repeated. His hand twitched. The blaster barrel jerked up to point at Jyn’s collar.

He was afraid.

He was not the Empire—not every moment of oppression and indignity and torment she had ever suffered. He was an Imperial, a petty, spiteful, scared little man who’d forgotten his own atrocities.

And he didn’t know her at all.

She decided to make him remember.

“You know who I am,” she said, and though her body felt brittle her voice was steady. “I’m Jyn Erso. Daughter of Galen and Lyra.”

She couldn’t remember ever saying that before, let alone with pride.

The man in white stared. “The child,” he finally said.

“The child,” Jyn agreed. She tried to shrug; the agony in her shoulders kept her from lifting them.

He straightened his firing arm. She couldn’t rush him, couldn’t possibly close the distance and disarm him; not in her condition, not without a delay or a distraction. Panic and wild indignation rose inside her at the prospect of this man—diminished or not—bringing about her ultimate failure, but she tamped it down. If she could control her fear, she could control his, too.

“You’ve lost,” she told him.

If she could keep him from shooting, her opportunity might come. And if he was going to kill her—if she couldn’t claw his face or punch him in the gut or put a blaster to his skull; if he stopped her mission, loosed the Death Star on the galaxy—she would damn well make him never forget her again.

“Oh, I have, have I?” the man in white asked, unctuous and cruel. He didn’t lower his weapon; he didn’t shoot, either.

“My father’s revenge,” Jyn said. She resisted the urge to sneer. Her voice came out proud and defiant. “He built a flaw in the Death Star. He put a fuse in the middle of your machine and I’ve just told the entire galaxy how to light it.”

The man in white scowled. His head twitched toward the great communications dish.

This is your chance. Go! Go!

But her legs wouldn’t move. If she leapt at him now she’d sprawl on the platform utterly defeated.

“The shield is up,” the man in white snarled. He was burying his fear, his fear of her, beneath patronizing disdain and venom. “Your signal will never reach the rebel base.”

Maybe he was right. But he couldn’t know. “Your shield is—”

He cut her off, enraptured by his own words. “I’ve lost nothing but time. You, on the other hand, will die with the Rebellion.”

He checked his aim. Jyn prepared a desperate lunge; she wouldn’t die, refused to die holding still. If he caught her in the side, maybe she could stop him, crawl the rest of the way to the control panel and transmit with her last breath…

She planned it, fantasized it. Yet when the blast came, she wasn’t ready.

She heard the electric echo of the bolt rip the air.

She saw the man in white drop to his knees and fall prone, his expression nothing short of astonished. A black hole was burned in the fabric of his ivory cape.

Like that, her nightmare was over.

Behind the man in white, stepping out of the smoke, came a bloody and limping Cassian Andor. He looked like a man who’d fallen twelve stories and clawed his way back to the top. He looked as beautiful as anyone Jyn had ever known, but she couldn’t spare a moment to even shout his name.

Instead she ran. Somehow she ran, thinking through the motion of each leg and certain she would slip on the platform; certain, too, she would scrabble up again and keep running. She tried to draw a lungful of air and found her mouth and nostrils raked by burning cinders. She heard a distant rumble, an explosion from a faraway battle, and pushed on. Soon her hands were on the control panel, fumbling as she looked to the screen in incomprehension. She forced herself to slow, to focus.

She pulled the broadcast lever.

She watched the screen flash. She couldn’t read it through the haze, but she heard the voice: “Transmitting.”

Her breath came in racked, tearless sobs of relief and elation. She had to grip the panel to keep from falling as vertigo stronger than anything she’d suffered in her climbs overtook her. She wanted to shout, but she lacked the strength. She wanted to laugh at the heavens, at the fleet and the Death Star, but she lacked the strength for that, too. Instead she turned to Cassian, who still waited in the smoke.

She stumbled to him, smiling like a child, and did not speak.