Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Alexander Freed is the author of Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company and Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Lost Suns and has written many short stories, comic books, and videogames. Born near Philadelphia, he endeavors to bring the city's dour charm with him to his current home of Austin, Texas.

Galen Erso was not a good farmer. That was only one of his many flaws, but it was the reason he was still alive. A man of more diverse talents-a different Galen, a Galen who could intuit what colonial crops would thrive in an alien world's soil, or who could check a withered tree for rot without peeling away its bark-would have grown bored. His mind, left idle in the fields, would have returned to subjects he had forsworn. That Galen, consciously or by habit, would have sought out the very work that had driven him to exile. He would have stared into the hearts of stars and formulated theorems of cosmic significance. In time, he would have drawn attention. His obsessions would surely have killed him. Yet an unskilled farmer was anything but idle; so the true Galen, the one who inhabited the realm of reality instead of idle fantasy, had no trouble filling his days on Lah'mu without succumbing to temptation. He took bacterial samples off boulders left by prehistoric volcanoes and looked in awe at the evergreen moss and grass and weeds that seemed to sprout from every surface. He surveyed the endless crooked hills of his domain, and he was grateful that he had yet to master his new profession. He constructed these thoughts like an equation as he looked out the window, past his orderly rows of budding skycorn and toward the black soil of the beach. A tiny girl played near the rows, sending her toy soldier on adventures in the dirt. "Is she digging again? I swear she didn't learn the words strip-mining from me, but we're going hungry next year if she keeps this up." The words breached Galen's concentration slowly. When he heard them, understood them, he smiled and shook his head. "The agricultural droids will repair the damage. Leave her be." "Oh, I never planned to do anything. That girl is all yours." Galen turned. Lyra's lips curled until she smiled. She'd started smiling again the day they'd left Coruscant. He began to reply when the sky rumbled with a boom unlike thunder. One portion of Galen's mind narrowed its focus and was aware of only his wife before him, his daughter on the beach. The other portion processed the situation with mechanical precision. He was walking without conscious intent, striding past Lyra and the cluttered kitchen table and the worn couch that reeked of clove after- shave. He passed through a doorway and reached a device that might have evolved in the junkyard of a machine civilization-all cracked screens and loose wires, apt to shatter at a touch. He adjusted a dial and studied the video image on the screen. A shuttlecraft was landing on his farm. Specifically, a Delta-class T-3c, all sharp angles and bare metal. It busily broadcast active scans of the landscape as its broad wings folded in for landing and its sublight engines tapered their thrust. Galen studied the associated readouts and let the specifications settle into his memory-not because they might be useful, but because he wanted to procrastinate for just a moment. To shut away the implications of what he was seeing. He squeezed his eyes shut and gave himself three seconds, two, one. Then it was time to accept that his family's life on Lah'mu was over. "Lyra," he said. He assumed she was near, but didn't turn to look. "Is it him?" she asked. She sounded unafraid, which frightened Galen more than anything.
 "I don't know. But we have to-"
 "I'll get started," she said.
 Galen nodded without looking from the console.
 Galen was not prone to panic. He knew what needed doing, had rehearsed it on those rare days when the farm tended to itself or on those less rare nights when sleep eluded him. Such preparations were the only obsessions he permitted himself. He turned to another machine, tapped in a code, and tore a series o