KRENNIC GLARED down at Galen, whom he’d knocked to his knees. The man might have been one of the most brilliant minds Krennic had ever encountered, but he was lousy in a fight.

He could barely believe Galen had been the one to betray him. To have stayed quiet for so long, silently working against him—against the Empire? He hadn’t thought the scientist had such doggedness in him.

Krennic saw now that he must have been wrong. Anyone who could work so long and hard to help him figure out how to power the Death Star with kyber crystals had more than enough determination to do whatever he wanted.

And of course, Krennic had given him the motivation, hadn’t he?

If only Lyra hadn’t been so stubborn. She’d been the one to lure Galen away from his work in the first place. Then she’d gone and trained her blaster on Krennic in an effort to make him leave her family alone.

What choice had he had at that point but to execute her?

That’s what had put them on this road. If Lyra had only been willing to go along with Krennic’s plans, she’d still be alive, and Galen would have been happily solving the problems with the Death Star. They might even have finished work on it years before.

Now that he knew Galen for who he really was though—a traitor to both the Empire and their friendship—Krennic wanted him to pay for his crimes. He wanted to make the man hurt.

“I fired your weapon,” Krennic told Galen. “Jedha. Saw Gerrera. His band of fanatics. The Holy City. The last reminder of the Jedi. An entire planet will be next.”

Galen set his bruised jaw and stared up at Krennic with defiance. Had the man ever had that kind of passion before, or had Krennic just never noticed?

“You’ll never win,” Galen said.

Krennic couldn’t help smirking at that. “Now, where have I heard that before?”

Lyra had said the same thing just before he’d had her killed. Galen could hardly think he was about to fare any better.

An alarm began to blare then, and it took Krennic a moment to figure out what it was for. They used different patterns for different troubles. This particular alarm was reserved to warn people about an imminent air attack.

Krennic looked up at the sky. Was this a drill? If so, it was a terribly timed one.

He got his answer when the first X-wing appeared out of the storm clouds and opened fire on the landing platform. The first salvo stitched blasts across the platform, sending stormtroopers and the bodies of the dead engineers flying.

Krennic, though, remained unharmed. If the rebels planned to try their luck with him there, they were going to pay for their audacity.

“Return fire!” Krennic barked at his death troopers. To the rest of the stormtroopers and officers, he shouted, “To your stations! Get our fighters in the air! Now!”

More laser fire rained down as an entire squadron of X-wings zoomed overhead, strafing the platform as they went. Then it grew quiet, but Krennic knew it would only be for a moment. They would be swinging around for another pass for sure.

Smoke billowed across the platform, obscuring Krennic’s view. For a moment, Krennic wasn’t sure which way he should move. He hoped the smoke would at least keep the X-wing pilots from seeing him when they came around again.

He saw Galen stagger to his feet, and he considered shooting the man dead right there to keep the rebels from robbing him of his revenge.

Despite that, he was more concerned about his own skin. He was about to race inside to take cover when a woman appeared out of the swirling clouds. She was young, with blazing hazel eyes and tied-back dark hair, and she seemed entirely out of place.

She wasn’t a stormtrooper or an Imperial officer, and she wasn’t wearing one of the jumpsuits the engineers favored. In fact, she looked dirty, tired, and more than a little desperate. As she approached, she shouted a single word.

“Papa!”

Galen spun around to see who could have said that word and who she was talking to. As he did, the woman raised a blaster pistol and leveled it at Krennic. For a moment, he thought he might die without any idea who his killer was.

Then a Y-wing roared in low and let loose a proton torpedo that blasted the landing platform apart.