Location: Tersik, Alex's Secret Base
Time: 0 BBY
A year passed in work. Tersik functioned like a well-oiled machine—the economy was stable, the population provided for, security systems worked without a hitch. Alex Corren had created what he wanted—an autonomous community, independent of galactic upheavals. He had also made significant progress in his research; the year had been very productive.
But this was destined to end.
Alex was working in the laboratory on neurointerface research when R4-K9 signaled an incoming urgent message. The screen showed footage that changed everything.
A huge gray sphere the size of a moon. A flash of green light. The planet Scarif, turning into a cloud of debris.
Alex leaned back in his chair, analyzing what he saw. A little later, dry news came on the Imperial channels. But without the footage he had seen. The announcer reported a "terrorist attack," but he understood the truth. The Empire had built a planet-destroying weapon.
"The project is complete," he told R4-K9. "They are no longer hiding their intentions."
A year ago, he thought he had time. That the Imperial galactic restructuring project was still far from completion. He was wrong.
The communicator lit up. Garrek's face appeared on the screen.
"Alex," his uncle said without preamble. "I need your help. Urgently."
"I saw the news about Scarif."
"This is just the beginning. We have data on the station, but we need a specialist of your caliber for analysis. Can you fly to Yavin?"
Alex weighed the options. Tersik was safe, but this safety might be temporary.
"I'm flying. What data do you have?"
"Fragmentary. Gravitational anomalies, energy signatures. Agents managed to get some things, but the full plans are still on their way."
"Understood. I'll be there."
Preparations for departure took two hours. Alex took only the necessary equipment and Rina Cass—her expertise might be needed.
"I'm flying with you," Verena said.
"No, I'm sorry, my love. You are needed here. You are the only one who knows everything."
"Alex, I..."
"Verena..." His voice allowed no argument and was simultaneously gentle. "Tersik needs protection. If something goes wrong, only you can lead the colony."
Verena wanted to argue, but the expression on his face stopped her. Over the years of their life together, she had learned to recognize when Alex had made a final decision.
Alex nodded to her. He had created Tersik as an autonomous structure precisely for such cases.
Yavin-4 greeted them with intense preparation. The base was buzzing with activity, but it was controlled activity of professionals preparing for an operation.
Garrek met them at the landing pad.
"The data is in the analytical center," he said. "General Dodonna is waiting."
The analytical center was a large room filled with computer terminals and holographic projectors. A gray-haired man in a general's uniform was working at one of the terminals.
"General Dodonna," he introduced himself, standing up. "Many have recommended you to me as an excellent engineer. What did you graduate from?"
"KTU," Alex replied.
"Me too, but ten years earlier. Even before the academy." Dodonna smiled. "Who taught you construction?"
"Professor Darek Volin."
"An excellent specialist. So, you have a good foundation." The general became more serious. "Go ahead, find me a vulnerability in this cursed station."
Alex approached the main terminal and began to study the data. Gravitational anomalies, energy signatures, fragments of intercepted messages—all this needed to be put together into a coherent picture.
"Rina, launch the 'Star Architect' program," he ordered. "We need a full analysis of the energy systems."
'Star Architect' was his own development—a program capable of analyzing the structures of space objects. It began processing the information, building a three-dimensional model of the station.
"According to preliminary calculations," Alex said, studying the results, "destroying a planet requires energy equivalent to a week's radiation of a yellow dwarf. This means thousands of crystalline energy accumulators."
"And that's the weak spot?" Dodonna asked.
"Potentially. But I need the full plans of the station to understand how to get to the accumulators."
At that moment, a communications officer ran into the center.
"General, Alderaan has not responded to communication for six hours. Complete radio silence."
Dodonna frowned.
"Technical malfunctions?"
"Unknown, sir. But it's strange for such an advanced system."
Bail Organa
Location: Alderaan, Organa's Palace
Time: 0 BBY
The morning began as usual. Bail Organa sat in his office, reviewing encrypted reports on the Alliance's activities. Alderaan's sun softly illuminated his desk through the high windows of the palace, and it seemed that this day would be no different from hundreds of other days.
The reports were encouraging. Rebel cells on Lothal had successfully sabotaged Imperial supplies. The Alliance fleet had been replenished with three new frigates, transferred from sympathetic systems. The intelligence network on Coruscant, despite recent losses, continued to transmit valuable information.
Bail leaned back in his chair and allowed himself a moment of pride. Twenty years ago, when the Republic fell, he had sworn not to give up. Then, standing by the ruins of the Jedi Temple and later watching Palpatine's coronation, he knew this day would come. The day when scattered resistance groups would unite into a real force.
His gaze fell on Leia's holoportrait. She had grown strong and determined, ready to continue the cause to which he had dedicated his life.
Bail stood up and walked to the window. Below, in the palace gardens, gardeners tended to the famous Alderaanian roses. A peaceful, idyllic picture. It was hard to believe that somewhere in the galaxy a war was raging, that the Empire was tightening its grip every day, suffocating freedom on thousands of worlds and planning a horrific plan for galactic genocide.
"How the galaxy has changed since the Republic," he thought. Then they argued in the Senate, sought compromises, believed in the power of law and democracy. Now, the only language the Empire understood was force. And the Alliance was learning to speak that language.
His thoughts were interrupted by the signal of an incoming message. Captain Antilles, commander of the "Tantive IV," appeared on the holoprojector. His face was grim.
"Your Highness, I have disturbing news," he began without preamble. "Our agents report a catastrophe on Scarif."
Bail frowned. Scarif was an Imperial fortress, a place where the Empire's most secret projects were stored.
"What kind of catastrophe?"
"The planet is destroyed, sir. Completely. A few days ago. Turned into an asteroid field by some new Imperial weapon."
The words hit Bail like a physical blow. An entire planet? It was unthinkable. Even the Empire couldn't...
"Are you sure about this information?"
"Unfortunately, yes. But there is other news. Before the planet's destruction, a group of rebels managed to infiltrate the Imperial archive and steal important data. They transferred it to Princess Leia."
Bail felt a mixture of pride and horror. Leia was there, on Scarif? She risked her life for the Alliance's mission?
"What exactly is the data? Does the Empire know that she has it?"
"Technical blueprints of a new Imperial weapon. A battle station capable of destroying planets. Our heroes paid for this information with their lives. As for the second question, most likely—yes."
Bail closed his eyes. A bad premonition stirred in his chest. He saw a whole host of negative consequences in this news.
"Where is the princess now?"
"Heading to the Alliance base with the blueprints. But sir... there is reason to believe that the Empire may track her route. Perhaps they know about Alderaan's connection to the Alliance."
Bail nodded. Here it was. The source of his premonition. He had always known this day might come. The day his secret activities would be revealed. He exhaled slowly.
"I understand. Continue to monitor the situation."
When the connection broke, Bail returned to his desk and began to analyze the information received. A weapon capable of destroying planets. This changed everything. If the Empire truly possessed such power, then no system was safe. Any world that showed defiance could be wiped from the face of the galaxy.
He thought of the millions of lives on Scarif. Of the families who made plans for the future. All of it disappeared in an instant at the whim of Imperial tyrants.
Bail walked to the safe and took out an encrypted communicator. He needed to warn other Alliance cells, coordinate a response. But before he could activate the device, his aide burst into the office.
"Your Highness!" the young man exclaimed, out of breath. "An unidentified object has appeared in the system! Huge! The size of a moon!"
Bail rushed to the window. In Alderaan's sky, blocking out the stars, hung a monstrous gray sphere. The weapon that destroyed Scarif now loomed over his homeworld.
"The Force," he whispered. "It's here..."
The station was even more terrifying than he had imagined. It was not just a battle station—it was a planet-sized fortress, a symbol of absolute Imperial power.
Bail activated the communicator, trying to contact the station's command. Perhaps not all was lost yet. Perhaps they could negotiate...
A few minutes later, a familiar face appeared on the screen. Grand Moff Tarkin, the architect of Imperial military doctrine, looked at him with cold contempt.
"Your Highness," Tarkin said with mocking politeness. "What an unexpected honor."
"Moff Tarkin," Bail replied, trying to remain calm. "Why have you brought this... station to Alderaan? We are a peaceful world, posing no threat to the Empire."
Tarkin sneered.
"A peaceful world? Bail, we both know the truth. Alderaan has harbored terrorists and traitors for many years. Your daughter was spotted in the vicinity of Scarif just before the... unpleasant incident."
"Leia is a diplomat of the Imperial Senate. She was on an official mission..."
"Do not lie to me, Bail. Persuasion will not help. The Emperor has already made a decision." Tarkin's voice became harsher. "You know how things work in the new order. By harboring rebels, you have signed your own planet's death warrant. Restructuring will begin with your world."
Bail felt a chill grip his heart. Restructuring. What an elegant euphemism for genocide.
"Tarkin, there are two billion innocent people living on Alderaan. Children, the elderly, people who have never heard of the Alliance. You cannot..."
"I can and I will. Alderaan will serve as an example for other systems that consider supporting terrorists. Fear will keep the local systems in obedience. Fear of this battle station. Forgive me, Bail, I have an important conversation to attend to. Goodbye."
The connection broke, leaving Bail alone with the horror of what was happening. No one answered his calls anymore. He did not give up hope of doing something until he looked out the window and saw the lights on the Death Star's surface begin to glow. The superlaser was charging.
Sounds of panic spread through the palace. Administration staff ran through the corridors, grabbing documents and personal belongings, hoping to reach their ships and escape the planet. Useless. No one would make it out in time.
He remained in his office, looking out the window and thinking of his adopted daughter. At least she wasn't here. She would continue the cause for which he gave his life.
"Perhaps it's good that I won't see the horror that will follow," he thought. The war was just beginning. Decades of suffering, trillions of deaths, the destruction of everything he held sacred lay ahead. But he believed that in the end, light would triumph over darkness.
He told himself he had made the right choice. Told himself that he had made decisions based on his convictions his entire life. Now he was dying for those convictions, along with his planet.
He tried to cope with the horror of what was happening in some way. "We die for a just cause," he repeated to himself like a mantra. "We die for a just cause. I die with dignity."
But when he thought of the children in schools, of mothers with infants, of all living on this beautiful planet, rage broke through his philosophical calm.
"Bastards!" he shouted mentally. "Why the planet?! Why two billion innocent lives?!"
A blinding pillar of green light flashed in the sky. The Death Star's superlaser struck Alderaan's surface, and the planet shuddered. It was not an instantaneous destruction, as he had expected. The beam of light gnawed into the planet's crust like a giant drill, penetrating deeper and deeper towards the core.
The ground beneath his feet trembled. First a light vibration, then increasingly strong tremors. Somewhere deep within the planet, something was breaking, melting, exploding. The atmosphere began to burn off from the monstrous radiation, the sky turned unnatural colors.
Bail held onto the desk, trying to stay on his feet. The palace windows cracked from the vibration. The air smelled of ozone.
The earthquake intensified. Books fell from the shelves, furniture slid across the floor. Somewhere deep in the palace, walls collapsed. People screamed, but their voices drowned in the roar of the collapsing world.
Bail looked one last time at his daughter's portrait. Leia was somewhere out there, among the stars, carrying the galaxy's hope in the form of stolen blueprints. She would find a way to destroy this death machine. He believed it.
"Leia," he thought, "forgive us for the world we left you."
Impact.
The floor disappeared from under his feet. The palace walls cracked like eggshells. The air became hot, then scorching. Bail fell, grabbed the edge of the table—the table slid across the floor, dragging him with it. Roaring filled everything—not a sound, but a physical force, pressing on his chest, his skull, every cell of his body.
Through the broken window, he saw the horizon rising. No—the ground was collapsing. The planet's crust was breaking, revealing its molten interior, and light streamed from the cracks—not sunlight, but a deathly white light, the light of the end.
"Forgive me, children!" was his last thought about the billions of lives perishing with him.
The study beam was so strong that the planet's interior exploded. A flash consumed everything. Alderaan, a planet of peace and beauty, a planet of poets and philosophers, disappeared from the universe, leaving behind only a cloud of glowing dust and the memory that even the most developed worlds are not protected.
In the depths of the Alderaan system, astronomical sensors registered a gravitational anomaly—the place where the planet once was was now empty. Two billion voices suddenly fell silent, and the galaxy became a slightly quieter place.
Alex was sitting at the terminal when it happened.
Not an alarm. Not a message. Something else. A wave—not sound, not electromagnetic—passed through him, and for a second he stopped seeing the screen. White flashed before his eyes, and a void formed in his chest—physical, like a hole, as if someone had cut a piece out of him.
He grabbed the edge of the table. Rina turned around.
"Alex? Are you alright?"
He did not answer. He sat, staring ahead, trying to understand what it was. The feeling was reminiscent of the day his parents died—the same heartache and emptiness.
After a minute, he straightened up. His face was pale, but his voice was steady.
"Continue the analysis," he said through gritted teeth to Rina. "I need all the data on the station's energy systems."
The work continued for several hours. His engineers tried to understand something from the partial blueprints that Luthen's agents had managed to obtain at the cost of many lives. Gradually, a picture of a monstrous weapon was forming—a station the size of a moon, capable of destroying planets. But complete plans were still missing.
"Our agents managed to extract data from Scarif," Dodonna explained, "but they're not in contact yet. We're waiting for them."
Suddenly, the early warning systems sounded. A ship appeared in orbit of Yavin—a battered freighter that the technicians identified as the "Millennium Falcon."
"It's them," Garrek said. "The data has arrived."
The next two hours were some of the most tense in Alex's life. The complete plans for the Death Star were uploaded to the base's computers, and the "Star Architect" analyzed every detail of the construction.
Key figures gathered in the briefing room—Dodonna, four engineers, and the squadron commanders. The station's image slowly formed on the holographic projector.
"Here it is," Alex said when the analysis was complete. "Diameter 120 kilometers, crew of over a million people. The main weapon is a superlaser based on crystal focusing."
"Are there any weak spots?" asked the commander of Red Squadron.
Alex zoomed in on a specific sector of the station.
"The program detected an anomaly. Here, in the northern hemisphere, the bulkheads are significantly thinner than standard. The shields in this sector are not powered. A modern proton torpedo would pierce this like paper."
"And what's behind those bulkheads?"
"A direct path to the main reactor and the crystal hearts. But there's a problem—you can only get there through a small technical channel. Too narrow for large ships."
"Will a fighter fit?" asked a young pilot.
"It will. But it will be a suicide mission. The channel is protected by turbolaser batteries."
Dodonna studied the schematics.
"Strange. Why would the Imperial engineers leave such an obvious vulnerability?"
Alex shrugged.
"Perhaps a design error. Perhaps sabotage. I lean towards the latter. In any case, it's our only chance."
Suddenly, the long-range detection systems howled with sirens. A communications officer burst into the room, his face pale.
"General, an object the size of a moon has emerged from hyperspace near the fourth planet. It's moving towards us."
Everyone rushed to the windows. In the sky of Yavin, among the stars, something monstrous was slowly appearing. A gray sphere, so enormous it seemed unnatural. The Death Star.
"The Force," whispered one of the pilots. "It really is the size of a moon."
Alex looked at the space monitoring data and felt his stomach clench. All the calculations, all the plans—now they would have to test them in practice. Against this monster. And he might die here. He felt the forgotten fear again. The same fear he had when he first witnessed murder.
"How much time do we have?" Dodonna asked.
"According to trajectory calculations, the station will enter the engagement zone in an hour," replied the analyst.
"Then we have one chance," the general said. "Prepare the fighters."
Alex looked at the station schematics one more time, then at the pilots' faces. The odds were negligible. This might be his last day. All of theirs. Fighters against a moon-sized station. But sometimes negligible odds are all you have.
"The program shows the exact coordinates of the vulnerable spot," he said. "The data has already been transferred to the fighters' computers."
Dodonna nodded.
"Then it's time. All pilots to the main hangar!"
Three hundred pilots gathered in the base's main hangar—the entire combat strength of the Alliance on Yavin 4. The fighters stood ready for combat, their metallic hulls dimly reflecting the light of the hangar spotlights. A heavy silence hung in the air—the silence before the final battle.
General Dodonna slowly ascended an improvised platform. His face was grim, as if carved from stone. When he spoke, his voice echoed throughout the base via the communication system.
"Pilots," he began, and there was not a trace of hope in his tone. "An hour ago, we received confirmation of what we suspected. The planet Alderaan no longer exists."
A murmur went through the ranks of pilots. Many knew people from Alderaan; some had studied there, some had friends.
"Two billion people," Dodonna continued, each word falling like a hammer blow. "Two billion civilians. Destroyed in seconds. The station hanging above our heads turned an entire world into cosmic dust."
The silence in the hangar became absolute. Even the technicians froze, listening to the general's words.
"This is pure evil," his voice became harsher, colder. "Not a military necessity, not a tactical decision. Evil in its most concentrated form. And now this evil is here, aimed at us."
Dodonna raised his hand, pointing to the hangar ceiling, beyond which the Death Star slowly rotated.
"We may all perish here. Every one of us. Every person on this base. The chances of survival are negligible. But we must do everything possible and impossible to destroy this evil!"
His voice grew louder, tinged with fury:
"Fate has given us this hour—perhaps the last and most important hour of our lives. We will carry out the last plan we have. It is an honor for me to stand here among you in this accursed hour!"
The pilots straightened up. There was no longer fear in their eyes—only cold determination.
"Let the glory of this battle replace prayers for the fallen! If we are destined to meet death—let us meet it with dignity! To risk everything for home, for the memory of the fallen—there is nothing more honorable!"
The general clenched his fists, and his words became an oath of vengeance:
"We will embody our faith in justice! We will pay any bloody price for our victory! In the darkness of space, we march against the enemy, and let death be our sister today—we will fulfill our duty!"
Dodonna stood to his full height, and his voice rang out like a battle cry:
"Their cursed star will fall this hour! We will cast fear from our hearts! Their cruelty will be their death, their shame! We will carry out a just sentence upon evil! For the fallen, for all the destroyed worlds!"
The general's last words boomed:
"Let fury burn like a flame in your hearts! Brothers—to battle!"
The hangar erupted not with shouts of joy, but with roars of fury. Pilots raised their fists, shouting the names of the fallen, vowing revenge for every life destroyed. It was not an inspiring speech—it was an oath of vengeance given by doomed people.
"To the fighters!" Dodonna ordered. "Let Alderaan be avenged!"
The pilots silently dispersed to their machines. No one said goodbye, no one spoke last words. They walked as if to an execution—but an execution they had chosen themselves.
Technicians disconnected cables with grim determination. Mechanics removed supports, knowing they would never see these fighters again. Engines roared, ready to lift their pilots on their final flight.
Alex stood next to Dodonna, clutching a tablet with coordinates. His calculations were accurate, but even accurate calculations did not guarantee success against such a monster.
"This is suicide," he said quietly.
"Yes," Dodonna agreed. "But what choice do we have? I believe the guys will handle it!"
The first fighters rose into the night sky of Yavin, their engines leaving trails of blue death behind them. Thirty machines against a moon-sized station. Thirty men against a million enemies.
But in their hearts burned fury for Alderaan, and that fury was enough to fly towards death.
The final battle had begun.