Star Wars: Before the Awakening (10 page)

Devi laughed. “See, that’s it! You’re welcome! It’s not a
big thing, Rey. We’re just protecting our investment, right? That’s all it is. Nothing more to it.”

Rey nodded slowly.

“So, listen,” Devi said. “I was talking with Forna when Forna and Oth and Grand were in Niima the other day, and they say that the
X’us’R’iia
all those months back uncovered an Uulshos XP, one of the yachts, you know? They said it’s entirely wrecked, they stripped it of everything,
but
they also said the main engine compartment came down intact. Neither me nor Strunk can ever remember Unkar selling a converter chamber, the thing’s just too hard to separate from the remix junction, right? But the one on this XP, it might still be intact. So we’re going to go out and take a look, what do you think?”

“I think it’s a good idea.”

“Gonna be a real pain separating it out, though.
Strunk’s strong enough to help lift it, but getting it disconnected without making it useless or cracking the diverter, that’s the part that’s worrying me.”

“I can help.”

Devi looked surprised. “You sure? It’ll leave the ship alone.”

“No, I can help,” Rey said. “Strunk and I can go. You stay with the ship.”

Devi stared at her, then looked away sharply. When she looked back, Rey thought her
eyes had grown wet.

“I won’t let anyone touch it,” Devi promised.

It was half a day’s ride from the Ghtroc to where Devi said they’d find the Uulshos XP, and Rey drove with Strunk on the back of her speeder. The wreck was almost exactly as Devi had described, broken into six sections that had scattered over a kilometer and a half, with the engines the farthest away. Everything usable had long
before been pulled from the cockpit, crew, and passenger areas, and at first look Rey would have said the same thing about the engine room. Whoever had worked the wreck had stripped it down to the bolts.

“What you think?” Strunk asked.

Rey didn’t answer at first, ducking beneath a broken crossbeam and stepping into the wreckage. Floor plates had been removed, and the footing was tricky. She
brought her flashlight out of her satchel and ran it along the ceiling, then the floor, trying to trace where the power lines had once run to the hyperdrive and finally tracking it back to where the injector complex had once been. She stood for several seconds, taking it all in, then switched off the light and turned to face him.

“I think it’ll work,” Rey said. “I think we can make it work.”

They broke out the tools and began the laborious process of disconnecting the converter from its junction. It took patience and care, because Rey was, in essence, trying to remove a component of the hyperdrive system that had never been designed to be interchangeable. In any other circumstance, it would’ve been considered safer and much more efficient simply to pull the entire hyperdrive array, right
down to the engines, and reinstall a new one. For all the obvious reasons, that wasn’t an option. Rey knew she could’ve managed the physical separation of the chamber from the rest of the engine by herself, but once she’d done so she just as quickly realized she would never have been able to remove it from the ship alone. She simply wasn’t strong enough. Strunk could barely handle it himself.
Working together, however, they were able to manhandle it off the wreck and get it strapped onto the back of the speeder.

It was after nightfall when they returned to the Ghtroc, finding the lights off and Devi sitting on the lowered loading ramp. She got to her feet when she saw them and pumped a fist triumphantly in the air as they approached. Strunk laughed, and Rey did, too. Working together,
they got the component off the speeder and on board the freighter. They shared a dinner, one portion apiece, sitting on the floor, and Devi talked throughout the meal, the way she always seemed to be talking, but Rey found herself enjoying it more that time. When they’d finished, Strunk got up to head for the ramp, Devi moving to follow him.

“See you in the morning, Rey,” Devi said and then,
to Strunk, “I’ll take the first watch.”

“You guys can stay on the ship,” Rey said. “It’s warmer.”

They stopped.

“That is true,” Devi said. “Also, it doesn’t smell so much like Strunk. Which, I hate to say it, that shelter totally does.”

“I do not smell.” Strunk sounded wounded.

“We
all
smell, Strunk. I can’t remember the last time I was in a refresher.”

Rey pointed to one of the small closed
doors off the main compartment. “Fully functional.”

“You serious?”

“No water, but the sonics work.”

Devi was already heading for the door. “You can have that first watch, Strunk.”

She disappeared into the refresher so quickly Rey couldn’t help laughing.

Two days later, Rey flew the Ghtroc 690 light freighter she had found, the spaceship she had spent the better part of a year reassembling,
into Niima with Devi sitting in the copilot’s seat beside her and Strunk hovering behind them, one of his big hands on the back of each of their chairs. The hyperdrive was functional and communicating cheerfully with the navicomputer. The repulsor engines were humming along at optimal efficiency. The pressure seals on all the external access ways were tight, and the atmosphere was stable, steady,
and comfortable. There were only two warning lights flashing on the console, and each was nonessential; one told Rey that the water tanks were empty, and the other told her that the Ghtroc was overdue for its scheduled twenty thousand light-year maintenance.

Devi had roared with laughter when Rey explained what that second light meant.

They flew in from the south, Rey slowing so everyone in
Niima could get a good look at the ship as it came in over the airfield. Almost every approach was from the east, and Rey knew that sharp-eyed observers would know the difference, would be wondering who they were and where they had come from. She banked in a lazy loop around the little town, looking through the canopy at the activity below. Devi leaned forward, doing the same. They could see the small
figures of scavengers and vendors emerging from their shelters and from beneath awnings, raising hands to shield their eyes from the glare of the sun.

“Think they’ve seen enough?” Rey asked.

“I think they’ve never seen anything like this,” Devi said.

Rey rolled the ship out of its turn and then, on a whim, gave the engines a sudden nudge. The freighter shot forward, the horizon vanishing from
view as she brought the nose up. She turned the ship in a half loop, then rolled out of it and doubled back. Devi whooped. Strunk’s grip on the seats tightened. Rey slowed once more as they reacquired the airfield and put the freighter into a hover, letting it turn in place. There was space between the old YT freighter and one of the newer, cleaner ships that Unkar had acquired, and with perfect
precision Rey set it down so gently the landing gear didn’t make a sound as Jakku once more took the Ghtroc’s weight.

She worked the console quickly, excited, putting the ship into standby. Unkar would want to know it worked, that
everything
worked, and when Rey brought him aboard she wanted to be able to show off her work without delay. She released the yoke and got to her feet, Devi and Strunk
moving after her. They’d loaded her speeder into the main compartment, and Strunk hit the release for the ramp. As it lowered Rey could see people gathered at the edge of the airfield, trying to get a look at the newcomers.

“Don’t let anyone else aboard,” Rey told Devi. “Only me and Unkar, nobody else, no matter how much they promise, no matter how hard they beg.”

“Ten thousand portions, minimum,”
Devi said.

“For all of us,” Rey said, and she grinned and gunned the speeder forward, down the ramp and out of the airfield, turning hard and fast toward Unkar’s place. Someone shouted as she passed, and a couple of the scavengers at the washing station burst into cheers when they saw her, understanding at once just how immense Rey’s accomplishment was. She was smiling again, her cheeks aching,
but that time she didn’t mind so much.

Unkar was waiting outside as she pulled up. He blinked at her slowly, waiting until she’d shut off the speeder and hopped down.

“It’s a Ghtroc 690,” Rey said. “Fully restored, working hyperdrive, everything but the laser cannon and the water tanks. Everything else fully operational, Unkar.”

He blinked at her again, then turned his heavy head to the side,
looking toward the airfield. That was when the sound of the engine reached her, and Rey turned to look, as well, just in time to see the Ghtroc rising into the air. It ascended quickly, almost too fast. It banked hard, its nose jerking up. The main engines ignited, and a blue flare of ionized gases jetted from the aft end.

Then the Ghtroc was a dot in the blue sky.

Then it was gone.

Unkar grunted
and headed back inside. Rey heard the outpost coming to life again around her, the voices of scavengers and vendors, Niima returning to normal.

Rey stood there a long time. When she finally moved it was to mount her speeder and drive home, back to the walker. She knew she should be angry, but she wasn’t. It took until that night, until she was sitting on her blankets, punching the lenses out
of a battered stormtrooper helmet, for her to understand why. It had always been an issue of trust, but never with Devi and Strunk. It had been about trusting herself.

Devi and Strunk had wanted the one thing that Rey absolutely hadn’t; they’d even told her so right from the start. But she hadn’t listened. She hadn’t heard them, because it was the one thing Rey never allowed herself to consider.

They wanted to leave.

But Rey had to stay. At least until they came back for her.

If she left, her parents would have no way of finding her.

She sighed, the sound echoing through the cramped hull that made her home. She shifted over to the workbench, switched the computer on, and loaded her flight simulator. She selected a Ghtroc 720, a suborbital flight with calm atmospheric conditions and
no complications.

Rey flew.

But it wasn’t the same.

P
OE DAMERON’S first ship was his mother’s RZ-1 A-wing.

It was a good, tight little fighter, much repaired and marked with scars from its years of service. An interceptor, the A-wing had been built for speed rather than strength. Twin-mounted laser canons on either side of the hull spat enough firepower to settle any dogfight—provided the fighter jockey on the stick could gain advantage—and two
concussion missile launchers mounted on the fore of the hull could give anything shy of a capital ship a very bad day. It was staggeringly fast at sublight speed. It was more like an armed cockpit with engines stuck to its back than a more traditional fighter, hyperresponsive and overpowered and meant to be flown solo, without copilot or astromech support.

The A-wing had been part of his mother’s
compensation package when Poe’s parents mustered out of the Rebellion some six months after the Battle of Endor, and it went with them to their new home in the fledgling colony on Yavin 4. She’d continued to fly it for a couple of years after, mostly in civilian defense, and every so often she would take Poe up in it. He would sit on her lap inside the cramped cockpit, his hands on the stick
and her hands on his, and he could feel the ship answering their control. He could feel them moving through the air, the atmosphere pushing against them, the pull of gravity trying to refuse them.