Star Wars: Before the Awakening Page 7

  She wasn’t looking forward to it.

  The ship was exactly as Rey had left it, undisturbed and silent. She slid the speeder into cover at the aft end of the ship, then stopped and listened to the silence of the desert. There was no wind. There was no sound but her own breathing. She shivered, rubbed her aching, cold hands together, heard the sand whispering beneath her feet as she walked to the loading ramp and keyed the passcode. The ramp lowered on its hydraulics, the noise of it sudden and all the louder in the stillness of the night.

  Rey climbed aboard, then shut and locked the ramp behind her. It was dark in the main compartment, lit by only the faint glow of starlight creeping in from the cockpit corridor. She followed the light into the cockpit and lowered herself into the pilot’s seat. She pulled her goggles down so they hung at her neck and laid her staff across her thighs.

  She felt foolish. She’d been so certain that she would arrive to find the ship already gone or, if she was lucky, Devi and Strunk in the process of trying to steal it. She had ridden through the Graveyard and across the Crackle and risked gnaw-jaws and frostbite and crashing all because she couldn’t bring herself to trust them. She wondered if the situation had been reversed, if Devi and Strunk had been the ones to discover the ship and Rey had stumbled on it later, would they have felt the same? Would Rey have done to them what she was certain they planned to do to her?

  She was so tired.

  She shut her eyes. She felt sleep tugging at her, pulling her down. She half-dreamt of being warm, of being small, lost memories trying to swim their way to the surface. She opened her eyes, and it was still night. The stars shimmered, limitless in the sky. She closed her eyes again, then opened them. At the lip of the dune ahead of her, she saw shadows moving.

  Rey started awake, one hand tightening around her staff. She wasn’t entirely certain she hadn’t been dreaming. She slid forward in the pilot’s seat, almost onto her knees on the cockpit floor, using the flight console to conceal herself.

  The shadows moved again. Two figures were descending the dune toward the ship. She couldn’t quite make them out, and then she saw two more shapes cresting the dune, leading luggabeasts.

  Four Teedos coming toward her.

  As they drew closer, Rey could make out details. All the Teedos were armed, most of them with staves but one had a rifle. She couldn’t see their markings in the darkness, but she didn’t need to. They had come either to take the ship or to destroy it. It didn’t matter. Either way, Rey wouldn’t let them.

  The Ghtroc was armed with a fore-mounted dual laser cannon, but the gun was nonoperative. Rey had restored the wiring and firing controls as best she could, but the Tibanna gas required to charge the weapons had long before leaked into the atmosphere and was impossible to replenish. Never mind that using the cannon was a terminal solution, and willing though she was to defend her prize, Rey didn’t want to kill anyone if she could avoid it.

  Rey rolled from the pilot’s chair to the floor and crawled quickly back to the cockpit hallway before getting to her feet. She stumbled through the darkness to the loading ramp, hit the release, and followed it down as it descended, then jumped out before it had touched the ground. Rey ran to the front of the freighter, both hands on her staff. She skidded to a stop, facing the Teedos.

  They paused their advance, the nearest of them—the one with the rifle—six, maybe seven meters away. For a long moment nobody moved and nobody spoke. One of the luggabeasts huffed, pawing at the sand, its gears grinding.

  “This is mine,” Rey said. “It’s my ship, do you understand? You can’t have it.”

  The Teedos didn’t respond. A deeper darkness had descended. Rey couldn’t tell who she was dealing with, scavengers or worse. Her stomach was tight, an ache in the pit of her gut, and she could feel her heart beating in her breast. It was, if anything, colder than before. When she spoke, her breath made clouds of condensation in the air.

  “Leave,” Rey said. “Go away.”

  The Teedo nearest her, rifle still lowered, turned his wrapped head to look back at the others. Their bodies were always hidden—everything, including their eyes—so even if the light had been better, Rey wouldn’t have been able to read anything in their expressions. The body language was clear enough, though. The Teedo in the lead looked back at her. They had no intention of leaving.

  “I don’t want to fight,” Rey said. “I don’t want to fight, but I will. I will.”

  The Teedo with the rifle brought the weapon up to his shoulder. Six meters was a close-range shot but too far for Rey to cover the distance before he could make it. She figured she had to try, anyway. If she got lucky, if she led with her staff, maybe she would hit the end of the weapon before he fired, maybe she could knock it away, force him to miss. Rey doubted she would be so lucky, but she didn’t see any other choice.

  She never got the chance to find out.

  A blaster bolt zapped into the sand between her and the Teedo with the rifle. The shot was brilliant red in the darkness and made the sand spit and sizzle. A second shot followed the first, hitting closer to the Teedo. Both had come from Rey’s right, atop one of the dunes.

  “You heard her,” Devi said. “It’s her ship.”

  She was standing just over the rise, a small blaster held in both hands. Strunk was beside her, and as Devi spoke, he ran clumsily down the slope, splashing sand as he went. His hands were empty, but he seemed even bigger than before, twice the height of the tallest Teedo.

  “I don’t have a lot of shots in this thing,” Devi said. “But I’ve got enough left. A couple of you are gonna get really hurt. Or maybe worse.”

  Strunk had reached the bottom and jogged up alongside Rey. He touched her elbow as he passed but kept moving forward, striding toward the Teedo with the rifle. He reached out and grabbed the weapon by its long barrel, then pulled it aside. The Teedo didn’t let go, but he couldn’t control where it was pointing. Strunk yanked, and the rifle came out of the Teedo’s three-fingered grip. Strunk turned the gun in his hands, found the charging clip, and tore it free. He flung the cartridge over the dunes, then handed the rifle back to the Teedo.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” Devi said.

  The Teedos turned and went back the way they had come.

  “You’re welcome,” Devi said, following Rey up the ramp and back into the ship. Strunk’s footsteps were heavy on the metal behind them.

  “What were you doing out here?” Rey asked. She flicked on the lights in the main compartment and hit the switch to close the ramp once more.

  Devi tucked the little blaster into one of her many pockets and ran her grimy fingers through her hair, looking up at Rey. She seemed puzzled.

  “We were keeping watch.”

  “Keeping watch?”

  “Yeah, Strunk and I have been camping out here pretty much the last two weeks whenever you headed home.” Devi looked genuinely confused. “Someone had to stay on guard, right?”

  “Two weeks?”

  “About that, yeah. I’d have thought you’d be more grateful.”

  Rey looked at her staff, then set it against a bulkhead. She didn’t know how she should feel. They had been sleeping out in the cold for two weeks, risking the gnaw-jaws and everything else just to guard the ship.

  “I didn’t know you were doing that,” Rey said.

  “We’ve got one of those old emergency shelters we pulled from a wrecked X-wing a couple years ago. It’s pretty warm inside, though it gets kinda cozy.” Devi shot a grin at Strunk, who was standing mutely by, listening closely. “We normally wait until we see you arrive and then we head out on the salvage runs, get our portions, like that. Hadn’t you wondered why you were always here first?”

  “I just thought I was early.”

  “Nah, Rey, we’ve been making sure everything stays safe.”

  Rey considered and found that she was struggling with what she should say. It came slowly. “Thank you.”

  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, w
aiting 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.