Star Wars: Before the Awakening

by Greg Rucka

  Rey shook the component dry and shoved it into her satchel, hoping the conversation was over.

  It wasn’t. Devi looked to her side, and her partner—another human, almost a head taller than Rey, with his hair shorn identically to Devi’s—slid onto the stool beside Rey. Devi took the one opposite.

  “You know Strunk, right?” Devi asked.

  Rey began gathering the pieces she’d set out to dry. Her staff was to her left, in easy reach, opposite where Strunk had taken a seat. Rey wondered if she would have to use it.

  “You hold pieces back.” Devi scratched her chin, leaving a smear of grease behind. “We’ve seen it. Like, you had the junction box for a power inverter on the YT series a couple days ago. That could’ve gotten you a lot. But you didn’t trade it.”

  “Doing a lot with circuits and cabling, too,” Strunk said. “Like you’re wiring something up, you know?”

  Rey stared at him. Strunk shrugged and smiled apologetically.

  “We don’t mean to pry, Rey,” Devi said. “We’re just curious, is all. You’ve not been around as much as you used to, and it’s just…you know, it’s just strange. Like, why would you not trade that stuff, you know?”

  “I’m not that hungry,” Rey said.

  Devi looked surprised. Then she laughed. “Sure, okay. I get it. We all mind our own business. I get it.”

  “Yes,” Rey said. “That’s what we do.”

  Strunk nodded. Rey stuffed the remaining components into her satchel, grabbed her staff, and got to her feet.

  “Nice talking to you,” Rey said.

  “Hey.”

  Rey turned back to Devi.

  “Thing is,” Devi said, “we’ve noticed. So maybe somebody else has, like, noticed, too. Know what I mean?”

  Devi tilted her head ever so slightly in the direction of Unkar’s window. Rey couldn’t see him there, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t watching. She looked back at Devi.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Rey said.

  It was another ten days before they found her. Rey knew it was coming. The two memetic sheets that had kept the freighter hidden had died, one after the other, the same day she’d spoken to them in Niima, and as a result she had to resort to throwing shovelfuls of sand over the hull of the ship. It was a weak concealment, and every time the wind picked up the hull would be revealed for anyone close enough to see.

  She tried to be more careful, but there were just too many places to hide amid the graveyard, too many places to keep watch. If Devi and Strunk were really on to her, all they needed to be was patient and eventually they’d see Rey on her speeder, heading out. They would follow, and it wouldn’t matter how many times Rey switched directions or doubled back, if she rode out in the morning or the afternoon. She would be seen. So it was never really a question of if but when, and Rey accepted that.

  She was on her back in the crawl space off the cockpit, trying to get the navicomputer relays reconnected, when she heard them outside.

  “Rey?” It was Devi. “Hey, Rey, you in there?”

  Rey sighed, then pulled herself up and out of the floor. She set the microblade beside the rest of her tools, grabbed her staff, and headed into the cockpit. Devi and Strunk were both standing outside. Devi was grinning and Strunk’s mouth was open, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “What?” Rey asked, then added, “Do you want?”

  “This is amazing!” Strunk shouted, as if snapping out of a trance. “R’iia’s shorts, Rey! This is amazing!”

  “It’s just a ship,” Rey said.

  Devi laughed. “Just a ship? You’re crazy! Look at this thing! How’d you find it?”

  Rey climbed into the pilot’s seat, pulled herself out of the half-repaired cockpit, and dropped onto the sand. She held her staff in both hands, leaning on it, but it would be easy enough to move it into a swing if necessary. She looked first at Strunk, then at Devi.

  “I figured it had to be something,” Devi said. “I knew you were working on something big, but, like, no way I ever imagined it was something like this. I thought maybe one of the ground vehicles or a repulsortank or something like that. Never imagined this! Rey, you’ve got a ship, girl! You’ve found yourself a ship!”

  “It needs a lot of work.” Rey’s voice sounded odd to her ears, as if she were speaking just to say something, but there was pride in it, too.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet.” Devi stepped forward, craning her head back to look at the exposed underbelly. “Looks like one of the repulsors is totaled. And the landing gear.”

  “There’s a Ghtroc 720,” Strunk said. He spoke slowly. “You know the one? Out by Feressee’s Point? The one that split when it came down? It’s all upside down and in pieces, but it’s still got its gear. This is a Ghtroc, right?”

  “The 690,” Rey said.

  “Two of us could move it,” Devi said, excited. “Be about a day’s work, maybe two, get it cut free and haul it back over here.”

  They were both looking at her.

  “It’s my ship,” Rey said after a long pause.

  “We can help you,” Devi said. “C’mon. Strunk’s big and strong and stupid, so he’s fearless, like, and I’m small and smart and can get into the tiny crawl spaces. We can help you fix this thing up, Rey.”

  “And what do you get out of it?”

  “You take us with you,” Devi said.

  Rey blinked. The sentence didn’t make sense to her, not at all. “Where?”

  “Wherever it is you’re going.”

  “I’m going to Niima. I’m going to sell it to Unkar.”

  Strunk opened his mouth to speak, but Devi moved her hand in a way that Rey understood was meant to shut him up. Strunk closed his mouth and shrugged.

  “Unkar’ll pay a lot for it, especially if it’s spaceworthy,” Devi said. She nodded, agreeing with herself. “Yeah, figure, what? Six, maybe seven thousand portions? He’d go higher if it’ll do hyperspace.”

  “The converter chamber fractured,” Rey said. “If I can find a replacement and fit it, it can do hyperspace. It needs fuel.”

  Devi nodded, enthusiastic. “Sure, yeah, perfect! We help you fix it up, we do shares of the sale, split whatever Unkar’s willing to pay. That’s what I’m thinking. That’s fair, right? Each of us gets, like, a third?”

  “It’s my ship.”

  “Right, that’s fair, too, your ship, you found it. So you get half, and Strunk and I split the rest. That’s gonna be five thousand shares for you, at least. Unkar’ll fall all over himself for this, you know he will.”

  Rey didn’t say anything, thinking. The split didn’t seem fair to her somehow, but she wasn’t entirely certain what fair was.

  Devi looked up at the hull again, as if admiring the ship. “In fact, he’d probably fall all over himself for this just as it is, right now.”

  Strunk had his hands in his pockets and was looking down, but he glanced at Devi for a moment before returning his eyes to his boots. Devi was turning slowly in place, still taking in the lines of the hull.

  It wasn’t an overt threat, Rey knew. The way Devi had said it, maybe it hadn’t been meant as a threat at all but rather an observation, a statement of fact about Unkar’s greed and the worth of Rey’s little light freighter. The problem was, of course, that there was no way to be sure. There was no way to be certain that, if Rey refused their help, they’d forget about the ship and leave her alone. No way to be certain that they wouldn’t go to Unkar and tell him about the ship and claim the finder’s fee on it, if nothing else. The more Rey thought about that, the more she realized she couldn’t trust them not to do it. If she couldn’t trust them to keep it secret, how could she trust them to help her repair it?

  But there didn’t seem any other option.

  “What do you say?” Devi asked. She was looking at Rey again. “Partners?”

  Rey looked at her hands, where they met on her staff. Her fingers were filthy, her nails cracked and grease stained. She considered her op
tions and didn’t like any of them. She sighed.

  “Let me show you around,” Rey said.

  The benefits of working with Devi and Strunk were immediate, much to Rey’s initial annoyance. She was so used to being alone that having them around the ship—her ship—set her teeth on edge. And Devi talked all the time, which made it worse.

  But they were good salvagers, and there was no denying that fact. They knew the graveyard as well as Rey did, but like everyone working in the deserts of Jakku, they had discovered their own prime spots, their own special finds that they’d kept hidden from everyone else. Many of the parts that Rey had begun to despair of ever repairing, let alone replacing, Devi and Strunk were able to produce in a matter of days. They brought in the promised landing strut within the first twenty-four hours; three days later, they showed up in the afternoon dragging an entire repulsorlift complex that they’d pulled, whole, from a crashed Lambda-class shuttle. It was an Imperial design, never intended to incorporate with the Ghtroc’s systems, but it took Rey only another day and a half to fashion an interface converter. Before the week was out, they’d replaced the missing port-side generator.

  Rey went up to the cockpit to check that the systems had interfaced properly. She’d replaced the batteries for the main flight system months earlier, and the ship rested in a low-power standby mode. Devi and Strunk followed her, eager and excited, watching closely as she went quickly through the power-up sequence, then initiated the repulsorlift engines. Each of the three emitters had its own gauge, blue vertical bars that measured lift power in percentages, and the fore and starboard ones responded immediately, indicating that they were fully operational.

  “Did it work?” Devi asked. “Is it working?”

  Rey fiddled with the port-side controller, trying to get the jury-rigged engine in synch with the other two. Its power bar remained stubbornly empty and then, all at once, jumped to full. All of them felt the ship tremble beneath them, vibrating slightly. Grains of sand bounced off the repaired canopy of the cockpit and slid down the window.

  Strunk whooped, cheering inarticulately, and Devi was laughing. Devi slapped Rey on the shoulder, which annoyed Rey, but she found herself smiling anyway.

  “You are amazing!” Devi said. “You are unbelievable, Rey!”

  Rey squirmed in the pilot’s seat. “You guys helped.”

  “Sure, if you call dragging chunks of starships across the desert helping! You’re the one who put it all together. You’re the one who’s making this thing work!” Devi swung herself into the copilot’s chair and spun it around on its post. The chair creaked as it turned. “Let’s take her up!”

  “What, now?”

  Strunk seemed to share Rey’s confusion. “Dev?”

  “Sure, now,” Devi said. She swept one hand toward the view out the canopy. “Sun’s low enough. We stay level nobody’ll see us, right? They’ll be looking at the sun. Let’s do it! I want to see if it’ll really fly!”

  Rey looked at the indicators on the console, the power levels, the temperature and pressure and flux gauges. The repulsors were idling, fully powered. The freighter was alive, trembling almost imperceptibly around them.

  “You know you want to,” Devi said. “You totally know you want to, Rey.”

  Rey put her hands on the yoke and licked her bottom lip. “Just to make sure everything’s hooked up properly.”

  “Of course.”

  Rey settled her feet on the control pedals and reached with her right to disengage the static locks. A warning light came on to tell her that the ship wasn’t properly pressurized, and she switched it off, then reconfigured the controls for atmospheric flight. Devi was watching her, grinning the same as ever. Strunk had moved to stand behind Devi’s seat and was holding on to the back of it so tightly Rey saw the color had gone out of his knuckles.

  “First flight?” she asked him.

  He nodded.

  “Mine, too,” Rey said.

  She cut the brakes and brought up the power on the repulsors, the way she had thousands of times before in simulations. The ship moved, rising in an almost perfectly straight line, and Rey felt Jakku trying to pull her back down, her and Devi and Strunk and the ship, too, as if afraid to let them go. She felt the ship wobble slightly as she held the yoke, felt the nose dip as she came off the pedals and directed the repulsor field to propel them forward. The little freighter hesitated, as if uncertain of its relationship with gravity. Rey’s stomach dropped, and Strunk made a noise that sounded like a whimper and a moan combined. Rey teased the power and fed more to the repulsors, and all at once they were sliding forward into the late afternoon sky.

  They were flying.

  “So amazing,” Devi whispered.

  Rey had to agree. According to the instruments, they were only fifty meters up and coasting at a sedate one-tenth acceleration, but the ship was alive in her hands and the world outside was changed because of it. The graveyard, the Crackle, the Spike, everything was recognizable yet entirely different seen from that new position. She could make out Niima on the horizon, the tiny specks of its huts and few buildings. She could see a lone Teedo and luggabeast traversing the desert away from the setting sun. She could see the sky changing colors, growing richer and deeper than it had ever looked from the ground.

  “It works,” Devi said. “It scorchin’ well works, Rey!”

  “It works,” Rey said softly. All the repairs seemed to be holding. A few warning lights were flashing, but they were all nonessential systems, at least for the moment. The engines were still in synch and at full power.

  “I’m glad it works,” Strunk said. “Can we land again, please?”

  Devi turned in her chair to look at him. “You big baby.”

  “No, he’s right,” Rey said. “We don’t want to be seen, not yet.”

  “Right, yeah.”

  Rey banked the ship, the maneuver graceful and effortless, and circled back to where they’d lifted off. The sense of movement, the response of the freighter to her commands, had her smiling again. Her flight sim, for all its wonder and entertainment, had never captured that, and how could it? How could it have ever synthesized the reality of that freedom and power?

  She set down the ship as gently as it had lifted off, powered down the engines in sequence, then put the main batteries back into standby mode. The sky had turned to dusk.

  Devi got out of the copilot’s seat and clapped Rey on the shoulder again. “Mechanic and pilot, you do it all! C’mon, Strunk, let’s go home. See you tomorrow, Rey. We’re gonna find that conversion chamber for the hyperdrive for you. We get that, then we’re in business!”

  Without a word, Rey watched them disembark down the boarding ramp.

  She couldn’t sleep.

  Within the walls of the walker, Rey lay on her pile of blankets and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the soft moan of the wind as it caught in the cracks of the hull. She’d shut off her power for the night, and it was very dark. She was tired, but she couldn’t keep her mind from racing. Questions and thoughts, memories long buried and fresh. When she held her breath, she could still feel the freighter coming alive in her hands, the elation of the flight. It had been extraordinary, better than she’d ever imagined.

  It wasn’t only that. The sense of accomplishment was profound. She had found a spacecraft that had lain in the sand for years—decades, even—and nursed it back to health. She had, with her hands and her smarts, taken it into the air once more. That was something to be proud of, though pride itself was a new feeling for her and she didn’t know what to do with it. It wouldn’t take much more to finish the job, to return the Ghtroc to something of its former glory. She could see the end in sight.

  Maybe that’s the trouble, she thought. Maybe that was the reason for the sickening, dull feeling that started in her gut. The sensation seemed to swirl and dance as it rose to her mind, yet it stayed just out of reach. It was as if Rey was chasing images in a dream—images she couldn’t identify or name.
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  Rey rolled from side to side on her blankets, struggling to get comfortable, trying to push away thoughts that refused to leave. She didn’t trust Devi or Strunk, either of them alone and certainly not together. Yet each time she had that thought, she remembered everything they had done, all the times they’d kept their word. They had delivered on every promise. They had followed her instructions. They had, without question, helped bring the freighter back to life. She should trust them. She wanted to trust them.

  But Rey couldn’t. They would betray her. Try to trick her. Try to steal the prize, cut her out of the sale. As much as she wanted to believe otherwise, she was certain that Devi and Strunk would turn on her, and soon.

  The ship was alone, unprotected, out in the desert.

  It was the dead of night and bitterly cold.

  Rey sat up and reached for her boots in the dark. She pulled them on, then found her goggles and her staff. She took one of the blankets and switched on a light long enough to find a knife. She cut a slit in the blanket’s center, then pulled it over her head, wearing it as a poncho. She switched off the light, shoved the door open, and stepped into the desert night. Somewhere, out beyond the dunes, Rey heard the distant howl of a gnaw-jaw summoning its swarm.

  The world was bright. The stars were magnificent and turned the desert a luminescent gray. Rey drove, goggles over her eyes and head down, the makeshift poncho weak protection against the cold. Her hands ached on the speeder’s controls. She went faster than she should’ve but not as fast as she could, and a sickening sense of dread pushed at her from within, as if it could climb from her belly to her throat.

  She wasn’t afraid of violence. She didn’t enjoy it, but she wasn’t afraid of it. It was a necessary part of surviving on Jakku. She’d learned to defend herself early. She had been in more fights than she could remember. More wins than losses, thankfully. She was good enough that the word had spread in Niima to stay clear of her and what she could do with her staff. She could fight. She would fight, if necessary.

  Devi, Rey decided, would be the dangerous one. Strunk was strong, but he was slow and followed Devi’s lead. Devi was quick, and Rey had seen the vibro-knife she carried on her belt, knew that she wore a cut-down shock stick strapped to her left leg, beneath her pants. If it came to a fight, Rey would go for Devi first. Then she’d deal with Strunk.