Free Star Wars: Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka

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 options 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. Shewas 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 hiddenfrom 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 theship 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.
    Strunkwhooped, 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’smaking 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! Iwant 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 makesure 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