Read Online Star Wars: Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka - Free Book Online

premix chamber for the hyperdrive engines needed a new containment unit,and Rey didn’t have either the know-how or the facilities to make one herself. The portside dorsal repulsorlift emitter was totaled, and while it wasn’t strictly needed to fly—there were three other emitters and they all seemed relatively intact—not having it would make takeoff and landing a challenge. Never mind the fact that, perhaps most crucial of all, the ship had no fuel left, only what remainedin the auxiliary batteries.
    Without fuel, there was no way she’d be able to fly her little freighter into Niima.
    That was something, Rey realized, she actually
wanted
. She wanted to be the ship that everyone looked up and stared at. She wanted to see the expressions on everyone’s faces as she came down the ramp and they saw it was her, Rey, who had flown that prize home. She wanted to see Unkar’sbig eyes open wide and his face puff up in surprise, to hear him stammer as he made offer after offer for the ship,
her
ship, before she agreed.
    Five hundred portions? Try five
thousand
portions, Unkar. Try five thousand portions and a new speeder, a new set of tools, a spare generator, and the first pick of salvage that comes in for, say, the next two—no, four, no,
five
—years.
    She wanted thatvery much.
    That meant, she realized, it was time to get to work.

    The task was even harder and slower than Rey had imagined. Problems magnified and grew exponentially, and it wasn’t simply with the repairs to her ship. That would have been bad enough, just trying to get everything aboard working again. That would’ve been a full-time job in and of itself.
    She still needed to eat. She stillneeded to survive. She still needed to work, and that meant she had to work twice as hard, because she was effectively trying to gather salvage for two jobs. Every piece of salvage she managed to collect was now subjected to critical evaluation: was it for the ship or for Unkar? The best pieces, of course, were worth the most to Unkar and could bring multiple portions. Invariably, those same pieceswere the ones Rey needed to repair her ship. The harder it was to replace, the more it was worth; the harder it was to replace, the less likely that Rey would find another.
    For that reason, the ship
had
to come first; it had to be the priority. If it wasn’t, then all that work was for nothing. Two months, then three, then five passed, and she was almost always hungry, sometimes going two dayswithout a meal before finally, begrudgingly trading Unkar for more than just one portion at a time. Days spent crawling through the graveyard, desperately searching for bits and pieces, racking her brain trying to remember where she had seen an oscillation gyro that might still work, an intact plate of duralloy shielding that was big enough to help seal the gash in her freighter’s side, a coercivereciprocating pump for the oxygen scrubbers. It was exhausting. It was unending.
    It took its toll, and Rey wasn’t as careful as she might have been.

    Much of what she salvaged, whether to be used on her freighter or traded to Unkar, needed to be cleaned. Rey would use the washing station at Niima, picking the times when the fewest people were around. She would scrub the filth and dirt and sandfrom her pieces, set them aside to dry, and then, as surreptitiously as she could, slip those components she needed for repairs back into her satchel. Some things she took in had no obvious salvage value at all but still needed to be washed. Cabling, for instance, was relatively easy to find but less than worthless as far as Unkar was concerned.
    “What’re you building?”
    Rey was bent down, scrubbinga particularly stubborn chunk of carbon scoring from a band limiter. She lifted her head sharply and stared the questioner accusingly in the eyes. The speaker was a human female, shorter than Rey but about her age. Her hair was short, shaved on the sides. Rey tried to remember her