Rey in the hands of Unkar Plutt calls out in the Force for her mommy. Anakin hears his granddaughter's call and becomes her protector and trainer in all that he knows.
Can he keep her from repeating all of his failures on her journey to becoming th...
That night, Ani woke her from her deep sleep in the middle of the night. "Rey, wake up. Wake up."
Rey jolted awake. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. But we have a ship to check out. Come with me."
Rey grabbed her bag of tools and her staff and hopped on her speeder. She fired it up and headed toward the Ravager. Ani spoke in her head, Wrong way. Go back to Niima Outpost.
The teenn spun the speeder around in the opposite direction. There was only one ship at the outpost, the Falcon. Rey pulled her speeder up to it, not seeing any guards.
The ramp was still down, so she just walked up the ramp. The cabin lights automatically turned on, probably set off by a motion detector. She stopped inside the hatch and absorbed it all.
In front of her a spiral passageway traversed the ship. To the left she saw cargo holds. She turned to the right and came to another passageway a few steps down. This one led to the cockpit. Rey stepped into the cockpit with reverence, feeling a pang of sorrow for the Wookiee who had lost this lady.
Rey ran her hand across the control panel. Most of the switches were not labeled, but she could guess what some of them were due to their placement. Deflector shields in the co-pilot's area, comm station behind the pilot, thrusters, throttle, hyperdrive, navacomputer, grav boosters. Rey leaned her staff against a panel and climbed into the pilot's seat.
Ani appeared again, watching his granddaughter get to know her ship. The awe and wonder on her face bespoke the connection she felt through the Force to the ship. "The Millennium Falcon. One part freighter, one part hot-rod, and a double-part of illegal systems all jumbled into the fastest ship in the galaxy."
"Have you ever flown her?" Rey pretended she was taking off.
"No, not flown. But it was in my custody twice," Ani said. "I want you to check it out, Rey. Everything, from the power couplings, to the thrusters, to the illegal engines, to the pesky hyperdrive that doesn't like talking to the navacomputer."
Rey spent the next three hours climbing in and out of the service panels, inspecting the craft. "It's a piece of junk, Granddad. You can't possibly expect this thing to even lift off."
"You are mistaken. She may need a few repairs before you escape, but this is your ship. Unkar is highly mistaken if he thinks differently."
"I could never fly this on my own. It needs a co-pilot." She tried to reach across the cockpit to those controls. "And how would I get it untethered without Unkar knowing? And where would I go?"
"Settle down. You're not going anywhere tonight. Let's see what we can do with the fuel hose that's leaking all over the engine compartment."
Rey looked throughout the hold for any type of binding tape, but she found none.
"Check that storage compartment over there."
She climbed out of the engine compartment and opened the locker Ani had indicated. She was startled to find a yellow astromech droid stored there, deactivated. "Oh, who are you, little guy?"
She reached on the back of his head cylinder and powered him up.
The top cylinder spun around, and the droid spat out a stream of binary.
"Slow down, slow down, Artoo," Rey said.
The binary came out again, a little slower.
"Sorry, Arseven Dee-Ate. Nice to meet you."
The droid thrust out its treads and rolled toward the panels behind her, removing the cover and scanning the system.
"Well, I can see you're busy, but could you tell me where they keep the binding tape around here?"
The droid beeped some more.
"Really? In the galley?"
Rey hurried through the spiral passageway to the passenger lounge and galley. She found the tape sitting on the counter.
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When she returned, she asked, "What are you working on?"
After a stream of binary, she replied, "The hyperdrive? Yeah, I've been warned about that."
Rey climbed back into the pit, wiped the excess fluid off the leaking hose, and sealed it with the binding tape. What she really wanted to do was fire up the engines and check out the system as they were running, but that was not going to happen tonight.
She climbed out of the pit "Guess it's time for you to go back in the closet, Arseven. Come on, no one's going to be flying this thing anytime soon."
As R7 rolled across the deck to his storage cabinet, he beeped a question.
"My name?" Rey asked. The last person who had asked her name was Ani, and that was almost ten years ago. "I'm Rey."
A few more beeps were heard as he rolled into the closet.
"Just Rey." She shut him down and closed the cabinet.
"Granddad! Granddad!" When he appeared, she scolded, "Stop disappearing on me like that."
"I was just checking out the ship."
"You said that you had this ship in custody twice."
"Yes." Ani sighed. "Most recently on Bespin at Cloud City."
"Good. You didn't happen to take any specifications on it while you had her, did you? You know, information on the systems?"
"They might be in my personal files on the Ravager's computers. If nothing else, we can look up the manuals on each of the individual systems," Ani said. "The hard part will be figuring out why things don't work. None of this was ever supposed to be put into the same ship. I'm not even sure how half of this works. That smuggler may have thought he knew what he was doing, but this could just be a ticking bomb."
"And you want me to escape in this thing? Granddad!"
"Trust me, Rey. The Force brought the ship here. This is your ship. You have every right to it."
"I'm stealing a ship, and you say I have the right to take it? You're not making sense, Granddad."
"Oh, I am. You own this ship, Rey. Remember that. You own this ship," Ani said. "We have a few hours before dawn. Let's go see what manuals are available on board the Ravager."
