BtA - 2 - Fix Up a Ship

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.