"Threepio, look for a medkit, anything that might help stabilize her." Ben instructed as he rose from the end of the curved bench with his wife still clutched in his arms.
C3PO glanced around nervously. "Oh why have I never been upgraded with medical programming?" The droid wailed as Ben staggered down the hall to the cockpit.
His own blood loss and lack of adrenaline were catching up to him now that nobody was actively trying to kill them. The pain in his shoulder alone was enough to make his head swim without the benefit of surging Force energy to bolster his body's ability to withstand the effects of such trauma. Dizzy, sweating and panting from the exertion he flopped down on the foldout jump seat near the doorway as Chewie smashed buttons on the navcomputer.
An alarm sounded and Chewie muted it before the it made barely more than a quick "Bloop!" sound.
"What was that?" Ben asked nervously.
Chewie's rumbled reply caused Ben's eyes to widen fearfully.
"What do you mean, 'suicide alarm?'" Ben gaped.
Chewie explained in his own language that it was just a nickname for the alarm that sounded when unsafe coordinants were manually entered into the navcomputer.
"Chewie, if you kill us, I'll hunt you down and torment you in the afterlife." Ben promised as the rusty furred Wookiee switched to the captain's chair and reached for the hyperdrive ignition.
Chewie purred in reply and sent the Falcon into hyperspace at it's maximum velocity. About ten minutes later the ship snapped back into realspace and Chewie pounded at the nav computer keys until he'd muted the alarm again. Back and forth he bounced no less than four times in the next five minutes.
Ben was impressed by the spry movements of the nearly quarter of a millenia old Wookiee... though technically Chewie was firmly into his middle-age years.
"Threepio!" Ben shouted. "Get up here!"
"Master Ben?" Threepio said inquiringly as if he had no idea why he was being summoned.
"Where's the medkit?" Ben demanded.
"Medkit?" Threepio asked blankly.
"Do you *want* to be melted down for scrap metal?" Ben growled. "Get me the medkit!"
"I don't know where it is!" The droid cried dramatically. "Oh, blast my circuits! Mistress Rey is going to die and it will be all my fault! I'm so useless! Perhaps you should just melt me down for scrap!" He wailed.
Chewie roared and threw a drinking thermos at the droid.
"Well my goodness, how was I supposed to know it was in the panel with the red symbol on it? I am a protocol droid, not a medical droid!" He protested.
"Get the kit!" Ben snarled.
It took Threepio almost long enough to drive Ben insane to retrieve the medkit, but once he had Ben rifled through it desperately. "Chewie what is this?" He Force flung a small glass vial in front of the nearly overwhelmed pilot. "I don't know that language."
Chewie barked in reply and Ben's heart leapt.
"Perfect!" He caught the vial and quickly loaded it into an autoinjector from the big grey metal box.
Rey's eyes fluttered a moment later as the synthetic adrenalin bolstered her body. Ben could feel how much more steadily her heart began to beat and relief washed over him.
Chewie rumbled and grumbled tensely.
"Alright, I can pilot for a bit." Ben said in reaction to Chewie's warning about the most dangerous part coming up. "She's doing better." He laid her gently on the floor and called for Threepio again. "If I say so, inject her with this." He Force floated the loaded autoinjector to Threepio.
Threepio looked at the medical device then Ben, then Rey and back to Ben who was already ignoring him.
Chewie tapped away on the navcomputer and roar-purred instructions at the same time.
"Threepio," Ben said. "Give her a shot."
The droid hessitated.
"You just saw me do it!" Ben growled. "Press the end against that red spot on her neck and push the button." He dropped the Falcon out of hyperspace at Chewie's prompt then fluttered it back into and out of hyperspace.
Everything outside of the cockpit was utterly black, not even Star Lines delineated the transitions between realspace and hyperspace. Chewie let the suicide alarm ring shrilly through the cabin as he tapped in a series of coordinants in rapid succession while Ben piloted the antique freighter through a series of jumps that left the Jedi wondering how his father had managed to do this by himself. "What?" Ben yelped when Chewie shut off the alarm and warned him that the dangerous part was coming up. "A dozen half-second microjumps through a black hole cluster wasn't the dangerous part?"
Chewie relayed what navigating the deadly bottleneck section of the Window was like.
This stretch of space, where three monsterously huge black holes surounding them were at their closest to each other, was responsible for the monicker "Widow's Window" that this little known path had come by honestly.
"Wait, let me get this straight…" Ben gaped at Chewie. "I have to pilot this broken piece of junk through a quarter-million kilometers of an invisible winding path with no landmarks… on sublight engines alone? How did my father do that exactly?" He reached out and watched the memory flit through Chewbacca's mind even as the Wookiee denied knowing how Han had managed it.
Only through sheer luck had the Falcon's hyperdrive overheated from the stress of navigating the micro jumps and forced Han to pilot the ship on sublights that long ago day. His mind had remained sharp enough to burn the image into his brain but his body had been nearly catatonic from the effects of the burning spice he had inhaled while dousing a fire in the hidden compartment under the shower floor caused by the overheated hyperdrive. He had been strapped into the jump seat, watching as his little human pal had manually piloted the much younger freighter through a series of twists and turns only visible to Han on the environmental scanner display.
Ben withdrew from Chewie's mind and flicked on the environmental scanner display and scowled at it, trying to figure out what information Han had used to guide him amongst the various wavy green lines and fluctuating magnetic, gravitational, and mostly blank atmospheric readings on the screen.
"Gah!" Ben groaned in frustration. "I don't see anything useful here!"
Chewie made an urgent sounding reply.
"I am looking harder!" Ben's eyes darted across the screen frantically for a long moment pausing briefly on each piece of information. "That's gotta be it!" He cried triumphantly when his brain did a double take on the only number being displayed under the external atmospheric sensor reading. "Empty space is actually filled with hydrogen, right?" He flicked a glance at Chewie, who shrugged unknowingly. "It is." He insisted. "So if we stay where we have good hydrogen readings, we should be safe."
Chewie made an encouraging sound.
"Right." Ben let out a loud breath. "Hit her again, Threepio."
"I would never strike a person!" The droid protested, clearly offended by the suggestion.
"Give her another shot!" Ben snapped and drifted the Falcon through a widening corkscrew manuever, his eyes glued to the fluctuating hydrogen reading.
"Oh! Yes, of course!" The annoying droid responded sounding less than abashed.
"Alright," Ben mused. "So the window is only about twenty times wider than this ship…" He flipped a few switches and dialed up the speed on the sublights. "Here we go."
