"Okay, what's wrong now?" Finn asked, coming down from the dorsal turret. "We did jump to lightspeed, right?"
"We jumped to lightspeed, then the motivator on this piece of garbage failed!" Rey replied, already levering up one of the floorboards with her staff. "That was the only thing that wasn't giving alerts!"
She glanced up at Poe, who'd arrived from the cockpit. "Not that our pilot was helping much."
"Hey, cut me some slack!" Poe replied, defensively. "I'm an ace fighter pilot not freighter pilot! And I didn't want to take this ship anyway!"
"It's not like we had much choice," Finn pointed out. "That quadjumper got blown to pieces! We were being strafed! We've got to get to the Resistance, right?"
"Yeah, but – you guys seriously don't know whose ship this is?" Poe asked. "I asked before but I think the question got lost!"
"Like we are?" Rey asked, then put a hydrospanner between her teeth while she adjusted something with a vibro wrench. "Hold on… who does this? This thing's got a bypass on it to feed pseudovelocity compensation from the secondary generator – the one that blew up halfway through the fight!"
She sighed. "And it's not on any of the manuals, either."
"I'm not really surprised," Poe said, then something began beeping.
"What's that?" Finn asked. "That doesn't sound like a good beep. That sounds like a very bad beep!"
"Proximity alarm, I think," Poe replied, turning to run back to the cockpit. "That or the reactor's about to fail, but since the reactors are in standby right now… it'd have to be-"
He yelped.
"Guys!"
"What?" Rey replied, head poking up from the underfloor compartment.
"You're going to want to see this!"
By the time Rey reached the cockpit, several seconds after Finn, their ship was already most of the way inside the cargo bay of a much bigger bulk freighter.
"That's not good," Fin summarized. "Do you think – the First Order? Have they found us?"
"Maybe," Poe muttered. "If they have, why aren't they using a Star Destroyer?"
"Do they have enough to go around?" Rey asked.
"Who cares, we need to get out of this mess!" Finn said. "Tractor beam, right? Can we shoot it out?"
"Not likely," Poe replied. "Okay – we need to hide under the floor plates. Rey, how soon can you get that hyperdrive motivator fixed?"
"If I knew that I'd already have it fixed!" Rey shot back. "Um – I'll see how quickly I can do it?"
"Make it quick," Finn suggested.
BB-8 whistled something.
"Yeah, take BB, he can help," Poe agreed. "Finn, you and me should hide in the other compartment."
It was cramped in the other compartment, but not that cramped, and Finn felt around to make sure he knew the space.
"It's like these were built to hide stuff in," he said.
"Of course they were, do you know whose ship this is?" Poe replied, in a whisper.
"I clearly don't," Finn countered.
Something went clang, then two sets of feet walked up the ramp.
Stopped.
"If you're in the underfloor compartments, you can come out now, nice and slow," a voice told them. "My friend and I have you covered, so don't get any funny ideas."
Finn glanced at Poe. "Got any funny ideas?" he whispered.
"I've got a blaster, but that's it," Poe told him, quietly.
Then a hand lifted the compartment, and Finn put his hands up as a sixtyish human man covered him with a blaster.
Poe stared.
"...General Solo!?" he said, astonished. "How did you-"
"I thought General Solo was a girl!" Finn objected.
"There's two, they got married," Poe said. "This is Han Solo, not Leia Organa Solo. I, uh… so I can explain-"
"General Solo?" Rey asked, then banged her head on the roof of the compartment. "Ow!"
She shoved the roof of the engineering space open, and stared at the wookiee pointing a bowcaster at her. "And you – you must be Chewbacca!"
Chewbacca made a pleased noise.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm recognizable too," Han muttered. "So you stole my ship?"
"We didn't have much choice," Rey said. "We were being shot by the First Order!"
"Imagine how I felt!" Han replied. "I got called in to do a favour for my wife by helping answer the distress call of that kid over there, Poe Dameron, right?"
Poe nodded, a bit jerkily.
"I knew he was on this dustball Jakku, not much else," Han went on. "So Chewie and I parked our ship – this ship – to ask the locals about anything that had been happening, and then the First Order starts shooting at us and I turned around and our ship was taking off without us!"
"...oops," Rey said, quietly. "Sorry?"
"We didn't recognize it," Finn volunteered.
"I did, but I got outvoted and it was a bit hectic," Poe finished.
"I also want to have a word with your engineer," Rey said. "Who has a failing inertial compensator?"
Chewbacca suggested something.
"If that compensator had failed I certainly wouldn't have been able to do that!" Rey objected. "...I don't think I could anyway, is that possible?"
"How did you catch up to us, then?" Poe asked.
"That's the ship we're on," Han explained. "I paid some smugglers way too much to charter their freighter-"
"Hey, Solo!" a trandoshan called, from the cargo ramp. "You done yet? We need to get moving!"
"Give me a minute!" Han shouted back. "Eesh, with how much I paid you'd think they'd be less rude."
There was a clunk, and the whole freighter shook slightly.
"What was that?" Rey asked.
The trandoshan outside shouted something harsh in another language, and Han frowned.
"That sounds important, we'd better go and see," he said.
By the time they were outside, the situation had not improved.
Two more freighters had shown up and docked with the one Han had chartered, and both had disgorged heavily armed groups, and the trandoshan smuggler group had armed up to find out what was going on.
"Hey, Rakas!" the first pirate group said. "Where are our rathtars?"
"Rathtars?" Rey repeated. "What are those?"
"They're not hauling rathtars on this thing, are they?" Finn asked, extremely worried.
"I didn't ask," Han admitted.
"Rathtars are balls of teeth, tentacles and attitude," Finn summarized. "You don't want to deal with them!"
"We've got them, we've got them," the trandoshan leader said. "Just let us get our passengers out of the cargo hold and we'll begin the process of transferring them safely. You don't want to cut corners with rathtars."
"You were supposed to be delivering them already!" the pirate snapped, then the other group turned up and bristled. Blasters got pointed in just about every direction, and Poe frowned.
"This doesn't look good," he muttered. "What are those guys doing here, then, if the other group are here for the rathtars?"
"That's Solo's ship!" the aqualish in charge of the third group said. "I was here for the bounty on you, Rakas, but Solo's bounty is much higher!"
"How much higher?" the trandoshan asked, sounding interested.
"Uh oh," Rey said.
BB-8 whistled, and all the pirates turned to look.
"...isn't that the BB unit the First Order is after?" one of the pirates asked. "The one where they're offering enough to buy all of us a ship?"
"Run," Han advised.
Rey and Poe made it into the Falcon, but a barrage of laserfire cut the others off from the ship, and Han glanced at Finn as they hid behind some barrels.
"Please tell me you've got a com frequency for them!" he said.
"Here," Finn replied, handing his comlink straight to Han.
"Okay, listen!" Han said. "Underneath the back right seat in the cockpit there's a control to deploy a miniature blaster turret. Use that to give us some cover!"
The Falcon deployed its miniature turret a moment later, opening fire, and Han glanced around as Chewbacca used his bowcaster to nail one of the trandoshans to a wall.
"We need to shut off the tractor beam before we go anywhere," he said. "Story of my life… okay, kid, how good are you with freighter control systems?"
"...I don't like this question," Finn admitted.
"You'll like the plan even less," Han told him, glancing over his shoulder at one of the other corridors leading off the hangar bay. "We need to cause chaos. They're keeping the rathtars somewhere, so…"
"You make terrible business decisions!" Finn accused.
"I know, I know!" Han replied. "Do you have any better ideas?"
"When a plan is this bad, no plan is better than this plan!" Finn complained.
AN:
Bit of thought about how to make the Falcon fit in a little more naturally.