HAN SOLO. The Millennium Falcon. Though Rey knew little about the First Order, she knew everything about Solo and his famous ship. She’d heard stories of his adventures from traders at Niima and had practiced his legendary maneuvers on her flight simulator.

Rey hurried alongside the old man. “This is the Millennium Falcon? You’re Han Solo?”

He smiled crookedly. “Used to be.”

BB-8 rolled behind while Finn caught up to them, adding his own questions. “Han Solo? The Rebellion general?”

“No,” Rey said, “the smuggler!”

Finn seemed baffled. “Wasn’t he a war hero?”

Rey recalled the power she’d felt when overthrusting the engines on Jakku. It all made sense. “This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs.”

“Twelve,” Han insisted. He dismissed her number with a snort. “Fourteen.” But he sounded more insulted when he read a display in the cockpit. “Hey—some moof-milker put a compressor on the ignition line!”

Rey and the others joined him in the cockpit. “Unkar Plutt did. I thought it was a mistake, too, puts too much stress—”

“—on the hyperdrive,” Han said, finishing her sentence. He locked eyes with her. His wrinkles made his expression hard to read. Was he annoyed with her? Or impressed?

Annoyed it seemed, from what he said to his partner. “Chewie, put ’em in a pod and send them to the nearest inhabited planet.”

“Wait…no…we need your help!” Rey looked at BB-8. “This droid has to get to the Resistance base as soon as possible! He’s carrying a map to Luke Skywalker.”

The name had an immediate effect on Han. The harsh lines of his wrinkles softened. His gaze grew distant. He became, in Rey’s view, just a sad old man.

“You are the Han Solo who fought with the Rebellion?” Finn inquired. “You knew him.”

“Knew him?” Han drew a long breath. “Yeah…I knew Luke.”

A loud clank from the hauler echoed into the Falcon’s cockpit. The haze vanished from Han’s features, and the hardiness returned. “Don’t tell me a rathtar’s gotten loose,” he muttered.

“Wait—a what?” Finn asked.

Han and the Wookiee hastened out of the cockpit. Rey refused to be left behind, as did Finn and BB-8. They followed the smugglers down the Falcon’s boarding ramp into the cargo bay of Solo’s hauler.

Finn kept up the questions as Han and Chewbacca kept up the pace through the cargo vessel’s main corridor. “You’re not hauling rathtars?”

“I’m hauling rathtars.”

Entering the larger vessel’s primary hold, Han keyed one of the many consoles. A three-dimensional hologram of the cargo hauler materialized, showing a smaller, needle-nosed ship attached to it. “It’s the Guavian Death Gang. They must’ve tracked us from Nantoon.” The Wookiee groaned. “That’s never good. I hate that.”

“What?” Finn asked.

“When someone who wants to kill us finds us.” Han and Chewbacca hustled out of the cockpit, forcing Finn, Rey, and BB-8 to follow down the corridor again.

Rey finally had a chance to ask Finn her burning question. “What’s a rathtar?”

Finn turned to her. “Ever heard of the Trillia Massacre?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said.

“I got three going to King Prana,” Han bragged.

“Three!” Finn shook his head.

Rey ignored him. “How’d you get them aboard?”

“Let’s just say I used to have a bigger crew.”

Stopping in the corridor, Han pressed a concealed button on the bulkhead. A section of the floor retracted, revealing a step ladder. “Get below deck until I say so.”

“What about Beebee-Ate?” Rey asked.

“He’ll stay with me,” Han said. “When I get rid of the gang, you can have him back and be on your way.”

Finn waited until Rey descended the ladder. “The rathtars…where are you keeping them?”

A tremendous boom shook the corridor. Behind a thick transparisteel port in the corridor’s wall clacked a circular row of teeth large enough to chew a Wookiee.

Han chuckled. “Well, there’s one.”

The creature rammed the port again.

“Now get below!” Han told Finn.

Finn quickly did just that. Rey stepped back to look up at Han. “What are you going to do?”

“Same thing I always do,” he said to her. “Talk my way out of it.”

Chewbacca rolled his eyes and groaned.

Rey watched Han and Chewbacca hotfoot it down the corridor, arguing with each other the entire way. BB-8 rolled after them, with nary a beep. His radar eye looked back at Rey, and then the floor hatch closed.

Han, Chewbacca, and BB-8 hadn’t gone far down the corridor when they encountered their uninvited guests. A portal irised open and out stepped six members of the Guavian Death Gang. Five were security goons armed with percussive cannons and clad in mottled scarlet uniforms with black leg greaves and shoulder pauldrons. A dark circle marked the center of their polished red helmets. No spot of color showed on the leather coat and heavy boots of the sixth Guavian, their leader. He wore no helmet, exposing brown hair and a face that looked too boyish for a life of crime. The percussive cannon he aimed at Han and Chewbacca said otherwise.

“I got this, leave it to me,” Han whispered to his partner. Chewbacca snorted, as he always did when Han took the lead. It wouldn’t be the same if he didn’t. It was all part of their routine.

BB-8 took the Wookiee’s side and hid behind his hairy leg.

The Death Gang leader advanced toward them. “Han Solo. You are a dead man.”

Han welcomed him with a grin. “Bala-Tik. What’s the problem?”

Bala-Tik did not grin back. “The problem is we loaned you fifty thousand for this job.”

“And you’re going to profit from it handsomely.”

“You also borrowed fifty thousand from Kanjiklub,” Bala-Tik said.

“Who told you that?”

“Kanjiklub.”

“Oh, come on. You can’t trust those little freaks.” Han exhaled, then used his warm and friendly voice again. “Bala, how long have we known each other?”

“The question is, how much longer will we know each other? Not long, with your excuses,” Bala-Tik said. “We want our money back. Now.”

“You think it’s easy hunting rathtars? I spent that money.”

“Kanjiklub wants their investment back, too.”

“I never made a deal with Kanjiklub!”

“Tell that to Kanjiklub.”

A second portal irised open behind Chewbacca and Han. From it emerged a motley mob of goons, none of whom were little or freakish. Compared with the Guavians, they dressed more like the pirates they were, with eye patches and soiled jerkins, but their various weapons were just as lethal.

Chewbacca snarled when the head of the second boarding party stepped forward. The man had an olive complexion, a knife-thin mustache, and eyes just as sharp. Han hailed him with the same bogus smile he had given Bala-Tik. “Tasu Leech. Good to see you.”

Leech spit out words in his native tongue, which Han didn’t need to be fluent in to understand. The gangster wanted Han and Chewbacca to rot.

Leech raised his bayoneted rifle—but Bala-Tik blocked his line of fire. “That BB unit,” he said to Han, eyeing the droid. “The First Order is looking for one just like it. And two fugitives.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” Han said.

A sudden loud clank seemed to dispute that. Han cringed. What were those kids doing?

Leech’s first mate, a despicable rogue whom Han knew as Razoo Qin-Fee, commanded the others to search the freighter.

“Where’d you get the droid?” Bala-Tik demanded.

“He’s mine, that’s where,” Han said.

“We’re going to take the droid,” Bala-Tik declared. “And our money.”

Razoo repeated Leech’s threat, adding that Han could choose whether they took the droid freely or off his dead body.

Then the lights blinked off and on. The constant whir of instrumentation around them was drowned out by an awful racket of snapping and skittering that echoed through the corridor.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” Han muttered.

Finn had a bad feeling about this.

He and Rey had wormed through the service tunnel, reaching a ventilation shaft that permitted them to hear and see some of what was happening in the corridor. Wanting a fuller view, Rey had stepped up on a support beam to peek through the vent. But the beam had cracked under her, making the sound that had alerted the Kanjiklubbers to search for them.

The gangsters were the least of their problems at the moment.

While messing with a fuse box that controlled both the ship’s illumination and its blast doors, Rey uttered the dreaded “uh-oh.” The lights flickered above them, but blast doors did not descend to trap each gang, as intended.

“‘Uh-oh’ what?” Finn asked.

“Wrong fuses,” Rey said.

The terrible noise that followed confirmed that they were, indeed, the wrong fuses. Instead of shutting all the ship’s blast doors, they had opened them, thereby releasing what had been locked away.

“Rathtars,” Finn said with a gulp.

He crawled down the tunnel after Rey. Their survival depended on getting as far away as they could from the rathtars—and the Millennium Falcon seemed their best bet to do so. Finn wished Han and Chewbacca could join them, but listening to the commotion above, it probably wasn’t going to be possible.

“New plan!” the one Han had called Bala-Tik shouted. “Kill them and take the droid!”

Blasters fired, followed by screams.

Finn winced. He had heard those sounds too frequently within the past day.

Yet the screams continued, in greater volume and frequency than a pair of smugglers, or even a Wookiee in pain, could ever produce on their own.

The rathtars.

Finn lifted the first access hatch they saw and hoisted himself out. Finding the corridor clear of both men and monsters, he helped Rey climb out, then motioned. “Falcon’s this way.”

“You sure?”

“No,” he said, but they rushed off in that direction anyway.

“What do these rathtars look like?” Rey asked.

“Horrible,” he said, turning the corner, then backpedaling immediately. “They look like that.”

Rey froze, covering her mouth. Around the corner, a round, pulsating, many-tentacled abomination fought a gangster, though it wasn’t much of a fight. The gangster’s blaster shots did little but glance off the sensory bulbs that covered the carnivore’s body, further enraging it. Caught in its tentacles, the man was drawn shrieking into its massive maw of razor teeth.

Finn grabbed Rey and pulled her away to race back down the corridor. But human speed was no match for a rathtar. A tentacle lashed out and entangled Finn.

He fought, he kicked, he bit, and he punched. The tentacle’s viselike grip only tightened around his waist, dragging him toward the rathtar’s mouth. Like the gangster before him, and those poor beings in the Trillia Massacre, Finn was going to be munched into hundreds of pieces.

He didn’t hear his own screams. He only heard Rey calling out his name.

“Finn!”

Rey yelled his name twice as the beast spun around the corner, taking Finn. She ran after it, but once again, it proved too fast, turning another corner. It wanted to enjoy its meal in peace.

She halted, glimpsing a sign on a door. She palmed the door panel and entered the cargo hauler’s auxiliary control room.

She went straight for a bank of monitors that showed the interior sections of the ship. One displayed the corridor down which the hideous monster was pulling a still-struggling Finn.

When the rathtar slinked into an intersection, Rey touched the console below the monitors. There were no wrong fuses to trip. There was only a bulkhead blast door to activate. It dropped down to slice through the tentacle that held Finn.

The audio pickups relayed the shriek of the wounded rathtar. But Rey’s focus was on the other side of the blast door, where Finn was yanking off clumps of tentacle. She mapped his location and darted out of the control room.

When she found him, he was shaking, breathing hard. “There was a door…it shut…precisely at…”

“Lucky,” she said.

Taking cover behind a stack of crates, Han could see his baby. The Millennium Falcon sat undisturbed at the other end of the cargo bay.

Blaster bolts lit up the air and struck the crates. A group of Guavians and Kanjiklubbers fired at them. Han fired back, as did Chewbacca, kneeling beside Han and wielding his enormous Wookiee bowcaster. BB-8 crammed himself between them, having no defense against this kind of long-range attack.

Han gauged the distance to his ship. It wasn’t far. Trouble was, he’d be making himself an easy target for the surviving thugs firing away from the corridor.

Despite the odds, he had to try.

“I’ll get the door,” he told Chewie. “Cover us.”

He jabbed a finger at the droid, signaling him to follow, and then the two were off, racing toward the Falcon in direct view of their pursuers. Chewbacca meanwhile spent half his bandolier pumping out plasma quarrel after plasma quarrel at the corridor.

Han and BB-8 made it unscathed to the Falcon. Han opened the hatch and the boarding ramp lowered.

He then began to lay down some covering fire of his own. “Chewie! Come on!”

The Wookiee roared and ran toward the ship, his immense stride covering much of the distance in half the time it had taken Han.

He was not fast enough.

Blaster fire hit Chewbacca in the shoulder. The Wookiee went down.

Letting BB-8 ascend the ramp, Han grabbed Chewie’s bowcaster and sprinted back into the firefight. He blasted the Guavian who had dared make that shot, then called on every muscle in his body to lift his heavy friend. Together they staggered toward the Falcon, with Han firing at the gangsters.

Han’s marksmanship was near perfect. The gangsters’ was not. They fell back, losing too many of their number, while Han and Chewie made it to the Falcon.

“Han!” shouted a female voice. The two kids dashed across the bay toward them.

“You shut the hatch behind us,” he ordered the girl, then hoisted his friend on Finn. “You take care of Chewie.”

Finn almost plunged off the ramp under his hairy burden. “How do I do that?”

Han left Chewie to bark out directions and hastened into the cockpit, where old habits took over. He sat in his well-worn seat and started flipping switches and turning dials to initiate the launch sequence. Though he hadn’t done it in years, never once did he hesitate; he knew the Falcon’s procedure by heart. Going through it in his head was how Han had coaxed himself to sleep on many a dark night.

He almost didn’t notice when the girl sat in Chewie’s seat. “Hey! What are you doing?”

She leaned over the copilot’s console and pushed a series of buttons. “Unkar installed a fuel pump, too. If you don’t prime it, we’re not going anywhere.”

Han glanced at the scopes and gauges. The girl was right. “I hate that guy.”

“And you can use a copilot.”

Han scoffed. “I got one. He’s back there.”

Chewbacca could be heard yowling in the medbay—though from the sound of it, Han was uncertain whether it was due to pain or sheer irritation at his nurse’s attempts to calm him down. “It’s just a flesh wound!” Finn shouted, which only incensed the Wookiee further.

After checking that the girl had indeed primed the fuel pump, Han warmed the engines and set the navicomputer to calculate routes. “Watch the thrust, we’re gonna jump to lightspeed—”

She gave him a look of absolute bewilderment. “From inside a hangar? Is that even possible?”

Han continued to make flight adjustments on his console. “I never ask a question until after I’ve done it,” he told the girl. He refrained from conceding that, like her, he wasn’t convinced it would work.

They were out of options when a rathtar leapt out of a corridor and landed atop the ship. Within seconds, it had scurried over the hull to hug the cockpit. The girl shrieked as the creature tried to bite through the canopy to eat them, leaving trails of slime.

“This is not how I thought this day would go,” Han said. “Angle the shields—”

She tapped her controls. “Got it!”

“Hang on back there,” Han shouted to his other passengers.

“No problem!” Finn called back.

Han gripped the hyperdrive lever. He gave the navicomputer another second of computation. “Come on, baby, don’t let me down.”

He pulled the lever.

Something whined. They didn’t move. The rathtar’s teeth continued to chomp against the canopy while the Falcon remained steadfastly in the hangar.

“What!” Han said. If Plutt had messed with his hyperdrive, Han would go to Jakku himself and throttle the numbskull.

“Compressor,” the girl said.

Of course—that moof-milker had installed a compressor on the ignition line. Han was about to reach over and switch it on, but the girl did it for him. His glare became a grin, showing her his appreciation.

Han pulled the lever again.