The Misfit Stray

The Misfit Stray is a Ghtroc 720 freighter, thirty-eight meters long, with the distinctive saucer profile of its class. It is painted blue and purple — a choice its owner and captain, Quinel Neviden, made simply because he thought she deserved to be special — and serves as both his home and his office, its original accommodations reworked for comfort. Unlike the YT-series freighters favored by pilots who sink credits into weapon mounts and hidden smuggling compartments, the Stray instead carries an upgraded primary engine (better speed in atmosphere and at sublight) and improved, longer-range sensors. Quinel keeps her deliberately clean of contraband. At the Ghauba docks, the Sluissi mechanic Kybuss tunes her engine to run 11.38% more power-efficient.

During the escape from Ghauba she takes heavy punishment — TIE-fighter fire and Imperial turbolasers leave her with a damaged port stabilizer, dead forward and dorsal sensor arrays, and failing shields — but Quinel flies her through a collapsing canyon run and out of the atmosphere. She clears the planet through a hangar wall breached by Damika's sacrifice and jumps to hyperspace toward Cloud City on Bespin just as the Empire begins its orbital bombardment.

Battered from the escape, the Stray is professionally repaired at Cloud City. Her sheared-off forward sensor housing is replaced, the jury-rigged stabilizer is swapped out entirely, the cracked shield emitter is patched and reinforced, and a faulty climate-control relay is replaced.

During a sweep arranged by Garaath, a tracking device is found attached to her landing-gear housing. Damaged from a hit taken during the escape, it is destroyed by Garaath's people. Before the crew departs for Nar Shaddaa, an old storage room aboard — the same one Tammea had fled to after Ghauba — is converted into permanent crew quarters for her, fitted with a bed, desk, and storage compartments and made up in blue and purple.

Quinel says he has owned the Stray for about eleven or twelve years, describing how he came by her only as winning her "in a... high-stakes negotiation." His own cabin aboard is small but functional. Approaching Nar Shaddaa, the ship is hailed by orbital control as a "Ghtroc-Seven-Twenty." There the crew loads six large sealed crates pitched as exotic spices; the containers are far heavier than their supposed contents should be, and they go into her hold bound for Taris as part of what proves to be a Black Sun contract.