“Yet he did,” Veebee pointed out, and tried to fit her arm back on her shoulder, but it was good and broken and flopped to the ground. The wires were severed, and I’d have to solder it back on with tools I didn’t have. She looked down at her arm but didn’t bother to pick it up. “He traded us for a blaster pistol.”
“What would he want with that?” I mumbled, perplexed.
Sian said, a little distractedly as he eyed a group of men loitering down the street, “Seems like your brother knew the droids would follow him, or he’d already planned to trade them.”
“Val wouldn’t do that,” I insisted again, doing a terrible job of convincing either of us. I watched the men, too, wondering if they had one of those lovelywantedholopucks, possibly tucked into one of their pockets by Val, but then the group wandered off.
Sian let down his guard, turning his attention back to the matter at hand. “He wouldn’t? You’re sure?”
No—no, I wasn’t sure. Not anymore.
Between our fight in my room, his stealing my master key, and his selling the droids—I wasn’t very sure of anything right now except that I needed to get back to the ship to tell Dad. Something was wrong, and it was bigger than just a stowaway.
“We’re taking the lander and we’re going after the ship,” I said.
The three of them all looked at me like I’d just suggested we shoot through an exhaust vent to make a Death Star explode.
I went on: “I know the itinerary like the back of my hand, and I know the hyperspace lanes we use. I’ve done this route a thousand times. TheStarfarerhas a slow hyperdrive, andStarstallis a little faster. We can catch up to them I think.”
Veebee said, “Do we get a vote on this?”
“No,” I said.
The droid sighed and picked her arm off the ground. “All right. Let’s go fly the unreliable, broken, run-down lander back home.”
It didn’t take much convincing to get the mechanic to release our lander. She had more than enough work to do anyway, and one less thing on her plate for a customer who didn’t payparticularlywell was one less thing she had to worry about.
I took the pilot seat and started the ignition procedure. The coils had to heat up for a few moments.Starstallwas older than I was and just as finicky as an ornery old widow. You had to boot up the systems in the correctorder and talk to it just right before it decided to run properly.
“That’s a good girl,” I muttered as the console lights flared to life, mostly green systems and mostly ready to go.
I punched the coordinates into the ship’s navicomputer. Long distances often required multiple hyperspace lanes, so onboard computers—or droids hooked into the system—calculated accurate jump points to prevent crashing into planetary bodies, space stations, other ships….
I checked the calculations half a dozen times before I keyed them in.
Mom could have closed her eyes and felt how to get home with her wayfinding skills. I wondered if I would ever be brave enough—or lucky enough—to try that. Probably not.
Things were done a certain way for a reason.
The next stop on the tour itinerary was Geonosis, which was fairly close, all things considered, though we had to take three separate hyperspace lanes to get there. TheStarfareralways made good time, but I hoped we could catch up to them before they took the Corellian Run to the Hydian Way to Yavin 4.
We could make it. I believed we could.
Sian hovered in the doorway to the cockpit.
“Here to say goodbye?” I guessed, rechecking the coordinates again.
Sian shifted on his feet. “Yeah, actually.”
Disappointment tasted tinny in my mouth, but I tried not to think about it. I had figured he would be leaving now, but I was still a little afraid to do this without him. “Thank you. For your help with the droids. Did you manage to get your ticket back?”
He shrugged. “I’ll get another one.”
“They must be expensive.”
“Maybe I’ll just stow away again. It worked so well the first time,” he replied with a bashful grin.
“Yeah. It didn’t work out too terribly,” I replied jokingly. “Stay safe?”
