Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [116]
“Then it was up to you to follow through?” Leia said.
“Just me.”
Allana stood up in the chair and leaned across the table. “Couldn't you have programmed some droids to fly the Falcon?”
Jadak smiled lightly. “We didn't want to send droids to do a person's job.”
Gently, Leia pulled Allana back into her chair. “What went wrong?”
Han put his arm around Leia's shoulders, but kept his eyes on Jadak. “I think I see where this is going.”
“I'm sure you do.”
“You'd already spent, what, a couple of months, almost a standard year, with the Falcon?”
“Ten months to be exact.”
“And since you didn't want to increase the risk of the baradium detonating prematurely, you took a slow route to Bilbringi, to avoid long hyperspace jumps.”
“Lots of time in realspace,” Jadak said. “Weeks more. I lost fifteen kilos sweating that some micrometeor impact was going to set the device off.”
Han grinned knowingly. “You said you were already taken with the ship. How close did you even come to Bilbringi?”
“One jump shy,” Jadak said. He cut his eyes to Leia. “But I swear to you, it wasn't cowardice. I wasn't thinking about the possibility of dying.”
“I'm not sitting in judgment of you, Quip,” Leia said.
“You just couldn't stand to see the Falcon destroyed,” Han said.
Jadak lowered his head, just as Quip Fargil had done when he had recounted the story. “The thing was,” he said, looking up, “a lot of good people had been counting on me. Bilbringi's destruction would have constituted a victory the insurgency sorely needed back then. And I sabotaged it—for a ship.”
“You might not have made it,” Allana said. “You could've exploded.”
“She's right, Quip,” Leia said.
“I told myself that over and over again when I was jettisoning the bomb. I might not have made it, anyway. And for a while I let myself be fooled into believing that. I even started dreaming about heading for the Outer Rim and setting up shop, just me and the Falcon. Vaced was supposed to have been the first stop, but it turned out to be the last. Not only couldn't I keep the ship, rebel agents were probably already looking to execute me for dereliction of duty—especially after an attempt was made to inflict damage at Bilbringi using a different YT-Thirteen-hundred and more conventional explosives. The two pilots who died didn't get anywhere close to the planet before Imperials destroyed their ship.
“When I happened to run across Parlay Thorp and her crew of do-gooders, helping the sick, offering relief to folks the Empire had trampled underfoot, I realized I'd found a perfect future for the Falcon. So I just …”
“Gave her up,” Han said.
Jadak nodded, playing his role to the hilt. He had his mouth open to say more when Poste burst into the restaurant, his face smeared with grease and his clothes stained with what looked like oil or lubricant of some kind.
“Hey … Quip,” he said, breathless when he reached the table, “I bet you're surprised to see me—”
“Did you get those machines running?” Jadak said in a rush, his thoughts swirling.
Poste gestured to himself. “Uh, as you might guess by looking at me, I ran into a couple of problems.”
Jadak turned to the Solos. “Mag, here, helps out at the ranch.” He whirled to Poste. “I'm not sure I grasp why you decided to come here, Mag.”
Poste looked at Han. “To tell Captain Solo that when I was coming past the spaceport, I saw the Millennium Falcon launch.”
Han shot to his feet so quickly that his chair hit the floor. “What?”
“What?” Leia, Allana, and Jadak said at nearly the same instant.
“I'm certain it was the Falcon, Captain,” Poste went on. “Launched straight from one