Boba Fett stood over the sleeping Annbri, watching the light from the
double moons of Henber play across her face. In sleep, it was easy to
remember how vulnerable and innocent she was. She had led such a sheltered
life until then. The attempted mugging in the lower levels of Shanwhir had
terrified her, and he remebered how she had stepped closer to him in the
Twi'Lek's office. Though he hated to admit it, he hadn't minded. He had
almost felt protective of this nineteen-year-old slave girl. She's just
hard merchandise, Boba, he reminded himself. But he had to admit, she was
the prettiest hard merchandise he had ever captured.
They had been in Shanwhir for five days already, and the dawning of the sixth day was coming in a few short hours. Boba, for once, knew what he would do with her that day. They would go shooting. There was a nice wasteland several miles west of the city, and marksmen commonly went there to practice. They would have plenty of room to fire away. Lucky Annbri, he thought with a chuckle, to be taught marksmanship by the infamous Boba Fett.
Annbri Fett. The words came to him as if out of nowhere. Some little voice in the back of his mind was intoning them over and over in a singsong way. Boba laughed quietly and turned away from the sleeping girl. "She's only nineteen," he said aloud. Then he paused, that could not be the only reason he had to keep his distance, emotionally. "Just hard merchandise," he insisted to himself, striding quickly towards the couch. "She's just hard merchandise."
~~~~~~
Kelrin and Senaver stepped off their borrowed ship, carrying their small overnight bags and once again in good spirits. Senaver had not pulled out any more alcohol, and after Kelrin had awoken, they had dueled good- naturedly for the better part of the way home.
Kelrin jerked his head in the direction of the ship they had left. "Slowest scrap of durasteel in the galaxy!" he laughed.
"Tell me about it," Senaver grinned, reaching out with the Force to close the boarding ramp. "So are you okay about everything now?"
They both knew what he meant. A shadow crossed Kelrin's face. "Yeah. I've made my peace with it all, you know? Yes," he added at a dubious glance from his friend, "all of it. Maybe I just don't want to know what happened to Danja. Anyway, I'm free from all that emotional baggage stuff now. I feel great!"
"Glad to hear it," Senaver nodded, gesturing towards the dormitory door, which they were quickly approaching. "How about we deposit our stuff, eat, and then report to the council." He paused, knowing something unpleasant was in store for his friend. "They'll probably want to go through your thoughts, you know."
Kelrin set his jaw and looked optimistically at his best friend. "Well, they won't find anything bad, so I'll be fine. It--it only hurts for a while."
Senaver knew Kelrin was scared to death. The council's infamous mind searches were excruciatingly painful, but very effective. If they thought a student was too given to Dark Side attributes, such as anger, fear, and lust for power, they would go collectively into the padawan's mind and search for any Dark Side influences. Just last year a padawan had been stripped of his master and, as much as could be, the Force. He then was taken to the gardening planet, where expelled and unsuitable Force-users used their talents to grow vegetables. It was not a pleasant prospect for one who had high hopes to become a Jedi Knight.
"Oh well," Kelrin smiled bravely, "Don't worry about the Sand People until they're after you, right?"
"Right," the older padawan replied with an encouraging smile. Inwardly, however, he was afraid for his younger friend. The Jedi Council could be more ruthless than Tuskan Raiders, when it came to the Dark Side. He desperately hoped Kelrin had buried his anger with his family, and not in his heart.
~~~~~~
"Wake up, Annbri." Boba Fett put a gloved hand on one of her slim shoulders and shook her gently. He did very few gentle things in his life, but he had been getting used to it this past week.
Annbri stirred, and her brilliant blue eyes blinked open, focusing on the bounty hunter's head. "Boba? What time is it?"
"The morning," Boba assured her, not exactly sure how the Henberans' time units worked. "There are some leftover cinnamon rolls on the table over there."
She sat up, her light brown hair mussed from sleep and her eyes squinting against the light. "It can't be that late in the morning...."
"How long will it take you to get ready?"
"How long? Well I--" Annbri stopped at an exasperated look from Boba. "A Coruscant hour?"
"Three-quarters of an hour, and then we're leaving, understood?" Boba waited until she nodded sleepily, then he strode back to his couch to retrieved the two appropriated blaster rifles from the day before. He would teach her to use a blaster rifle, his personal weapon of choice, and, if she learned quickly, the hand-held blaster as well. He understood from the files on Annbri's mother, Matriarch Anmei, that the queen had been quite a good shot. Hopefully it runs in the family, he thought grimly.
Annbri was ready in half the time she had expected she would need, and the two Phendols set off towards the hoverbus landing platform. This time, Fett had assured her, where they were going was indeed too far away to walk.
When they reached the city limits, Boba rented a speeder. They headed out across the wasteland, known as the Pelhamasan Plains, looking for a good empty stretch where they would neither shoot other marksmen nor be shot themselves.
When Boba was sure they were isolated enough, he stopped the speeder and jumped out. Annbri seemed to be having some trouble with her door, so he shrugged and crossed to the other side to help her out.
Annbri looked up as Boba approached, then pulled hard on the door release mechanism again. It would not budge. "Stand up," Boba commanded, and when she did so, he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her out.
Annbri cried out momentarily, then was standing on firm ground again. She turned and leaned against the speeder to steady herself, and to hide the blush that was rising to her face. "Thank you," she said belatedly, as Boba pulled out a blaster rifle from the back of the speeder. Suddenly, alarm bells started going off in her head. Why were they out in the wilderness with guns? Was he going to shoot her and leave her here? Terrible visions of her body, baked to white bones by the relentless sun, traipsed through her head, and she caught her breath as she met Boba's eye. "What's going on?" She backed up into the speeder, fumbling again with the door clasp.
Boba smiled briefly at her obvious fear. "Don't worry," he assured her, "I'm not gonna shoot you. We're just going to have a little blaster rifle handling lesson, okay?"
Still wary, Annbri watched as he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted at a rock, then fired.
"Now you try," Boba prompted, handing her the rifle.
Annbri bit her lip, disappointed that he had noticed her deficiency with firearms. Of course he would have known she had never owned a blaster. Slaves were not permitted to carry weapons, and she had been a very young slave. She held the rifle as she thought she had seen him do, squinted down the complicated sighting mechanism, and fired a half-hearted shot that went thirteen yards or so wide of its target. She heard Boba lauging behind her, and she turned to see him fire a shot with the other rifle, reducing the rock she had been aiming at to dusty shards. Annbri frowned at him, then looked back at the destroyed rock. How did he do that?
Boba had heard that women looked prettier when they were angry. Whoever had told him that had been right. However, this angry woman wasn't going to stand around looking pretty all day. He laid the blaster rifle he held on the back of the speeder and went back to help her. Taking the rifle from her, he held it in the correct position. "See?" he asked, sighting on another rock.
After he had reduced that rock to dust too, she took back the rifle and made her own attempt, but not matter how hard she tried, the muzzle kept drooping towards the red dust at her feet.
"No, no," Boba shook his head impatiently, "like this." He stood behind her and covered her own arms and hands with his own, guiding them to the correct placement on the rifle. Her small brown head pressed against his chest, and he hoped she couldn't hear his heartbeat speed up suddenly. For a moment, Boba let his mind wander to the vulnerable woman, hardly more than a girl that he now held in his arms. Her hands were shaking under his, and he was acutely aware of how close their bodies were. If she had simply looked up at him then, Boba later realised, he would have given up his disinterested charade and kissed her, but she did not, and he reined in his daydream before it had even begun. Under his gloved finger, her own depressed the trigger, and a piece of dead wood shattered with the impact of the plasma bolt.
Annbri was slowly relaxing into his protective embrace. She wasn't as uncomfortable as she had expected she would be, and his arms around her were a pleasant surprise. Everything in her life had changed so quickly in the past week, and she felt secure pressed against his broad chest. She hoped she wasn't shaking too badly, and wondered if she should pull away, now that the shot had been fired. But she didn't want to. Instead, she took a deep breath, then let it out, willing her hands to stop trembling. She didn't want Boba to know she was afraid of him. She didn't want Boba to know he made her heart beat three times faster than it normally did.
"Now let's try to aim," Boba said quietly, bending down to rest his head on her shoulder so he could sight along with her. He felt her flinch a little as his head grazed hers, and felt both triumphant and terrible at the same time. I'm scaring her, he thought.
Annbri felt his breath on her cheek, and had a hard time concentrating on the sighting instruments. She allowed Boba to guide her hands and aim the rifle at an old dead tree. As the rifle came into position, the muscles in his shoulders and arms tensed, holding it firmly in place. Annbri was acutely aware of this, and remembered what one of her older friends on board the Marauder's Revenge had once said about a man. She had described him as being "intoxicating," and Annbri was sure she knew what her friend had meant by that. Trying her best to keep her attention directed at the tree, she sighted, then fired. She felt Boba relax as the knot in the middle of the dead tree's trunk exploded with little ceremony.
Boba let his arms fall from hers, stepping away from Annbri. Shouldn't have done that, Fett, he warned himself, watching her raise the rifle again, take aim, and fire, this time nearly hitting his target. He stepped back up behind her, and supported the rifle once more, this time allowing her to pull the trigger when she deemed necessary. Her shot was right on the mark.
For the rest of the morning, Annbri practiced her shooting. Once Boba had shown her, she proved to be a quick learner, and was soon firing with increasingly deadly accuracy. Likewise, the hand-held blaster became a weapon to be reckoned with in her hands, and though she could not hit her mark every time, her firing had improved greatly from what it had been the day before.
As lunchtime came and went, Boba regretted not putting the remaining stale cinnamon rolls in the speeder. After Annbri had completed another few shots, he suggested, "How about we go back to Shanwhir and pick up something to eat? I suppose you haven't really eaten anything proper in your life. No," he added, seeing her raise her eyebrows, "cinnamon rolls don't count."
Annbri agreed, for the plasma in her blaster was getting low, and this time she was ready when Fett swung her up into the hovering speeder. The trip back to the city took much less time, it seemed, than the trip out, and Annbri welcomed the cool breeze on her face. Boba returned the speeder and they collected their blasters and departed.
After a quick stop at the hotel to drop off the firearms and wash the desert dirt off themselves, they took a taxi to an upscale restaurant called the Fountain's Canopy. Despite the somewhat dreamy name, Annbri was delighted with the place. It was well-lit, with windows making up all four of its walls, and the slave girl could not take her eyes off the enormous fountain that rose up from the middle of the room, sending an unending curtain of water down the sides of the dome underneath which the diners sat. The waiters came from hidden doors somewhere behind the giant ferns that surrounded the pillar of water in the middle of the room, bearing trays upon trays of the galaxy's finest food.
Boba helped Annbri choose something that she might like, promising to let her try some of his savajan, an Alderaanian food that he was extremely partial to. After the waiter left with their orders, Boba looked out the window at the bulbous palace. In the midday sun, the principal building of Shanwhir looked like a handful of opalescent marbles tumbled in an artful heap. "We're going there tomorrow, Annbri," he said quietly, "to find your family."
Annbri had not realised how close they were to that long-anticipated day. As she regarded Boba, she found something strange in his eyes. Was that regret? Surely he was not sad at the prospect of selling her to her family...was he? Did he know something about her family that she did not? Were they terrible people, who would treat her worse than Stellar had? Surely he wouldn't turn her over to people like that! Annbri remembered the moment that morning when she had felt safe in his arms. Had he been leading her to belive that he was trustworthy, only to sell her for whatever he could get?
They had been in Shanwhir for five days already, and the dawning of the sixth day was coming in a few short hours. Boba, for once, knew what he would do with her that day. They would go shooting. There was a nice wasteland several miles west of the city, and marksmen commonly went there to practice. They would have plenty of room to fire away. Lucky Annbri, he thought with a chuckle, to be taught marksmanship by the infamous Boba Fett.
Annbri Fett. The words came to him as if out of nowhere. Some little voice in the back of his mind was intoning them over and over in a singsong way. Boba laughed quietly and turned away from the sleeping girl. "She's only nineteen," he said aloud. Then he paused, that could not be the only reason he had to keep his distance, emotionally. "Just hard merchandise," he insisted to himself, striding quickly towards the couch. "She's just hard merchandise."
~~~~~~
Kelrin and Senaver stepped off their borrowed ship, carrying their small overnight bags and once again in good spirits. Senaver had not pulled out any more alcohol, and after Kelrin had awoken, they had dueled good- naturedly for the better part of the way home.
Kelrin jerked his head in the direction of the ship they had left. "Slowest scrap of durasteel in the galaxy!" he laughed.
"Tell me about it," Senaver grinned, reaching out with the Force to close the boarding ramp. "So are you okay about everything now?"
They both knew what he meant. A shadow crossed Kelrin's face. "Yeah. I've made my peace with it all, you know? Yes," he added at a dubious glance from his friend, "all of it. Maybe I just don't want to know what happened to Danja. Anyway, I'm free from all that emotional baggage stuff now. I feel great!"
"Glad to hear it," Senaver nodded, gesturing towards the dormitory door, which they were quickly approaching. "How about we deposit our stuff, eat, and then report to the council." He paused, knowing something unpleasant was in store for his friend. "They'll probably want to go through your thoughts, you know."
Kelrin set his jaw and looked optimistically at his best friend. "Well, they won't find anything bad, so I'll be fine. It--it only hurts for a while."
Senaver knew Kelrin was scared to death. The council's infamous mind searches were excruciatingly painful, but very effective. If they thought a student was too given to Dark Side attributes, such as anger, fear, and lust for power, they would go collectively into the padawan's mind and search for any Dark Side influences. Just last year a padawan had been stripped of his master and, as much as could be, the Force. He then was taken to the gardening planet, where expelled and unsuitable Force-users used their talents to grow vegetables. It was not a pleasant prospect for one who had high hopes to become a Jedi Knight.
"Oh well," Kelrin smiled bravely, "Don't worry about the Sand People until they're after you, right?"
"Right," the older padawan replied with an encouraging smile. Inwardly, however, he was afraid for his younger friend. The Jedi Council could be more ruthless than Tuskan Raiders, when it came to the Dark Side. He desperately hoped Kelrin had buried his anger with his family, and not in his heart.
~~~~~~
"Wake up, Annbri." Boba Fett put a gloved hand on one of her slim shoulders and shook her gently. He did very few gentle things in his life, but he had been getting used to it this past week.
Annbri stirred, and her brilliant blue eyes blinked open, focusing on the bounty hunter's head. "Boba? What time is it?"
"The morning," Boba assured her, not exactly sure how the Henberans' time units worked. "There are some leftover cinnamon rolls on the table over there."
She sat up, her light brown hair mussed from sleep and her eyes squinting against the light. "It can't be that late in the morning...."
"How long will it take you to get ready?"
"How long? Well I--" Annbri stopped at an exasperated look from Boba. "A Coruscant hour?"
"Three-quarters of an hour, and then we're leaving, understood?" Boba waited until she nodded sleepily, then he strode back to his couch to retrieved the two appropriated blaster rifles from the day before. He would teach her to use a blaster rifle, his personal weapon of choice, and, if she learned quickly, the hand-held blaster as well. He understood from the files on Annbri's mother, Matriarch Anmei, that the queen had been quite a good shot. Hopefully it runs in the family, he thought grimly.
Annbri was ready in half the time she had expected she would need, and the two Phendols set off towards the hoverbus landing platform. This time, Fett had assured her, where they were going was indeed too far away to walk.
When they reached the city limits, Boba rented a speeder. They headed out across the wasteland, known as the Pelhamasan Plains, looking for a good empty stretch where they would neither shoot other marksmen nor be shot themselves.
When Boba was sure they were isolated enough, he stopped the speeder and jumped out. Annbri seemed to be having some trouble with her door, so he shrugged and crossed to the other side to help her out.
Annbri looked up as Boba approached, then pulled hard on the door release mechanism again. It would not budge. "Stand up," Boba commanded, and when she did so, he grabbed her around the waist and lifted her out.
Annbri cried out momentarily, then was standing on firm ground again. She turned and leaned against the speeder to steady herself, and to hide the blush that was rising to her face. "Thank you," she said belatedly, as Boba pulled out a blaster rifle from the back of the speeder. Suddenly, alarm bells started going off in her head. Why were they out in the wilderness with guns? Was he going to shoot her and leave her here? Terrible visions of her body, baked to white bones by the relentless sun, traipsed through her head, and she caught her breath as she met Boba's eye. "What's going on?" She backed up into the speeder, fumbling again with the door clasp.
Boba smiled briefly at her obvious fear. "Don't worry," he assured her, "I'm not gonna shoot you. We're just going to have a little blaster rifle handling lesson, okay?"
Still wary, Annbri watched as he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted at a rock, then fired.
"Now you try," Boba prompted, handing her the rifle.
Annbri bit her lip, disappointed that he had noticed her deficiency with firearms. Of course he would have known she had never owned a blaster. Slaves were not permitted to carry weapons, and she had been a very young slave. She held the rifle as she thought she had seen him do, squinted down the complicated sighting mechanism, and fired a half-hearted shot that went thirteen yards or so wide of its target. She heard Boba lauging behind her, and she turned to see him fire a shot with the other rifle, reducing the rock she had been aiming at to dusty shards. Annbri frowned at him, then looked back at the destroyed rock. How did he do that?
Boba had heard that women looked prettier when they were angry. Whoever had told him that had been right. However, this angry woman wasn't going to stand around looking pretty all day. He laid the blaster rifle he held on the back of the speeder and went back to help her. Taking the rifle from her, he held it in the correct position. "See?" he asked, sighting on another rock.
After he had reduced that rock to dust too, she took back the rifle and made her own attempt, but not matter how hard she tried, the muzzle kept drooping towards the red dust at her feet.
"No, no," Boba shook his head impatiently, "like this." He stood behind her and covered her own arms and hands with his own, guiding them to the correct placement on the rifle. Her small brown head pressed against his chest, and he hoped she couldn't hear his heartbeat speed up suddenly. For a moment, Boba let his mind wander to the vulnerable woman, hardly more than a girl that he now held in his arms. Her hands were shaking under his, and he was acutely aware of how close their bodies were. If she had simply looked up at him then, Boba later realised, he would have given up his disinterested charade and kissed her, but she did not, and he reined in his daydream before it had even begun. Under his gloved finger, her own depressed the trigger, and a piece of dead wood shattered with the impact of the plasma bolt.
Annbri was slowly relaxing into his protective embrace. She wasn't as uncomfortable as she had expected she would be, and his arms around her were a pleasant surprise. Everything in her life had changed so quickly in the past week, and she felt secure pressed against his broad chest. She hoped she wasn't shaking too badly, and wondered if she should pull away, now that the shot had been fired. But she didn't want to. Instead, she took a deep breath, then let it out, willing her hands to stop trembling. She didn't want Boba to know she was afraid of him. She didn't want Boba to know he made her heart beat three times faster than it normally did.
"Now let's try to aim," Boba said quietly, bending down to rest his head on her shoulder so he could sight along with her. He felt her flinch a little as his head grazed hers, and felt both triumphant and terrible at the same time. I'm scaring her, he thought.
Annbri felt his breath on her cheek, and had a hard time concentrating on the sighting instruments. She allowed Boba to guide her hands and aim the rifle at an old dead tree. As the rifle came into position, the muscles in his shoulders and arms tensed, holding it firmly in place. Annbri was acutely aware of this, and remembered what one of her older friends on board the Marauder's Revenge had once said about a man. She had described him as being "intoxicating," and Annbri was sure she knew what her friend had meant by that. Trying her best to keep her attention directed at the tree, she sighted, then fired. She felt Boba relax as the knot in the middle of the dead tree's trunk exploded with little ceremony.
Boba let his arms fall from hers, stepping away from Annbri. Shouldn't have done that, Fett, he warned himself, watching her raise the rifle again, take aim, and fire, this time nearly hitting his target. He stepped back up behind her, and supported the rifle once more, this time allowing her to pull the trigger when she deemed necessary. Her shot was right on the mark.
For the rest of the morning, Annbri practiced her shooting. Once Boba had shown her, she proved to be a quick learner, and was soon firing with increasingly deadly accuracy. Likewise, the hand-held blaster became a weapon to be reckoned with in her hands, and though she could not hit her mark every time, her firing had improved greatly from what it had been the day before.
As lunchtime came and went, Boba regretted not putting the remaining stale cinnamon rolls in the speeder. After Annbri had completed another few shots, he suggested, "How about we go back to Shanwhir and pick up something to eat? I suppose you haven't really eaten anything proper in your life. No," he added, seeing her raise her eyebrows, "cinnamon rolls don't count."
Annbri agreed, for the plasma in her blaster was getting low, and this time she was ready when Fett swung her up into the hovering speeder. The trip back to the city took much less time, it seemed, than the trip out, and Annbri welcomed the cool breeze on her face. Boba returned the speeder and they collected their blasters and departed.
After a quick stop at the hotel to drop off the firearms and wash the desert dirt off themselves, they took a taxi to an upscale restaurant called the Fountain's Canopy. Despite the somewhat dreamy name, Annbri was delighted with the place. It was well-lit, with windows making up all four of its walls, and the slave girl could not take her eyes off the enormous fountain that rose up from the middle of the room, sending an unending curtain of water down the sides of the dome underneath which the diners sat. The waiters came from hidden doors somewhere behind the giant ferns that surrounded the pillar of water in the middle of the room, bearing trays upon trays of the galaxy's finest food.
Boba helped Annbri choose something that she might like, promising to let her try some of his savajan, an Alderaanian food that he was extremely partial to. After the waiter left with their orders, Boba looked out the window at the bulbous palace. In the midday sun, the principal building of Shanwhir looked like a handful of opalescent marbles tumbled in an artful heap. "We're going there tomorrow, Annbri," he said quietly, "to find your family."
Annbri had not realised how close they were to that long-anticipated day. As she regarded Boba, she found something strange in his eyes. Was that regret? Surely he was not sad at the prospect of selling her to her family...was he? Did he know something about her family that she did not? Were they terrible people, who would treat her worse than Stellar had? Surely he wouldn't turn her over to people like that! Annbri remembered the moment that morning when she had felt safe in his arms. Had he been leading her to belive that he was trustworthy, only to sell her for whatever he could get?