Boba Fett stared up at the body of the woman he had thought long dead. She still looked dead, for that matter... or at least, not alive. She looked like a statue, beautiful and still, carved in some forgotten metal. But the readings on the side of the carbonite panel told him that she was very much alive, if frozen in time. Alive, and had been for the past nine years.
He didn't waste time with asking the air why, if she was alive, why Syra hadn't been able to sense her. He, of all people, knew that there were many ways to block a person from the Force. He'd employed several of them when he had been hunting down the Jedi. He understood why they'd kept her shielded from the Force... she could have figured out a way to escape if she'd had that one link. He understood why they'd frozen her in carbonite... in case they needed any more of the source of genetic material. He understood it all, even if they didn't understand that he was going to kill every last one of them for it. Whoever 'they' were.
But that didn't matter, right now. Boba Fett shook himself out of his daze, stepped over to the side and keyed in the release sequence. Slowly, he dialed the temperature back up, keyed the carbonite storage block to release its long-held contents.
He didn't hold his breath that she'd still be alive... or even that she'd live through the first five minutes. Han Solo had had enough problems when the princess had gotten him out after a few mere months in carbonite hibernation. She had been in the carbonite for over nine years. It had kept her body from atrophying, but it would have left her weak... maybe too weak to stay alive once the preservation qualities of the carbonite had been taken away. But he had to try. Besides, it was her, after all.
If anyone could survive it, Cassandra could.
As he waited for the sequence to complete he became aware of a buzzing in his ear. With concentration, it clarified. "...miri..." his daughter was saying.
"What? Slow down..."
"Shoot the ysalimiri."
Of course. The forest-dwelling creatures that projected a bubble of... nega-Force, or whatever it was. He looked up towards the ceiling; they dwelled in the canopy when they were natural-born, they'd be in the ceiling now. He picked off one, two, three... by the time the sixth one was gone, Cassandra was starting to crumple to the floor. He caught her as she fell, gasping for air.
"Relax..." he found himself murmuring as she flopped around wildly, blind eyes staring, chest heaving as she tried to draw breath to scream. He hoped she could at least hear him. "Just relax. You're free of the carbonite."
She could hear him. She did relax, going almost entirely limp in his arms. Her fingers twitched a little with the need to push herself up, but she didnt' have the strength to do much more than lie there and shake. "You have hibernation sickness..." he added finally, although possibly unnecessarily."
Her eyes widened, looking around. Somehow she managed the energy to reach up and take hold of his upper arm, pulling herself upright. Her other hand crawled up her body till her fingertips brushed her eyes as she opened and closed them, clearly alarmed at her lack of sight. "It's okay..." he said, a little too quickly. "Your eyesight will come back. With time."
Cassandra struggled to stand up, to stand away from him, but couldn't manage it. She didn't recognize him, he thought with dismay. Then, as she struggled to her knees (healing faster than he would have thought possible) he realized why. All her energy was now bent on healing herself. She didn't have the strength to see with the Force, to see who was rescuing her. "Wuh..." she started, licking her lips. "Wuh... where..."
"We're on Kamino..." he said slowly. "The cloning facilities at Tipoca City."
Her eyes widened; she knew what that meant. She backed away even further from him, and would have fallen if he hadn't lunged forward and caught her in time. She pulled away, pushing against him with her hands flat on his chestplate. "Wuh... Who..." her hands fumbled upwards, even as she tried to pull out of his grasp. "Who are..." Her fingers touched his helmet, and stopped. More slowly, more carefully, they traced the smooth lines and ridges of his helmet. Then, still slowly, she smiled.
He smiled back, weary, ducking his head a little as she tugged off his helmet and began gently running her fingertips over his face, seeing with her hands. Her eyes were blinking, adjusting slowly. She was healing more rapidly than he would ever have thought anyone could, from years of hibernation and carbon-freezing.
"Can you walk?" he asked finally, recovering his scattered wits. "We have to leave. And then I have to destroy this place."
She nodded, working her mouth slowly, making sure she could speak at least a little. "Think suh... so."
Fett nodded, putting his helmet back on and releasing her just long enough to make sure he could secure his weapons. She reached out till she could feel a wall and put her hand on it, slowly pulling herself to her feet. He was a little dismayed at how weak she seemed to be, then annoyed at himself for assuming she could just get up and walk out of there in such a cavalier fashion. He made sure he could reach his weapons, then reached out and scooped her up into his arms.
She was incredibly light.
The door opened easily, revealing the still-armored Syra standing in the hallway with Kashya leaning heavily on her arm. They exchanged a look, a nod, and started walking slowly towards Fett's ship. Cassandra lifted her head as they exited the lab.
"Syra..." she said it almost as though she were tasting the air with the word. Syra's expression was hidden behind her helmet, but Fett would have placed a year's bounties on her smiling fit to split her face.
"Lightsabers..." Kashya said then, and Cassandra looked up and nodded.
"Our lightsabers..." her voice was still a little slurred, but getting stronger. She looked like she was getting stronger by the minute. Kashya wasn't recovering nearly as quickly, but at least Cassandra... she slid out of his arms within a few minutes and was slowly walking on her own. "In a storage... facility..."
Syra was gaping at her mother. "How are you..." she asked, astonishment plain even through the distortion of the helmet.
Cassandra glanced at Boba Fett, didn't respond.
"Questions later," he said gruffly. "Now, we ...."
"MOVE!" Cassandra dragged Fett to one side, even as Syra threw herself to the other side and dragged her sister with her. Force lightning sizzled the air between them. The second blast scorched Cassandra in the forearm as she raised her hand and sent the detritus of the labs flying to intercept the crackling electricity.
"Maman?!" Syra yelped.
"It's okay, Syra..." Cassandra said calmly, ignoring her burnt arm. She didn't even have to look around; Fett lunged across the ground behind her even as she stood, sending more debris to intercept the purple lightning. Blaster fire sounded, echoing down the hallway. After a few minutes there was silence again, and two robed figures at the end of the hall with smoking holes in their foreheads.
"Don't look," Cassandra warned, almost falling to her knees. Boba Fett caught her by one arm and held her till she could stand on her own again. Her face was gray and slightly damp with sweat. "You don't want to look. Trust me..."
"How did you know...?" Boba Fett murmured into her ear. "You're still blind... aren't you?"
She smiled grimly, giving them all time to recover enough to walk. "They were attacking us through the Force. I could feel it... respond to it. Besides," she continued with the arrogance of long habit, "I'm better than they are."
Beneath his helmet, the bounty hunter smiled.
"Let's go..." he said finally, when it looked like Kashya could walk almost on her own. They moved down the hallway a little further while he tried to remember where in area they would have kept the lightsabers. Probably in the weapons lockers for the clones, he thought with dismay, which was all the way on the other side of...
But... no. They wouldn't have had the tools or the ability to make more lightsabers. They had to be somewhere safe, somewhere secret where most people wouldn't get their hands on them. And that meant...
"Wait here..." he said brusquely, and took off. Cassandra blinked and stared after him in confusion as his footsteps disappeared down the hallway.
"Syra, did he get shot in the helmet a few too many times or something?" Kashya choked out, with a harsh and stuttering laugh. Cassandra chuckled, her voice also rusty.
"He says he thought of some place where they might have kept the... oh! He found them..." Syra's voice was tinny and distorted through the helmet, but the youth and enthusiasm carried through to her mother, who smiled.
"Good," she said, and started to say something else, except that Syra stepped back and brought her lightsaber up from her belt, igniting it with the familiar snap-hiss. "Syra...?"
"It's okay, Maman..." she said, grinning. At least there was something she could surprise her mother with. "They've been training me at the Jedi Academy."
Boba Fett arrived just in time to hear Cassandra's uncharacteristically startled "WHAT?!"
"We've got to move..." he watched Cassandra blink her eyes and shake her head, forcing her vision into focus. "Are you going to be all right?"
She nodded. "Eventually this is going to take its toll, but I'll be all right till we can make it to the ships. Then I'll probably sleep for a week," she said ruefully. He tossed her the lightsaber she'd constructed for herself, and she caught and ignited it easily. The gold blade split the air, complimenting Syra's blue.
He hated to do it. But he had to. "There's one more thing you're going to have to do before we take off," he said slowly. All three females looked at him. "We can't let the clones live... we can't afford to let this continue. And after we broke in here, they're going to know that someone knows about their operation. I was going to set the city's self-destruct and explode the room, but... can you set the self-destruct through the Force?" Ordinarily he wouldn't have asked any Force user to help him in any way... but this was different. And he knew her abilities, knew that if she had the strength, she'd have the knowledge to do it.
Cassandra took a deep breath as both her daughters looked at her. "I think so..." she said slowly. "But in that case, there's two things we have to do before we take off... fortunately they're both on the way."
Fett stared at her, and she stared back, gold eyes finally focused on his face (well, helmet) but impassive and carefully blank. "All right..." he said slowly, trusting her judgement. "Syra, get your sister. We're leaving."
Cassandra was already starting to walk ahead, her fingertips trailing electricity along the walls as she tapped into the central city computer. It was her own little personal touch of the Force.. she had a way with computers, speaking to them, working with them. Boba Fett didn't understand it. He hadn't even realized it existed until she had escaped from his ship, and then he had tracked her down and finally asked her how she'd done it. It seemed to be a rare gift among the Jedi. Whatever it was, he'd been glad of it in the past and he was doubly glad of it now. As he helped Syra and Kashya make their cautious way through the hallway, he saw clone guards out of the corner of his eye in the other corridors. At first they were mobilizing, and then they seemed to stop and go back to their posts.
"Cassandra...?" he made the one word a question.
"I'm suppressing the alarms, sending fake comm messages, telling them it's just a malfunction."
Well, that explained that. He'd suspected something of the sort. But... "Where are we going?"
"To the ships... I'm sending them to meet us."
Them?
"Cassandra..." his tone darkened... this wasn't how he liked things... but she interrupted.
"Trust me... besides, we can't leave them here. You'll understand when you see..." She stopped dead in her tracks, dropping her hand from the wall as the traces of electricity died. Fett opened his mouth to say something annoyed and then stopped, staring where she was looking. Suddenly he did understand, as he stared down at the two, tiny, blue-clad forms that could have been twins if he hadn't known better, if he hadn't seen those faces in a mirror many decades ago.
"They're coming with us," Cassandra said firmly.
He couldn't find the words to disagree with her. The image of a small boy on orange arena sands, an empty helmet pressed to his forehead, was too strong to deny.
He didn't waste time with asking the air why, if she was alive, why Syra hadn't been able to sense her. He, of all people, knew that there were many ways to block a person from the Force. He'd employed several of them when he had been hunting down the Jedi. He understood why they'd kept her shielded from the Force... she could have figured out a way to escape if she'd had that one link. He understood why they'd frozen her in carbonite... in case they needed any more of the source of genetic material. He understood it all, even if they didn't understand that he was going to kill every last one of them for it. Whoever 'they' were.
But that didn't matter, right now. Boba Fett shook himself out of his daze, stepped over to the side and keyed in the release sequence. Slowly, he dialed the temperature back up, keyed the carbonite storage block to release its long-held contents.
He didn't hold his breath that she'd still be alive... or even that she'd live through the first five minutes. Han Solo had had enough problems when the princess had gotten him out after a few mere months in carbonite hibernation. She had been in the carbonite for over nine years. It had kept her body from atrophying, but it would have left her weak... maybe too weak to stay alive once the preservation qualities of the carbonite had been taken away. But he had to try. Besides, it was her, after all.
If anyone could survive it, Cassandra could.
As he waited for the sequence to complete he became aware of a buzzing in his ear. With concentration, it clarified. "...miri..." his daughter was saying.
"What? Slow down..."
"Shoot the ysalimiri."
Of course. The forest-dwelling creatures that projected a bubble of... nega-Force, or whatever it was. He looked up towards the ceiling; they dwelled in the canopy when they were natural-born, they'd be in the ceiling now. He picked off one, two, three... by the time the sixth one was gone, Cassandra was starting to crumple to the floor. He caught her as she fell, gasping for air.
"Relax..." he found himself murmuring as she flopped around wildly, blind eyes staring, chest heaving as she tried to draw breath to scream. He hoped she could at least hear him. "Just relax. You're free of the carbonite."
She could hear him. She did relax, going almost entirely limp in his arms. Her fingers twitched a little with the need to push herself up, but she didnt' have the strength to do much more than lie there and shake. "You have hibernation sickness..." he added finally, although possibly unnecessarily."
Her eyes widened, looking around. Somehow she managed the energy to reach up and take hold of his upper arm, pulling herself upright. Her other hand crawled up her body till her fingertips brushed her eyes as she opened and closed them, clearly alarmed at her lack of sight. "It's okay..." he said, a little too quickly. "Your eyesight will come back. With time."
Cassandra struggled to stand up, to stand away from him, but couldn't manage it. She didn't recognize him, he thought with dismay. Then, as she struggled to her knees (healing faster than he would have thought possible) he realized why. All her energy was now bent on healing herself. She didn't have the strength to see with the Force, to see who was rescuing her. "Wuh..." she started, licking her lips. "Wuh... where..."
"We're on Kamino..." he said slowly. "The cloning facilities at Tipoca City."
Her eyes widened; she knew what that meant. She backed away even further from him, and would have fallen if he hadn't lunged forward and caught her in time. She pulled away, pushing against him with her hands flat on his chestplate. "Wuh... Who..." her hands fumbled upwards, even as she tried to pull out of his grasp. "Who are..." Her fingers touched his helmet, and stopped. More slowly, more carefully, they traced the smooth lines and ridges of his helmet. Then, still slowly, she smiled.
He smiled back, weary, ducking his head a little as she tugged off his helmet and began gently running her fingertips over his face, seeing with her hands. Her eyes were blinking, adjusting slowly. She was healing more rapidly than he would ever have thought anyone could, from years of hibernation and carbon-freezing.
"Can you walk?" he asked finally, recovering his scattered wits. "We have to leave. And then I have to destroy this place."
She nodded, working her mouth slowly, making sure she could speak at least a little. "Think suh... so."
Fett nodded, putting his helmet back on and releasing her just long enough to make sure he could secure his weapons. She reached out till she could feel a wall and put her hand on it, slowly pulling herself to her feet. He was a little dismayed at how weak she seemed to be, then annoyed at himself for assuming she could just get up and walk out of there in such a cavalier fashion. He made sure he could reach his weapons, then reached out and scooped her up into his arms.
She was incredibly light.
The door opened easily, revealing the still-armored Syra standing in the hallway with Kashya leaning heavily on her arm. They exchanged a look, a nod, and started walking slowly towards Fett's ship. Cassandra lifted her head as they exited the lab.
"Syra..." she said it almost as though she were tasting the air with the word. Syra's expression was hidden behind her helmet, but Fett would have placed a year's bounties on her smiling fit to split her face.
"Lightsabers..." Kashya said then, and Cassandra looked up and nodded.
"Our lightsabers..." her voice was still a little slurred, but getting stronger. She looked like she was getting stronger by the minute. Kashya wasn't recovering nearly as quickly, but at least Cassandra... she slid out of his arms within a few minutes and was slowly walking on her own. "In a storage... facility..."
Syra was gaping at her mother. "How are you..." she asked, astonishment plain even through the distortion of the helmet.
Cassandra glanced at Boba Fett, didn't respond.
"Questions later," he said gruffly. "Now, we ...."
"MOVE!" Cassandra dragged Fett to one side, even as Syra threw herself to the other side and dragged her sister with her. Force lightning sizzled the air between them. The second blast scorched Cassandra in the forearm as she raised her hand and sent the detritus of the labs flying to intercept the crackling electricity.
"Maman?!" Syra yelped.
"It's okay, Syra..." Cassandra said calmly, ignoring her burnt arm. She didn't even have to look around; Fett lunged across the ground behind her even as she stood, sending more debris to intercept the purple lightning. Blaster fire sounded, echoing down the hallway. After a few minutes there was silence again, and two robed figures at the end of the hall with smoking holes in their foreheads.
"Don't look," Cassandra warned, almost falling to her knees. Boba Fett caught her by one arm and held her till she could stand on her own again. Her face was gray and slightly damp with sweat. "You don't want to look. Trust me..."
"How did you know...?" Boba Fett murmured into her ear. "You're still blind... aren't you?"
She smiled grimly, giving them all time to recover enough to walk. "They were attacking us through the Force. I could feel it... respond to it. Besides," she continued with the arrogance of long habit, "I'm better than they are."
Beneath his helmet, the bounty hunter smiled.
"Let's go..." he said finally, when it looked like Kashya could walk almost on her own. They moved down the hallway a little further while he tried to remember where in area they would have kept the lightsabers. Probably in the weapons lockers for the clones, he thought with dismay, which was all the way on the other side of...
But... no. They wouldn't have had the tools or the ability to make more lightsabers. They had to be somewhere safe, somewhere secret where most people wouldn't get their hands on them. And that meant...
"Wait here..." he said brusquely, and took off. Cassandra blinked and stared after him in confusion as his footsteps disappeared down the hallway.
"Syra, did he get shot in the helmet a few too many times or something?" Kashya choked out, with a harsh and stuttering laugh. Cassandra chuckled, her voice also rusty.
"He says he thought of some place where they might have kept the... oh! He found them..." Syra's voice was tinny and distorted through the helmet, but the youth and enthusiasm carried through to her mother, who smiled.
"Good," she said, and started to say something else, except that Syra stepped back and brought her lightsaber up from her belt, igniting it with the familiar snap-hiss. "Syra...?"
"It's okay, Maman..." she said, grinning. At least there was something she could surprise her mother with. "They've been training me at the Jedi Academy."
Boba Fett arrived just in time to hear Cassandra's uncharacteristically startled "WHAT?!"
"We've got to move..." he watched Cassandra blink her eyes and shake her head, forcing her vision into focus. "Are you going to be all right?"
She nodded. "Eventually this is going to take its toll, but I'll be all right till we can make it to the ships. Then I'll probably sleep for a week," she said ruefully. He tossed her the lightsaber she'd constructed for herself, and she caught and ignited it easily. The gold blade split the air, complimenting Syra's blue.
He hated to do it. But he had to. "There's one more thing you're going to have to do before we take off," he said slowly. All three females looked at him. "We can't let the clones live... we can't afford to let this continue. And after we broke in here, they're going to know that someone knows about their operation. I was going to set the city's self-destruct and explode the room, but... can you set the self-destruct through the Force?" Ordinarily he wouldn't have asked any Force user to help him in any way... but this was different. And he knew her abilities, knew that if she had the strength, she'd have the knowledge to do it.
Cassandra took a deep breath as both her daughters looked at her. "I think so..." she said slowly. "But in that case, there's two things we have to do before we take off... fortunately they're both on the way."
Fett stared at her, and she stared back, gold eyes finally focused on his face (well, helmet) but impassive and carefully blank. "All right..." he said slowly, trusting her judgement. "Syra, get your sister. We're leaving."
Cassandra was already starting to walk ahead, her fingertips trailing electricity along the walls as she tapped into the central city computer. It was her own little personal touch of the Force.. she had a way with computers, speaking to them, working with them. Boba Fett didn't understand it. He hadn't even realized it existed until she had escaped from his ship, and then he had tracked her down and finally asked her how she'd done it. It seemed to be a rare gift among the Jedi. Whatever it was, he'd been glad of it in the past and he was doubly glad of it now. As he helped Syra and Kashya make their cautious way through the hallway, he saw clone guards out of the corner of his eye in the other corridors. At first they were mobilizing, and then they seemed to stop and go back to their posts.
"Cassandra...?" he made the one word a question.
"I'm suppressing the alarms, sending fake comm messages, telling them it's just a malfunction."
Well, that explained that. He'd suspected something of the sort. But... "Where are we going?"
"To the ships... I'm sending them to meet us."
Them?
"Cassandra..." his tone darkened... this wasn't how he liked things... but she interrupted.
"Trust me... besides, we can't leave them here. You'll understand when you see..." She stopped dead in her tracks, dropping her hand from the wall as the traces of electricity died. Fett opened his mouth to say something annoyed and then stopped, staring where she was looking. Suddenly he did understand, as he stared down at the two, tiny, blue-clad forms that could have been twins if he hadn't known better, if he hadn't seen those faces in a mirror many decades ago.
"They're coming with us," Cassandra said firmly.
He couldn't find the words to disagree with her. The image of a small boy on orange arena sands, an empty helmet pressed to his forehead, was too strong to deny.