Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars

A Shift in the Force: Chapter Thirty-Five: Sabé's Image-caster

AN: The Carina Arc is going great and there's a lot of interest in Carina clashing with the Jedi, and I promise you, that is definitely going to happen

This chapter is dedicated to Carrie Fisher who passed away earlier yesterday and who inspired my love of Star Wars. You will be missed.


Talik needed to sit down, but her legs wouldn't move, they wouldn't follow her commands to do so. Listening to Obi-Wan explain everything with Anakin hovering awkwardly at one side…it was startling.

Arthree who had stuck to her side since Sabé's disappearance gave a few rapid beeps that Talik didn't even need to interpret when he'd followed after her when she'd gone to see Anakin after she'd arrived back from her mission with Tiplar.

A year ago Talik would have screamed denials, would've raged against the information, beaten her fists against Obi-Wan's tunic, every bit unlike a Jedi should be and every bit like an angry child would be.

But it was not as it had been a year ago. Talik was older and wiser, Talik knew better. Arthree made a jittery noise beside her and Talik dropped a hand to his domed head.

A calm mask had settled over her face, so blank that Obi-Wan couldn't help but be vaguely startled. Plo Koon watched her expression with intrigue.

"Carina, huh?" Talik said finally.

"So it would seem," Plo Koon stated impassively in the stead of Obi-Wan.

"She became her nightmare," Talik said, bowing her head just slightly. "I'm sure there's some symbolism in that."

Anakin scrutinized his best friend suddenly. "You feeling all right?" he inquired. "You're taking this all rather well."

"My master is a Sith, I don't think there's a proper way to be taking it," Talik said coolly, her eyes narrowing slightly.

Obi-Wan fixated his eyes on hers, admiring how despite her face lacking all feeling, her eyes were so expressive. They were like the heat of the sun, of the stars, burning brighter as one got too close. She was angry, furious even, but she was managing her control of it rather well.

Talik took in a sharp breath and released it just as quickly.

"Was she wearing Mandalorian armor?" she asked suddenly, her eyes curiously sharp.

"Not in the cell," Anakin said slowly, looking to his master whose eyebrows arched in surprise.

"Talik," he said in such a way that the girl doubted her name had been spoken in such a way since the day he had found her in the apartment at 500 Republica crying over her master's beads, "have you seen her before?"

"No," Talik said quickly, raising her hands up, "but Master told me a little about her dreams, something about Darth Carina wearing a sort of red-brown Mandalorian armor…"

"Anything else?" Obi-Wan probed.

Talik shook her head and frowned at him. "You're going to try to find her? Can I help?"

"No," Obi-Wan said shortly, not wanting to think of what would happen if Carina and Talik crossed paths.

"I can help," Talik insisted, her fists balling slightly. "I know her!"

"Not as Carina," Obi-Wan countered. "If she didn't recognize me or Anakin, she won't recognize you and she might even kill you." She certainly hadn't showed any care in ending the lives of those in the bunker they'd found her in.

Talik sulked.

Obi-Wan and Anakin said their goodbyes before disappearing out of the room, Anakin squeezing Talik's arm as he passed by her.

She swallowed before realizing that Plo Koon was still standing there, making her swivel to look on the Kel Dorian.

"Talik, I would like to see your master's room," he said.

"The apartment is still able to be accessed by any of the Jedi in the Temple," she said a bit flummoxed. "You can go there at any time, Master Plo."

"Yes," Plo Koon agreed, "but out of respect no Jedi has stepped foot there since Sabé's…supposed demise."

Talik frowned and Arthree beeped something to her and Talik shrugged a moment later. "I'll go call a hoverbus," she decided, vanishing with Arthree on her heels, tooting something to her that had her waving a careless hand.


Talik hadn't been back to the apartment in almost a year, not since she'd moved in with Aayla, but not much had changed, she noticed once she'd tapped the code into the keypad and entered, the lights flicking on automatically.

Of course, even though no one had been within the apartment, it was still impeccably clean, due to the cleaning droids that came through every so often.

Talik pressed the button beside a sleek door, allowing him a look inside. "I'm not sure what you're looking for, Master Plo," she said mildly, "but there's not much to Master's room."

And, in truth, there wasn't. Her bed was made and the walls were decorated, but in a manner that said that was the way that they had been before Sabé had lived there. In one of the corners was mechanical equipment that Sabé made good use of when Arthree stuttered or she was going undercover as a mechanic. It was a rather impersonal for someone who was so vibrant.

"She's got a spare arm and she keeps all the data-messages from her family on an encrypted datachip, but apart from that, I don't think there's much more to it," Talik said helplessly.

"Spare arm?" Plo Koon said suddenly. "The one she had when she was sixteen?"

"I guess," Talik said, frowning slightly. "Is that significant?"

But Plo Koon offered her no response, so she simply pulled open a drawer out of the wall to remove the first version of Sabé's cybernetic arm. It was more skeletal in appearance than the one she had currently, but there was a spare limb in the case that her cybernetic limb was destroyed.

She pulled the old prosthetic arm out and held it out to the Kel Dorian master and he took it easily, examining it silently.

His long fingers probed the indents on the metal before popping open the hatch that exposed the wiring within.

"Ah," the Jedi Master said and Talik's brow furrowed, not understanding what he meant when he pulled an image-caster from within the wiring.

"I don't think that's supposed to be there," Talik said, visibly surprised as Plo Koon held it in the palm of his hand, activating the message recorded.

A second later Sabé's form appeared in wavering blue and Talik chewed on the inside of her cheek. It was strange to think how much she'd missed her master over the past year that the very image of her made her emotions well in her chest.

Sabé's holo-image smiled. "Master Plo," she said, "I know only you would think to look in my old cybernetic arm for answers, since you're the one that suggested it as a place to hide certain things when I first received my prosthetic."

The image's smile fell slightly. "I admit that my actions are a bit…drastic, especially for someone like me, but I'm not sure what other options I have." She cleared her throat. "I believe that Siri Tachi discovered the existence of a Sith Holocron on Korriban and that she was killed for it. Of course, the Dark Side is so heavy around the planet that a Jedi wouldn't likely survive coming topside…I will admit the idea terrifies me, the Sith always have. But we all have to face our fears and…maybe I just hope that the Jedi are wrong and that there is a way to come back from the Dark Side, from the Sith. It wouldn't be the first time the Jedi were proven wrong." The last words came off wry and Talik thought she sounded a bit like her old self. It made her smile. "This Sith Holocron is important and dangerous, or else Siri wouldn't have been killed, that much I know, and if the High Council knows anything about the knowledge those holocrons have, they'll know that I'm doing this to keep it out of the hands of those who could use it to disastrous effect."

Sabé's teeth gritted together in irritation. "I will sacrifice myself in the hopes that I can find it before someone else does, so I will become the thing that I fear, the thing everyone seems to think I will become anyways…but I've never been very good at following other's beliefs. I have left you alone with the way to return me to my original state.

"Normally I'd leave a subconscious thought in the back of my mind to meditate upon the completion of my task and thus awaken my true self, but I think this mission is too dangerous, too important, and I can't possibly trust myself as a Sith to do what I, as a Jedi, would do. You will need to reach the deep recesses of my mind and speak the coded phrase that you once told me: 'Allow yourself to become familiar with your new limitations and expectations.' Without your voice-print, the code is useless."

Sabé opened her mouth as if contemplating saying something further, but nothing came out, so she simply nodded seriously and canceled the connection.


"Madam Jocasta," Obi-Wan called, going through the painstaking effort of keeping his voice a respectable level of loud and the Head Librarian paused where she was cataloguing a few data-chips to spare him a grandmotherly smile.

"Knight Kenobi," she said before her eyes flitted to Anakin, "Padawan Skywalker, here for some data-texts?"

She only called Jedi by their first names if they'd spent an incredible length of time in the Jedi Archives, or if they were a member of the same Council. Sabé had always gotten a kindly smile and the use of her first name. Obi-Wan could recall when she was younger, holed up in one corner, her stylus moving over the surface of her datapad with a frown creasing her brow.

The corner was empty now.

"Are you capable of monitoring which data-files a Jedi has accessed, Madam Jocasta?" Obi-Wan inquired and she looked very surprised, after all, Jedi didn't generally share that information openly.

"Why, yes," she said, "it's a requirement in order to know which data-chips are taken out and by whom."

"I need to see Sabé Amidala's records," Obi-Wan said and her eyebrows reached high on her forehead. He knew how it sounded. If a Jedi was having their archive record searched, it wasn't good, and it was even less so if that Jedi had been presumed dead for almost a year.

But all Jocasta Nu said was "Of course" and lead them back to computer at the main desk, tapping a few keys until Sabé's image popped up on the screen. Her eyes were brown and bright, hair long and in a multitude of plaits. She wasn't smiling but Obi-Wan could see how the corners of her lips curled. The image pulled at Obi-Wan's heartstrings, especially with how little she now looked like the woman captured in that image; Carina was too cold, too harsh, too brutal to resemble Sabé Amidala in any way.

Jocasta drew up Sabé's records from what appeared to be the dawn of time, as Anakin later thought.

"Wow," Anakin said, "that's a lot of data-files," and he wasn't entirely incorrect.

It was going to be a long day, maybe ever a long week or month.


"How was she? Back when you guys were locked together?"

Anakin was thumbing through one of the data-files that Sabé had been reading up on prior to her disappearance and re-emergence as a Sith, of course that was every data-file, but he and Obi-Wan were focusing on the most recent.

"I don't see how this is going to help us find her," he'd said to Obi-Wan, struggling to say Carina when he'd known Sabé so well.

"It helps us understand what mindset she was in before she left," Obi-Wan had responded.

Anakin didn't see how it could. Sabé and Carina were clearly two very different people.

But he still looked up from the data-pad screen in order to fixate his eyes on his best friend. They were holed up in her room in her and Aayla's apartment in the Jedi Temple. The knowledge that Sabé Amidala was now known as the Sith Darth Carina had broken and it was all anyone could talk about. Hiding away was the best option for Talik, rather than listening to people degrade her old master.

Anakin was lying on her bed and Talik was sitting with her legs thrown over his, a frown set on her face.

"She wasn't half-dead or anything," Anakin said and Talik gave him a glare.

"You know that's not what I meant," she said.

"I didn't like her," Anakin said finally. "She was…I don't know, cold. I mean, Master Sabé always feels cold, but it's never a bad feeling, it's more like moonlight, you know?"

Talik didn't know, she wasn't as in tune with the Force as Anakin was, but Sabé and Anakin always joked about each other's presences, because Anakin was born under two suns and his presence was as radiant as them, whereas Sabé was born under a moon and hers was just as luminous.

"She was like ice, though." Anakin shuddered. "Like there was nothing but the cold."

Talik had seen the holo-recording of the so-called Darth Carina effectively ending lives without restraint. It was startling to think about, someone like Sabé taking lives when she was so peaceful and balanced in nature.

She knew that Sabé had killed before, it was sometimes impossible when you were undercover and Sabé had made Talik very aware of that, but she also knew that Sabé didn't like to and it settled deep in her soul in a way that made her treasure life as something precious that could be snuffed out in a single moment.

A sigh parted from her lips briefly and then she decided to turn the conversation somewhere else.

"Did you hear that Master Kit has a padawan now?" she asked instead and Anakin's eyebrows arched.

"Really?" he asked dubiously. "I thought he didn't like the idea of having a student very much."

They'd certainly never seen him in the presence of one before, well, one that wasn't the pair of them.

Talik rolled her eyes, pushing his leg with her hand as she did so. "Its Nahdar Vebb, you know that padawan whose master died in that skirmish on Dac?"

The death had been an accident involving some machinery malfunctions in the midst of a disagreement between two parties. Jedi dying wasn't exactly uncommon but it wasn't common either. Deaths like Siri Tachi and Korinth'Kel Dorma and even Qui-Gon Jinn were outliers.

"He's that Mon Calamari that was in the lightsaber training arena earlier," Talik added when she saw that Anakin wasn't really following.

"I'm not really social with other Padawans, Tali," Anakin snorted and Talik rolled her eyes.

Neither of them really were, but Talik was more approachable than Anakin, which was eternally amusing because Anakin had seen Talik at her most furious and it had been nothing short of terrifying.

"He's a little older than us," Talik informed him, which probably was the appeal to Kit; Nahdar didn't need a hand to hold. "He's training to be a Jedi Healer, too." She frowned.

"Jealous?"

"No, I know whose Master Vokara's favorite." Talik positively preened at the thought and Anakin snorted as a message showed up on his datapad from Padmé with a small beep. He grinned.

"Tell Padmé I think you're an idiot."

"I don't tell her things she already knows, Tali."

Talik grinned widely.


It was troubling, the matter with Carina, but, unfortunately, Obi-Wan wasn't as bad as he'd thought he'd be in trying to track her down.

He'd started at the hangar bay that was a few minutes outside of the town that he and Anakin had been held in and it had paid off. The owner of the seedy docking area for ships kept meticulous records despite his less reputable clientele and a figure like Talik had described had appeared on the screen wearing Mandalorian armor.

It couldn't have been anyone else.

Unfortunately it was the last lead that Obi-Wan had in awhile.

Carina was smart. She had all of Sabé's cleverness and caution and none of her restraint. She switched hyperlanes seamlessly and disappeared into hyperspace with no way to track her, unless her transport appeared anywhere within view of a holo-camera.

But Obi-Wan had his doubts.

"Find anything out?" he asked as a greeting to Anakin when he approached the table with the computer that Obi-Wan was sitting behind, replaying the image of Carina in Mandalorian armor with a blaster strapped to one thigh and a metal cylinder dangling at the opposite side of her hip. A lightsaber maybe? She would've been skilled enough to make her own, that was for certain.

"Master Sabé read up on the Dark Side and the Sith a lot," Anakin said, pulling up a seat beside his master. "I think she read every text the Archives have on them…there's some stuff on Grey Jedi and the Light Side of the Force mixed in, but it's mostly the Dark Side."

"Well, she was practically the expert on it," Obi-Wan heaved a heavy sigh and Anakin tilted his head to look at him again.

"Did you see the holo-message Master Sabé left Master Plo?" he asked him.

"Yes," Obi-Wan said. It had been shown to him first and then the High Council. Many didn't believe in its authenticity while others claimed it had been arrogance that had led Sabé to make the decisions she had; arrogance in proving that she was right.

But Obi-Wan knew her better, and he knew that arrogance had never been a part of who Sabé was. Aayla's lips had curled when she'd heard the suggestion and Kit's teeth had gritted behind his lips.

"Do think she'd really become a Sith voluntarily?" Anakin asked him, thinking of Darth Maul with his dark robes and his red face tattooed with black designs, thinking of his cranial horns and yellowed eyes.

Carina walked across the screen and Obi-Wan watched her steps, like a predator stalking their prey.

"I think that Sabé would do anything she could to keep something as dangerous as a Sith Holocron out of the hands of dangerous people," Obi-Wan said decisively.

He had to believe that was true.


Carina was tired when she arrived at the outpost on Honoghr, doubling back twice, as was customary, pulling off her helmet in order to scan her retina and punching in her specific code and pressing her right hand onto the scanner.

"Darth, how nice to see you," intoned an amused voice, "kill anyone worth mentioning?"

"Only to mention that I did kill someone," Carina said dryly.

"Kill is inaccurate," Jay-Seven said at her side, "assassinate is a more proper term."

Carina rolled her eyes and there was a rusty chuckle beyond the door that clicked open to allow both to step inside.

There were more than two hundred huntresses in House Renliss and Carina knew hardly any of them, but she didn't care, she didn't need to.

She rarely did assassinations with other members, and she was perfectly fine with that, but unfortunately for her, she was apparently very likeable to the newer recruits, which Carina thought was odd since she made no bones about how many people she'd killed or how much she'd enjoyed killing.

But they all enjoyed killing and probably just found Carina likable because she was a…curiosity. Carina doubted that any of them had ever seen someone like her before, someone who was the opposite of a Jedi, if they had even seen a Jedi before, which very few of them had.

Janildakara was young with hair a fiery orange, chopped short and wild with a prominent slave brand on her neck to indicate that she'd once been the property of the Zygerrian Slavers Guild. Her skill was in poison, something Carina couldn't help but admire.

She smirked at Carina, crossing her arms. She was easily wearing the least out of all the members Carina could see in the room, but Janildakara had always been very confident in her body. "Easy kill?"

"When is it not?" Carina arched an eyebrow, reaching around the girl in order to lodge the credit chip in the counter behind her, painfully close that she could see the exact color of violet that her eyes were. "I'd think you were trying to seduce me, 'Kara, if I didn't know you dressed like that every day."

"If only you were that special," Janildakara said in an almost off-hand manner as Carina retrieved the credit chip with the five percent filtered out that went to the House Renliss.

The outpost, for hosting so many huntresses, was very well hidden, and you'd only be able to find it if you actually knew what you were looking for.

"I hear the sisters are thinking about moving the outpost," Janildakara added as Jay-Seven moved past Carina in order to plug into House Renliss' database, his optical lights blinking as he attained new data.

Carina considered her. "Is that normal?"

Janildakara shrugged. "Every few years. They don't like to stick around in the same place for long."

Carina rolled her shoulders and called over to her security droid. "Jay, you done?"

"Yes, I am," Jay-Seven said.

"Good," Carina said coolly, "then we're heading out." She gave Janildakara a nod. "Let them know I was by to drop off their five percent."

Janildakara gave a mocking salute that made Carina roll her eyes as she situated her helmet back on her head and left the way she came.

"I calculate that our transport is being tracked by a third party every time it is seen on a holo-recording," Jay-Seven informed her once they'd reached the transport.

Carina paused. "Any idea who?"

"Impossible to be certain," the droid said, which Carina didn't find very helpful.

"Well there's always a good way to find out," Carina said, her lips twisting into a cruel smirk.

"I will not like this idea," Jay-Seven said with an air of knowing too much, and that only made her smirk widen.


The first viable lead that Obi-Wan and Anakin had had of Darth Carina's possible location occurred on the planet Kalla VII one month after they were assigned the mission, and it was only mere chance or even luck that they'd gotten a hit at all.

Still, when they'd landed Obi-Wan couldn't help but be filled with a sense of foreboding.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Anakin murmured as they moved slowly closer to the ship that was sitting on the landing pad, unassuming.

Obi-Wan did too, but he didn't realize just how proactive Darth Carina was until he heard the steady beeping of more than one thermal detonator.

"Anakin, get down!" he yelled as the explosions filled the air with smoke and fire blazed bright around them.

The explosion threw Anakin against a beam, which luckily only appeared to disorientate him, and Obi-Wan could sense the heat of the fire burning through his cloak as he ripped it off, feeling where a bruise would begin to form on his shoulder.

And amidst the fire and the smoke stepped a single figure wearing Mandalorian armor that was rusty reddish in color that almost glowed in the wake of the fire.

Darth Carina called the long silver cylinder at her hip to her hand. "Kenobi and Skywalker," the words filtered through the modulator. "You should not have followed me."

And the crimson blade extended from the top and bottom of the double-bladed lightsaber.

Obi-Wan remembered the last time he had faced a Sith with a double-bladed lightsaber.

Obi-Wan remembered the fear.

"Your deaths will be swift," Darth Carina informed them coldly, twisting the 'saber around her hand before leaping forward.

AN: Dramatic much? But, as I mentioned on tumblr, since Carina's a Sith she kind of has to be Extra™, so blowing things up to appear impressive is definitely in her repertoire.

I swear, all I'm going to be updating before classes start again are this fic and my Rogue One fic Explosions of Stardust. Expect nothing but Star Wars.

As always: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REVIEW!