Ileth and Borre approached the woman timidly, neither one knowing what to say to her. Borre saw that the look in the woman's eyes was much more focused than it had been when he had seen her last, but there was still something in them that told him that she was not completely recovered. Other than that, now that she held herself up on the bed, he saw for the first time how beautiful she truly was. Thus far he had seen her only in the bacta tank and lying helplessly on the bed, and neither situation had given him a true idea of what she looked like when she was fully conscious. She had grey eyes and her dark hair flowed upon her shoulders, framing the delicate features of her face, bringing out her full lips and beautifully curved cheekbones. When she smiled, her cheekbones became delightfully pronounced.
"How do you feel?" Ileth asked her when they had reached her bed. She wore a short white gown that seemed the kind people usually wore in medical facilities and made her seem very frail as she sat there in front of them.
"I don't know," the woman replied, smiling hesitantly. "Your droid told me that I'm doing surprisingly well, so that's what I'm counting on."
"Do you remember what happened to you?" Borre asked, feeling unable to keep the question inside any longer.
The woman's eyes grew larger and suddenly very uncertain. "No," she breathed. "I remember nothing. I've been trying to remember how I got here, but..."
Borre frowned. "Yesterday when you woke up, you seemed to remember something," he said. "Does the name Dadanna system say anything to you?"
The woman's eyes narrowed and she frowned to herself for a while. Then she looked back at Borre and Ileth and shook her head. "I feel that I've heard it somewhere before, but I cannot remember anything else."
Ileth crouched in front of her and looked into her eyes. "What about your name?" he asked. "Can you remember your name?"
The woman smiled. "That I remember. My name is Cait."
Borre tried to keep himself from frowning. The woman was clearly happy to provide them with her name, but she had given them only her first name and did not seem to realise that something was missing.
"My name is Ileth Kolen," Ileth said. "And this is Jedi Borre Daigeil."
There were signs of sudden alarm on Cait's face as she turned to look at Borre again. "Jedi?" she said, as if tasting the word.
"Yes," Ileth contined. "A Jedi, like we think you are as well."
The woman turned back to Ileth and her eyes narrowed for a brief moment. "What do you mean by that?" she asked sharply.
Ileth gave Borre a quick glance and then turned to look at the medical droid. "Two-Onebee, can you give us a view of the docking bay on that holoviewer over there?"
Moments later a view from the docking by filled the air two metres from Cait's bed and the view zoomed on the Jedi starfighter in the corner. Borre remained silent now, deep in his thoughts, and settled on observing the woman's reactions to what she was being told. He had a nagging suspicion that she remembered more than she let them know, but he had no way of knowing for sure. So, he settled on watching her as Ileth told her everything that they knew about her.
"We believe that you used to fly that ship, Cait," Ileth said, his voice hesitant as he tried to come to terms with the concept of the past. "Does it remind you of anything?"
The woman squinted as she looked at the image of the ship, then shook her head. "No, I don't remember ever seeing that ship before."
Borre found himself believing her, which was something he had not expected. Then, before Ileth could ask her anything more, the woman turned her eyes to Borre.
"I've seen you before," she said, her frown deepening.
Borre nodded. "Yes, we saw yesterday when you first woke up," he said.
The woman shook her head. "No, before that," she said slowly and Borre felt shivers running down his back. "I think I've seen you before that," she repeated.
"You cannot have," he said. "We found you in a stasis box where you have spent almost the last forty years. I wasn't even born then."
The woman seemed taken aback and her eyes widened. For a moment, her mouth moved but no sound came out. "Forty?" she gasped at last. "Forty years? But that means that..." Her voice faded away.
Borre nodded. "It's true. I'm sorry, but it is. We've been trying to find out what happened to you and the people you were travelling with, but it seems that you are the only one who can tell us that."
Cait shook her head turning away from them and pulling the bed sheet over her feet. "I think I want to be alone," she said. "Leave me alone."
Borre and Ileth fell silent and left the room.
As they walked away from the medical bay in silence, Borre wondered how it must feel to have practically jumped forty years in time, realising that everything and everyone that one had once known was now a thing in the past. Of course, Cait was still saved the details of her past that she would later start to miss. She had probably started to suspect that she had once been a Jedi when Ileth had shown her the holoview of the Jedi starfighter in the docking bay, but even that must have seemed very distant to her. Still, Borre hoped that the memory would give her some peace as it at least let her know where she was supposed to stand in the universe.
* * *
The next time Borre saw her, later that same day, Cait was sitting on a chair pulled beside the holoviewer that they had used on their last visit to show her the starfighter. The Two-Onebee droid had contacted Ileth and told him that their patient had been up and about again for a while and seemed to have made tremendous progress. Ileth had called Borre and asked him to go and see the woman, since he did not have the time to spare. When Borre walked to her, he noticed that she seemed to be browsing through some miscellaneous files of the New Republic's history. She did not seem to be reading or listening to any of the descriptions, but only looked at the images.
When she noticed his presence, she looked up and said, "So much has happened."
Borre gave her his kindest smile. "So you are beginning to remember?" he asked.
Cait nodded. "Yes, I remember some general events, like the Clone Wars and the great battles. I remember Palpatine becoming the emperor and I remember how he took control of the entire known galaxy. But," she added, "I cannot remember anything about myself. It is as if all my memories are like these files on these datacards: mere images with explanations that mean so little, in the end."
"Much has happened since the days of the Empire," Borre said. "As far as we have been able to find out, you were put in a stasis box in the early days of the Empire, so you have missed the height of Emperor Palpatine's power, as well as the height of his cruelty and his final collapse and the birth of the New Republic."
Cait nodded. "Yes, I've been studying these files for the past three hours and I still cannot believe how I could have missed all this. It is as if I have reborn and arrived to a completely new world where nothing is as it used to be."
Borre smiled. "I'm sorry about that," he said, "but you seem to be doing quite well in this new world of ours." He indicated the datacards that she had been studying.
Cait shook her head. "I hope that it will continue to be so." Then she seemed to get a grip of herself and she turned to look at him intently. "I remember something else now," she said.
Borre bit his lower lip and crouched to meet her eyes at her own level. "What is it?" he asked.
The woman smiled weakly. "I remember the Jedi," she said. "I remember images of them, I remember their faces."
"I like the sound of that," Borre said. "You are growing nearer to your own past, then."
"You mean me being a Jedi?" Cait asked, her expression showing her disbelief.
Borre nodded. "That is what I mean. Even if the world that you knew has changed much over the past forty years, there's still need for the Jedi. When you start remembering more about your past and your ability to touch the Force, I'm sure everything will be clear to you."
"And, until then, this will all be just a dream," Cait said, smiling gloomily.
"That's not so," Borre said. "This is only a phase that will pass, surely, but I think it is a necessary phase. If you were to remember everything too quickly, it might damage your mind and stop this progress that we have seen here."
The woman shrugged. "I guess you are right," she said. "But I still hope that there was something here that might help me remember more. I saw that Jedi starfighter that your friend, Ileth, showed me and it meant nothing to me. I recognised the ship type, of course, but, other than that, it gave me nothing." She turned to look at him seriously. "It did not make me remember being a Jedi," she finished.
Borre frowned. "Well, the Jedi starfighters were no personal vessels for the Jedi. They just took which ever happened to be free at the moment to go wherever they needed to. Most often, they merely hitched on other starships, if their destination happened to be on a travelled route." Then, after a brief pause, he made his decision and reached into his shoulder bag and pulled something out. He handed it towards her. "I hope this will help you some more," he said. "We found it in the stasis box by your side and we believe that it is yours."
The weight of the lightsaber did not seem to come to the woman unexpectedly and her fingers curled around the handle as if they had done so many times before. The woman gasped and stared at the weapon and her hand that held it. Then, suddenly, she shuddered and her eyes grew moist. Borre began to worry about her and he reached out to take the weapon away from her, but she brushed him away and turned the chair away from him. For a moment, he stared at her back and listened to her breathing, but then decided that it would be better to leave her alone for a while, to come to grips with what she was remembering. His questions might wait until later.
* * *
That night, Borre woke up to the alarm of his personal comlink. He had not given the frequency to anyone aboard the Distal Talon and he knew immediately that the alarm came from his A-Wing. Either someone was trying to contact him through the fighter's communication equipment, or the security measures that he had set on his ship had been tampered with. He got up quickly and picked up his clothes and the shoulder bag. He pulled the clothes on even as he was running through the station's corridors towards the docking bay.
As he got closer to the docking bay, he reached out and attempted to sense if there was anyone in the docking bay already. It was night-time, so he did not expect to sense anyone, unless the alarm that he had received had been caused by someone trying to enter his fighter.
Almost before he had fully opened himself to the Force, he sensed anger, confusion and fear, all coming from a single conscious mind. And the sensations all came from the docking bay. Hurrying his steps, and wondering what could have happened, Borre crossed the last few metres of the connecting corridor and arrived to the docking bay.
All the lights in the docking bay were still on their full power and not dimmed down as they had been in the crew's sleeping quarters and Borre saw Cait immediately. She was crouching on top of his ship, trying uselessly to open the cockpit canopy. Then, before Borre could call out to her, she suddenly turned and looked at him as he slowed down and walked the rest of the way to her.
"I need to get away from here," Cait said, breathing hard. From close up, Borre could see that she had been crying.
"Why do you think that, Cait?" he asked her. "You are amongst friends in here. We only want to help you."
"No," the woman said, her whole body shaking with emotion. Borre could see and feel that she was confused and afraid. Very afraid and very confused, in fact. "I don't belong here."
Borre hesitated, wondering what had happened. He had been hoping that Cait would remember her past gradually, so that she could get used to it while she simultaneously learned to function in a completely new world. Now, sensing the utter confusion from her, he was afraid that she had come too far, too quickly. "Have you remembered something else of what happened?" he asked, keeping his voice soothing.
Cait smiled suddenly; a sickened, forlorn smile. "I did." She dug into her pocket - she had apparently found a light grey jacket somewhere but she still did not have any proper trousers, just the hem of the medbay gown - with her right hand and brought out the lightsaber that Borre had given to her. Borre tried make sense of Cait's emotions while he held her gaze as she turned fully towards him, still crouching. "I killed them," she announced. "I killed them all." There were fresh tears in her eyes.
Borre felt a sudden chill inside and took a couple steps backwards, feeling an urge to get away from the woman quickly. The emotions that he was sensing from her were intensifying. Then he realised that what he sensed was still the confusion and fear. There was nothing to indicate that she meant to kill him.
But the woman had already seen him reel away from her. "Yes, I killed them all in cold blood, for this is what I am," Cait announced, standing up on the wing of the A-Wing. She held her right hand in front of her body and ignited the lightsaber.
Reeling away from the eerily red glow of her weapon, Borre instinctively unslung his shoulder bag and dug out his own lightsaber. His eyes were fixed on the weapon in Cait's hand and he tried desperately to form a thought in his mind. He had never seen a red blade before in his life. He knew only the stories of such. Only the blades of those who had been lured by the dark side of the Force were supposed to be red, as far as he had understood from Jedi Master Skywalker's teachings. It had something to do with the process of constructing the saber, where the Jedi let the Force flow through it, making the weapon his own. The dark side of the Force affected any diamonds and crystals inside a half-constructed weapon so that the blade came out red when it was first turned on.
And if Cait was holding a lightsaber with a red blade, it could only mean that she had constructed the blade under the influence of the dark side. And that meant that she was his enemy.
Borre sought reassurance from the feel of his own weapon that he now held in his left hand. Unlike the little over twenty-centimetre long handle that Cait's saber had, Borre's weapon was almost twice as long and the metallic handle had been covered with the same green leather that his boots had been made of. And, also unlike Cait's lightsaber, Borre's weapon was not ignited.
"You see now what I am, Jedi?" the woman standing on his fighter cried out, her voice anguished. "I killed all those people in cold blood and now I need to get out of here, so tell me how to get into this ship, or I don't know what I'll do." With the words, Cait jumped off the fighter's wing, clearly using the Force to land lightly on the deck of the docking bay, and started moving towards him.
Borre retreated, trying to focus on what she was saying. He could see that she was very confused and her anguish told him that she was struggling within with something dark from her past, but he could not get a clear enough reading of her to understand everything that was going through her. Her emotions seemed to him as a kettle boiling over.
"I remember that served the Emperor and that I considered him my master," Cait said as she approached him, her chest heaving with emotion. "I remember the triumph I felt when he gave me that Jedi starfighter and told me to come here to Dadanna system, to meet with those whom I had once considered friends and betray them."
"Is that all you remember, Cait?" Borre asked, trying to figure out a way out of the situation.
"Isn't that enough?" Cait cried out before he had time to form a single useful thought. "I remember being a killer, is that not enough?" With a sudden surge of both emotion and movement, she jumped forward, slashing towards him with her blade.
Borre stepped back, igniting his own weapon to block the swing. He caught it just in time. The red and the green blades met with an electric hum and crackle, but Cait came on and attacked again, bringing her weapon around almost too quickly for Borre to block the next swing. Still, he could not make himself fight back. He merely blocked and evaded the attacks that the woman rained upon him, one after the other. He did not want to believe that she was truly a lost cause and he wondered if he was a fool for that. But he also knew that the Force had brought him here for a specific purpose and that it could not have been simply to kill a woman who would have died soon even without his intervention.
"So you attacked the Corellian freighter alone?" Borre asked, keeping his voice as calm as he could while he defended himself. The emotions that he felt in her were all very confused, drowned in anguish and fear, and he hoped that if he made her explain herself and her memories to him, she might find a way through them. "You caused all that destruction by yourself?"
"No," Cait said hesitantly, in-between her strikes, "I had help. It was my job simply to dock with the Corellian freighter and stop it from jumping out of the system before the emperor's gunship could follow me in and finish the Jedi. But when I entered the ship, I saw that the freighter's pilot had awakened one of the Jedi that he was smuggling. I remember how I managed to fool him, at first, but then the emperor's gunship jumped into the system and he realised what I had done and whom I served. I killed the pilot immediately, of course, but I could not inform the gunship crew that I had dealt with him and thus they attacked. I and the Jedi fought then, and I beat him down and killed him in cold blood. And when I killed him, I felt only satisfaction for the fact that I had served my master well."
Her emotions burning with pure pain, Cait renewed her attacks, moving even faster than she had before and soon Borre realised that he was not backing up and defending himself so much out of choice than out of necessity. He realised that he would have to make his decision about the woman quickly and either defend himself properly or let her kill him. He backed up further, wondering how Cait had recovered from her stasis and all the damage that she had suffered so quickly and how she had become so strong in the first place.
Of course, he remembered the old teachings that the dark side was stronger and it gave more, and more quickly, than the light side, but he doubted that that was the case here. He sensed that Cait was driven more by her desperation than she was by her skills or the dark side. It was also clear to him that Cait was strong in the Force, much stronger than many Jedi apprentices at the new academy. He suspected that some part of her fast recovery could be explained by her knowledge of the old Jedi healing trance that few of the new Jedi had been able to master. Distracted by these thoughts, Borre continued backing up from Cait's unrelenting attacks. He found that they were circling the docking bay with him moving backwards as the woman came at him with astounding strength and vigour.
"You must have known where to find those Jedi that you killed," he said, realising that he was breathing rather hard. "How did that happen? Who betrayed them?"
The woman laughed; her voice shrill with madness. "I betrayed them, Jedi. Don't you understand? I betrayed them. The Jedi I killed I had known for years. We had shared voyages together as friends. But when I faced the Emperor, he merely had to ask me where they were and I told him, feeling joy for being able to help him. And when he asked me to kill them for him, I promised to do so without hesitation."
Borre jumped and rolled backwards, avoiding another deadly barrage only by the width of a hair. "So, the emperor had captured you and turned you on his side, on the dark side?" he asked even as he jumped back onto his feet. Sweat trickled on his forehead and he had to wipe it away with his free hand.
"Yes," the woman cried out, her voice full of anguish, and she came at him again, jumping high into the air and lashing at him with her red lightsaber even as she descended.
Borre did not need to hear more. He had made his decision. Purposefully, he jumped away from her again and then stood still, as Cait eyed him warily, taking a hold of his lightsaber with his both hands. "You are missing one very important point here, Cait," he said and activated the second blade of his weapon. Both of the blades were green. He knew that he had to be able to focus the woman, to drive past the roiling emotions and confusion that threatened to consume her, if he was going to make her listen to him and to understand what he was saying.
As the woman stopped to stare at the two-bladed lightsaber that he held as if it was a long fighting staff, Borre ran towards her and landed a blow after a blow at her, all of which she managed to block but only barely. It was her turn to retreat now and she did so quickly. But even as she did so, Borre saw and felt that something in her was changing. Instead of feeling more anguish and more fear, as she had when she had been attacking him, the woman started to radiate calm and composure, both of which she needed in order to be able to defend herself properly. She also seemed to lose her taste for the fight, as if it had been her anguish and her memories that she had been battling against, not him, and her movements grew less precise, less deadly.
Borre had predicted both of her reactions even before he had started his assault. He had sensed that she had lacked the hate and fury that should have been her strongest emotions when attacking him and he had realised that she had not really been battling him, but merely her memories and the anguish that and fear they made her feel. That she now lost that anguish and fear, concentrating to keep herself alive, made Borre more than certain that he now understood the woman, at least enough to start helping her.
"And what is that?" she asked finally, when he gave her a moment to recover. He knew now why the Force had guided him this far and he knew that it was not his responsibility to kill this woman. She would kill herself, if it came to that, but before that he would give her every chance that he could to choose otherwise.
"You are not angry now," Borre said and attacked again, feeling almost joyous. "And you are not drawing your power from the dark side."
"What are you saying?" the woman asked, stopping suddenly still.
Borre stopped his last attack just in time not to kill the woman and took a step backwards before he assumed his guard position with the two-bladed lightsaber held levelly in front of him. "You are not a servant of the dark side, Cait. Not now. Not this time. Don't you feel it? If the dark side was in you, you'd have drawn strength from it when I attacked you. You would have done all that you could to kill me."
"No," the woman said, looking at him confusedly. "I killed all those people. I must serve the dark side."
Borre shook his head. "Perhaps you did, once. But it is different now. I can see and feel you anguishing over what you remember doing, but I do not see you gloating as you would do if you truly served the dark side. You fought me only to make those bad memories go away, which is also why you tried to get into my ship and run away in the first place."
"But what can I do?" she asked desperately. "I don't want to remember these things. I don't want to carry these memories in me, how I killed those whom I had once loved. Murdered them by cutting the power from one and smashed the other stasis box with my friends still inside them. They died without ever knowing about it. You cannot make those memories, or my deeds go away."
"I cannot change what has happened," Borre said, still holding his lightsaber in front of him. Even though he felt that he was doing the right thing, he could not find it in himself to trust Cait before she had turned off her own weapon. "But I can tell you that there is a way out of this. I can take you to the new Jedi academy. There are others amongst us who have once succumbed to the dark side but have returned. You'd be among people who understand what's happened to you."
Cait swallowed and raised her right hand, turning off her lightsaber and offering it to Borre. "Take this, please. I don't know what will happen to me next, but I don't want that, or any other weapon, near to me before I'm sure of who I am."
Borre put away his own lightsaber and stepped forward to take the weapon that the woman was holding. He half expected her to ignite it at the last moment and attempt to attack him again, but she merely held the weapon until he took if from her. Then she collapsed onto the floor and started crying.
Borre was about to go to her and try to console her, but someone else beat him to it. Aiie Eodo rushed past him and knelt by the other woman, taking her into her arms. Borre frowned, having not realised that there had been someone else in the cargo bay with him and Cait. He had focussed all his attention to the other Jedi and had not realised what was going on around himself. He turned to look towards the other end of the bay and saw that there were several others standing near to the openings that led to the connecting corridors. With a sigh, he put away the small lightsaber that Cait had given back to him.
* * *
For the next three days Borre remained with Cait as she gradually remembered more details of what she had done. She still seemed to remember very little of her meeting with Emperor Palpatine and what he had done to turn her against the Jedi order, but the grief that she felt for her actions made Borre more and more certain that there was no danger of her trying to attack him, or anyone else on the mining station. Still, he felt reluctant to leave her alone for long periods of time and he arranged her to have quarters close to his when Two-Onebee deemed her healthy enough to leave the medbay.
Borre learned from Cait that when she had killed the Jedi and the pilot aboard the Corellian freighter, the ship had lost all its communications and manoeuvrability in the battle against the gunship. Hearing her describe the battle and how the Corellian freighter had been captured in the gas giant's atmosphere and sucked in while the gunship had left the system, Borre started to suspect that Cait had never been intended to survive her mission. The fact that there had still been one working stasis box aboard the ship was a miracle and the fact that it had worked for nearly forty years was even a greater one. Borre told Cait about his suspicions, trying to make her believe that the Emperor must have used some dark side power to lay a Compulsion on her and that it might be that she had never really joined the dark side after all. He did not know if it was merely wishful thinking, but he hoped that another point of view might help Cait come to terms with her past. His speculations did little to help the woman, however. She did not care if she had been serving the dark side willingly or been merely a puppet; her friends had been killed by her in either case.
Coupled with the fact that Cait started remembering the rest of her life, her other friends who were probably all very old or dead now, Borre started to realise that he did not have what it took to help her over all the strain that she felt. She needed to cope with too many losses at the same time. Her only hope was to get to the Jedi academy to meet the older and more experienced Jedi who might have the skills to help her. And even if they lacked the skills, there would still be more people with whom Cait would be able to talk with - more people to listen to and comfort her.
* * *
"Are you sure you can trust her enough to take her to your academy?" Ileth Kolen asked him. "As far as I understand she is still remembering stuff from her past. What if she suddenly remembers the reason she turned to the dark side in the first place while you are still making your way to Yavin 4? She could kill you in your sleep."
Borre shook his head. "I will keep an eye on her, and make sure that she gets all the way to the academy where she can be helped. As it is, I think she's been given a new chance to choose the light side, and I will do all that I can to help her stay in the right path. Now, she remembered her evil deeds and was frightened and upset by them and I think it will give her the strength to oppose the dark side when she starts remembering other things from her past. I got the feeling from her that she doesn't really remember how the emperor turned her against her old companions, she just remembers doing so. Now, since she had the chance to remember and be horrified of her actions, she will be stronger when she recalls the temptation that turned her in the first place."
"But how can she ever live with her memories, even if she can be saved?" Aiie asked, her expression showing worry. She was sitting on a chair beside Ileth Kolen, but, again, they avoided touching each other. At the other tables in the mess hall there were several others of the mining station's crew that Borre had come to know, at least a little, during his visit, including the Rodian pilot and the strange Qalaquan scientist.
"I don't know," Borre said. "I only know that others have gone through what she has - meaning the visit on the dark side - and come back. There are Jedi out there who have done much worse deeds in their past than Cait has. In fact, if I understood correctly, she was seduced to the dark side by the emperor, after she had been caught by his servants, and made to betray her friends. The murders were awful, of course, but they are ancient history now. The Jedi who died at her hands would probably have been captured anyway, sooner or later. The emperor would have tortured Cait until she betrayed them with her words, if not her deeds.
"And, even more than Cait needs our academy to survive, the academy will need her. As it is, we have lost much of what was once known and there are Jedi skills that we know only the names of, Jedi history that we know only from children's fables and other obscure sources. Maybe she can give us real information about what it once meant to be a Jedi." Borre smiled as he finished, knowing deep inside that this was what the Force had intended when it had guided him here. This was what it had wanted accomplished. There was no greater joy than came from serving the Force.
"What about the command module of the old Corellian freighter, and the Jedi starfighter?" Tae Saal asked after a short silence. "What should we do with them? The starfighter still needs much work before anyone can be trusted to fly it, and I'm not sure what anyone will want to be done with the command module."
"You can do with the command module whatever you want to, even install a hyperdrive to it and make a small shuttle out of it, if you want to. It's yours, as far as I'm concerned, by the right of the salvager. The Jedi starfighter I'd like to get to Yavin 4 at some point when you have repaired it. The academy will pay good money for it and I'd not like to see it fall into wrong hands."
Tae laughed. "I will fly it there myself. I will find a way to repair the booster ring, or find a hyperdrive that is small enough to be installed on that fighter, and I will bring it to Yavin 4 personally."
"I'll be looking forward to it," Borre said laughing.
It was three hours after that that the shuttle from Yavin 4 arrived to the Distal Talon. Aboard it was one of the other Jedi from the academy who would be flying the A-Wing back home while Borre and Cait boarded the shuttle and prepared for their long journey. While standing at the door of the shuttle, Borre turned back to look at the people who had gathered there to see them off and he caught Aiie Eodo looking at him again, with a secret smile on her face. He returned her smile and wondered if he would ever see her again. Then, turning back to Cait, who smiled shyly and waved her hand to the others, he took her inside and sealed the shuttle's door.
It was time to go home. He knew that his A-Wing would be home several days before he and Cait would arrive to the Jedi academy, but he was hopeful that the few extra days that he and Cait would spent together aboard the shuttle, travelling through hyperspace, would give them enough time to talk and for him to begin the healing that would be continued at the academy. As he sat down on the pilot's seat and prepared for the lift-off, he realised that it would also give him time to prepare Cait to encounter a world that was much different from the one she knew from the days of the early Empire. And, Borre admitted to himself, there was something that he might also gain from Cait. After all, she was a beautiful woman, and he did not fail to notice that a few days spent together aboard a cramped shuttle would give him a perfect opportunity to start to know her better, and perhaps to learn something of the world that she came from.
The end (for the time being)
Best viewed with Opera/Mozilla browsers!
