Chapter Text
The temple lurched and went skidding sideways at the same time that Boba's entire HUD glitched out into static. He was effectively blind and partially deaf as he tumbled across the floor -- he couldn't yank the helmet off, either, since while-actively-falling is not a good time to remove your head protection.
From the yelping that was making it's muffled way through Boba's glitching helmet, he wasn't the only person having this problem.
Boba's fall stopped with an abrupt impact into a flat surface that made him very glad he hadn't taken off his helmet. Someone hit Boba's legs, and someone else crashed into Boba's back, which did not feel great on Boba's ribs. It probably hurt a lot more for whoever hit him, with all the pointy bits of the jetpack. The good news was that Boba religiously disabled all external switches on his gear these days, so the jetpack didn't fire and cook whoever was floundering around on Boba's thighs.
Boba's HUD finally cleared, although he'd lost both his holonet signal and his tightbeam connection to the Slave 1. He started a diagnostic running while he sat up and looked around. They'd all collided into the far wall of the temple, the plinth in the middle and the shimmering black rock hovering ominously over it seeming unaffected by the temporary shift in gravity.
Kestis was groaning behind Boba, and Han was blearily trying to get up, still half-tangled with Boba's legs. Boba shoved him off with a foot to the center of his chest.
Skywalker and Organa had crashed in a heap below them, Tano having landed a little more gracefully on their other side.
"Did the whole building fall off the cliff?" Han demanded, laying flat on his back where Boba had shoved him.
"I think we all would have died if that happened," Skywalker said as he and Organa sorted themselves out.
Boba's diagnostics were all coming up green except for his network connections, and his barometer told him they were at the same altitude they'd been at the whole time.
"I vote we don't touch that thing again," Organa said, getting to her feet and shaking out her sleeves.
"Here, here," Kestis groaned. His droid whistled in agreement.
Tano was frowning to herself, eyes closed. Communing with the Force or whatever Jedi did, Boba assumed.
"Any theories on what did happen?" Boba shoved himself to his feet and started walking towards the door to check if the Slave 1 had been damaged -- all of his other tightbeams were connecting fine between each individual piece of his armor.
"Uhhh," was all Skywalker managed.
"Seismic event?" Boba prompted, his own current theory. "Did anyone look up if this planet has seismic activity before we came here?" Boba would have been looking that up already if only he could hit the holonet. It was an oversight that he hadn't already checked, but since this temple had been here for thousands of years, supposedly, that hadn't occurred to him as a possible problem.
"No, I didn't think of that." Skywalker pulled out his comm and then frowned when it gave him an error code. "I think I broke my comm."
"My connections are down, too," Boba said. "Can anyone reach the holonet?"
Everyone else started opening their comms, all of them lighting up red. So, either everyone fried their comm chips at the same time, there was some kind of atmospheric storm disrupting comms, or this was an attack and their comms were being disrupted on purpose. Breaking Boba's comm line to Slave 1 did put a big dent in the firepower he could bring to bear, although she was autonomous enough these days to take action on her own if she noticed a threat and couldn't reach Boba. That shouldn't be common knowledge, though, so Boba wouldn't rule out the attack theory yet. He started cycling connection frequencies and protocols to see if anything old and/or non-standard might get through whatever was blocking them. He also changed his angle of approach to the temple door to come up along the side of it, giving anyone outside a narrower angle to shoot him from.
No one tried shooting him when he made it to the opening, but that suddenly became a much lower priority once he'd gotten a good look around. The Slave 1 was gone. Boba ran outside to get a better view of the plateau the temple was sitting on the edge of, rifle in hand. A clear look around the whole plateau didn't change anything -- the Slave 1 and the Millennium Falcon had both vanished. There were no craters in the ground, and a scan of the clear yellow sky showed no ships above, either. Boba toggled his viewplate settings to look for recent ship exhaust trails, but that came up totally blank, too, even though Boba thought their original trails from landing should have still been visible, if faint; possibly that filter was glitching after Boba's fall.
Boba had left the Slave 1's engines primed, so she could have easily been well on her way out of the gravity well by then and invisible from the ground. Except that he had also left her primed to kill anyone who tried to board her without Boba's explicit say-so. She could have been hacked, but that should have taken longer than they'd been in the temple for, and definitely longer than their tightbeam had been down; she should have have sent Boba an alert as soon as she got a connection attempt from anything except Boba's armor.
Boba's HUD alerted him that he was hyperventilating and his pulse was elevated. Yeah, thanks, he already knew he was panicking. He turned around and activated his jetpack, flying up to the top of the temple in a waste of fuel he would probably regret later.
There was nothing in all directions around, no trace of a ship, but also no trace of anyone else approaching to steal their ships. There were no traces of anything at all, actually. The soft, sandy dirt held footprints easily and deep -- Boba had noticed that when they first arrived and their landing struts had sunk into the stuff a good few inches. But there were no footprints visible at all except for the trail Boba had just left coming out of the temple. There wasn't so much as a trace in the dirt where the ships had been. Boba didn't know how that could be. The whole landscape looked totally untouched.
“Hey, Boba?” Han lead the little knot of Jedi out of the temple. If there had been a sniper, they would have been easy pickings. Boba himself would also have been easy pickings, highlighting himself helpfully against the sky on top of the temple. So. They could probably cross sniper off the list.
Han looked around for Boba at ground level, and then got thoroughly distracted by the ships not being there. Skywalker turned around and looked directly up at Boba, doubtless prompted by his freaky powers.
“Any clues on the ships from up there?” he called up, shading his eyes from the sun.
“Nothing,” Boba said. He saved the scan as it finished running and jumped back down to the ground, firing his jet pack as minimally as possible. “There’s not even tracks left from the landing struts. No blow marks from takeoff and landing. Not even our own footprints, except for the fresh ones we’re leaving right now.”
Organa scowled and crossed her arms while Skywalker looked back around, face pinched with worry. Han had run back to where the Falcon had been parked, searching the ground for clues, and Kestis was halfway over there, too, doing something with his droid.
Tano was still inside the temple, apparently.
"So we're stuck here until we can get back on the network?" Organa said.
"Unless your force powers give you some other means of summoning a getaway ship," Boba said. He started poking more actively at his background process that was still trying different network protocols -- it was slow going since you had to give each method a couple of minutes of trying to confirm it really wasn't working. He went through the laborious process of turning on full logging in his HUD, and then of trying to read through the logs to find any meaningful information with only the minimal text search functions he had in his helmet. He had never bothered to install a full debugging suite in his helmet because why the hell would he want to do that when he had all those tools on the Slave 1's dashboard in an interface that was a hundred time better for it.
A few of the results seemed like they were making contact with something, but they couldn't secure a connection for some reason. Boba sighed and pulled out an external comm, turning around to go back into the temple to try and find a table to sit at while he worked on the connection.
"Do you have something?" Organa asked.
"No." He gestured vaguely with his comm, "I just need a table to look any further."
"You think you can get back on the holonet?" Skywalker looked eager.
"They might have stolen our ships, but there's no way someone could take down the entire holonet," Boba said. "If it's still out there, I'll get back on it." He started walking back into the temple.
"Are you sure it's still out there, though?" Kestis had come back from uselessly wandering around the place their ships weren't anymore to uselessly trail behind Boba instead. "This is a really isolated planet, someone could have taken down all the relay satellites in this system."
"We're still in the colonies," Boba said. "They can't have taken down enough intersystem relays to totally black us out. Not to mention all the major hyperlanes in the area."
"And you can reach intersystem relays without your ship and with only a little hand-held comm?" Organa said doubtfully, her and Skywalker also trailing after Boba.
Boba rolled his eyes. "Did you think the antenna was for decoration?"
"I thought that was a rangefinder?" Skywalker said.
"Clearly you don't know much about Mandalorian armor." Mandalorians didn't believe in single-function tools, and Boba had to agree with them on that point.
Tano was still standing in the belly of the temple where Boba had last seen her, eyes still closed and arms crossed over her chest. She was frowning now, instead of being all serene Jedi bullshit, and Boba didn't know if that was a good or a bad sign.
"I'll see if Ahsoka has been able to sense anything," Skywalker said as he scurried off towards Tano. Kestis followed him, and Organa stopped in the middle of the room to frown after the three of them.
Boba kept on going, eager to loose the little Jedi entourage. He wandered through a few hallways until he found a side room with a long, stone table. The matching stone chairs were uncomfortable, but it was better than crunching himself up on the ground to type. He set his comm in front of him and projected it's holo screen and keyboard out.
He linked his comm up with the long-range signal finder in his armor and tried to hit the big relays in the nearest hyperlane. He got the same kind of indeterminate results that he had from trying to connect to the local relays. Trying to hit the Slave 1 again via her comm connections got him nothing at all, which made his throat tight. It was theoretically possible that someone had hacked her so thoroughly and so quickly that she hadn't even had time to send Boba a warning ping. But it was much more likely that she'd just been destroyed somehow. An instantaneous obliteration from orbit that she hadn't seen coming for some reason. That would also explain the minor earthquake they'd all experienced inside the temple. The only thing that didn't match up with that theory was that there wasn't a huge impact crater where Boba had left her.
Boba shook himself and forcibly stopped thinking about that. It wasn't going to help anyone to have a preemptive meltdown about his ship being destroyed.
He dug further into the logs as he tried to connect to the holonet relays again and again, parsing through unfamiliar error messages.
He didn't get long to work in peace. Organa lead Han into the room, her still frowning and him looking haggard and worried. Boba could relate.
"Any leads?" Han came to sit next to Boba, staring at the mess of log files and execution windows Boba's comm was projecting.
"Not yet," Boba said. He keyed in the next command and didn't let his shoulders tense when Organa leaned against the doorjam, blocking the only escape route from the room.
"But you are hitting something?" Han squinted at the error-riddled logs.
"Probably. Or else someone is just trapping all traffic in the area and bouncing it back to the requestor to waste their time with error messages that don't make sense."
"Is that likely?" Organa asked.
Boba shrugged, using the motion to disguise rolling out his shoulders a little. "Probably not. Seems like a lot of effort for no apparent reason."
Where one Jedi went, the others soon followed, and within a few more minutes the room was filled with everyone else who'd come on this ill-fated trip.
Tano finally had her eyes open, but she was still frowning, and she looked worried. "... know, it just doesn't make sense," she was saying to Skywalker and Kestis as they all came into the room and sat down across from Boba and Han. "It's like... if I didn't know better I'd say we traveled back in time, I could swear I can feel --" she stopped and shook her head, visibly regrouping. "But. That's impossible. It's got to be the aura of this temple, it's taking us through some kind of trial that's altering our perception of the Force."
"Is that something temples do?" Skywalker asked, looking more fascinated than worried by now.
Tano paused before answering. "Supposedly. I read about a lot of temples that were used for that sort of purpose before the Jedi Archives were destroyed. But I never got a chance to visit any myself to experience it." She shrugged, resigned. "The war was always too pressing, and we were always needed too much on the front lines."
Boba curled his lip in disgust in the privacy of his own helmet. Jedi, always so eager to take the moral high ground, only to throw it away at the first inconvenience. What was wrong with a little bit of child soldiering, after all? He didn't say anything out loud while Kestis and Skywalker pressed Tano for any more details she could remember on how Force trials were supposed to work in old Jedi temples. Organa stayed standing in the doorway, listening, and Han kept inching closer next to Boba, reading failed attempt after failed attempt off of Boba's comm projector.
That was annoying, but not worth starting a fight about. Also, Boba could sympathize with the state Han was in currently -- Boba wasn't the only one who had just lost a beloved ship that was more like a home.
After a handful more failed tries, Boba figured what the hell. Tano's Force powers suggested they had traveled back in time, Boba would try going back in time himself. For his next few attempts, he tried a handful of common galactic protocols that had been largely abandoned for one reason or another 10 years ago, then 15, then 20.
That got him through. Boba froze as his comm connected easily with the holonet which a cheerful little chime on the long-abandoned protocol. Next to him, Han let out a little whoop and did a fist pump that drew the attention of all the Jedi. When Han brought his hand down, he clapped it to Boba's shoulder and shook him a little. "How did you do it?" Han asked, elated. "Can you get the rest of us hooked up?"
"It's... just an old protocol that works," Boba said. His whole body had gone tense and his heart was pounding, like there was a predator in the room with them. They couldn't really have time traveled, could they? Everyone was still staring at Boba, and he needed them not to do that just then. He secured a tight-beam connection with all of their comms and sent the old protocol over in a package that would add it to the default connection methods for their comms. "Install that and you should all be able to get back on."
That got everyone to look down at their own comms. Boba's heart was still pounding as he cleared off the workspace of his comm and pulled down a general newsfeed instead.
It was showing him headlines from the beginning of the Clone Wars.
Boba shook his head, closed and re-opened the feed. Same result. He tried searching for today's date and got an error telling him to search for current or past dates only.
Boba's hands started to shake, because no, no, this couldn't really be happening. He opened up another news feed, and then a basic calendar, and then another news feed, and another. They all said the same thing.
Boba felt cold, and hot, and his breath was sticking in his chest. He looked over at the others, their loud, overlapping chatter an unintelligible buzz in his ears. Tano was openly crying, and Kestis was rubbing at his eyes. Han had gotten up to go hover next to them, but Organa was still blocking the doorway, staring at her own comm with blank incomprehension on her face.
For a long moment Boba saw his father's head rolling across the sands of the arena on Geonosis. He felt the sun-hot beskar in his hands and against his own forehead afterwards, while what felt like a black hole opened up in his chest, everything collapsing into it.
Boba did his best to take a deep breath, failed miserably, and tried to tune into what the others were actually saying just as Tano let out a sob and said, "He responded, he's still alive; it's real." She looked over at Skywalker, her face split in a wide grin that showed her fangs, tears still spilling openly down her face. "We can save everyone."
No. They couldn't. Boba's ears were ringing, and his breath was ragged in his throat. He couldn't be in this room with these people anymore but Organa was still blocking the door, and Boba didn't think he could walk anywhere without stumbling.
Organa may have been blocking the door, but no one was looking at him. And why should they? He didn't matter -- he'd never mattered. Not him, and not his father, either. He turned sideways so he wouldn't clang his jetpack into anything, checked one more time that no one was looking, and then slipped underneath the table. He sat on the ground, hidden from view by the heavy stone chairs, and drew his knees up to his chest. He made sure his vocodor was muted.
He'd started crying at some point, tears dripping into the shock padding on his cheekbones. The salt water was going to irritate his acid scars, some distant part of him recognized, and all of his skin creams were on the Slave 1, which apparently hadn't time traveled with him.
Boba was on Geonosis again for another few seconds, and a strangled sob forced it's way out between his teeth. He'd time traveled back over twenty five years, and he was still too late to change anything that mattered. The Clone Wars had already started. Jango Fett was already dead.
Boba buried his helmeted face between his knees and screamed.