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There was something about the return trip to Kamino that offered Hunter a sense of comfort. It wasn’t the sterile halls or crowded dining area, and it definitely wasn’t the Kaminoans themselves. No, rather, it was the unchangingness their homeworld brought with each visit that served as a sort of reassurance to the commander.
Orders to wipe out the Jedi, the dismantling of the Republic — yet Kamino remained plain, old, sterile, blank Kamino. Even with the start of a new Empire and its strange, nervous connotations, walking the halls with his squad was simple. Familiar.
The child trailing them from behind, however, was new.
Hunter knew little about children, rarely ever interacted with them, really. He’d seen them from afar, held a few, but his contact was limited to battlefields and war zones. This child, a small girl with unruly blonde hair, was different. Small, fragile, definitely not supposed to be there.
The child does not speak as Clone Force 99 notices her— are kids that small even supposed to speak?— and simply stares up at the five with wide brown eyes that look uncannily familiar.
“What’s that?” Wrecker grumbles, to which Tech responds right away, as he always does. Infant human female, origins… uncertain.
“What’s a kid doing here?” Echo mutters behind him, and Hunter can’t help but ask the same question as he approaches the child cautiously.
This close, she stands just below his waist. He crouches and falters, not sure what to say. The child continues to stare, and Hunter couldn’t help but feel a pang of endearment at the girl's small features.
She was tiny. Which made him ask again, Why the hell is this kid on Kamino? She didn’t look like a cadet, and typical clones were engineered to age immediately to the proper maturity level for combat training.
As if summoned, a Kaminoan— a scientist Hunter assumes from their dress— approaches, its black eyes focusing on the group.
“My apologies,” her voice is as calm as ever as her gaze drifts from Hunter's face to the child as she places a long white hand on the girl's small shoulder. “It appears my assistant's curiosity has led her to wander.”
“Assistant?” Hunter asks, eyebrow raised. The child couldn’t have been no more than two years old. The Kaminoan brought her gaze up to meet Hunter. “This is Omega. She is in training to be my medical assistant.”
There was a nagging feeling in Hunter's gut, questions circulating in his mind as the Kaminoan offered her apologies and, just as quickly as she arrived, led the child away.
As the pair left, the small girl turned to look back at the group, her tiny face now sporting a small frown. The sight of which sent a strange sensation into Hunter's chest, only for it to disappear as Wrecker slapped his hand on his back cheerfully.
Hunter shakes his head as the mood between the five shifts from the sudden appearance and disappearance of the small girl. “This day keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
…
She appears again, at their table in the canteen, as silent as their first encounter. Despite his enhancements, Hunter almost jumps at her sudden appearance by his side, a stealthiness he contributed to her size.
He glanced around the table at his brothers, all of whom looked just as perplexed as the girl reached a tiny fist to tug at Hunter’s arm.
“Eh, hello again.” He starts, realizing his pleading glances for what to do directed at his squad were futile. He mustered up the most friendly voice he could and leaned slightly so that his words could be heard over the noises of the cafeteria. “Omega, right? Wandered off again, have you?”
He didn’t know how he was expecting her to answer, but he most definitely did not expect her small arms to reach upwards with the small request of “Up”. It was the first word he’d heard her speak, and not an answer to his question but a command no less. Hunter didn’t know what he’d been thinking, but he felt a compulsion to comply with the child’s demands and lift her up onto the bench. He refrained from it, however, and turned to look at the group.
“Ignore her,” Crosshair grumbled, showing more interest in his tray of bland rations.
“Is she hungry?” Echo suggests, leaning forward slightly to get a better look at Omega from across the table. “Maybe she wants something to eat.” Echo offers the child a small smile from where she stands, still tugging at Hunter's arm. He offers her a little wave with his organic hand, and to Hunter's astonishment, she raises hers and offers the clone a small wave in return. “Are you hungry, Ad’ika?”
If the child, Omega, was going to respond, she was cut short by the call of her name from across the canteen. It was the same Kaminoan from before, who’d manage to project her soft voice across such a loud space to grab the attention of the small child. Omega hesitated, looking back at the table and up at Hunter before begrudgingly letting go of his arm and trudging towards the scientist who waited at the cafeteria’s entrance, a stern look on her face.
“Fascinating.” Tech says, more to himself than anyone else. Hunter was not sure what part of the interaction he found fascinating, but he’d most likely have to agree with it.
———
Echo hated Kamino.
He hated the sterile white walls and floors and the fluorescent lights that made you nauseous if you looked too long. He hated the pervasive smell of antiseptic cleaners that clung in the air and the hum of medical equipment always ringing through the walls.
He hated what it reminded him of. Of his brothers— the ones from before. It reminds him of Fives. And it reminds him of Skako Minor.
He doesn’t like to dwell on that part of his hatred, though.
For now, he focuses on the general discomfort of how bright and bleak his surroundings are.
Echo has a feeling the child hates it too, despite her limited vocabulary. Her presence was a sort of breath of fresh air from their return to Kamino, something new and curious.
The child, Omega, was a small thing. Wandering the halls with not a look of boredom or stoicism as the other clones who marched past, but with wide eyes and a juvenile sense of pure delight that fascinates him.
Such a sense of wonder should not be contained to a single place, and certainly not a place like Tipoca City.
…
“Why do you think she’s here?” Wrecker asks unprompted. The group was locked in the brig, a thing that was surprisingly new for them.
Crosshair was not with them.
He hadn’t dismissed their mission with such ease as the others had. His absence is strange, as if the missing limb of a group that made up a whole being. So many changes since they’d first returned, all within such a short span of time.
Echo is not surprised that Wrecker's thoughts linger on the girl after everything that has happened. His own mind strayed constantly to the small girl and her curious presence and her familiar brown eyes.
He can imagine the others were wondering the same question.
Hunter shakes his head, eyes on the guards visible through the clear shield of the cell. “The scientist said she’s training to be her medical assistant.”
That’s what the Kaminoan—Nala Se, Tech informed them— had told the group during their first encounter. Such a reason didn’t fully sit right within Echo. He furrows his brows in contemplation. “Not even cadets start training that young.”
It was true— Echo himself had started his training as a cadet at the physical age of roughly 10 or 11, and from that point onwards, they were engineered to grow at an exponential rate to shove more soldiers to the front lines as soon as possible. And while Echo certainly didn’t consider himself a pediatric expert, Omega was nowhere near that level of development. To say she was too young to familiarize herself with medical equipment, as Nala Se suggested, would be an understatement— the girl could barely walk on her own.
Echo's gaze drifts to Tech because if anyone would know the answers to such questions, it would be him. It was clear he wasn’t the only one, as the faces of his other brothers all turned expectantly towards the goggled clone. Tech, in the midst of contemplating how to escape the room they were trapped in, raises his eyes to find the others staring at him. “Well…” He starts, seemingly at a loss for words. Tech pauses for a moment to think before speaking again. “I theorize her purpose is to provide the Kaminoans a test subject for medical trials.”
The faint feeling of unease in Echos' gut grew to a sharp feeling in his chest as Hunter straightened beside him and asked, “What do you mean? Why would you think that?”
Tech cleared his throat uneasily, glancing down out to the hall. “There was a small puncture mark on her neck, right above her collarbone, when she joined us in the dining area.”
That feeling again, that nausea, that protectiveness struck Echo as Tech spoke, as well as a vile feeling of knowing exactly what Tech was implying. Those puncture marks he spoke of, Echo had not seen them in the cafeteria as Tech had, yet he could picture them clearly. They were the same ones that marked what parts of his body remained human.
To go under the knife was to be ripped open and exposed to a group of strangers. Echo was all too familiar with the vulnerability of examination tables and medical procedures, all to slice him open and stitch him up, replace an organic part of him with steel. It was a helpless, cold, and lonely place— one he’d been trapped in for what felt like decades before his brothers saved him. Echo thought of the girl again. Such a small life form who'd barely begun to live, receiving such a treatment as he did, the thought was enough to nearly render him ill.
Echo had never felt such a range of emotions before, such disgust and fear and protectiveness towards a being that wasn’t part of his squad. His eyes scanned the faces of his brothers, all of which conveyed the same mix of emotions he felt. Wrecker stuttered, vocalizing the same feeling of disturbed astonishment that rippled in his chest. “But she’s so small!”
Tech contemplates for a moment, shaking his head slightly as if carrying on a discussion in his head. He straightens slightly and simply says, “Kaminoans can be cruel.”
Echo couldn’t help but scoff at such vast understatement.
———
The child was tiny. Obviously.
Yet it was something that Wrecker couldn’t seem to wrap around his head, even after Tech’s lecture on the growth rates of human children. To Wrecker, practically everyone was small in comparison, but her height made him feel otherworldly— like a giant from folktales his brothers used to share as cadets. It didn’t make any sense to him. Never had Wrecker encountered such a small being, something so new and tiny and so easily breakable that Wrecker feared she’d be crushed in the halls by a passing crowd.
She was little, he was not. Wrecker was large and loud and hulking. Omega was small and quiet and moved in a silent, unpracticed step that reminded him of a newborn loth cat.
Her presence on Kamino— well, that was a whole other mystery. While Wrecker was certainly not the smartest member of the team, he had quickly deduced the Kaminoans' reasoning for Omega being there as bantha shit.
…
They end up escaping the brig. Such a small room would never have held them down for too long anyway, even when down a member.
Ever aggressive, Wrecker’s first instinct was to grab the kid by any means possible. An instinct that the others seem to share, as they rush through the corridors in escape. They find her, thankfully, having presumably wandered off again. Wrecker wonders if this would be considered kidnapping, but if puncture wounds and isolation were this kid’s home, then maybe it didn’t matter.
Leaving Kamino was nothing new to Wrecker. It wasn’t to any of them. They were soldiers after all.
Kamino was the place of in-betweens. Where they rested after completing missions and awaited new ones to start. So yes, Wrecker was used to leaving his home, because there was always a time they’d come back.
This time was different.
This time, there was no coming back.
This time, their commander held an infant in his arms as they ran to their ship.
This time, Crosshair shot at them rather than with them.
“All this for a child?” The sharpshooter sneered. It was a question that hadn’t even crossed Wreckers' mind during the entirety of their escape. Because yes, in theory, this was all for a child. A child they barely knew. A child they'd met yesterday, but had somehow managed to grab hold of the squad's senses and shift their priorities to her.
It was strange, but what was stranger to the larger clone was how Crosshair had been so untouched by these instincts.
She’s huddled somewhere aboard the ship with Tech, out of the line of fire directed at them by their own brother.
When he gets shot, the hit barely registers with the adrenaline pumping through his veins.
Wrecker could always appreciate a good fight. In fact, more times than not, his brothers were the ones who’d have to drag him from the inviting fists or drawn blasters of others, the desire to ruffle a few feathers and alleviate his restlessness all too welcoming.
However, Wrecker felt no joy in this fight. Rather, it was the pooling sense of dread in his stomach that filled him as he ran from Crosshair's aim and onto the ship, ducking at stray blaster fire as they rose from the landing platform.
———
There had been a pull, Tech realized, when he first encountered the child in the sterile halls of Kamino. It was an odd sensation—a reflexive spark of inquiry, like the thrill of discovering a new species or an unclassified phenomenon demanding immediate documentation.
Tech had felt it before; after all, he recorded everything. Every observation, every anomaly, every fleeting thought had its place in his data logs. His brothers had once mocked his meticulousness—until it proved invaluable on missions.
Omega’s file was created exactly ten minutes after their first meeting.
The girl fascinated him in ways that resisted classification. His brothers were curious too, though their interest seemed instinctive, protective. Tech’s, however, was academic—at least at first. It compelled him to scour Kaminoan databases and research files with the same fervour he reserved for mission-critical objectives. He catalogued every observation he could: her gait, every attempt at speech through unpracticed vocal cords, the way her small hands brushed every surface as if trying to memorize the world through touch.
She was a curious thing, walking around the Marauder as if it were a thing of myth. Her eyes drank in every bulkhead, every blinking console light, stumbling over her own feet. Hunter would always catch her—steady hands, gentle voice—and Tech would note the event without comment, though the sight lodged somewhere deep in his chest.
He kept logs on his brothers as well, not out of distrust but out of need for understanding. Their patterns, their temperaments—it was data, nothing more. Yet soon those files, too, filled with Omega. Hunter, who handled her like a live explosive. Wrecker, who softened his movements to a near-silent tread when she was nearby. Echo, perpetually on alert, swooping in whenever she attempted to put a tool or wire into her mouth. The precision of their care unsettled Tech. He had not realized his brothers were capable of such gentleness.
Children, as a field of study, had never interested him. But Kamino had resources, and Tech absorbed them all. After several hours of research, he could gauge Omega’s developmental stage, her cognitive range, and her approximate age, around eighteen months, by his assessment. Her speech was limited, her balance uncertain, yet her awareness was keen.
Still, there was something in her stillness that disturbed him. When fatigued, Omega would simply sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor, hands folded, eyes distant. The behaviour drew him back to the notes he had taken before their escape—the puncture wounds, small and deliberate. He had documented them with the same precision as anything else, but for once, the act had filled him with unease. He understood Kaminoan experimentation, the calculated cruelty hidden beneath their white coats. But the idea of those methods inflicted upon something so young, so unformed, rendered even his logic hollow.
War justified many things. Efficiency over empathy, strategy over sentiment. A soldier should understand that better than anyone.
And yet—
Not even Tech’s most clinical side could see value in those puncture marks.
Omega’s innocence unsettled him precisely because it lacked function. It served no tactical purpose, no measurable value—and yet it disarmed him more effectively than any weapon. She was a clone, yes, but unlike any he’d known. She did not bear the rigidity of programming or the weight of rank. Her existence felt… unaccounted for.
In the downtime between missions, Tech often found himself observing her. Omega rarely rested when the others did. You watch her like a lab rat, Wrecker had joked once, half-heartedly. Perhaps a poor choice of words, perhaps because it was true.
Though Tech’s gaze had begun as analytical, but over time, it softened. The child was not a subject; she was something else entirely—something he couldn’t quantify.
Omega’s presence was a small disruption in a system built on order. The way she looked at them—as if they were heroes from some half-remembered story—made Tech aware of his own reflection in a way no mirror ever had. She spoke in broken phrases, often half-formed, but her meaning was always clear enough.
Tonight, she wanted to see the stars.
When she held out her arms to Hunter, the commander hesitated for a fraction of a second before lifting her, balancing her against his chest as he carried her to the viewport. Teech watched her expression shift—eyes wide, mouth parted in quiet awe—as the streaks of light bled into the blackness of space. She cooed softly, entranced.
It struck Tech then: this was the first time she’d seen the galaxy. All her life had been sterile light and cold machinery. Now, before her stretched infinite possibility.
He found that he liked the sound of her small voice echoing against the hum of the ship. He liked the way she reached out, fingers splayed toward distant suns she could never touch. He liked, most of all, the way she made silence feel alive.
He still logged his data, still noted her growth and speech and sleep cycles—but somewhere along the line, the reports became less precise. More subjective. Curious tendency to smile at nothing. Appears soothed by proximity. Laughs when I speak quickly. Small, unscientific notes that no one would ever read.
He had stopped studying her some time ago.