"Is everyone geared up?" Harry asked the ground team, plus the remaining Spec Ops team, who had all gathered around him. "You have the weapons?"
The last part had been directed at Javoc, whose task it had been to gather an assortment of weaponry and other equipment from the stocks they had acquired during their various missions. Unsurprisingly, he had taken to his assignment with glee, happily picking what he considered the most appropriate tools to oppose the likely to be heavy Imperial presence.
With nods all around confirming everyone's readiness, Harry pulled up the portkey he had made and linked to the beacon Iabaes had taken with her on her mission. She was clearly instructed to drop the small item in a wide-open area, where the attack party was then supposed to arrive. With or without notice from her, she knew they were coming after two days. As one, the group gathered around, grabbed the rope, and waited. Disconcerting as it was to use a portkey, the young wizard was happy to note that with repetition came resilience, and the feeling of having a hook behind his navel was not nearly as weird as it had once been; he even considered the possibility that he might not make a fool of himself when they eventually landed.
That hope was cruelly dashed, though; immediately upon arrival, not a small number of them was hit in the face by sturdy metal.
"Merlin, what did she do?" Harry complained as he gathered his wits, only to finally notice what had gotten his head to ring like it did: where there should have been an empty area was what he would call a barracks, though not the kind he would put soldiers in, whose loyalty and fighting spirits were somewhat important. It was more of a prison, maybe labour camp atmosphere. Then, he noticed the eyes of the entire room on himself.
Immediately, he used the same spell he had used on the surveillance equipment on the shuttle when they had fled Dathomir, what now seemed so long ago. Having secured the continued secrecy of their mission for the time being, the wizard finally had time to take off his mask and take a look around, the first thing to grab his attention being the bed he had landed next to, as well as its occupant, who was now indignantly pushing Arden off of her. The young woman had ashen hair, piercing, emerald-green eyes, and the stance of a warrior, if what Harry had been able to glean from Arden and Iabaes was any indication. She had proceeded to push the Dathomirian witch off of her, and without much further interaction, was enveloped by a turquoise light and simply… vanished.
Now, being a wizard himself, people vanishing was not all that uncomfortable or uncommon for Harry to witness, but it did not seem to be an ability wide-spread in this reality, and the woman's continued presence in a place like this while she could obviously have left at any time, indicated she had had her own reasons to be there.
Aside from his musings, the captain, decked out in the Alliance-themed suit of armour, took in their surroundings; they were definitely in some sort of prison barracks, though that might not be all that bad. Worrying, however, was the complete absence of their Mandalorian ally and, dare he say, friend.
"Are you those people that woman was talking about?" an older, somewhat less-beaten looking man came to the forefront of the gathering their entrance had, understandably, attracted.
"Brown hair, thirties, warrior's physique?" Arden inquire at that, looking suspiciously at the speaker, who nodded. "Where is she?"
"She was taken away by the Inquisitor," came the prompt reply, and even though Harry did not know what exactly the man was talking about, anyone with that kind of title could only be bad news.
"When?" he demanded briskly, perhaps a bit harsher than it would have been necessary.
"Yesterday," who now started to appear to be a leader among the prisoners replied, though he did seem somewhat displeased with Harry's rudeness. "She said you would bring weapons and a way to block the signal to the slave implants."
With a sharp nod, the captain indicated for Javoc and Corsek to get going; the latter started handing out E-11s, even as the former began distributing the small jamming devices Palestro and he had cooked up over the preceding days.
"These are small signal jammers," he told the group, just as he was giving the first to their spokesman. "They inhibit the termination signal to the slave implants, but their battery time is limited, and they only work on one person. So, if we don't want someone to take the entire rest of the prison population hostage, we better find a way to disable that possibility. Where is the command centre?"
"I'll lead you there," the older man offered. "Dark Cruufyn, at your service. Might I know your name?"
"Captain Potter," the wizard responded curtly; Iabaes was someone he considered to be, at least for the moment, under his remit. Therefore, her being in danger made him become rather curt, if he was being honest. "Talk later, let's do this now."
No more words were exchanged, as the Mandalorian prisoners and the complement from the Lightbringer quickly left behind the room, its door opened by an unlocking charm courtesy of the ring the ship's captain was wearing on his left index finger. Outside in the corridor, they came upon the first enemy.
He was a young-looking, quite obviously bored army trooper, disinterestedly leaning against the wall opposite the doors of the barracks. Before anyone, very much including Harry, could say anything, the man was hit in his unprotected neck by a short-range blaster bolt. Just as he was about to say something, maybe reprimand the shooter, Cruufyn spoke up.
"Don't bother," the Mandalorian stepped in. "Had you known what this man has routinely done, you would have shot him too."
With a shrug, as well as the insight that any attempt at holding back people as angry as these would be not only a futile, but also a possibly dangerous endeavour, Harry turned back around, following after their guide. Still, something needed to be said.
"The first officer you see, you stun," he ordered the group, taking note of several mutinous expressions all over. "I need them for intelligence. And take this one's armour."
Angry as they were, the gathering of intelligence on their opponents was something the Mandalorians understood, transforming the formerly annoyed looks all over the group to ones of grudging acceptance. With their overwhelming numbers, swelled as they were by the prisoners from any cell they passed, any opposition was quickly quashed; of particular comedic value was one of the factory slave overseers who, upon spotting the approaching group, began rapidly tapping around on his panic button, intended to detonate all the implants in his immediate vicinity. Noticing that nothing was happening, he drew out his blaster pistol and was quickly felled by three shots, once again hitting in vulnerable areas of his body.
At one point, the group was accosted by two uncommonly courageous adversaries, the kind of which Harry had not seen before. The two were wearing somewhat modified versions of the standard stormtrooper armour, less heavy, but allowing for more mobility. Yet, the most striking feature were their staff weapons, crackling electricity on both ends, not all that much unlike the one on the wizard's back, which he was now almost automatically going for.
Then, in the middle of their charge at the group, a flurry of blaster bolts took the two down, as well.
"Really, Boss," Arden objected, "were you actually about to duel them? That's not an advantage we want to give our enemies, right? Fighting in their preferred method…"
Getting caught in a moment of misdirected fairness, Harry was happy that his mask was obscuring his blush; he had a certain feeling that might have lessened his command authority. Still, one good thing to come out of the confrontation was the glee with which Arden was now whirling around her newly acquired electrostaff.
On and on they went, from corridor to corridor, finally hammering home the real extent of the Imperial operation they were up against, and despite the relative lack of resistance, a feeling was niggling in the back of the captain's mind that something was decidedly off…
That something turned out to be waiting for them in the next room.
There, in front of the entrance to the control room, stood a man. Blood-red, ankle-long robes draped over a decidedly unimpressive physique and, if Harry was not completely mistaken, some armour plating. On his belt he had a collection of silver cylinders, lightsabres, on his face a cruel, superior smile.
"Go the other way around," the wizard ordered the group, the moment he laid eyes on the dark Jedi, or whatever else he might be. Now, he knew what he had felt: similar to Vader, if significantly weaker. "I have a feeling this one will not easily be hit with blasters, do you agree?"
Though none of Harry's forced levity seemed to be able to take hold with the escapees and his ground team, the general consensus seemed to be that he was most likely correct. As such, it was he and Arden that remained, standing opposite the red-robed figure, her newly acquired electrostaff bristling with energy, even as his staff's non-lethal part had withdrawn, exposing the glinting blades at both ends.
"How very amusing of you to think you might beat me," the man chortled, the cruel smile splitting his face almost in half. "Your weapons shall make worthy trophies on my wall."
"You're this Inquisitor I've been hearing about, I presume?" Harry inquired acidly; the man reminded him too much of some of the Death Eaters to tolerate his presence any longer than necessary.
"Why yes, that is me," he chortled, sounding more and more deranged as he went. "And you're the back-up for that foolish Mandalorian I captured, right? Well, maybe bringing her news of your demise might get her to talk. I would be most interested in finding out, how you got in here."
With that, the man drew his own lightsabre from among the gathering of trophies along his belt, a long crimson blade extending from a dark hilt. "Time to die."
OOOOOOOO
Iabaes Kurn was not completely sure, how long she had been strapped to the chair, or how often that Inquisitor had come and tried to rummage through her head, it could not have been more than a few days, she ventured. Still, despite her severely weakened state, she was content in the knowledge that anytime he had come, the man had left, frustrated and scared.
Frustrated with her resistance and scared of his superiors.
Her people had been fighting Jedi and their ilk for decades, nay centuries, and she would not let herself be overcome by one of them, whether he may be a former Jedi, dark Jedi, or even a Sith.
In the distance, she could hear the sounds of guns firing, the thud of bodies hitting the floor, screams of pain and fear. Then again, she was so delirious at this point that it had become hard to distinguish between fact and fiction, hallucination and reality.
Another pain-filled cry, much closer this time. It sounded rather real…
Without warning, the cell door was opened, and the bright light of the corridor flooded the cold, sterile room, even as the face of the man she had spoken to just before her arrest appeared in the doorframe.
"Ready to get some revenge?"
OOOOOOOO
A good deal of lightyears away, although not all that much on a galactic scale, around a green moon orbiting an orange gas giant, a young, white-clad woman was frantically speaking into a mirror.
"Harry Potter," she espoused the mirror repeatedly, only to be met by the stony silence of her own face reflected back at her once again. Frustratedly, she threw the communication device away, even though she regretted her actions the moment she did. Luckily, the precious gift had landed safely on her bed, still whole and unblemished.
Yet also without the picture of the person she was hoping to see.
"Princess Leia, you should really be preparing your things," the gold-plated form of the protocol droid C-3PO, standing in her doorway, admonished in his almost accent-free Basic. "I fail to see how getting Master Harry here would help. The odds of him being able to defeat a fleet such as this are…"
"Shut your vocabulator," Leia told the voice brashly, another action she regretted almost immediately; if droids could look ashamed, this one was doing exactly that now. "Sorry, 3PO. I'm just worried that I can't reach Harry."
"Understandable, Princess. Though it could probably be considered wise to worry about our own predicament," the droid remarked, playing rather unsubtly at the fact that, without much warning, a fleet had appeared in the system and started a large-scale blockade of the planet Yavin and its moons. Although what exactly the Imperials were waiting for was not all that clear, it was almost guaranteed to be bad news.
"Princess," the communicator unit mounted on her belt chimed up with the voice of General Dodonna. "Skywalker is back, and he brings news."
"I'll be right there, General," Leia responded, quickly striding out of her room, one gold-plated droid on her heels. Nervously shifting her weight from foot to foot as she rode the turbolifts to the command centre, she considered their situation, and could not help but feel rather hopeless for a second; there were several star destroyers picketing all around the moon on which the Rebel base was located, and the sophisticated sensors had picked up the signatures of several artificial gravity wells at key positions all around the system.
"Damn interdictors," the princess muttered under her breath. Even if Harry could somehow manage to break through the blockade, his corvette would be hopelessly outmatched. Unless of course…
"Princess Leia? Princess Leia," 3PO woke her out of her musings, signalling stiffly at the open doors. Throwing a thankful nod at the helpful droid, she continued her walk to the Alliance headquarters' command centre, where she was already being expected. The one bright spot in all of this, as far as she was concerned, was that Mon Mothma's presence was only by hologram, their leader being far away from the trap they had now found themselves in.
"Princess," Dodonna greeted, even as the other participants of the meeting turned around, looking at the newest addition rather grimly. "Continue, Lieutenant Skywalker."
"As I said, they were working on a gigantic new ship, the Executor," the young man went on with a report he had quite obviously already started. "The thing is nineteen kilometres long and was supposed to leave Fondor any moment, when I made my escape. R2 has the schematics."
"So, basically another Death Star, only just a little more flexible," Leia observed sounding calmer than she really felt. "Another weapon of fear."
"What I don't get is why they're not attacking," Luke interjected, looking at the holographic representation of the veritable armada already amassed in the Yavin system. "They have enough ships to reduce the entire planet to slag in a few hours."
"More fear," Vernan commented. "A propaganda show; they'll have to make the destruction of the Rebel Alliance a big, public spectacle now that we've shown ourselves to be a credible threat. Their troops will come in with the express orders to capture rather than kill. Skywalker, you said this Executor was Vader's personal flagship?"
Luke nodded.
"They're waiting for him," Cracken concluded morosely. "'Supreme Commander Personally crushes Murderous Traitors' has a certain ring to it, does it not?"
None of them had it in them to rebut him, for they all seemed to have the exact same thoughts.
"Have the flight crews prepare the fighters and the transports, put every bit of ion weaponry on them that we can," Dodonna finally ordered. "These interdictors are their main weakness; if we can take out one and manage to disable only one of the ISDs, we should be able to escape."
No one appeared to be willing to say how unlikely that seemed without any outside help.
OOOOOOOO
Without forewarning, the Inquisitor leapt into battle, and had he not been an incredibly dangerous foe, Harry would have been hugely impressed with the grace that movement showed. Still, even as he himself was still looking, dumbfounded, Arden had already responded, the crackling of her new electrostaff filling the corridor.
Right between the three combatants' earlier positions the two met, crimson blade to silver staff and…
The blade simply shorted out. Even the always adaptable witch was too surprised to properly jump onto her opponent's weakness. For his part, the Inquisitor simply drew a second weapon from his belt, just as he replaced the one, he had been using, in one single fluid motion. What had once been a glowing red was now a deep green blade, with which the man returned to hacking at the Dathomirian.
Shaken out of his stupor, Harry engaged as well, an aggressive swing of his bladed staff targeting his enemy's legs only stopped by a timely parry that drove the Inquisitor back a few steps, rage bubbling in the man's eyes. With reckless abandon, the Emperor's servant charged at them once again, his blade hacking at Arden's weapon, only to short out as it had before. However, this time, they were both prepared for it, and while the witch got a hit in against his shoulder, prompting his arm to spasm and drop the hilt from his hand, the wizard got their opponent in the middle of his thigh, the vibroblade leaving behind a wide gash.
Blood now flowing freely from his wound, the Inquisitor's wrath was truly upon them, and any remaining questions about the man's general state of mind, dare one say sanity, were no longer relevant. With a scream of rage, Harry and Arden were thrown back into the wall, heads ringing with the impact even through armour and bodyglove, and a fraction of a second later, death seemed to be upon them, as the vengeful darksider stood above the young captain with yet another newly ignited lightsabre, ready to deliver the coup-de-grace.
Only, as the strike descended, it was interrupted by a silver staff, which proceeded yet again to short circuit another of his blades. And yet, all was not well, as this time, the lightsabre had finally managed, just before winking out, to destroy the weapon that had been used against its brothers, the electrostaff being cleaved cleanly in half.
"I liked that thing," Arden complained, just before throwing the still-crackling pieces into her opponent's face, who quite expectedly managed to easily dodge them. However, he had not been expecting Harry to be back in the fight quite so soon, and the nonverbal, but very potent banishing charm courtesy of the staff he was using came as a rather nasty surprise.
Still, frustrating as it was, and despite his robes and armour plates, the man spun around in the air to land in a low, stable crouch, panting with exertion, just like his two enemies.
"You want one of those swords?" Harry murmured, receiving a sharp nod from his companion. Not resorting to any fanfare, and in the hopes that, considering it was not an attack on him, the summoning would not trigger the Inquisitor's danger senses, the wizard reached out with his magic, using his ring as a focus, and summoned the crimson-bladed sabre to him. There seemed to be some resistance as the darksider tried to pull back with his telekinesis, yet it was obviously too late.
An interesting observation that would have to be filed away for later, he decided.
"Can you do something like that again?" Arden murmured as the three were circling each other. "Maybe not something like an attack, but something that affects his surroundings? I don't like this standstill."
"Those lightsabres don't like water, right? And they conduct energy?" he reassured himself that he remembered correctly what Obi-Wan had told them about the weapon of the Jedi and the Sith. Seeing his companion nod, the young wizard directed, "Good. You distract him. When I say now, make ready to be pulled away."
Doing as instructed, the Dathomirian once again went back into the fray, although it was obvious that, fed as he was by the power of his own hatred, the Inquisitor was the stronger of the two. Harry, meanwhile, tried to find even the barest minimum of peace of mind, drawing his wand into his right hand; what he was planning to do would require a bit more finesse than his staff could achieve.
The first thing he did was erect a ward, not unlike the ones Hermione had erected what seemed like a lifetime ago; probably not as strong, but it would do what it was supposed to. Then he gave his all to a spell he had never considered to be particularly useful in a combat application; with a wave of his wand and a strong push of magic, a huge amount of water began spewing out of the tip, dousing both combatants and shorting out any sabre they still had on their person.
"Now," Harry called and summoned the witch through the intent-based ward. "This might sting a little."
Then, he enveloped the doused Inquisitor in the blue-white fire of lightning.
OOOOOOOO
Once again decked out in her beskar'gam, her Mandalorian armour, even her weakened state could not hold Iabaes Kurn back; she wanted revenge, for herself and her people.
"Take prisoners if you can, kill them if you must but don't risk the lives of the slaves," she ordered the group that made ready to storm the command centre. "Captain Potter is very effective in extracting information, I'm being told, so one should suffice."
The ground team from the Lightbringer, whose familiarity with the wondrous things their leader could do was out of question, immediately nodded their assent; seeing their allies agree certainly had a steadying effect on the freed slaves, as they too acknowledged the order.
"Morquen, breaching charge; Tevo, Sestac, flash-bangs," Corsek instructed, and the three Rebel soldiers moved to comply. Within short order, the shaped charges had been set onto the metal of the door, and the troops made ready to storm the room. "Breach."
In execution, if Iabaes did say so herself, the attack was almost flawless, and she was happy to see how well these two different groups worked together. Following the detonation of the disabling explosives, they rushed the room, and though a few of the officers and technicians tried to resist, one of them even managing to clip a freed slave with a blaster shot, it was obvious that these people were not trained for combat, many of them not even outfitted with a side-arm. Had the factory been a Mandalorian operation, things might have been different, of course, but the Empire had a propensity for discouraging the widespread issuing of blasters among its ranks.
"Javoc, Iabaes," Corsek called, standing next to a large console, the purpose of which became clear as soon as she got a closer look at it. "I don't know this stuff well enough to deal with it."
So, it was her and the former Imperial technician (granted, his specialty had been vehicles) that got to work on the central control station for the slave implants. As might have been expected, there was a control that would allow them to immediately detonate the devices buried inside the prisoners, all of them at the same time; it made a sick kind of sense, really. However, it was equally expectable that the Empire would not include an option to disable them, all in one go.
That was not something the Imperial designers seemed to expect would happen anytime soon.
This particular design choice left them with the unenviable task of selecting every single slave's data that was stored inside the console and manually override the controls for the implants. Busy work, nothing more, nothing less. Meanwhile, Corsek was organising their fighters.
"I want teams of five, each with at least one of our crew, to sweep the installation," he ordered to nodding from the assembled mishmash of Rebel Spec Ops soldiers, his own crew and freed slaves, who even now were pulling the armour from stunned Imperials to wear themselves. "Every team sweeps one level, if you encounter any resistance you can't overcome, don't play heroes, call for backup. We're looking for the M14-X prototypes, someone able to fly them, any weapons, some transports to get out of here, the labs, each and every piece of beskar you can find, and of course every slave in this building who wants to be freed. If you find any of these things that can't walk themselves to the hangars, call in. Understood?"
A smattering of approval went through the ranks and the teams of five quickly found themselves, leaving for their assigned tasks with a fervour that showed Iabaes to be far from the only one whose fighting spirits had been awoken. Meanwhile, the SpecOps team's medic was tending to the wounded slave in one corner, and it seemed they would make it; a large scar was to be expected of course, but nothing majorly impacting function. Additionally, battle scars were often a point of pride for a Mandalorian.
"Did they manage to send out a distress signal?" the seasoned warrior asked the man who had taken up residence at the communications console, still tapping away furiously at her task of disabling slave implants.
"No, we were lucky," her comrade replied; a rather fresh recruit to their cause, he was a young man from the Outer Rim, an orphan whose real name had been lost to the same ship crash that had killed his parents. These days, everyone just called him by his chosen nickname, 'Slicer'; it was what he was best at, really. "They have the whole facility under a communication black-out, the only transmitter capable of reaching orbit is in here, and by the time the command staff knew something was going on, it was too late, it seems."
"Lucky, indeed," Iabaes murmured. She had seen the Imperial fleet in orbit, and she had absolutely no interest in getting their attention onto them.
OOOOOOOO
When the blinding blue light of the electrical attack Harry had unleashed on the Inquisitor receded, it quickly became obvious that the fight was very much over. His and Arden's opponent lay on the ground, wheezing, large swathes of his skin burned by the crackling lightning. Still wary, the wizard summoned all the lightsabres to him before he dispelled the already weakened ward he had erected across the corridor and approached the fallen warrior.
"So, you have the courage to use… real power," the man wheezed, short of breath; whether that was due to pain or a direct effect of his injuries, Harry was not sure. Not that it really mattered, given that he was most certainly lethally wounded.
Looking into the pained, crazed eyes of his fallen opponent, the wizard engaged his legilimency and found himself lightly rebuffed; still, even the most competent practitioner of the mind arts would be weakened in this state, and so the barriers the Inquisitor had erected inside his mind were like paper before a lightsabre to the probe hammering away at them. As he receded from the man's mind, Harry was ready to puke all over the corridor; the things this one had done and had had done to him were incredible.
"I am… almost impressed," he wheezed. "The Jedi would… never have used… such a technique."
"Well," the wizard replied, still feeling an odd mix of pity and revulsion for the broken shell of a human lying before him. "I'm no Jedi, never will be, don't agree with them."
"Not that it will… change anything," the Inquisitor chuckled darkly, the last vestiges of his formerly wide cruel smile once again appearing on his face. "When Lord Vader… is through with those Rebel… scum. I hear he's… already underway."
Harry did not stay long enough to watch the light leave his opponent's eyes, he was already on his feet and moving toward the command centre, pulling the mirror out of its protected pouch.