Working on his new weapons, and more importantly two new parts of his very being, did indeed take Harry almost until the Lightbringer reached the planet of Wroona. The weapons merchant the Alliance had asked them to help out had in the past repeatedly supplied Rebel field teams with the weapons they needed, and advanced ones at that.
It was 2300 hours shipboard time when the wizard finally had an image in his mind of what he wanted his two smaller foci to look like. One, the wand, was simply put a rod; sure, it would have a handle and some ornamentation, but a rod just was its basic shape. Had it been made of wood rather than metal he would have felt confident in calling it a stick.
After all, it was a wand, and wands were glorified sticks.
The other piece was a little more unusual, though. From his initial idea of a simple ring, the design had just evolved, now involving a hinge and a latch allowing him to affix the tube of metal to his left or right index finger. It was even flat enough to be worn under the body-glove that was part of their redesigned stormtrooper armour.
Now to making it.
Just like he had done with his first staff in this strange new world he had found himself in, Harry reached for the crystal shard and the metal ingot with his mind and magic, simply willing them into obeying his command. Now that he was aware, the wandless casting came almost ridiculously easy, even if it lacked both the finesse and power achievable by using a focus. Before his eyes, the supposedly indestructible metal bent to his will, liquefying at the touch of his magic and enveloping the clear crystal in an embrace impossible to shatter. From that start, he worked on to form the narrow shape of a wand, adding a handle just the right size for his hand, both the base and the top of which flared out decoratively.
Without having noticed it, Harry had spent almost an hour on his 'little project' as he realised when looking at the clock in his wall. Shortly, he debated whether possibly sinking another hour in his second creation of the evening was a particularly good plan, yet eventually his more impulsive side won out.
Once again, he let himself sink into the feeling of his magic and began shaping the phrik alloy. Half an hour later, a smile on his face and two foci in his hands, Harry Potter fell asleep.
OOOOOOOO
Wroona, as seen from orbit, was an inordinately blue world. It was also rather small, although the gravity was still close to standard, due to it also being a rather dense world. Geologically speaking, not in referral to any of its natives. With the planet they were hoping to land on having much less traffic than Corellia, they were on the ground barely twenty minutes after their arrival in orbit, which suited Harry just fine, being on a time-sensitive mission and all. Even the dockworkers had let them go without incident after unsuccessfully trying to coax out the story behind a civilian owning a Raider corvette.
However, when the group of Harry, Arden, Mercer, Javoc and Corsek finally reached Palestro's Wholesale Firearms, they found only an Imperial Army trooper standing guard before an obviously ransacked shop.
"What happened here?" the captain asked the young man, probably a conscript, standing guard.
The guard looked him up and down, before replying, "What's it to you? You seem plenty armed for a civilian, already."
"Bounty hunter," Harry replied without missing a beat. "Pirates, violent gangs, that kind of thing. I need all the firepower I can get for me and my team. So, can you tell us what happened here?"
With a glance to the team Harry had mentioned, the trooper checked that they indeed did look like they were used to being heavily armed.
"Alien scum was helping the Rebellion," he finally told them. "Giving those terrorists weapons to kill our guys with. Fled up north, but we'll have him soon enough."
Throwing the trooper a small salute, the bounty hunter led his core crew away, striding confidently toward the landing bay where they had parked the Lightbringer. The Imperials already knowing of Palestro's association with the Alliance was a foreseen, yet rather unfortunate complication in their efforts to extract the Wroonian trader.
"Arden, can you find out if there's a bounty on the guy's head?" Harry asked the witch, who promptly pulled out her datapad and began searching the listings for the planet.
"Are you going to hand him over to the Empire?" Corsek asked, shock written clearly on his face. "I thought we didn't do that?"
Harry looked at him darkly in return. "Frankly I'm insulted you'd ask," he replied. "No, but if there's a bounty on Palestro's head, then as bounty hunters, we have a legitimate reason for looking for him, should someone ask. Arden, how does it look?"
The Dathomirian witch was looking at the holographic picture of a blue-skinned humanoid (or near-human? Harry found it hard to follow, sometimes), the bounty on his head noted as 5000 credits.
"Huh, that's not all that much," the wizard commented. "Not the kind of bounty an operation of our size would usually take, right?"
Looking at Mercer, Harry raised an eyebrow in question. "No," his first officer replied. "That's a bounty a novice bounty hunter would go after. We might only have two under our belts, but any normal bounty hunting team with our resources wouldn't even take a second look at this one."
"So, we should make sure we're not seen snooping around," the captain concluded. "Mercer, I want those droids of yours scouting out the coast to the north. Caves, abandoned structures, everything someone could hide in."
With a nod, the Imperial deserter started tapping around on his pad, and even as the group reached the ramp into the vehicle bay of the Lightbringer, the probe droids he had bought on Corellia were hovering out.
"Arden, I'll disillusion you," Harry then turned to the witch. "I'd like you to keep an eye on the Imperial garrison. If anything big starts happening there, I want to know."
"Aye, Boss," she replied with a cheeky salute. "I'll get my gear."
"Mercer, as soon as you have those droids underway, take Javoc and Corsek, and paint over our symbols on those speedervans and the bikes," he continued. "I'll ask Leia to allow us to use the Alliance starbird for this mission."
Even while Mercer looked at him rather dubiously, Arden was grinning widely. "You'll just confirm everything they've been thinking already," the Dathomirian warrior enthused. "Elegant subterfuge."
"Anyone care to fill us in?" Javoc interjected. "Arden might have been planning ambushes and traps since she was probably way too young, but we haven't."
"Of course," Harry replied, grinning widely. "Suppose a known Rebel agent is suddenly rescued by a group of bounty hunters? That wouldn't be good for those bounty hunters, right? Instead, we will give these Imperials exactly what they will be expecting: Alliance forces breaking out a Rebel sympathiser."
OOOOOOOO
"Damn it, they already found him," Mercer cursed loudly as he looked at the video feed transmitted by one of the scouting droids he had sent out. "But… why is there a firefight?"
Indeed, the feed was showing what seemed to be an intense firefight between a squad of Imperial Army soldiers and someone inside a cave, whom the camera was unable to pick up. Even as they were watching, a small object flew out of the mouth of the cave, landing between the troopers' feet and scattering them, just before the explosion ripped a crater where they had just been standing.
"Why is there just one scout squad?" the captain asked his crew, not at all understanding why the Imperials would not call in backup if there was such fierce resistance. "Sure, an armoured vehicle would be at a severe disadvantage in one of these caves, but a heavy repeating blaster would definitely help them out."
Mercer chuckled a little. "This is not actually live footage," he explained. "It's around five minutes old. The droid had to leave the area around the caves to get out of the full spectrum jamming someone set up. See those speeder bikes?"
Harry looked at the line of ten bikes, all of them properly grounded, and not in their usual wating position. From what Javoc and Corsek had told him, if these soldiers expected a fight, they would have left the repulsorlifts running.
"Exactly," the former Imperial officer said, watching Harry's eyes flick first to the row of bikes and then their two former Army members. "Looks like someone jury-rigged a repulsorlift jammer. Kind of limits our methods of approach. At least we know it doesn't go out all that far, maybe a hundred metres, otherwise we would have lost the recon droid."
Now understanding the scouts' determination in their attack, Harry simply verbalised his conclusion, "And because, as far as these soldiers are concerned, the repulsorlift and comms jamming could go out for miles, they haven't sent someone out on foot, because they have no idea, how many people could be holed up in that cave. Helmsman."
"Yes, sir," the young officer at the helm controls replied.
"Bring us down north of those caves, absolutely avoid being seen," the captain ordered, getting a quick salute, palm down, like a British seaman. Much as it annoyed him, Harry had introduced the gesture as a means of inducing group loyalty among his crew, and people seemed to take to it.
Pressing the button that allowed him to use the PA system, he continued, "Everyone to combat stations. Combat personnel, gear up to look as much like Alliance members as possible and meet in the vehicle bay in five. Potter out."
With everyone helping each other, it was really only five minutes later that Harry and the others, except Mercer and Arden, were ready inside the speeder van or on the multiple bikes, wearing either the transfigured stormtrooper armour (in the case of Harry, Javoc and Corsek) or the less elaborate armour sets they had been given by the Alliance.
"Alright everyone," the captain said over the intercom. "We'll park the speeders around 150 metres away from the enemy, so we don't run a risk of wrecking once we cross into that jamming field. Around half a click out, we will lose radio connection, so have your navigation systems set, don't rely on your comrades to tell you when to stop. As soon as we're on the ground, proceed to the caves. I want to be in and out of there as quickly as possible, with no casualties. That means live blaster fire for the soldiers, and if it becomes necessary, we stun Palestro and apologise later. Any questions?"
When none came, Harry signalled for the driver of the speedervan to get going, and they were soon surrounded by a swarm of bikes covering their advance. With the incredible speed these repulsorlift vehicles tended to display, it took them only minutes to cover the twenty kilometres between their actual target and where the helmsman had set down the Lightbringer.
As the group left behind their rides, they quickly formed up into a broad line, allowing them to maximise the amount of firepower they would be able to bring to bear. However, that turned out to be very much unnecessary, for as soon as they reached the vicinity of the caves, they could see that the battle they had come to fight was almost over. Only a single member of the scout squadron remained and he had taken to running away; obviously, it had seemed a better idea to run and face the penalty the Empire deemed appropriate for abandoning one's post, than to face whatever was waiting inside that cave.
Naturally, that made the troops under Harry's command rather nervous, an attitude that was only compounded when the fleeing enemy crumpled to the ground in the midst of one leaping step, felled by only a single shot to the back of his chest.
"Sharpshooter!" Javoc called out, prompting all the soldiers to duck into a crouch, even as the wizard among them drew his wand into his left hand (the right was occupied by a pistol) and raised a strong shield in front of him.
"Form up behind me," he ordered the soldiers, who moved to comply with surprising speed, given their crouch positions. Then again, they had seen their captain hold off fire from a rotary blaster for a good deal of time before.
The group, now huddled behind Harry's shield, even though no more fire seemed to be incoming, quickly moved up onto the mouth of the cave.
"This is Captain Potter, I'm with the Alliance," Captain Potter called into the cave; he had decided to go with his 'Rebel name', given that he was wearing his Alliance-style armour. "We're here to extract a merchant by the name of Palestro."
"Ah, so you're our ride out of here," commented the voice of a Bothan, who proceeded to step out of the shadows with a swagger that belied his short stature; if the wizard had to guess, he would say even Leia would tower over this one by at least twenty centimetres. "Took you long enough."
Already Harry could hear grumbling among the ranks of his crew, most of it coming not from the single former Imperial who was now distastefully inspecting the bloodbath that had once been a scout squad, but from those who Harry knew to be Alliance special forces members.
"Ungrateful spooks, getting in trouble and not appreciating those who get them out of it," he could hear Gur mutter with a healthy smattering of annoyance that made the Bothan's face bristle the way Harry had once seen a cat do when it did not want to be disturbed, yet someone insisted on doing so.
"Gur, behave," the captain chastised his man, before turning his attention to the duster-wearing man who had approached them. "And you, we're risking our cover to get you out of here. A bit of gratitude would be nice. Now deactivate those jamming devices so we can get our transport in place."
With little to no posturing, the Bothan (who, as Harry noticed in annoyance, had still not introduced himself) swaggered back into the cave, quickly followed by the young wizard. What he found inside that cave was both somewhat awe-inspiring and discouraging.
"The trader refused to leave without his stock," a human woman, around thirty to forty, if Harry had to guess, explained the chaos. In the back of the large cavern stood the two devices that had both severely hamstrung the Empire's response as well as the ability of the rescue team to come in. While the bounty hunter watched calmly, a blue-skinned man, otherwise looking just like a human, flicked a switch first on one, then on the second. As soon as the second switch had been flicked, the commlink indicator inside his helmet began blinking ominously.
"This is Potter," Harry accepted the call.
"Harry, whatever you're doing, do it quickly," the voice of Arden wafted through the connection and into his ear. "I just saw the base launch two of those Imperial gunships, the ones that look a bit like ours. They were headed in your direction."
"Copy that, Arden," the captain replied, already in motion. "Javoc, Corsek, Gur, Sestac, Morquen, you get the speeders here. We got IDTs on the way, and I want to be gone when they arrive."
The group around the overly self-assured Bothan did not seem too bothered by suddenly being ordered to move by a new commander, so Harry turned to them next. "How many of you are there?"
"Eight, including Beeth over there," the human woman explained, pointing at the unlikable Bothan. "What is the plan?"
"I'll contact my ship, they've landed twenty clicks away," the young man explained. "Our cover in the Empire is important, so we won't be leaving behind anyone who can identify us, and my people will be coming in under full-spectrum jamming."
Just as he was finished talking, the whir of repulsorlifts could be heard outside, the particular thrum of the speedervan giving the vehicles away as friendlies.
"I want everyone who can to take one of the bikes, the rest gets into the van," he continued to order, looking around for any dissenters. "It'll give them more targets to shoot at. Palestro…"
"Y-yes?" the blue-skinned man, who had begun hoarding his stock in his arms turned to look at him.
"We don't have time to take everything," he said, without any kind of give in his tone. "You can take the most important things, as much as you can carry, the rest we'll have to destroy."
Seeing the horrified look on the man's blue face, Harry added, "Would you rather die, or have the Empire get a hold of your stock?"
Emphatically shaking his head, the Wroonian dropped the myriad pieces of merchandise already in his grasp and proceeded to gather what he had been allowed to take.
"Lightbringer, this is Potter, we have enemies incoming and need you at our position," Harry then contacted Mercer over his helmet's comm system. "As soon as we're done talking, I want you to engage that jamming device we have onboard."
"Aye-aye, Boss. We're already on our way."
OOOOOOOO
Lieutenant Nared, garbed in the field officer armour befitting his rank, stood behind the pilots of his lead gunship, fantasising about the lucky day he was having. The opportunity to take out a Rebel sympathiser was not one to be had every day, and whatever the piece of alien scum had used to defend himself against the scout squadron that had not fulfilled their pre-scheduled call-in was surely now spent. Even if it was not, he had a complement of two line and two heavy weapons squads with him.
Oh, this would be such a boost to his career. Just recently promoted and already taken out an important Rebel weapon provider.
"Sir, you need to see this," the gunner called him over, pointing at a line of what looked to be speeder vehicles barrelling north, the number of which would have worried him, were he not in command of a full platoon with the firepower of two IDTs to back him up. The van proudly displayed the symbol of the Rebel terrorists on its roof.
"Follow them," he ordered, delighting in how he could already feel the new rank insignia on his chest; Captain Nared sounded so much better than Lieutenant Nared to his ears. "As soon as they're in range, open fire. And contact the base, we have Rebel elements."
Obviously having noticed their pursuers, the fleeing vehicles began to scatter, running wild evasive manoeuvres to make targeting harder and harder. Still, if he had to settle for any one target to be taken out first, it would be that speedervan. These weak, sentimental rebellious fools would surely have the target of their operation in the most secure vehicle. Yet, it would not avail them as soon as the missiles started hitting.
The first of their weapons systems to come into range were the laser cannons, and quickly his and the second dropship began opening fire on the small convoy. As expected, the only thing that did was annoy the Rebel scum, maybe scare them a bit. At this range, little more could be expected. They were just about getting close enough when things started going wrong.
"Lieutenant," the gunner announced loudly, drawing Nared's fixated gaze from these people, already dead, only not yet informed of it. "We have lost comms contact with the other dropship. I've tried raising the base, but no luck there, either. Looks like someone's jamming us."
Well, that was indeed worrying, the young officer was honest enough to admit that to himself. Still, there was nothing on this planet that was not within Imperial hands that would be able to easily shoot them down. They probably just had a jammer installed on that speedervan, or maybe boosted the power of those that came with the bikes they were on and had probably stolen from the murdered scout squad.
And then, things started going really, really wrong.
"Everyone brace, incoming fire," the pilot called. Instinctively, Nared grabbed the railings to the side of the cockpit, but it was to no avail. Some kind of ordinance hit the dropship he was on, and at only 50 metres high and more than 400 km/h fast, the Imperial transport pummelled into the ground with enough kinetic energy to crumple the already damaged craft like a can of field rations, killing everyone inside.
Then, a barrage of turbolaser fire ensured no record-keeping device would be recovered, either.
OOOOOOOO
"Absolutely not," the angry Bothan declared heatedly, trying to look larger than he actually was as he stood opposite the armoured figure of Captain Potter. "You will immediately transport us out of the system."
That did it for Harry; he had enough experience dealing with arseholes, but this particular one seemed intent to drive him into a corner by being so incredibly rude in front of a good portion of his crew. That was without even mentioning that many of these people had just put their own lives on the line in an attempt to save his.
"I will do no such thing," he declared forcefully. "One of my crew is still down on the planet, and as I said, our cover is important. What do you expect the Empire will think when, just after two gunships were wiped out of the sky, my ship tries running from the system? No, we will land again, we will pick up my crewmember, then we will do what our cover has people expecting from us: we will hunt some criminals, buy some weapons from a different distributer, and then, maybe, if you are nice, we might be so inclined as to offer you a ride to wherever it is you're going."
At first, the Bothan Harry now knew to be named Beeth Va'lim, simply looked around the bridge, as if assessing the ship.
"This is a nice ship," he finally observed, almost casually. "What tells you we won't just take…"
He did not get further, felled as he had been by the strongest stunner Harry could manage with the new focus now wrapped around his left index finger. Immediately, the Lightbringer's troop contingent had the remaining members of the Rebel cell in their sights.
"Anyone else inclined to make any threats?" the wizard asked in quiet menace.
The rest of them, including the helpful human woman from earlier, simply raised their hands in surrender.
"Very wise," Harry commented. "I want this one strip-searched, in an overall and taken to the brig, constant surveillance, isolation cell. The others can hand over their weapons and are confined to the crew deck. Full use of all the facilities, as befits our guests."
Actually looking somewhat surprised, the other rebels handed over their multitude of weapons to one of the soldiers who had come up to them with a large crate.
"All of them," the captain reminded the operatives. "Your boss did just threaten to steal my ship, leaving one of my crew stranded on the planet."
Almost managing to look contrite, the woman drew a small knife from her boot and a small holdout blaster out from under her breastplate.
"I don't even want to know how you had that one concealed," Harry commented. "Once again, I am Harry Potter of the corvette Lightbringer. Just to say it upfront, I am not an official member of the Alliance, but merely here as a favour to someone important to me. My first duty is to the people on this and on my second ship. So, if you try something to hurt my crew, I will have you informed that everyone on this ship is armed and will be ordered to shoot you."
With an audible gulp, the woman nodded in understanding. "Thank you for the warning," she said. "I am Iabaes Kurn, by the way. Taking out a threat to your clan when it presents itself. I approve. We will follow your orders."
"Good choice," he replied simply. "I wish that could have gone better though. Is he always like that?"
General nodding among the Rebel cell.
"Too bad," Harry responded, looking between the agents. "As soon as we're done in this system, we can let you off anywhere you want, within reason. We'll have to take Va'lim to Alliance High Command, though."
"He was just…" one of the other team members spoke up but was quickly silenced by Iabaes.
"He was threatening to steal their ship," she told the alien, whose species Harry did not know, in rather unquestionable terms. "We both know him well enough to know he might actually have tried. Betraying an ally like that is not only dishonourable, it would also almost certainly have gotten him killed."
Hearing her speak like she did now, Harry finally took the time to take in the armour the older woman was wearing. Mercer, obviously having seen the glance, spoke up, "Ms. Kurn, you're a Mandalorian?"