Chapter 2
Petra Nebula, Vetus System, Elysium, Harry Potter's Apartment - 07.13.2176
"FUCK! FUCK! SHIT! ARSE! DAMNATION AND HELLFIRE FUUUUUUUUUUCK!"
A high whine filled the stale air in the hallway of the prefab apartment, punctuated 750 times a minute by the staccato rhythm of a seriously pissed off Batarian firing an M96 Mattock. Harry clutched a moist towel to his otherwise naked form and ran for his life through the hall of his place.
"COME BACK HERE YOU FILTHY APE!"
If he had more time the irony of that statement would have amused him, but as it stood Harry's eyes stung like hell from the soap as he sprinted through his server room, into the second half of his home. His neighbors made fun of him for buying two pre-fabs next to one another and making it one big unit, but who was laughing now Gurdlesons? Shaking the remnants of his bubble bath from his head Harry dived over his bed and began furiously searching for something.
Above his bed the nice photo he had framed of his farm on Shanxi shattered as another hyper-accelerated metal pellet was fired through a wall into his room.
"Come on you asshat! That's the only copy of that photo I have!"
From the other side of his bed, and just outside the door to his room, a deep and gravelly response came, "It won't matter much WHEN YOU'RE DEAD, APE!"
Harry shifted a pile of shirts to the side, promising himself for the hundredth time to actually use his laundry basket, and underneath it was the sight he had been dying to see since his daily 'me' time had been so rudely interrupted not five minutes ago.
His wand.
With a smile on his face he took better cover against his bed, and sticking his wand out above his covers he yelled, "Kontakte Lyn!"
A bolt of raw electrical potential shot from the thin stick, lancing into the Batarian's assault rifle and arcing from there to his body. The four eyed man fried from the inside out, collapsing where he stood, steam rising from his body.
The smell left Harry feeling hungry for some reason.
Which left him feeling a little guilty for some reason.
Shaking that dark line of thought from his head, Harry calmly finished drying himself and put on his clothes. He hoped, he really hoped, that some Batarian had just gotten drunk and decided the wall leading into his bathroom was too structurally sound and in the name of neighborly assistance it really needed a hole.
He knew that wasn't the case, but a man could dream.
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Harry stood one step outside his door with his eyes closed. His pair of apartments were stacked with hundreds others, the individual buildings each made modular so they could be separated by miles to form outposts and farmhouses, or they could be stacked on top of each other like the complex he lived in.
Harry hesitated to pass any further from his door.
He knew there was trouble. He also knew that was far too late to avert whatever fantastic new bullshit he was going to have to deal with. So now he was going to have to go into battle.
Again.
But he was only one step out from his door.
Harry had cast selective silencing charms around his place to isolate himself from all noise above a certain threshold, or from particularly annoying sources. It meant that he didn't have to suffer from the nice sky-bike racer gang that rented out the bottom floor, or the goddamned Gurdlesons with their stupid/amazing stereo-system and penchant for Asari opera. The ward line for his charms was at two steps. Just one more and he would hear it all.
Then he would start running, and he would find a gun, and he would track down the nearest Alliance substation, and he would kill and save and it wouldn't be enough because he'd been doing this for over a century now and it was never bloody enough.
Harry Potter was so tired.
He took one more step out.
Gun fire: widely varying rate of fire and tonal volume suggest number of calibers and manufacturers.
Engine noises: similar level of variance, though not uncommon for the neighborhood this time of day.
Screaming: Too much. Regimented military strike would silence their targets if not kill them, too many and too consistent indicating screams were an objective not a secondary effect.
It struck a chord in him, he knew this style. The Death Eaters had used it often enough. These weren't military, they hadn't come regimented and in force, they were terrorists. This day and age, and given a bloody Batarian had shown up in his bath, that meant slavers.
He really fucking hated slavers.
/-/
Two days later Harry shouldered his rifle, taken from an unlucky Private that no longer needed it, and popped up from behind a makeshift barrier.
He'd honestly never thought he'd be thankful for crashed air cars after Shanxi, but here one was, saving his life again.
Shots hit and shattered against the body of the car next to him, micro fragments from the pellets blasting the edge of his shields and making his kinetic barriers light up for a moment. One shot into the visor of what he was pretty sure was one of their captains, breathe, exhale, double tap into the exposed shoulder joint of the VORCHA WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER- OH SHI-
With a distracted operator the rocket had no direction and spun high, passing less than a meter over his left side. Smoke from the fire burning in the wrecks that formed the battle-line got pulled into the rocket's wake, mixing with the off-white contrail as it whizzed past.
Harry turned as it passed to catch where it hit, the rocket's path spiraling outward until it hit a building at the end of the road, half a block away. It blew a hole into the facade, raining burnt and crushed creamacrete onto the line of retreating civilians, and scaring the ever-loving hell out of them.
He stared dumbfounded at the crater, not really seeing it. Harry was still reeling with disbelief that someone would give a Vorcha a rocket launcher. Vorcha very nearly did not qualify as self-aware, giving one high explosives was just asking for a problem! Especially given that he just took its arm out of commission, actually-
A boom reverberated deep in Harry's chest, shaking the building all around the battlefield and dislodging even more of the facade from the surrounding buildings.
Harry locked eyes with one of the local deputies and waved him back to the crowd of civilians crossing the intersection, they needed to get six more blocks over to reach their bunker. Harry had been very grateful to learn no one had seen fit to re-purpose those holdovers from the colony's earlier, and more paranoid days.
Risking another glance over the barrier, Harry saw exactly what he had hoped to see. Vorcha Demolitionist Number One had tried to fire again with its off hand and managed to fire a rocket point bank into the Batarian immediately to its right. These shits had either fudged the arming distance setting, or bought bad rounds, because the shot blew the four eyed terrorist into chunks. The whole battle line he had been holding off was still reeling.
"Confrigissimo!"
The good old siege engine curse.
A thick bar of butter-yellow light sprang from the wand he had drawn in his off hand, and impacted a small clearing about just back from the cover the Batarian line was using. The light hit the ground with all of the grace and kinetic energy of an old Earth rail train, blowing a half meter deep crater in the ground and driving the slavers into further disarray.
Harry took a breath and rested his rifle on the car he was hiding behind. Using it to steady his aim, sixteen shots cleared the skirmish line and gave their sector some relief.
"Kalinowski!"
One of the generic blue armored men that was helping the line of retreating civvies turned around and started towards Harry.
"Grab three and go police their side. Looks mostly clear, but watch your ass! There might be some heavy ordinance over there, salvage all you can."
Harry got a salute in response, and the man motioned to a few other armored people who quickly fell in beside him. They passed his position, scrambling over the line of rubble and crashed air-cars, and began picking over the fallen attackers.
They locals doubted him at first, and questioned why they should give a shit what some random civvie thought. It only took two or three attacks and a double digit body count for them to see the light.
Harry poked around his omni-tool and refreshed the local tactical net.
"Sector Report."
The map of the route to the closest bunker lit up in sections, green across the board. The actual combatants that had been in and around the city, mostly the local colonial garrison and a Marine groom's party that were currently setting records for a bachelor's party gone wrong, all gathered at the city's edge between the bulk of the civilian population and the main body of Slavers. Harry deliberately placed himself nearest that front guessing that he'd catch all of the sneaky fuckers who thought they could pass around the battle line and capture people.
It looked like he chose correctly.
One Lieutenant Shepard was leading the garrison and the marines at the battle front, and had proven to be both a blessing and a curse. She had been all kinds of annoying about the chain of command and where a random civvie (in her opinion, Harry scoffed, he'd been fighting evil since before her grandmother was a twinkle in someone's eye) stood in it.
It was almost enough to make him nostalgic for the old days, when all he had to do was say 'I'm Harry Potter' to get put in charge.
Taking a breath, Harry took a swig from a canteen he had filled… hell… at some point. It'd been a long few days.
Kalinowski didn't sound like he had gotten shot yet, so Harry figured the sector was probably still clear. Harry idly summoned a ration bar from the small pile the locals had assembled for this junction on the route to the bunker, and after shredding the wrapper began munching.
"SHEPARD TO POTTER, SHEPARD TO POTTER, OVER!"
Harry winced and suppressed the urge to just remove his communicator.
"This is Potter, what do you need? Over."
"YOUR ASS OUT HERE NOW-"
The transmission was interrupted by what sounding like a rather large explosion, and large-caliber cannon fire.
"-HALIAT IS BACK, AND HE GOT THAT DAMN GUNSHIP BACK IN THE AIR!"
Harry took a moment to splash some water from his canteen onto his face. The last time that damn Batarian showed up with his gunship, the front had almost collapsed. He needed to get out there now. At least he could be spared here, the retreat was mostly clear and the dead bodies behind him were probably one of the last hunting parties still on this side of the main line.
"Kalinowski! You got a something for me?"
Harry groaned and stood to see for himself.
"Found one un-cracked launcher right here, only the one shot in the barrel though, everything else went up with the rest of this stuff."
Harry jumped the barrier and collected the launcher, and once he had it he slapped the guy on the shoulder.
"Good enough. Watch'em for me, radio if it gets bad, hopefully I'll be back in a few hours."
/-/
With his last orders given, Harry turned and began jogging towards Shepard's last position. Apparating was well and good, but in a pitched battle he would just pop in front of a bullet and end his streak of not dying. He was getting pretty good at living and he would be beating himself up for months if he lost his record here to these wankers.
The gunship the Batarian commander was using looked like the soldiers on the front felt. Scrap metal made up most of the thing's tail and fuselage, and unless Harry's eyes were deceiving him, there was definitely an old fashion metal stop sign making up the bulk of the thing's port stabilizer.
Where in the hell did that Batarian son of a bitch get an actual metal stop sign? There were probably only two of those in the nearest thousand cubic light years. There may have been one in the Elysium Museum of Humanity, but only tourists went there and...
Wait.
That fucker broke into the museum and stole a god damn stop sign!
Harry had no idea why that pissed him off so much, especially in comparison to the sat images they had of the few hundred men and women the Batarians had in camps behind their side of the front. A detached and analytical part of Harry's mind noted that he had been pretty close to a number of explosions in the last forty-eight hours, and there was that time he got surprised and hit by that Vorcha's submission net...
Regardless of why, Harry raised the foraged launcher to his shoulder and activated the flight control VI. A small and pissed of caricature of a Vorcha face appeared in the holographic crosshairs, and it began barking out instructions for a successful launch in broken Batarian. Harry was just thankful he'd used ML77 launchers before.
Elanos Haliat, the Batarian leading the raid on Elysium, juked his ship constantly side to side. The combined fire from everyone on the Human line not focusing on his incoming ground forces was slowly degrading his shield integrity, but if he kept mobile it wasn't enough to slow him down.
It was a fantasy he continued to maintain right up until a 22.5 millimeter rocket-powered projectile impacted the port stabilizer that had been giving him so much trouble.
His shield held, but the full kinetic energy of the blast couldn't be perfectly diverted, resulting in the flash welded repairs failing, and the stabilizer falling apart.
Haliat watched the results of the impact, helpless in the cockpit. He had no idea why his personal slave had been so adamant that they use that particular hunk of metal from the foolish ape's museum. He hadn't cared. He let the slave do as it wanted, and then flashed twenty minutes worth of torture into the wretch's implants for working so slowly.
Only now did it occur to him that perhaps a thin steel sheet in a visually distinct color stolen from a Human museum might draw the Vermin's attention to poorly welded, but vital, repairs.
He knew he should have punished his slave longer.
Without the stabilizer, the craft was unbalanced. Incorrect airflow over the wing and, more importantly, the now incorrect balance of the craft in relation to its mass effect core, could theoretically be compensated for by an experienced pilot.
Elanos Haliat was more of a slave master than an experienced pilot.
The gunship fell from the sky in an elaborate death spiral, leaving an artful path marked by smoke and vaporized eezo expelled by an overworked and unbalanced core. It hit the ground and its core fully overloaded, causing a blue/white explosion and raising a ragged cheer from the line of defenders hiding behind sections of broken building, re-purposed cargo containers, and crashed air cars.
Most of the defenders had been manning the line at the edge of the city since the battle started, and most hadn't slept in that time. With the crash of the gunship that had been harassing them on-and-off for the whole battle, their morale shot up and battle cries filled the air.
"Elysium!"
"The Wolverines!"
It started with one Batarian, Belrah Habaat. He looked at the screaming and triumphant humans that he'd been shooting for two solar days, and he thought of his mate back on Aratoht. Sure, they didn't have much, but a bed to share and a domestic slave was a hell of a lot better than an ignoble death on some primitive's world. He dropped his rifle when he thought that none of the others were looking, and just began making his way back to their shuttles.
It was only moments before the defenders began firing again, heartened by the striking lack of giant flying machines shooting at them. More Batarians were cut down by the ranks of Humans fire, and after less than a minute, more than a score of the attacking slavers dropped their weapons and retreated like Habaat.
The attacking slaver group was now entirely without a leader, and when the main front countered by Lieutenant Shepard and Harry broke, the secondary fronts across the city soon broke as well. The ground war fell apart in the defender's favor, and the few Batarian ships in orbit suddenly had dozens of shuttles to cover in addition to their own asses. Alliance reinforcements that were blocked by those same cruisers earlier found their traffic lanes cleared in a matter of minutes, and the entire slaver force found itself routed and streaming atmosphere as they retreated back across the relay.
The siege of Elysium was broken.
Arcturus Stream Cluster, Arcturus System, High Orbit over Themis, Arcturus station - 05.16.2183
Donnel Udina sat back in his chair, a datapad with the report he had been looking for clutched uselessly in one hand.
"Well I didn't expect that. We recruited this Potter then?"
"For a time. You have to understand, he isn't exactly a normal recruit here. Even for other people in his position, and we pulled a few exceptional officers from the civilians that helped defend Elysium, they'd have to go through basic and officer training. We would do background checks, verify some personal history, standard security clearance interviews, the usual process."
"What was the problem, I mean I have a report here of his actions earlier on Shanxi. He has at least two incidents of extraordinary valor under fire, was he temporarily rejected?"
Anderson shook his head on the other side of the table.
"That's exactly it, his history, what there is of it in our records, is filled with this kind of thing. He was at the site of seven of the twelve largest terrorist attacks all across Earth from 2020 until the founding of the Systems Alliance. The man has no identification, no education record, no jobs, or even any tax records, despite working directly for the government at several different points. The only places the name Harry Potter crops up are at the sites of disasters, and in the context of a civilian that was far and away more competent than the local authorities. Udina, in the most literal sense the only paperwork we have associated with this man, and this is after a review by Inland Revenue and the Alliance Internal Defense, is a birth certificate stating that he's older than any human has any right to be, and some historical records and news clips showing he's saved hundreds of lives."
Donnel scrubbed his face, sighed, and looked down at the datapad.
"That was when we gave him this commission then? The commission that lead to Akuze?"
"Yes, and that was what led to the end of our direct interactions, anyway."
