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Chapter 5: Obscured

In the Bastion's corridors, on the level of the reactor control centre even, there was little sound beyond the quiet, hurried steps of the ship's former cook's assistant, dashing through the halls as quickly and quietly as he could. He knew that, by now, the Rebel scum would have noticed the absence of one of their prisoners and could only hope they did not consider him a danger; given what little he had been able to glean of their operation by observing the way the two guards he had encountered acted, he did not think that likely. The misstep on the part of those two that underestimating him had been, did not seem indicative of their overall operation, where for every meal they had, the prisoners had been closely watched and promptly rebound after they had finished.

Therefore, time was of the essence if he wished to achieve his goal.

He was just about to start wondering about the small presence of enemies, contemplating, whether an uprising, even with those few he might have been able to gather could have a chance of success, when he almost stumbled into the first guards. Luckily, the group of two posted at the entrance to the reactor control room had not noticed him, though that was bound to change quickly, should he approach them out in the open. While he might have been able to take out two of the soldiers in a surprise attack when they were expecting a meek, helpless prisoner, this was an entirely different situation; these two had blaster rifles that would riddle him with holes the moment he stepped into their line of sight. Then, he remembered a certain detail from the briefing his ISB handler had given him prior to his posting on the Strike-class cruiser.

Determination flooding his veins, he turned around, bound for the closest entrance to the maintenance tunnels.

OOOOOOOO

Now decked out in his Alliance-themed armour, Harry was quickly striding through the corridors of the Bastion, though he cared little for staying quiet. What was important though, was that he reach the place he was going as quickly as possible.

It was, according to everyone he had talked to, an open secret among the members of the Imperial Military that most larger units, especially the Navy's ships, would contain moles of the ISB or COMPNOR, and while it was far from certain their escaped prisoner was one of these, generally assuming the worst meant one could only be surprised positively. For this reason, he had inquired what the quickest way to destroy the entire ship and keep it out of Rebel hands was; the consensus amongst the entirety of those he had asked was blowing up the reactor. While introducing something into the air, like they themselves had done was possible, it was also prone to mistakes and unforeseen variables. A reactor explosion though? That was both permanent and and almost guaranteed to succeed.

So, he had immediately taken Arden and Corsek, both of them equally armoured, and made for the reactor control room. Yet when they reached the place, nothing seemed out of place; the two guards in front of the door, though perturbed by the interruption, seemed undisturbed. Still, Harry had a bad feeling. He ordered the two soldiers to remain on guard, while he and his companions entered the control room proper.

What they found inside was nothing short of gruesome: the three beings stationed around were all dead, one of them lying directly in front of an opening in the wall the young wizard could only guess led to the maintenance ducts (and he would cuss up a storm about forgetting those, later). The Nautolan's neck was stuck in an unusual angle that, though it looked like it had been produced by a combat technique intended for use against humans, seemed to have worked well enough on the alien. The other two guards were placed close to each other, sharing a large puddle of blood; each had a gash across their neck, deep enough to cut arteries, veins and trachea, and wide enough to reach from ear to ear. It was obvious that, whoever had done this, had felt absolutely no remorse. Harry was just about to storm over to the control panel to see what could be done despite his lacking skills in reactor technology, when he noticed the fourth body, directly next to the console he had been going for.

The young man was dressed in the uniform any enlisted in an auxiliary role aboard an Imperial Navy would have been, the grey jumpsuit ruffled around his still form. Around him, too, he had a pool of blood, the last drops still seeping out of his slit wrists.

"Fuck it all," Harry roared loudly and could just about hold himself back from kicking the body of the deceased saboteur who, having fulfilled whatever mission he had been ordered, must have decided to end himself rather than allowing himself to be captured and interrogated. Into the communicator, built into the helmet, he ordered, "Get me Captain Lilstrand and that reactor tech from yesterday into the reactor control room, now! That prisoner we lost was a saboteur; he did something to the reactor then slit his own wrists… yes, he slit both, vertically, too. Definitely did not want to be interrogated."

Quicker than the wizard would have thought possible, the group in the control room had been joined by the former Imperial captain and a technician who, just the day before, had expressed his interest in joining Harry's little project. Seemed like he would have to prove his worth sooner than anyone would have expected.

"We had a saboteur," he explained, looking distastefully at the obvious fanatic still on the ground in his own blood. "Did something to the reactor we think. Can you find out, what happened?"

Now visibly shaken, maybe even sweating a bit, the tech hurried forward and, had he not swiftly stepped to the side, Harry would have been knocked aside. Some tense minutes followed, no one uttering a word as they simply watched the tech at work, digging through screen after screen of data readouts. When eventually the young man let slip a mixture of a growl, a groan and a whimper, the wizard did not have to be a technical genius to know they were in deep, deep bantha poodoo.

"What is it?" Lilstrand questioned urgently. "Speak, man."

A small shake of the head seemed to clear the technician's mind, allowing him to answer. "He… he disabled the containment shield," the young man explained. "I reengaged it, but the reactor shell already has been damaged; it's only a matter of time before the whole thing blows up."

"We don't have the capacity to evacuate the entire ship, not with thousands of prisoners," the former Imperial captain immediately protested, giving credence to a fear Harry had felt growing inside of him for quite a while now. However, having that concern also equated to already having an idea about fixing the problem.

"Where is the damage?" he interceded pressingly, fixing the reactor tech with a determined stare that, beyond anything else he hoped would prompt a swift answer; dying from a burst reactor while the means to at least try and fix the damage was well in reach was most definitely a more ignoble end than anyone of them could wish for. Not to mention how ticked off Leia would be, if he died the moment, she left the ship for some Alliance business.

"Not one special place," the tech continued to elaborate. "That's not how it works; if the containment field fails, the entire structure gets damaged. First with micro-fractures, then they get progressively larger."

A groan upon his lips, Harry waved Arden over. "I know, what to do but I can't do it alone," he said, a nod being the only reply. "Remember how I taught you to pool energy with me, so I don't have to channel it all by myself? We'll do that now."

Seemingly a bit overrun by the rapid pace things were suddenly happening at, the witch nonetheless brought forth the wand she had strapped to her arm and stepped up next to him where he had placed himself, both of them now standing in front of a transparisteel window that, in the event of a failure of the monitoring equipment provided visibility into the reactor chamber. In fairness, even with that visible access, Harry still had little of an idea of what actually went down inside the chamber, but that was not necessary for the magic he was about to do. Really, he was just about to do some very basic magic. The problem was the sheer scope.

So, wand in hand, he began pulling on the power of magic all around and inside him, the growing vortex of power quickly bolstered by Arden in her efforts to help him reduce the stress channelling all that magic was exacting on his body. A believable representation of a pristinely unblemished reactor shell in his mind, Harry incanted the spell.

"Reparo!"

Then, he promptly proceeded to stumble to the ground as exhaustion overcame him.

OOOOOOOO

"As soon as I am away for a few days, you manage to get yourself in trouble," the voice of Leia Organa cut through the nebulous layer covering the surface of Harry's still sleep-addled mind. "I am happy you managed not to blow yourself up, though."

A simple 'hmph' would have to suffice for an answer, the young wizard decided in that moment, for he could barely feel the inside of his mouth for the incredible dryness of his tongue. That was soon remedied, though, when a gentle hand began steadying his head and then held the rim of a cup against his parched lips. As he opened his eyes, he was greeted not by Leia, as he had expected, but by Jane, the former Twi'lek slave the crew had set free. Had he not been worried about what she thought of their relationship still, her look of supreme worry would have been heart-warming.

"I did not have the heart to send her away," the voice of his girlfriend cut in, who he was now able to make out as being seated next to his bed. "Next time, think about what you're casting before you actually do it, will you? Did you really have to repair the entire reactor shell in one go?"

Had he had the proper energy to lift his arm, Harry would have slapped his own forehead; so much like his own, adolescent self, he had managed to jump into the fray, the best of intentions on the forefront of his thoughts, without truly thinking things through.

"Sorry," he croaked, even as he felt the cooling effect of the water he had managed to sip down before Jane had taken away the cup get to work on his throat. "Next time there's a reactor getting ready to blow up on us, I'll repair it in smaller parts."

"Just don't worry me like that, again, needlessly," Leia half choked, half bit out, before planting herself at his side. "Before you ask, you were successful, and Arden is quite alright. She says you could have drawn from her a lot more."

"I didn't think…"

"…it would take such a toll on you, yes," she interjected almost exasperatedly. "I'm just glad you're alright."

"How long was I out?" Harry questioned, already dreading the answer; he could not remember ever having exhausted himself this much with a single spell before. In fact, the last time he had been as wiped out as he was now, it had been after the fight with Quirrell.

"Two days, Ma… Harry," Jane replied in Leia's stead, who now seemed to be quite comfortable in simply cuddling into his chest while listening to his heartbeat. "We're on our way to the new base, now. Shall I go tell the others you're awake."

"Yes; thank you, Jane," the wizard replied, watching the red-skinned Lethan walk out of the commanding officer's quarter on the Decimator assault ship. For the following few minutes, the two of them that remained simply lay still on the bed, basking in each other's presence after a combination of not seeing each other for multiple weeks and a rather jarring situation. Eventually, it was Leia that began talking again first.

"She seems to be doing well."

"She is," Harry confirmed, smiling at the door through which the former slave had just left. "She spends a lot of her time with Arden, and it's starting to show. A few days after you left for that secret mission you refuse to tell me about," someone poked him in the ribs for that remark, "the two of them got together in an effort to mercilessly tease poor Mercer."

Leia snickered a little at the thought of that. "That witch alone can be bad enough, when she wants to be," she observed amusedly. "But another one like her? I could almost feel pity for the man, had he not interrupted my 'Harry-time' just before you dropped me off."

Harry snorted; he himself had amply punished the older man for walking in on him and his girlfriend in a rather compromising situation, for he had stumbled into and absolutely ruined the afterglow of some very intimate activities. Luckily, she had been lying on his chest by that time, stomach-down and a comforter pulled halfway up her back but had his first officer come in even a minute earlier he would have gotten quite the show; Leia had yet to forgive him, for she had missed out on the opportunity for revenge.

"Annoyed as I was with him, I think he has suffered enough," the wizard eventually replied, after recounting all that the two mischievous women had come up with. "For two entire days, whenever Merce sat down to eat, either Arden or Jane always came up to him and whisper in his ear what he might have witnessed, had he come in earlier. Increasingly ridiculous stuff, too."

By now, the princess was laughing openly. "Yeah, for example? Maybe there's something there for us to try…"

"Somehow I doubt you would want to eat Imperial rations from my, and I'm quoting here, 'sculpted, if pasty ass'," Harry relayed one of the ideas he had been told about; whether that meant it was one of the least or one of the most outlandish ones, he was not sure. It was an observable fact though that, over those two days, Mercer had spent little of his time in the mess actually fully concentrated on eating.

By now, Leia had started tracing shapes only she could see on his shirt next to where she was resting her head. "I don't know about military rations, but if you ever wanted to slather me in something more appetising, we could certainly try."

By the end, her voice had taken on that sultry quality that, over the past months, Harry had learned to associate with some of the best experiences of his life and, were it not for the continued weakness of his still recuperating body, he would have taken her up on the unspoken promise that tone always implied, regardless of the content of her words. Yet, the mind was willing while (most of) the flesh was weak, and so he elected to simply run his thumb up and down his girlfriend's back, tracing out wand movements.

"Might take you up on that, when I'm better," he eventually commented. "Not that I need more than what we're doing at the moment, not at all…"

He was interrupted by a pair of lips on his own. "Will you ever start believing that I know what I want and what I don't want? I wouldn't suggest it if I didn't think it was… damn it, Mercer, I thought you would have learned your lesson after what Harry told me about Arden and Jane's little campaign."

"Sorry," the older man hurried out, hand over his eyes. "I didn't expect anything to be going on; Jane said he was still rather out of it. Everyone decent?"

"Yes, that's not the point, though," Leia lectured. "Someone might not have been, and this is someone else's bedroom. Oh, come now, you can open your eyes, we're already through with the rations…"

"Sure, thanks for bringing that back up," the first officer responded archly. "Boss, I just needed to know, whether you wanted us to take the Decimator to our new base, so you could set up that… that charm thing you wanted to set up. I remembered something about the less people knowing about a place before you did your thing, the better, and this ship is bursting at the seams with Alliance personnel."

Harry nodded, thankful of the former Imperial's tendency to keep every important piece of information in mind. "Fidelius charm, and yeah, that would be good," he replied gratefully. "Hiding an entire planet will be hard enough, without hundreds of more people than necessary knowing about it."

"Then I'll arrange it," Mercer replied, before once again leaving the young couple blessedly alone.

"You know I won't sit idly by while you do this, right?"

OOOOOOOO

In a small basement, for lack of a better word, which Harry and Arden had collaborated to make, right on the edge of the large, flat plains, the two of them were joined by Leia. For now, the princess had made it abundantly clear she was keeping an unerringly close eye on her boyfriend with each piece of magic he was casting. They were all arrayed around a round plinth of stone, about the size and diameter of two astromechs stacked on top of each other. Perched on top, set inside a small depression in the stone, was a lightsabre crystal, taken from one of the trophies belonging to the first Inquisitor they had ever faced, back on Concordia. Secretly, the young wizard thought the original owner of the sword might have liked his weapon's central component being reused like this, to protect and keep people out of the eyes of the Empire, to disguise an entire planet.

"When I begin, I want you to simply… push power to what I'm doing," he said, aware of how woefully inadequate a description that really was, or would have been, had the other two never practised this before. "Not to me, but to what I'm doing; and don't let me have to pull it from you either, that's not the point. The idea is to minimise the work I have to do beyond forming the charm."

The two women who had agreed/demanded to be involved in his undertaking nodded, though understandably with different levels of confidence; that was a given really. After all, Harry had simply spent much more time practising magic with Arden than he had with Leia, a deficit he was loath to admit to and determined to remedy.

"Don't worry," Harry assured his girlfriend at seeing her insecurity. "If you want to, I can show you later, how to do this as the lead-caster; the conductor, if you will."

Seemingly cheered up by that promise (ever driven to learn and better herself), Leia nodded once again, smiled widely and adopted a stable, grounded stance not unlike what Luke or Arden might use when preparing to engage in a melee. Though lacking on the pure, predatory grace one could usually see in the Dathomirian, it was ample reminder the younger years of this princess had not been filled solely by stately functions and pretty dresses.

Without further comment, because really, what would the point have been, Harry returned his attention to the plinth and the crystal resting atop; they would have to find a new source for them, and soon, if he had any real intention of teaching people magic here, preferably one that did not involve hunting down darksiders for their focussing gems. Annoyedly returning from the tangent his thoughts had strayed to, the young wizard began recounting every step of the creation of a Fidelius charm that he had gleaned from his 'ancestral memories' and began pooling energy into the focussing crystal. Soon, what had begun as a small puddle turned into a swirling vortex of energy, to which first Arden, then Leia continued adding their own sizable chunks.

The first part of the charm, the one that involved a scaling in complexity and power requirement the more people knew about the secret basically worked like a memory charm on very, very strong steroids. Despite the planet's relative obscurity, Harry could in fact already feel the strain channelling and moulding all this magic was taking on his stamina, which he considered worrisome, given that the hard part was yet to come. That hard part was something his forebear's teacher had called 'phase-shifting'. Now, the young wizard had little idea what that was supposed to be in a technical sense, and frankly, he doubted either his ancestor or their teacher did, either, but it was easy enough to understand the basics. Also, it seemed to suffice for the spell, which was the main thing he was concerned with, as of that moment.

So, while he was conducting the swirling vortex of energy inside that crystal, forming the magic along the lines of his will, he could feel the drain of more and more power from the two women beside him. At an alarming rate, potential was being lost, dissipating into the surrounding air and stone and dirt and gravel, doing Merlin-knew-what to the basement and the planet surrounding it. Just before Leia, much less used to this particular kind of exertion than the other two, was about ready to faint, while her contribution dribbled almost to a halt, something in the air seemed to snap and the whole world seemed to make a small lurch all around them.

Panting, the three of them slid down the polished sides of the plinth, each doing their best to pump as much oxygen as they could into their overworked cells by sucking in mouthfuls of air. Unsurprisingly, it was once again Arden, still the most physically fit of them all, who spoke again first.

"I thought," she panted. "I thought… you had to store… the secret… in someone's… mind?"

After a few more moments of simple breathing, Harry felt up to a response. "Still did, right in my noggin'," he joked light-heartedly; or maybe it was lightheadedly. "I just didn't want to risk using this much magic without properly focussing it on something. Or worse, focussing it on myself. This way, the crystal does all the heavy lifting, I just happen to hold the key, right here."

He tapped himself against the head, mimicking the way people where he came from would flip someone the bird. Then, he remembered how unlikely it was these two would understand the gesture.

"Doesn't that produce a weakness?" Arden inquired worriedly, looking at the small blue crystal like it had somehow managed to personally offend her.

"It does," Harry confirmed tiredly. "That's why I'm putting up enough magical defences around this place that it could probably hold back even a very determined herd of rancors."

Immediately, he got onto doing exactly that, under the ever-watchful eyes of the other two, inquisitively keeping stock of every movement and every syllable the wizard used to layer protection after protection over the small basement. Muggle-repelling, intent-based, concealment, even one of the Weasley twins' creations; every single person that, from now on, approached the pedestal without repeating a code phrase would invariably end up a fluffy kitten.

"Unless you have a wish to find out how the world looks from a little cat's perspective, you should always say the passcode before you go near," he explained as he finished his work. Seeing two questioning looks aimed his direction, he added, "Double, double, toil and trouble. That's the code. A song from where I first learned about magic… and really nothing one would ever say as an accident."

Without any prompting from him, he was once again enveloped in the kind of warm hug that always seemed to occur when he mentioned 'back home' in Leia's vicinity, while Arden was simply standing by, awkwardly, looking like she was caught somewhere in between dashing up the ladder and staying to somehow help him deal with the bout of melancholy they both seemed to be expecting from him. Interestingly, it never did though; admittedly, feeling sad was no easy task with your girlfriend's warm, comfortably familiar body pressed up to you, but somehow, not even the slight pangs of 'what if' he had been having despite his 'future visions' remained. No, this was home now, a home he had worked hard for to create and would continue to work hard for to keep safe; the freedom of his new people, though they would still have to be found in the first place, was next on that list.

With a deft swish of his hand, he pulled forth the communication mirror and established a connection to Mercer. When, upon the question, whether he was alone, the older man nodded enthusiastically, Harry shared the secret.

"The planet Sanctuary is located on the third orbit of the star known as Q8-G-3447. I'll take a nap with Leia now, don't disturb us."

OOOOOOOO