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Chapter 3: Out of the Bacta

"Ms. Organa, I wish to apologise for my rudeness earlier," were the first words out of Hermione Granger's mouth, uttered as soon as the addressee of these same words had spotted the witch standing next to Harry's bacta tank. To Leia's eyes, she simply looked forlorn, and remembering their earlier conversation, if it could even be called that, it was clear that it had been she herself who had been the ruder of the two of them, not her back-then opponent. Still, it was obvious this woman was willing to put aside the pride she obviously had for the sake of… whatever drove her most; likely the man in the healing mucus.

As he had most likely been doing for quite some time now, TC-A5 was beginning to translate, though it was most likely no longer necessary, after the zealousness with which she had thrown herself into the study of the English language. By now, she was almost guaranteed to get at least the meaning of what was being said right. That an interruption would come from shy Ximna, who had been trying to hide her presence behind and around Leia ever since they had left the training areas together, was somewhat surprising.

"Why is the droid repeating everything she said?" the girl questioned in the queen's direction. Then, speaking directly to Hermione, she asked, "Why is he repeating everything you said, word for word?"

For a few moments, the two of them were stumped. It seemed the girl was unaware she had been switching between two languages, instinctively and at the drop of a hat. "Because I was speaking a different language that Ms. Organa is not that well-versed in. I'm Hermione, by the way. And who are you?"

"Ximna," the girl replied, back to being shy, seemingly shocked by her own daring in questioning the older two right to their faces. Then, something seemed to be dawning on her. "You were speaking a different language? But I understood you!"

"Well, you are speaking my language now," Hermione pointed out with a small, wan smile. Perhaps Leia was not the only one who was in need of a distraction. "Don't worry, it's nothing bad; a friend of mine had a similar talent: he could talk to snakes, but he never really knew it was a special gift. Tell, me, have you ever had weird things happen around you?"

Wide-eyed, the girl nodded. "I once made a broken hydraulic jack work again! They would have hurt my friends if they found out it didn't work anymore."

"Well, then it does sound like you have a gift, as well, Ximna," Leia butted into the conversation once again. She did not think Hermione would actively do something to hurt the girl, she certainly did not seem the type, but her lack of knowledge regarding the galaxy at large might end up doing so regardless of intentions; what had been described so far could easily still be attributed to some certain, more unique gifts in the Force, rather than the accidental magic Harry had once described to her. It would not do to dangle an exciting possibility in front of the former slave, only to then have it taken away by matters of circumstance. Not that having a gift in only the Force, not in magic, was not an awesome thing, as well. "I think both Hermione and me might have an idea of what that gift might be, but would it be okay for us to wait to tell you until we're sure?"

"But I want to know now!" The girl had turned pleading eyes on the bushy-haired witch now, letting out some of that pubescent energy she had been lacking all through both of their conversations so far. In a way, it was reassuring that at least some things could not be bullied out of a child, even after what sounded like years of unrelenting servitude. With a shrug to her sudden ally Leia allowed Hermione to make the choice for both of them.

"Well, it sounds like you could have magic," the witch said gently, carefully pulling out her wooden wand from a holster hidden inside the wide sleeve of her robe. The sudden flinch on Ximna's part did not go unnoticed, as she saw the short rod, but it appeared she had been well-trained in hiding her true emotions. "This is what we call a wand. It helps with focussing, forming and directing magical spell. Leia and I, we're both what's called witches; women who control magic. I'm fully trained, while she's still learning. Now watch."

With an elegant flourish of her wand, she created a flock of small, bright yellow birds that began flying around the enchanted girl's head. "I can do that, too?" she questioned, unconsciously reaching for the focus, the one that had created her objects of fascination.

"I'm not sure about that," Leia admitted, drawing her attention even as the flock of birds simply disappeared to whence they came, from thin air. "It's possible your gift is more with the Force, like the Jedi. To be honest, we don't really understand the difference, yet."

It was positively easy to see the gears working inside the girl's head, until they reached a conclusion old Obi-Wan would have been heartbroken about.

"But I don't want to be a Jedi. They tried to destroy the Republic!"

OOOOOOOO

In a palatial building on the edge of the light and dark side of the planet Ryloth, standing in what was unofficially called the throne room, stood two figures. One of them, the master of the palace, was human, with long white hair and a perpetual sneer. The other one was a large, bipedal but birdlike alien, and his head was bowed in a revential greeting.

"Your mission went well, Urai?" The human man questioned his subordinate, not bothering to look up from the holographic map table he had been studying for quiet a while now. "A simple meeting should be well within the skills of a warrior of your calibre."

"It was, Tyber," the large Talorta replied, his stoic manner not allowing him to rise to the concealed barb of his friend and boss; recently, he had blundered on a mission to intimidate a local Imperial garrison on Saleucami by severely injuring the governor, forcing the Consortium to go in much more… guns-blazing than Zann would have preferred in any other situation. "As you wished, Commander Seerdon has been killed. I have some disturbing news about his loyalties, though."

"Let me guess: he was working for one of our main rivals," Zann analysed dispassionately, finally looking up from his close study of a report he had opened on the holo table only moments prior. "Jabba or Black Sun?"

"It appears he was working for Black Sun," Urai confirmed with another nod, the small, almost miniscule movement enhanced by the beak so typical for his species. "I have had to pay for that information with access to the plans for our Crusader-class corvettes."

Pulling a few items across the hologram in front of him, the crime lord pondered what he had heard. "Not a great loss to us," he eventually decided, closing up the tedious financial report on the profits of the black markets running around the Kuat system; things were going well, with the Empire still reeling from the Death Star's destruction and the increasingly open Rebellion. All that money being poured into the planet's shipyards…

"Potter is not interested in challenging us, and as long as we don't try to make him do anything that goes against his… moral sensibilities," Zann spat the words out like they were acid on his tongue, "he won't risk having his identity exposed to the Empire. If he wants to build a flotilla, let him; might make him even more of an asset."

Urai, though, seemed troubled by something. "Speak your mind, Urai. I can't have my closest advisor hold out on me."

"I think it unwise to simply dismiss Potter as a threat," he counselled, not at all hesitantly, now that he had explicitly been asked to talk about his worries. "He and his team easily broke into an Imperial Oversector headquarter, abducted and killed an ISB commander, framed Black Sun for his attempted murder and made it appear as if he had deserted. He might be unable to field a fleet strong enough to challenge us, but we would be wise to not underestimate him, whatever leverage we hold over him."

"Go on…"

"We still do not know of his base of operations, despite our intelligence operations all doing their best to find it and your contact within the Alliance, of which he too has several highly-placed ones," the Talorta continued, dispassionately laying out the facts. "Additionally, there was something… different about one of the humans sent to meet me. The Force was clinging to her in a way I have never seen before…"

"The Force was clinging to her?" Zann repeated at him, verbatim, somewhat mockingly. "Have you had a change of heart while I was in prison and become a Jedi knight?"

Once again, Urai did not rise to the bait. It was one of the reasons the crime lord kept him around, after all: his unwavering calm even in the most stressful situations. "There are no Jedi or Sith in my people, but the Force has always been tied into our very existence. We feel its presence, see how it flows. It was strong with her, though neither dark nor light."

"Interesting…" Tyber fell silent for a few moments, visibly pondering what he had heard, before abruptly changing the topic. "Speaking of Force sensitives: Have you found someone to decrypt the artifact for us?"

OOOOOOOO

After doing quite a lot of fast talking in an effort to convince Ximna that being a Jedi was not synonymous with being an evil traitor intent on subjugating the good people of the galaxy, for apparently even being in captivity in a mine for all of her life had not shielded her from the Emperor's propaganda machine, Leia was now on a different mission. She had left the girl in Granger's care while she herself was setting off to find Mercer; if people were asking her for orders now, she was going to be using that for the good of everyone around here and use it in a way she knew Harry would appreciate. Eventually, she found 'the Captain's' second-in-command sitting in the mess hall, indulging in an Imperial field ration somewhat spiced up by what looked like locally sourced meat; apparently, someone had gone out hunting. She only hoped they had thoroughly checked the product for compatibility with the human digestive tract. The deserter had barely noticed her approach, when the queen sat down across the table from him.

"You… want some of this?" he questioned, half-jokingly, with a raised eyebrow, mimicking pushing his plate over. "Wouldn't you prefer it fresh? I think the serving droid still has a good deal left. One of our patrols ran into some kind of large predatory animal. Turns out it did not have the good sense to be wary of people with blaster rifles."

"Yes, you're a big joker," Leia snapped at him. Forcing herself to cool down, as he had not really done anything to earn her ire, she continued, "How come I had to find one of the former slaves, a 15-year-old, without anyone taking care of her?"

"Uhm…" Mercer began eloquently explaining the situation. "I'm eating, can this wait?"

Though everything inside her, spurned on by the image of Ximna's scared expression back when she had first spotted Leia, was screaming no, she nodded; this was no emergency, and interrupting his meal in the first place had been bad form, especially in the way she did it. Pressing now would be downright rude.

"Thanks," the lieutenant replied, turning back to his meal, before fixing her again, just for a second. "It's really quite good, the meat. You should try it."

Only now did Leia notice she actually was quite hungry, and she tried to remember, when she had last eaten. Not when she had taken Ximna to the mess, she had been too distracted then, so it would have had to have been on the Alderaanian Twilight. But there, their last meal had been… well, supper, because they had decided to wait the extra few hours until they were back at the base to eat more comfortably and, even if only slightly, better. No wonder she was hungry, not having eaten in almost 24 hours. With unusual fervour most of the time reserved for food that was not ration packs, she moved to the back of the small queue the serving droid had to work through and semi-patiently waited for her own portion. When she finally had the tray in her hands, she returned to the table as quickly as it was possible, while also taking care not to spill anything.

As it turned out, the mystery meat she still hoped someone had thoroughly checked, was indeed rather good; perhaps a bit stringy, but that could probably be taken care of with the right cooking techniques. Aside from that, it had a somewhat odd, but rich flavour that rather well complemented the overly bland contents of the ration pack. Perfectly balanced nutrition notwithstanding, the stuff really was quite a drag after some time. Once the two of them were both finished, and possibly in an effort just to spite her, Mercer insisted on not even talking while she was still demolishing her meal, they rose from the meagrely padded bench and walked out of the room together. As if by a shared decision, they each instinctively chose the route to the office of the base commander's deputy, now the Imperial deserter's workspace.

"What the hell was that about?" Mercer hissed angrily at her, as soon as the automatic door closed behind them. "Pulling off a show like that, in the middle of the mess hall. That's going to be all over the place in an hour, maybe two if a few of the people who heard are taking desserts."

Leia was just about to bite back some blistering retort, when the more reasonable parts of her that had, for a few days now, been rather frayed, pulled her back. "Sorry, Mercer. I'm just stressed and haven't been sleeping well. Won't be happening again."

With a 'hmm' and a nod, the man received her apology and explanation, before sitting down behind his desk and pulling some file on his terminal. "One of the slaves Kisc and his people brought back, you say?"

"Yeah, young girl by the name of Ximna. 14 or 15, but looks younger," Leia answered, trying her best to peer around and onto the screen. "How did these people get here, anyway?"

Pausing in his effort to search through record after record, Mercer looked up at her and replied, solemnly, "They were after a bounty somewhere on the Outer Rim; nothing big, just something to train up his newest crew member. Some farmers were being harassed by a group of pirates and had pitched in to hire some professional help."

"And they didn't want their people back?" the queen questioned, horrified. "I mean, these would have to be abducted farmers, right?"

With a sad nod, the former Imperial gave affirmation to at least part of her statement. Which part, though, she was not quite sure. "Many of them are; they were forced to work in a cortosis mine by the pirates, who then sold at least part of their product to the Empire to keep the local moff off their backs." Then, as if it cost him an immense amount of energy, he added, "But none of the captives had any families to return to. They always took entire families. Either that or, if someone could not work, they were just killed. No sense in leaving behind someone harbouring a grudge, right?"

"Oh…"

She was not quite sure what to say about that, or if there even was much to say. The simplicity of this horrid calculation was astounding, both in its pure logic as well as its callousness.

"That was my first reaction, too," Mercer replied with a forced, strained laugh. "Kisc got them armed and they managed to fight out of the pirate's base, hijack one of their two CR90s and hightail it out of there."

Leia was shocked, to say the least. "They had two corvettes just sitting around?" The idea that a pirate group, whose purpose was, by definition, to attack others, would let a ship as valuable to that purpose as one of the 'Corellian Corvettes' simply sit around, let alone two of them, seemed ludicrous. "Good thing Kisc is level-headed enough not to attack them outright."

Mercer nodded, gravely, before doing a few taps on his console. In response, the datapad she was always carrying around hummed against her thigh. Opening the file, she had just received, the queen was even more relieved the Bothan had held back on what any halfway decent being's instincts must have told them to do in this situation. "How did they get their hands on this many ships?"

"Must have managed to stay under the radar for a long time," the former Imperial mused, himself now once again going through the list. "Lots of old military hardware: a Marauder, some Consulars even… I'll be damned, some V-wings, too. Haven't seen those in a while."

"You think that moff is doing more for them than just divert the wrong kind of attention?" Leia questioned, carefully considering the ship line-up in front of her. "Many of these would have been decommissioned by the Empire over the last few years, and the CR90s could easily have been seized by the Imperial military. The Alliance likes using them and many of the Navy's commanders make a sport of finding the flimsiest excuses to board and search any they manage to get their hands on."

"Unsuited to getting the refugees off of Coruscant then?" Mercer ventured, dispassionately analysing the situation for what it was.

"Unsuited to getting the refugees off of Coruscant," the queen affirmed, thinking back on how often even she, flying a diplomatic flag, had been stopped for 'inspections'. That that flag had been the Alderaanian one had probably not helped, though. Her people were far from loved within the Imperial Navy, way too uppity. "Excellent ships, though."

"Excellent ships currently in the hands of a pirate gang," Mercer observed, looking at her intently, stressing the word currently beyond what she would consider accidental. "Kisc already took away the Slayer, and I think we should continue with that noble work, unless we want them to continue plaguing every system around them. This fleet is too large to be supporting only a single mine, too. What they've lost with our operation will be quickly replaced, both the ship as well as the human… assets."

Leia winced a little, berating herself for not noticing further; with the loss of an entire complement of forced labourers from one of their sites, the pirates would be out there again, rather quickly, looking for replacements. Another ship they might simply buy from the corrupt moff, but workers would be abducted, their families killed, maybe entire small communities devastated. It was the Outer Rim they were talking about, after all: many planets had only one or two significant settlements, the population of the smallest colonies sometimes numbering only in the hundreds. Given the number of people it took to man these ships and how many troops some of them could carry, it was entirely possible an overly zealous pirate lord might depopulate an entire world.

"Do you think we can take them?" she therefore questioned, doubtfully looking at the entire line-up once again, at least the part they knew about. A Pelta-class, seemingly rebuilt as a carrier to hold 24 V-wings, two Marauder-class corvettes, 12 V-wings each… some other corvette-sized ships that had yet to be identified. Meanwhile, all they really had to pit against that comparatively massive fleet was the Lightbringer. Sure, the multiple M14 squadrons were excellent fighters, and especially the one squadron being flown by the freed Mandalorians was also expertly piloted, but they would still be torn to shreds among the numerically superior V-wings and the devastating laser cannon fire of themultiple corvettes. In a pinch, the new CR90 and the various YT-2000s could pitch in, but things were still too close that way for her liking.

"Hey, I'm Empire-trained," Mercer rebutted her question. "My personal specialty is succeeding by an overwhelming show of force. You're the insurgent, you tell me. Beating the odds is supposed to be your thing."

Smiling indulgently at the variably deadly-serious, then sometimes surprisingly childish man, she replied, "No, not if there's another way. I think we would win, but not without unnecessary casualties, especially for our fighter squadrons if they get caught in the crossfire between those corvettes. If we could…"

A wide smile spread across the queen's face as she thought of something. "Say, have Kisc and the others brought back any prisoners, perhaps?"

OOOOOOOO

Hermione was sitting next to the slip of a girl Leia had brought in earlier; Ximna, she was called. A small waif with sickly, off-white hair and pale skin, she was distantly reminiscent of Luna when they had first met her. These days, the ethereal blonde was much different, spurred on by having people to rely on for probably the first time in her life. Maybe this wounded girl would be the same, would blossom the way young Luna Lovegood had.

The queen had left quite some time ago, incensed no one had taken care of Ximna since her arrival, just letting the young orphan be on her own in a completely alien place. At least the latter of these things she understood; ever since arriving… here, she had been completely out of her depth. A different language, technology so far out of reach for the humanity she knew it might as well have been fantasy, an entire little town following her brother's leadership. If he was anything like she remembered him, they could not have chosen anyone better.

And with those thoughts returned the last reason she had been feeling so completely blindsided: the Harry she found, even though he was not even awake, was not the one she had been expecting. Not that she had been overly sure, what she was expecting, but it had certainly not been this. A girlfriend, loyal friends, almost a thousand people considering him their leader; let alone an entire little fleet of spaceships. Spaceships. Did she really have the right to take all th…

Her thoughts were abruptly brought to a halt when, in the corner of her eye, she spotted a tiny bit of movement. Turning to the large container, a bacta tank, she reminded herself it was called, she made sure her eyes had not deceived her. Indeed, there, inside the viscous liquid, her best friend's forearm… the remaining one, she shuddered, was moving, trying to reach the breathing apparatus she had been told was imperative to his continued well-being. Given that humans generally tended to need oxygen, she was rather sure that had not been an exaggeration. Before she had time to call for someone, both one of the medical robots and a medic who had been doing their regular shift nearby were upon the tank.

The young woman who looked barely old enough to have finished training as a medic called out to her patient, managing to calm him down sufficiently for a large, crane-like contraption to lift him out of the liquid and onto a bed the robot had made ready. Outside the tank, his body was even more visible to Hermione's probing eyes. Well-nourished, mostly; well-trained, now, too, with lean muscles that looked like they had atrophied somewhat from him floating in a liquid for multiple days. Of course, there was also the small issue of the missing half of an extremity. At least the stump looked to be healthy, having sealed almost without scar tissue. With some trepidation, the witch closed in on her friend's bed and looked into his still somewhat blurred eyes, just barely keeping from crushing him in a hug she would never come out of. When he spoke, though, it was like a knife, twisting into her heart.

"Her… Hermione? What are you doing here?"

OOOOOOOO