Title: Defender's Path
Author: Knife Hand
Feedback: Constructive feedback appreciated, flames unappreciated
Spoilers: Phantom Menace for Star Wars. New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are all ignored. At least the first three or four Harry Potter Books, there will be some changes.
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Don't own em, if I did, I would be worth millions.
Summary: When an accident occurs with a potions experiment, Harry and Hermione wake up in a strange place, but that is not all that is different. Set in Seventh Year, Cross with Star Wars.
" " denotes speech, ' ' denotes thought.
AN: There is no correlation between the HP Verse Timeline and the SW Verse Timeline. Time does move faster in SW than HP but each storyline is told semi independently. The placement in the story had no significant meaning.
AN2: No, the Susan Bones that is Minister for Magic is not the one that went through Hogwarts with the gang. It is her Mother.
Harry raised the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the village from the gully. The streets were empty of civilians, but there was a patrol of about thirty soldiers spread out through the village. Harry noted that the soldiers were efficient and methodical, better than most teams he had seen, even some clone units. He noticed a soldier was carrying a field com unit backpack.
"See if we can break their comms signals." Harry ordered.
"On it." One of the Transfer Clones said and began to tune his own, more compact and powerful field radio pack.
Two hours passed, and the team watched the soldiers and listened in on their comms chatter. The soldiers radioed back to their base that they would be bunking in the town for the night. The soldiers were laughing and about to disperse when one emerged dragging a girl who looked to be all of seventeen, and it did not look like he wanted to talk.
"Damn it." Harry muttered. "Sprint. Move up as close to the girl as you can without being seen, when we hit them, get her to cover as fast as you can. Give a comms tap when you are in position. Deadeye, take aim on the guy holding her. When I give the word put a round right between his eyes."
Deadeye nodded, and then hunkered down to get a steady shot while Sprint moved forward low and fast.
"Stalker, you read?" Harry said over his radio.
"Read." Stalkers taciturn reply came.
"I saw their officer head over to your side, do you see him?" Harry asked.
"Yes."
"Ok. On my signal, I want you to incapacitate him, but I want him to be able to talk." Harry ordered.
"Rodger." Stalker replied.
Harry turned to the trooper with the comms set.
"On my mark I want you to jam their frequency." He said, getting a nod from the Clone. "Everyone else, pick a target and be ready to fire."
After another minute, Harry heard the comms tap from Sprint.
"All troopers. Execute." Harry ordered.
The ambush was over almost as soon as it began. One second the soldier was dragging the struggling girl down the street, the next he was dead on the ground and Sprint was dragging the girl into cover. Almost half the patrol fell within one second of the first soldier from the accurate fire of the clone troopers. The patrol leader had only enough time to utter a surprised "What?" into his radio, not that it mattered as the radio was being jammed, before he was hit in the shoulder and then the hip and dropped to the ground. He watched in horror as the remaining soldiers around him were quickly and brutally cut down by accurate blaster fire. Only one soldier had time to return fire, and his one shot was not aimed anywhere near a clone trooper.
'Shh, it's ok." Sprint said to the terrified girl he was holding.
She looked up at him with abject terror. Realising how he must look to her, in the impersonal and intimidating armour and the realistic red claw marks that made it seem like he was bleeding, Sprint took of his helmet. Seeing a smiling and slightly irreverent face, the girl broke down and started sobbing with relief into Sprint's chestplate.
The rest of the recon team moved into the village and secured it. After a quick discussion with the village leaders, in which he assured them that the team had no intentions to stay or bother them, Harry went to interrogate the patrol leader.
After a few minutes of fruitless questions, Harry tried the Jedi Mind Trick.
"Tell me where your base is." Harry ordered, performing the Mind Trick.
The officer still managed to stay quiet. Fortunately for Harry, he still had one trick up his sleave, literally. Drawing his Wand from its forearm holster, Harry aimed it at the officer's head.
"Legilimens."
Against this kind of mental attack, the officer had no defence. Harry was quickly able rummage through the man's mind, though he tried to resist. In the end the resistance, without any magic to fuel the fight, caused a cerebral haemorrhage that killed the officer, but not before Harry got what he needed.
"Get me a link to General Granger." Harry ordered.
"That was scary." One of the rookie troopers said, carefully out of earshot of the General.
"Not as scary as some of the General's other tricks." Deadeye said. "Once saw him burn twenty Bugs with a flick of his wrist. Just be glad he's on our side. Him and General Granger. Now she's a scary lady."
The rookie simply nodded in shock.
The commander of the bastion was a rank that equated to a Colonel. Before the Separatist occupation, the bastion had also been the administrative centre of the province but now it was manned purely by soldiers who had sworn to the Separatists and was responsible for the pacification and compliance of the surrounding area, which had opposed the decision to join the Separatist cause. The Colonel was effectively the Provincial Governor, with the understanding that he could call on Separatist forces in an emergency, but with the clear implication that it had better be a damn emergency or there would be consequences. His communications room had reports on the location of over a dozen patrols currently pacifying the countryside.
The first sign of trouble was not recognised as such by either the Colonel or by communications specialists. Evening was approaching when the long range communication systems went down, leaving only short range channels used within the bastion open. This was noted in the communications logs but was not thought much of because the system had been buggy for the last two months and had gone down on four previous occasions.
The second sign of trouble was a number of sentries going silent on the short range channels. The Colonel responded immediately to this by sending a pair of soldiers to the location of each sentry that had gone silent, turning sensors and eyeballs on the ground approaches to the bastion and sending the majority of his soldiers down to man the ground level defences. Unfortunately for the Colonel, the assault was not a ground attack but a swift airborne insertion by fifty well trained clones and General Granger. The airborne clones and Hermione landed on the parapets of the bastion, having taken out the initial sentries and the pairs sent to check on them before they even landed.
Captain Talon lead ten troopers to take out the command and communications centre while Hermione took the rest to take up defensive positions. The defensive team took up their first position down on the second level, using the defensive design of the bastion itself to aid them against the counter attack by the real defenders. Several times throughout the battle, General Granger ordered the blocking force to fall back to higher levels within the bastion. In the end the bastion's defenders fought to the last man but only managed to wound a few of the clones and none of them seriously.
Captain Talon's group had a second objective. After they had taken out the Colonel and the communications centre, they planted explosives throughout the bastion, carefully placed to make it ineffective as even a temporary military instillation but leaving evidence of the fire fight. Indeed when a the patrols returned to the bastion, they came to the intended conclusion that partisans had assaulted the bastion, fighting hard to get to the fourth level before they were stopped, but infiltration teams managed to plant explosives. This was what was reported to the Separatist high command in the Capital by the team that was sent to the neighbouring province. He remaining soldiers from the patrols stayed with the intention of hunting down the insurgents. All of them were dead by the time the report reached the Capital.
Harry and Hermione wandered through the new encampment of the Legion. Two months had passed since the first on planet raids, with the province they had landed in now mostly under their control and the encampment had a different feel, not the least being that the Legion was now had log cabins for barracks, headquarters and mess halls. The transfer and rookie clones had all seen action and were now integrated into the Legion and many had earned the respect of the Veterans. Captain 564 had become friends with the taciturn and surly Captain Punisher, the pair setting up perimeters and defensive lines that were, as 564 had once described as 'solid as a rock', which of course earned him the name Captain Rock.
There were also now two elite units within the Predators that had not existed before. The fifty troopers who had gone on that first patrol with Harry were now under the direct command of Captain Stalker, and had spent a lot of time training for their new role as specialist recon troopers. Several were also being trained as specialist snipers under the tutelage of Deadeye. They were officially designated as the Scouts, being identified by their right shoulder guards being painted in dappled greens, browns and reds. Captain Stalker reported solely to General Potter in all matters that related to the Scouts.
The other elite unit were those who had raided the bastion with Hermione. Their commander, Captain Talon, was quite a flamboyant clone and it was reflected in his running of what he dubbed the 'Nighthawks'. The Nighthawks were a specialist airborne insertion team, reporting directly to General Granger in the same way that the Scouts reported directly to General Potter. The Nighthawks made the HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) jump their speciality. Talon himself had designed the unit marker, consisting of their right shoulder guard being painted sky blue overlaid with a side on emblem of a black hawk with its wings extended behind and above and his claws extended as if just about to snatch up prey.
There was one other new element present in the encampment, which Harry and Hermione observed as they passed an open area, converted to a shooting range, where a number of clones under Major Rush were supervising a militia of locals who had joined up to fight for the freedom of their world. The Generals continued to wander and passed another unit of Militia who were panting heavily and drinking deep from their water bottles, having just returned from a forced march.
At first when the Militia had been formed, there was some reservation among the clones, but the locals were proving themselves, both as a hardy stock being this world's equivalent of frontiersmen and in their determination to fight for their world. Once the Militia had demonstrated their willingness to fight some clones had felt a sense of relief and that they were not bearing the burden of the fight alone. This opinion had been most prevalent among the transfer clones, in particular ones who had seen their brothers fight and die for populations who refused to fight and then hated the clones afterwards for the damage that had been caused during the fighting.
Harry and Hermione walked into the cabin that was their private quarters and let their General personas drop, knowing that Thrust and Rush had command for the next two shifts. The cabin had been built from local timber by Harry and a group of clones and distinctly resembled another cabin on another wooded world where they had spent half a year in seclusion, and where they had celebrated their wedding night. This was the one place where they could forget their responsibilities for thousands of lives and take a few steps back towards the Wizard who wanted nothing more than to be normal and the Witch who hid behind books and her formidable intelligence while desperately wanting to be accepted by here peers. They both collapsed into the bed, snuggling into each others arms as they fell asleep.
TBC…