Disclaimer: The Star Wars and Harry Potter copyrights lie with their respective owners, should any of them have any problem with my story being shared, I will comply with their wishes and remove it from circulation.

Please do not copy this work or any part of it.

Chapter 11: Sewage

"You keep an eye on the Imps, I look out for any other… interesting developments," Arden ordered to the enthusiastic consent of Jane. The two of them were sitting on a balcony, not unlike the one Harry and Leia were likely to be just about to vacate, as far as the witch knew, overlooking the Imperial Oversector Headquarters. And while the red-skinned Twi'lek was indeed diligently watching the installation, the Dathomirian herself had a very different mission; instead of doing effectively the same exact thing her accomplice was doing, which was keeping up surveillance of an almost empty facility all through the night, she had chosen a more apt target.

Arden was out to get more material, a few snippets of information to tease Loverboy and Princess with, as Mercer had so charmingly put it when they left him behind on Sanctuary. Annoying as he was from time to time, she missed the guy already, even if it had been only days since they had last seen him, short though their stop at the base might have been.

When she turned the optic of her electrobinoculars in the direction of Harry and Leia's domicile, however, something surprising happened: where just the prior day she had been able to make everything out in extreme, almost worryingly accurate detail, there was now a haze covering the entire building almost as if… there was even a part of her mind telling her to look somewhere else.

"Damn," Arden muttered. "Harry must have noticed something, put up some kind of magic to keep me from getting the really embarrassing intel."

"Or he did not think of you being so… weird and simply put up protections against being seen by the Empire," Jane proposed, still gazing at the Imperial compound, the formerly bustling inner courtyard now devoid of any signs of life beyond the small rodents scurrying around between the main and multiple auxiliary buildings.

"Whatever the reason," the witch bemoaned, also turning her binoculars to the enemy compound, "the effect stays the same. Probably better like this, anyway. It was a bit creepy, wasn't it?"

The Lethan stayed quiet, but there was a certain silent condemnation to be felt that left little to the imagination, as far as Arden was concerned, so she said nothing, either. Instead, she proceeded to simply stare at their mission target, maybe see if anything at all interesting was going on, not that she thought it would. Nothing interesting had happened last night and the one before, so why should this one be different?

"Heads up, we got a shuttle incoming, Lambda-class," Jane announced, around an hour into their stakeout, shaking the stupor that had settled over her accomplice after staring at an empty courtyard for just about 55 minutes. "Western landing zone."

And indeed, over on the western landing pads, one of the classier Imperial shuttles, closely followed by two TIE fighters, was setting down, its escorts continuing to their landing chutes in the grip of the base's tractor beams. The passengers, who turned out to include Moff Seerdon, had barely alighted the craft, when the typical whine of an alarm could be heard throughout the compound and into the city, at least as far as their rented domicile.

"Time to call Harry and Leia?" Jane questioned.

"Indubitably."

OOOOOOOO

The young couple, who despite circumstances had decided to make the most of their situation in the vacation department, had just sat down in front of a nice little grill that supplied the baked dartfish Harry had grown addicted to since their arrival, when the alarm from the Imperial headquarters began blaring through the streets. Therefore, when the call from Arden reached them, they were already back in their rented apartment, gearing up for as many possible scenarios as they were able to come up with.

"What's going on, did anything tip them off?" the wizard asked hurriedly as the image on his mirror cleared up. "Do we need to get out of here?"

"No, doesn't look like it," she replied, even though she too was now visibly wearing her armour. "Moff Seerdon showed up in a shuttle and now it looks like he's mobilising the entire base for some operation. Are we doing anything on that?"

Though the temptation to intervene in whatever Seerdon was planning was there, Harry eventually decided against it; whatever was going on was bound to make everyone more alert. Instead, waiting for even more personnel to be pulled away for some unknown operation was bound to leave the compound even more weakened than it already was. "No; whoever's their target now will have to find some way to deal with it. We have our own mission to fulfil."

"Understood, Boss," Arden confirmed. "Still, does this change our timetable?"

A short glance in Leia's direction was enough to tell him that she did indeed think it should change their timetable, so he turned the mirror far enough that they were now all able to see each other.

"It should," the princess, who probably had just as much if not more experience in running a guerrilla war than any of the others, explained. "I know we wanted to wait for some kind of opening, and this is it. If the Moff is pulling away troops for some emergency operation, then it will take some time for reinforcements to arrive here, if any come at all. Garrisons also have a tendency to get sloppy as soon as their commanders are away, especially when those commanders are like what I have heard about Seerdon. My guess would be tomorrow night; it gives everyone of an opportunity to relax again, while not risking anything too major happening in between."

"Understood, Boss Lady," the Dathomirian replied, just before the image vanished from the surface of the mirror, leaving behind only a reflection of a frowning Leia and an amused Harry.

"Did she just call me 'Boss Lady'," she questioned, looking over at him, perplexed.

With a slight chuckled, the wizard replied, "Well, at least we know she approves of you."

OOOOOOOO

"Tell me again whose idea this was?" Arden complained as she scrunched up her nose, looking around in disgust. "Infiltration is not supposed to be this disgusting."

Leia turned around to glare at the Dathomirian for a moment, before turning back to the front without giving any comment, the only sounds the slow sloshing of the raw sewage flowing along next to them, the steps of the four humanoids and the slow whirring and occasional beeping of the astromech unit Slicer had installed the relevant access protocols on before their departure.

"It was my idea, Arden," Harry replied evenly from the tip of the small group. "They have some kind of sensors active at the entrance to the compound, at least that tech we overheard yesterday seemed to think so. Since we have no idea, what those sensors might be, a disillusionment charm was out of the question. And I don't want to overuse either the Inquisitor or the ISB trick when we don't really need it."

"Couldn't you just use that…" Jane interjected, petering out when she seemed unsure of what exactly the witch was supposed to be using. "That bubble thing? Or even your mask?"

"I don't like the mask, I'll only wear it when we're inside the base," the Dathomirian grumbled, staying suspiciously silent on her non-use of the bubblehead charm. Her quick action in applying it though was enough to tell her teacher she had simply forgotten about this option.

"Better now?" Leia questioned archly from behind her own mask (she had insisted on Harry making good on his promise to make her a suit of armour as well). Arden only nodded belligerently, the way she tended to do whenever she was mostly annoyed with herself.

"Tell me again how this is going to work," Harry asked of the group, to the general annoyance of the three females, though what really was their problem, he could not fathom. Okay, maybe he could; still, he had learned a lesson in precise planning from the many hare-brained schemes he had run during his time in school. That lesson was, in all brevity: do that precise planning thing.

"You got a janitor drunk last night, got him to spill the beans on some of the internal layout of the compound…" Leia began, a fond exasperation audible, and he could almost imagine her smiling, despite the somewhat intimidating mask that completed her helmet.

"…then you rummaged around in his head, something you'll be feeling overly sorry for, for at least another few days, picked out a few more important details, including where to find the databanks and some of the guard roster…" Arden added, suddenly once again a unit with the princess she had just been glared at by.

"…and we're going to be following these sewers to just under the server room, where you and Arden will then vanish the ceiling so we can climb up, take as much data as we can and hopefully be gone before anyone notices we were ever there," Jane finished, receiving a satisfied nod from her captain; if they wanted to tease him, treating it as if they were just doing him a favour instead was guaranteed to have him win the whole thing. At least he hoped that was the case.

"Hold," the witch suddenly hissed holding up a balled fist to make everyone stop in their tracks. Aware as they were of her finely tuned senses, they did, and lucky that was, for there, hidden in a nook so as to be almost out of sight waited what looked like a sensor belonging to some kind of security system.

"Good catch," Harry whisper-called before pulling out his wand and aiming it at the offending piece of technology. A short freezing charm, the same one a man named Horace Slughorn had once used to take out muggle alarm systems, was enough to take care of that particular problem (they had tested such things exhaustively with the security systems built into the prefabricated garrison base), but only if it was applied before the system was triggered. Otherwise, it was just a fancy way to make the blinking on that singular unit stop, something a blaster bolt was well able to do, too. "Go through, I'll bring up the rear and dispel the charm in case the system expects regular updates."

The other three (and the astromech) scurried past him, single file and as far away from the disgusting fluids coming out of the base as possible. Now in the back of the group, the wizard followed on their heels, only turning for but a moment to remove the magic he had placed on the sensor. With Leia now in the lead, they followed the sewer for another fifty metres until they reached a small junction, which they followed to the left, toward the heart of the Imperial facility.

When finally, they came to the spot they were going for, the whole thing was admittedly rather anticlimactic; it was just another spot of walls and ceiling, more of the brownish sludge, all very non-descript. Yet, the navigation system on his datapad (anonymised, Slicer had assured him) told them it was the right place. So, without further ado, both Harry and Arden pointed their foci toward the rough-hewn duracrete and vanished a sizable portion, just about enough that a grown man would have absolutely no trouble fitting through. A wave of cold air greeted them, as each one in turn was levitated into the sterile room, packed to the ceiling with tech the wizard could not even hope to comprehend. Luckily, he was quite able to make out the data port for the astromech, after which the droid would do the rest.

"R3, do your thing."

The unit had just beeped its confirmation when their hitherto completely smooth operation turned radically sideways.

Without any particular warning, the sliding door to the databank room Arden had just been about to magic shut slid open, admitting a suddenly very shocked technician. And despite the Dathomirian's superior reflexes in rounding the corner and shooting a stunner after him, the whine of alarms sounding throughout the facility was enough to tell them that he had been able to sound at least something.

"Damn…" Harry swore loudly, taking in as much of the situation in as little time as he could. "R3, how long?"

While the beeping itself was as unintelligible to him as any other foreign language, the translator in his datapad told him exactly six minutes and twenty-five seconds. For some reason, the droid had also deemed it important to mention how a standard R2 would have taken twenty seconds longer, though why exactly, the wizard had no idea.

"Six and a half minutes," he told the other three humanoids. "Exit strategies?"

"Back through the sewers?" Leia ventured, going with the original plan. "We didn't leave anything in the rented apartments that could tie back to us, nothing important or sensitive. Didn't even leave DNA after you were through with it."

"Fight our way through the base all the way to the hangar," Arden proposed, though the enthusiasm (or rather lack thereof) the others showed for her idea obviously disappointed her. "What, I wanted to steal another ship. Heard Moff Seerdon was doing some top-secret research. I'm sure he has something interesting standing around."

"Couldn't we just do this portkey thing of yours?"

All eyes turned to Jane and, had she not already had red skin, Harry was sure she would have blushed at the sudden attention. "Normally, great idea; no idea, what it would do to the astromech though, and I don't want to let the little guy behind to find his own way out of the base. Too much intel in his memory."

"Sewers it is then?" the witch questioned, that disgusted look back on her face. "Great… I'll barricade the door."

She was just about to grab the nearest thing she could stack up in the way of any possible intruders, when Leia looked at her meaningfully and said, "Are you a witch or not?"

"Wait," Harry interrupted them. "If we make our stand at the door, they'll be shooting into the server room and might hit something important. Get out into the corridor; Arden and Jane to the left, Leia and me on the right."

As they placed themselves to both sides of the doorway, hunkered down behind crates they had levitated out of the server room, blocking access from both directions, it was deceptively silent; the alarm was still going strong, but nothing further could be heard. Only slowly was the din of booted feet, echoing in the distance growing louder, but as it did, it told a story of an overwhelming force closing in. It was Harry and Leia who had the first contact in the form of an entire guard squad made up of Imperial Army soldiers, from the looks of them almost all fresh out of training. Before they could let loose more than a few shots, all of them harmlessly impacting the shield he had erected, the princess had landed a few well-placed stun grenades into their midst, felling the entire group.

However, that turned out to be only the beginning, and within moments, what had started as a drizzle, became a torrent. Where they had once been determined to go at it as non-lethal as possible, their ability to continue with that approach went out of the window when the first stormtroopers started showing up, for while they were still vulnerable to the effects of the enchanted grenades, a standard stun shot from an E-11 at the current distance did not faze them one bit.

Harry and Leia had just dispatched their third group of the white-armoured enforcers, the largest one yet, when a new group of foes, one the wizard could not quite place appeared at corner from which most of their enemies had come; they were two large, skeletal constructs, black half-cloaks draped over their right shoulders, proudly bearing the Imperial crest. In their metallic hands, the battle droids held crackling electrostaffs. With almost blinding speed, the two units dashed toward the two of them, deftly avoiding any incoming shots.

"Arden, I'm going to need you here," Harry called, even as he drew the phrik staff from his back and activated the crackling energy at the tips; somehow, he had a feeling these droids would only laugh about the vibroblades he could be using alternatively. No, a strong (really, really strong, according to Palestro) shock was bound to fry anything these things might have onboard.

Within moments, they were on him, and it was quickly clear that they were at least as skilled, if not more so, than the Inquisitors the wizard and his team had battled before. It would have been easy to become overwhelmed, what with the droids' superior reflexes and obvious skill, but for one tiny thing: they seemed to be unaccustomed, if such a thing could be said about a machine brain, to fighting others wielding the same kind of weapons they did or, in the case of Arden, a quarterstaff. Still, it quickly became apparent that, barring any surprising interventions or interesting plans, they would simply be worn down over time.

That was when he realised that the same kind of aura or shield the Inquisitors had surrounded themselves with, the weakened version of what he had been able to feel around Vader that would surely have negated the rebounded kinetic blast, had the Sith not been completely surprised, was totally lacking in these droids. And while a Jedi, at least according to old Ben's teachings, might not have been able to abuse this weakness due to the amount of concentration it took them to channel the Force, which was simply not easily attainable with the flurry of electrostaff blows, Harry himself did not have that limitation.

So, as he parried yet another blow, feeling his muscles shudder with the mechanically strong impact before he managed to glance his opponent's weapon away, he swung his own staff around in a wider arc than what would most likely have been necessary, had he been in a pure melee fight. However, he was not a pure melee fighter, and this was not a pure melee fight, he had decided, for that was a fight he would be destined to lose. Instead, the wizard channelled his power through the conductive metal in his hand and the focussing crystal encased within, unleashing in the form of a wide wave the same charm he had used earlier to take out the base's security systems. Whether guided by instinct or the Force, or simply by her superb senses, Arden jumped out of the way just in time for the spell to wash over her own adversary yet spare her. Harry followed up with two quick stunners to completely take out the two droids and watched them fall to the ground in slow motion with a sense of accomplishment he was not completely sure was warranted. It felt a bit like he had cheated.

The corridor around them had, with the defeat of the two mysterious droids, fallen eerily silent; where there had once been the sound of blaster fire, only the distant echoes of the alarm's continued blare and many footsteps could be heard. Deciding to take the sudden silence as a blessing, the captain turned around to take stock of the situation: a number of troops were lying around both ends of the corridor, either stunned or worse; Jane was favouring her left side, where a blaster had burned the armour covering her thigh; Leia, as far as he was able to tell through the mask and suit of plating, was simply a bit winded, as was Arden. Over his HUD, the astromech informed him there were only seconds left in the duplication process, after which the little droid would install what Slicer had called 'the electronic equivalent of the Death Star' to cover their tracks.

"What are those things?" the Dathomirian questioned from beside him, breathing still accelerated from the exertion that fighting them had been. "They don't look like something the Empire would come up with."

"They don't," Leia agreed silently. "The image rings some kind of bell, like I've seen them before… in my history lessons, I think. The Separatists were the specialists with droids, so it would make sense."

Harry agreed with a low hum, even as he read the R3 unit's progress report. "Whatever they are, I think they were designed to kill Jedi. I mean what else would be the reason to build something like this, especially with the Separatists likely to be involved."

Text was scrolling along the HUD rapidly, warning him of the danger they were in; apparently, this was not the only Imperial base on the planet, and the computer terminals said the whole sector had been mobilised against an intrusion into such highly classified a system as the one they had attacked.

"No matter, we have to get going," the wizard announced, before hitting the two still conked-out droids with a shrinking charm and stuffing them into his pack. "The entire sector will be on us in no time."

In short order, they retreated back into the sewers, each of them jumping through the smooth-edged hole in the server room's floor, before Arden let the structure reappear, hopefully confusing the heck out of anyone who might try to come after them. The way out was much more hurried and silent than the way in had been: none of them talked as they followed their predetermined path through the tunnels, not back into the city, but further away from it toward where the Empire was draining all the sewage their headquarters produced into a river, for that was where they had parked the VT-49 on which they were planning to leave the planet.

Luckily, no one seemed to have entered the small dip (the thick layering of muggle-repelling charms had probably helped in that) and the imposing craft still stood there, looking as pristine and peaceful as an Imperial-designed warship ever could, hidden away between the trees of Bimmisaari.

"Arden, Jane, get on the turrets; Leia, I need a co-pilot," he ordered the other three, and though at most times, he would have gotten a quippy reply for his tone, none came in this moment. The wizard barely took the time to get off his helmet before he fell back into the pilot's chair and began the start-up procedure for the ship's powerful engines, once again lamenting not having taken a fifth member on their little excursion; still, there was little to be gained in lamenting spilled potion, and most everyone else had either been busy or was needed on Sanctuary in some other capacity. Besides, as the VT-49 was designed specifically for raiding missions, extensive quick-start subroutines had been installed that reduced the risk of damaging anything with such a rushed start-up to a minimum.

"We've got incoming infantry, Stormtroopers," Arden announced over the ship's intercom. "I'll hold them off easily, but I guess this means they were faster in finding out how we escaped than we expected."

"Thanks, we'll be in the air in… T-20," Leia replied, as the captain was still involved in getting them off the ground. "Get ready to repel any fighters they might send after us."

The last part, or so Harry assumed, must have gone to both of the other women, now having taken their posts at the two gunnery stations in the aft part of the command deck, close to the dorsal turret. Little tremors, the kind that tended to accompany the large laser cannon turrets being shot, were going through the ship and Harry was internally counting down along the start-up routine.

7…

6…

5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Just as the high whining of a wing of TIE fighters was beginning to flood the bridge, the captain pulled his ship into a steep dive, leaving behind only three small divots where the landing gears had burrowed into the ground and a few craters where shots from the incoming fighters had impacted.

"This is going to be rough…"

"We got five on our six," Leia announced from the co-pilot's seat, where she was diligently keeping an eye on the sensor screen. "Rerouting shield power to aft shields."

"Thanks," Harry replied tensely as he pulled the ship (they really would have to think of a name, one of these days, if they were getting into shootouts with her now) into another spin to evade a volley of green lasers fired according to their old trajectory. He had, to his great delight, been able to keep them impact-free, for the moment, but that would not last. At some point the TIE pilots would realise that their precise, controlled shooting was not working out with him flying around like a maniac and start spraying around just as wildly, and they were decidedly not limited to two bludgers, either.

"R3, you have the coordinates ready?"

The droid beeped an affirmative from where it was plugged into the navigation computer by its data-jack, the general spindliness of which continued to amaze the wizard; luckily, the astromech was also quite capable of magnetising its struts, so the delicate equipment was not torn off in any of the manoeuvres the ship was now performing. Obviously, with standard settings, no one aboard the ship would have felt the G-forces pressing down on them, but just as he had done with the M14 (and pretty much anything else he had flown afterward) Harry had decreased power on the inertial dampeners; he had only once tried flying in a simulated dogfight without and, suffice it to say, that had not gone well.

"Uh, about those coordinates," Leia interjected worriedly. "I think we might need new ones. The sensors show Imperial ships stationed at all three hyperlane entry points. We have to compute a new route…"

"Compute a new route?" Harry exclaimed, now definitely understanding the depth of worry in his girlfriend's voice. "That could take minutes! Who knows what else the Imps might come up with in that amount of time?!"

As if he had spoken prophetically, a second wing of fighters, this time a full twelve interceptors chose to make their appearance, even as the last of the pursuing standard TIEs went up in a blaze of glory and sharp metal shards that would, had it not been the last one, most definitely have posed a threat to his wing mates in their unshielded, weak-hulled balls of death.

"Damn it, I just had to say something," the wizard muttered belligerently under his breath. Not only were these interceptors simply better ships in all possible aspects, safe perhaps price and their lack of a hyperdrive, but their pilots were usually even more skilled than their standard counterparts, too. Not to mention even more bloodthirsty and suicidal. "We're doing a blind jump. R3, tell me where to point the ship, away from any large gravity wells…"

At that moment, a large tremor ran through the ship, concurrent with Leia's announcement of, "Starboard shields lost… superficial hit to the hull, no systems damage."

"…alright, R3, are we past the gravity well?" Affirmative, if hesitant beeping. "No, I don't see another option. Just make it a split-second-long jump, slip in for a bit and right out again. That should give us enough time to calculate a proper jump."

A low, dubious whine filled the cockpit. Nevertheless, for just a moment, the canopy window was filled with the starlines that accompanied entry and exit into hyperspace. Then there was just… empty void.

OOOOOOOO

AN: Hi all,
Just to let you know, I'm well on my way to finishing this second part, already working on chapter 20 and with just a few left to go. Once I'm done… I'll get writing on part three, though when that will start publishing, I simply can't say.

Also, I want to thank Tyber Aurora for being something of a sounding board recently, reading through finished chapters before upload just to give me a different perspective on things. SO, thanks very much for that.

Hope you liked the newest chapter, but even if you didn't leave a review. If you did, as well, obviously.

Greetings,
alexandertheII