Chapter Four: Step By Step

Star Wars + Harry Potter Crossover

A/N: Chap 3 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

Chapter Four: Step By Step

"Blimey, you're 'Arry Potter!"

"C'est impossible!" another of the conscripts said. "'Arry Potter is over forty years old!"

Another of the men snorted. In English with a heavy Germanic accent, he said, "We are standing on an alien world in front of a Sasquatch from another world entirely, and you say something is impossible?"

"Enough," Harry said. "I am Harry Potter. My supposed age is irrelevant. Who are you?"

The twelve gave their names, and some Harry winced to recognize some of them. "Melissa Wood, sir," one of younger of the seven women said.

"Oliver's girl?"

She nodded, eyes watering. "I remember meeting you when I was a little girl after dad won the Quidditch Cup before he retired."

"You still are a little girl," the wide-bodied woman said. To Harry, she said, "Martha Moreau."

Harry recognized the name. "French Aurors?"

"Correct. I guess I was never close enough in the dorm to see you, or else I would have recognized you even looking as young as you do. I served in one of your units against Delesteros in Bulgaria."

Harry nodded, thinking back to one of the many Dark Lords he was called on to eliminate not as an English Auror, but as a mage general of the ICW Enforcers. "Good to have you." To the thin, tall girl with brown hair, he said, "And you're Justin's girl, aren't you? Karen?"

"Katherine, sir," Katherine Finch-Fletchley said, blushing.

Once all the names were exchanged, Harry said, "Okay, here's what happened. Remember when the droid stopped working a few days ago, after that sandstorm? Stupid imps hadn't cleaned out those air intake vents in years. I recognized it was about to blow, ran into the command deck, and imagine my shock to see a stupid, perfectly human kid in command. As human and Muggle as you please. I won't lie—I lost my temper and Legillimized the hell out of him. Then I threw the bastard into the furnace and took over his identity. It's even in their computers now—I am Lieutenant Daroon Holdig. I've been given the assignment of fixing the droids, and I'm going to do it with your help. We're going to get those damned things running perfect, because if we do that, we might be able to save our people."

"How is that?" Moreau asked.

"I'm still working out the details," Harry admitted. "Taking over Holdig's identify was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but I think we can make it work. We start by taking the magicals out of those dorms and giving them that neural conditioning so we can treat them as conscripts. As conscripts, you all have at least some basic rights. Then we go from there. But no one's going to survive if those droids keep blowing up. Almost four thousand of our people died night before last. Our first priority is to save the droids."

He studied their faces intently. "Now, were you the only magicals, or the only ones who volunteered?"

"We were the only ones who agreed to risk being singled out and executed," Moreau said. "The girls at least knew most of each other."

"I know of a few more who stayed in hiding," the German, Albert Kaufmann, said.

"Good. We'll get them later. Right now, can any of you cast wandlessly?"

The younger people shook their head, but Martha Moreau, one of the Frenchmen named Salieri, and Kaufmann all nodded. "Good. Now, do any of you know the technomage spell?"

"I do," Moreau said.

She was the only one. "Then we have some work to do while we go," Harry said. "The neural interface gives you basic knowledge, but that spell will really help you use it. Even those of you who normally can't cast wandlessly will need this, so gather around..."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Harry stood at attention four days later in front of Colonel Halabern Nadist in the Imperial Headquarters as the balding officer read through Harry's report and recommendation. He placed Harry's datapad down and picked up another. "Each droid is reporting a twenty percent increase in production following your maintenance," he finally said. "Overall production has increased to the same level we had prior to the loss of droid number three."

"Yes, sir," Harry said, voice neutral.

"And you did this with slaves? Three days ahead of schedule?"

"Yes, sir."

Nadist leaned back and studied Harry with a blank face. "What made you think of using primitives?"

"You indicated I should take a tech team to act on my previous recommendation. When I found all active tech teams were permanently assigned to the Death Star, I assumed you had issued a challenge. I accepted, and sought other means of achieving my mission objectives. I have observed that the slaves were baseline humans. While primitive in comparison to the Empire, they did have technology, including limited space flight. It seemed a small leap to provide them neural conditioning to make full use of their potential."

"Close the door, Lieutenant."

"Sir."

Harry did as ordered, and then returned to his previous position. "You've demonstrated a great deal of initiative and potential, Holdig, so I will be brutally honest. The primitives are not going to ever leave this world alive. If the Senate discovered that Tarkin violated an untouched world of humans for cheap slave labour, the unrest would make the Rebellion seem like a pittance. Not even the Emperor knows about the attack on their world, officially at least, and Tarkin fully intends to keep it that way."

Harry struggled to keep his face blank, while inside he raged. The raping of his world—the death of everyone he knew and loved—was nothing but a secret power-play?

"You can use the slaves anyway you see fit on the surface," Nadist said. "Your behaviour during this crisis has, as far as I'm concerned, wiped away any deficiencies of your previous record. You have shown a great deal of maturity and ingenuity. So, I am promoting you to Captain. With the loss of the droids and the increase in the work aboard the battle station, General Bast has ordered a general reorganization of our efforts down here. All senior staff is being reassigned to oversee the construction on the station directly. Ninety eight percent of the materials necessary to finish the station are already on board. You will be the ranking officer in charge of the refineries. Make sure production keeps up with demand, or you will find all the good you have done here quickly undone. In six months, during the Emperor's scheduled tour, planet-side operations will be terminated, as will all planet-side assets. As for you, Captain, your career will have taken on a very promising future."

"Sir, thank you, sir!"

"Dismissed, Captain."

Harry left the executive level of the headquarters building and stalked on stiff legs to his quarters, only to have his security card beep at him that his quarters had been reassigned, and his personal effects moved by the droid housekeeping services. He followed the instructions to a different dormitory that featured a much larger studio apartment with a balcony looking over the terraced grass compound, a larger kitchen area and a double bed. Holdig's things were already sitting at the foot of the bed.

Ignoring the trappings of his success, Harry collapsed on the edge of his bed and stared at his hands.

Six months, and they would all die. "What am I going to do now?"

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

With a sense of urgency he not felt since the hunt for the Horcruxes, Harry took over the whole ground production operation. While he'd never worked with the numbers like he had now, his experience as a Ministry department head and ICW mage general gave him sufficient experience in how to organize and lead.

The first step was to remove any obstacles that could endanger the mission. With a cold brutality fuelled by a deep, burning anger he could not shake, he Apparated from refinery droid to refinery droid, often taking Shewtalla along to speak to the other Wookiees while he killed the young, inexperienced officers who were placed in command of the droids.

He did the same to the cadre of Stormtroopers assigned as security for each droid, removing them unit by unit as he called them up to the command deck. He was still astonished that all the troopers carried the same face.

"They are clones from the Clone Wars," Shewtalla explained when he finally asked about it. "The original generations of clones are too old for front line duty, so the Emperor puts them on worlds like this. They are worked until they die because they are conditioned to do nothing else. They cannot be returned to society because they were never a part of it."

While their circumstances were unfortunate, Harry didn't let it stop him from killing them all. He knew that, being clones, if any of the originals saw any of his imposters, they would sound the alarm immediately.

The only way it would work was to eliminate the entire storm trooper population. The troopers were housed together, segregated from officers, and were required to wear their helmets at all times outside of their barracks. Any off time they enjoyed was in their own dedicated barracks.

So on that first day, with the help of the Wookiees, Harry apparated to each of the remaining droids and killed the troopers there. He stunned or paralyzed them en masse, had the Wookiees help strip them of their armor, and disposed of the bodies in the maw of the massive droids. This meant he had to work non-stop through the night shifts too. The stormtroopers, being older veterans who themselves were considered disposable now, stayed with the same shifts of slaves out of sheer laziness on the part of General Bast.

If they had rotated their men at least one, it wouldn't have worked. However, after one seemingly endless day that had Harry killing more men than in all the other fights in his life combined, he managed to wipe out the entire Clone population of Despayre and replaced them by terrified, but also exultant slaves.

This entire time, he had the Wookies processing slaves through the neural conditions in the hopes that he could at least make the replacements in Stormtrooper armor look like they knew what they were doing. He found one more magical in his dorm that could perform wandless magic, being a former Unspeakable who, like Harry, was captured fighting the Imperials when they invaded. With that help, they started handing out Confundus charms like they were candy, doing everything they could to make sure no one realized what was happening to the planet's clone population.

The problem they soon had to grapple with was what to do with the majority of the slaves themselves. It was difficult to inform almost forty thousand slaves in five huge dormitories what was happening, only to then ask them to continue to live like animals. He talked it over with those he had already freed, and though it pained all of them, they agreed it would be safer not to inform all the slaves of what was happening. Instead, they continued to replace the Imperials in a piecemeal fashion, until they could move safely about their greater mission.

While they couldn't immediately take all the slaves out of the dorms, they did restructure the work into shifts to give the slaves more rest and water during the day while maintaining sufficient staffing to ensure production continued. Any drop in production risked inquiries into how Harry was handling things, and that would be a complete disaster.

Over all, though, it was Nadists' terrible deadline that kept him up at night.

Within two months of assuming command of the planet-side operations, Harry had all two thousand troopers replaced with his people. The neural conditioner had a program on Stormtrooper protocol that he used with abandon to give his false troopers as much authenticity as possible in case Colonel Nadist or General Bast toured his operation. As terrifying as those months were (when Clones were missing but he hadn't replaced everyone with a conditioned former slave yet) when they reached the point where every trooper was replaced Harry let himself relax ever so slightly.

But the Imperial officers were busy preparing for the termination of the ground-side operation, and so as long as production continued, they did not care what Harry did. He knew that the entire defense of Despayre and the Death Star was designed in keeping threats out. In that regard, they were successful. Harry knew from Holdig's memories the Rebellion had attacked several times and were repulsed with each attempt. What the Empire did not prepare for—could not have imagined, in fact—was primitive slaves rising up as a threat from without their own compound.

In the evenings, alone in his quarters, Harry pored over every scrap of information he had access to with the glamoured witches and wizards who had assumed the roles of the dead junior officers to try and figure out how to evacuate forty-thousand slaves before they were all slaughtered.

"We've been running those neural chairs non-stop since we started this," Moreau, the former French Auror, said during one of their daily meetings. "And we've only managed to replace the Stormtroopers. There's no way we could get our whole dorm conditioned, much less all the slaves in all the dorms."

"Why couldn't we just get a ship?" David Oliphant asked. The young Englishman was one of the first to step into the role of a now deceased lieutenant, just like Harry did with Holdig.

"Because there is no ship traffic to the surface at all," Harry said, having already researched the problem extensively. "Any ship attempting to reach the surface is fired on. There are two star destroyers in orbit at all times to guard the operation. Evidently the Empire has insurrections of their own they have to guard against."

"Those ships in orbit, are they like the ships that attacked Earth?" David asked.

Harry nodded darkly. "What about Portkeys? Could we rig the dorms as Portkeys?"

Darrin Montclaire, the Unspeakable Harry previously found, snorted dismissively. "It would take dozens of wizards of your power to charge something as large as a dorm to be a Portkey, and we don't even have wands. No, whatever means we use to move these people, it must be through technology. There are not enough wands to use magic."

Harry was experienced enough to accept the Unspeakable's hard truth at face value. He knew enough to do his job, but never claimed to be an expert on all magic.

"What about the Skyhook?" Melissa Wood asked timidly. "Could we escape on that?"

"Some of us," Harry said darkly. "The people we have in Stormtrooper armour, and ourselves. But they are guarding that thing pretty closely within every EM spectrum. Disillusionment charms would not work."

"It would be something, at least," Katherine Finch-Fletchley said. "At least some of us would be safe. Maybe we could use our people to take over one of those big ships."

Harry shook his head. "Each star destroyer carries almost three thousand troopers on board. They could carry as many as ten if they had to. Even if our people have gone through the neural conditioner, that doesn't make them physically conditioned or skilled enough to fight. No, we're going to have to figure something else out. Somehow, we have to get onto that station. It may require a more direct approach on my part."

"What do you mean?" Kaufman asked.

Harry smiled at them and then disappeared. They stared in surprise a moment before Harry reappeared. "It's a long story, but somehow I have a very good invisibility cloak on hand. It's the only magical artefact that can fool their sensor technology. I can't use it to hide lots of people, but if I can make it into the controls of the skyhook, I might be able to bring our people up."

"It's risky."

"I just don't see any alternative," Harry said. "And it's going to have to happen at the last minute, too."

He looked around, and the others nodded. With no other better ideas, they started working on their plans.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

It was not possible for Harry to order forty-thousand conscript uniforms without attracting undue attention. So, when Harry was positive that Nadist's and General Bast's attention was firmly set on the Death Star, he and his growing body of conditioned Earthlings gave up all pretence of being slaves and began to openly recruit from the dorms. He couldn't help their living conditions, but he could finally tell the Earthlings that there was the light of hope in the near future.

The Earthlings, having gone so long without any hope, clung to this new light desperately and did not argue with the orders. The refineries had to keep working at full schedule, but now some slaves remained behind in the dorms every day so that the neural conditioning went non-stop, day in and day-out.

Harry did manage to obtain a few dozen conscript uniforms. He brought them to the main dorm, and at night transfigured the orange jumpsuits to look like the grey and white conscript uniforms. It was exhausting work, and only a handful of the magicals they found in the other dorms were capable enough with wandless casting to be of any help. But still, it was their only hope.

Production continued, only now the former slaves oversaw everything themselves, working hand-in-hand with the Wookiees, who thought the entire affair was entertaining.

The days wound down, and soon the Imperial compound became a ghost town as most of the staff relocated to the station. Nadist was the last ranking officer to leave.

"Two weeks, Holdig," the colonel said to Harry the day he was to take the skyhook up. "You've done remarkable work. I've already nominated you for a commendation. All production is to cease in twelve days' time. The final evacuation of personnel will occur on the thirteenth day, and on the fourteen day Grand Moff Tarkin has scheduled a test firing of the primary weapon on Despayre itself, so make sure you don't leave anything behind."

"I won't, sir. Thank you for all your help."

Nadist saluted and dismissed Harry, who walked calmly back to his quarters before collapsing on his bed. "Shite!" he muttered. "We're going to have to take the Wookiees too."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

On the last day of formal production, after the quotas were met, Harry ordered all the droids shut down. The giant monsters had lived well beyond their senescence date and would not be transported off planet, since the cost of doing so would come close to the cost of the units themselves. All the slaves were gathered in their vehicles and transported back to their dorms.

They went through the feeding and showering lines of their own volition, as they had since Harry recruited them all into the mission, and then dressed in their transfigured conscript uniforms as they shuffled into their beds. Once settled in, Harry opened the intercom system not just in his original dorm, but in all five.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Harry Potter. As you now know, the Imperials plan on killing us all rather than letting us return to our planet. Today was our last day of work. Tomorrow, the Imperials will evacuate the last of their people, and the day after they will destroy the whole planet. We are not going to be on it when they do. Right now, the Imperial Compound is almost empty. Our people are going to begin escorting you on foot into the compound, where you will spend the night in now empty dormitories. It is going to be a very tight fit, but we have to do this now. So, Dormitory One, please begin lining up at the front door and follow the instructions of your guides. Be quick, but do not rush or panic. The Wookiees will also be coming with us."

Harry led the very first line of his fellow Earthlings toward the compound. They went through the Stormtrooper entrance after Harry deactivated all the security sensors that lined their path. The fit in the now empty dormitories that once housed the planet's compliments of troopers and infantry was indeed tight, but no one complained.

The process continued throughout the night, until all forty thousand slaves had left the dorms and were now packed into two large buildings meant to house Imperial soldiers, Stormtroopers and enlisted personnel. The Wookiees stayed in the now empty vehicle pool, crowded together as tightly as the humans, if not more.

The next morning at dawn, Harry as the ranking officer oversaw the last Imperials leaving the planet. Most were base personnel who had never been near the refinery droids and were in charge mainly of making sure no important data was left behind. Harry walked with them toward the massive skyhook pod, oddly excited to finally get to ride it.

The skyhook was the actual realization of a science fiction idea first proposed on Earth by Ray Bradbury. It was in essence a space lift designed to carry raw materials from the surface to the station overhead. It had an astonishing load capacity, as witnessed by the hundreds of tons of quadranium plates that were already loaded onto it from the last days of the droid refineries. The fifty or so personnel who were left all boarded with Harry, and moments later they shot skyward.

The door to the pod, which could almost have held a refinery droid, swung closed with a ponderous whine and then the boom and hiss of the seal. The whole door was composed of transparisteel so Harry was able to watch as they began to rise into the air. He felt only a momentary dizziness as the skyhook shot them higher and higher at speeds inconceivable on Earth. Soon they could see the curvature of the planet itself before the horizon became lined in black, followed by the twinkling blackness of space itself. At first Harry thought the twinkling was from stars, but then realized it was actually debris from construction that had formed a thick ring around the planet.

Some pieces impacted the elevator with loud, even deafening thuds, but nothing broke through. Soon they saw a new inverted horizon opposite that they just left. The entire car began to rotate slowly, spinning the view until they no longer headed up away from Despayre, but rather down toward the Death Star surface, which looked grey, lifeless and cold. Nor was it finished. The sky lift continued directly into the girder exoskeleton of the station until the lift passed by the fitted front of a large, well-lit receiving bay crawling with hundreds of workers and droids.

The moment the pod bay opened, massive droid lifters reached in to begin hauling away the plating. Harry followed the personnel out until they came to a security station that blocked off part of the receiving bay. Harry waited until all others were gone before he stepped up to the kiosk. A bored lieutenant sat behind the desk. "Is that it, then?" the man asked, thinking Harry was Captain Holdig.

"No, we have quite the load of conscripts coming," Harry said. Before the man could protest, Harry cast a wandless, silent Imperio.

"Oh," the man said, eyes widening as the magic took over. "So we do. It's not in the system, though. What should I do?"

"Enter it into the system, please. By order of General Bast—you spoke to him personally. We'll need quarters for them as well, humans and Wookiees."

"Very well, sir."

"Where is the skyhook control room?"

The ensorcelled lieutenant pointed out the window looking over the cavernous receiving bay. Harry narrowed his eyes, cloaked himself in invisibility, and then Apparated to just inside the window he saw.

No one knew he was there, and with a few silently cast spells, the skyhook was soaring back down to the surface to pick up the conscripts. A quick glance out the window toward the security checkpoint revealed another officer talking loudly to the one Harry ensorcelled. He Apparated right behind the new man and cast yet another Imperius curse, stretching even his magic in the process. To hold so many under the curse would have been a challenge even for Voldemort, and Harry found himself sweating with the effort. However, with the senior shift officer under his control, the new orders were entered into the system to account for the introduction of forty thousand new conscripts and the twenty thousand Wookiees who remained on the surface.

It felt like Harry didn't breathe at all until an hour later, when the massive pod slid smoothly down into the receiving bed and began to disgorge thousands of "conscripts" with their Stormtrooper guards.

Harry could actually see his first selected people among the conscripts, impersonating junior offices supposedly in charge of the workers. Among them was young Melissa Wood, Oliver Wood's oldest daughter, and the French Auror he served with on the continent, Martha Moreau.

They walked calmly toward the security kiosk and the two ensorcelled officers who would admit them into the greater portion of the station. As they approached the security checkpoint, though, something began to gnaw at Harry's perceptions. He searched the receiving bay, desperately looking for a threat, but he didn't see anything.

Then it hit him. He didn't see anything, or anyone! In the hour the pod had taken to descend to the surface and return, the entire busy receiving bay had been emptied. His instincts screamed at him that something was terribly wrong, and those instincts were proven right before Harry could even act.

It began with a sudden wind that in a second became a raging maelstrom. The pod suddenly ripped up and out of the bay, still wide open and half-packed with Harry's people, and shot into open space in the suddenly depressurized bay. Harry was about to Apparate down to cast a shield that might hopefully slow the loss of atmosphere when the door opened behind him and Stormtroopers came pouring in, firing indiscriminately. He shrouded himself with invisibility, Apparated to one side of the room, and then the other, while the dozen troopers rushed in. Once they were in, Harry stepped outside and sent his most powerful blasting curse at the windows that overlooked the bay.

The wall blew out, sucking the Stormtroopers out into the suddenly depressurized bay in the process.

Harry disappeared in a swirl of magic and appeared on the floor of the bay, only to be pulled toward the gaping maw himself. Around him, terrified people screamed in horror. With all his magic, Harry shouted out a shielding charm directed at the bay door.

The drain was shocking—Harry could actually feel his magical core depleting—but the sudden depressurization stopped. People fell back to the floor around him, still screaming. "Get to the security kiosk!" he shouted to them. "Go, this won't hold!"

People knew him enough by this time to obey and started running wholesale toward the kiosk. Harry, using every ounce of his magic to hold the terrible vacuum of space at bay over the hugely wide bay opening, could only stand and watch as a massive black wall slid up from the floor, cutting the kiosk off from the bay. The wall rose all the way to the ceiling of the bay.

Across the wall, at various points, slits opened up to reveal large e-web automated anti-personnel laser cannons. Harry did not even have a voice to scream as the weapons opened fire with the deadly efficiency he had come to hate so much in his captors. The last to stand were the magicals, who through concerted wandless or accidental magic, managed to shield themselves for the first few hits.

Melissa Wood turned and stared at Harry, eyes wide with terror. Harry wished desperately that his eyes were as bad as they were before he absorbed the Hallows into his magic, because he did not want to see the sacrilege the laser blast committed to her body when it broke through her accidental magical shield.

He did not want to see the magic and life bleed out of Oliver Wood's little girl, who was so awed to meet the Harry Potter she cried that first meeting, so many years ago. Albert Kauffman, Katherine Finch-Fletchley, Martha Moreau…one by one they fell, until the only person left standing in the receiving bay was a magically exhausted Harry Potter.

Realizing how complete he had failed, Harry let his shield go, fully prepared to be sucked out into the blackness. However, when nothing happened, his trembling knees gave out and deposited him on the floor of the empty bay.

"Tell us the story again, Daddy!" Lily asked.

Harry closed his eyes as his little girl's voice echoed in his mind. He did not see, nor even care about, the blue bolt that struck him down into the darkness.

sp

sp

Author's Note: Yeah, this was a pretty brutal chapter. But rest assured, my friends, that Harry's adventure is just getting started. Also, once again I just wish to stress just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.