Chapter 7: Career Change

When Harry and Leia reached the cockpit, the ship was already thrumming under their feet.

"We were attacked," Leia said, as soon as the young wizard had dispelled the disillusionment charm on her, making way for the pilot's chair.

"Hey, occupied," came Mercer's disembodied voice. "Harry, could you maybe take off that charm thing?" The entire group snickered at Leia's rapidly reddening face, even while Arden made room for her to sit down in the co-pilot's chair and Harry dispelled the charm on Mercer.

"There weren't any troops, so hopefully there won't be any fighters coming after us in the near future," the Princess continued, already working on something at the workstation in front of her. "But Vader was there; he tried to attack us, but Harry somehow managed to repel him. Just fly straight to the edge of the system, I'll have the nav-computer prepare the jump." The last bit had been added for Mercer's benefit, who was now rapidly working away on the controls in front of him.

"Harry, could you keep an eye on the scanner, see if anything shows up?" Leia asked, pointing at a screen on the wall right next to her. "If you see any more dots than the one in the middle and that massive thing behind us, you tell us."

He took one look at the screen, then turned back to look at the two people on the chairs. "There's one more dot," he told them, pointing at the little sensor contact they were rapidly closing in on.

Leia immediately started tapping away on her console again, until she jumped out of her chair and placed herself in front the screen, shoulder to shoulder with Harry.

"Huh," she commented. "Corellian freighter, older model, modified. Looks like a piece of scrap. They seem to be fighting a tractor beam. Let's see if we can't make some new friends…"

Back to the seat she went, now working on the controls between her and Mercer. "Corellian freighter, you need some help?" she asked into what Harry now understood to be the communications console. "I assume you are not in the situation you want to be in?"

For a few seconds, there was only static on the other end of the line. Then suddenly, not only one, but two voices could be heard.

"Oh no, everything under control here," the first one grumbled sarcastically, somehow giving off the feeling that it was not unusual to hear this voice in exactly the same inflection.

"That sounds like the woman on the recording inside R2," a very excited, and considerably higher, if still masculine voice called in the background. "Ben, I think we found her."

That seemed to pique Leia's interest more than just a little. "General Kenobi, is that you?" she asked eagerly leaning toward the console.

"The old man is a general?" the deeper voice queried. "Never would have guessed. Now, as much as I enjoy this meet-and-greet, if you don't happen to have a way of disabling the tractor beam, we won't be doing anything more than that, anytime soon."

Seeing a certain wisdom in that observation, even though he already had some kind of instinctive dislike of the voice on the other side of the connection, Harry turned to Arden and inclined his head sharply.

"Blow the charges," he ordered and, turning toward where Leia had been speaking into earlier, he added, "The tractor beam should lose power right about… now."

Indeed, as the grinning Dathomirian witch lowered her thumb on the detonator, a group of high powered charges exploded inside the monstrosity of a space-station behind them. As three of the energy couplings supplying power to the tractor beams were turned to very expensive shrapnel, the force pulling in the other ship winked out. Immediately, the sensor contact for the Corellian freighter stopped coming closer and was now simply matching their speed on a trajectory away from the moon-sized installation behind them.

"So, now that we're free, where can I go to get paid?" the voice on the other side of the console asked, his lack of manners managing to elicit a very annoyed frown on Leia's face; understandable, considering she had probably been drilled in following manners her whole life, even though Harry got the feeling she would have rebelled against that.

"Excuse me?" she questioned agitatedly. "Who are you, and why would I pay you?"

"Woah, Lady, cool down. Han Solo, Captain of the Millenium Falcon, fastest ship on the Outer Rim," the man introduced himself. Still, going by the Princess' eye roll and expression, she was not impressed. "I was hired to bring these people to Alderaan, and I did. Not my fault Alderaan isn't there anymore. As you seem to be the one they were looking for, I consider myself done. Now, I'd like to get paid, so I can get rid of the bounty on my head."

Leia groaned audibly, then muttered, "Smugglers…"

"Alright," she added, loud enough for Solo to hear, "we'll meet up, I'll send you coordinates. What's the hyperspace rating on your ship?"

"0.5," came the prompt reply, intense smugness radiating across the connection; somehow it reminded Harry of Draco boasting about his Nimbus 2001, so long ago. "Wait, Grandine? That is not along a hyperspace lane. We need to get out of here fast. Do you want me to wreck my ship?"

This time, it was Mercer who replied. "We stole a scout ship," he explained almost mechanically, definitely absent-minded. "It's a relatively short jump, so the nav-computer on this thing can easily calculate the path for you. We'll send you everything you need to not 'wreck your ship'."

The Imperial defector's fingers were flying over his console now, instructing the nav-computer, Harry assumed, and he soon turned to Leia, indicating with a nod that whatever his exact task had been, he was now done.

"We're limited to a class 1," Mercer instructed the smuggler. "I'll transmit the hyperspace route and we'll meet you at the coordinates."

Without another word, the connection was severed and the two ships continued to speed away from the moon-sized space station. Soon, the Millenium Falcon was at the edge of the system, as Mercer had said they needed to be for the jump. And indeed, within moments of clearing the strongest effects of the local gravity wells the sensor contact vanished. Not soon after, their captured vessel followed.

OOOOOOOO

Harry was sitting in one of the two chairs of what would probably be called a common area, maybe a lounge, by his normal reality's standards. What it was called on a spaceship, he had little idea. He had found among the 'food' stashed upon the vessel some ready-to-eat rations that were most definitely utilitarian in nature and not designed for their palate-pleasing nature; still, with the addition of some of the provisions he still had with him, scavenged in the jungles of Dathomir, they were edible, and he was hungry.

"That looks… tasty," Leia commented as she sat down on the second chair. "Beats out protein paste any day."

The young wizard chuckled; obviously he had no idea what protein paste was, but anything that could be described as paste would have to be treated with serious suspicions as to its culinary qualities, as far as he was concerned.

"It's edible and I'm hungry," Harry replied, deciding to go for light conversation. The woman was, after all, the Princess of Alderaan: Native to a planet that no longer existed.

"That's something," she replied, and as he saw the tightly guarded expression on her face, any plan of keeping the conversation light went out of the… well, not window, they were still in space. He had a feeling it would somehow end with crying.

"How are you?" he began. Yes, not too deep to start with, that was a good start.

"I'm fine," Leia replied immediately, way too quickly for Harry's liking; also, he was quite an expert on saying he was fine when he was anything but.

"You believe that about as much as I do," he observed, looking at her closely. "I'll ask again and inform you that I am a master of 'being fine' while I'm actually anything but."

Her trained countenance, as well as her obviously stubborn and vivacious spirit, made sure that her loss of control was neither fast nor complete, but it was visible, at least to Harry.

"My… my parents were down there," she whispered waspishly. The princess shook her head violently at the thought, shaking loose the donut-shaped braids laid at the side. Admittedly, Harry had never been that much of a friend of physical contact, so it came as a surprise to both of them when, more out of instinct than any real decision, he lightly put his hand on her shoulder in a comforting grip.

"I hope…" Leia sighed deeply, or maybe it was a steeling breath. "I hope my sister wasn't home." Harry simply squeezed her shoulder once.

"So, my heroic saviour," the freshly orphaned woman went on, already pulling back behind her barriers. "What is the next step in your dashing rescue plan?"

Harry forgave her the obvious attempt to change the subject, Merlin knew he had done it often enough when things started moving into painful topics, and removed his hand.

"Well, we'll have to figure out that Solo guy, otherwise, he'll never leave us alone. Especially if there's a bounty on him," he mused absently. "You wouldn't happen to have any cash on you, would you?"

Leia laughed lightly, and even though he could tell it was a little forced, the sound warmed Harry's heart.

"Why yes, actually all my money was the only thing the Imperials left on me when they threw me into my cell," she joked back, making him immediately feel bad about joking in such serious circumstances. Obviously, it showed. "Oh, don't look at me like I drowned your pet womp-rat; you were just trying to cheer me up, I appreciate it. Still have to figure out how to pay the smuggler, though. And you'll need to give your ship a name."

It took a while for Harry to process everything she had said. "We could always give him some of the stuff Mercer and Arden took from the armoury… wait, my ship?"

Leia shrugged before giving him an innocent smile. "I have a feeling you're going to be needing a ship," she replied simply. "Both Mercer and I would be sitting in a cell right now if not for you and Arden, and she insists she would be dead if it weren't for you. So yes, your ship."

It was a weird feeling, Harry decided. Sure, it was stolen and, judging from everything else he had seen not all that big either, but it had been stolen from the bad guys, making it justly taken villain-tax. Additionally, despite any comparisons he could make to some of the other things he had seen around, even this small vessel was easily the size of his relatives' house on Privet Drive.

With all that thinking going on in his head, one thing had slipped his mind; what name to give to his new ship. For a moment he considered naming her Hermione, but immediately discarded the idea. Somehow it felt wrong to name a simple thing after his brilliant best friend, as far away as he might now feel removed from that life sometimes.

"This ship is intended to explore space, right?" he asked, fishing for any ideas that might help in the naming process; Lei nodded. Not helpful at all, if you asked Harry. "A pioneer…"

He mulled it over for another few minutes, until he finally came up with something he liked.

"Morningstar," the displaced wizard decided. "I'll call her Morningstar."

OOOOOOOO

"Any ideas?" Harry asked, leaning against the wall in the lounge, looking expectantly at Arden and Mercer, who were now sitting at the table, 'enjoying' the military rations. "Leia and I had some, but I'd like to know what you think."

"Well," Mercer began, before taking another bite of the dried meat Harry had given him as a less bland addition to the pre-packaged meal. "We could always pay him with some of the things we took from the armoury. There's some real good stuff in there, and your bag allowed us to take it all. Detonators, all kinds of guns, some officer armour. There's even some stormtrooper armour. Illegal for a civilian to own, making it that much more valuable on the black market. Some of the best features are biometrically linked to the owner, though, so we would need a slicer to unlock those for us."

"I would rather not give that man," Leia sniffed audibly in annoyance, "any weapons or armour. He seems like the type that would do anything for some money. That's without even considering whom he might pay using that gear."

The room fell silent for a while as they all thought about the problem at hand.

"You're part of the Rebellion, right?" Mercer asked, looking at Leia almost… hopefully. "Couldn't they pay him?"

The Princess mulled it over, moving her jaw as if chewing something that was not there. "I'd rather not," she finally said, still not sounding completely sure of herself. "He will most likely be transporting a droid that has vital information for our cause, but I'd still like to not lead that man to our secret base."

Harry nodded immediately; it was a problem he was familiar with. "The more people know, the less of a secret it is," he agreed. "If we had anything really valuable that is not a weapon, I could use my abilities to make more of it so that we can either sell some ourselves or use it to pay Solo."

Looking into the round, it quickly became clear that none of them had anything on them that would fit the description which they would feel comfortable with when giving it to a smuggler.

"Any hard currency?" he ventured, again only receiving nos and shrugs. "Ah, damn it."

"There might be something else," Mercer finally commented, although it sounded more like he was thinking aloud than anything else. "We could always do some bounty-hunting."

Obviously cognisant of the shocked and appalled faces all around him, he rushed to explain. "No rebels, or good people who just fell in with the wrong crowd," he clarified, seeming almost offended by their reaction. Understandably, Harry mused. "I once served on a system patrol craft, so we had to keep a good eye on the wanted list. Believe me, for some of these people, Imperial justice is exactly the right thing."

Harry thought the idea over and was surprised when he found himself liking the prospect. Helping himself and his friends by getting someone violent and dangerous off the street? It sounded rather enticing.

"Of course, without a license, we could only claim the local bounty, and even then only half, but we could use that money and what little I have on my credit chip to buy something for Harry to do his thing on," the defector explained. With a bemused look he added, "Whatever Harry's thing is."

Mercer started tapping on a small console that was embedded into the table. "Holo-net," he explained at Harry's questioning glance. "Should tell us the active bounties in the Grandine system…"

The man rifled through multiple pages of pictures with accompanying text. Most showed simple-looking people, the amount promised for their capture often rather low or the reason for the warrant something like 'insurrection' or 'insubordination of the New Order'. Finally, after five minutes of perusing had passed without luck, a gasp from Mercer alerted the rest of them that he had found something interesting.

"So that bastard's still around," he muttered, looking at the picture of a scarred, bald man. Harry had no idea why, but he got a certain expression of greed and shiftiness from the person depicted in the high-resolution photograph. "Goes by Lizard, no idea what his real name is."

Without warning, he stood up and lifted the upper part of his uniform. "Gave me this," Mercer explained, pointing at a small, round scar on the side of his torso. "Likes poking people he doesn't like with knives and then leaves them to bleed out. I heard he had relocated but didn't know where."

They all looked at the now slowly rotating picture. "How did you run into him?" Arden eventually asked, watching the former Imperial curiously.

"Used to be a smuggler, then hit some kind of jackpot and started his own little 'business'," Mercer described, even as he started pacing up and down the room; as much as pacing was a possibility, given the rather limited space. "Mostly dealt in spice, some exotic animals, slaves from time to time. Anything that could make him some credits. We were assigned to smoking out his base and I was in charge of the ground team."

Unflappable as he normally was, Mercer shuddered at the memory. "We were ambushed, outnumbered three to one. I only survived because Lizard left me behind to bleed out, but I was found by some reinforcements, who were originally meant to help us round up the stragglers," he almost reported, monotonously speaking of events that might have simply happened to someone else as far as his delivery was concerned. "Found out later that we had been sold out by an informant and lured into a trap. After that, the brass didn't consider him troublesome enough to mount something larger."

Leia threw the man a dubious glance. "Look, I know you hate the Empire, especially right now, but it is not all bad and it is not all people like Tarkin," he said vehemently, drawn out of his memory-induced stupor. "Most of the guys that sign up don't do it because they want to stomp any semblance of free will; they join up because their heads have been stuffed full of propaganda, or they want to help keep their neighbours and their friends safe. Problem is that most of these people don't make it far in the Imperial hierarchy. This man is not a Rebel, or any kind of freedom fighter; he's just a vile criminal, nothing more, nothing less."

As much as she seemed to dislike it, as evidenced by her taught face, the young woman who had been the main audience of this declaration nodded.

"Yeah, I know you're right," she finally admitted. "Those are the ones that, if they have the courage, join the Rebellion at some point. There's a reason so many of our people are former Imperials. Still, what gives you the idea that we could capture a man who managed to take out an entire Imperial ground team?"

There was a mad gleam now visible in Mercer's eyes, making it painfully obvious that he had been dying for someone to ask that question. "Well, after our failed mission, there was one more piece of intel I was able to recover," he explained gleefully. "The Lizard has a vice that he simply can't control; man likes playing sabacc, and for huge sums too. Legal businesses don't let him in, either."

After another smug look at the picture he finished, "We find the illegal casino with the highest limits, we find the Lizard. Might be a good idea to change out of the uniform, though…"

OOOOOOOO

The planet Grandine, going by the same name as the system it was in, might once have been a beautiful world. If so, Harry could see little of that now. Where there might once have been a clear sky, there was now only the stifling twilight of an atmosphere filled to the brim with pollutants. No one seemed to know, how exactly it had ended up like this, but everyone agreed, that it was most likely not Grandine's natural state. The few plants that were able to grow in the diminished light and shrug off the frequent storms were of an uninviting nature and so obviously inedible, that the wizard had to wonder, whether there was any significant population of herbivores left.

Still, inhospitable as it was, the spaceport both the Morningstar and the Millenium Falcon had landed in was bustling with activity. Obviously seeing, and correctly interpreting Harry's wandering gaze, Mercer proceeded to explain.

"It's unimportant enough for the Empire not to care, but close enough to the core to be an excellent place for a smuggling operation," he said quietly, unwilling to draw any serious attention.

The three of them, Leia had stayed in the ship, were wearing long, dense coats Harry had transfigured to protect them, both from rain as well as the eyes of the locals. Underneath, they were all wearing the chest armour usually worn by Imperial officers in the field. Each of them was also wearing a blaster pistol, just to be safe.

"Forget self-defence," Harry muttered, looking around warily. "We would've had to bring those blasters anyway, just to fit in with the crowd."

Arden chuckled darkly, letting her eyes roam around like a predator. Harry had not considered how different the environment had to be for her, seeing as she was from a predominantly tribal culture who she herself had said tended to live in small villages. Still, she seemed to avail herself surprisingly well, despite the throngs of humanity (as well as alien-kind) flowing all around them.

"What did they promise that smuggler again?" Mercer asked quietly, looking at both of the others in turn.

"2000 up front, 15000 on Alderaan," Harry replied. "The bounty?"

"50000 sector bounty," came the prompt reply. "But we have neither a certificate nor an Imperial Peace-Keeping permit, so we can only claim half of the local bounty. Still 20000 credits."

They kept silent after that, wary of nosy listeners in the crowd, and simply followed the instructions provided to them by one of the dock workers, who had pointed them to the local cantina. When they finally reached the building, it was not all that much removed from what Harry had expected, and somehow reminded him of the Hog's Head. There was a multitude of different creatures, even though humans were still the majority, and all of them were drinking, talking or jeering. In one corner, a large blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoid was fighting violently with a broad-shouldered human man. There was a general feeling of depredation around the whole place that was profoundly unsettling.

The barkeeper, a green-skinned humanoid whose facial structure strongly reminded Harry of an insect, glared at their audacity in nearing his little kingdom.

"What do you want, human?" he asked belligerently. Before Harry could say anything, Arden took a step forward and, without the movement being all that visible to anyone involved, had her hand on the blaster she had strapped to a leg-holster.

"Now, be nice," she hissed. "We just wanted some information and we were willing to pay for it. Now, though, that payment will be me not making a mess of you. Sound fair?"

He gulped, looking warily at the pistol pointing toward his stomach. "Great," Arden replied, distressingly cheerfully, and even with a wide smile. "Your turn," she added in Harry's direction.

The wizard stepped forward now, directly in front of the counter, and pushed the Dathomirian's gun away. "You'll have to forgive my partner. She's a bit… overzealous," he apologised. "We were looking for a place where we could play sabacc. High stakes, no nosy Imperial bureaucrats."

Nodding enthusiastically, whether out of fear or simply to get rid of them as fast as possible, Harry did not know, he began describing the way. When they were back outside the seedy establishment, he turned a disapproving glare at his earliest companion in this new world.

"Was that really necessary?" he asked accusingly. "Sure, the place was bad news, and the guy an arse, but that was a bit too far, don't you think?"

Instead of answering, Arden turned to Mercer. "What can you tell us about his species?" she asked expectantly.

"Rodians," the man replied, as if it was enough of an explanation. It probably was, for most everyone else. "Very violent culture, war-like. If you find any off-world, they're often either criminals or refugees. Even as refugees, they often still respect strength above all else. Arden's right, this was the best way to go about this."

Harry continued grumbling for a while, but ultimately accepted their position; not that he would not later go back to do something nice for the Rodian. Ultimately, and not all that much later, they reached the underground casino they suspected their quarry would frequent. He flinched violently when one of the things Mercer called com-links beeped on his belt. Just like the defector had shown him, the young wizard took the unit and held it up to his ear.

"Leia here," came the voice of the princess, a little craggy but definitely understandable and directly attributable to the person. "How are things going?"

"We found the casino," Harry replied. "I think it's enough when only one of us hangs around and waits, no reason for us all to be standing around all day. You?"

"Not all that much going on, here," she answered. "General Kenobi is still on the Falcon. He refuses to leave, until he can make sure Solo gets paid."

"Alright, see you later," the novice bounty hunter ended the call. "I can take the first watch."