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Harry and Aayla showed the others around the crew quarters, but did not show even Padme the cargo bay that the two of them and Master Fay had slowly been working on over the past few months. After making sure the trio of Nabooans and the Wookies with them were happy with their quarters, Harry found Lily and Fay once more smiling at something together, Lily hovering over Fay's shoulder as they moved around the bridge.
They turned as he entered, and he smiled at them before gesturing around the bridge then back over his shoulder. "You know, we will eventually need a crew for this ship? Why don't we ask the Wookies for help while we're on Kashyyyk?"
"That's not a bad idea in the long term, Harry, but let's finish our work with that one hangar bay first," Lily said, nodding her head. "We have no idea how many people we will need eventually, after all."
"Indeed, I think that is actually quite an excellent idea long-term. I think we grossly underestimated how much mechanization we would need to operate this ship. The Nabooans thought they were doing us a favor removing all the droids and much of the operating code, but they really weren't. It will take time to change things around, yet it must be done."
"Maybe," Harry said thoughtfully. "Maybe. I have to wonder if maybe there are some ways we can use runic arrays to do the same thing."
"I doubt it, Harry," Lily said with a sigh. "The ship's too large, a lot of the interior bulkheads are already going to be covered with the expansion and durability charms, and there is only so much we can do with runes. Runes, after all, can't think, and a crew can do a lot better than even robots in a lot of ways."
"True enough," Master Fay said with a sigh. "And we will have to build up a crew that we can trust eventually. But not just yet."
"All right. It's not like we're about to be attacked, anyway," Harry said with a chuckle.
Lily's eyes rolled, and her hand came to rest on her face, shaking her head as Master Fay asked, "Why is that important?"
"It's just, the number of people we have aboard could never fight with these ships properly."
"Harry, we've talked about this! Why do you continue to say things to tempt the fates?"
Now it was Master Fay's turn to roll her eyes. "I still say that calling Harry the Force's Lancer is a better concept than simply blaming all his mishaps on such an ephemeral thing as luck, no matter if you stick your last name in front of it, my dear."
Lily laughed, shaking her head, while Harry blinked, thinking he had caught something in the words 'my dear' that hadn't been there before. "Harry might be the Force's Lancer, but that's simply a new style of Potter-like. I've told you his father and his grandfather all had the same kind of luck. Remember when I told you about a few of his adventures!"
Harry looked between them as the two continued to jibe and laugh, the feeling of his mother's laughter rolling over him. A Force Ghost's laughter was like that, almost like being near a Patronus, but not quite as powerful. "I don't get why you find that so funny, and I'm not certain I want to know what stories my mother's been passing on about my father." He winked at his mother, who giggled, before shaking his head. "Still, I actually agree with my mom on this one. I probably shouldn't have said that."
OOOOOOO
"Really shouldn't have said that! Really shouldn't have said that!" Harry said the next day as alarms blared the moment they came out of one of the hyperspace jumps to Kashyyyk. The scanners of the two Lucrehulks reached out as they came under a sporadic amount of fire from right in front of them. The fire trailed off for a moment as if the attackers, about three dozen retrofitted merchant freighters of various sizes and two dozen gunboats, seemed to realize that there were two Lucrehulks rather than one. But they stiffly began to attack once more
The shields of the Lucrehulks were decent enough for their size, not truly up to a real capital ship's, but they were better than most. Therefore they held under that first hail of fire easily, allowing the Wookies, Harry, and his friends to realize what was going on and start to react.
"Enough complaining," Master Fay said, moving into the captain's chair while Padme raced to one of the stations controlling the turbolaser batteries, Sabe and Eirtae following. The elven Jedi's eyes closed, her Force powers reaching out. "Deal with the problem first, then about being the Force's Lancer later!"
With a few clicks of a button from where he was sitting, Harry brought the shields up to full power, while Aayla, Kass, and Mak began to man the remaining weapons stations as best they could. Mak put half of the secondary weapons on automatic, keying in the other Hulk as the only friendly ship in the area, then began to designate the ships attacking them by level of threat, while Kass began to analyze the attack.
To one side an image popped up of Lisherovokkka, the leader of the Wookies sent to Naboo to take command of their Lucrehulk. "Those are Trandoshan vessels!" he shouted, eagerness and fury both coloring his tone, though the translation device leached much of that out. "I don't know why they're attacking us like this, but I know those ship designs. The Trandoshans have often tried to raid our planet for slaves and for other things."
Aayla shuddered a little, and Harry looked at her quickly. Aayla replied telepathically, not wanting Padme or the other girls to overhear. "I talked to Malla at one point, and I mentioned the Trandoshans and their feud with the Wookies. Apparently the Trandoshans think Wookies make both good slaves and good eating."
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