Chapter 57 – Lending A Hand With The Maidens

They appeared outside the city, on a cliff that Harry had spotted during his landing outside the Main Hanger.

Panaka dropped to his knees as his equilibrium returned, Alema and Asani too were affected, Asani digging her claws into his shoulder to grip as her world spun. Alema was more used to it and so just wobbled on the spot before stabilising herself.

"You were not exaggerating about the unpleasantness," the captain groaned.

"Unfortunately not," Harry replied. "It becomes easier the more you travel and the more familiar the location is. There is a bit of guesswork involved in first time apparation anywhere. The return and subsequent trips will be easier, but I'm afraid you will have to endure it for this one. Where next?"

"That way," pointed the captain before standing and taking his arm again.

Pop.

It took four more jumps for them to come to the training area, it would have been less, but Harry could only apparate in line of sight as he had never been there before.

They appeared on the edge of a valley and allowed themselves a few moments to recover. Even Harry was a bit unstable after so many apparitions pulling three others along with him.

As they looked down they saw clouds of steam and water vapour coming up from a waterfall which obscured most of the valley but from their angle they could see a combination of forest, obstacles, equipment, assault courses and some smaller buildings which were presumably a combination of storage and housing.

"An impressive set up," Alema remarked, being the first to recover.

"I wanted to…undo the mistakes…that the Instructors are making," Panaka replied brokenly as he slowly readjusted to not moving again.

"Shall we go down?" Alema asked, starting to walk towards the lift that would take them down to the valley floor.

"Yes."

As the quartet left the lifts at the bottom they saw movement on the ground.

Harry could see half a dozen young women running an assault course whilst firing at training droids that were firing stun blasts back at them. A guard stood off to the side timing each run.

As he watched, one of them did a back flip to dodge a stun blast before returning fire at the droid which hit and powered down for a few seconds as per their programming.

As the handmaiden made it to the end of the course the two already there congratulated the runner.

"That was a good shot," one remarked.

"Yes," another agreed. "We will fight to protect our queen."

"Handmaidens!" called Panaka drawing their attention.

The six, the last two just having crossing the line, lined up before them.

"This is Knight Harry Potter of the Jedi Order and Explorer Alema Ani of the Antarian Rangers; they are here to assist with your training. I know some of you have already seen them at the Palace during the formal dinner the other day, but now I can properly introduce you."

Turning so he was facing the trio Panaka began walking along the line of handmaidens.

"This is Yané, Sabé, Rabé, Eirtaé, Saché and Padmé."

"A pleasure to meet you all," Harry bowed, Alema mirroring him. "I hope to get to know you all very well by the end of this, by which time you will hopefully be able to beat us to a pulp with ease."

There was a slight giggle from a couple of them before they remembered themselves and stood back to attention.

"Right then, shall we begin?"

They started by observing their skills and stamina; the sextet were already above average in fitness and increasing quickly, they were also smart and learned quick. The training droids had been in use for over a week and already the group knew how best to outdo them at the current settings.

They watched them all run the course and how Yané used exactly the same back flip manoeuvre to dodge a droids blast, shooting it before she landed.

"They are getting too complacent," Alema remarked to the others as she, Harry and Panaka watched from the viewing platform that doubled up as the droid control station.

Turning, Alema moved to the console, ignoring the technician who stood there, and entered a series of commands.

"What are you doing?" asked Panaka.

"Giving them a rude awakening," she replied. "I have raised the droids skill level by three."

"Three!" he exclaimed. "You want them to go against level eight droids? They haven't been tested against higher than level five!"

"That's the point," Harry replied.

"They are not learning how to evade," replied Alema. "They are simply learning the course. They need an instinctual understanding of when they need to dodge, when to fire. Raising the level should catch them off guard and also teach them not to assume that everything will be the same every time and teach them how to adapt to sudden changes. I have not changed the stun level, just the speed and intelligence of the droids."

They watched as Yané attempted the course again, in exactly the same place she back flipped, but now the droid was faster and fired, hitting her in mid-air. She tumbled as she hit the ground and was hit once more for her trouble before she shook herself off, rolled away and fired at the droid which, much to her surprise, dodged the shot and hit her a third time.

She rolled to her feet and jumped away just in time to dodge the fourth shot, she made it to the end of the course before she dropped to the ground panting.

"Yané!" exclaimed Sabé as she and Eirtaé ran up to her. "What happened?"

"I could not hit the droid," she groaned, holding her leg and side where she had been hit. The stun blasts were not fatal but they really stung and too many of them at once could cause serious damage. Thankfully the four she had been hit with would only make her ache. "I don't understand what happened?"

"You got careless," Harry replied as he walked up, the other two following him as the other Handmaidens grouped around their aching comrade. "You were not learning when to dodge them, you were just repeating the course."

"You knew when the droids were going to attack and you just reacted to that," explained Alema. "So we changed the settings on the droids. You will not know how an enemy will act and must learn to adapt and change in a split second."

"That's not fair!" exclaimed Saché.

"Life isn't fair," replied Harry. "If it was I likely would not be here and you would not need to learn any of this."

"Do you think any assassins who come after the queen will be polite enough to give you advanced warning of their plans?" continued Alema.

"Explorer Ani is right," Panaka nodded, before sending a look in her direction. "Though I am less than certain of her methods, her conclusion is right. You need to be prepared to deal with the unexpected. All the droids levels will be set to random from now on; some will be faster, others more intelligent and a few, more accurate and faster at firing. It will better simulate real life conditions."

Over the course of the next month the trio went about improving the Handmaidens skills, their timings and scores on the course were never as good as they were before the settings were changed, but that was to be expected as the different levels and abilities of the droids increased the difficulty of the tests.

Alema started assisting them with their hand-to-hand training, although she had Force sensitivity, which Harry noted seemed to strengthen her physical abilities, she was more on par with the Handmaidens as regards their capabilities. There was a lot of bruising after the first few sessions as they realised that they were not as good as they thought and suffered constant defeats at Alema's hands.

Harry aided mostly with their fitness, agility and weapons training. A good test he came up with was a game of capture the flag…sort of.

In this case the flag was a moving target in the form of Asani who had to run away from the two teams of three young women. Surprisingly she did not seem to mind being chased and treated it like a game most of the time. It proved a very good test as they had tried something similar with the training droids but they had a completely different way of thinking to a living organism and Asani could attack as well as evade. It forced the Handmaidens to come up with strategies, not only to catch her, but to keep her away from them until the rest of the team could assist so she would not scratch at them.

They were also given training in the more traditional form of capture the flag with either three each defending and attacking, or two flags with each team trying to protect and acquire at the same time.

After several months they were much better with blasters and staves than they had been before their instructors had arrived. Their hand to hand combat had also increased threefold in skill. When Alema decided that they were good enough she challenged them to a sparring competition, both with and without weapons. Three on one, then in pairs and finally individually.

They now had the skill to beat her as a group of three, win around half the time as a pair, but still could not manage more than a draw against her on their own. Both Harry and Panaka had been impressed by their progress as most beginners would have been hard pressed to keep up with a skilled fighter after such a short time of training, but evidentially the hard training and Alema's instruction techniques has paid off.

It was the first time Harry had really watched Alema's fighting skill; they had fought together many times in the past but it was only now that he was able to see the elements of Jedi Forms in her movements. She had obviously learned from her time in the Temple and around him. He was able to feel her subtle use of the Force, nothing conscious he was sure, but little bits of accidental or instinctual use that helped her know where her opponents were going to be or when to duck. It reminded him of wizards and witches on his world doing accidental magic. It was such a shame she was far too old to train when they first met.

It was around this time that Alema decided to set the Handmaidens against Harry; the group were getting more confident in their abilities and were getting overconfident in their skills. She had heard Yané remark:

"With the training we have received I'm sure we could face any threat now, there cannot be anyone with the skills to face us all together?"

Padmé, ever the voice of reason, disagreed:

"I'm not so sure, there are always those who are stronger, more extensively trained or who have better equipment."

"Padmé's right," Sabé, the handmaiden who had become closest to the latest addition to the group added. "You forget that although Knight Potter and Explorer Ani are training us, they are also training the Security Volunteers and the Royal Guards as well. Both of which carry heavier equipment than we do."

"That's only because a full size blaster and light armour cannot be concealed as easily as a sports blaster," Rabé returned. "If we have the same equipment I'm sure we'd be able to defeat any force that we at least equalled in strength."

It was time for another lesson in complacency.

For the duration of most of their earlier training Harry remained an observer. Only one of them was really needed at that stage and Alema was more than capable of training them without supervision. Her Antarian Ranger training was suited to their style. As such Harry had offered to assist the capital's fighter squadron, who gratefully accepted, allowing him to make small improvements to their craft, suggesting tweaks to their maintenance and adding small magical improvements; enabling them to shrug off some blaster fire by enchanting the hull plating being a prime example. Harry also participated in training exercises for their pilots, operating as a target evading fire in either one of their fighters or the Raven, which Harry found almost as enjoyable as they did. They had even affectionately started calling Harry, Ace because, despite his superior skill which made him very difficult to defeat, he was so naturally inspiring and supportive that they could not help but like and admire him. Because of all this Harry had not shown the extent of his skills to the Handmaidens, so they only had a patchy idea what he could do. As such they were unprepared for what they were up against when Alema set them the challenge.

Initially Alema had told just three of them to defeat him. Within thirty seconds they were all on the ground in surprise but put it down to 'beginners luck'. She then suggested six versus him and they were shocked to realise that he could defeat them while they had staves and he was unarmed and without using the Force.

They then tried again, this time using blasters, but the result was equally as frustrating.

It had been the wakeup call that some of them needed, especially as none of them would likely ever be able to match Harry's combat skill without intense combat training. There were very few non-Force Sensitive peoples in the galaxy that could match the Jedi for combat skill. Hopefully that would prevent them from becoming arrogant, but right now that was not the only major thing they had to work on:

"Start your run in ten seconds!" came Knight Potter's voice over the comms.

The group were at the starting line of Knight Potter's and Ranger Ani's latest training idea. An objective based obstacle course.

The course started fairly easily with a series of barricades, beams, walls and other standard obstacles to dodge, jump and duck around. In between some of the obstacles were force fields that had to be deactivated by hitting targets with their blasters. Each field would go down for a few seconds after the target was hit, granting them a split second opportunity to make it through. If any of the Handmaidens failed an obstacle or were stunned by the droids they failed the run.

After scaling a wall, the last target was designed to not only deactivate the last shield but also activate a pair of front armoured, but crucially, open backed auto-turrets armed with stun guns which they had to get passed or disable. There was then a dash across fifty meters of ground with only low obstacles to hide behind while they got shot at by training droids that could only be disabled by flicking a switch half way up the far wall. The last challenge was to get too the top of the vertical wall with only a single run of hand holds to reach the flag at the end which all had to be done within a time limit. Simple.

They had all done similar exercises, but nothing so long or complex before, this took their course training to a whole new level. They had also never done it with a time limit, said limit being five minutes to reach the queen (aka the flag) before 'insurgence' (aka Alema) killed her (removed the flag).

"Everyone ready?" asked Sabé.

"You bet."

"Good to go."

"Let's do this."

"For the queen."

"For the queen."

"Five…Four…Three…Two…One…Begin!"

The group immediately sprinted to the assault course part of the course and jumped, ducked and climbed at speed.

The first problem occurred when Eirtaé, who was leading the pack, shot the first target, deactivating the shield that blocked the landing space that a rope swing led too. She made it across, as did Padmé and Yané who were right behind her, but Sabé and Saché were a tiny bit too slow and swung at full speed into the shield, sending both dropping into the pool of water below the course.

"Wait!" called Eirtaé as she noticed the others plight and slowed.

"No! Keep going!" said Padmé.

"She's right," agreed Yané. "This is a scenario, we may lose people in real life, and they would give their lives for the queen. We have to get to the flag."

They kept going, being more careful with their timing on the targets.

The second problem came when they got to the last shield. They had to climb to the top of a wall before sighting the target. Their aim was good and both Padmé and Yané, who had caught back up with the pair, landed good hits and the shield went down.

This was the first time the group had seen the auto-turrets and they were surprised by how quick they reacted.

Yané and Padmé both jumped down the far side of the wall but Eirtaé was just reaching the top when the guns opened fire and had no time to dodge as she was hit.

"Eirtaé!" the others called as they went to try and catch her as she fell towards the rough rocks, only for her to hang in the air.

Padmé saw movement off to the side of the course and saw Knight Potter with his arm extended. He must have caught her with his Jedi Magic, but her pause cost her as she was hit in the back by the turrets and slumped to the floor.

That left only Yané who had reached the barricades and tried several times to land a shot on the turrets, but as soon as any part of her emerged from any side of the barricade she would be shot at.

She kept trying; the others, now recovered and revived, were cheering her on from the side and did so all the way up to the sounding of the klaxon.

"Time!" called Alema as she walked through the course. "The flag is dead."

"Are you injured Yané?" asked Padmé as the surviving handmaiden approached.

"Just my pride," she replied. "This course is impossible."

"If you think it's impossible," smiled Alema in a very quiet but dangerous way, "Maybe you would like to try something easier…Like a long uphill run."

"What!" they cried.

"Now!"

"And when you get back," Knight Potter explained as he approached. "You need to think about what you are doing when you do the course again."

"Again?"

"Again!"

AUTHOR's NOTE: Sorry for the massive long absence guys. REALLY hectic few months: birthdays, weddings, car trouble, running out of money and a whole load of other things that don't even include Writers Block.

I am not being assisted in Betaing this story by several volunteers, if you subsequently emailed my about help, thank you for offering but I already have several volunteers and the only additional kind I would be interested in adding to that group would be anyone who fancies either writing chapters or arcs to be included in this story.

I have had this chapter ready for a while but was reluctant to post it until I knew exactly where the arc was going and now I have a good idea how it will round up. In fact part of the arc is being written by one of the betas (Connor, many thanks) so hopefully the next chapter wont be too long in coming.

Enjoy.