Rakatan warriors storm a Killik nest (Darren Tan)
“War is ruin, predicted and then remembered as glory.”
—Satine Kryze, Duchess of Mandalore
Very little is known about the galaxy’s first civilizations, but the legends of the eldest spacefaring species tell an intriguingly similar story—about a terrible war waged with unimaginable weapons.
Pre-Republic specialists believe that the Columi, the Gree, the Kwa, and the Sharu all had contact with a species known as the Celestials, or the Architects, beings of astonishing power and malleable form. The Columi retreated from the stars after contact with the Celestials, and the Sharu sought refuge in primitivism. But the Gree, the Kwa, and the Killiks became their servants, helping build astonishing technological projects—projects some scientists believe included the assembly of star systems and the engineering of the hyperspace anomalies west of the Deep Core, if not the barrier surrounding our galaxy.
But another slave species revolted, wresting control of the Celestials’ domain some thirty thousand years ago and waging war against the Gree, Kwa, and the Killiks. They were known as the Rakata, or the Builders, a species of bipeds with amphibian features whose technologies were powered by the Force.
Drawing on the Force made the Rakatan hyperdrive useless for traveling between points in realspace—instead, it homed in on the Force signature of planets brimming with life. Rakatan shields and energy weapons, meanwhile, used crystals to focus the Force.
The Force was fuel for the Rakata’s Infinite Empire, and so they needed slaves—which they found on many worlds and trained to use their technologies. For millennia the Rakata ruled the galaxy, crossing space in their skipships, devastating planets with disruptor fields, and building armies of war droids. But then they too fell—cut off from the Force by a terrible plague. Their former slaves—humans, Duros, Herglic, Baragwin, Devaronians, Gossams, and others—rose up and hunted them down, leaving just a few bands of survivors in the Unknown Regions.
Those former slave species then reverse-engineered the Rakatan technologies, eliminating the role of focusing crystals and anything else that required the Force. A period of wild experimentation produced new technologies that became the basis of new territories—which then coalesced into the Republic.
A SOLDIER’S STORY:
NOTRON IN FLAMES
The ancient history of Coruscant was shaped by war between the Battalions of Zhell—believed by some to be the ancestral human population—and the Taungs. During one skirmish, a volcanic eruption destroyed the city of Zhell. Taking this as a sign of divine favor, the Taungs christened themselves Dha Werda Verda, the Shadow Warriors, and celebrated their victory in the epic poem of the same name.
Dha Werda Verda encompasses more than seven hundred verses divided into eleven chapters. The best-known part is a fraction of the ninth chapter, presented here as translated by Baobab archivists:
And so upon his pyre burned the Doom of Ulmarah, and the warrior bands stood as ragged bandits, in zigzag lines of mourning. With the dawn the flat-faced Zhell would come, cackling and howling, oozing mirth and tricks, and find the shade of the Doom departed and the Taungs unprotected.
And so with the dawn would our woe be revealed. Our once-bright armaments would become stacked grave goods, trophies for Zhell children. Our flesh would become smoke given to uncaring gods, and the sky would forget our names.
With death upon him Rexutu the Unconquerable prepared to be stripped of all by his enemy, but vowed that his honor would be last to be torn away. And so the Unconquerable gathered his kinsmen and his oath girdlings alike. They polished their fearsome helms, that they might flash even in the weak sun of Notron. They rewrapped the hilts of their weapons and pounded straight the shafts, that they might slake their thirst in Zhell ichor a final time.
Assembled they ascended, in taut Taung lines, to the high place where the Reaver had staked his standard before it was cast down into the mire. They gazed out over the gathering places and walking ways of Great Zhell where they scaled peak and cradled valley, the lines of lights ordering the night. They unfurled the Taung banner, reversed, a reckless thing snapping in the dark, awaiting Zhell eyes. And they performed ceremonies of leave-taking, for now they had died to the world and must be remade among the stars.
When the dawn came the Zhell awakened and saw the Taungs upon the high place and were afraid, for the morning light caught the glint of helms and weapons and created phantom warriors, made of dazzle and distance. But the cleverest of them were not deceived, and saw how few we were. And so they assembled without haste, merry in mockery, and prepared to march. And in the high place we awaited death.
But then came a shaking of the ground, and the sun’s wan light was eclipsed by a bright and terrible fire that exploded from the rock. The patterns of Great Zhell shivered and broke. And after this came darkness, as the very air turned to black ash. The Zhell fell on their faces in terror, and from the high place we ran in haste to meet them, and we were cloaked in shadow.
The Maker had come to unmake, and the Taungs would be His instruments.
The last stand of the Taungs (Bruno Werneck)
Around fifteen thousand years before the Battle of Yavin (BBY), a terrible civil war—known as the Hutt Cataclysms—tore through Hutt Space, leaving several Hutt homeworlds barren wastelands. The surviving Hutts established a Council of Elders to prevent clan rivalries from exploding into open warfare, and instituted a new philosophy—kajidic—that rejected war and territorial conquest in favor of working from the shadows to manipulate others.
But before the Hutt Cataclysms, the Hutts conducted themselves very differently. They were warriors, leaving their homeworld of Varl to seek their destinies among the stars. When they encountered a species strong enough to resist them, that species was utterly destroyed. When they encountered a species too weak to be of use, it met the same fate. Only those species that were useful to Hutt ambitions but able to be mastered survived—and many of those were then worked to extinction.
The Hutts have always utilized a grab bag of technologies copied, borrowed, or stolen from others, and little is known about their own native technologies, if they ever existed. Perhaps the best glimpse of the ancient Hutts comes from records kept by the Sakiyans, one of the few species of Hutt Space to maintain their independence and win the Hutts’ respect. Sakiyan chronicles tell of Hutt cavaliers clad in iron shells, maneuvering via clattering metal limbs, treads, or wheels—perhaps ancient versions of the armored Shell Hutts who still dwell on Circumtore. Ancient Sakiyan tribute-counts also record payments for the Sakiyans’ assistance in building Hutt planechanga—massive tubular railguns built to accelerate space rocks to planet-cracking velocities.
The victims of the Hutts’ depredations are long gone and unable to bear witness to their oppressors’ crimes, about which even the Sakiyans are silent. But the oldest legends of the Tion and the histories of long-established Rim worlds such as Delacrix and Rinn speak of the Hutts with fear and horror, recording that worlds caught between feuding clans or whose people somehow offended the Hutts were depopulated, poisoned, bombarded, or incinerated.
Galactic history has seen billions of admirals, generals, and warlords come and go. Most of their territorial gains have lasted decades at most; most of their names have been forgotten within a few centuries. But not all.
The Tionese empire of Xim began to fragment soon after his death, but the Despot’s name has endured for twenty-five millennia, and still has the power to inspire and frighten. Depending whom you ask, Xim is a romantic swashbuckler, a sad symbol of lost power and prestige, the embodiment of human brutality, or an icon of madness and ruin. Scholars are similarly divided about this ancient son of the Tion Cluster, arguing about which of his deeds should properly be attributed to his father, Xer, and how many of the tales of the sprawling epic known as The Despotica are based in reality.
It’s generally accepted that Xim was born on Argai, the son of the pirate-king Xer VIII. Xer and his pirates seized ships moving between hyperspace jump beacons through the nebula now known as the Indrexu Spiral, and the pirates’ wealth and exploits attracted new raiders to Xer’s banner. Battles at Panna, Duinarbulon, and Chandaar shattered the fleet of the Kingdom of Cron and made Xer its king. The teenage Xim made his first appearance soon after, becoming famous for his brutality during the slaughter of Cron’s nobility known as the Cronese Sweeps.
Xer’s forces stormed through the Tion, checked only by the well-armed, disciplined starfleet of the Livien League. After Xer retired to Raxus, Xim fulfilled his father’s ambitions, smashing the league at Jhantoria. At Desevro, Xim met with Maslovar Tiatiov, the defeated planet’s military ruler. Tiatiov showed the young Despot the Desevrar fighting academies and ministries, and explained how the Livien League had strengthened itself by turning its enemies’ sons into janissaries and ministers.
Xim, impressed, spared Tiatiov’s life. The Desevrar philosophy fueled Xim’s Expansionist Period, a decade-long crusade that saw Tionese colonists advance in lockstep with Xim’s forces. Worlds that opposed the Tionese were destroyed; those that accepted their rule became part of the ever-growing empire. By the end of the Expansionist Period, Xim ruled a vast domain—the Despot’s territory extended from the Radama Void to Jabiim, including hundreds of thousands of worlds linked together by a network of jump beacons.
Adventurous Tionese scouts and merchants explored beyond this beacon network, hoping to win the Despot’s favor by discovering rich new worlds. Some of those scouts returned to the Kiirium Reaches describing meetings with alien traders who served ruthless slug-like creatures.
The Hutts became the Despot’s obsession. He burned to add Hutt trade worlds such as lush Ko Vari and fabled Sleheyron to his empire, and prepared for war, taking the old Rakatan title Daritha—ruler of worlds—for his own. He pushed his beacon network farther and farther to trailing, establishing a network of fortresses from which he might attack Hutt Space.
In the twenty-fifth year of Xim’s rule, he assaulted Sleheyron and Ko Vari. Ko Vari was brutally sacked, while the drive to take Sleheyron failed, with the Despot’s warships driven back to Xo’s Eye (now known as Kessel) and lost in a tangle of black holes.
The lord of the Hutts, Kossak, was a wily foe. He lured Xim into ritual combat at Vontor, a world traditionally used for showdowns between Hutt clans. The Daritha would fight three battles at Vontor, all of which he would lose.
At the first, around 25,100 BBY, his warships were bested in space; at the second, a rematch sought by Xim, his Star Lancers and other ground forces were beaten by Jilruan flecheteers and Cyborrean heavy infantry, but Xim escaped with great stores of Vontorian kiirium. Offered a choice of ground or space combat at the Third Battle of Vontor, Xim chose ground and saw his janissaries and war droids overwhelmed by Nikto, Vodran, and Klatooinian berserkers led by Boonta the Hutt.
Xim had ignored his advisers and bled his empire dry creating warships and battle droids. At Vontor the depths of his folly were revealed: Fighting far from his own borders (and, it’s whispered, betrayed by those close to him), Xim was not just defeated but captured, with his surviving orbital fortresses taken as Hutt trophies. The human who had dared oppose the Hutts was paraded in chains through Hutt Space. Xim’s name would outlive many a civilization, but the former Despot spent his miserable final days as a Hutt slave.
A warrior of the ancient Hutts (Chris Scalf)
Xim’s war robots were technological marvels, likely derived from Rakatan designs—it was eons before war droids of comparable sophistication became common in the galaxy. While exalted in tales of the Despot, the war robots likely weren’t run-of-the-mill infantry, but reserved for use as shock troops and ceremonial guards.
The war robots stood nearly three meters high. Their armor was made of an alloy of carbon, neutronium, and hadrium, later augmented with kiirium. They were armed with heatbeams, particle dischargers, and pulse-wave cannons. Some units utilized technologies that have defied technologists’ reverse-engineering efforts: Xim’s Crimson Condottieri, for example, apparently used Force-sensitive Rakatan modules to enhance their limited behavioral circuitry matrices.
Though they were among the first combat automata ever produced, their toughness and effectiveness in battle have rarely been equaled. Shortly before the Battle of Yavin, a thousand war robots—Xim’s fabled Guardian Corps—were activated on Dellalt and attacked a band of roughneck miners, fighting effectively and without the slightest hint that nearly twenty-five millennia had degraded their programming or physical systems.
Most of Xim’s war robots were destroyed when the Despot was defeated at the Third Battle of Vontor, as berserk Hutt slaves overpowered them through sheer numbers. For ages, the Guardian Corps watched over the treasure off-loaded from the Queen of Ranroon on lonely Dellalt. Elsewhere, Tionese families handed down some units as bodyguards, while others guarded lost outposts of the Despot’s empire, awaiting orders that would never come. Even in the final years of the Republic, scouts would occasionally discover a rogue planet or hidden asteroid base defended by an unimagin-ably ancient war robot.
The Hutts took hundreds of war robots from Vontor as trophies, and travelers in Hutt Space would sometimes stumble across them standing mutely in plazas and palaces. When the Yuuzhan Vong invaded Hutt Space in 26 ABY, the warriors received a shock: The war robots woke from their long sleep and killed thousands of the attackers before they were overcome and destroyed. Xim himself might have appreciated the irony.
Hutt retainers face Xim’s war droids (Tommy Lee Edwards)
TIONESE TECHNOLOGY
Like most pre-Republic galactic powers, the Tionese had been Rakatan slaves, and they inherited their oppressors’ technology after the Infinite Empire fell. Under the canny administrators of the defeated Livien League, the Tionese created the galaxy’s first great military-industrial complex. During Xim’s time the Tion Cluster and the Thanium Worlds bustled with factories and shipyards that created warships, ground vehicles, war robots, and armaments for flesh-and-blood soldiers.
Particularly given their great age, Xim-era armaments are surprisingly common, allowing historians to reconstruct the Despot’s technology with relative confidence. Xim’s soldiers were divided into several castes. Most were janissaries from occupied worlds, trained as children for a lifetime of war. They wore armor and helmets of lightweight ceramic alloy and carried either slugthrowers or heatbeams, which fired jets of plasma. Heatbeamers wore tough, fireproof padded gloves and kamas as protection against their weapons’ superheated exhaust.
Xim’s elite soldiers, such as the Duinarbulon Star Lancers, known for their glossy black ceramic armor, carried beam tubes—ancestors of the blaster that required larger reserves of actuating gases to function. Beam tubes needed two hands to wield because of their large gas reservoirs, and backpack power cells that weighed more than thirty kilograms. Because beam tubes offered slow rates of fire and their power cells could only deliver one hundred shots, beam-tubers alternated fire by squad and carried large power generators on repulsorsleds.
The Despot’s forces are popularly depicted as fighting on foot while supported by sleek warships, but this notion owes more to romance than reality. Xim’s armies made use of tracked tanks, armored groundcars, and floaters that boasted beam-tube cannons, with elite vehicles armored in gleaming kiirium to reflect energy weapons.
Less is known about Xim’s warships. They were smaller than most Imperial-era craft, perhaps reflecting the Despot’s pirate origins. The ancient Tionese saw starship construction as an art form, looking down on the mass production of The bulk of Xim’s warships would be classified as frigates or corvettes today, with Argaian hemiolia, Livien cutters, Thanium star-glaives, and Cronese battlebirds mixed and matched within squadrons.
Xim’s airships primarily used torpedoes, concussion missiles, and pulse cannons that melted enemy hulls and disrupted circuitry with blasts of radiation. Xim’s shipwrights armored the Despot’s fleet with kiirium, a superconducting alloy that was a major breakthrough against energy weapons. Many an enemy turned his weapons onto the mirror-bright hulls of Xim’s warships, only to see energy bolts coruscate harmlessly across the kiirium surface. Beneath those hulls, the ships’ mytag crystalline vertices kept communications and sensors working under electromagnetic attack, and highly efficient Bordhell fuel slugs extended their range and speed.
Xim did have larger ships, believed to be cruiser-class: Cronese harpices, Brigian penteconters, and Thanium polyremes were later joined by Yutuski rakehells and Xolochi dreadnoughts. And the legends speak of the treasure ship Queen of Ranroon and two flagships. The keel of the Eibon Scimitar was laid at the shipyards of Barancar, and later renderings of it inspired the Republic’s long-lived Invincible class of heavy cruisers. The Scimitar was destroyed at the First Battle of Vontor and replaced by the Deathknell, which met a similar fate at the Third Battle of Vontor.
SHIELD TECHNOLOGY
Only armored hulls protected the first ships to explore the dark between the stars. But the many dangers of space travel quickly made it clear that better protection was desperately needed.
The first defenses were energy shields, originally designed to dissipate solar energy absorbed by hulls in deep space. Energy shields were soon refined into deflector shields, which could also defend against energy weapons. Deflector shields create layered force fields enveloping an object in a single field or series of intersecting fields, depending on the size of the object to be protected and the energy available to power the shield. Energy is diffused away from the point of contact and either absorbed by the shield or radiated away as waste heat.
Deflector shields, however, were a poor defense against impacts that couldn’t be diffused, such as projectiles, micrometeorites, or asteroids. Particle shields offered an additional means of protection, absorbing the kinetic energy of a collision and diffusing it as deflector shields do. Particle shields also bind a ship’s hull together at the molecular level.
For millennia, even small-sized starships have traveled with both kinds of shields. But the shield technology of the post-Imperial era little resembles that of the early Republic. Shields of all types require enormous amounts of power, and for eons only the largest starships could mount shield generators big enough to defend against energy weapons. Until the 7700s BBY, shields were primarily a defense against accidental impacts and radiation storms, not enemy ships. Armor was a starship’s principal defense, with research focusing on alloys and coatings that could dissipate energy impacts.
Advances in power generation made shields practical for smaller ships and also let ships mount capable defenses against more powerful energy weapons. But even stronger shields could be penetrated. Directing energy against single points can overload the defensive field, allowing projectiles or energy blasts to pass through before the shield can regenerate, or burning out the generator powering that section of the shield. Particle shields must be lowered to allow ships to launch or projectile weapons to be fired, leaving vulnerable gaps. Finally, heat sinks, exhaust ports and other systems can’t have particle shields, because heat, waste, and debris would be trapped inside—a problem that left the first Death Star vulnerable to Luke Skywalker’s proton torpedo.
Planetary shields offer a defense against bombardment by capital ships, as well as sorties by starfighters and landing craft, but ground vehicles rarely have shields. Personal shields are largely a relic of history: They require large power packs if they are to function for a significant period of time, expose living beings to unhealthy radiation and magnetic forces, and sometimes fail in catastrophic fashion, flash-cooking those they seek to defend. Droids with properly shielded circuitry fear none of these things: During the Clone Wars droidekas were among the Confederacy of Independent Systems’ most feared units. Fortunately for the Republic, the vast expense of producing and maintaining destroyer droids limited the number of units that could be deployed.
WAR PORTRAIT:
BOONTA THE HUTT
If not for the leadership of two great Hutts, Xim the Despot might have achieved his goal of making Sleheyron the Ninth Throne of his empire, avoided the fatal distractions of Vontor, and escaped his fate. And the history of the galaxy might be very different.
The first Hutt who stood in his way was Kossak Inijic Ar’durv. It was Kossak who persuaded the fractious Hutt clans that the Tionese were an existential threat; cajoled them into uniting against Xim (with Kossak himself as clan-general); exploited the Despot’s pride and vanity to ensnare him in ritual combats; and lured the Vodrans, Niktos, and Klatooinians into Hutt service so their forces might tip the balance against Xim at the Third Battle of Vontor.
While Kossak was a political genius and a cunning warrior, it took another Hutt to defeat Xim: Boonta Hestilic Shad’ruu, hailed as the architect of the Hutts’ defenses and the assaults that destroyed the Despot’s forces.
While the history of this period is hazy, most historians believe Boonta began his rise to power as a clan leader on Ko Vari, a rich trade world on what was then the Hutt frontier. Knowing he couldn’t defend his world against the Tionese, Boonta determined that the invaders would pay dearly for it, sacrificing countless valuable slaves in suicidal attacks on the Despot’s warships and ground forces. Xim responded by sacking the planet brutally, but Boonta had bought invaluable time for his fellow Hutts. Impressed, Kossak directed him to harass the Tionese worlds with slave-crewed privateers.
Boonta fought well at the First and Second Battles of Vontor. When Xim withdrew from the Moralan system in the hope of fomenting slave revolts against the Hutts, Boonta crushed the rebellious Moralan Parliament, sterilizing the planet as an object lesson for the Hutts’ slave species. He then retook Ko Vari before leading the Hutt warships at the Third Battle of Vontor.
The Hutts say that on the night before the invasion of Moralan, Boonta gathered his kin, loyal retainers, and favored slaves and spoke of the Hutts and their rightful place in the galaxy. He swore he would rather die than live in a galaxy in which Hutts bowed down to bipeds, and in which the beneficence of their rule was replaced by the chaos of slave species scratching and crawling for brief dominance. Boonta’s Eve is still celebrated as a Hutt holiday, a night in which slaves renew their vows of obeisance and are rewarded with a feast and trinkets.
Another tradition honors Boonta: popular Podraces on a number of Hutt-controlled worlds. The Hutts say such competitions date back to celebrations held by Boonta himself on reclaimed Ko Vari: Each year on Boonta’s Eve, Tionese prisoners would be forced to run while the Hutts wagered on the results, with the stragglers in each heat put to death until the sole survivor was proclaimed winner.
The planet Ko Vari, meanwhile, is now called Boonta, in tribute to the Hutt who recaptured it from Xim.
Boonta the Hutt (Drew Baker)
