Aarrba's Repair Dock

Aarrba's Repair Dock, also known as Aarrba's Repair and Salvage, Aarrba the Hutt's docking bay and spacecraft repair, and Aarrba the Hutt's service dock, was a starship repair and salvage business that was based in the city Cinnagar on the planet Koros Major. It made use of a dome-shaped brick building, situated near the city's Monument to Lost Navigators, that had an open space at the front of its tall entrance. The area had enough space for docking at least one starship. The structure itself, which had exposed bricks in multiple places, had six chimneys, and a pile of boxes and other equipment was at one point stacked against its wall to the right of the door.

The dock's spacious interior had room for at least two starships, and cables that could be attached to the ships being repaired hung from its high ceiling, where a small population of reptavians resided. The repair bay featured an elevated platform accessible by a tall staircase and held several barrels on the ground floor. The dock employed a group of organic workers and also made use of multiple droids, including a pair of tread-equipped units and one bipedal and several multi-legged ones—and later a wheeled one, as well—to effect ship repairs. By 5000 BBY, the owner of the facility, Aarrba, had it outfitted with a new security system that involved the dock's droids monitoring any intruders via their photoreceptors. When the ownership of the business later passed to Jori Daragon, she had a sign depicting a smiling Aarrba hung above the dock's entrance.

Aarrba's business offered affordable, expedient, and discreet repairs to the clients' spacegoing vessels and guaranteed all repair work, if only for a limited time. The Hutt also frequently lowered prices and extended credit for trusted clients but was wary of others, including his own employees, learning of such practices on his part.

Aarrba's Repair Dock was in business during the Unification Wars of the Koros system in 5000 BBY. Toward the end of that conflict, Aarrba rendered repair services to the Shadow Runner, the starship of the supply runners Hok and Timar Daragon. The work was done quickly, and the Hutt extended credit for the Daragons. Aarrba agreed to accept his payment in the form of a percentage of their profits as well as keeping the Starbreaker 12, the Daragons' other ship that was also kept in the dock, as collateral until the pair would return from their supply run mission to the nearby planet Kirrek.

On the day the Daragons departed on their mission, a droid was effecting the last preparatory work on the Shadow Runner while others were loading supplies aboard the vessel. Before leaving the dock aboard their ship, Hok and Timar expressed their gratitude to Aarrba for his willingness to cooperate, while their children, Gav and Jori, spent the time atop the hull of the Starbreaker 12, vocalizing their wish for their parents to take them along for the mission. At the same time, another vessel was parked outside the entrance to Aarrba's dock. The vehicle had a broken sail, and smoke was billowing out of its interior, with two droids attending outside the vessel.

During their mission, the elder Daragons perished, and when Aarrba was notified of the fact, he informed the supply runners' children while Gav was nearing the completion of repairs on the Starbreaker 12. The owner of the dock, reasoning that Hok and Timar had paid for the collateral vessel in their blood, gave it to Gav and Jori, who subsequently decided to use the ship to become hyperspace explorers. Luck in the young Daragons' chosen profession proved elusive, however, with the pair accumulating a large debt with Aarrba for repairs made on their ship.

Later that year, upon returning to Koros Major from a exploratory trip through the Starswarm Cluster that had once again left the Starbreaker 12 in need of repairs, the Daragons contacted Cinnagar Control and asked to be relayed to Aarrba at his repair dock while the pair was bringing their ship in for a landing there. Over the comm, the explorers begged the Hutt to help them out again. As the Starbreaker 12 was subsequently undergoing repairs at Aarrba's dock, the Daragons attempted to convince the facility's owner to extend credit for them, but, since they did not have any collateral to offer, Aarrba refused and, no longer trusting the pair's promises, decreed that he would not return the ship to the explorers until they had repaid the repairs in full. In the process Aarrba also disclosed that his business was facing financial losses and that he had had to install a new security system in the dock merely in order to prevent people from stealing parts from the facility.

Refusing to give up, not long thereafter Gav visited Aarrba at the dock again, inquiring about the repairs on the Starbreaker 12. He also tried to improve his and his sister's credit reliability by informing the Hutt that an affluent merchant, Ssk Kahorr, was already using a hyperspace route the Daragons had charted and that they would therefore receive a substantial bonus soon. During the visit, however, the young explorer, concerned about his ship, verbally lashed out at one of the repair bay's droids working on the vessel for dropping a part on the floor.

The Daragons were later accosted by two assassins sent by Kahorr, who was dissatisfied with the risky route the explorers had mapped. Rattled from the encounter, Gav led Jori to Aarrba's dock and suggested that they steal the Starbreaker 12 and go on a desperate, all-or-nothing exploration run to try and discover something valuable that could profit them. The pair stealthily entered the repair bay—albeit tripping the facility's security system in the process—and boarded their ship. Breaking it free of its tethers, Gav expressed his belief—although he was not sure of it—that Aarrba would not have programmed the dock's security system to destroy any of the Hutt's vessels, after which the Starbreaker 12 left the dock. Cinnagar security starfighters attempted to intercept the illegal departure, but the Daragons made a random hyperspace jump that took them to the remote Sith Empire.

During the Daragon siblings' absence from Galactic Republic space, Aarrba visited the Koros system's Empress Teta. The business owner told the empress about the pair's theft of the Starbreaker 12, noting that his repair dock had been damaged in the process, and also asked that the fact that he had extended credit to them not be made publicly known. Meanwhile, after the Daragons had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Sith, Gav expressed to his sister his regret for stealing their ship from Aarrba.

Jori, having been separated from Gav in Sith Space, eventually escaped imprisonment and returned to Koros Major, where she was promptly arrested and Kahorr took possession of the Starbreaker 12 as recompense for the financial losses he had incurred while using the route charted by the Daragons. When the Sith Empire's fleet of warships, having followed the route taken by Jori, subsequently attacked Koros Major as part of its invasion of the Republic, Jori—who had warned Empress Teta of the impending Sith threat—rushed to Aarrba's repair dock in order to find a suitable starship to pilot in combat against the invaders.

Meanwhile, Gav, whom the Sith Empire's Dark Lord, Naga Sadow, had made his apprentice and appointed the commander of the Sith fleet, took a shuttle down to Cinnagar in order to find Jori. Narrowing his search by using a Sith amulet that reacted to the presence of a similar one worn by Jori, Gav arrived at Aarrba's dock, which had been damaged by bombardment during the battle. Landing his ship at the same time as the nearby Monument to Lost Navigators was destroyed—and immediately after the dock itself was nearly hit—Gav took the Massassi soldiers under his command into the dock, where he hoped to find out Jori's location from Aarrba.

However, upon seeing Gav, Aarrba immediately denounced him as a traitor and spat upon him. Believing the Hutt to be attacking his master, one of the Massassi then killed the Hutt. In turn, before succumbing to his wounds, the owner of the dock crushed two of the Massassi to their deaths beneath his massive body. As Gav stood shocked at the scene of the massacre, Jori also arrived at the dock. Assuming that Gav had ordered for Aarrba to be killed, his similarly shocked sister ignited the lightsaber given to her by the Jedi Odan-Urr and cut down the Massassi present at the dock. As the grieving Jori knelt down by the side of Aarrba's body, the still-shocked Gav dropped his Sith amulet on the floor of the dock and ran away, taking off on his shuttle. Jori, unwilling to become separated from her brother again, then hijacked a starship that had been parked nearby and pursued Gav to the Sith fleet.

Later, after Gav had perished during a battle against Sadow's forces and the Republic had emerged victorious over the Sith Empire, Teta summoned Jori to her throne room. Considering the former explorer's losses during the conflict with the Sith, the empress inquired as to any way she could help Jori, to which she responded with her wish to reopen Aarrba's repair dock in the Hutt's memory.

Jori subsequently had the dock restored and opened to business again, and she herself took on an active role in carrying out repairs on the starships there. The new owner of the facility appreciated her situation, admitting that it was both all that she had ever desired and more than either she or Gav had ever hoped for—and she believed that the late Aarrba would have been pleased, as well. More than a thousand years after Aarrba's death, his humble, charitable, and honest nature, coupled with his small business and tragic fate, had led other Hutts to disown him as an ancestor, instead holding up the later crime lord Bogga as an example of success. The Daragon siblings' theft of the Starbreaker 12 from Aarrba's Repair Dock was eventually recorded in a 25 ABY galactic history chronicle by the Historical Council of the New Republic.

Aarrba's Repair Dock, referred to as "Aarrba the Hutt's service dock," first appeared in the prologue issue of Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi — The Golden Age of the Sith comic book mini-series. The issue was written by Kevin J. Anderson, penciled by Chris Gossett, and published on July 31, 1996.

Anderson's subsequent issue of the series, published in October 9 of the same year, further identified the facility as "Aarrba's Repair and Salvage," and Anderson went on to introduce the name "Aarrba's Repair Dock" in the August 20, 1997 third issue of the Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi — The Fall of the Sith Empire series and "Aarrba the Hutt's docking bay and spacecraft repair" in the fourth issue on September 17 of the same year. The 2002 reference book The New Essential Guide to Characters by Daniel Wallace ultimately confirmed the capitalization of the name "Aarrba's Repair Dock."

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