Lucia (soldier)

The Human female Lucia was born sometime between 1030 and 1020 BBY, and she served in the Brotherhood of Darkness during the New Sith Wars against the Galactic Republic in the years leading up to the Seventh Battle of Ruusan. Lucia served as a junior officer and sniper in the Gloom Walkers unit, under the command of Lieutenant Ulabore. She served alongside the trooper Dessel of the Gloom Walkers during the battle at Kashyyyk, and again during the battle at Hsskhor. In 1002 BBY, Lucia and the Gloom Walkers participated in the Battle of Phaseera, an effort to capture the Republic manufacturing world of Phaseera. The Gloom Walkers were tasked with taking out a Republic outpost overlooking a valley that led to the Republic base camp in Phaseera's capital city. This outpost prevented the Brotherhood army from moving through the valley during the daytime without being spotted and their presence alerted to the Republic soldiers in the camp. In addition, the Republic had three that could inflict massive damage from the sky.

Before the battle began, the Gloom Walkers stayed at a makeshift camp in the jungle. Ulabore eventually received the order from the Brotherhood's commanders to move out, and Lucia was sent to tell the rest of the troopers to assemble. However, when Ulabore told the Gloom Walkers that they were to attack the outpost in one hour, the Gloom Walkers objected, believing it to be a suicide mission. When Ulabore refused to listen, Dessel, who had been promoted to Sergeant, mutinied by knocking Ulabore out and taking command. The Gloom Walkers then waited until nightfall to strike and moved through the jungle, split into four squads, and encircled the outpost, with each squad using interference boxes to jam all transmissions within the perimeter.

Lucia was in Dessel's squad, and when Dessel saw that the crews of the now-grounded gunships were still there, he asked Lucia if she could snipe them. Lucia answered in the negative, stating that no one could kill so many troopers that fast. Frustrated and acting on impulse, Dessel attacked the crews by himself, killing several before being blinded by a flash canister. Dessel was able to retain his sight, even after the detonation of the flash canister, and went on to kill the rest of the Republic soldiers with incredible speed and precision. Lucia was very shocked by this display and stared with her mouth agape for a moment before continuing the fight for the outpost.

Three hours later, the Gloom Walkers succeeded in taking the outpost, with nine casualties. With the outpost eliminated, the main Brotherhood army was well on its way to surprise-attacking the Republic base camp. Lucia and the rest of the Gloom Walkers, save a small squad led by Senior Trooper Adanar that was tasked with holding the outpost, returned to their jungle camp to find an awake Ulabore surrounded by several Sith enforcers. Dessel was placed in shackles and told by Ulabore that he was going to be court-martialed. Although Lucia tried to defend Dessel, he was taken away by the armed enforcers.

A month later, Lucia and the Gloom Walkers traveled to Alaris Prime. On patrol there, they were ambushed by Republic troops—something that Lucia knew would never have happened had Dessel still been with them. The ensuing skirmish was quick and bloody; casualties were heavy on both sides, but the Republic troops were forced to flee. Lucia had not forgiven Ulabore for having Dessel arrested and likely killed, and she shot him in the back during the battle, killing him. The other Gloom Walkers never reported her betrayal, and Ulabore was registered as killed in action. However, unbeknownst to Lucia, Dessel's court-martial never occurred; word had spread of his remarkable shooting, and he was taken to Korriban to train in the dark side of the Force. Dessel eventually became the Sith Lord Darth Bane. Two years after his arrest, he destroyed the Brotherhood by providing them with the thought bomb to use in battle against the Jedi. The war ended after the last battle on Ruusan, and Bane secretly established his own Order of the Sith Lords.

After the end of the New Sith Wars and the collapse of the Brotherhood of Darkness Lucia became a prisoner of war. She served for six months on a work planet, repairing starships, until the Galactic Senate released a pardon to all the beings who had served in the Sith army. For the next thirteen years Lucia worked as a freelance bodyguard, mercenary; and later as a bounty hunter. In 987 BBY she attempted to track down and capture the Meerian Salto Zendar, who had attempted to kidnap a high-ranking Muun in the InterGalactic Banking Clan.

She tracked him to a hospital on the planet Bandomeer, where she tried to take him into custody. However, a nurse working in the hospital, Serra, blocked her way and refused to move, even when Lucia pulled a blaster on her. A Twi'lek, who was also hunting Zendar, suddenly arrived and shot Lucia in the stomach before taking Zendar out into a hall. Lucia, although injured, crawled after them, but she fell unconscious. Even as the skirmish continued in the hospital, Serra retrieved Lucia and performed life-saving surgery on her.

Lucia then vowed to protect Serra and became her loyal bodyguard. With Serra she traveled frequently from place to place, never staying on one world for more than a few weeks at a time. At first, the healer was reluctant to have Lucia always watching over her, but Serra eventually came to appreciate her bodyguard, and the two became very close friends. When Gerran, the Prince of Doan, contracted Idolian fever, his father contacted Serra to heal him. Within three months, Gerran was cured and he and Serra had fallen in love. He proposed to her, and she accepted on the basis that Lucia would remain her bodyguard. The King remained against their union, but accepted reluctantly, allowing Lucia to join the Doan Royal Guard.

In 980 BBY, the Doan Royal House came into conflict with the planet's mining caste, and the tensions escalated when the miners accidentally killed Gerran, destroying his airspeeder while trying to capture him. Serra became very depressed, and Lucia, concerned for her friend, decided to exact revenge on the miners' leader, Gelba. She traveled to the space station Paradise and hired an Iktotchi assassin, the Huntress, to assassinate Gelba. Meanwhile, however, the king had allowed for the Jedi Order to dispatch an ambassador, Jedi Knight Medd Tandar, to meet with the miners and begin negotiations, and the Huntress also killed Tandar during her attack. The next day, Serra and Lucia met with the King and agreed that they should travel to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant to ensure the Jedi that the Royal House had not been behind the attack on Tandar, in order to avoid a diplomatic incident. After their meeting with the King, Lucia revealed to Serra that she had been the one to hire the assassin, and suggested that the Princess turn her in. Serra, however, denied her, insisting that she would convince the Jedi that it had not been their fault and that the incident would soon be behind them.

During their trip to the Jedi Temple they met with Tandar's former Master, Obba. The Jedi Master showed them to a monument of five Jedi that had been killed by a Sith Lord in 990 BBY. On the monument, however, was also a sixth name—Caleb of Ambria. Lucia recognized the name as a healer who had lived during the New Sith Wars, and refused to take sides during the war. Obba revealed that an injured Sith Lord had traveled to Ambria after killing the five Jedi, but Caleb had refused to heal him. Obba told them that the healer had sent a message to the Jedi, telling them of the Sith Lord. Obba and a team of Jedi had been sent to arrest him, and had found the healer dead before killing the deranged Dark Lord. Unbeknownst to Lucia, Caleb was Serra's father: in 1,000 BBY, Darth Bane had threatened Serra's life in order to get Caleb to heal him, and Caleb, believing that Bane would some day return, had forced his daughter to change her name and move off-planet, so that the Sith would not be able to force the healer to cure him again. Serra thus assumed that Bane had returned and killed her father. Lucia asked Obba about the Sith that they had killed, and he revealed that the man had been thin and pathetic—not at all like Serra remembered Bane. Convinced that Bane still lived, Serra ordered Lucia to rehire the Huntress to capture the Sith Lord.

Lucia returned to the space station Paradise and found the Huntress, revealing that Serra would pay her triple the normal rate if the assassin met with her on Ambria. The Huntress agreed and succeeded in her task. Bane was taken to Doan, where Serra had the Sith Lord placed in the Stone Prison, a secret prison located deep underground beneath the planet's Royal Manse. Lucia, meanwhile, had begun to become concerned for Serra, whose vengefulness disturbed her.

Serra kept Bane incapacitated in the prison through the use of drug injections for three days before finally deciding to interrogate him. Lucia and the Huntress accompanied Serra during the interrogation, and Lucia was surprised to recognize Darth Bane as Dessel—her old Sergeant from the Gloom Walkers whom she had believed to have died twenty years previously. Serra tortured the Sith Lord with the drug injections, and Lucia was shocked by her friend's ruthlessness in interrogating the Sith Lord. When Bane revealed to the princess that he had not killed Caleb, Serra became furious and assaulted him, causing Lucia to try to restrain her from continually attacking Bane, whom Lucia believed had not killed Caleb. She pleaded with Serra that torturing Bane would not bring her father back, even as Bane insisted that Caleb had been weak, and deserved to die. Lucia countered that Bane's own strength had not mattered—he had become a prisoner, anyway; but Bane declared that he deserved his suffering as well—had he been stronger, he would not have been captured. Serra injected him again, and even as he began to lose consciousness, continued arguing with him. Lucia again tried to restrain her friend, telling her that she needed to calm down. Serra realized Lucia was right and left the room. The Huntress left soon after, leaving Lucia alone with Bane.

Lucia was conflicted on what to do with Bane: she believed that Sith Lords were cruel, but she felt pity for him—she was convinced he had not actually murdered Caleb, and thus believed that he did not deserve the torture. Lucia also believed that Bane probably deserved to die for other atrocities he may have committed in becoming a Sith Lord, but she felt that she still owed Bane her life for the many times he had saved her—along with the rest of the Gloom Walkers—during the New Sith Wars. Lucia found the injection that contained a drug that countered the effects of the incapacitating drug, senflax, and injected it in Bane's thigh so that it would take a while to wake him. Lucia then left the cell, ordering the guards outside to lock the door and hit the alarm if anything went wrong. She then went to find Serra and get her to safety before Bane could find and kill her.

Meanwhile, Bane's apprentice—and the true killer of Caleb—Darth Zannah, arrived on Doan, hoping to find her Master and challenge him for the title of Dark Lord of the Sith. Soon after Lucia left to find Serra, Bane escaped from his cell and began to hunt down the Princess. However, the alarm sounded as Bane broke free, and Lucia heard Serra yelling out. As Lucia ran through the halls, she almost ran into the Huntress, who informed her that she had told Serra of her bodyguard's betrayal. The assassin then pointed her in the direction which Serra had gone running.

As Lucia neared Serra, she saw Bane and called him by his old name: Des. She asked if he remembered her, but Bane asked why she had helped him before, revealing that he knew who she was. She replied that he had saved her life at Phaseera, and when Bane asked what she wanted, she requested that he let Serra live. As she pleaded with him, he warned her that she would not be able to stop him. Lucia refused to back down, replying that she believed she owed him her life, and that if he wanted to take it, it was his right to do so. As Bane began to gather the power of the dark side, Zannah found them, unleashing a powerful blast of dark side energy. Bane managed to protect himself, but Zannah's blast sent Lucia flying thirty meters down the hallway, knocking her body against the walls and ceiling and smashing her skull on the stone several times, killing her.

Although Lucia was one of the youngest members of the Gloom Walkers, she was recognized as one of the best shots in the unit, and she carried a TC-17 sniper rifle into battle. She greatly respected Dessel and even tried to convince Lieutenant Ulabore not to have the Sith enforcers arrest him for mutiny. When she saw Dessel's remarkable display of shooting during the Battle of Phaseera, she was shocked by his precision and had to be told by Dessel to snap out of it. Lucia was also exceedingly loyal; when Serra saved her life, Lucia vowed to protect the healer, no matter what the cost. When Serra became depressed after Gerran's death, Lucia hired the Huntress to assassinate the miner who had caused Serra's depression; an action which she compared to her decision to kill Ulabore. Ulabore had been responsible for Bane's supposed death, so she killed Ulabore; just as Gelba was responsible for Gerran's death, she had Gelba assassinated.

When Bane was later imprisoned by Serra, Lucia still felt that she was indebted to him and believed that, no matter how cruel he had become, it was right of her to free the Sith Lord. Although Serra' vengefulness disturbed her, Lucia remained loyal to the Princess and tried to find her and keep her safe from Bane, whom she knew would come after Serra for torturing him. Even when confronted by the Sith Lord, Lucia begged him to let Serra go; she tried to turn him back from the dark side and refused to back down, claiming that since she owed him her life, it was his to take if he wished to kill her.

Lucia first appeared briefly in Drew Karpyshyn's 2006 novel, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, the first entry in the Darth Bane Trilogy. She reappeared as a major character in Karpyshyn's 2009 novel, Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil, the trilogy's finale.

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