Operation Influx was a three-stage Jedi military operation led by Jedi Master Vannar Treece during the Republic Dark Age in 1032 BBY. Its main objective was to disrupt the export of baradium, a volatile compound used in the production of munitions, from the planet Chelloa. Chelloa was part of the Sith Lord Daiman's fiefdom, the Daimanate. Daiman intended to use Chelloa's extensive baradium resources to aid his war effort against his rival and estranged brother, Lord Odion. Vannar Treece was aided by intelligence supplied by the undercover former Jedi Knight Gorlan Palladane, who was the leader of the Chelloan resistance.
Operation Influx involved infiltrating Sith space via the planet Oranessan, a key regional transport hub. This would then be followed by a Raid on Chelloa itself. The Jedi mission would then depart on a direct hyperspace line to neutral space. Despite its initial successes on infiltrating Oranessan, the Jedi mission was killed on Chelloa during an attack by the Sith Lord Odion, who unleashed a kinetic corruptor which razed large areas of the surface. Odion personally slew Vannar, leaving Kerra Holt as the sole survivor of the mission. Despite the failure of the operation, she succeeded in establishing contact with the Chelloan resistance led by Gorlan and helped evacuate the planet on the Freedom Fleet during the Destruction of Chelloa.
During the Republic Dark Age, the last century of the New Sith Wars, the Galactic Republic lost control of large areas of the galaxy, including the Outer Rim Territories. By 1032 BBY, the Outer Rim's Grumani sector had become the domain of several warring Sith Lords including Daiman, who believed himself to be the Creator of the Universe, and his estranged older brother Odion, who saw himself as the Destroyer of the Universe. These Sith Lords fought each other and the Republic for galactic domination. While the Republic military had abandoned much of the Outer Rim, several maverick Jedi like Master Vannar Treece and his followers launched several knight errant operations to harass the Sith and to bring hope and deliverance to the occupied populations in Sith space.
In 1032 BBY, Master Treece obtained intelligence from the undercover former Jedi and Chelloan resistance leader Gorlan Palladane that the Sith Lord Daiman had discovered the mother lode for baradium on the planet Chelloa. Baradium was a volatile compound used in the production of a wide variety of explosive devices. Daiman began shipping substantial amounts of baradium to his war forges near the front line. This development vexed Master Treece, who feared that Daiman's new discovery would alter the balance of power in the Grumani sector in Daiman's favor. In response, Treece and his young aide Kerra Holt, a former Aquilaris Minor refugee who had become a Jedi Knight, proposed a three-stage plan called Operation Influx to knock out a portion of the baradium production on Chelloa.
While Kerra had initially named the Chelloan military operation Operation Deadlock, Master Treece settled for the name Operation Influx because he regarded stalemating the Sith Lords as one of the ulterior motives of the mission, something they did not want to express openly. Operation Influx consisted of three stages: insertion into Daimanite space via Oranessan, a key regional transport hub; the raid on Chelloa itself; and extraction via a direct hyperspace line to neutral space. Master Treece submitted the outline of Operation Influx to Supreme Chancellor Genarra, a high-ranking fellow Jedi Master who served as the leader of the Republic's government. Unknown to its Jedi planners, the Sith Lord Odion had intercepted Palladane's transmissions and assembled a force to destroy Chelloa as part of his nihilistic policy of destruction.
Since Operation Influx was an unconventional "knight errant operation," Master Vannar Treece recruited a Jedi volunteer force that included his former apprentice Kerra Holt, the Cerean Jedi Master Dorvin Eltrom, the Quarren Master Berluk, and the Trandoshan Jedi Mrssk. During the first stage of their operation, the Jedi traveled to the Daimanate transport hub of Oranessan on one of their starships. While descending into the planet's atmosphere, they shot down a small Daimanate personnel shuttle. While the rest of the Jedi team waited in their transport, Treece and Kerra visited the crash site to retrieve stolen cloaks and identification badges from the dead crew. After killing a party of Daimanite sentries led by a female ground crew chief, they commandeered an empty Daimanate Heavy-Lift Starcrosser in the transport zone.
After giving the signal for the other Jedi to enter the transport, the Jedi proceeded with their plan to travel to Chelloa. However, the mission encountered an unexpected obstacle when Kerra discovered that the transport's navigation computer was missing its activation cylinder. Without an activation cylinder, the Starcrosser transport would be unable to jump to hyperspace, and the mission would have to be aborted. The Jedi were unable to travel to Chelloa on their own transport since the planet was tightly guarded by Daimanate starfighters. Unwilling to jeopardize their mission, Kerra exited the transport and stole a replacement cylinder from a nearby hangar. After fitting the device, the Jedi departed for Chelloa to continue the second stage of their mission.
As planned, the Jedi strike team managed to slip into the Chelloan spaceport of Jenith unnoticed. Their arrival coincided with Daiman's slave laborers loading crates of baradium onto freighters headed for the front lines. The Jedi's Starcrosser freighter rammed into several Sith freighters and ignited several of the baradium crates, causing chaos among the Sith ranks. Catching the Daimanites by surprise, Treece and his Jedi team succeeded in overpowering Daiman's troops with the aid of Gorlan Palladane. Having achieved their objective in knocking out a portion of the baradium export line, Master Treece and the Jedi made preparations for extraction and for demolishing the spaceport's facilities.
Before Master Treece and his Jedi team could proceed to the third phase of Operation Influx, the Sith Lord Odion and his forces raided Jenith. Desiring to destroy Chelloa because he believed that the planet's abundant baradium resources created an imbalance in the Force, Odion had decided to test his kinetic corruptor on the town. The kinetic corruptor unleashed a massive explosion which damaged large parts of Jenith and its spaceport. Odion's forces then departed to prepare for a large-scale assault on Chelloa. As a result of Odion's attack, Treece and his entire Jedi strike force with the exception of his former apprentice Kerra Holt were killed. Kerra was rescued by Gorlan, who had survived the conflagration by sheltering aboard a Starcrosser freighter.
Following the destruction of Master Vannar Treece's Jedi strike team, Kerra Holt sought refuge with Gorlan Palladane, the leader of the Chelloan resistance. In response to the Jedi and Odionate attacks, the Sith Lord Daiman embarked on an investigation to discover the source of the baradium leakage. Daiman apprehended Gorlan Palladane's Rodian friend Skodo, who possessed an illegal transmitter, and had him tortured to death in an attempt to find the culprit who had leaked intelligence on his baradium operations to the Jedi and Odionate. When his torture methods failed to extract information, Daiman arranged for the transmitter to be returned to Skodo's hut. His troops monitored Skodo's adobe and caught Gorlan in the act of contacting Odion in an attempt to dissuade the Sith Lord from destroying Chelloa. As retribution for Gorlan's role in the leakage, Lord Daiman ordered the destruction of the town of Jenith.
Meanwhile, Kerra Holt attempted to assassinate Daiman. However, the Sith Lord distracted Kerra by informing her of his brother Odion's plans to destroy Chelloa. Kerra and Gorlan managed to dissuade Odion separately from carrying out his nihilistic plan. After learning that Daiman planned to expand baradium mining operations on Chelloa, Odion decided to seize the planet for himself. However, this was actually part of a ruse by Daiman to lure Odion into a death trap on Chelloa. Unwilling to commit substantial resources to defending Chelloa, Daiman decided to destroy the planet with his own kinetic corruptors, which were smuggled into Chelloa disguised as mobile munitions factories. As planned, Odion's armies invaded Chelloa only to stumble into a death trap. By the end of the campaign, Odion's entire Lightning Guard was destroyed, and the Sith Lord himself sustained serious burns during a fight with Kerra and Gorlan Palladane.
In the midst of the Sith sibling rivalry, Kerra managed to rescue Gorlan from Daiman's alpine retreat. Rendezvousing with other Chelloan resistance members in the spaceport town of Arboth, Kerra and Gorlan organized a large-scale evacuation of Chelloa's 60,000 inhabitants using a fleet of hijacked freighters known as the Freedom Fleet. Their evacuation coincided with Daiman's destruction of Chelloa's surface. Following the Chelloan affair, Kerra would resume her guerrilla campaign against Daiman and the other Sith Lords of the Grumani sector.
Operation Influx was first developed as a plot device by the comic script writer John Jackson Miller for his Dark Horse Comics series Star Wars: Knight Errant, which debuted on October 9, 2010. The military operation was first mentioned in his tie-in short story Star Wars: Knight Errant: Influx, which was published on StarWars.com on October 19, 2010. Operation Influx's background was further explored in The Knight Errant Gazetteer, an online supplement to Jason Fry and Daniel Wallace's The Essential Atlas reference book, which was published by Del Rey on August 18, 2009. The Knight Errant Gazettee was written as an in-universe article by the Jedi Master Vannar Treece, a minor character in the Knight Errant franchise.