Aarrba's Repair Dock

Description

Aarrba's Repair Dock, which also went by the names Aarrba's Repair and Salvage, Aarrba the Hutt's docking bay and spacecraft repair, and Aarrba the Hutt's service dock, was a business specializing in starship repair and salvage. It was situated in the city of Cinnagar on the planet of Koros Major. The business operated out of a dome-shaped brick structure, located in proximity to the city's Monument to Lost Navigators. The building featured an open area in front of its tall entrance, providing sufficient space to dock at least one starship. The structure itself, which exhibited exposed bricks in several areas, included six chimneys. At one point, a collection of boxes and various equipment was piled against its wall to the right of the door.

The dock's interior was spacious, capable of accommodating at least two starships. Cables that could be connected to the ships undergoing repairs were suspended from its high ceiling, where a small population of reptavians had taken up residence. The repair bay also included an elevated platform, accessible via a tall staircase, and featured several barrels on the ground floor. Aarrba's dock employed a combination of organic workers and various droids, including a pair of tread-equipped units, one bipedal unit, and several multi-legged units—and later a wheeled one as well—to carry out ship repairs. By 5000 BBY, Aarrba, the facility's owner, had equipped it with a new security system that utilized the dock's droids to monitor for intruders via their photoreceptors. Later, when Jori Daragon took over ownership of the business, she had a sign depicting a smiling Aarrba hung above the dock's entrance.

Aarrba's business offered affordable, swift, and discreet repairs for clients' spacegoing vessels, guaranteeing all repair work, although only for a limited time. The Hutt also frequently reduced prices and extended credit to trusted clients but was cautious about others, including his own employees, becoming aware of these practices.

History

Servicing supply runners

Aarrba's Repair Dock was an active business during the Unification Wars of the Koros system in 5000 BBY. Near the end of this conflict, Aarrba provided repair services to the Shadow Runner, the starship used by the supply runners Hok and Timar Daragon. The repairs were completed quickly, and Aarrba extended credit to the Daragons. He agreed to accept payment in the form of a percentage of their profits and retained the Starbreaker 12, another ship belonging to the Daragons that was kept at the dock, as collateral until they returned from their supply run to the nearby planet of Kirrek.

On the day of the Daragons' departure on their mission, a droid was performing the final preparatory work on the Shadow Runner, while others were loading supplies onto the vessel. Before departing from 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 their time atop the hull of the Starbreaker 12, voicing their desire to accompany their parents on the mission. Simultaneously, another vessel was parked outside the entrance to Aarrba's dock. This vehicle had a damaged sail, and smoke was rising from its interior, with two droids attending to it outside.

During their mission, the elder Daragons perished, and upon being informed of this, Aarrba notified 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 effectively paid for the collateral vessel with their blood, gifted it to Gav and Jori, who subsequently decided to use it to become hyperspace explorers. However, the young Daragons experienced little luck in their chosen profession, accumulating a significant debt with Aarrba for repairs performed on their ship.

Theft of the Starbreaker 12

Later that year, after returning to Koros Major from an exploratory trip through the Starswarm Cluster that had once again left the Starbreaker 12 in need of repairs, the Daragons contacted Cinnagar Control and requested to be connected to Aarrba at his repair dock while they were bringing their ship in for a landing. Over the comm, the explorers pleaded with the Hutt for assistance once more. As the Starbreaker 12 underwent repairs at Aarrba's dock, the Daragons attempted to persuade the facility's owner to extend them credit, but lacking any collateral to offer, Aarrba refused. No longer trusting their promises, he declared that he would not return the ship until they had fully repaid the repair costs. Aarrba also revealed that his business was facing financial losses and that he had been compelled to install a new security system in the dock solely to prevent people from stealing parts from the facility.

Refusing to concede, Gav visited Aarrba at the dock again not long after, inquiring about the repairs on the Starbreaker 12. He also attempted to improve his and his sister's creditworthiness by informing the Hutt that a wealthy merchant, Ssk Kahorr, was already utilizing a hyperspace route that the Daragons had charted, and that they would soon receive a substantial bonus as a result. During this visit, the young explorer, concerned about his ship, verbally berated one of the repair bay's droids working on the vessel for dropping a part on the floor.

The Daragons were later confronted by two assassins dispatched by Kahorr, who was dissatisfied with the risky nature of the route the explorers had mapped. Shaken by this encounter, Gav led Jori to Aarrba's dock, suggesting that they steal the Starbreaker 12 and embark on a desperate, all-or-nothing exploration run in an attempt to discover something valuable that could generate profit. The pair stealthily entered the repair bay—though they triggered the facility's security system in the process—and boarded their ship. After breaking free of its tethers, Gav expressed his belief—though he was uncertain—that Aarrba would not have programmed the dock's security system to destroy any of his own vessels. Subsequently, the Starbreaker 12 departed from the dock. Cinnagar security starfighters attempted to intercept the unauthorized departure, but the Daragons executed a random hyperspace jump that took them to the distant Sith Empire.

The absence and return of the Daragons

During the Daragon siblings' absence from Galactic Republic space, Aarrba paid a visit to Empress Teta of the Koros system's. The business owner informed the empress about the pair's theft of the Starbreaker 12, noting that his repair dock had sustained damage during the incident. He also requested that the fact that he had extended credit to them not be made public knowledge. 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. Kahorr then took possession of the Starbreaker 12 as compensation 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 forewarned Empress Teta of the impending Sith threat—rushed to Aarrba's repair dock to find a suitable starship to pilot in combat against the invaders.

Murder of Aarrba

Meanwhile, Gav, whom the Sith Empire's Dark Lord, Naga Sadow, had made his apprentice and appointed as the commander of the Sith fleet, took a shuttle down to Cinnagar to locate 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 sustained damage from 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 struck—Gav led the Massassi soldiers under his command into the dock, where he hoped to learn Jori's whereabouts from Aarrba.

However, upon seeing Gav, Aarrba immediately denounced him as a traitor and spat on him. Believing the Hutt was attacking his master, one of the Massassi then killed Aarrba. In response, before succumbing to his wounds, the owner of the dock crushed two of the Massassi to death beneath his massive body. As Gav stood in shock at the scene of the massacre, Jori also arrived at the dock. Assuming that Gav had ordered Aarrba's death, 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 beside Aarrba's body, the still-shocked Gav dropped his Sith amulet on the floor of the dock and fled, taking off in his shuttle. Jori, unwilling to be separated from her brother again, then hijacked a starship that had been parked nearby and pursued Gav to the Sith fleet.

Under new management

Later, after Gav had died 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 about how she could assist Jori, to which she responded with her desire to reopen Aarrba's repair dock in his memory.

Jori subsequently had the dock restored and reopened for business, actively participating in the repairs of starships there. The new owner appreciated her situation, acknowledging that it was both everything she had ever desired and more than she or Gav had ever hoped for—and she believed that the late Aarrba would have been pleased as well. Over a thousand years after Aarrba's death, his humble, charitable, and honest nature, coupled with his small business and tragic fate, led other Hutts to disown him as an ancestor, instead promoting 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 documented in a 25 ABY galactic history chronicle by the Historical Council of the New Republic.

Behind the scenes

Aarrba's Repair Dock, initially referred to as "Aarrba the Hutt's service dock," made its debut in the prologue issue of Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi – The Golden Age of the Sith comic book mini-series. This issue was penned by Kevin J. Anderson, with artwork by Chris Gossett, and was released on July 31, 1996.

Anderson's subsequent issue of the series, published on October 9 of the same year, further identified the facility as "Aarrba's Repair and Salvage." Anderson then introduced the name "Aarrba's Repair Dock" in the third issue of the Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi – The Fall of the Sith Empire series on August 20, 1997, 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."