Chaelt

Chaelt was a human woman who worked as a buccaneer after the conclusion of the Galactic Empire's reign. During the New Republic Era, she was associated with a group of pirates under the leadership of Captain Silvo, with whom she had a close and amicable relationship. These pirates sustained themselves by attacking other vessels using a large spacefaring ship as their mobile base. Occasionally, the crew would visit Starport Borgo, an asteroid notorious for its criminal activities.

Around 9 ABY, Captain Silvo became aware that some of his crew members were starting to question his leadership abilities, with some losing confidence in him. To reassert his authority, Silvo decided to launch an assault on a commercial freighter, believing it was transporting a valuable shipment of funds. The pirates initiated their attack from their frigate, employing boring-like access tubes to penetrate the freighter's outer shell and board the targeted ship. While the boarding party engaged in combat with the defending traders, their spacesuit-clad allies disabled the freighter's weapon systems from outer space. As the battle neared its end, the Shistavanen Brutus boarded the ship to shoot down the remaining survivors. Turning back, he informed Captain Silvo that the ship was now under his control. Praising Brutus's efforts, Silvo boarded the ship, accompanied by Chaelt and Gunter. Chaelt walked to Silvo's right, holding an axe-like close combat weapon under her left arm and smiling as Silvo clapped his hands and demanded to be taken to the vault. Once there, he began interrogating the shipmaster, ordering him to open the magnetically sealed vault while disregarding his repeated claims that there was no credit shipment. When the merchant captain demanded that all the pirates leave the vessel in accordance with a New Republic decree, Silvo had him ejected from an airlock and assigned the task of opening the vault to his subordinates. Chaelt nodded in agreement as the captain boasted about his achievements, taking pride in having led his crew to "cold, hard credits" despite his earlier failures. However, when the vault door finally opened, the pirates discovered that the freighter held only a single piece of currency. Brutus pushed through the crowd and picked up the metallic piece, lamenting that the raid—which had cost so many pirate lives—had yielded no real wealth. After his speech, several crew members turned against Silvo, drawing their energy weapons and aiming them at him. Rather than joining the mutineers, Chaelt and Gunter simply observed as the now-defenseless Silvo resisted the traitors' attacks. The rebellion concluded with Brutus emerging as the new leader and Silvo being captured for trial.

Although Chaelt was not directly involved in the mutiny, she did not challenge the new captain's authority. Shortly after, she and her crew arrived at Borgo Prime, where the pirates dispersed, each going their separate ways. Meanwhile, the same spaceport saw the arrival of the Skeleton Crew, a group of four children who had become lost on their journey home: Fern, KB, Neel, and Wim. The pirate Vane encountered Neel and Wim when they attempted to use Old Republic credits. During their conversation, the children revealed that they were from the planet At Attin, a world known in pirate legends as the mythical "lost planet of eternal treasure." Although Vane dismissed their claims, he was intrigued by the money they possessed. Using a distraction, the children fled, but Vane and several other pirates quickly caught up. Ultimately, the Skeleton Crew was protected by the pirate android SM-33, who helped them reach the landing platform.

Informed of the unexpected commotion, Captain Brutus—along with Gunter, Vane, Pax, and Chaelt—found the younglings attempting to board a small spacecraft. After shooting down their droid, Brutus demanded to know what the children were doing in his starport and how they had obtained their coordinates. He passed his ion blaster to Chaelt, who aimed it at the children. Fern retorted that he should have asked the droid before shooting it, a remark that Chaelt responded to with a grunt. As Brutus was about to leave, Fern called out and urged him to interrogate them immediately. Chaelt, still holding the girl at gunpoint, remained vigilant until the captain ordered the younglings to be placed in confinement, hoping that a few days in a jail would encourage them to reveal more information.

The four children were placed in the same brig as former Captain Silvo, with whom they soon joined forces to escape to the Onyx Cinder. With the ship constrained by fuel lines, Silvo found himself unable to break free except by jumping into faster-than-light travel, a desperate maneuver that sent the snapped fuel line bouncing back onto one of the platforms on the asteroid. With the asteroid descending into chaos, Brutus ordered Gunter to place a bounty on the runaway's head.

The search for Silvo led the pirate crew to the planet of Lanupa, where he had been located by Pokkit and immediately reported to Captain Brutus. Upon arrival, the pirates attempted to stop Silvo before he and the Skeleton Crew children could reach Captain Rennod's Lair, but the chase ended abruptly when they were caught in a trap. After Silvo had separated from his young companions, the pirates encountered him again as he emerged from the underground lair through an access hatch and swiftly arrested him pending trial.

The Silvo Trial was held within a grand hall on the frigate. A large group of pirates stood beside a table filled with produce and drinks, awaiting Captain Brutus's verdict. To his left, Chaelt stood beside a seat of power-like structure, resting her right arm on a rifle as the captain pronounced the sentence. Brutus's proclamation of execution via airlock was met with enthusiastic applause from the audience. With other pirates shouting for joy, Silvo looked towards Chaelt, who remained standing beside the judge with a somber expression. Noticing Silvo's silent appeals for intervention, Chaelt hesitated and turned away, only for their eyes to meet again. Finally, she shouted for everyone to wait. Standing up for Silvo's rights, she cited the Pirate's Code, invoking both equal opportunity and the Final Appeal Right. The crowd fell silent, and the woman glanced at her former superior once more, then watched as Brutus growled and turned to Snee. Snee, in turn, agreed with Chaelt. Since the Right of Last Appeal was to be honored, Brutus announced that equal time was now beginning. Chaelt took a deep breath and lowered her head as he struck a superheated gas-filled time measuring device to monitor the defendant's allotted time.

After a brief silence, the defendant shifted the focus from his own guilt to the broader issue of the hunger for credits, which he claimed was a struggle faced by his former subordinates. Chaelt observed as Silvo disregarded the protests of some pirates and instead posed a rhetorical question: how long his listeners had been hungry. This question prompted a protest from Brutus, who insisted that Silvo finish his speech, remarking that the words of a dead man were worthless. In response, Silvo pointed to the hourglass near Chaelt, arguing that, since the plasma was still flowing, his allotted time had not yet expired. Turning to the audience, Silvo urged them to envision a place where credits were limitless and directly addressed several pirates, including the Quarren Glerb and the human Kona. While acknowledging his past transgressions, he vowed to make amends and pulled out an Old Republic credit coin, which he tossed into the air. He asserted that he knew the source of these coins, claiming to have accessed Captain Tak Rennod's data storage device. When Brutus pointed out that Tak Rennod had long been deceased, Silvo began singing a pirate song recounting the renowned pirate's fate and his arrival on At Attin, an isolated Pre-Empire treasure rumored to contain an inexhaustible supply of Old Republic credits. Other crew members soon joined the singalong. Finally, the former captain commended Brutus, the current captain, as a highly capable second in command but proposed himself as the new leader. Although his suggestion was rejected, Brutus chose to spare his predecessor's life, stipulating that the death sentence would be carried out should At Attin fail to yield any treasure.

Under Brutus's command, Chaelt served as the frigate's navigator. Guided by the coordinates provided by Silvo, the pirates finally emerged from hyperspace at At Attin. With a massive maelstrom drifting outside the window—which the crew did not know was in fact the planet's protective field—Captain Brutus was skeptical about the planet's existence and so he turned to Chaelt. The elderly woman, who was sitting at the navigation system, confirmed that the position was correct.

Brutus soon went on to notice that a maelstrom of such magnitude would obliterate any ship attempting to breach it. Concluding that At Attin was nowhere near a treasure planet, the captain ordered that Silvo be airlocked immediately, a death sentence he had promised to perform if his guarantees were undelivered. The convict, however, persuaded the captain to hold off the execution until one of his aviators verified if the maelstrom was just a camouflage, as he insisted. Initially conceding to Silvo's proposal, Brutus ordered proceeding with the sentence after the volunteer Glerb had died while exploring the storm system in a small fighter. When locked in an airlock, Silvo continued to plead with the crew, making his executioner hesitant about pressing the launch button.

In light of the delayed execution, Brutus started threatening the executioner before moving on to airlock Silvo himself. When he was about to press the launch button, Chaelt screamed out one more time, again ordering everybody to wait. The woman informed the captain that she had detected something on sensors, a starship none other than the Onyx Cinder, with the Skeleton Crew children on board. When Brutus ordered firing the ship, Silvo interrupted, and Chaelt swiftly let him back aboard by pressing a dedicated navigation system button, again saving his life. Looking at the others, Silvo announced that he knew how to reach to At Attin, pointing to the Onyx Cinder as the key to the planet.

Following Silvo's release, the Onyx Cinder was pulled aboard with a repulsor beam and rested in the freighter's hangar. When Brutus and several other pirates went down to see the intercepted vessel, the Skeleton Crew caught the captain in a cargo handling device as he walked up the entry gangplank. With Brutus trapped by the enemy, Silvo took the opportunity to reclaim the leadership and shot Brutus down. The Skeleton Crew, however, managed to regain control of the starship and get back to space, making for At Attin through the massive maelstrom. However, neither the children nor the pirates realized that Silvo had made it back aboard before takeoff.

Upon his arrival on the planet, Silvo posed as an emissary for the Galactic Republic and demanded an audience with "the Supervisor", whom he quickly discovered to be only a droid. Having destroyed the machine, the man obtained ship access from Subordinate Administrator Fara, allowing him to contact the pirate crew and order an invasion. As the frigate descended to the surface, the pirates launched a massive aerial bombardment, with several crew members landing via troop carriers to take some townsfolk prisoner. However, Silvo's plan to take control of the planet and turn it into his personal credit mint ultimately failed when the Skeleton Crew managed to bypass the Barrier and alert the New Republic. With the Barier disabled by the Skeleton Crew younglings and their guardians, reinforcements arrived in the form of a group of X-wing and B-wing space superiority fighters. The X-wings unleashed a barrage of energy fire on the pirate frigate, while the B-wings used their high-powered converging lasers to carve through the vessel's upper structure. Consumed by a chain of explosions, the bombarded frigate began drifting out of control. In a panic, the crew abandoned the bridge, and the wreckage of the destroyed ship eventually came to rest in a local body of water canal.

A fair-skinned, elderly human female, Chaelt had a mature face with deep wrinkles and a weathered complexion, as well as a prominent double chin that reflected her stout build. She moved with a distinctive waddling gait, a side-to-side motion influenced by her heavyset posture. She styled her brown hair with gray roots into two long, thick braids extending over her left shoulder. In addition, she sported sizable tattoos on her arms, accentuated by the masses of flesh dangling from her upper arms.

While generally friendly, Chaelt occasionally displayed independent thinking. During Silvo's trial, when the defendant silently pleaded with her to intervene, she struggled with an internal conflict, attempting to avoid looking at the former captain's imploring eyes. Despite her hesitation, she finally spoke up, using her strong voice to silence the audience. A man Chaelt knew intimately, Silvo could soon rely on her help once again. With his execution delayed, she took advantage of Brutus's inattention and opened the airlock that Silvo was locked in. By letting him back aboard, she saved his life again.

Dressed in sleeveless armor-like garments, Chaelt's outfit included a crisscross pattern of ammunition belts over her chest and an armored pad on her left shoulder. Around her waist, she wore a utility belt adorned with a glowing device with color-changing lights, holding up a dark skirt with a pair of trousers underneath.

Chaelt could sometimes be seen carrying an axe-like melee weapon, as when she clutched it under her left arm during the raid on a merchant frigate. On another occasion, she utilized an ion long gun passed to her by Captain Brutus. However, rather than shooting, the woman simply used it to hold an enemy at gunpoint pending apprehension.

Chaelt first appeared in the live-action television series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and was played by actress Dale Soules. She made her debut in the two pilot episodes, "This Could Be a Real Adventure" and "Way, Way Out Past the Barrier", which premiered on December 2, 2024. From then on, Chaelt was a recurring character of the show, with Dale Soules listed as a guest star in end credits.

Alongside a few other pirates, Chaelt was first identified as early as September 18, 2024 in an Entertainment Weekly article, where she was presented as a character of the upcoming Star Wars: Skeleton Crew series, played by Dale Soules. However, Chaelt's role remained largely non-speaking until the sixth episode, "Zero Friends Again". In addition, although listed in the end credits, her name was first pronounced in the seventh episode, "We're Gonna Be In So Much Trouble". Even so, additional information on the character had priorly been supplied by the Disney+ audio description: in "Way, Way Out Past the Barrier," narrator Jedediah Barton called to Chaelt "a pirate underling" vis-à-vis her relationship with the new Captain Brutus, and in "Zero Friends Again," he first referred to her by her name, in addition to specifying her gender and grammatical case subject.

Unlike her fellow pirate comrades, Chaelt was notably absent from the final episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, "The Real Good Guys," which aired on January 14, 2025. In an ensuing interview for Entertainment Weekly, series creator Christopher Ford referred to Chaelt as a "motherly pirate" and confirmed that Silvo did not use a Jedi persuasion technique on her in "Zero Friends Again," a fan speculation he had happened upon while reading online discussions of the show. Instead, Ford simply noticed that Silvo and Chaelt knew each other "very well."