Q'anah's Marauders

In the years preceding the Naboo conflict, the pirate band that would evolve into Q'anah's Marauders was commanded by the youngest male offspring of the Asmeru aristocratic family of Elegin. The group he led eventually welcomed his romantic partner, who participated in their battles and later gave life to his triplets. The pirate commander was apprehended and given a death sentence, which was carried out on the world of Karfeddion. With the leader gone, his lover assumed leadership of the group, adopting the moniker Q'anah.

The organization expanded its operations to cover the whole Mid Rim's Senex-Juvex area, and Q'anah became a popular figure in the Senex. Although Q'anah was captured twice and sentenced to life incarceration during this time, her crew rescued her both times. Following a fierce battle with Judicial Forces of the Galactic Republic, in which the pirates destroyed six vessels, a reward was offered for Q'anah's capture. This led the pirate chieftain to relocate to the Greater Seswenna section of the Outer Rim Territories.

The Greater Seswenna saw little Judicial presence, making it an easy target for the Marauders. Q'anah became the head of a coalition of various pirate factions, and together they were able to attack transport shipments of lommite material traveling from Eriadu to the Core Worlds. She created a special method of attacking the convoy's "escort vessel" and any security ships, while targeting five specific slave-rigged lommite cargo containers. The containers, disconnected from the convoy and then connected to a pirate vessel, were selected by varying combinations of the digits 23416, the date of the Q'anah festival, which became the group's signature tactic. At its peak, the pirate fleet, containing large numbers of corvettes and frigates such as the Elegin's Hope, were able to successfully distract the limited resources of Outland Regions Security Force during their raids; their numerical superiority combined with Q'anah's ingenious tactics forced Eriadu Mining to implicitly accept the loss of much of its assets in the name of cost-effectiveness.

Despite Eriadu Mining's eventual conclusion that the attacks on convoys were random and impossible to stop, Wilhuff Tarkin, a young officer in the Outland's anti-piracy unit, spent months figuring out Q'anah's unique attack style. He devised a plan to insert malicious software into the container's FTL drives. Once the Marauders attacked a convoy, the viruses would take over the pirate navigation systems and send them to a location in realspace where the Outland task force would be waiting. The plan worked perfectly, and Q'anah was captured by forces led by Ranulph Tarkin and brought before his young cousin who had outsmarted the pirate queen.

The prisoners were then placed onboard a cargo container which was programmed to fly slowly toward the system's star. The younger Tarkin had the audio and video feeds from the container left on so that both the security forces and other pirates could witness the Marauder's death, cooked alive by the sun's heat. Several other Marauder vessels arrived in futile rescue attempts, but were destroyed on sight by the Outlands flotilla. Now leaderless, the remaining Marauders fled into hiding after the incident, ending their supremacy over the trade routes of the Seswenna once and for all.

With no pirate queen, the Marauders ceased to be an active threat to galactic trade, going underground. Certain remnants of the Marauders, however, eventually reformed themselves into Culoss (from "Q-less", or "without a Q") following her death, led by the figure known as Angel. Though they would never regain their former presence, they continued to mount small-scale hijacking operations in the Outer Rim well into the Imperial Era, hiring figures such as the rebel operative Nevil Cygni (codenamed Nightswan). Tarkin developed a certain notoriety among the surviving followers of Q'anah, who told tales of his merciless role in Q'anah's gruesome death to younger pirates.