Retribution

Chapter 1: Innocent Beginnings

"I need a surgical droid in here stat!" cried the doctor. He looked down at the pale face of the woman on the gurney before him. He could barely discern the soft rise and fall of her chest as she laboured for breath. He placed his scanner on her swollen abdomen to make sure the child within her still lived.

"How can I be of assistance?" chimed in the inhuman voice of the surgical droid. It hovered into the room and floated over to the end of the gurney. "Shall I begin the removal of the child?" it inquired.

"Affirmative, and make it snappy. This woman could die any minute now and take that child with her." the doctor ordered as he moved over to the computer terminal so he could monitor the woman's vitals. She was dangerously close to dying and the baby she carried was suffering as it's incubator faded away.

The droid worked faster than any organic doctor could have. It's specially designed appendages expertly opened the mother's abdomen and removed the infant from the womb. The child was deathly still but the monitors indicated it was still alive. The surgical droid deftly inserted it into the waiting incubation chamber and soon its vitals started to return to normal. The surgical droid quietly floated out of the room as the doctor unhooked the monitors from the now dead mother of the newly born human boy.

The doctor rubbed his eyes as he stared at his computer monitors. The boy's mother had been nobody, just another homeless woman among millions in Coruscant's lower levels. He could find no record of the boy's father or any other living relatives from his DNA scans. Not surprising, since most of the denizens of the lower levels had never been to any sort of hospital. It had only been by luck that someone had chanced upon the pregnant woman passed out near one of the local cantinas. The doctor gave up on that route and pulled up the list of personal effects found on the mother. There wasn't much there, but one item did catch his eye. He pulled up the details on a note found in her pocket, a barely legible message written in basic: "His name is Brandon." The doctor pulled up the child's profile and quickly entered the name Brandon Smith. Nothing extraordinary but it was serviceable. The file indicated that the boy's midichlorian count was high enough to warrant taking him to the Jedi temple. The doctor flagged the child for transport to the temple by the hospital staff the next morning and closed the file.


Rage burned within him as he knelt in meditation. He could feel it seething beneath his skin like a living thing, itching to bust out and wreak havoc among all it could find. He revelled in the feeling, letting it fuel is connection to the force. The room seemed to darken as he opened his mind up to the force and reached out across the stars with his mind, seeking his master. As his mind brushed the distant Coruscant he paused for a moment, suddenly distracted by the presence of a new but familiar mind. Rising too his feet, the cloaked figure moved out of his meditation chamber to the helm of his ship. His master could wait, he had felt the presence of his newborn child.