Euruta

I mentioned Euruta, my homeworld. I figure I should at least say something about that rock. Nestled right between Hutt Space and the Kessel Sector, ours was a barren, overlooked, impoverished, Outer-Rim World. You had your choice between living in the rocky hills or the dry valleys. Euruta had few natural resources, too few for even smugglers and small-time corporations to exploit.

The only ones who came were the slavers from Kessel or Nar Shaddaa, whenever their laborer numbers needed supplementing. Most everyone on Euruta was malnourished in some capacity, so the slaver "collection" trips were hardly worthwhile, but they still came. It had been this way for centuries. The slavers were almost exclusively non-human species, Gran, Zabrak, or Zygerrians. I'd imagine humans lacked the stomach to practice this behavior on their own kind. We were taught from a young age to both hate and fear them, but mostly hide whenever you spotted a xeno. Euruta was an overwhelmingly human populated planet, so the distinction was easy to make. Any alien on this worthless rock had an ulterior motive for being there, and you could never take them at their word.

It could be expected –fear and paranoia being associated with some of your earliest memories. Countless nights of my childhood were spent cowering in the well concealed cellar of our hovel when the slavers entered the settlement. The worst collection, they made off with one hundred and twenty people, one-third of the settlement's population, in one night. They took my mother in that raid. The Zygerrians were particularly effective in their efforts in rounding up Eurutians. It seemed to come naturally to their kind.

I can recall tales about the old times –I couldn't imagine things were always this bad. Euruta was a flourishing paradise at one point, the tellers would claim. The brutal, yet localized, Eurutian Civil War about a millennium ago wiped out our sorry excuse for a planetary government and our advanced settlements. From then on it was tribalism, though we Eurutians mostly let each other alone. Nobody had anything worth taking, as destitution was equally distributed. Of course, here and there, individuals would make overtures to the Republic and the Senate. They would plead for aid, inclusion, or at the very least enforcement of the anti-slavery laws. The Senate never took any serious action. I guess we were too far out of the way for them to care. The Republic seemed to care when the Separatists Fleet arrived.

I have heard conflicting accounts as to why the Separatists came to Euruta. Some will say they wanted to establish a naval base –protect the transport convoys of war materials illegally sold by the Hutts. Others claim they were surveying for a remote planet to establish a droid manufactory. More than likely, the Republic task force stumbled upon their armada and the battle began by accident.

I was around eight when the Battle of Euruta was fought. The Droid Army landed a few days prior to the Republic's arrival. I remember a tall, ornately dressed human escorted through the streets by his B1 battle droids. He was not there to bother or harass us, on the contrary, he was rather friendly. Greeting those he met on the streets, giving parcels of sweets to us kids, hell, one of the droids let me shoot its blaster at some scrap metal. They even sent a squadron of engineering droids over to rebuild our water re-processor and donated a medical droid to care for the sick.

Mostly, this official from the CIS was there to warn us to stay indoors if fighting with Republic forces broke out. He went on to say they weren't expecting any sort of engagement, and that they'd be gone in a few days' time. He even offered a passage off Euruta in exchange for service in the Confederacy. A few of the older kids signed on. I would've joined them if I were their age. Then the Republic arrived.

We climbed the tall hill beyond the settlement to stare at the night sky and watch the battle in orbit. The laser exchanges illuminated the blackness. The explosions from ships being blasted apart was exciting when there was absolutely nothing else to keep you entertained. The space battle lasted for maybe three days and nights. On the fourth day, a squadron of five Acclamator Assault Ships, under heavy fighter escort, broke through the Separatist armada's battle line and descended to the surface.

I did not feel much like doing chores that day, not with all the excitement, so me and my mates slipped out of the settlement to go have a look at the Separatist garrison on the opposite plateau, a good four or five kilometers away. We found a small rise that overlooked the droid base, the droids knew we were there, but did not seem bothered by our presence. We just wanted to watch; things were never this exciting. Then their anti-ship artillery opened fire. Their turbolaser bolts arced into the sky. Three made direct hits on the lead Acclamator. Dropping in, almost out of nowhere, a Munificent-Class Star Frigate descended at a forty-five-degree angle and fired its forward cannons in a spread between the Acclamators. The frigate leveled out to avoid a collision. The lead Acclamator sustained heavy damage and was going down. The four remaining were readjusting their flight path to engage the droids.

Fighters from both sides locked in aerial combat. Droids on the ground were firing heavy repeating turrets at the sky, filling it with enough ion-flak to make it nearly impassable. Dropships began to emerge from the holds on the four Acclamators, the old LAATs. The battle was chaos, and I couldn't tell who was winning. The dropships would spray the droid base with rockets –blasting countless battle droids apart. The frigate would then fire its point defense ordinance at the dropships with devastating effect.

We decided it was probably safer for us back at our settlement –being a rocket passed too close for comfort above our heads. We crossed the valley towards home. The burning hulk of an Acclamator prepared for a crash landing just south of the droid base, suddenly it lurched. The droid craft were no longer bothering to attack that Acclamator and turned their attention to the others. It was coming down fast and changing course. The bow was pointed directly at the settlement. A V-Wing spun out of control and exploded when it smashed into the ground, not a few meters from us. Our group scattered and we became separated. Debris was falling out of the sky left and right, and we took our own paths to seek cover. I crouched against a boulder in the dried-out riverbed –watched the stricken Acclamator crash. The reactor went critical and exploded. I was just outside the blast zone because I made it, though was thrown several meters, and knocked senseless.

The battle had long ended by the time I awoke. I was in a makeshift hospital that was overflowing with a mixture of clone and civilian casualties. Ideally, the military wanted to keep their clones separated from the local inhabitants, but triage and overworked doctors prevented their intentions. The hospital was a collection of shaded shelters of tarpaulin set up below the ventral cover of a landed Acclamator. Everything was set up in the ruins of the once established droid base.

"Hey, rest easy son," said the accented voice of one of the medical clones. "You sustained a pretty nasty head injury."

My head was pounding at that point and my vision was not completely straight.

"Can you tell me your name? Who are your people?" the clone asked.

Everything seemed to fade into a blur, and I believed I blacked out at that point, because I don't remember much afterwards. When I regained consciousness again a few days later, events had taken a drastic turn. I was able to sit up in the medical bed, now aboard the Acclamator's sickbay. There were a few hours of a medical droid administering care before I was greeted by an actual person, or clone of a person.

An orderly, the medical clone who had been there when I woke up the first time, or the first time I remembered, came to chat. He was asking me questions about who I was, where I came from. I told him, if he couldn't guess already, I was a local and my settlement had been in the vicinity of where their Acclamator had crashed. I then asked if I could go home already –that my abusive, alcoholic, piss poor excuse for a father was probably waiting to deliver a belting once I returned.

The medical clone seemed a bit uneasy, like he hadn't had much experience delivering bad news. He told me the Acclamator crashed headlong into the settlement, and the town was vaporized when the reactor blew. I can't say I was sad when I heard the news. Only one I had left was my father, who had been reduced to a deadbeat mess since we lost my mother. All my older siblings had already run off or were snatched in the collections. It was also in that same conversation, I don't know how we bridged to it, but the medical clone told me the War with the Separatists was over. He said the Republic had been reorganized into the Galactic Empire. The announcement was only days old, and nobody really knew what that last part fully meant, the clones were more elated in the fact the War had ended and they were victorious.

Things started to progress quickly now, with the establishment of the Empire. The former droid base became the central hub of all activity on Euruta. The clones started repurposing it as a staging depot for resupplying campaigns before the cessation of hostilities. As it was already a concentration point and established base, the Empire just kept building on to support their transition into peacetime. Being the only Imperial real estate on Euruta, the new Imperial Governor had nowhere else to begin constructing his administrative compound.

Eurutians from all over the planet started migrating to its vicinity. The base served as the direct link from the planet to the rest of the Empire. Imperial forces constructed landing ports, barracks, supply depots, and the infrastructure to maintain a garrison in this system. The work required labor the local Eurutians were willing to fill. So, in a few years, the once droid camp became a ramshackle, prefabricated, repurposed city sprawling in all directions from the Imperial facilities.

For the first time, in a long time in Euruta's history, the people had opportunities to work, infrastructure and suitable housing were being rapidly built to support the garrison's growing population. Those enterprising Eurutians discovered that valuable Imperial construction contracts could be secured by simply organizing a workforce to meet the Empire's increasing demand. The Empire was paying credits to develop this planet, and everyone was doing what they could to make themselves rich.

As for me, I saw Euruta progress. The once contested battlefield transformed into a bustling space port. Ships would come and go daily; unlike anything I had ever seen before. I ran the streets of the newly proclaimed Yggdrasil City, after the first Imperial Governor Trajos Yggdrasil. There was even a cut of the prosperity for the orphans organized into street gangs. The Separatists shot down another Acclamator on the day of the landing, only this one remained relatively intact when it crashed, too far gone to recommission, but good enough to scrap. There were downed ships and military debris from both sides of the conflict all over this region ripe for picking. I spent a few years scavenging for valuable components and selling them to junkers in Yggdrasil's markets. Military quartermasters were always supplementing their stores with the salvage they bought from junkers.

I made a good many credits in this line of work, that I mostly squandered away being an ignorant kid. The routine was starting to wear me down and I was honestly getting bored with life on Euruta. Quick credits could be made, but it was nothing that could sustain you in the long run. The arrival of the professional salvage corporations taking over rights to scrap the old wrecks put us individual scavengers out of work. You had the choice of hustling the streets of Yggdrasil like a rat or returning to the old ways of subsistence farming the unsuitable land.

It seemed to be the new tradition amongst the youth who reached their adulthood year to immediately enlist for Imperial service. Imperial "policy" called for an individual to be eighteen standard years, though you could easily make the cut at seventeen, what with all the recruiters eligible for promotion if they surpassed recruitment quotas. The Eurutian calendar never quite synced with the standard Galactic one on Coruscant. We may have been a few cycles off out here. I honestly couldn't tell you my real age, sixteen maybe. The recruiter said I looked "old enough" and accepted my enlistment. The more recruits he signed, the faster they'd reward him with a transfer off this dump. With no family, no prospects, and just a desire to see more than Euruta, I entered Imperial Service.

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