Her name was Nisa, and she was the last of her people.
Ardek had her brought over to the Calm Waters and placed in the infirmary. There, he'd kept her sedated. Unconscious, like most children, she radiated a serene calm and a sense of helplessness. It was sometimes difficult to remember she'd managed to injure three marines, one seriously.
The sedation was for her own good as much as the crew's. A warship was no place for a child. Awake, should she escape, dangers abounded, from high-voltage electric junctions to the force screen that kept air in the ship's hangar bays. Asleep she couldn't panic and run smack into one of the numerous hazards of life on a warship.
He had requested guidance from Naval Command about what to do with her, but they'd so far declined to issue him instructions. It would be up to Ardek to decide what to do with her. Were she a normal child, he'd simply have turned her over to Corellian Family Services. Unfortunately she clearly wasn't normal, and now he had to figure out what would be the best not only for her, but for everyone. Having half-trained force users running around was dangerous for everyone; much less half-trained children force users.
The logs of the Gauntlet, like most Imperial vessels, were exhaustive. While the Imperials had managed to scrub much of the information from the ship's computers before they were boarded, Ardek's intelligence staff had managed to reconstruct much of the captain's log. It had much to say about Nisa. According to it, she was the last descendant of the survivors of the Dudka-IV colonization effort.
Dudka-IV was a world out on the far rim. It had been a tempting target for colonization because of the pre-existing breathable atmosphere, as well as high concentrations of heavy metals that were much prized by the Old Republic. Most of the colonists of the original effort had been prospectors, hoping for the big strike that would pave their way to riches.
The colonization had been small, and barely recognized by the media of the time. Asteroid mining was far easier than planetary mining in most cases. Adding enough power to exit a gravity well to a multi-ton cargo of ore added a great deal of expense, and it was generally felt that the expedition would be a commercial failure. Still, the colonists pressed on, fueled by the prospect of striking it rich on minerals not readily found in asteroid fields.
The economic potential of the world was never discovered. The colonists were mostly loners, outcasts, or fugitives hoping to make a new life somewhere else. When the messages from them suddenly ceased mere weeks into the colonization effort, it went unnoticed by the bureaucratic bulk of the Old Republic, which felt it had better things to deal with. The few queries by concerned family members and friends of the lost colonists were rebuffed by Republic officials that felt they had more important things to do. Its loss having gone unnoticed, the Colony at Dudka-IV was alone. It stayed that way for centuries.
Ironically, it was the Imperial Taxation Bureau that was responsible for the planet's rediscovery. Shortly after the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire an audit was performed by the ITB to make sure that member worlds were paying their taxes. One world that had never paid any taxes, but that had been granted a charter was Dudka-IV. The ITB sent a revenue cutter to investigate, and were amazed at what they'd found.
The Dudka system was, astronomically speaking, a celestial deathtrap. What appeared on initial surveys to be a simple, peaceful yellow primary system instead turned out to be a binary, with a distantly orbiting brown dwarf star making orbits in the system erratic. At some point in recent geologic history, perhaps between when the initial survey of the world was done and the colonization effort was launched, Dudka-IV had experienced an extinction-level meteor strike that had smashed into the world and cracked the tectonic plates.
The result was an absolute hell of a planet. The still-shifting tectonic plates combined with a weird, unpredictable solar gravity led to unusually high seismic and volcanic activity. The barely-fading extinction event had killed off the larger flora and fauna, and without larger trees, erosion and wild winds led to choking dust storms seemingly at random around the colony's landing site. It was amazing that anything could survive.
And yet, that's just what the colonists did. A rogue meter shower had smashed their ship and most of their supplies upon landing. The colonists soon discovered that this was something that seemed to plague Dudka-IV on a frequent yet random basis. For most people, this might have meant extinction, but the colonists of Dudka-IV were a hard-bitten lot that managed to survive, and to procreate.
Hundreds of years later, when the revenue cutter from the ITB had found them, they were a much changed people. Centuries of being deprived of the technology of their forefathers had almost completely removed their knowledge of their people's origin, leaving only oral tradition. They were tribal, and had returned to the simple use of flint and stone for tools. The separation from the rest of the galaxy left their dialect of Basic barely intelligible even by the most advanced protocol and translation droids.
Natural selection, and perhaps the need to foresee the changes in the totally random environment around them, had left them with something else. Each tribe was led by a single individual, a force-sensitive whose job it was to guide them through the perils of the world around them. This frequently included other tribes, who would battle for territory. Each was regarded as a god by their people, and force-sensitive children were considered untouchable, sacred even between the bitterest of enemies.
This, of course, piqued the Empire's interest. Here was a whole planet, populated with dozens of force-sensitives who had to rely on their raw, barely trained skills not only for their own survival, but for that of their whole people. Some of them, it turned out, were quite powerful, having developed combat skills and dark side abilities well and above what many scholars considered possible.
The Empire tried to co-opt them, but one does not give up godhood lightly, even to men from the sky. This became evident almost immediately, with the loss of an Imperial survey team sent to parlay with them. The empire tried again and again, wishing to add the brute force and raw power of the Shamans of Dudka to their cause, but nothing seemed to work.
This lasted for decades until finally the Empire gave up and did what it did best. A full task force was sent to Dudka, of which the Gauntlet had been a part. They kidnapped the only young Shaman they could find, Nisa, and simply retreated into orbit. Without any means to cross the ocean, the tribes had been restricted to one continent. The task force bombarded the continent to glass.
The Gauntlet had been under orders to return the child to the Empire, and would have gone there directly if it hadn't been commandeered by an Imperial Admiral desperate for ships. Rather than keeping an eye on their captive, they'd simply thrown her into a maximum security confinement cell. Occasionally they fed her, but other than that they ignored her. This lasted for weeks. Locked in the cell, which quickly went dark under the barrage of ion fire inflicted by 4th fleet, Nisa began to panic. She had lashed out against the first thing that came through the entrance to her cell.
It must have been hard on her, thought Ardek. She had been locked up, alone, in a strange place and among hostile faces. It was hardly a wonder she'd acted the way she had. Still, she was dangerous, and he still had to decide what to do.