Siege of Calimondretta

The Siege of Calimondretta took place on Syned, the capital of the Arkadianate, in 1032 BBY. This battle marked the first time that the Brigadier Jarrow Rusher launched an assault on a fortress from the inside rather than the outside. The siege occurred in response to a plot by the Arkadianate ruler Sith Lord Arkadia Calimondra to assassinate Vilia Calimondra, her grandmother and the matriarch of the Calimondra family, a major Sith dynasty during the Republic Dark Age. Arkadia had conspired to kill her grandmother to avenge the death of her father Chagras several years earlier and to end Vilia's monopoly over the cycle of conflicts known as the Second Change Matrica. Arkadia also planned to exploit the crisis by launching an expansionist campaign against other Sith states in the Grumani sector. However, her plans fell apart due to the refusal of the Jedi Knight Kerra Holt to carry out the assassination.

Arkadia was then forced to rely on the Bothan spy Narsk Ka'hane who was a secret agent working for Vilia. Vilia also learnt about the plot through unknown means and ordered Ka'hane to sabotage Arkadia's scheme. Narsk came up with a spur of the moment plan which involved hiring the services of the mercenary Rusher and the Jedi Kerra Holt. In return for being given hyperspace coordinates leading to the Galactic Republic, the two agreed to collaborate with Narsk against a common Sith enemy. Rusher and his crew from the Diligence hijacked an icecrawler which had been scheduled to bring the student refugees aboard his ship to Calimondretta, the main city on Syned where they would then be integrated into the Arkadianate. Meanwhile, Narsk broke Kerra out of prison and the Jedi Knight helped distract Arkadia's forces.

Rusher meanwhile succeeded in breaching Calimondretta by using the hijacked icecrawler and launching an attack from within the fortress's walls, a feat which he had never accomplished before. Rusher and Kerra's actions caused substantial interior damage to the city. Meanwhile, the Diligence destroyed the planet's tractor beam emitters and Arkadia's parked military fleet by discarding its massive cargo extension pods, which created a series of explosions which caused further damage to Arkadia's assets. Narsk took advantage of the chaos to escape Syned with the catatonic Sith Lord Quillan, the younger brother of Arkadia and the grandson of Vilia, on a modified shuttle. He also sabotaged Arkadia's assassination plot by destroying the hover chair which was to be used as part of the assassination. It contained the nerve toxin Chagras's Blood, which had been harvested by the Sith Lord from Synedian algae.

Following a lightsaber duel between Kerra and Arkadia, Rusher rescued Kerra and escape offworld aboard the Diligence. The refugees aboard the Diligence were also joined by 500 defecting Arkadianate citizens who wanted to escape to the Republic. The Siege of Calimondretta dealt a death blow to Arkadia's ambitions of killing her grandmother and launching an irredentist military campaign. The destruction of substantial military assets also forced Arkadia to withdraw substantial forces from the newly-acquired Dyarchy world of Byllura. Ultimately, custody of the late Chagras's younger children Quillan and his twin sister Dromika fell into the hands of their grandmother Vilia, who took steps to keep the twins separated and protected from opportunists like their elder sister Arkadia.

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