Zodoh

Zodoh was a Hutt crime lord during the later years of the New Sith Wars, a conflict between the Galactic Republic and the Sith, who profited by selling slaves and munitions to the Sith based in Hutt Space. By 1032 BBY, Zodoh had grown weary of the constant warfare between the Hutt clans and set out to expand his influence into the Sith-dominated Grumani sector. The key to Zodoh's plans was his fleet of Stormdrivers, starships which were capable of harnessing moisture from planetary atmospheres and unleashing it as storms which could flood an entire world, wiping out all life. As a demonstration of his power to the Sith Lords operating in the area, Zodoh tested his new weapon on the planet Aquilaris Minor in the Daimanate, a region of space controlled by the Sith Lord Daiman. The Hutt was forced to abort the operation early when Jenn Devaad, a Republic starfighter pilot and former slave of Zodoh's, set off a number of explosives aboard Zodoh's flagship, the Voracious, disrupting the coordination of the Stormdrivers.
The Stormdrivers still proved successful, and Zodoh soon turned his attention to Daiman's capital world of Darkknell. Although he caught Daiman's forces off-guard, Zodoh's attack on Darknell was foiled by Devaad and the Jedi Knight Kerra Holt. The Voracious was destroyed, effectively disabling the Stormdriver fleet, and Zodoh was left stranded in the vacuum of space. Following the battle, Zodoh was found injured but alive by Daiman's forces and taken before the Sith Lord, who used a miniature Stormdriver to exact revenge by dehydrating the Hutt.
==Biography==
===Crime lord===
During the Republic Dark Age, the Galactic Republic was unable to afford to maintain its communications network and shut down comm-relays outside the Core Worlds.The New Essential Chronology When the comm-relays in Hutt Space went down, the Hutts were quick to take advantage, leaving the Sith Lords operating in that part of the galaxy reliant on the Hutt clans to move equipment and personnel. The Hutt crime lord Zodoh was among those who profited by dealing in slaves and munitions. At some point, Zodoh's clan captured an entire Republic task force on the planet Daalang after the local population betrayed them. The captive Republic personnel were put to work as slaves in Zodoh's labor camps. However, after five years of captivity, a small number of survivors, including Captain Jenn Devaad, escaped and joined Grace Command, a mercy organization run by the Alderaanian Baron Lemayne, which delivered supplies to those trapped in Sith space.
During the later stages of the New Sith Wars, Hutt Space was locked in internecine clan warfare with the Sith playing different clans against each other. Growing tired of the battling clans, Zodoh decided to expand his business operations beyond Hutt Space and turned his attention to the Grumani sector in the Outer Rim Territories. The Grumani sector had previously been controlled by the Chagras Hegemony, a Sith state ruled the the Sith Lord Chagras, but had descended into squabbling principalities since Chagras's death. Seeking to take advantage of the Sith infighting, Zodoh sought to establish a presence in the sector and sell his services to the warring Sith factions. As Zodoh began launching hit-and-run attacks on Sith forces, he discovered the true nature of Grace Command's missions in the area: the mercy organization served as a front for Operation Deluge, an effort to sabotage the Sith war effort by inundating entire worlds with Deluge, an addictive drug which sapped all desire from those who took it.
===Imperial ambitions===
By 1032 BBY, Zodoh had consolidated a substantial fleet of military starships led by his flagship, the Voracious. Zodoh's fleet also included several Stormdrivers, capital ships equipped with weaponized moisture vaporators that were capable of generating downpours by squeezing moisture from a planet's atmosphere. While the Sith Lord Daiman, ruler of an area of Sith space known as the Daimanate, was away from his holdings to oversee the invasion of the nearby Bactranate following the fall of the Sith Lord Ayanos Bactra,Knight Errant Zodoh saw the opportunity to launch an invasion of the Daimanate. Zodoh personally led a strike force consisting of Intruder-class starfighters in an attack on the Daimanate world of Aquilaris Minor. Emerging from hyperspace within the Sith patrol zones and immediately striking at the surface, the Hutt took the small military garrison at the oceanic port of Capital Cay by surprise, inflicting heavy damage before the Sith troopers could mount a defense. With the Sith reeling from his initial attack, Zodoh withdrew his fighters and positioned one of his Stormdrivers over Capital Cay's bay, using its vaporators to start draining the water from the bay. As a result, he triggered a storm which would flood Capital Cay and sweep the surviving Sith into the sea. Zodoh's attack coincided with the arrival on Aquilaris of the Jedi Knight Kerra Holt, who was on a covert mission to liberate the planet's enslaved inhabitants. Finding the population addicted to Deluge and unwilling to assist her, Holt attacked the Stormdriver with a blaster pistol. With the crew preoccupied, the Stormdriver was ambushed and destroyed by Devil Squadron, a unit of Fire Lotus-class starfighters affiliated with Grace Command and comprised of the Daalang survivors, led by Devaad. Facing unexpected opposition, Zodoh withdrew his forces to the Voracious.
Despite the loss of the Stormdriver, the attack on Aquilaris had proved a successful test of Zodoh's new weapons and provided sufficient data on Aquilaris's atmospheric systems for Zodoh to proceed to the next phase of his campaign. A single Stormdriver could produce a violent storm; by using his entire fleet of Stormdrivers, Zodoh could drain a planet's atmosphere of all moisture, drowning its entire population. Back aboard the Voracious, the Hutt convened a live hologram conference with several Sith warlords including Odion, Arkadia Calimondra and Malakite. By expanding into Sith territory, Zodoh had incurred the wrath of the local Sith Lords, and both Odion and Calimondra expressed their anger at being summoned by the Hutt. In response, Zodoh accused the Sith Lords of the Grumani sector of being a bunch of petty crooks more interested in short-term gains than long-term strategic goals. Zodoh explained that he was in Sith space to expand his business franchise by selling slaves and munitions to the Sith warlords. The Hutt promised that those who cooperated with him would benefit as business partners, and reminded them that the Sith who had opposed the Hutts in Hutt Space were no longer around. In case the Sith Lords had any doubts, Zodoh instructed them to inform their spies in the Daimanate to watch for a demonstration of his abilities on Aquilaris. After concluding the meeting, Zodoh conferred with his trusted advisor, Oon Garat, who expressed her distrust of the Hutt's potential Sith business partners. Zodoh, however, was confident that his planned demonstration would convince the Sith to ally themselves with him, and instructed Garat to dispatch a courier to the Hutt homeworld of Nal Hutta to report that he was ready for the next step in the operation.
===Reunion with an old foe===
Meanwhile, Holt had joined up with Devil Squadron, and together they had finished pacifying the remaining Daimanate forces on Aqualaris. Zodoh's fleet returned to the Aquilaris Minor system in time for the Hutt to witness Devil Squadron depart for the Malakite-occupied world of Heptooine. Flying one of his Intruder-class starfighters, Zodoh allowed Devil Squadron to see him as they proceeded to their hyperspace jump point. Seeking vengeance for her period in captivity, Devaad ignored Holt's call for caution and led Devil Squadron in pursuit of the Hutt. Taunting Devaad via his comm unit, Zodoh led his pursuers back to the waiting Voracious before ordering the launch of his starfighter squadrons. With the tables turned on the pursuers, Devaad ordered her starfighters to disengage from the dogfight and make for any jump point. At this moment, a large fleet of Stormdrivers emerged from hyperspace, trapping Devil Squadron in the system.
As Zodoh boasted of his intentions to drown the people of Aquilaris as a demonstration of his power, Holt suggested returning to Aquilaris to begin an evacuation. Devaad, however, was determined to get revenge against Zodoh and ignored the Jedi's advice, leading Devil Squadron in an attack on Zodoh's fleet of Stormdrivers. Zodoh was not unprepared for starfighter opposition, and his Stormdrivers were each equipped with defensive systems which prevented the outnumbered Grace Command fighters from inflicting serious damage. Within minutes, Devil Squadron started to take losses. Seeing little strategic gain in assaulting Zodoh's fleet and unable to persuade Devaad to help her, Holt disengaged her starfighter, Devil Seven, from the firefight and returned to Aquilaris. As a finale, Zodoh ordered the crew of the Voracious to activate the tractor beam projector, using it to ensnare the surviving Devil Squadron starfighters. Brought aboard Zodoh's flagship, the squadron members were disarmed, imprisoned and tortured within the warship's holding cells.
Zodoh had Captain Devaad brought before him, held suspended with her wrists in stun cuffs while the Hutt gloated over his recent victory and his plans for the Grumani sector. Zodoh told Devaad that he had uncovered Grace Command's true purpose in Sith space. The Hutt planned to turn Operation Deluge to his advantage by synthesizing his own stock of the drug and using it to lace supplies of seafood from Aquilaris which he would sell to the Sith. Zodoh intended to turn entire planetary populations into drug addicts, leaving nearby Sith worlds ripe for conquest while also making a profit from food relief. Zodoh attempted to coerce Devaad into his service by offering to spare the lives of her wingmates if she cooperated in retrieving the stocks of the drug which Grace Command had recently delivered to Aquilaris. Devaad reluctantly agreed and was dispatched to the planet in a shuttle, while Zodoh remained in orbit with the Voracious and his fleet of Stormdrivers.
Following a confrontation with her former ally Holt, Devaad returned to Zodoh's flagship in the shuttle with the remaining Deluge containers. With the Deluge in his possession, Zodoh gave the green light for his fleet of Stormdrivers to submerge Aquilaris in water. Within hours, the planet's surface was flooded. The survivors, led by Holt and the seacropper Joad Kreel, managed to escape in a submarine to a harvester station on the sea floor. In another holo-conference with his Sith rivals, Zodoh gloated over his new superweapon which had resulted in the submergence of Capital Cay. He threatened to flood all of Lord Daiman's worlds, starting with his capital, Darkknell, which Zodoh intended to requisition as his own following Daiman's capitulation. The Hutt offered the Sith Lords the opportunity of becoming his trading partners if they agreed to keep Daiman's forces busy while he struck, and he threatened that those who did not join him would share Daiman's fate.
After concluding the holo-transmission, Zodoh was confronted by Devaad, who demanded that the Hutt honor his side of the bargain by releasing her captive crew. Zodoh, however, had never had any intention of releasing his prisoners and had already executed them by releasing them into space through the airlock, as an example to other slaves of the consequences of trying to escape. Devaad had prepared for this development and had rigged the Deluge containers with explosives from the torpedoes on Holt's Fire Lotus before returning to the Voracious. She remotely detonated the explosives, causing a series of explosions throughout the ship. The blasts killed several of Zodoh's crew but did little damage to the Voracious, with the exception of disrupting the coordination of the Stormdrivers which had already completed their task. Zodoh himself was sent flying into a bulkhead by a nearby blast. Although Zodoh survived due to his protective armor, the distraction allowed Devaad to slip away and escape by stealing one of Zodoh's twin-seater starfighters. Unable to stop Devaad's escape, Zodoh recalled the Stormdrivers and ordered his fleet to depart for Darkknell.
===An untimely demise===
Having purged half of his defense force due to the Deluge drug epidemic, and with his remaining battleships called away to respond to incursions by his Sith rivals along the Daimanate's borders, Daiman was caught unprepared for Zodoh's arrival. The Hutt's fleet blockaded Darkknell, overwhelming Daiman's understaffed defense force, and the Stormdrivers moved into the atmosphere, triggering storms that submerged much of the planet, causing widespread damage and sweeping away anyone caught in the path of the flood water. Despite worldwide broadcasts by the Sith Lord trying to allay the fears of his subjects, Daiman was effectively powerless against the onslaught. The Southern Reservoir was unable to cope with the denudation and burst its banks, flooding Daiman's palace in the city of Xakrea.
While Zodoh's victory seemed almost complete, he had underestimated Kerra Holt and Jenn Devaad. The Jedi Knight and Republic starfighter pilot teamed up to stop Zodoh's onslaught, using the stolen twin-seater Hutt starfighter to catch up to his fleet in orbit above Darkknell. Since the explosives that she had set off aboard the Voracious had disrupted the Stormdrivers' attack on Aquilaris, Devaad deduced that the Hutt lord's flagship contained a command center with a massive data processor for coordinating the Stormdrivers. Devaad flew the starfighter into the hangar bay of Zodoh's flagship, allowing Holt to eject and infiltrate the vessel, before joining the fight against the Hutt's fleet. Holt quickly eliminated Zodoh's guards in the hangar and made her way to the control dome at the top of the vessel. Zodoh was overseeing the assault from the control dome when Holt arrived, and the Hutt surprised the Jedi with a blast of energy that sent her crashing to the deck and caused her to drop her lightsaber. Clad in his armor and armed with an antique Mandalorian axe, the Hutt chose to duel with Holt personally, disabling the artificial gravity and activating his jetpack to even the odds against the Jedi's Force abilities.
Zodoh swung his axe at Holt, but the Jedi evaded the blow and retrieved her lightsaber. Before she could bring her weapon to bear, however, Zodoh wrapped his tail around the Jedi and drew her to him, using his arms to crush her. Ready to deliver a killing blow, the Hutt was interrupted by Devaad's hijacked starfighter, which shot a hole through the control dome, resulting in an explosive decompression. Holt escaped in Devaad's fighter, but Zodoh and the control dome's crew were blown into space moments before a series of explosions destroyed the Voracious. With the destruction of the Voracious, the Stormdrivers were unable to coordinate their global storm, and Daiman's defense forces were able to regroup. The Sith Lord's forces found Zodoh clinging to the wreckage of the Voracious and were surprised to learn that he had survived, since his Hutt physique was tough enough to withstand exposure to the vacuum of space. The unconscious Hutt was captured by Daiman's cruisers, stripped of his armor and brought as a captive before the Sith Lord.
Zodoh was bound in a purpose-built metal cradle while Daiman's agents revived him. When Zodoh regained consciousness, he found Daiman and several Sith guards standing over him. Also present via hologram were fellow Sith Lords Odion, Malakite and Arkadia Calimondra, who gloated over the change in his fortunes. Zodoh tried to plead with Daiman for his life by proposing a deal. Daiman, however, was unwilling to cooperate. Daiman wanted revenge for the brief spell of ignominy that he endured during the Battle of Darkknell and also blamed the Hutt for the flow of Deluge into his territory, since it had ceased with Zodoh's defeat. The Sith Lord explained that he had been studying Zodoh's Stormdriver technology. Although he considered the dependency on a large data processor to be a flaw which made the technology impractical on a planetary scale, Daiman had developed a miniature Stormdriver which was capable of completely draining all water from individual lifeforms, including Hutts. Daiman, who believed himself to be the creator of the universe, dismissed Zodoh's creation as a mistake which he intended to correct and proceeded to use the device to dehydrate the Hutt.
==Personality and traits==
Zodoh was a brown-skinned male Hutt with orange eyes. As was common among his species, Zodoh was involved in crime, primarily slave trading and munitions production, but viewed himself as a businessman providing services to his clients. The Hutt was quick to seize opportunities to expand his business. When the Republic turned off comm relays in Hutt Space, Zodoh saw the opportunity to provide logistical services to the Sith in that part of space. When he later grew tired of the infighting between the Hutt clans, Zodoh saw the opportunity to take advantage of the war between the Sith Lords in the Grumani sector, picking the Daimanate as a weak target in which to set up a presence while Lord Daiman's attention was focused elsewhere. Upon learning about Grace Command's Operation Deluge, Zodoh planned to use the drug to further his own plans by tainting food supplies, destabilizing his enemies and allowing him to make a profit at the same time.
Zodoh did not trust others easily. His aide, Oon Garat, was among the few beings in Zodoh's confidence, and the Hutt found that even she was targeted by rivals hoping to recruit her. As a result, Zodoh took an active role in his ventures, viewing this as the only way for him to guarantee success. Unusually for a Hutt, Zodoh found that he enjoyed working in the field and that combat appealed to his hedonistic tendencies. Although his leadership style made him unpopular, Zodoh believed that it made him more effective than other Hutts. The Hutt could not resist the opportunity to try his hand at something new and was eager for the opportunity to test himself in combat against a Jedi.
Zodoh was arrogant, with ambitions of becoming the greatest Hutt of all. He was not easily impressed and spoke dismissively to the Sith Lords in the Grumani sector, seeing them as little more than petty crooks and believing that they would come to serve him. He was manipulative and deceptive, both in his dealings with the Sith and with Devaad, whom he tricked into delivering a supply of Deluge to him by promising to spare the lives of the other Devil Squadron pilots, when he instead planned to execute them as a warning to other slaves of the consequences of defying him. Zodoh had little regard for the lives of other sentients. His callous nature was best exemplified by his willingness to addict entire populations to Deluge and his use of Stormdrivers to create artificial storms to drown his enemies. In order to conquer Darkknell, Zodoh was prepared to sacrifice many of its population of billions. However, the Hutt was also cunning and patient, willing to accept small losses to achieve long-term objectives. This was evident in his acceptance of the loss of one Stormdriver during the attack on Capital Cay in return for gaining the necessary intelligence on Aqualaris Minor's atmospheric systems, and his later willingness to abandon his Aquilaris campaign after Devaad's interference to focus on his main objective of attacking Darkknell.
==Skills and abilities==
As opposed to most other members of his species, Zodoh was a physically fit fighter. The Hutt wore armor over his upper body and a jetpack which allowed him to fly. He enjoyed dueling with his opponents using his weapon of choice, an antique Mandalorian axe. Zodoh could also use his own body as a weapon, employing his large physical mass to subdue and overpower his opponents and wrapping his muscular tail around opponents in order to draw them to him and crush them. With his jetpack providing an advantage in zero gravity, Zodoh proved a match for the Jedi Kerra Holt. His Hutt physiology allowed him to survive in space after the destruction of the Voracious whereas most species would have been killed. Zodoh was a skilled pilot and often led his Intruder-class starfighter squadrons into battle, lying forward in his starfighter with his arms operating controls in the wings.
==Behind the scenes==
Zodoh was created by author John Jackson Miller and artist Ivan Rodriguez to serve as a key antagonist in the Deluge story arc of the Star Wars: Knight Errant comic series. The character first appeared in Knight Errant: Deluge 1, released on August 17, 2011, and subsequently appeared in all issues within the Deluge story arc, in which he was illustrated by Rodriguez, Iban Coello, Sergio Abad, and David Daza. Miller created Zodoh after seeing in The Essential Atlas by Jason Fry and Daniel Wallace that Hutt Space was under Sith control during the period in which Knight Errant is set. When Fry confirmed that no backstory had yet been created to explain the relationship between the Hutts and the Sith, Miller decided to include a Hutt character in Knight Errant. Although Daiman announces his intention to completely dehydrate Zodoh after his capture at the end of Knight Errant: Deluge 5, Zodoh's death has not been confirmed in any source.
==Appearances==
*Knight Errant: Deluge 1 
*Knight Errant: Deluge 2
*Knight Errant: Deluge 3
*Knight Errant: Deluge 4
*Knight Errant: Deluge 5
==Sources==
*
*The Essential Reader's Companion
==Notes and references==
Category:Crime lords
Category:Enslavers
Category:Hutts
Category:Males