What Was The Great Hyperspace Disaster?
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Pivotal to the first wave of media for The High Republic, the Great Hyperspace Disaster was caused by the machinations of the Evereni known as Marchion Ro. As the Eye of the Nihil, a group of marauders and criminals who rejected the growing authority of the Republic, Marchion helped instigate this calamity to begin a chain of events whereby they could start fulfilling the century-and-a-half-long grudge their family held against the Jedi and, more broadly, the Republic. In the chaos, there was great destruction and even consequences that Marchion had not predicted. Today, Culture Slate runs down the origins, events, and aftermath of the Great Hyperspace Disaster.
Inciting Incident
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The Great Hyperspace Disaster began with a seemingly simple event: the collision of two starships in hyperspace. However, this occurrence was beyond rare, if not thought impossible, in the Star Wars galaxy, and yet Marchion Ro accomplished it. But how?
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The Ro family had abducted the brilliant and uniquely gifted Mari San Tekka at a young age, keeping her under private lock and key aboard their starship, the Gaze Electric, over a century before the events of Light of the Jedi. Exactly how long it took, or who helped is now unclear, but sometime before Phase 1 of The High Republic, the Ro had created Path Engines, unique devices which possessed knowledge of Paths. These alternative routes of hyperspace travel were forged by Mari, who was capable of calculating them from a young age, likely due to her exposure to Planet X when she was gestating within her mother. Mari’s gift of creating the Paths allowed the Ros to empower the Nihil, granting them the ability to appear and ravage settlements before vanishing just as quickly. It was a potent technology and something Marchion chose as the center of his plot for revenge.
In Light of the Jedi, Marchion lays out the strategy he employed. He purposefully set a Nihil vessel on a collision course with a large transport ship, the Legacy Run, and then waited to see what would happen. In the immediate moment, the collision destroyed the Run’s bridge and many other key systems, shattering the vessel and scattering its debris across hyperspace. But this is where the largest effect of the Disaster reared its head.
The Emergences
As a result of the ship collision taking place in hyperspace, the shards of ship parts or intact sections of the Legacy Run continued at their pre-existing extreme speed. These pieces of debris resulted in Emergences, when they would suddenly emerge into real space and hurl at intense speeds toward whatever mass of gravity was in the way. The first known Emergence was in the Hetzal system. With the help of dozens of Jedi led by Avar Kriss, fortunately nearby after a tour of the nearly completed Starlight Beacon, a canister of volatile fuel was prevented from slamming in Hetzal’s sun, which would have caused a devastating ignition. Other raining debris did cause some loss of life and a great deal of suffering, but Hetzal and its moons were broadly saved. The same could not be said of other areas of the galaxy.
Emergences began to strike almost randomly and with devastating power, but this was not the worst of it. Marchion Ro, acting unaware of a situation he had engineered, was able to successfully acquire key information regarding the Emergences due to the course of the Nihil ship involved in the collision. Calculating where the debris from the event would pop out next, he was able to draw up a list of Emergences for the Nihil’s Tempest Runners to choose from as suitable targets to help them carry out criminal activity. So, as Emergences devastated defenses, cities, planets, and moons, the Nihil came sweeping in to attack, plunder, and vanish into the depths of space.
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We can see the effects of an Emergence most clearly in Star Wars: Jedi: Survivor. The world of Koboh was the site of a massive Republic project to both research the unique Koboh Matter native to the planet and to try and explore the Koboh Abyss located nearby. Helmed by Santari Khri and assisted by many other Jedi, including her close friend Dagan Gera, they successfully charted the Abyss and located a planet within the anomaly, Tanalorr. But barely had they started building a new Jedi outpost on Tanalorr then the Nihil appeared in orbit, likely having used their Path engines to bypass the Abyss. Forcing the Jedi to retreat, an Emergence suddenly devastated Koboh’s moon, leaving it as the Shattered Moon and allowing the Nihil to ransack the Republic facilities across the region. Unknown to Marchion or the Nihil, these actions resulted in the fall of Dagan Gera, and the stasis of his injured body in recently discovered bacta, where he would remain for over 200 years after Santari Khri’s trusted droid, ZN-A4, was unable to wake Dagan for the evacuation.
Immediate Consequences
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Further Emergences devastated the galaxy and the Nihil’s raids greatly added to their existing infamy. Above the world of Eriadu, however, Tempest Runner Kassav made the foolish mistake to try and ransom his services in stopping an Emergence from hitting one of the planet’s moons. Able to extract a sum from Eriadu’s governor, his drug-addled gunners missed their mark, and the Emerge struck the moon, killing millions. This earned the governor’s deep ire, but it also helped alert the Republic to the Nihil’s awareness of when and where an Emergence would hit.
Elsewhere, the Jedi discovered that some Emergences had to be stopped by unique means. Trapped inside shards of the ship were still living people, terrified and hurtling toward laser fire or plantery bodies, though many of them were fortunately rescued. However, the same could not be said for many ships traveling in hyperspace as the Disaster unfolded. Should a large enough piece of debris hit a ship while in hyperspace, the vessel in transit would be immediately destroyed, scattering further debris through transportation lanes and possibly creating further Emergences. As a result of the Legacy Run’s destruction, many ships in its immediate path dropped out of hyperspace voluntarily due to the instability of hyperspace itself, only to find the Republic broadcasting strong recommendations to avoid hyperspace travel. It was one such group of ships, dropping out of hyperspace in an isolated star system, that would cause the return of the Drengir.
The Drengir Awaken
Among the ships was the Vessel, transporting four Jedi out to the frontier, only to be stopped before their journey could be completed. Forced to make port at a mysterious space station alongside others, Dez Rydan, Reath Silas, Orla Jareni, and Cohmac Vitus soon realized a darkness dwelt there. Waiting for hyperlanes to clear, an accident caused them to believe Dez was dead. Out of a desire to return to Coruscant with what they thought were evil statues that had been putting the remaining Jedi off-balance, the group rushed to remove them and retreat to the capital. However, the truth is that these statues were a warning against the true evil lurking on the station, the Drengir.
Naturally attuned to the Dark Side, these intelligent plant creatures had been put into stasis by the Sith centuries ago. The Drengir had once ravaged the galaxy, harvesting living organisms as “meat” alongside the Sith before this betrayal. While the Jedi did return to the station to try and set things right, they were forced to keep the Drengir unleashed to fight a force of Nihil who had also descended on the location. In the coming months, the Drengir would become a devastating threat for Republic colonies, independent worlds and even well-established planets, as their leader, the Great Progenitor, awakened all Drengir in hibernation across the stars. But the Nihil ultimately used this threat to their advantage. By the time of the Republic Fair, Drengir seeds were being taken and used as a sort of biological weapon by the Nihil, seeded onto worlds to cause chaos or, in the case of the Republic Fair, disrupt communications.
The Elders of the Path
Elsewhere in the galaxy, Marchion Ro used the Emergences as part of a much more personal quest. His ancestors had once been part of the Path of the Open Hand, a cult that believed that to use the Force in any way was a violation, resulting in conflict with the Jedi and many other Force-based faiths. In the aftermath of the Night of Sorrow, many of the remaining faithful stopped practicing their religion, partly due to threats secretly delivered by Marda Ro. However, one group did not get the memo. During the Night of Sorrow, many of the Path’s Elders, their leadership below figures like the Mother and the Herald, were transported to safety or otherwise arranged for their evacuation. By the time of Phase 1, the Elders of the Path were a group with suspiciously similar ideals to the Open Hand and even shared their membership in some long-lived individuals. It is reasonable to assume that one evolved into the other.
But Marchion Ro was aware that one of the modern Elders, named Tromak, had knowledge key to the Evereni’s plans for the future. With an Emergence approaching the Elders of the Path’s temporary home of Tyrmant IV (they were previously migratory), Tromak made a deal to be saved by Marchion in exchange for his information about where one of the Nameless control rods was located. These rods, when used separately or united into the Rod of Power, had the ability to control the alien creatures known as the Nameless, and were key to Marchion’s revenge against the Jedi. But, he had to get Tromak out first, and his efforts were almost stopped by the arrival of the Jedi training ship Star Hopper, carrying Padawans like Lula Talisola aboard, but also Jedi Master Yoda. Still, Marchion managed to successfully evacuate with Tromak, and the young man Krix Kamerat, recently emotionally riven by the reveal that his close friend Zeen Mrala was a Force user, who had used her power to stop the hurtling Emergence from making landfall on Trymant IV. Marchion would come to value Krix as a weapon, giving him purpose and power in the Nihil, fully turning him against his friend and the Jedi in the coming months and years.
Aftermath
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With time, the Emergences ceased as the largest of the debris left hyperspace, sometimes causing destruction but other times prevented by Republic intervention. Jedi investigations into the Disaster helmed by Avar Kriss and Elzar Mann soon allowed them to understand just what had happened, especially when the Legacy Run’s black box was located and saved from the Nihil, who tried to stop the Republic from learning the cause of the calamity. The Nihil connection was fully unveiled, and by the end of Light of the Jedi, Marchion had used the Republic’s manhunt to lure the Tempest Runner Kassav into a trap where he and his Nihil Tempest were scapegoated as the full Nihil force. The Battle of Kur that broke out devastated both sides, as the wild and dangerous Nihil didn’t play by any rules of war, but also because Marchion Ro had rigged their Path Engines to randomly jump tiny distances in the region, causing collisions that destroyed or damaged many Republic Defense Coalition ships.
Marchion Ro, having goaded the Republic into a show of force and eliminated one of three rivals to his power, then performed a raucous speech to the Nihil. He fired them up and turned them into a murderous mob ready to strike out against the Republic, all while putting himself at the center of their fervor. The Disaster was Marchion’s calculated effort to start twisting the Nihil to serve his personal goals and to cause damage to both the Jedi and the Republic, and he succeeded. Elsewhere, the Republic remained ignorant of the true threat, assuming Kassav’s force was the majority of the Nihil. They had no idea what was coming for them at the Republic Fair, in the novel The Rising Storm.
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