One-Shots -- Star Wars

A Droid for a Family

Written for starwarsfan's 2021 Kessel Run Smackdown

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My name is Scarpi, and a droid is my mom.

I don't know where I was born. I know it wasn't on Carrakaan, though that's the earliest place I can name. But I remember a ship ride that ended with dropping me and a bunch of other kids of different species on the garbage planet. I remember the engines shuddering when the ship came down through the atmosphere, and the dull gray metal all around us. Some of the kids were crying, but it wasn't a loud kind of sobbing. The adults in the hold with us would snap at the loud criers, and after an hour or so we'd all gotten the message. Sit still and keep quiet.

I don't call Carrakaan a garbage planet because I hated it, or because it was some lawless, ungoverned world (although both are certainly true). It was literally a garbage world. Nearly all the garbage in the sector came here, to be dumped and left to rot, tarnish, rust, decompose, or whatever other slow process the respective materials would go through once they were no longer being cleaned and maintained by the beings they had belonged to. There were battleships from the Clone Wars, the Rebellion era, and the First Order war, though at the time I barely had any idea what any of those were or what made them different from each other. There were also civilian vessels, long-dead droids, everyday garbage that could include datapads or clothes or old toys. Once I found a bust of a Gark-beast made solely of aluminum. I've learned a lot about people and the galaxy since those days, but I still don't have an explanation for that one.

We were made to dig through the junk and find anything worth selling. Intact items, scrap material, lost valuables. We'd take them to one of Gerrod's minions whenever we found something, and in "exchange" we had food, water, and a place to sleep. I learned later that

Everyone dealt with the crappy situation in their own way. Some kids would look for mostly-intact ships that weren't buried under other junk, in the hopes that they could repair it enough to fly out of there one day. I knew a band of people who had been squirreling away ration packets and water purifiers and other essentials, so that they could make a home somewhere away from Gerrod's thugs. Those people all vanished at some point; whether they were caught and had something horrible happen to them, or found a place to hide, I never knew. Some people convinced themselves that the salvage work was meaningful-- that they were getting still-useful supplies out to the people of the galaxy, and that they were cleaning Carrakaan up in the process. I tried that for a while, but could never make myself believe it. If people were so invested in cleaning the junk off this planet, there wouldn't be junk barges flying in to dump more of it several times a month. There was no way we were getting enough junk sent off-world to make up for the amount getting shipped in.

It was on a dumping day when I found CL-N4. The dumping barge was a few miles away, but the crashing and screeching of falling metal could be heard from much farther away than that. I was standing on a small starcruiser that topped one of the taller junk piles, a good observing point. The barge looked like it was from Varrakis, a place we had all learned wasn't worth much when it came to salvaging useful stuff. Apparently that world took great pains to make sure it generated as little waste as possible. Even if someone decided to dig through that rubble, no one would actually go there for at least a week. The older kids had drilled it into the younger ones' heads to let the new stuff settle and collapse in on itself as much as it was going to before trying to climb through it.

The barge shook out the last of its load and flew off through the air. I went back to searching for sellable stuff. I'd found another starship sticking out near the bottom of the garbage pile, and had managed to squirm through a tunnel in the junk to get to a hatch. Intact ships were good for finding junk, as long as it hadn't been exposed to anything corroding. This ship was probably an old kind; I hadn't seen any that looked like it near the tops of the garbage piles.