Kerra Holt

"Some kind of Knight errant, running around in Sith space alone, is that it? Saving student bodies here and there.''" "''No, this is new. Usually I save whole planets."

- Jarrow Rusher and Kerra Holt

Kerra Holt was a Human female Jedi Knight during the New Sith Wars. The former Padawan of Vannar Treece, Kerra determined to make herself into a "living weapon" and, having done so, returned to the areas of the galaxy still controlled by the Sith, determined to fight them wherever she found them. The rival Sith Lord brothers Odion and Daiman were two enemies she encountered. Later on, Kerra found out that she was facing an almost entire family of Sith and intended to use this knowledge to warn to the Galactic Republic.

Early life
"M-my family. They told me to run&mdash;far away, But I came b-back. And I found&hellip;I found&hellip;''" "You found this''. I'm so very sorry&hellip;"

- Kerra Holt and Vannar Treece

Kerra Holt was born in 1,050 BBY on the world of Aquilaris, in the Grumani sector. Her sector of birth was overrun by the Sith, while her family perished during a massive raid on her homeworld carried out by the Sith Lord Odion, who at the time fought under the banner of Chagras, ruler of the Chagras Hegemony. She was saved by Vannar Treece, a charismatic Jedi adventurer, who took her to the Jedi Temple and later became her Master.

Operation: Influx
"Gorlan. You're&mdash;You're a Jedi?''" "No Kerra Holt&mdash;The only Jedi on Chelloa now is you''&hellip;"

- Kerra Holt and Vannar Treece

Having a close relationship with her Master, Kerra participated in a Jedi mission known as Operation: Influx and completed the Jedi Trials. In 1,032 BBY, Kerra embarked on the operation's second phase which aimed to disrupt the Sith Lord Daiman's baradium shipping operations from the planet Chelloa to the frontline. With the collapse of the Chagras Hegemony, Lord Daiman had established an independent principality known as the Daimanate, developing a personality cult surrounded around his view as "creator of the universe". Chelloa was rich in deposits of volatile baradium which was used in the manufacture of munitions. Daiman exploited countless slaves and local inhabitants as he strip-mined the planet for the valuable ores.

The Jedi were assisted by Gorlan Palladane, an undercover field agent who worked as the leader of Daiman's slave workers and a relief worker. With the help of the Rodian mechanic Skodo, Palladane communicated with the Jedi using a transmitter to activate a routing station in space. While the Jedi received his transmission, it was also intercepted by Daiman's rival Sith Lord brother Odion, who ruled an independent domain known as the Odionate. However while Treece planned to disrupt the shipping operations and liberate the slaves, Odion desired to exploit Chelloa's baradium ores to fuel his own war effort.

Using a captured cargo liner, the Jedi team infiltrated the port facilities at Jenith and quickly overwhelmed Daiman's security guards with the support of the slaves. During the assault, Holt saved Palladane and a group of miners from being roughed up by a group of Daiman's thugs. Despite the warm reception from the liberated slaves, Palladane was disappointed that the mission was only a hit-and-run raid as opposed to a full scale invasion of Chelloa. Holt defended her master by pointing that the depleted nature of Republic finance had limited the resources available to the Jedi. Still, Treece planned to evacuate as many slaves as he could on their cargo liner.

Taking on Daiman
"Kerra, is it? From what I've seen. Your guardian could have used protection himself&mdash;against you. I can feel the anger, washing off you in waves. It might be diverting to break you&hellip;"

- Lord Daiman

However, victory was quickly spoiled by the arrival of a strike force under Lord Odion at Squatter Hill. During the assault, Treece took on Odion during a duel. When Holt attempted to intervened, Treece sent her away, ordering her to look after the refugees. When Odion activated his massive kinetic corruptor, the machine ignited the baradium veins beneath the surface, free the baradium gas but creating a massive explosion that wiped out many slaves and troops as well as most of the Jedi team with the exception of Holt. At the climax of the duel, Odion slew Treece by impaling from behind, leaving Holt the only remaining Jedi on Chelloa.

While the survivors began attending to the wounded, Lord Daiman arrived on a repulsorcraft. Despite the enormous loss of lives and wounded particularly burn victims, Daiman was apathetic and demanded to see Paladane. Palladane pleaded for help in treating the wounded but Daiman was more concerned with discerning how his rival Odion and the Jedi discovered his secret baradium mining operations. When Palladane expressed his ignorance of the matter, Daiman used Force choke to strangle the former. However, Kerra intervened and tried to force Daiman to stop tormenting Palladane at gunpoint.

Amused by her courage and dismissing her as an orphan, Daiman relinquished his grip on Palladane and fondled with her, making obscene gestures. He mockingly told her to embrace her anger as a diversion and released her since he was preoccupied with the threat of Odion to his goals. Showing little concern for the well-being of his subjects, Daiman ordered them to erect one of his statues in the village square before dismissing the crowd. Later at his alpine compound above Jenith, he tortured the Rodian worker Skodo with Force lightning in an attempt to force him to confess to contacting Odion. Earlier, Skodo had been found with a transmitter which he and Palladane had used to contact Odion with information about Daiman's baradium operations.

However, Daiman's torture session was interrupted by the arrival of Holt who dueled him. She trapped Daiman in a suspension field before engaging in an argument with the temporarily incapacitated Sith Lord. When she attacked his maltreatment of slaves, Daiman countered by reiterating his personal Sith philosophy with himself being the only true living being. To distract Holt, he then revealed that his brother Odion was preparing a second attack and that Odion had a mobile space station known as The Spike which was capable of producing various arsenal particularly kinetic corruptors. One kinetic corruptor was capable of igniting the entire planet of Chelloa due to the vast baradium deposits. Daiman managed to break away but Holt had escaped, hijacking one of Daiman's starfighters deployed to attack The Spike.

Confronting the Destroyer
"I just want you to leave Chelloa alone.''" "''Not a chance. That's too much baradium in one place. It upsets everything."

- Holt and Odion

Viewing Odion as a threat to his control of baradium extraction on Chelloa, Daiman had dispatched a small strike force of Daimanate starfighters in an attempt to knock out The Spike. However, his light starfighters were wiped out by Star Wars: Knight Errant 3: Aflame, Part 3he midst of the attack, Holt bailed out of her starfighter into space and infiltrated The Spike by entering through an open hatch. Discarding her spacesuit, she disabled a service droid and then made her way to Pod Seventeen, in the vast assembly area. There, Holt overpowered a labor droid known as GAD-3 and reset his motivation center. In exchange for Kerra fixing his robotic arms, Gad-3 revealed that The Spike was dedicated solely to the production of kinetic corrupters and that all floors were decentralized from the main structure for security reasons. Gad-3 then added that Holt should not have come alone.

At that moment, they were interrupted by the arrival of Odion and his Givin second-in-command Jelcho. However, Odion did not sense Kerra or Gad-3 initially, since they were hidden under the catwalk. Odion was preoccupied with using his corrupters to extract Chelloa’s baradium deposits. From Odion's conversation with Jelcho, Holt learned that an unidentified informant had supplied the Odionates with intelligence on Daiman's baradium operations. From a recorded transmission, the informant claimed that all of Daiman’s mining operations were permanently off-line in an attempt to draw Sith attention away from Chelloa. However, Odion dismissed the informant’s latest reports as an attempt by Daiman or other parties to undermine his planned baradium operations. Meanwhile, Holt released GAD-3 and sent him back to his station with instructions to open another door when she gave the signal.

Odion then concluded the meeting by ordering all his kinetic corrupters to be prepared for landing on Chelloa in order to harvest all the baradium. Due to the volatile nature of baradium, much of Chelloa would be destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. While gloating of his recent victory over the Jedi, particularly Master Treece, Odion suddenly sensed the presence of an intruder through the Force. In a fit of rage, he ripped apart the catwalk and discovered Holt. He engaged her in a duel. Kerra drew him into a pursuit. Kerra was also pursued by a mob of armed Gamorrean guards, followers of Odion who craved dying in combat. The fighting led the combatants through a series of catwalks to the upper levels of the Spike, the main structure supporting the various assembly lines.

In a verbal confrontation, Kerra told Odion that she had attacked him aboard his space station to drive him away from Chelloa thus saving the lives of thousands of sentients. She also revealed that Daiman’s mobile munitions factories were bringing in thousands more slaves by the day. Odion shrugged away Holt’s concerns for innocent lives, arguing that all sentients existed only to be killed by him. Due to his nihilistic philosophy, Odion saw himself as the destroyer of all life in the Galaxy and embraced death. As he prepared to strike Holt down with his lightsaber, she played her final card by ordering the reprogrammed Gad-3 to open all containment fields, thus opening much of the space station to zero-gravity space. This triggered an explosion that wrecked large areas of The Spike, destroying many labor droids and killing many workers. Further destruction was averted after Jelcho reactivated the emergency shielding. As with all Givin, Jelcho had a tough exoskeleton that could seal all external orifices for protection against depressurization, allowing him to survive in hard vacuum.

In the midst of the chaos, Holt hijacked a construction shuttle, incapacitated the pilot and then fled into space. Meanwhile, Odion ordered his entourage back to his flagship Sword of Ieldis. Understanding his Jedi opponent, Odion knew that Holt would return to confront him. In an ensuing cat-and-mouse race in space, Holt’s shuttle engaged Odion’s gunship. Anticipating that Holt was going to ram her shuttle into his ship, he ordered his crew to open fire. However, the duel was interrupted by an incoming transmission from Lord Daiman.

Two Jedi Comrades
"...Disabling the baradium mines -- that was Vannar's mission. Remember your mission --The one Vannar gave you before he died!" "...Save the people! It was always part of Vannar's plan, but also getting whatever locals he found out of harm's way!"

- Palladane and Holt

In a live broadcast from his Chelloan headquarters, a furious Daiman revealed to Odion that he had seized and tortured his informant: Palladane. In response to the intelligence leakage, Daiman had ordered a military crackdown on all mining settlements on Chelloa with his troops razing and pillaging the homes of the Chelloan people. Witnessing the plight of her friend, Holt aborted her run by executing a quick jump into hyperspace. Holt succeeded in dissuading Odion from using his kinetic corruptors to destroy Chelloa by leaking intelligence on Daiman's mobile factories. Odion's Lightning Guard was assembled for a ground invasion beginning with the capture of Daiman's forges near the baradium mines. He also planned to conquer Chelloa and annex it for his interstellar principality&mdash;the Odionate.

Meanwhile, Holt returned to the mining settlement of Jenith to protect Palladane’s family from Daiman’s retribution. She arrived just in time to save the family of Gorlan Palladane from being harmed by a pair of Sith troopers. Learning of Palladane's incarceration, Holt hitchiked a ride on one of Daiman's shuttles and infiltrated Daiman's complex, immobilized the Sith guards and freeing the prisoners. Kerra rescued the wounded Palladane from Daiman's dungeons. Gorlan revealed that his attempts to contact the Jedi with a transmitter had attracted the attention of Odion who had intercepted the interstellar transmission. Initially he had thought that Odion's attack was a coincidence until the death of Skodo at the hands of Daiman.

Sensing Palladane's noble intents, she comforted him by telling him that he was serving the interests of his people. Palladane also revealed that Odion was bringing a fleet of kinetic corruptors and that Daiman was preparing for a showdown with the rival Sith Lord. By this stage, Holt realized that her true mission was to evacuate the Chelloan people rather than seeking to eliminate the two Sith Lords Daiman and Odion. However, before departing with Palladane and the village leaders on their shuttle, she personally beheaded all of Daiman's statues as a gesture of defiance.

Later, Palladane, Holt and the other village leaders fled to a safehouse in the town of Arboth where he was reunited with his family. Meanwhile, Holt spied on the vast transports transporting workers to Daiman's mobile munitions plants and discovered they were empty. Coming to the conclusion that Daiman was not planning to invest more into his mining and industrial projects on Chelloa, she suggested to Palladane that they use the empty transports to evacuate the entire population of Chelloa: 60,000 sentients scattered across ten mining towns. Aware that Odion was planning to conquer Chelloa, Daiman had allowed Holt to escape to Odion and thus leak intelligence on the mobile munitions plants. Odion planned to utilize the factories for his own goal of defeating Daiman's faction. Seeking to aid a fellow Jedi in what he regarded as a noble endeavour, Palladane offered his services to Holt and reactivated his lightsaber, signifying his re-commitment to the Jedi cause.

Escaping the Apocalypse
"Sorry, Odion -- But this flight's fully booked. You'll have to wait for the next one!"

- Kerra

Meanwhile, Lord Odion invaded Chelloa with a planetary assault force consisting of elite Lightning Guards. Following his earlier duel with Holt, Odion had been dissuaded from his plan to destory Chelloa with his kinetic corruptors with intelligence that Daiman was expanding baradium mining operations with Mobile Munitions Complexes. Desiring an industrial base for his war effort, Odion changed his plans to capturing these factories. However, this played into Daiman's plan to eliminate both the Jedi and his estraged brother. In reality, the mobile factories were actually disguised Kinetic Corruptors which would incinerate Odion's forces while destroying Chelloa's surface, rendering it uninhabitable. As planned, Odion's forces descended on the surface and overwhelmed a poorly-trained detachment of Daimanate troops. They arrived at the pyramidical factories only to discover too late that they were actually Kinetic corruptors. The corruptors initiated an explosion which ignited the volatile gases beneath Chelloa's surface, killing many Odionate and Daimanate combatants alike. Meanwhile, Daiman and his forces made preparations to escape using a fleet of transport ships.

With Daiman preoccupied, Holt and Palladane organized a mass evacuation of Chelloa's people by organizing the villagers into teams. These teams infiltrated the spaceport at Arboth and seized control of the transport fleet, overpowering the crew and guards. By the end of the battle, they had managed to evacuate most of Chelloa's population on a hastily-assembled fleet known as the Freedom Fleet. Facing death from lava flows triggered by the kinetic corruptors, Odion and his surviving troops fled for Daiman's transports at Arboth but were prevented from boarding by Kerra and Gorlan. Having achieved their objective and with all teams safely aboard, the Freedom Fleet departed into space.

Meanwhile, Holt confronted Odion, taunting him that he had missed the "flight" and daring him to finish their duel. This escalated into a heated lightsaber pursuit in the upper atmosphere above Chelloa. The Jedi Knight commandeered an airspeeder while her Sith opponent donned a jetpack. Kerra managed to reach one of the ascending cargo liners but Odion caught up with her. He taunted her by telling her he savoured the killings on Aquilaris to provoke her into attacking him. However, this duel was interrupted by Gorlan who opened one of the entry hatches while fastened to a cable. Armed with a lightsaber, Palladane took on the Sith Lord and drove him to the engine thrusters, expressing his desire for retribution. During the confrontation, both men were severely burnt but Odion managed to escape because of his jetpack.

Mortally wounded, Palladane crawled back up to the entry hatch with the assistance of Holt. In his last moments, Palladane commented that Kerra was dying for the wrong thing while he himself was living for the wrong thing. Kerra promised to bring the Chelloan people back into Republic space but Palladane reminded her they were now her people and that she had a responsibility to save billions of other sentients living under Sith domination. She took this to heart and formulated a new mission: stay in Sith space and save as many people as she could.

Alone in the Daimanate
After seeing the Freedoom Fleet off in the direction of Republic space, Kerra made her way to Daiman's throne world, Darkknell, disguised as an itinerant worker. On her weeks-long journey, she made stops at several planets with munitions and weapons factories, which she sabotaged. On one such world, Nilash III, she liberated the slave workers and sent Daiman a symbolically powerful message by cutting the heads off of statues of himself he had had erected there.

Once on Darkknell, Kerra tried to stay under the radar while gathering intel, staying as a live-in teacher in the home of an old Sullustan and his granddaughter, Tan. She eventually decided to target the Black Fang, Daiman's premiere research facility. While scouting the location, she noticed a suspiciously-behaving Bothan, who would later turn out to be Narsk Ka'hane, at that point a spy in Odion's employ. She continued to observe him, and after he successfully smuggled explosives into the facility, she followed and intercepted him a safe distance away. Kerra destroyed the data he had absconded with, detonated the Black Fang herself, and confiscated the stealth suit he had used to infiltrate the high-security building.

Using it, she gained entry to Daiman's palace, where she intended to assassinate the Sith Lord. The opportunity did not present itself, forcing her to follow Daiman, first to his personal ship, then to the planet Gazzari.

Fighting a Sith family
As events moved around her, she later began to sense an order to the seeming chaos, a pattern to the feuding Sith that seemed paradoxical. Eventually, she discovered the reason: there was a power struggle within a family of Sith, headed by Vilia Calimondra. Her seven children had undertaken a challenge known as a Charge Matrica to inherit her holdings, and now the grandchildren were doing the same.

Personality and traits
Kerra Holt was a headstrong and assertive young woman who was committed to the Jedi less because of a love for Jedi ideals, and more for personal reasons: her animus against the Sith was fuelled by her childhood experience of witnessing the destruction of her family and home on Aquilaris at the hands of Sith Lord Odion. This motivated her to join the Jedi Order as a means of exacting retribution against the Sith. At the beginning of her odyssey, Kerra's worldview was starkly black-and-white, but softened and grew more nuanced once she experienced life in Sith space first-hand, with all its subtleties and contradictions.

She was able to think on her feet, as evidenced by her quick actions at Oranessan, which saved Operation: Influx from ending before it had even properly started. In fact, the entire operation was her idea: she had so impressed her mentor, Vannar Treece, by coordinating logistics for previous missions of his from the Temple, that he trusted her enough to prepare a plan for striking against Daiman. Operation Influx was the first mission she participated in in the field, which explains her sometimes rash behaviour.

Behind the scenes
The name Kerra is a contraction of Knight Errant, and started as a placeholder used by John Jackson Miller. Kerra's last name was inspired by the Andy Holt Apartments, in which Miller lived for a summer. Kerra Holt was first introduced as the primary protagonist in the new Knight Errant comic series which debuted in August 2010 with the release of Star Wars: Knight Errant 0 during Celebration V. Miller developed her story background while she was drawn by Ivan Rodriguez and colored by Michael Atiyeh.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Knight Errant: Influx
 * Star Wars: Knight Errant: Aflame
 * Knight Errant novel