The galaxy’s best-known secret (or so it’s said), Ark Station is a criminal hub in the unknown regions and a place where pirates, marauders, spice traders, and smugglers of all kinds can find safe haven. Outside of Hutt space, it is the largest criminal hub in the galaxy.
Established from the hulk of a long-unused space dock, Ark Station started as a small gathering place for illicit activities or dead drops. Its location was quickly spread around and shared pirate-to-pirate, and as its notoriety spread, so too did the amount of traffic that frequented the “derelict” station. It wasn’t long before a group of outlaws banded together to begin repairs on the station itself, hoping to get it into a working condition with breathable atmosphere and gravity.
Much to their surprise, the repairs went along much quicker and much smoother than anticipated. Within months after reconstruction began, the station became truly livable. It was then when explorers and mechanics discovered a vault of DNA samples from a heretofore unknown civilization that had built the station as a sort of colony ship, or ark. The people were long gone, even the location of their home world lost to history, and the preserved samples were inert. There was nothing more to be learned from or done from the builders. However, it was decided upon rather unceremoniously and unofficially that the structure would be known as Ark Station to commemorate their sacrifice.
And it stuck.
Up until the Skeleton Crew’s run in with Ark Station, it had been a relatively quiet and massively successful operation for various cartels and crime lords who had come to a mutual understanding of their situation and the benefits that could be gained therefrom. The largest of these criminal groups was run by a figure called Cicero, who poured an immense amount of resources into locating Sith artifacts in hopes of using them to locate the hidden Sith Empire or, at the very least, destroy said artifacts to keep them from being used against the free galaxy.
Sith are bad for business. Doesn’t matter what business you’re in. Ark Station didn’t have a standing fleet, but the plethora of frigates, battleships, and dreadnaughts that loitered around it were deterrent enough to anyone who thought they could take a few potshots at the station. That, coupled with the array of orbiting cannon emplacements, gravity well generators, and aftermarket weapons fitted to the station itself, and everyone believed Ark Station to be invulnerable.
But the Skeleton Crew attracts trouble, it seems, and as they traveled to Ark Station to deliver the Sith Holocron in their possession, the secret Sith had already begun to move their pieces into play, and execute a grander plan. Hundreds of capital ships and thousands of smaller craft dropped out of hyperspace in an instant, just outside the range of the station’s defenses, utterly destroying what little resistance was able to scramble against them.
As the Ark Station “fleet” attempted to organize, it quickly became clear that their disunity would lead to their demise, and they quickly began to disperse. As the station’s defenses crumbled and countless pirate vessels were destroyed, a fight on the inside of Ark Station raged on as Sith troops carried out an incursion to secure the artifact and destroy the station. They only succeeded at one of those goals, however, as a small, Amalgamated Hyperdyne 578-R Space Transport called the “Kepler 12” outran its pursuers, breached the blockade, and jumped to hyperspace with the Sith Holocron in hand as Ark Station erupted behind them in a final and terrible explosion.