by James Luceno
“You came here to kill someone, Aryn. I cannot spare that kind of time.”
Her face flushed, and he saw some inner battle going on behind her eyes. “I can just identify him.” She said it as if trying to convince herself. “I can find him another time. But I must have his name. This may be my only chance.” She blew out a deep breath. “I would welcome your help.”
“Been real useful so far,” he said.
“You got me here.”
“I got us blown out of space.”
“And yet here we are.”
“And here we are.”
“Let me get a name and then I’ll help you get offplanet. Agreed?”
He made up his mind, nodded. “All right, I’m with you, but we have to do this fast.”
Malgus waited for Eleena to awaken, his mind moving through possibilities, still trying to square a circle. He was beginning to think it could not be done.
Eleena emerged from the bedroom of his quarters, barely covered in a light shirt and her undergarments. As always, her beauty struck him, the grace of her movement. She smiled.
“How long did I sleep?”
“Not long,” he said.
She poured tea for both of them and sat on the floor near his feet.
“I have something I need you to do,” he said.
“Name it.”
“You will take several shuttles to Coruscant. Ten members of my security team, Imperial soldiers, will accompany you.”
In his head, he had already picked the men—Kerse’s squad—men whose discretion he knew he could trust. He continued: “I will give you a list.”
She sipped her tea, leaned her head against his calf. “What will be on this list?”
“Names and locations, mostly. Some technology and its location.”
He had pulled it all from the Imperial database while she had been sleeping.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find everyone and everything you can on that list and bring it to this ship.”
She sat up straight, looked up at him. The question was in the pools of her eyes.
“The people are to be made prisoners,” he said. “The technology confiscated as spoils of war.”
The question did not leave her eyes. She gave it voice.
“Why me, beloved? Why not your Sith?”
He ran his hand over her left lekku, and she closed her eyes in pleasure.
“Because I know I can trust you,” he said. “But I’m not yet entirely sure whom else I can trust. Not until things progress a bit further.”
She opened her eyes and pulled away from him. Concern creased her forehead. “Progress further? Are you in danger?”
“Nothing that I cannot deal with. But I need you to do this.”
She leaned back into him, her arm draped over his legs. “Then I will do it.”
The smell of her clouded his thoughts and he fought for clarity. “Tell no one else of this. Report it only as a routine transfer of cargo.”
“I will. But … why are you doing all of this?”
“I’m simply taking precautions. Go, Eleena.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
She rose, bent, and kissed first his left cheek, then his right.
“I will see you soon. What are you going to do while I am gone?”
He was going to disobey Angral’s orders yet again and return to Coruscant. “I am going hunting.”
The smell of smoke and melted plastoid hung thick in the air. Aryn and Zeerid picked their way on foot through the streets and autowalks of Coruscant. Aryn was conscious of the fact that level after level of urbanscape extended into the depths below her. She realized that she had never put a boot to solid ground on Coruscant. Not really. Instead she, like so many, simply trod the network of walkways and duracrete streets on the surface level, unaware of most that went on in the lower levels. She had lived on the planet for decades but did not know it well.
The sun pulled itself into the sky, slowly, as if it did not want to reveal the ruin. Her eye fell on a distant, isolated skyrise that leaned precipitously to one side, the attack having damaged its foundation. It, like all of Coruscant, like the entirety of the Republic, had been knocked off kilter.
In the distance, the black dots of a few aircars and speeders populated the morning sky. Sirens blared from somewhere, rescue teams still searching the wreckage, pulling the living and dead from the ruins.
Coruscant was coming to life for another day, the day after everything had changed.
As they traveled, they encountered piles of rubble, streets flooded by broken water lines, shattered valves spitting gas or fuel. It was like seeing bloody viscera, the innards of the planet.
A few faces regarded them from behind windows or from balconies high above, the uncertainty and fear in their eyes the expected aftereffect of unexpected war, but they saw far fewer people than Aryn might have imagined. She wondered if many had fled to the lower levels. Perhaps the damage was less severe there. If so, the underlevels must have been thronged.
As the morning stretched, an increasing number of vehicles filled the sky. Medical and rescue ships screamed past. Swoops and speeders, bearing one or two riders to who knew where streaked over them.
Due to her empathic sense, Aryn felt the dread in the air as a tangible thing, a pall that overhung the entire planet. It wore on her, weighed her down. The towers of duracrete and transparisteel seemed ready to fall in on her. She felt hunched, tensed in anticipation of a blow. The dread was omnipresent, an entire planet of billions of people projecting raw emotion into the air.
She could not wall them out. She did not want to wall them out. The Jedi had failed them. She deserved to feel what they felt.
“Aryn, did you hear me? Aryn?”
She came back to herself to see Zeerid standing beside an open-topped Armin speeder. It was just sitting there in the middle of the street. His face twisted with concern when he saw her expression. His straggly beard and wide eyes made him look like a religious fanatic.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m fine. It’s just … fear is everywhere. The air is full of it.”
Zeerid nodded, his lips pressed together and forming a soft line of sympathy. “I’m sorry you have to feel it, Aryn. Everyone on Coruscant knows what the Empire has done to some conquered worlds. But if they were going to do it here, I think they’d have done it already.”
“It’s only been a day,” Aryn said, but still she hoped he was right.
A squad of Imperial fighters flew high overhead, the unmistakable hum of their engines cutting through the morning’s silence.
Zeerid climbed into the speeder, stripped its storage compartment of four protein bars, a pair of macrobinoculars, and two bottles of water. He tossed a bar and bottle to Aryn.
“Eat. Drink,” he said, and ducked under the control panel.
“What are you doing?” Aryn asked him. She guzzled the water to get the grit out of her throat, then peeled the wrapper on the bar and ate.
The speeder’s engine hummed to life and Zeerid popped back up from under the instrumentation.
“I’m taking this speeder. We can’t walk all the way to the Jedi Temple. Get in.” He must have read the look on her face. “It isn’t stealing, Aryn. It’s abandoned. Come on.”
She climbed in and strapped herself into the seat. Zeerid launched the Armin into the sky.
They made rapid progress. There was little traffic. Zeerid flew at an altitude of about half a kilo. For a time, Aryn looked out and down on Coruscant, but the rubbled buildings, smoldering fires, and black holes in the urbanscape wore her down until it all began to look the same. When she realized she had become inured to the sight of the destruction, she sat back in her seat and stared out the windshield at the smoke-filled sky.
“The Temple is ahead,” Zeerid said, coming around. “There.”
When she saw it, her heart sank. A hole ope
ned in her stomach and she felt as if she were falling. She extended a hand to the safety bar and held it tight, to keep from falling.
“I’m so sorry, Aryn,” Zeerid said.
Aryn had no words. The Temple, the Jedi sanctuary that had stood for millennia, had been reduced to a mountain of smoking stone and steel. The destruction wrought by the Sith on Coruscant generally had left her pained. The destruction of the Temple left her gutted. She had to remember to breathe. She could not take her eyes from it.
Zeerid reached across the speeder and took her hand in his. She closed her fingers around his and held on as if she were sinking and he was a life ring.
“I don’t think we should set down, Aryn. No data cards survived that.”
“Fly closer, Zeerid.”
“You sure?”
She nodded, and he took the speeder in for a better look. Smoke leaked from between blackened stones. The remains of the towers lay in chunks across the ruins of the main Temple, as if they had folded over on it.
Broken columns jutted up from the ruins like broken bones. Aryn braced herself for bodies, but thankfully saw none. Instead, she saw broken pieces of statuary here and there, the jagged remains of the stone corpses of ancient Jedi Masters.
Thousands of years of honorable history reduced in a day to dust and ash and ruins by Imperial bombs. The fires would smolder for days, deep in the pile. Loss suffused her, but she was too dried out for tears.
How wonderful and terrible, she thought, was the capacity of the mind to absorb pain.
Zeerid had not released her hand, nor she his. “If your Master was here when the bombs hit, then he … he died in the blast. And it was just some anonymous Imperial pilot, Aryn. There’s no one for you to find, no one for you to hunt down.”
She was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “He did not die in a blast.”
“Aryn—”
She jerked her hand from him, and some of the grief and anger she felt sharpened her tone. “I felt it, Zeerid! I felt him die! And it was no bomb blast. It was a lightsaber. Right here.”
She touched her abdomen, and the memory of the pain she’d felt when Master Zallow had died made her wince.
Zeerid’s arm and hand still stretched across the seat toward Aryn, but he did not touch her. “I believe you. I do.”
He circled the ruins in silence. “So, what now?”
“I need to go down.”
“That is not a good idea, Aryn.”
He was probably right, but she wanted to touch it, to stand amid the rubble. She fought down the impulse and tried to quell her emotions with thought, reason. “No, don’t go down. There is another way in.”
“There’s nothing standing.”
“The Temple extends underground. One of the rooms where backup surveillance is stored is fairly deep. It may have survived the blast.”
Zeerid looked as if he wanted to protest but did not. Aryn was grateful to him for it.
“Where is the other way in?”
“Through the Works,” Aryn answered.
Malgus’s private shuttle bore him toward Coruscant’s surface. Eleena and her team had left Valor in a convoy of three shuttles an hour earlier. They would already be well into their mission.
He sat alone, the steady rasp of his respirator the only sound in the compartment. Staring at his reflection in the transparisteel window of the shuttle, he tried to sort his thoughts.
Wild ideas bounced around his brain, thoughts that he dared not latch onto for fear of where they would carry him.
He knew only one thing with certainty—Angral was wrong. The Dark Council was wrong. Perhaps even the Emperor was wrong. Peace was a mistake. Peace would cause the Empire to drift into decadence, as had the Republic. Peace would cause the Sith to become weak in their understanding of the Force, as had the Jedi. The sacking of Coruscant was evidence of that decadence, that weakness.
No, peace was atrophy. Only through conflict could potential be realized.
Malgus understood that the role of the Republic and the Jedi was merely to serve as the whetstone against which the Empire and the Sith would sharpen themselves, make themselves more deadly.
Peace, were it to come, would dull them.
But, while Malgus knew that the Empire needed war, he had yet to determine how to bring it about.
“Entering the atmosphere, my lord,” said his pilot.
He watched the fire of atmospheric entry sheathe the ship, and pondered something he recalled from his time at the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.
It was said the ancient Sith of Korriban purged their bodies with fire, learned strength through pain, encouraged growth through destruction.
There was wisdom in that, Malgus thought. Sometimes a thing could not be fixed. Instead, it had to be destroyed and remade.
“Remade,” he said, his voice harsh through the respirator. “Destroyed and remade.”
“Darth Malgus,” said the pilot over the comm. “Where shall I fly you? I do not have a flight plan.”
The fire of reentry had faded. The smolder in Malgus was growing into flames. Aryn Leneer’s unexpected presence had started him down a path he should have trod long ago. He was grateful to her for that.
Below, the cityscape of Coruscant, pockmarked and smoking here and there from Imperial bombs, came into view.
“The Jedi Temple,” he said. “Circle at one hundred meters.”
If nothing else, he would soon have his own personal war. Aryn Leneer had come to Coruscant looking for him. And he had returned looking for her.
They would meet on the rubbled grave of the Jedi Order.
Aryn pointed over the windscreen at an enormous building of duracrete and steel that could have held ten athletic stadiums. The peak of the dome stood several hundred meters high, and the innumerable venting towers and smokestacks that stuck from its surface looked like a thicket of spears. Not a single window marred the metal-and-duracrete façade.
“The Works,” Aryn said. “Or at least one of the hubs. Set down there.”
As Zeerid piloted the speeder down, Aryn looked back over the urbanscape, orienting herself to the relative position of the Jedi Temple. She could not see the actual ruins from their location—the intervening terrain blocked it—but she could see the smoke plumes.
The image of the ruined temple still haunted her memory.
Zeerid put the speeder down atop a nearby parking structure. Few other vehicles shared the structure. A single speeder and two swoops—both tipped onto their sides—were all that Aryn saw.
“Where is everyone?” Zeerid asked.
“Hiding in the lower levels, maybe. Staying home.”
Though it seemed a lifetime ago, the attack had happened only a day before. The populace was still in shock, hiding perhaps, picking up what pieces they could.
They took a lift and autowalk to the Works hub. A large gate and security station provided ingress through the ten-meter duracrete walls. While the gate remained closed, the security station stood empty. Ordinarily it would have been well guarded. Aryn and Zeerid climbed over and through unchallenged.
The mammoth structure of the hub, larger even than a Republic cruiser, loomed before them.
Zeerid drew a blaster from his hip holster, then pulled another from a hidden holster in the small of his back and offered it to Aryn. She declined.
“Thought I’d ask,” Zeerid said. “That lightsaber doesn’t do you much good at twenty meters.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said.
The arched double doors that offered entry looked like something from an ancient Alderaanian castle built for titans. They were enormous. Aryn’s Raven starfighter could have flown through them.
“Power is still on and controls are still live,” Zeerid said, examining the console on the doors.
Aryn tapped a code she’d learned years before into the console.
Somewhere invisible gears turned, the groans of giants, and the doors began to rise.
The doors opened and they entered, walking empty corridors that smelled of grease and faintly of burning. The metal floor vibrated under their feet, the snores of some enormous, unseen mechanical beast. The shaking increased as they moved deeper into the complex. Somewhere, metal ground against metal.
They cut away from the wide main corridor through which they’d entered and moved through a network of halls and offices sized not for vehicles but for sentients.
“I’ve never seen the inside of a hub,” Zeerid said. “Not much to look at. Where are all the mechanisms?”
Aryn led him through a series of deserted security checkpoints until they reached a set of soundproofed doors that opened onto the central chamber under the dome.
EARWEAR AND HELMETS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT FOR ALL NON-DROIDS read a sign on the door.
She pulled open the doors and sound poured out in a rush: the rhythmic clang of metal scraping metal, the hiss of vented air and gas, the discordant hum of hundreds of enormous engines and pumps, the beeps and whistles of maintenance droids.
Zeerid’s arms fell slack at his side. His mouth hung open.
The Works was difficult to comprehend all at once. The central chamber itself was several kilometers in diameter and hundreds of meters tall. Tiered flooring and a network of stairs and cage lifts made the whole of it look like a mad industrial artist’s take on an insect hive. Aryn always felt miniaturized when she saw it. It seemed made for an alien race ten times the size of humans: gears as large as starfighters, pipes wide enough to fly a speeder into, individual mechanisms that reached floor-to-ceiling, chains and belts hundreds of meters long. Hundreds of droids scurried, rolled, and walked among the workings, checking gauges, readouts, maintaining equipment, greasing mechanisms. The sound was overwhelming, a deafening industrial cacophony.
Compared with the advanced technology apparent elsewhere on Coruscant—with its sleek lines, compact designs, and sheer elegance—the Works looked primitive, garish in its enormity, like a throwback to ancient times when steam and combustion powered industry. But Aryn knew it was an illusion.
The Works stretched under Coruscant’s crust from pole to pole, generally accessible only through the hubs. Its pipes, lines, hoses, and conduits formed the circulatory system of the planet, through which water, heat, electricity, and any number of other necessities flowed. It represented the peak of Republic technology.