Star Wars Coruscant Nights 1 Jedi Twilight

One In the lowest levels, in the abyssal urban depths, of the ecumenopolis that was Coruscant, it was a rare thing indeed to see sunlight. For the inhabitants of the baroque and gleaming cloudcutters, skytowers and superskytowersthe latter reaching as much as two kilometers highthe sun was something taken for granted, just as were the other comforts of life. Since WeatherNet guaranteed that it never rained until dusk or later, the rich golden sunlight was simply expected, in the same way that one expected air to fill one's lungs with every breath. But hundreds of stories below the first inhabited floors of the great towers, ziggurats, and minarets, in some places actually on or under the city-planet's surface, it was another story. Here hundreds of thousands of humans and other species lived and died, sometimes without ever catching as much as a glimpse of the fabled sky. Here the light that filtered through the omnipresent gray inversion layer was wan and pallid. The rain that reached the surface was nearly always acidic, enough so at times to etch tiny channels and grooves into ferrocarbon foundations. It was hard to believe that anything at all could survive in these dismal trenches. Yet even here life, both intelligent and otherwise, had adjusted long ago to the perpetual twilight and strictured environment. At the very bottom of the chasms, in the variegated pulsing of phosphor lights and signs, stone mites, conduit worms, and other scavengers flourished on technological detritus. Duracrete slugs blindly masticated their way through rubble. Hawk-bats built nests near power converters to keep their eggs warm. Armored rats and spider-roaches scuttled and hunted through piles of trash two stories high. And millions of other species of opportunistic and parasitic organisms, from single-celled animalcules all the way up to those self-aware enough to wish they weren't, doggedly pursued their common quest for survival, little different from the struggles on a thousand different jungle worlds. Down here was where the jetsam of the galaxy, a motley collection of sentients dismissed by those above simply as "the underdwellers," eked out lives of brutality and despair. It was merely a different kind of jungle, after all. And where there's a jungle, there are always those who hunt. Even Piell had been one of the lucky ones. Born on the violence-plagued planet Lannik to an impoverished family, he had been taken by the Jedi in his infancy because of his affinity for the Force. He had been raised in the Temple, high above the poverty and misery that had once seemed the inevitable birthright of his homeworld. True, his life had been somewhat ascetic, but it had also been clean, ordered, andmost important of allit had been purposeful. It had been about something. He had been part of a cause greater than himself, one of a noble and revered Order stretching back hundreds of generations. He had been a Jedi Knight. Now he was a pariah. Those who knew him respected the diminutive humanoid for his fierce courage and fighting skills, as well they should. Had he not defeated the Red Iaro terrorist Myk'chur Zug, at the cost of an eye? Had he not survived the Battle of Geonosis, and fought many a battle for the Republic in the Clone Wars? It was truthfully said that Even Piell had never backed away from a fight in his life. Give him a lightsaber and a cause in which to ignite it, and there was no braver warrior on two legs, or four, or six. But now . . . Now it was different. Now, for the first time in his life, he knew fear. Even walked hurriedly through the colorful crowds that thronged the Zi-Zhinn Marketplace. This was a euphemistic name for an ongoing rowdy street fair on the 17th Level of an area in Sector 4805, also known as the Zi-Kree Sector, along the equatoReaves, Michael is the author of 'Star Wars Coruscant Nights 1 Jedi Twilight', published 2008 under ISBN 9780345477507 and ISBN 0345477502.