Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [15]
Den found a relatively clean spot on a street bench and sat down. The fetid air, along with the cacophony of dozens of languages being spoken, fluted, stridulated, or otherwise produced, and the sheer overload of the crowd, were all reminders that things hadn’t gone quite as well as he’d hoped after he and the droid I-Five had finally arrived, nearly a year ago, on Coruscant. The credits they’d hidden away were all but depleted, and the rent on their “luxury” lacuna would soon be due. Den had been eking out a meager living writing as a stringer for various holozines and tabloids, but even that was beginning to dry up.
This wasn’t the way he’d imagined it, not by a country light-year. Den Dhur was, after all, a name that sold news—or had been, once upon a time. But that was before the Clone Wars, and before the Battle of Drongar. Den had covered that front, and while there had written an exposé of the Bunduki teräs käsi champion Phow Ji.
Ji had been a martial arts master and, in Den’s opinion, a psychopath who liked to kill, and who used the war as an excuse for doing so. Eventually Ji had gone up single-handed against several Salissian mercenaries and an entire battalion of Separatist soldiers, and destroyed them and their transport, dying in the process.
There were some who viewed this action as heroic. Den had felt differently, along with several others of Republic Mobile Surgical Unit Seven—including Barriss Offee, the Jedi healer assigned to the Rimsoo. As a representative of her Order, she had been a particular target of Ji’s verbal as well as physical abuse. As far as Barriss and the others were concerned, Ji’s motivations had been anything but patriotic. They felt he was a brutal thug who would have been just as happy killing Republic troops as Separatists.
Such was the slant Den had taken with his story. Unfortunately, his editor, feeling that the public needed heroes at that time, had done an in-house rewrite that painted Phow Ji as a martyr, rather than a murderer. Even more unfortunately, one of the last public acts of Chancellor Palpatine before his ascension had been to dedicate a statue of Ji in Monument Plaza on Coruscant.
Den had taken his name off the rewritten article, but most editors and publishers in the Column Commons publishing district knew what his initial take on Phow Ji had been. That, coupled with the fact that Palpatine was now Emperor, and that the Emperor frowned upon any media suggesting the war had been anything less than a glorious episode in galactic history, had resulted in an industry backlash that left Den all but unemployable.
He’d tried for a time to write a novel, on the rather shaky theory that unpopular points of view could be more easily disguised in fiction. But that wasn’t where his talents lay. He was a newshawk, blast it, and to have the comlink suddenly stop buzzing was not only financially distressing but demoralizing as well. And so, bitter and even more disillusioned than usual, he’d begun frequenting the taverns and pubs in the neighborhood more and more.
For the last couple of weeks he’d been thinking seriously about chucking the whole thing and trying to get back to Sullust, somehow. Perhaps there he could again hook up with Eyar Marath, the comely troupe dancer he’d met during the HoloNet News and Entertainment tour on Drongar. She had offered him an honored position as high husband to her warren. At first he’d been unsure, because he wasn’t old enough to retire yet, no matter what the industry seemed to think. But lately the whole patriarchal gig was looking better and better. Being fêted and lionized in a comfortable cave on the homeworld certainly beat this hardscrabble existence.
There was, in fact, only one thing that had kept Den in this welter of plasteel and permacrete this long: I-5YQ. Except that Den never