Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [21]
The Yaam Sector was nearly five thousand kilometers east, along the equatorial belt, plus about four hundred klicks north. Nick had taken a hypertrain for the first part of the journey, one of the big mag-levs that rocketed through a sealed tube at two thousand kph. Inertial dampeners protected the passengers from the high g-forces and torque, and the near vacuum in the tube reduced friction to almost zero. The result was a comfortable trip, in a little more than two and a half hours, that had taken him nearly an eighth of the way around the planet, even allowing for a detour past a large blast crater.
The bypass had slowed the hypertrain long enough for the passengers to get a good look at the devastation. The crater was seven kilometers wide, its walls and floor fused to black glass. The remnants of structures rose here and there around its edges, like melted candle stubs. There were a great many such craters pocking the urban surface, Nick knew: ghastly evidence of the Separatists’ carpet bombing of Coruscant in the final days of the war.
He’d switched at Ts’chai Station, taking a conventional monorail the rest of the way. When he’d arrived at the Yaam Depot, a member of the underground had a skimmer waiting for him, and he’d plunged into the Slums.
It was disturbing, yet fascinating, to watch the decay and decrepitude slowly grow as he piloted the skimmer down at a steep angle. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, but never before had it seemed so condensed. Around the 115th level, the air became hazy, stinging his eyes, and the smell grew noxious, to such a degree that he considered putting the canopy up. He knew this was the effect of hydrocarbons and ozone, caused by a temperature inversion layer, and that it was produced by underdwellers burning oil, wood, animal dung, and the like, to keep warm and provide power. In the sunlit world above, automated air scrubbers patrolled the upper atmosphere, keeping it reasonably clean and fresh. But no such benefits were available downlevel.
Beneath the belt of gritty brown air, it was another world—a world that Nick Rostu had come to know all too well.
Air traffic was far less plentiful down here than up there, which was good, because the drivers were far less competent. Nick narrowly missed being creamed by a landspeeder that was veering to the right so consistently, he suspected the craft’s starboard repulsor vane was malfunctioning. The pilot, a phlegmatic Ortolan, acknowledged the nearly fatal encounter with a single twitch of his blue trunk, and then was gone into the haze.
Although the buildings of the Yaam Sector were, for the most part, only cloudcutters—most of them no more than seven or eight hundred meters high, which paled next to the impressive two-thousand-plus-meter skytowers of the equatorial belt—they were set extremely close together. The Yaam Sector was one of the oldest on Coruscant; not as old as the Petrax Quarter, but old enough. A great many buildings had been built before the majority of the oceans disappeared, and the streets were narrower and winding, possibly because large ground transport vehicles hadn’t been used as extensively back then. Nick didn’t know or really care all that much about the reasons—he just knew that the constricted and vermicular routes on this part of the surface were making him intensely claustrophobic. In addition, many of the streets—more like glorified alleys, in his opinion—had a distressing tendency to come to an abrupt halt because some free spirits had decided, centuries ago, to erect a structure of some sort across them. Sometimes these had maze-like routes he could navigate gingerly through; more often they were simply dead ends, and he would have to backtrack and find a different way. It didn’t help any that the locator sensor on this skimmer was malfunctioning.
Eventually, after much retracing of his route, he reached the street he was looking