Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [19]
In a word: squalor.
Coruscant—or Imperial Center, to use the approved nomenclature, not that he had ever heard anyone other than stormtroopers, mediacasters, and governmental shills do so—for the most part did a good job of hiding its seamy underside. Tourists, visiting dignitaries, merchants, and other intermittent travelers had little opportunity, and even less inclination, to peer too long and deep into the dark abysses that occupied the spaces between the cloudcutters and sky-towers. Visitors usually came to the planet to catch glimpses of holoproj glitterati, to spend more on one meal than the average Ugnaught laborer made in a standard year, to gamble away piles of credits the size of monads without a second thought. They certainly did not come to be reminded of the filth and desperation of the conveniently concealed teeming masses who dwelled beneath the inversion layers that made many of the elegant taller structures look like they were floating on clouds. They most emphatically did not want to know that immigrants in search of the shiny dream life that escaped them on their home-worlds had been coming to Coruscant in droves since before the Clone Wars. Even though one of the first fiats issued by Palpatine had severely curtailed the flow, the ecumenopolis still processed more visas in an hour than most worlds beyond the Core systems did in a month.
All those questing, hopeful, desperate, frantic beings had to live somewhere.
Den was not speciesist. He had lived among too many different kinds of sentients to put any particular one above or below another. All he asked was to be left alone to go about his business. But it was hard, sometimes, not to feel alienated from the thousands of beings who endlessly roamed the congested streets. Alienated, and somewhat superior, given the lack of personal hygiene that frequently seemed to characterize them.
Cave dwellers his kind might be, but it was absurd to compare the noctilucent beauty of an underground city like Pirin to these fetid warrens overrun with the dregs of every conceivable outworld society. The worst examples of Kubaz, Rodians, Ugnaughts, and myriad other species crowded the streets, the open-air markets and bazaars, the seedy entertainment districts, day and night, leaving, it often seemed, hardly room enough to breathe. It was a sad thing indeed when a Sullustan found himself claustrophobic.
And if all that weren’t bad enough, there were the humans.
Everywhere you looked, humans walked the narrow, twisting avenues or piloted ground and hovercraft as if they had the whole planet to themselves.
Which they just might, and soon, if the worrying rumor that the reporter had recently heard carried the slightest bit of truth.
It had come from a fairly reliable and reputable source, at least for this kind of thing: Rhinann. The dour Elomin had told Den that a plan would soon be under way, if it had not already been implemented, to round up and quarantine as many nonhumans as possible, segregating them from the human population. Den had found this hard to believe. Even though humans by far outnumbered all other individual species on Coruscant, they were hardly dominant in the aggregate. From Anzati to Zeolosian, humanoid and nonhumanoid aliens made up the vast majority of the city-planet’s population. Trying to segregate them all from humans seemed to Den to be just asking for an uprising that would make the final struggles between the Republic and the Separatists look tame.
And if that wasn’t cause for se’lahn, he didn’t know what was.
seven
Jax could sense the subtle but insistent tug of Dejah Duare’s pheromones, the chemical call to come to her aid, the plea to do whatever was needed to help her and her comrade leave the city-planet. Before the urge could become strong enough to sway him he invoked the Force, warming