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“Yes, yes, of course. Trust that I will see to it personally, my Lord Sidious.”

These days, an appointment with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine was not something to be taken lightly—even for a member of the so-called Loyalist Committee.

Appointment?

More an audience.

Bail Organa had just arrived on Coruscant, and was still wearing the deep blue cloak, ruffle-collared shirt, and knee-high black boots his wife had laid out for him for the trip from Alderaan. He had been away from the galactic capital for only a standard month, and could scarcely believe the disturbing changes that had taken place during his short absence.

Alderaan never seemed more a paradise, a sanctuary. Just thinking about his beautiful blue-and-white homeworld made Bail yearn to be there, yearn for the company of his loving wife.

“I’m going to need to see further identification,” the clone trooper stationed at the landing platform’s Homeworld Security checkpoint told him.

Bail motioned to the identichip he had already slotted in the scanner. “It’s all there, Sergeant. I’m a member in good standing of the Republic Senate.”

The helmeted noncom glanced at the display screen, then looked down at Bail. “So it says. But I’m still going to need to see further identification.”

Bail sighed in exasperation and fished into the breast pocket of his brocaded tunic for his credit chip.

The new Coruscant, he thought.

Faceless, blaster-wielding soldiers on the shuttle landing platforms, in the plazas, arrayed in front of banks, hotels, theaters, wherever beings gathered or mingled. Scanning the crowds, stopping anyone who fit the current possible terrorist profile, conducting searches of individuals, belongings, residences. Not on a whim, because the cloned troopers didn’t operate like that. They answered merely to their training, and the duties they performed were for the good of the Republic.

One heard rumors about antiwar demonstrations being put down by force; of disappearances and seizures of private property. Proof of such abuses of power rarely surfaced, and was quickly discredited.

The omnipresence of the soldiers seemed to bother Bail more than it did his few friends on Coruscant or his peers in the Senate. He had tried to attribute his agitation to the fact that he hailed from pacific Alderaan, but that explained only some of it. What bothered him most was the ease with which the majority of Coruscanti had acclimated to the changes. Their willingness—almost an eagerness—to surrender personal freedoms in the name of security. And a false security, at that. For while Coruscant seemed far from the war, it was also at the center of it.

Now, three years into a conflict that might have been ended as abruptly as it had begun, every new security measure was taken in stride. Except, of course, by members of those species most closely associated with the Separatist agenda—Geonosians, Muuns, Neimoidians, Gossams, and the rest—many of whom had been ostracized or forced to flee the capital. Having lived for so long in fear and ignorance, few Coruscanti stopped to question what was really going on. Least of all the Senate itself, which was so busy modifying the Constitution that it had completely abandoned its role as a balancing arm of the government.

Before the war, widespread corruption had stifled the legislative process. Bills languished, measures sat for years without being addressed, votes were protested and subjected to endless recounts … But one effect of the war had been to replace corruption and inertia with dereliction of duty. Reasoned discourse and debate had become so rare as to be archaic. In a political climate where representatives were afraid to speak their minds, it was easier—and thought to be safer—to cede power to those who at least appeared to have some grasp of the truth.

“You’re free to go,” the trooper said at last, apparently satisfied that Bail was in fact who his credentials claimed him to be.

Bail laughed to himself.

Free to go where? he wondered.

This high up on Coruscant, one couldn’t be a pedestrian.