Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [89]
Unequipped to defend itself against the onslaught, tattered Red Squadron banked broadly to the north, evading plasma beams and flak from exploding heat seekers. Anakin and Obi-Wan paid out the last of their proton torpedoes in futile attempts to save Reds Three, Four, and Five. Bursts from their laser cannons crippled two enemy speeders and countless droid fighters, sending them crashing into the contaminated terrain. R4-P17 howled as Obi-Wan twisted the starfighter through violent air-bursts and superheated clouds of billowing smoke.
Red Six vanished.
When they had juked their way through the worst of it, Anakin came alongside Obi-Wan.
It was just the two of them now.
“Point three-oh,” Anakin said. “On the landing platform.”
Obi-Wan gazed out the right side of the cockpit at what had been an enormous plasma-generating facility. Fractured containment domes and adjacent roofless structures revealed toppled extraction shafts, exploded activators, and tumbled walkways. In the center of the complex stood an elevated square of corroded ferrocrete, crowded with enemy fighter craft and bearing a single Geonosian fantail of distinctive design.
“Dooku’s sloop.”
The words had scarcely left Obi-Wan’s mouth when battle droids began to gush from the facility and out onto the landing platform. Bolts from the droids’ blasters clawed at the pair of prowling starfighters.
“I guess we’re not going in through the front door,” Obi-Wan said.
“There’s another way,” Anakin said, as they were emerging from their flyby. “We go in through the north dome.”
Obi-Wan looked over his left shoulder at the partially collapsed hemisphere. The lid that had once topped the plasma containment structure was long gone, and the resultant circular opening was large enough for a starfighter to thread.
Obi-Wan had misgivings, nevertheless.
“What about residual radiation inside the dome?”
“Radiation?” Anakin laughed. “The maneuver alone will probably kill us!”
With its fifty-three skydocks, hundreds of private turbolifts, arrays of hidden security armaments, and towering atria, 500 Republica was a world unto itself. Containing more technology than many Outer Rim worlds and more residents than some, the sky-piercing structure was the unrivaled gem of the Senate District, and the elegant cynosure of the district’s prestigious Ambassadorial Sector.
What had begun as a stately building in the classic style had, over the course of centuries, become a veritable mountain of steps and setbacks—some with flat roofs, others as gently rounded as shoulders, and still others as massive as any structure in the district. Up and up they climbed, profuse, organic, in seeming competition for Coruscant’s sunlight, culminating in a graceful crown, banded with penthouses and topped by a lithe spire. Gilded by the rising sun, its head in the clouds, buttressed by the towers that had allowed it to outgrow all its neighbors, 500 Republica was the lofty vantage from which a privileged few could actually gaze down on Coruscant.
Which was precisely why the building had become the landmark the galaxy’s disenfranchised pointed to when they spoke of Coruscant’s disproportionate wealth and elitism. Why 500 Republica was viewed by many as more emblematic of the bloated, indulgent Senate than the Senate’s own squat mushroom of a home.
Mace could feel the oppressive weight of the structure bearing down on him as the team entered 500 Republica’s level-one sub-basement—square kilometers of supportive ferrocrete and durasteel, crammed with whining, whirring machines that kept the tower stable, aloft, secure, climate-controlled, and supplied with water and power. As deep as it was, the sub-basement was still a hundred meters above Coruscant’s true underground, and twice that above the original surface of the planet.
The team had had to wait hours for Republica security to grant them permission to enter and carry on with the investigation. For a time, Mace had considered appealing