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“Revealed, the importance of Tythe is. To draw into the Outer Rim additional Jedi.”

“Maybe Palpatine will heed the Council’s warnings next time.”

“Improbable. But as you say: perhaps.”

Mace swung back to Yoda. “It’s Grievous. But he can’t be planning to occupy Coruscant. There aren’t enough battle droids in the entire galaxy for that.”

“Desperate he is,” Yoda said, more to himself.

“It’s not in his programming.”

Yoda looked up. “Not Grievous—Sidious.”

Mace took a moment to answer. “If that’s true, then we’re closer to finding him than we thought. Still, he can’t believe we’d call off the search now.”

“Demoralize Coruscant, Grievous will. Harry those who live in the heights and who wield power. Send them fleeing for safer havens, the attack will. Disrupt the Senate.”

Mace paced in front of the windows. “This will only encourage Palpatine to triple the size of the clone army, construct more and more starships and fighters, strike at more worlds. With the Senate crippled, no one will oppose him.”

“Modulate, this war does. Recall every available Jedi, we must.”

“The HoloNet is down,” Mace said. “Surface communications are distorted by the defensive shields.”

Yoda nodded. “Use the beacon, we will.”

In the wake of the erratic and mostly unintelligible messages that had reached 500 Republica regarding the Separatists’ surprise attack, Dyne had considered the sub-basement to be the safest place on Coruscant. But now that the team had discovered a possible finish to the long trail they had followed from The Works, the building’s vast underground seemed the most dangerous place to be.

With a battle raging in space, and notwithstanding Mace Windu’s command to the contrary, Dyne had been tempted to suspend the search for Sidious’s lair and report back to the Intelligence division, as he had ordered the other analysts to do. But as ARC commander Valiant had pointed out, the search team’s objective was as important to the war as the actions of the ships that were protecting Coruscant.

So, while the team waited for Intelligence to deliver additional probe droids, a search of the sub-basement had begun—admittedly superficial and somewhat desultory, but only in response to the seeming impossibility of the task. Electronically tethered to the probe droids, Dyne and the commandos had performed imagings of some of the partitions and walls, and investigated numerous unlit hollows and recesses. The basement became a kind of microcosm for the entire war, with everyone on the team contributing separate skills.

Only the interpreter droid, TC-16, was at a loss for something to do.

Five Hundred Republica hadn’t sustained any follow-up jolts. Dyne had learned that the initial jolts had owed not to bombardment, but to the fall of ships destroyed at the edge of space. With thousands of cargo and passenger vessels arriving at Coruscant at any given moment, he could scarcely imagine the chaos upside. Secondary shocks that had rocked the huge building had been traced to the firing of plasma weapons concealed in 500 Republica’s cake of a crown.

Several hours into the cursory search, Dyne had been struck by the possibility that certain Coruscanti—perhaps the Sith Lord himself—could be helping to coordinate the attack. With HoloNet transmissions jammed and surface communications sabotaged by the defensive shields, he had theorized that the probe droids might be able to home in on exchanges occurring on eccentric frequencies.

He was as astonished as anyone when the hovering probe droids had led the team right back to where they had begun the search: where the footprints of their as-yet-unidentified quarry ended.

The source of the unusual frequency was determined to be directly beneath them. The droids had discovered further that the ferrocrete floor panel thought to have been the end of the trail was actually a movable platform, not unlike a turbolift, but powered hydraulically rather than by antigrav repulsor. The