The Underworld was not this dark, quiet, morbid place where the living go to die. The Underworld had never been more alive, more alive than even the glittering clari-crystal skyscrapers of Galactic City. The Underworld had never learned how to sleep, never had that luxury.

Two-thousand, four-hundred, and forty-two levels from the surface, the Undercity existed in a permanent false dawn; there was this sickly twilight of false luminescence that filtered down from the the level above, and the level above that, and the level above that, all two and a half thousand levels up.

Not that you could tell. Light leaked from neon signs into the soggy air. Light shimmered from holographic advertisements projected through curtains of industrial steam. Light bled from thousands upon thousands of habitation modules stacked atop one another like cells in some impossible mechanical hive. Entire avenues glowed in lurid shades of violet, crimson, and electric blue. Holoboards flickered overhead, advertising products manufactured on worlds whose names the local inhabitants had never heard.

It was all so bright, in a way that clawed at your eyes, digging into your sockets and scratching at your skull.

And yet somehow, the sound was even worse. Down here, sound had nowhere to go. It bounced off the ground and the walls and the ferrocrete sky, folding upon itself over and over until it all meld together into a single continuous noise that pressed against your ear ceaselessly.

Vendors hawked recycled protein and black market spice from stalls bolted to ancient infrastructure. Somewhere in the distance, a klaxon cycled through its rotation with the tired indifference of a thing that had been ignored for years. The grind of cargo lifts, the roar of a freighter descending through a portal high above, the percussion of a generator running somewhere inside a wall. Music leaking from a dingy cantina three streets over.

A child crying in a dialect nobody recognised. Voices and voices in a million languages, none of them trying to be understood by anyone more than a metre away. A stolen automover with a seized bearing screaming as it rounded the corner. Two men arguing outside the parts dealer in rapidfire Huttese, and somewhere above them, a flock of hawk-bats migrating between levels in a sound like distant scattered applause coming down from the heavens.

PRIESTESS stepped out of a drainage conduit and into it all with scarcely a sound.

Her zeyd-cloth cloak moved with her the ways shadows moved–not dragged, not trailed behind her long, purposeful strides, but following as if it had a mind of its own. It drank the neon, swallowing the ambient light of the street. It existed in the negative space between the bodies and the droids and the repulsorlifts idling on the curbs. Beneath it, there was a shape. Beneath the shape, there was nothing at all.

There was a gang of death stick dealers sheltering in a wet alleyway, huddled beneath a flickering holosign. One glanced in her direction, his eyes narrowing briefly. Every luminescent panel in the alley simultaneously extinguished. The sign above them burst into blue-scanned static. The dealer blinked. When the lights returned a second later, there was nobody there.

There was a vendor holding a datapad, haggling with a Duros, mid-transaction when the screen suddenly died, its light simply gone like pinched between two fingers. The vendor smacked it with a palm. The Duros looked up. By then she was already past them, ten steps deep into the crowd, and neither of them could say with any certainty that they had seen anyone at all.

The surveillance cluster mounted on a pillar swiveled on its arm as she passed beneath it. The feed, somewhere in the bowels of a Homeworld Security substation, recorded thirty-seven consecutive seconds of straight static. It resolved itself, showing an empty bystreet where there had been an empty bystreet before.

Beyond there, a tower vanished into the abyss overhead. A transit shaft climbed beyond sight. There was an old cargo elevator there, repurposed into a security checkpoint by Homeworld Security to prevent undesirables from ascending beyond their station.

A pair of armed police droids stood before the elevator, at the checkpoint cordoning off a crowd of people jostling to catch their ride, tickets and paperwork waving over their heads. The elevator’s lights winked out, the whine of its cogs and servos stuttering into a silent lull. After a long moment, it became evident that the machine was dead, and the droids began ushering the displeased crowd away, all while they boiled and shouted annoyances.

As soon as the landing was empty, the police droids froze in their place, their running lights going dark, and photoreceptors dimming, before rebooting. When their connection was restored, the elevator was long gone, trundling skyward.

She rode freight lifts that groaned beneath centuries of modifications. She crossed pedestrian bridges suspended between skyscrapers-turned-pillars whose original builders had been dead for millennia. She climbed maintenance ladders hidden within ventilation systems large enough to swallow starships.

The seedy underlevels turned into industrial sectors. The industrial sectors gave way to the commercial districts. And the commercial districts yielded to the administrative zones. The Undercity was no more, crushed beneath the first foundations of Galactic City.

Two-hundred and thirty-nine levels beneath the surface, the air was cleaner. The noise was more subdued, the lights were softer. Neon disappeared beneath regulated duracrete facades and carefully maintained illumination grids that the municipal government paid to keep burning round the clock. Security was thicker and the networks tighter, for this was close enough to the surface that Homeworld Security actually considered it the homeworld.

Not that it mattered.

There was a long security corridor with a camera mounted at the end that captured its whole length. It caught the overhead lights flickering; blacking out and reviving in sequence from the opposite end, one and then two and then three, each snapping to darkness and coming back as though it never turned off in the first place. One after another all the way until–the camera’s feed went dark–and came back, and the corridor was still there, empty as it had always been.

She had reached the transit hub. Directly above her was a portal: the Senate District was visible from here on a clear day, a cluster of domes and spires rising against the amber glow of the upper atmosphere.

Nobody noticed her enter the bustling crowds, the bureaucrats, shift workers, low-level functionaries with stress-lined faces and eyes glued on their datapads and speaking into their comlinks. Or rather, had been. She passed through a transit hub and the devices died in sequence–not all at once, but in a radius, a rolling blackout that moved with her through the atrium like the bow wave of a ship, screens going black and comms fizzling as she approached and flickering cautiously back to life as she receded.

Nobody saw her enter a shuttle.

At the surface was Galactic City. It could be all but silent, compared to the realm beneath its feet. Broad avenues and thoroughfares swept between buildings, swallowing all noise with their breadth. You could scream on one side and not be heard from the other side of the street. If not for the constant hum and drivel of airspeeder traffic, it was positively quiet.

Nor was it very bright, even as Coruscant’s pathetic sun gleamed overhead. She stalked the shadows of colonnaded facades in pale stone cladding, of Loyalist banners hanging sixty metres from crown to hem.

The surveillance network up here was a different creature entirely. The cameras were not the cheap, jury-rigged units of the lower levels but Republic Intelligence equipment, with shielded housings, redundant power feeds, fiber-optic relays that didn't so much as share a junction box with the civilian grid. The kind of equipment that failed gracefully. The kind of equipment that logged its own failures.

She crossed the Glitannai Esplanade and the camera cluster at the northern arch blacked out as she walked beneath it, its feed showing nothing but the timestamp ticking forward over a field of absolute dark. She passed a pair of plainclothes Intelligence officers near a fountain, and one of them touched the side of his coat, instinctively, the way a trained man touches a holster when something feels wrong. There was nothing to touch. He didn't even know why he'd done it.

She was a block past him before he’d even finished the gesture.

She climbed the Novaplex hotel, though nobody saw her enter, and none of the monofilament screen guards detected anything. And she exited a window, onto a maintenance ledge, barely a metre of duracrete jutting out somewhere three-fourths up the western face of the building. It was high enough to clear the surrounding buildings, but low enough to avoid the extensive security that surrounded the prestige suites on the upper to penthouse levels. She settled against the railing, and went still.

Below and ahead, the Processional Way opened up in all of its terrible grandeur.

She had seen it in memory before. A mile of broad avenue, paved in pale permacrete, starting from a public landing platform and terminating the the foot of four naked plinths where once stood solemn visage of Jedi Masters. The Jedi Temple stood there no longer. Gone were the towering spires where masters convened, gone were the chiselled reliefs depicting its long history, leaving smooth pale rectangles of negative space where the figures had been. Loyalist banners hung between every column, the red-and-black livery of the New Order billowing in dusk.

Through her eyes, she scanned the entire length of the Processional Way, and settled on an armed entourage leaving the Chancellery, moving toward the landing pad, where a government airspeeder was waiting for them.

With a glance, she checked the speeder’s navigation computer, and confirmed its destination. Her tattooed knuckles clenched, and indigo lips thinned. RI-0810’s intel was correct. The speeder lifted from the pad in a sweep of repulsor wash, banking towards the Novaplex tower.

She turned, and went back inside.

The hotel’s server room was simple enough to find–she just had to follow the network. It was accessible via a maintenance corridor that branched off the eastern service spine, behind a blast door as do all high-security facilities in the Senate District would have.

It took PRIESTESS eleven seconds to open it.

Inside, the room was cold and loud in the particular way of places that were never meant to be occupied by people. Rack upon rack of server blocks stacked floor to ceiling like some vast mechanical library, kept from overheating day and night by industrial coolers.

She moved between the racks without touching them, until she came across a squat durasteel housing roughly a metre tall, bristling with data ports on its forward surface. She knelt down before it, drew back the zeyd-cloth covering her left hand, and inspected her olive green skin under the pale lights.

A concealed port on her palm popped open, and an implanted cyberjack slithered out. It extended on its filament like a rearing snake as she guided it to the port she wanted, and seated the connection with a sound no louder than a whisper.

The server room ceased to exist. What replaced it was not vision, rather, a vision. It was a digital architecture: the entire hotel’s surveillance network laid out in something that her brain interpreted as space because it had no better visual for it. She navigated through it as a nimble frigate navigated orbital traffic, and found the external feeds first.

She caught that very same airspeeder pulling a tight arc around the building’s southern pylon before pulling onto a private landing platform on the six-hundred seventy-first floor. The landing struts hadn't finished extending before the hatch was open.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Two female Pantorans stepped onto the illuminated pad. Both were dressed in military uniform, one black and the other white but identical otherwise; finely pressed, metallic collar tabs, a thick high-waisted belt, and blue insignia printed on the left sleeve depicting a stylised rendition of a star system. She did not recognise it.

Feed to feed, level to level, she tracked them through the Novaplex's upper interior. Through the private turbolift that serviced the pad exclusively, through the short corridor on the six-hundred eighty-second level that connected to the prestige wing, and finally to a suite at the wing's far end. The kind of suite that would be reserved by someone who values privacy, and wouldn’t have cameras inside.

But these guests were certainly aliens, foreign to even the Republic, and the suite’s reservation, when she pulled it, was listed under a shell company three incorporations deep, the kind of financial origami that cost more than the suite itself. This was the handiwork of Republic Intelligence, no doubt, and Republic Intelligence had their eyes on everything they worked with.

She sat with that for a fraction of a second, then noticed that the suite’s environmental controls had been adjusted. So she logged into that instead, and found the other camera, attached to some hidden cavity in the ceiling, piggybacked on the hotel’s own environmental infrastructure the way a parasite clung to a host’s circulatory system.

Both of them were in frame, arranged around the suite's low table with the body language of people who swept rooms as a reflex and had satisfied themselves that they were alone.

“...Etah ch'urci nah’vacosehn vsabah, Ch'abcesit,” she caught the black uniformed Pantoran saying.

Except that was not the Pantoran tongue. The language did not exist in her Tranlang database, in which existed all languages in the known galaxy. So these are not Pantorans. These are Pantorans the same way the Pantoran is Pantoran.

“Csei carcir nah’turnen ch'at mohn,” replied the one in white, the Ch’abcesit.

Her skin was blue, a deep blue that can’t be discolored. Her hair was dark, black as the night sky, slicked back and fastidiously kept. It was her eyes–uniform red eyes with no irises that caught the light the way a cat’s might.

She had seen it all before. She had seen it all in the features of the Supreme Martial Commander of the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

But where Sev’rance Tann’s face, though angular, was softer and heart-shaped, this woman’s face was sharper and severe, in the way her cheekbones were high and jawline pronounced. Where Sev’rance Tann’s hair fell in relaxed, voluminous waves, this woman’s hair was falling long and straight down her back.

But these were the same species of people, beyond a shadow of the doubt. And it concerned her greatly. Why? She asked herself. Why now?

She will have to find out for herself.

PRIESTESS fried every electronic device in the suite. The protective shutters rammed down over the windows, making the two aliens jump. The lights went out next, drenching the room in complete and total pitch black darkness. The only door was locked, and its controls rendered inoperable. Every communications frequency in the building was scrambled. Lastly, she killed the environmental system, and with it, the Republic Intelligence camera.

She pulled out of the dataport, blinking as her vision of the server room was returned to her, and leaving soon after.

Making her way up the hotel, she took her time, checking, watching for any reaction from either the staff or the building itself. If there were none no matter how long she took, it would mean that her work was thorough.

It was.

It took her fifteen minutes to reach the six-hundred eighty-second floor.

She pressed her back against the corner, and opened the door.

Two blaster bolts came screaming out of the black with this high-pitched whine that sounded like a scream. Tense silence followed.

She rounded the corner, and felt for their presence. They were pressed against the blindspots of the entrance, handhelds–not blasters exactly–pointed squarely where the light of the corridor flooded into the room. She stood there, just before the threshold, and watched her cloaked, wraith-like reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows on the other side.

The lights all exploded back on.

She stepped through the threshold, and was shot at. They missed, briefly dazzled by the lights, and a half-second later their weapons were flying out of their hands, as if seized by an unseen force.

The door closed.

“You are not with the Republic,” the woman in white said. Her Tranlang module registered as Sy Bisti, a trade language used predominantly in the northwestern edge of the known galaxy, on the edge of the Unknown Regions.

“No,” she replied in Sy Bisti, having downloaded the language, “If I was, I would know who you are.”

“So you are here to find out,” the white uniformed alien slowly rose to her full height, rubbing her blue wrists as she did. She was taller than the ghost, but not by much.

“Ch'abcesit–” the other woman in black started, but was stopped by the one in white.

“I am Admiral Ar’alani,” Admiral Ar’alani announced, circling to the centre of the room, “officer of the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet, servant of the Chiss Ascendancy.”

“...I am Senior Captain Kiwu'tro'owmis,” the one in black said begrudgingly, and nothing more.

Chiss Ascendancy. Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet. Culture of self-introduction. Different naming conventions? Seniority related?

She did not introduce herself. It appeared, however, her unwilling hosts already had an idea of who she was.

“You are the Priestess?” Admiral Ar’alani questioned.

“No,” the Priestess replied, gliding to one of the fallen not-blasters and picking it up, “But that is what you know me as.”

“That is what they called you,” Ar’alani agreed, “They thought you might try something… like this.”

The Priestess frowned, tossing the weapon aside like a toy she lost interest in. Republic Intelligence was on her trail, and from the Chiss Admiral’s words, they were far closer to catching up to her than she would like.

“They are useless,” the Captain Kiwu'tro'owmis grumbled, “They said we would be safe here.”

Nowhere is safe in Galactic City. I am everywhere on Coruscant.

“Why have you come to this Republic?” the Priestess demanded. Her voice was soft and mellow, but it carried throughout the expansive suite nevertheless, “Why were you sent?”

“Do you need something to report to the nation you serve?” Admiral Ar’alani was audibly and visibly finding her confidence, as it became apparent the ghost before her was not overtly hostile.

“I serve the Republic.”

“Do you mean those who claim to be the Republic in the south?”

“That remains to be seen,” the Priestess tilted her head, “Certainly not this Republic. Until then, I serve only myself. Whether they find your body will also depend on myself.”

The Admiral didn’t move a muscle, save for a raised eyebrow and a light of certain understanding in her crimson eyes, “You serve to destroy this Republic.”

One of the not-blasters slid across the floor on its volition once the Senior Captain Kiwu'tro'owmis inched within three paces of it. She raised her hands in grudging surrender.

Ar’alani made no comment on it; “Well, perhaps there is merit in looking for alternatives.”

“Ch'abcesit–”

“–Didn’t you say we ought not to trust these people, Wutroow? The Council had awarded me complete authority over this mission.”

Captain Kiwu'tro'owmis–now Wutroow?–deflated, “You will still need to report back to them, Admiral. If we are pivoting–General Ba’kif will need to know.”

Ar’alani turned back to the ghost anyway, “The Ascendancy seeks allies, Priestess. There is a growing threat lurking in the Chaos, and if the Ascendancy falls to them, this Republic will be next.”

“This Republic is in no position to help,” the Priestess murmured, “It is besieged on all sides. It survives only because the… because its greatest threat is intent on keeping it alive for its own purposes.”

“The Confederacy,” the Admiral stated, “I am aware. It is the Confederacy who we made first contact with.”

“...”

“But the Confederacy is on the other side of the galaxy,” she continued, “Would they really see the merit in allying with us?”

“Admiral, the Sev family…”

“The Sev family’s affairs are the Sev family’s affairs, and not ours.”

The Priestess stilled imperceptibly.

Oh.

I see how it is.

“What have you already agreed on?”

Admiral Ar’alani paused, visibly thinking over whether it would be worth sharing. Standing before her was the Priestess. Terrorist, enemy agent, whatever she was, she was the most reviled hostile entity on Coruscant, pursued by just about every intelligence agency in this Republic. They had been warned multiple times that the Priestess may make an attempt on their lives.

An ‘attempt’, knowing what she did now Admiral Ar’alani could laugh at that descriptor. The Priestess wouldn’t need to attempt. If the Priestess wanted them dead, they would be dead. It was a wonder why the Chancellor wasn’t already. Perhaps his security is too tight for even the Priestess to breach?

But now it was apparent the Priestess wasn’t some mindless terrorist, but a dedicated agent pursuing her own mission, whatever it was. A mission that would see the downfall of this Republic.

“Limited fleet access and military liaisons,” Admiral Ar’alani started cautiously, as if prodding the waters, “And technology sharing.

“Technology sharing,” the Priestess repeated, “On Kuat?”

“...You are well informed,” Ar’alani said, “We have a Senior Captain posted there to supervise the tests.”

“Is that all?”

“That is the gist so far, indeed.”

“You mentioned the Confederacy. How?”

“There was a Confederate fleet–”

“Where?”

It was the first time the Priestess spoke with any amount of intensity, with any tone beyond that total flatness, and that caught the Chiss Admiral’s curiosity.

“Wutroow, the coordinates, please.”

The Captain produced a datapad-like device from a pocket, and began tapping through its screens. It worked perfectly fine.

“We don’t know their exact location,” Ar’alani explained while they waited, “But the fleet’s admiral had told us about where they could be contacted should the need arise. I did not expect you to be so interested, however. Do you work with the Confederates?”

“...That is not a Confederate fleet.”

“What?”

“–Here, take a look,” Captain Wutroow turned the device around and showed it to the Priestess. There were two sets of numbers on it; first were the coordinates of the contact point, the second were the coordinates the first set of coordinates were relative to.

PRIESTESS logged them.

Every alarm in the building suddenly went off at once. Every single light turned hideously red, while klaxons blared their baleful wails throughout every floor, corridor, and suite. In the middle of the Coruscanti night, the most prestigious hotel on the planet was made a screaming, kicking beacon at the heart of Galactic City.

“...What is this?” Admiral Ar’alani looked up, “Did the Republic finally respond? I must say it took quite some time.”

“No. This is my gift to you. For your safety.”

“Safety?” Captain Wutroow murmured, “Why would you call the Republic Intelligence while you’re still here?”

Admiral Ar’alani’s eyes widened, and an impressed smile crept up her lips, “So that we will have to try to explain to them exactly what sort of conversation was made here. You work quickly, Priestess, already trying to drive a wedge between us.”

The lights went out. The armoured shutters retracted, revealing the Coruscanti skyline once more. Went the lights returned a second later, the Priestess was gone, the only trace of her presence being the hiss of the closing door.

Admiral Ar’alani of the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet cautiously approached the window. Already the horizon was being swarmed with the floodlights of approaching shuttles and transports. She had a lot to think about; what fanciful story to tell the Republic Intelligence chief among them.