St. Peterius
0223 Hours Standard Galactic Time | Financial District | Coruscant
Brutalist megastructures. Neo-gothic spires. A horizont of iron.
They stretch for kilometers, down into darkness below, and up into the darkness above.
But it is not dark. It is never dark. An army of a million lights makes it so.
Thousands of windows, pinpricks of flimsy variations of white, like reflections of starlit water. Silent, stationary sentinels. Keepers of the skyline.
And yet, everything moves. Flashes. Bursts. Zig-zags. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal.
A carnival of vehicles whirs past. Invisible roadways hum with the motion of countless floating steel boxes. Rectangular, angular, circular, serpentine, each a silhouette of blackened chrome against a nocturnal backdrop. Shapes blurred in speed, sliding across a void fabric.
Above them, larger vessels, ovals, orbs, obelisks, ascend into the metal-pierced heavens, vanishing into orbit and beyond.
Yet even in the dead of night, the scene drowns in color. Neon crimson. Toxic green. Deep violet. Flickering cobalt.
Holograms, flashing signs, glowing placards, advertisements draped across facades, strung along electronic banners.
Some blink. Others flicker. A few burn constant, blinding symbols etched into glass and durasteel.
But all of it pales in comparison to the sound.
Silence died here long ago.
Engines hum and howl, a chorus of propulsion, throttling up, throttling down.
Music that isn't music. Music that is. Techno overlaid with ad jingles, clashing against neoclassical overtures, entangled with synthesized voices speaking every language in the galaxy.
The city speaks. The buildings. The towers. The spires. The windows. The vehicles. The lights.
They whisper. They shout. They chant. They argue. They wail.
All of it fuses into a single, indistinguishable vibration. A pulse. A breath.
This was Coruscant.
The splash of ruptured glass. A faint sparkle. No sound, its splintering drowned beneath the ever-present hum.
A single silhouette. Humanoid.
It falls. And falls. And falls further.
It spins, it twists, it sails through the air as it tumbles.
It splatters against a rooftop, kilometers below.
No noise. No reaction. No one even noticed.
- 7 Hours Later -
"I can't believe it. Oh, this is just so tragic..." said a human woman, her eyes replaced by an electrovisor that covered half her face, the other half twisted in visible anguish.
"First that group from Cademimu... now this? What is happening?"
"Wasn't he from Ord Cantrell?" another voice chimed in, a bulkier, middle-aged female, a secretary from a few floors below, draped in bright crimson.
"Hush now." The first woman raised her index finger to her lips and muttered, "Yes... he was the son of local royalty. His family's been importing into the Core Worlds for generations. Did you hear what they said happened there?"
The two women fell silent, leaning in close. Then the lady in red whispered.
"You mean... the Empire?"
Before them lay a shattered glass pane, once sealing the now-exposed panel that stared out into the skyline.
Only a few jagged remnants clung to the frame, splintered and trembling, now coated in a pulsing film of bluish energy from an active containment shield.
This was the 1,678th floor of the Central Novaplex Hotel, a level dedicated to traders, merchants, and major corporate players. Now, it crawled with uniformed figures: constables and private security alike, combing the scene before a growing crowd of anxious onlookers.
Murder was nothing unusual on Coruscant. But this? The circumstances were foul.
The inclination was worse.
Whispers had already begun to spread: That Ord Cantrell had been ransacked. Now a senior representative of a major family governing both trade, local hotels and resorts alike had just been assassinated.
And it wasn't just him.
It was less rumor and more bone-chilling confirmation: radical Imperial remnants had descended on Cademimu V only a month or so earlier. An entire charter of official envoys to the Celanon Spur trade route had been killed by a strange, untraceable neurotoxin, administered during a simple elevator ride a few blocks across , just days before.
People started talking. People started being afraid.
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