05. Coruscant Nights 2

Author:Street of Shadows
Format: epub

thirteen

The Ploughtekal Market was probably not the biggest on Imperial Center, but then, it was hard to say for certain, since no one had ever measured its full extent. Furthermore, its physical boundaries and the density of merchants to whom it was home were constantly shifting. Those who did their business there, and often lived there as well, were reluctant to extend much cooperation to the authorities. If they could be censused, they could be taxed.

It was said of Ploughtekal that you could find anything in the galaxy within its hive-like depths. Legal, illegal, unimaginable: it was all there for those who knew how to work the innumerable streets and multiple levels. A large number of shops were not even listed on the electronic registries. You had to find them the old-fashioned way: by walking and asking directions.

Word moved almost as fast by mouth on the streets and avenues of Ploughtekal as it did via holocast. Intel would reach the sector police of an establishment engaged in especially antisocial dealings, and by the time the cools had arrived at the indicated location, the entire business would have pulled up stakes and vanished—only to reappear somewhere else, kilometers away and levels up or down, under a completely different name and appearance. It was a game with hundreds, thousands of continually moving pieces, like a stadium full of dejarik masters all playing on one another’s games simultaneously.

It was, in other words, a place that Den Dhur considered nothing less than designer hell.

The street was narrow and crowded with merchant booths hawking everything from strips of roasted hawk-bat to risqué holos, and made even more crowded by the heterogeneous assortment of sentients appraising these wares. The cacophony of shouts, squawks, hisses, moans, stridulations, and other means of communication made Den fearful of getting an earbleed. Add to that the heady, humid reek of open-air cooking, from Gungan bouillabaisse to Wookiee luau, spices, death sticks, stimsticks, other mind-altering vectors, and, as always, the staggeringly multi-phasic stench of unwashed bodies, and the result was a full-out synesthetic assault. It made his time on Drongar seem pale by comparison.

As he walked Level H-26, Den studied the readout on the compact Multi-Tasking Assistant, or MTA, that he carried. It contained a list of all the components Jax required in order to put together a rudimentary lightsaber. They were the absolute minimum items necessary to construct the elegant and deadly instrument that identified a Jedi. A second list accommodated those components that would make the final construct not just functional, but also worthy of its owner.

The cheap pack that jounced against his back was half full. Certain parts were innocuous enough—focusing lenses and an emitter; a superconductor and a power cell—and therefore comparatively easy to obtain. Despite Ploughtekal’s resources, other components were proving either more difficult or prohibitively expensive. Slowly, methodically, the latter constraint was yielding to the reporter’s contacts or negotiating ability. Even so, Den realized glumly, without the CEC the rest of the components were pretty much useless.

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