Entry Six – Days after Geonosis, Fourteen
There has been an incident. Incident. Such an anodyne term, one that spreads dishonesty through its innate blandness. No, I will not use it any further, not in these recollections.
Starting over then. There has been a bombing. Yes, that is the truth, harsh and stark as it must be. It conveys at worst the least implication of the unfolding horrors.
The bombing is simple enough to describe, frightfully so in truth. The underworld police figured it out quickly, and I have no reason to fault their analysis. The terrorists, unidentified for now, simply added several bottles full of industrial grade explosives alongside empty ones in a box carried by an ASP assigned to pick up used liquor bottles and take them for recycling. The bombers waited until the oblivious labor droid entered a bar primarily frequented by Judicial Department veterans and then triggered the detonation.
Thankfully the ASP conducted its rounds in the morning, when traffic was light. It would have been much worse on a busy evening. It seems a ridiculous thing to be thankful for, considering the consequences, but I must take whatever blessings I can find for now. Anything to push back against the frigid toll of eight dead, nine seriously wounded. We managed to save eight of them.
I have learned several things today. I need to record them now, to make certain I remember them. There would be a price to pay should I need a reminder, so I must not allow myself to forget. First among these things is that I was wrong about the terrorist threat. The underworld police were right, the threat is deathly real. The officers are enraged at this attack. They consider the Judicials part of some unspoken brotherhood of lawmen. They intend to extract a price in blood, I can feel it around them. I fear that if they find the ones responsible they will never come before the courts. Two weeks only into this war, and my eyes have opened to such wretched possibilities. Has it dragged us down so far so fast? I do not know. Some part of me, a part that I am not certain I should trust, carries the suspicion that much of this is simply the nature of the underworld, that there have always been debts paid in blood at the bottom of the Bucket. Even so, I never expected to encounter such sentiments spoken aloud on Coruscant.
Another lesson learned is that I cannot carry with me any expectations regarding emergency services at this depth. The underworld police do have medical droids on staff, and they are decent models, if rather outdated. Some of the officers are also surprisingly skilled at deploying first aid. Yet when I jumped out of the passenger seat of Morne's speeder I was the only doctor present, and no others arrived subsequently.
I can say I saved two lives today. Something to hold onto against the hardships and the loss. One by preventing a droid from attempting an extremely high risk neural extraction procedure because it was unaware of the new neural clotting method developed four years ago. The other by conducting experimental field surgery on a green-skinned humanoid who despite an outward appearance at least as close to human baseline as my own had a completely alternative organ positioning. My best way to describe the arrangement was as if the profile of a human-sized aquatic quadruped was displaced into a humanoid frame. Her species, which her retired sector ranger husband told me is named Ellne, was not in my field reference database. He claimed he liberated her from slavery two decades ago out past Rattatak and knew nothing of her true origins. Unfortunately it is rather impossible to ask any questions of a person anesthetized to unconsciousness while a six inch spike of jagged durasteel shrapnel is extracted from their liver. I can only trust to the Force that the drug cocktail I formulated on the fly based on her genetic print has no unforeseen side effects. The next few days will tell.
The Bucket does have hospitals, something I discovered by riding with the medivac speeder. Technically, I believe that action was outside my jurisdiction, but even here Jedi status carries some privileges. My presence was not questioned. The ride was regrettably lengthy and, due to aged compensators, not particularly smooth. I did what I could to keep the patients stable, but I fear that had we been transporting a case in immediate need the nearly twenty-five minute ride would have overwhelmed anything that could have been done. As for the medcenter itself, it betrayed the expected combination of overburdened and understaffed from the first glance. The rest was merely confirmation. I suspect that my own credentials rate out above any of the doctors on staff, a highly distressing possibility. Medical Corps training is some of the best in the galaxy, of course, and it is common for me to exceed the prestige of peers my own age, but there were those here with several times my career experience. I should not have been in a position to override them.
Within the confines of that hospital, immersed in a situation where I understood exactly the difference between what ought to be and what was rather than merely intuiting it, struck hard. The measure of it is so much clearer now, the deficiency made manifest. It is very late, but sleep eludes me. And that is in spite of foolishly agreeing to join the underworld police at one of their local haunts while they tried to blunt the damage of the day in the ancient way; with alcohol. Thankfully I indulged only lightly, and retained the presence of mind to leave before the various amorous hints segued into obvious advances. Though I cannot say I was not tempted, a little.
By the Force! What a thing to think. This has cut deeper than I realized.
It's the neglect. That's the heart of this. I cannot say I was unaware of it, at least intellectually. The medical press is quite good at highlighting points of concentrated misery, and even it was not above criticism of ineffectual Senate activity. I think it is the proximity that strikes hardest. Reorient the artificial gravity and the walk from here to the surface along the side of a portal would not take even a day. On a priority speeder route I could be back in the Jedi Temple in less time than it took to reach that hospital. The scale too, shocks me. I joined several crisis response deployments during my training, landed in the ghostly spaceports and dilapidated industrial colonies far out in the Rim that bear the same uncaring decay, but they were always small, isolated. Never more than a few million people at once. There is no real census of the Underworld, but reasonable estimates suggest that the Bucket alone, twenty-five levels, house almost twenty billion residents. The underworld as a whole has a population exceeding that of many Outer Rim Sectors, and yet though it sits at the center of the galaxy it has been allowed to decay to the very brink.
No wonder there are Separatist sympathies. If anything, it is surprising it is not much worse. Coruscanti are known for their cynical resignation, and I suspect it may be only that feature of their character that keeps these lower levels from open revolt. Thinking upon it now, the mission Master Rancisis gave to me carries great importance. I have drafted my first summary report to him just now, cautioning the absolute importance of maintaining the flow of resources. I suspect any serious shortage of critical supplies, even of limited duration, could lead to mass riots or perhaps a full-fledged popular uprising. I now understand Officer Morne's disappointment at losing a Jedi Knight's support.
Much as it hurts to acknowledge, it is far beyond my power to change this alone. Instead, I must trust in the Force and do all that I can. No matter how overwhelming, a task can never succeed if it is not begun. If I can earn the trust of the populace then perhaps I can borrow enough strength to catalyze a change.
Notes
Separatist bombings on Coruscant are an established feature of the Clone Wars, with varying levels of sophistication. Using a basic labor droid like an ASP as a walking bomb seems like an obvious Separatist tactic (they used specially designed droids of this nature later in the war to disrupt the power grid).
I have simply made up a population figure for the Bucket that seems reasonable to me. I figure the underworld probably has roughly 1 trillion inhabitants, giving it a total population roughly equal to that of Galactic City on the 'surface.' The Bucket's twenty billion would therefore be about 2% of the total, which makes it fairly high density since it represents only about 0.5% of the total underworld, though not drastically so since a substantial portion of the underworld is functionally uninhabited.