Heaven's Basement

7 ABY

Coruscant.

A living world, a soon-to-be dying city.

It was every architect's wet dream, where wealth was calculated in skyscrapers and notoriety in death threats. That was Coruscant as it was always known, a perpetual entity gleaming from every travel brochure. What was just as well known and equally fantasized were the Coruscanti underlevels. No doubt you've heard of them too, maybe watched a gritty Holonet drama about some PI that bumbled his way through the neon-lit streets, read an article about the ever-evolving Deathstick trade.

Those were romanticizations of a bygone era, tall tales to keep the populace from panhandling. A populace that the media had locked far above us.

For the world didn't just stop for the under levels, not even close. There were the spire of maintenance levels, the three kilometers worth of septic tanks, the constant drip feed of industrial sewage, then, beneath it all, the small crevice that had been carved out for us.

We were the lifeblood of this place, the cogs that kept the gutters churning and not spewing up some politician's ungrateful ass.

We know all about you, but you've probably never heard of us, and there's good reason for that - you were never supposed to.

It's been that way for every tyrant I've ever known. But there was something curious about the most recent one, something that set this tyrant apart from the rest. For all the anger he had garnered while he was alive, there seemed to be a lot more worry now that he was gone.

When news of the Emperor's demise first dropped down to us it had already spread like wildfire, from planet to planet, system to system. It was the sort of gossip that had been turned over a dozen times before, the sort of headline that had already gotten hundreds of tabloids shut down. The Emperor couldn't die, there was no life before him, and, if the word of a dozen warlords was to be believed, no life after him. But it had happened, the 'Alliance' was sure to broadcast that fact on every conceivable channel, even the ones that still worked down here. It was a message of hope for some, and one of calamity for others.

Sovereign rule had always had its pitfalls, but the one thing it ensured was stability. In its place now was a vacuum of power, an invitation for the disenfranchised to break past ceilings made a generation ago. Or so it would have been.

The Black Sun was the first to make a move, and if there was one thing the Sun was good at it was making sure no one else had a move to make. Their claim to the throne was well-known though not particularly well-deserved. Here in the slums the crime syndicate had always superseded the Emperor, now they just had the legal authority to enforce it.

This isn't a story about the Sun, though. It's not about how they carried on the tradition of hunching us over in caves, leaving us to dine on the slugs that slithered our way. It's not a story about the years of oppression, about the misinformation and lies that so often spread.

It's a story about how we got out from beneath it all.

Jedah.

That was what we called him.

He had started out as a ghost story between some of our pit crew when we weren't busy draining gunk from the mainline. Jedah had been a slave that somehow escaped the caverns and managed to travel far offworld mastering all disciplines of combat from across the Galaxy. An interstellar warrior. He was back supposedly, lurking in the shadows, here to free us now that we were no longer wrapped within the Empire's evil clutches.

It was a nice story, a simple fantasy, but far from the only one. There was the one about how he killed a Cthon, wrapped himself in its skin, that that was what made him so hard to see. Another on how he had gotten his name from the 'Jedi', keepers of peace from a bygone era. A third on how maybe he had actually been apart of that mythic cult for a time and the Empire had them exterminated in an attempt to coax him out. It was the tall tale to trump all tall tales. Something we could all long for, something more. Something that could make our current plight worth the trouble, even if the prize never showed itself.

Of course, one of the Sun's honchos caught wind of it all and beat us hard enough to make sure we 'forgot' the whole thing.

Something strange happened before long though, something no number of beatings could keep quiet. One of the workers started claiming they had seen Jedah. Then another, and another, each one a rescue, some from muggings, some from being Cthon chow, all in the dead of night.

Even then I didn't buy it. You stick your neck out for someone down here, you're asking to get it snapped.

That was until the Black Sun did the worst thing they could have done in the situation - put a bounty on Jedah's head. That made him real. Now I did believe, now we all were forced to.

For a time the search for the vigilante turned us into the savages the Sun always treated us as. Brother against brother, each framing the other, all in the hopes of claiming the bounty, winning a voyage far above this level. What had once brought hope now brought greed.

Jedah stopped coming around then.

We all tried to forget the whole thing soon enough, especially when all the mistaken bounty-claimers started disappearing.

When I finally got stationed away from all of it, it wasn't without a sigh of relief. My new assignment had me posted near the mouth of the cave itself, at the edge of known society. The floors and walls were encased in a kind of hardened sludge, the sort that made it dangerous to stand in any one place too long. Towards the middle was a pillar, the lone support structure of the entire vault, nearly half a kilometer in length. Its presence had been a constant since I was born, too encrusted for anyone to ever be entirely sure what it was. All I knew was that it had punctured the septic tanks far above us long ago, a gape that was deemed too costly to ever fill properly. Any shift in its position now would lead to a flooding of the entire cavern system.

I wasn't meant to move it though, simply to scrub it down, by hand, by myself. The task would take months to complete, but the Black Sun had their deadlines, and I no longer had any fairy tales to keep me distracted.

The work was just as grueling as ever, long hours, with an intense heat always radiating off the pillar. Whether that was from something encased within or some sort of secondary radiation from the tanks above, I was never too keen to find out.

It became strange, chipping away at the gunk all by myself. The patrol of guards that would pass by to oversee my work soon became less frequent, perhaps tired by the tedium, perhaps wary of the gaping abyss behind me. Soon they stopped coming altogether, leaving me isolated on the most populated planet in the entire galaxy.

Conveniently enough, that was around the time I discovered what exactly it was that I was scrubbing down. It was a starship, a big one, had to be to be the support structure for a labyrinth of this size. It looked to be Republic-era based purely off the insignia gleaming up at me. The more I wiped, the more was revealed. It was a relic from a battle long gone, scorch marks all along its hull, just as likely earned from battle as they were garnered from its crash down here.

A starship at this level was unheard of, more unbelievable than all of Jedah's exploits put together. It was incredible, a mother lode, the kind of thing that the Black Sun was surely already aware of. But as the days passed, and no more patrols came to check up on my progress, the reality set in that maybe the Sun didn't know of the warcruiser's existence. That their guise about being concerned that the sewage-encased structure was violating some health code wasn't really a guise at all.

And that made another possibility all the realer, one that fully embraced the idea that we could strap ourselves in and fly away from this place for good.

I had been a pilot long ago, in what was almost beginning to feel like another life. Long before I had double-crossed the Black Sun and they had dumped me here. That was navigating freighters along trade routes, but the same concept still applied here and perhaps was even simplified. It wasn't so much about piloting as it was going up. That was a problem in itself, for nothing was bringing back the ship's tank of reactant fluid.

It didn't need enough thrust to break atmosphere though, just enough to break past the lowest levels of society. Now the question became how much industrial-grade sludge that would take, and I didn't have long to find out.

Keeping the cave's literal biggest secret quiet was to perhaps be the most challenging part of the endeavor. I was recruiting a group of people who had turned gray, sullen, and rough after years of excavating, a group who had turned on each other just weeks earlier in the vain hope of receiving a bounty's rewards. A group who was becoming more and more like the savage Cthon everyday. Expecting reason of the masses was foolish, but I did it anyways.

Explaining the needs and processes was easy, it was the actual transportation of a 'good' we were always so quick to drain away that was challenging. It took seven days and seven nights to fill the ship's fuel tanks, working by lantern, always fearing a late night patrol.

But no patrols ever came.

Illusion.

The tyrant of reality.

Somewhere along the way Jedah and I had started becoming the same person. As far as the rest of the cave people were concerned, maybe we always had been. And in leading them, maybe that was enough.

It was surreal being strapped into the captain's chair, huddled with a dozen beings in what was left of the cruiser's bridge. A dozen was all we could afford, a dozen was all that believed. After spending decades concealed in darkness and excrement we were finally ready to reconcile with the better half of the galaxy.

Not just other tribes, we often had to explain to the youngest of our group, but of other worlds, worlds separated by an endless void, each revolving around a pool of everlasting light. Of structures where they met in congregation, where people of all kinds had a seat at the table, a worth for being.

And we would get there by flying an ancient warship fueled by industrial sludge.

It was the tall tale to trump all tall tales. Something we could all long for, something more. Something that could make our current plight worth the trouble, even if the prize never showed itself.

End