Chapter 4: Coruscant Reads the Anomaly

The transport docked at the Coruscant spaceport in the grey hour before the planet's artificial dawn cycle completed itself, and Arthur descended the boarding ramp into a city that had no sky.

He stood for a moment at the ramp's base and looked up. Towers of glass and metal rose in every direction to a height that made the tallest spires of Camelot look like hearthstones, and above them rose more towers still, and above those a lattice of traffic lanes where vehicles moved like starlings in murmurations too vast and too purposeful to be called chaos, though they were very close to it. The air smelled of fuel and something electrical and, beneath both, the particular mineral coldness of a place where wind had not touched actual ground in a very long time.

Qui-Gon waited at the bottom of the ramp with his hands folded inside his cloak. He had spent the transit from the Outer Rim in quiet consultation with the Temple's communications array, and his face carried the particular composition of a man who has already prepared himself for a difficult room.