238036032-Star-Wars-A-New-Dawn-by-John-Jackson-Miller

32 John Jackson Miller
Okadiah winked and ambled off after his co- workers. Kanan did keep
the bar on occasion, but on some nights he was his own best customer.
He’d also tried his hand as bouncer, although again, he’d wound up
starting as many fights as he’d stopped. Still, this system had been closer
to a home than any he’d known in years of wandering. It would be a
hard place to leave.
But he would. The day job was wearing on him. Giving up on the
loader droids ever arriving to help, Kanan finished filling the first hovercart
and pushed it into the freight elevator.
As the doors closed behind him, he thought on it. He might miss
Okadiah’s place, yes, and he’d certainly miss Cynda. In all his travels
he’d never encountered a place quite like it. The landing bay didn’t look
like much, but he knew to watch for the big show as soon as the elevator
doors opened.
They did, a thousand meters below— and Kanan was bombarded
with a coruscating display of lights and colors. He was in one of the
countless great caverns beneath the surface. Crystal stalagmites climbed
and stalactites hung all around. Each one acted as a prism, refracting the
lights of the work crew; to move was to see kaleidoscopic change. Better
still, the crystals gave off warmth, making Cynda’s many oxygenated
caverns as bright and pleasant as parent- planet Gorse was dark and sticky.
Back before the Empire, the place had been a natural preserve. Cynda
had been the literal bright spot in the lives of Gorse’s residents; tourism
had been the moon’s— and Gorse’s— number one draw. And while Republic
scientists had learned early on that Cynda’s interior contained
massive amounts of thorilide, no one had wanted to mine for it while the
workable nightside of Gorse still held any of the substance at all. As far
as Kanan knew, no one even bothered looking for thorilide on Gorse’s
dayside, where the heat was enough to melt any droid in manufacture.
But then, almost exactly on the day that Chancellor Palpatine proclaimed
the first Galactic Empire, a report had revealed that Gorse’s
mines were exhausted. The refineries went idle. The Empire wouldn’t