The familiar sound of gunship engines rattled the glass and blinds in the high-rise apartment where Terry sat on his couch, watching the datastream news on his screen. The maneuvers of Republic ships weren’t unusual in the heightened security in the aftermath of the Separatist invasion of the planet, but Terry knew something was wrong. These gunships were roaring on full power towards the Jedi Temple, a notoriously strict restricted airspace area even for routine police and military operations. Instead of a pair of gunships loitering lazily over neighborhoods to provide overwatch to clone patrols in the streets below, there were more than Terry could count. He leapt up to the window and raised the blinds, revealing squadrons of gunships and fighter escorts racing towards the Temple. Seconds later, blaster fire echoed through the cityscape from the sounds below. Shots rang out, heavy repeating blasters following the rifles.


	Flashes of light erupted from the mystical home of the Jedi as proton torpedoes struck guard posts and landing pads. A shockwave shook the building seconds later, a familiar rumbling in his core reminding him of the explosions from clone artillery blanketing the landing zones at Geonosis. He frantically looked around for other signs of fighting: were the Separatists back? They didn’t give him any advance warning. There must have been an assault on the Jedi Temple, maybe special forces dropped in from stealthy ships in orbit to decapitate the Republic’s Jedi leadership. He quickly closed the blinds and rushed to his bedroom closet, where a safe under the floor had been specifically installed for sensitive equipment. His datapad, connected to the public network, was displaying a “signal lost” message along with the viewscreen. Communications had probably been cut.


	The Separatist spy rummaged through and withdrew a set of concealed plasteel body armor, tossing it aside. His pistol belt and holster came next, along with a heavy hooded cloak to conceal his features. At the bottom of the safe were his communicators on the illegal datasteam that he had become all too familiar with during his tenure on the planet. He withdrew one, a simple disk with a button on the front and activated it: a holographic panel illuminated the room, where he scrolled to his contacts. Terry activated a secure line to his liaison with the CIS loyalist militia operating in the area, the closest thing to friendly forces he had without relying on the gangs and criminal networks in the undercity. “What is going on?” Terry demanded immediately as the blurry hologram of a bearded human appeared on the screen.

	“I don’t know,” hurriedly answered the militiaman. “The clones are out shooting in the streets, at what I’m not sure. We haven’t made any movements in a week!”

	“They’re fighting over here, too,” said Terry, looking out the window. More gunships zipped overhead, appearing to shuttle troops to a singular landing zone at the front of the Jedi Temple. “They’re dropping off clones at the Jedi Temple.”

	“The where?!” asked the militiaman, a look of shock on his face. “What the hell is going on?”

	“I don’t know, man. I’m gonna try and figure this shit out. We might need to rally and get a move on soon,” Terry answered. “Be ready for a call, get your shit in a row. Out.”

	The man quickly threw the body armor over his shirt, tightening the straps to his torso. It felt awkward on his body, too restricting after being used to operating without any protection. He clipped the pistol belt to his leg and immediately felt the weight of his drop holster dragging on his right thigh. Terry finished by donning his black, hooded robe. The agent left his room, making sure to lock his safe and door before he bolted to the end of his hallway. A small window was there, looking out across to another residential building: a drop of hundreds of meters was in between, but Terry had no time to worry about that. He climbed out the window and dropped down onto a metal fire escape by him.

	He had always felt fire escapes were fairly useless, with a climb of hundreds of meters down to floor level. Even floor level was a misnomer on Coruscant: the “street” was itself hundreds of meters above the true floor of the undercity. But Terry wasn’t climbing down, he was climbing up: a much shorter vertical distance to the roof of this building. Despite this, it took ten minutes of sprinting up the bolted metal stairs and ladders before he clambered over the top onto the roof of the structure. Night concealed his movements as he quickly crossed industrial and climate control machinery to find a vantage point. The Separatist dropped quickly into the prone beside a humming air conditioner, retrieving a monocular scope from his pocket. The Jedi Temple was too far away for him to see what was going on, but the scope zoomed in significantly: CIS research and development had produced some interesting toys besides battle droids.

	There was only one phrase Terry could utter as he saw where the gunships had been landing: a clone army had marched through the entrance and now was fighting violently across the Temple. Flashes of light from blasters and lightsabers illuminated windows and balconies. He steadied the monocular sight on the scene as another explosion somewhere else in the city rocked him.

	“What the fuck is going on?” he mouthed, face frozen in confused fear.