The district adjacent to their Coronet sector had long been an urban ghost. Once, hundreds of years ago, it was the pulse of Corellia—a complex of giant factories where warships for the Republic fleet were built and repaired day and night. Thousands of workers, the hum of machines, the roar of smelting furnaces, transports with raw materials, finished destroyers heading into space—it was a city within a city, a symbol of power and technology. As long as wars raged on the periphery, as long as the Republic needed a fleet, the quarter lived.
And then the wars subsided. Military orders began to shrink. The need for giant ground facilities disappeared. Factories one by one began to close, to be mothballed, and then simply abandoned to their fate. Workers dispersed, power grids were shut down, and the huge workshops fell silent.
City authorities talked for years about grand plans: to demolish the outdated buildings and build a new residential area with parks, or a technopark, or even a museum complex in their place. But something always stood in the way—either the budget went to more urgent needs, or the administration changed, or disputes arose over land ownership. Projects gathered dust in archives, and the quarter slowly rusted.
Alex saw entire blocks of underground premises on an old plan—old workshops with high vaults, endless warehouses, power nodes, tangled with cables as thick as a human arm. All this was supposed to lie right beneath his feet.
"There must be access points," he muttered, studying the diagram of ventilation shafts that snaked between the levels like metal snakes. "Here, the old air duct system... They couldn't have sealed all the entrances."
Three days later, Alex stood before a rusty grate in a service alley, where even during the day, perpetual twilight reigned between the tall walls of buildings. The air here was heavy. He armed himself with homemade tools—a plasma cutter assembled from spare parts and a portable flashlight that his uncle considered lost. The metal yielded surprisingly easily—the bolts crumbled into rusty dust at the first touch, as if time had turned the steel into sand.
The narrow shaft met him with the breath of the past—the air smelled of stagnant moisture, dust, and something else, indefinably ancient. The metal walls were covered with condensation, which dripped from the ceiling with a steady, hypnotic rhythm. Alex squeezed inside, feeling the cold metal scratch his back through his clothes. The flashlight beam trembled in his hand, snatching pipes and cable bundles from the pitch darkness, covered with a thick, velvety layer of dust that rose in clouds with every movement.
The grate at the end of the shaft hung on one hinge, swaying from a slight movement of air with a quiet creak. Alex carefully pushed aside the metal bars, and they gave way with a drawn-out groan.
What he saw made him forget to breathe.
Before him stretched a huge hall, the ceiling of which was lost in darkness somewhere high above. The air here was different—colder. Rows of massive columns receded into the distance, lost in the depths of the hall, supporting vaults covered with intricate technical patterns that, in the light of the flashlight, seemed alive, pulsating. The walls were lined with some dark metal that absorbed light, reflecting it only with dim glints.
Alex took a few cautious steps forward, and the sound of his footsteps echoed in the emptiness, reflecting many times off the walls and columns, creating the illusion of invisible companions. The floor was paved with slabs of an unknown material—not metal, not stone, but something in between, which felt both hard and slightly elastic underfoot. Between the slabs, shards of glass and metal shavings crunched, making a quiet, almost musical chime with every step.
Somewhere in the depths of the hall, a quiet dripping could be heard—water seeped through the ceiling, falling into invisible puddles with a steady, hypnotic rhythm.
Between the columns stood rows of abandoned equipment, covered with a thick layer of dust, which seemed silvery in the flashlight beam. Alex approached the nearest machine—a massive device with numerous manipulators and lenses that gleamed in the darkness like dead eyes. Even under the layer of dust, it was clear that this was something completely different from modern machines. The lines were smoother, more organic, the materials—more perfect, and the complexity of the design was astounding. It was not just technology—it was art, frozen in metal.
"What were you doing?" he whispered, running his hand over the smooth surface of the control panel.
Suddenly, a metallic clang echoed from somewhere in the depths, sharp and unexpected in the dead silence. Alex froze, like a statue, turning off the flashlight with trembling fingers. In absolute darkness, every sound seemed deafening—his own breathing, the beating of his heart, the rustle of clothes. Another clang, then a drawn-out scrape of metal on stone, which made his teeth ache from unpleasant vibrations.
His heart pounded so loudly that it seemed to be audible throughout the hall. Alex slowly turned on the flashlight, covering it with his hand so that the light seeped through his fingers in weak rays, and looked around. A shadow flickered between the distant columns—something large and angular, moving with mechanical clumsiness.
A rogue droid. Alex had heard stories about machines that continued to operate in abandoned places, gradually going mad from isolation and lack of maintenance. Their programs degraded, their logic circuits short-circuited, and they became unpredictable and dangerous.
Muttering came from the darkness—a distorted electronic voice, uttering fragments of phrases: "...procedure number... seven-seven-four... initialization... error... error... where... where are the operators?... shift ended... no... not ended... work... always work..." The voice sometimes faded to a whisper, sometimes rose to a mechanical scream, creating a creepy cacophony in the empty hall.
He began to slowly back away towards the exit, trying not to make noise. The shadow moved between the columns, accompanied by the creak of damaged servos—the sound of metal rubbing against metal without lubrication, piercing and painful. Alex discerned the silhouette—an old loading droid, one of whose manipulators dragged along the floor, leaving a furrow in the dust and sparks from contact with the stone slabs.
"...where is the cargo?... cargo number... number... memory error... reboot... failed... "—the muttering became more disjointed, interspersed with static and mechanical sounds.
Fortunately, the machine seemed not to have noticed him—its sensors had probably failed long ago. Alex reached the ventilation shaft and hid in its protective darkness, but thoughts of the discovered hall did not leave him. Even crawling back through the narrow tunnel, where every sound echoed off the walls, he thought about what he had seen—about the perfection of the abandoned machines, about the secrets they held.
The next day he returned, better prepared. In his backpack were a rope, additional flashlights with spare batteries, a simple life form scanner borrowed from his uncle's workshop, some food, and a thermos of hot tea—the only comfort in the cold underground. Alex made a plan—to circle the hall along the perimeter, staying in the shadows near the walls, avoiding the central part where the damaged droid wandered with its mad muttering.
The descent for the second time seemed even more tense. The shaft seemed to narrow, the metal walls pressed against his shoulders, and the air became more stuffy. Drops of condensation fell on the back of his neck, running down his collar in cold streams. The sound of his own breathing in the confined space seemed monstrously loud, and the thought that the way back might be cut off made him speed up, risking getting stuck in particularly narrow places.
Along the walls of the hall stretched rows of smaller rooms—workshops, warehouses, laboratories, each holding its secrets. Most of the rooms were empty, but in some, equipment remained, covered with dust that rose in clouds with every movement, causing coughing and watery eyes.
In one of the rooms, Alex found a whole collection of tools of incredible precision. Chisels that could carve details the size of a grain of sand, their blades gleaming in the flashlight beam, not dulled by years. Measuring instruments with accuracy capable of distinguishing fractions of an atom. Materials he couldn't even identify—metals with iridescent sheens, crystals emitting a faint internal glow, polymers that felt both hard and soft to the touch.
But the real discovery awaited him in a locked metal cabinet, which he had opened with the same plasma cutter. Inside, in individual cells with anti-static backing, lay crystalline matrices. They were clean, without a single scratch, and glowed faintly from within with a steady blue light, as if they had been charged only yesterday.
Dust lay unevenly on the workbenches, and in some places, there were visible prints—as if someone had touched the surface quite recently.
In one of the workshops, he discovered a palm-sized device covered in symbols that resembled no known alphabet. The markings were carved with incredible precision, each line seeming alive, pulsing in the lantern light. When Alex picked it up, the surface glowed faintly with a bluish light, warm and pleasant, and a shimmering hologram appeared in the air – a diagram of some complex mechanism, its parts slowly rotating to reveal its inner workings.
"It reacts to touch," he muttered, turning the device in his hands. The hologram obediently rotated with him, showing the mechanism from different angles, each turn revealing new details, new levels of complexity.
Nearby, in a desk drawer, beneath a layer of worn-out schematics, lay something more understandable and no less valuable: three portable multispectral scanners. These were used by dock inspectors to analyze the integrity of starship hulls. Their casings were covered in scratches, but the indicators on the side panel, once the dust was wiped away, lit up green.
From the depths of the hall, the muttering of a feral droid could be heard periodically: "...shift number... twelve hundred... or... no... error... where is everyone?... why is it dark?... turn on the lights... command not executed... system damaged... repair... repair required..." The voice sometimes grew louder, sometimes fainter, accompanied by the grinding of metal and the hiss of damaged hydraulic systems.
Alex chose a small room in the far corner of the hall. The room was relatively clean, the air here didn't seem as heavy, and the single entrance allowed him to control approaches. He brought in several waterproof crates, a camping table, and a battery-powered lamp, creating a semblance of a field laboratory.
On improvised shelves, cobbled together from crate fragments, a collection was already being assembled: a row of priceless crystals in containers, neatly arranged tools, scanners. These items could be worth a considerable sum. This was his first capital.
Every few days, he descended into the dungeon, overcoming his claustrophobia in the narrow shaft, where metal creaked under his body's weight, and condensation dripped onto his neck in cold drops. Gradually, he learned to move in the dark, to distinguish sounds – the harmless dripping of water from the ominous scraping of an approaching droid, the echo of his own steps from foreign sounds. He developed a map of the underground levels, marking safe paths and places to avoid.
One day, while examining a particularly interesting device – something like a material analyzer that responded to touch with a soft hum – Alex heard voices from above. The sounds penetrated through the concrete mass, muffled and distorted, but clear enough to understand – there were people upstairs. He froze like a statue, listening to every sound. Heavy footsteps, the creak of equipment, muffled commands.
"Scanners show activity in sector seven," a male voice came through, distorted by interference. "Could be smugglers. Or vagrants found a way in."
City security. Alex felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. Quickly packing the most valuable finds into a waterproof bag, he extinguished the lamp, and the room plunged into absolute darkness. In complete darkness, he made his way to a backup exit he had discovered a week ago – an old drainage pipe leading to the river. The path to it lay through a particularly narrow corridor where he had to crawl on all fours, and the walls were covered in slime of unknown origin.
The pipe turned out to be a real test. It was narrow, barely wider than his shoulders, and half-flooded with icy water that seeped through cracks in the concrete. Alex crawled knee-deep in water that was so cold it took his breath away. The pipe walls were slippery from years of accumulated slime. Every meter was a struggle, his knees and elbows ached from contact with the rough concrete, and the thought that the pipe might narrow and he would get stuck here forever made his heart beat faster.
Somewhere in the middle of the path, the flashlight began to flicker – the battery was dying. In the flickering light, the pipe walls seemed alive, pulsing, and shadows danced, creating an illusion of movement. The sound of his own breathing, amplified by the acoustics of the confined space, seemed monstrously loud. Water splashed with every movement, echoes bounced off the walls and returned as distorted whispers.
When he finally emerged through a grate at the river pier, the sun was already setting, painting the sky in red hues. Alex was soaked to the bone, frozen, and exhausted, his clothes clinging to his body, his hair hanging in icicles, but in the waterproof bag lay strange devices. The air on the surface seemed incredibly fresh and clean after the stale atmosphere of the dungeon.
At home, he washed himself for a long time in a hot shower, trying to wash away not only the dirt and smells of the dungeon but also the feeling that the walls were pressing in from all sides. The hot water burned his skin, steam filled the bathroom, but even here, in safety, he felt the ghostly presence of ancient corridors, heard the echo of the droid's mad muttering: "...where is everyone?... why is it so quiet?... must work... must work...".
But the things he had brought out from there, he believed, were worth it.