“Thought I’d ask,” Zeerid said. “That lightsaber doesn’t do you much good at twenty meters.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

The arched double doors that offered entry looked like something from an ancient Alderaanian castle built for titans. They were enormous. Aryn’s Raven starfighter could have flown through them.

“Power is still on and controls are still live,” Zeerid said, examining the console on the doors.

Aryn tapped a code she’d learned years before into the console.

Somewhere invisible gears turned, the groans of giants, and the doors began to rise.

The doors opened and they entered, walking empty corridors that smelled of grease and faintly of burning. The metal floor vibrated under their feet, the snores of some enormous, unseen mechanical beast. The shaking increased as they moved deeper into the complex. Somewhere, metal ground against metal.

They cut away from the wide main corridor through which they’d entered and moved through a network of halls and offices sized not for vehicles but for sentients.

“I’ve never seen the inside of a hub,” Zeerid said. “Not much to look at. Where are all the mechanisms?”

Aryn led him through a series of deserted security checkpoints until they reached a set of soundproofed doors that opened onto the central chamber under the dome.

EARWEAR AND HELMETS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT FOR ALL NON-DROIDS read a sign on the door.

She pulled open the doors and sound poured out in a rush: the rhythmic clang of metal scraping metal, the hiss of vented air and gas, the discordant hum of hundreds of enormous engines and pumps, the beeps and whistles of maintenance droids.

Zeerid’s arms fell slack at his side. His mouth hung open.

The Works was difficult to comprehend all at once. The central chamber itself was several kilometers in diameter and hundreds of meters tall. Tiered flooring and a network of stairs and cage lifts made the whole of it look like a mad industrial artist’s take on an insect hive. Aryn always felt miniaturized when she saw it. It seemed made for an alien race ten times the size of humans: gears as large as starfighters, pipes wide enough to fly a speeder into, individual mechanisms that reached floor-to-ceiling, chains and belts hundreds of meters long. Hundreds of droids scurried, rolled, and walked among the workings, checking gauges, readouts, maintaining equipment, greasing mechanisms. The sound was overwhelming, a deafening industrial cacophony.

Compared with the advanced technology apparent elsewhere on Coruscant—with its sleek lines, compact designs, and sheer elegance—the Works looked primitive, garish in its enormity, like a throwback to ancient times when steam and combustion powered industry. But Aryn knew it was an illusion.