Even before the lift door opened on the hangar, Maul heard the blasters going off in a steady volley of explosions. Eogan stared at him, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the recessed lights. “What’s going on out there?”
“A firefight,” Maul said. He hadn’t expected it, but at this point, nothing came as a surprise. “Keep your head down.”
The lift opened and a blaster bolt exploded inside it, decimating the control panel behind his head. Eogan let out a startled shout. Ignoring the boy, Maul dropped into a defensive crouch and stared out at the hangar, giving himself five seconds to analyze everything that was going on in the cargo bay.
Two distinct groups were staging a pitched battle on either side of an open five-meter gap that divided the hangar floor in half. On the side nearest where they stood, a small group of Cog Hive Seven guards was exchanging fire with what appeared to be a much larger mob of prisoners, all of whom seemed to have more powerful weapons.
The prisoners were clearly winning.
Not only were they having a far better time of it—some of them, Maul noticed, were actually laughing as they fired on the guards—but they’d very nearly managed to manipulate a long docking gangway over so that it spanned the open chasm in the hangar floor, allowing them complete access to the entire hangar.
Maul wondered fleetingly why the guards didn’t simply trigger the bombs implanted inside the inmates’ hearts, and then realized that the men that he was seeing must have been the incoming prisoners.
A screaming guard ran across the floor. His face was literally on fire, his features melting even as he ran.
Things were falling apart on Cog Hive Seven.
“What do we do now?” Eogan shouted.
Maul ignored him. Great rafts of blaster smoke and burning metal hung in the air. The guards were running low on ammunition, and there didn’t seem to be any backup coming. In the midst of all this, Maul saw the enormous holovid of a Hutt perched on a repulsor platform, rolling his eyes and chortling with delight.
Jabba.
He registered the crime lord’s virtual presence here and in the same moment dismissed it as irrelevant. Whatever Jabba the Hutt was doing here in the middle of Cog Hive Seven—in person or by proxy—was a complete enigma, but it had nothing to do with his own mission.
Keeping his head down, Maul bolted across the hangar to the CLL binary load-lifter blundering heedlessly back and forth among the fray. Judging from the carbon scoring along its armored carapace, it hadn’t been completely successful in avoiding stray blasterfire. Exposed wiring and circuitry dangled from the central processor, fuming with sparks and contrails of pale gray smoke.
“Droid!” he shouted.
The thing pivoted and regarded him dully through the yellow haze.
Maul cast his mind back to the last time he’d been here with Slipher, remembering what the banker had said. “IBC yellow card security variant 377055.”
“Voice-verify?”
“Vesto Slipher,” Maul told it. “There’s a package arriving here. You’re holding it for me. Where is it?”
The droid didn’t budge. “Voice-verify?”
Rather than answering it, Maul swung himself up onto the back of the droid, casting a quick glance across the wires of the thing’s processor. His experience hacking into systems was limited, but it was sufficient to identify the manual override on the load-lifter’s primitive security system. Redirecting wires into the remaining circuits, he snapped them back into place.
The low, unwavering hum that followed seemed to take an eternity. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eogan racing toward him, dodging a hailstorm of shrapnel and landing next to the CLL unit. The boy glanced at the ongoing firefight, up at the droid, then finally back to Maul.
“What’s it doing?”
“Giving me what I came for.”
“We can’t stay here.” Eogan pointed across the hangar to where the gangway had finally bridged the gap. “They’re already coming over.” With a roar, armed prisoners started storming into the hangar as the last of the guards turned to flee. “They’ll kill us!”
“They’re indifferent to us,” Maul snapped, not sure why he was bothering to answer. He hadn’t expected the boy to survive this long, certainly not by following him across the hangar. Inmates were streaming past them on both sides, chasing the guards, heading for any still-functional turbolifts. Less than a meter away, he saw one of the corrections officers turn to glance back—just in time to catch a red bolt of energy directly in the throat, flinging him into the wall, a smoking corpse. The boy stared and made a noise like he was going to be sick.
“We have to get out of here!”
“Run if you want,” Maul told him, “or stay and die. It makes no difference to me.”
Eogan stared at him, opened his mouth, and shut it again. The thunderclap of the blasterfire had begun to recede. Maul turned back to the hangar, where the last of the prisoners were swarming their way toward the prison’s upper levels.
“Mr. Slipher,” the droid said, “here is your package.”
Opening its housing, the thing reached inside itself and handed over a featureless black shipping crate.
Maul took it from him.
It was time to go.