Atton's face screwed up and his gut roiled as he brought the borrowed grav-loader around a corner, banking it almost forty degrees before leveling out and zigzagging down the aisle. Metal shrieked and sparks flew as he sideswiped the storage racks on either side of him, denting girders and containers. The repulsorlift generator sizzled in protest.

Despite looking like a modified landspeeder, there was almost nothing familiar about the grav-loader's controls. Worst of all were the fat, rectangular tractor prongs, which doubled the vehicle's length and formed giant blind spots to the left and right. And every time Atton bumped or scraped something with them, which was roughly every couple of seconds, the console beeped and lit up with alarms that he didn't know how to shut off.

Strapped into the passenger seat behind him, Atris was quiet except for the occasional sharp breath, cough, or sigh. Her cane rattled about in the gap between the seats and the side-hatch, as did the bag of stolen datatapes. Atton had half-forgotten she was there.

Because of Atris's exhausted state and general frailty, the grav-loader had been necessary. But after the precious minutes it took to find the vehicle, it had taken even more time wandering frantically—and destructively—through several storage rooms before he got his sense of direction. Somehow there wasn't a map to be found anywhere, but even though the maze-like layout of the various storage racks didn't match up with the old schematics, Atton was confident that he knew what direction DP Bay 97 was in.

The only thing he had going for him was that the depot was practically deserted, with no other traffic in the aisles. By now an intruder alert must have been declared, which would have gotten the workers all evacuated somewhere.

Atton wasn't counting on having the whole place to himself for long, though. Emerging from the maze of racks for a moment, his course brought him skimming past a row of ten sloppily-parked grav-loaders besides what looked to be a maintenance bay. Set into the back wall was a wide-windowed office of some kind where uniformed men were milling about—several pointing and staring at the renegade vehicle as it passed them at top speed, which was roughly eight kilometers per hour.

After leaving the scene behind, Atton spared a look to his right, noting a row of oversized doors, each one emblazoned overhead with a hangar bay's number—except that the sequence was 75, 78, 71, 80, 70...

He kept staring in slack-jawed bewilderment as he tried to figure out the order, and why it wasn't in numerical order, even ignoring a familiarly urgent, scrabbling feeling in his mind until a shrill voice went, "ATTON, UP!"

His jaw locked as he yanked back on the repulsor lever; the grav-loader rose into a nauseating hurdle that barely cleared the three-meter-high piece of equipment—whatever it was—that even his Force sense had barely noticed in time. After his fight with the squid-head, driving was dangerous enough that he might as well have been drunk, though of course it wasn't as fun.

"Sorry! Sorry, thank you!" he stammered. "Still getting the hang of this thing! We'll be fine once we get to the Hawk!"

"By what definition of fine?"

"I can fly that ship in my sleep, Grandma."

"Do not call me that."

Taken aback, Atton in his scatterbrained state could not come up with a retort. He hadn't heard such venom in her tone since her yelling match with Kaevee months earlier on Belsavis. Instead he focused on grinding his way down another lane of storage racks, around a corner, and through a connector tunnel into the next room.

And through another labyrinth to the next.

And the next—

—where, as though the Force was answering a prayer he hadn't made, he cleared a connector tunnel and came out in a rectangular staging room. Yet another storage rack, mostly empty, took up the wall to his left. To the right, boxy protrusions of equipment linked by maintenance catwalks climbed almost to the ceiling, each level striped with shadows cast by the one above. And straight ahead: a single bay door, marked DP Bay 97.

Atton stomped the accelerator petal as hard as he could, for all that would do. As he guided the grav-loader down the amazingly clear and direct path toward the door, he took note of the control panel off to the side. He'd have to get out to hit the button, or else use the Force—

His bad feeling came back, pulling his bleary eyes over to the catwalks. Fifteen meters up, something was moving through the grillwork of shadows, flowing from one patch of light to the next. Atris was saying something, but Atton's brain didn't decipher the words.

In his haste to free a hand for his blaster pistol, he inadvertently jerked the steering yoke, causing the grav-loader to lurch just as a bolt of red light shredded the windshield into glass confetti and scorched through his headrest.