At the Outland deep space station, a WA-model barmaid droid delivered another round of drinks to spacers Vash Lodestar and Niko Daedalus, courtesy of a patron at another table, the veteran space pirate Volta Gabbana.  Vash and Niko joined Volta at his table, where he introduced them to his associate, seated with him, an aging T-series tactical droid from the Clone War era, T-101.  Volta revealed that word had traveled fast that Vash and Niko had acquired Imperial credentials, and informed them of a heist in which they could exploit those credentials.  He explained that he had inside information from a contact at a black site Imperial prison in the Anoat Sector called The Crypt that authorities had arrested some spice smugglers and that their ship, containing a wealth of spice in its cargo bay, was impounded at the facility.  Volta hatched a half-baked plan to use Vash and Niko's credentials to gain entry into the prison and escape with the cargo.  Niko refined the plan by forging a requisition order for the impounded ship that they could use to extricate it with without complication.  Niko's plan also included, however, a brief return to Cloud City, which they found under "level 4 lockdown."  Imperial authorities occupied the city and refused to permit Captain Gabbana's ship, the Perfidy, to land, but allowed Niko to refuel the Nerio at a docking platform under close supervision of an Imperial officer and his stormtroopers.  The Nerio reunited with the Perfidy on the far side of the Bespin gas giant, but something -- perhaps the continued presence of the Nerio in the system, or perhaps the clandestine rendezvous between the two ships -- aroused the suspicion of the Empire, and a wing of TIE fighters chased them away.  

 

Both Niko and Volta made hasty hyperspace jumps in their respective ships back to the Outland Station starport, where Captain Gabbana left his ship, and he and T-101 joined Niko and Vash on the Nerio.  From there, they jumped to the Anoat System, where Niko's and Vash's credentials gained them access to a black site facility on the lifeless moon of the planet Pujool.  A TIE-series interceptor escorted them over a barren lunar landscape, sparsely criss-crossed by long, black metal corridors that connected distant prison compounds.  The Nerio was permitted to dock at one compound, and Niko presented his flawlessly forged requisition order to the Warden, who personally escorted the crew to an impound lot.  When the warden opened the berth indicated by Volta's contact, and included in Niko's forged requisition, instead of finding a spice-smuggler's freighter inside, they saw an old Delta-7 Aethersprite-class light interceptor, a starfighter used by the Jedi knights during the Clone Wars.  His suspicion roused, the warden had nearby prison guards take them into custody as he left to "more closely inspect" the requisition order.  Niko, Vash and Volta punched out the guards, and Niko boarded the old Jedi starfighter as Vash, Volta and T-101 ran into a nearby tube train.  The train took off through one of the metal corridors, across the barren lunar surface, toward another compound several kilometers away.  Niko followed, scraping the sides of the tunnel with the wings of the starfighter, much to the dismay of the recently awakened astromech unit, R2-Zeta-8. 

 

A pair of Imperial corrections officers approached the traincar Vash, Volta and T-101 were in from an adjoining traincar, and Vash attempted to engage them through the adjoining doors.  One corrections officer pulled Vash into the adjoining car and Volta removed the magnetic peg that joined the cars, causing his own car to screech to a halt as he and T-101 watched Vash disappear into the tunnel in the still-moving car.  Niko used the Jedi starfighter's grappling hook to tow Vash and T-101's car and commed Vash to brace himself.  Vash did so and Niko rammed the first tube-train car with the one in tow, felling the corrections officers.  Niko blasted his way toward his own ship using the Jedi starfighter, and Vash and T-101 followed.  Volta Gabbana, however, turned the other way, and took another tube train back toward the impound lot, vowing not to leave until he had acquired the spice for which they had come.  Deciding the odds too great, Niko entered the Nerio, carrying the head of the R2 unit that had been hardwired into the Jedi starfighter, and started the Nerio's engines.  Vash and T-101 ran toward the open boarding ramp, but scores of armed corrections officers interposed.  T-101 noticed an input port on a nearby computer console, and plugged in.  He opened all the cells in the compound, causing an alarm to sound, diverting the corrections officers away from the Nerio to deal with hundreds of escaping prisoners.  Vash and T-101 ran toward the open boarding ramp again, but were stopped one more time by an armed figure emerging from behind the boarding ramp:  the warden!  As he held them at bay at the point of his blaster, the durasteel door of the landing bay burst open, nearly knocking them all down.  An aged Lannik Jedi appeared in the now open doorway, and Force-pushed the warden out of their way, slamming him into a bulkhead and rendering him unconscious.  Vash and T-101 urged the Jedi to hurry aboard the Nerio with them, and as he hobbled forward, he was gunned down from behind by Imperial corrections officers returning to the landing bay.  Vash and T-101 hurried aboard the Nerio and Niko sped away from the moon.  As they set hyperspace coordinates into their nav-computer and jumped away, the last image they saw in realspace was the impounded spice freighter they had come for speeding away from the moon with Imperial TIE fighters in hot pursuit!  Once safely in hyperspace, Niko plugged the head of "Zeta," the R2 unit, into his ship's computer to see what might be in the droid's memory banks, and a hologram projected from the droid's eye began to materialize before them...