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Shadow of Maul: 2 : Game Tactics

What is it ? : Two Boots and Captain Brander Lawson are doing an unauthorised stakeout of Nico Deemis and see him meeting with a droid, while Lawson realises he's missing another of his sons games. The droid wants to pay 20 million imperial credits for weapons, and Lawson knows that much money will not only disrupt the order of the underworld, but also draw Imperial attention. Lawson follows the droid as it leaves knowing that Two Boots being a standard issue police droid will be obvious, following it through the streets and pausing at a noodle stand when he thinks it has spotted him.
He follows it into a subway train transit station, and spots it boarding a train and Two Boots warns him not to follow, but he leaps through the doors just as the train departs, and finds himself in an empty carriage. And is surprised when the droid ambushes him having recognised he was tailing it.
He fights the droid as it realises he's police, telling him "they" were told that the Janix Civil Defence Force was irrelevant. Two Boots brings his speeder parallel to the train, and shoots destroying the droid, but Lawson thinks they can pin down the exchange when Two Boots retrieves the droids memory drive.
Nico Deemis is meeting at the spaceport with the contact, they've brought the money, he's got the weapons stored nearby. The contact demands to know what he's done with their droid, but Deemis denies all knowledge, but Looti Vario arrives having heard of the deal and wanting a share of it. The contact leaves because Janix is too chaotic a place to do business in and takes his money with him.
Lawson is watching and happy that the deal has failed, and knows Deemis will think Vario was behind it falling through. Lawson thinks about one of his sons favourite players, a physically small player who he watched win a game by causing other players to turn on each other and cause damage which allowed him to score the goal by controlling a broken field.
Above Janix, Mauls stolen ship requests landing at the metal yards, and lands meeting with Ccorn and Icarus, the two Zabrak with similar tattoos and markings to him, he orders the stolen ship to be melted so no one knows he is here until it's too late. . . .

High Points : The style of Janix as a cyberpunk city is never greater than Lawson tailing the droid through the streets and stopping at a noodle stand to avoid being spotted, it's straight out of Blade Runner. Even the Metal Yards at the end, big firey industry suits the design,
There's also a line of dialogue that I adored, while Lawson is on the train fighting the droid, the window gets smashed and he can see Two Boots levelling his blaster at the droid he's fighting, and we see him think "Now it's droid against droid. Mine wins.", felt totally noir, and played into the detective working the streets aesthetic the story is giving us.

Low Points : But once again I'm not seeing Lawsons view of Janix, his line that it's a "city hardwired for disorder" really doesn't match with the dad being late for his sons sports game that is threaded throughout. While this might just be showing that like every city, Janix has it's darker side, but Lawson straddles the two sides, while feeling the entire city is corrupt. He obviously chose Janix as a decent place to bring up his son, but somehow has come to see it as dangerous and crime filled, makes me wonder what happened between these two things to make him so jaded.

So what do you really think ? : I liked this one as well, I said from the first episode of Maul: Shadow Lord that I'd be totally into a Star Wars Police Procedural with Brander Lawson and Two Boots, and I'm kind of getting that. I love his plan, that by disrupting the deal, not by raiding it, but by letting the criminal opposition know, it's collapse and keep things stable on Janix. I would have thought that getting a chance to arrest Deemis would have been better, but perhaps things were just moving too quickly for him to get that organised, and as mentioned earlier in the issue he still thinks there are moles within the Janix police, so Deemis would know about a raid before they even left the station. But is there actually a mole? (I think probably, the last was just too easily discovered), or is Lawson just a bit paranoid, and a corrupt police department just plays into his mindset of Janix being such a crime filled and dangerous place.

Final Words : The story is very well set up, we've got Maul as the headline name for this series, but we know from having seen the animated show that he can't do too much before that series starts, so like the title suggests everything is in the Shadow of Maul. He's only been on 4 pages so far, and all he's done is arrive on Janix, but we know that Deemis and Vario are both scrabbling for power after the fall of Maul's Shadow Collective. They were both parts of it, and are now fighting for control of Janix causing the chaos on the streets that Lawson sees, so the entire set up isn't so much what Maul is doing now, but the repercussions of what he did before Palpatine caught him and took him out of the criminal underworld.

Score : 8.5/10

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