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Even that wouldn’t have been so bad-well, okay, it wasn’t bad, it was just blasted embarrassing-since he’d gaped in slack-jawed shock for only a second, maybe two or three, before turning around, crimson-faced, and saying, "Oops, sorry!"

But what kept him staring for that extra second was Tolk’s expression. That, along with the rest of her.

She smiled. Slow, languid, no-mistake-about-it. "Hi, Jos. Did I forget to thumb the diode on? How careless of me."

Jos managed to exit and shut the door, the vision of Tolk’s mostly bare form seared into his memory-for-ever, he was pretty sure. But that smile... oh, that smile had been the stopper in the bottle. And as he thought about it later-at least two dozen times during the day as they worked together-he kept wondering: Had she forgotten to light the diode?

Even at its coldest, the water couldn’t wash that ques-tion away.

"You’ve been in there half the night, Jos! How clean do you need to get?"

A very good question, that.

Seated at a table in the chow hall, Den Dhur was a happy diner. It didn’t really have anything to do with what he was about to eat. He was savoring the taste of imminent cold revenge, for soon-very soon, now-he would slam the hatch on Filba, that no-creche outling Hutt. He had just collected another rock for the Hutt’s cairn from an unhappy corporal, and soon he was going to bury Filba like a battle dog does an old bone.

The thought made him smile. You do not mess with the press, no way, no how, especially if you are as crooked as a rancor’s back teeth. Most everybody had something to hide, something they wouldn’t want to see splashed on the evening holonets, but if you were a thief, it would be something worse. A lot worse.

And he’d found it.

Filba was going to be flensed and hung out in the hot sunshine to dry, and good riddance.

Den chuckled to himself, and reapplied his cutlery to the food before him with gusto.

Vengeance was the perfect spice for dinner.

Of course, what dinner was and how it was prepared was something he had to get used to when he spaced to odd planets. One of the first things Den had discovered as a young reporter was that if he didn’t learn to eat and drink the local flora and fauna when he world-hopped covering the military, he got hungry and thirsty in a big hurry. Space on board an interstellar troop transport was at a premium, and it wasn’t usually wasted on ex-otic foods. He’d heard the clone troopers had been con-ditioned to be happy with simple fare, but even so, given the number of different species in the Republic armies and navies, they couldn’t begin to stock fa-vorites for everyone. Especially since the officers, as usual, got preferential treatment.

The soldiers in the field got RRs-Ready Rations - which were reconstituted pap with essential nutrients for each species. They usually ranged in color from pus-tulent to putrid, and in texture and taste from old boot plastoid to something that would gag a Neimoidian. Given this, the first thing military cooks generally did when they got to a new planet was assign foragers to find and bring back anything that might be edible. Den had been on some worlds where there wasn’t much lo-cal produce or game to be found, and a steady diet of RR meals made for a lot of thin troopers. He’d lost a lit-tle mass himself on those assignments.

Fortunately, one of the few positive things that could be said about Drongar was that there were plenty of things to be trapped, picked, tapped, or dug up, and, while it was not the best he had eaten, the Rimsoo chow hall wasn’t bad as such things went. Den had ordered a plate of the local land shrimp, a hand-sized creature that, boiled with herbs and spices, tasted surprisingly like hawk-bat, although more pungent. It came with some bright orange mashed plant root that had a smooth consistency and a nice cinnamon flavor.

Wash it all down with some of the locally produced ale and, well, he’d eaten a lot worse.

Until someone finally fig-ured out how to invent a gadget that could instanta-neously assemble a meal from basic elements,