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Sy would be the biggest delay, he knew. She always took too long getting dressed. For that matter, she took too long with everything. You couldn’t trust nibblers, he thought, just like his grands had always said.

He knocked on her cabin door, shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

“Yes?” a delicate reed-thin voice called from inside.

“It’s me,” Max called. “Evar says to hurry up. Transport’s ready and we need to eat.” If that didn’t get her out, nothing would.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Hurry!” he said. Turning, he continued up the corridor.

Dinner, dinner, glorious dinner! He could almost taste it now. Bantha steaks, kiwip grass, and gannesa juice. Fire stew, lavender treebread, and succulent ploth. Roast yarnak, ginger noodles, and white seedcake. He would have some of everything. All he had to do was find Snit and he’d be done.

The Kitonak’s cabin door stood open, so Max went right in. After all, why waste time when food was waiting? The sooner they got moving, the sooner they’d eat, he thought.

Snit huddled in the corner, his huge lumpy head buried in his huge lumpy hands. Sobs racked his body. It was the most emotion Max had ever seen from him.

Poor primitive, Max thought. Evar had really been starving Snit. In the six months he had been with the band, Snit had only eaten six times as far as Max knew—a single huge slug each time. When Evar had bought Snit on Ovrax IV, Snit’s belly had hung so low you couldn’t see his legs. That had been one happy Kitonak, Max had thought a little enviously, imagining what fabulous meals must have gone into creating such a corpulent body. Since that time, though, Snit had lost half his body weight. Dressed only in bright red shorts, he looked positively svelte for a Kitonak—still like a lump of badly shaped yeast, but a svelte lump of yeast.

“We need you to come out now,” Max told him. “It’s dinnertime,” he added happily. That should cheer him up, he thought.

To his relief, Snit stopped snuffling and rose on his three wide, circular feet. Tiny black eyes peered out at him from beneath a heavy, lumpy brow.

“Come on,” Max said, taking Snit’s hand and leading him toward the corridor. They could pick up Sy on their way out, he thought. Was nobody else hungry? He felt gnawing pains in his belly. It was time for dinner, dinner, glorious dinner!

Evar Orbus stood by his eight crates of equipment and fumed silently. Where in the seven hells was that transport? Never trust a Bith, he thought angrily. He’d had run-ins with them before. Their hearing might be keener than his, but that didn’t make them his betters, not by a long shot. It had been half an hour since he’d called. He’d definitely talk to the Wookiee about that bartender.

Sy Snootles, her lips pursed angrily, continued to shift from one thin leg to the other. She’d been glaring at him since she’d gotten outside twenty minutes before.

“What are you looking at?” Evar finally demanded.

“Max hustled me out here,” she said in her high, thin voice, “by saying you had transport ready to take us to dinner. There’s no transport. There’s no dinner. I could have been resting in my cabin. You know how frail I am, Evar. This desert air just isn’t good for my lips. Let alone my throat. Let alone my lungs.”

Evar sighed inwardly. He knew all about her lips and lungs. She certainly kept them running on hyperdrive. If she wasn’t one of the best singers he’d ever seen, and if her contract didn’t have some very nasty early termination penalties, he would have replaced her in a millisecond with the first sandflea he came across.

Just as he was about to let loose a very cutting comment about those same lips and lungs, an airbus screamed down and landed in front of them. A Bith—possibly the same one he’d talked to earlier; he’d never been able to tell them apart—sat in the driver’s seat.

“I am sorry we took so long, gentles,” the Bith called, climbing down. He opened the passenger compartment and three more Biths stepped out. “I asked some friends to help. You have