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Phanan’s group, including Tyria and Kell, was charged with acquiring disease agents. They took the repulsorlift rail passage from Revos to the capital city of Scohar, home of the planet’s largest spaceport and of a medical center designed to deal with diseases both domestic and alien.

The Revos-Scohar railway was a marvel of engineering and public relations. The conveyance itself was a series of lengthy repulsorlift cars coupled together, traveling for the most part along a featureless tunnel. But every so often the train would rise into the open air, long enough for the passengers to enjoy one of the planet’s most beautiful vistas—here a spectacular view of snowcapped mountain peaks, there a long look at valleys purpling under the setting sun—and then descend again. Kell decided that it was a good compromise between giving the tourists the show they wanted and marring the carefully maintained landscape.

Scohar was much like Revos, only far larger, and dotted with recreational complexes that included thrill rides that simulated danger without ever harming a visitor. The Plague Group, as they called themselves, stayed away from the most tourist-heavy portions of the city and checked into lodgings near the Scohar Xenohealth Institute—the innocuous name the government of Storinal had given to their center for disease control.

Wedge, Face, and Donos, informally the Yokel Group, found lodgings at the Revos Liberty, a hostel catering to large ships’ crews on shore leave. Because of its orientation, rooms were small but inexpensive; services and amenities would be rare. However, half the rooms, including the Wraiths’, opened directly out onto an artificial riverside beach.

Face excused himself for a few minutes and returned with a pile of brightly colored cloth. He handed out individual portions to the others.

Wedge shook his out. A short-sleeved tunic in orange and yellow tropical fruit patterns and short pants in lavender. “I’m going to throw up.”

Face smiled. “That would be the final bit of trim on the ensemble, wouldn’t it? I recommend you keep the hat. That really completes the image of an Agamaran stereotype with no taste and no sense.”

“I wish I didn’t agree with you.”

“Yub, yub, Commander.”

Donos looked mournfully at his outfit: a shirt with thin red and green horizontal stripes and shorts with black and white vertical stripes. “Sir, permission to kill Face?”

“Granted. But keep your hat, like Face says.”

Face unfolded his own fashion disaster. A black silken shirt with a variety of insects picked out on it in glittery silver, shorts in a brighter, more painful orange than that of New Republic pilot’s suits, and a red kerchief for his neck. “As you can see, I saved the best for myself. Time to find some brides, brothers.”

22

“Really,” Wedge said. “I thought all you Imperial Navy boys were TIE fighter pilots. Every one.”

They sat in the Sunfruit Promenade, actually an extensive roofed patio flanked by flower gardens. The lounge was thick with recliner chairs and interrupted occasionally by musicians’ pits, most of which, at this late-afternoon hour, were occupied by musicians, male, female, and droid, playing a variety of stringed and percussion instruments.

The three yokel brothers were there, in the midst of a veritable sea of Hawkbat crewmen. Most of the crewmen were doing some light drinking in preparation for going out after dark and doing their heavy drinking. Some were accompanied by local women and men; the recliners were built to accommodate a cozy two. But Wedge, Face, and Donos, garish and loud, were by themselves.

The man opposite Wedge, a long-time Imperial Navy NCO, if Wedge was any judge, built like Kell but even bigger and deeper in the chest, smiled at Wedge’s stupidity. “Now, think about that, Dod—”

“I’m Fod. This is Dod. That’s Lod.”

“Fod. Even an Imperial-class Star Destroyer only carries six squadrons of TIE fighters. That’s seventy-two. Even with relief pilots, you’re talking about ninety or a hundred pilots on one of the big ships. Do you