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“Well, I didn’t think about it, really.”

The Hawkbat crewmen immediately around them laughed.

The big NCO, whose name was Rondle, looked sadly into his almost-empty glass.

Face, his motions those of a profoundly drunken man, jerked upright. “We can’t have that. Hey, server! Another one all around.” He collapsed back into his simulated drunken stupor.

The Hawkbat personnel were more than happy to have the Nobrin brothers around. The boys from Agamar obligingly bought drinks for everyone in their vicinity and seemed oblivious to the barbs the spacemen aimed at them. Wedge had noticed some of the spacemen bringing dates to see the supposed men of fabled, idiotic Agamar. He felt like an animal in a cage viewing a procession of zoo-goers.

Wedge continued, “So when it’s time to go home you don’t all just hop in your TIE fighters and blast off for space.”

Rondle smirked. “No. I’m an unarmed combat instructor. Partus over there, she’s the one with the red face, is a navigator. That’s someone who tells the ship how to get where it’s going. Dewback Kord over there, he’s a ship’s mechanic. No, when it’s time to leave, we all hop in a shuttle and go up.”

“A shuttle? A Lambda shuttle? I was in one of those once.”

Rondle nodded distractedly and accepted a drink refill from the droid server.

“Is yours the Doran Star? That’s the one we were in.”

Rondle fixed him with an aggravated stare. “Now, you just arrived from Agamar in whatever bucket brought you here. If that was our shuttle, too, how would we have gotten groundside before you got here?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“No, ours are the Hawkbat’s Ferch and the Hawkbat’s Vigil.”

“Oh. Hey, that’s some kind of coincidence. Ending up with two shuttles with names kind of like your big ship’s name.”

Rondle covered his eyes with his hand.

“I wish Grinder were here,” Phanan said. He tapped irritably away at the suite’s terminal keyboard, cruising through layer after layer of helpful organizational screens.

Kell and Tyria were behind him, squeezed into an oversized stuffed chair that would have easily accommodated two ordinary-sized people. Tyria said, “What’s wrong? You don’t seem to be encountering any security.”

“No, but I can’t just issue a command for the system to give me information on all biological agents being stored over at the Institute, not without raising some alerts, and I bet Grinder could. Plus, I have to deal with roommates making obnoxious snuggling noises while I’m hard at work.” His tone was only half joking. He’d been annoyed ever since Tyria suddenly made her preference known.

Kell said, “We can go take a walk.”

“You’ve already done your initial look at the Institute’s exterior—hold it. News retrieval. Disease outbreaks. Sort by mechanisms. This won’t be as comprehensive, but it’ll tell us what has actually gotten out into the Storinal population. And whatever’s been out there is sure to be in the Institute’s vaults.”

Tyria and Kell came up to lean over his shoulders.

“Bothan Redrash,” Phanan said. “Too hit-or-miss. Plus, Grinder might catch it, and we’d never hear the end of it. Bandonian Plague, too severe. Blastonecrosis likewise, also disgusting. Big tourist planet like this has seen some odd ailments. Hey.” He abruptly focused on one of the entries on the screen and brought it up to read more.

Kell leaned in closer. “What is it?”

“Bunkurd Sewer Disorder.”

“Yecch,” Tyria said. “Sounds disgusting.”

“Not as bad as it sounds. A couple of centuries back, on Coruscant, the Bunkurd Corporation engineered a bacterium that does a better job of breaking down sewage for recycling. Something like a twenty percent improvement over previous bio-agents used for the same purpose. And believe me, Coruscant needs all the help it can get, that way. But if this bacteria gets in the human digestive system, it basically attacks what you eat as soon as you eat it, making it less nutritional … and giving you the equivalent of food poisoning. It takes a predictable amount of time to incubate