by Joe Zieja
The terrified starman shook her head.
“That’s because I don’t have one,” he said. “I have no name. I am only known as Ticket. I am here to save you.”
Plinkett suddenly stopped blubbering and looked at Deet with wide, worshipful eyes.
“You have arrived,” she whispered. Then she hiccupped and sneezed at the same time, which really ruined the moment. And Rogers’ uniform.
“Come with me,” she said, and started walking through the empty IT room back toward the mainframe room.
“I thought droids couldn’t lie,” Rogers said, leaning over to talk to Deet in a hushed tone.
“I’ve been studying,” Deet said. “Plus, the IT guys had some neat old movies in the database that I watched while I was plugged in over there for a few seconds. I learned a thing or two about dramatics.”
They made their way back to a door in the rear of the IT center, where Plinkett punched in a code, spoke a passphrase that Rogers didn’t understand, and motioned for them to move inside. The mainframe room was, strangely, about a quarter of the size of the IT room, probably because technology had shrunk processing power to the nano scale several hundred years before. In fact, most of the mainframe room was actually taken up by a picnic table, on which still rested the hastily abandoned basket of a doubtless still-hungry IT troop.
“Here we are,” she said. She turned to Deet. “Please. Please, let us reboot again.”
“I won’t let you down,” Deet said.
“Alright,” Rogers said, tapping on the datapad to let the others know what was going on. “We’re ready. Let’s do this.”
“Uh, sir?” Tunger said over the datapad. He sounded a little dazed.
“What is it?”
“It’s McSchmidt,” Tunger said.
“What about McSchmidt?”
“Well,” Tunger said, “I’m not really sure I understood the subtext, but right after he armed the bomb in the engineering bay, he ran toward the escape pods, screaming ‘Ha, ha, ha, there is an invasion coming!’ ”
ORDER: A-222FR-02134-K
Serial: A-222FR-02134-K
Distribution: DBS//DSS//DAK//DFR//BB//CLOSED NETWORK A66
Classification: Special Protocol Required
Summary: Issue of Orders
Order: Whoever armed the bomb in the engineering bay, report to me immediately for reprogramming. If it was one of the units currently studying human humor mechanisms, this would be classified as not funny.
Order: Everyone else, please see the nearest surviving AIGCS member for weapons distribution. Plans are being accelerated.
Order Submitted By: F-GC-001
The German-Irish Inflammation Conflagration
“That son of a bitch!” Rogers screamed into the datapad. “Mailn, Alsinbury, did you hear that?”
“I’ll strangle that . . .” The Viking’s speech degenerated into a nonsensical, if colorful, string of obscenities.
“Well, he did tell us he was a spy,” Deet said. His extension cable hovered over the port that would allow him to access the mainframe. “Am I going to blow us all up if I try to plug in now?”
“I don’t know,” Rogers said. “Admiral, put down that egg salad sandwich and get over here! Deet’s going to need your authorization codes. I hope.”
Klein gave Rogers a sour look but walked over to where Deet was patiently waiting to either save or destroy the entire fleet.
Rogers looked at Deet for a moment, his heart racing. If they were going to erase the droids’ memories, they would have to start now. But if they plugged in and the droids detonated the bomb, that really wouldn’t matter much, would it?
“Rogers,” crackled the Viking’s voice over the datapad. Something else was in the background.
“Are those . . . disruptor blasts? What’s going on?” Rogers asked.
“The droids are shooting,” the Viking said. “You know. At us.”
He heard the pulsating hum of disruptor rounds being fired, and Mailn shouted something so loud, he could hear it through the Viking’s communication device. Rogers could tell that other marines—thankfully armed—were already on scene.
“How many of the droids have weapons?”
“Lots,” the Viking said. “Look, I can’t really talk right now. Just hurry up and finish this.”
Rogers licked his lips and looked at Deet. “Do it.”
Deet plugged in.
The Flagship didn’t explode.
Things were going well.
“This is going to take me a while,” Deet said, his eyes flashing. He made a few beeping noises. “I can tell right away that there are more failsafes than that bomb. The droids have been manipulating the mainframe; there are several layers of security that I am going to have to work through before I am even able to utilize the admiral’s access codes.”
“Great,” Rogers said, eying the door. Any moment now, droids were going to burst through there and start shooting. They must know by now what they were trying to do. If the marines couldn’t keep them at bay, the first thing they would do is run to the mainframe room and rip Deet’s extension off his body.
“Tunger,” he called into the datapad. “Are you still in Engineering? Do you think you could disarm the bomb?”
“Rogers?” came a different, gruff voice through the pad. “Is that you? What the hell are you up to this time?”
“Hart!” Rogers said. “There’s no time to explain. The droids are taking over the ship and they’ve armed a bomb in the engineering bay. Can you disarm it?”
“That would be classified as an explanation,” Deet chirped. “I guess you had time after all.”
“Shut up,” Rogers barked. “Hart?”
There was silence for a moment on the radio.
“This here?” Hart mumbled. Rogers heard him and Tunger having a short but animated conversation about the danger of stacking boominite containers, and so on. Hart called McSchmidt “McShit,” which Rogers was a little upset he hadn’t thought of much sooner.
“I’m an engineer, not EOD,” Hart said. “I don’t like explosives. But Lopez’s here, and I have some other crew that crossed over. We’ll see what we can do. Get that monkey out of my face!”
The datapad clicked off. Rogers looked at the door again. Were the marines going to be able to subdue the droids? If they did, would the droids just set off the bomb?
Rogers paced back and forth in the tiny mainframe room, which didn’t exactly give him a lot of pacing space. What was the point of having a whole room dedicated to mainframes that were barely bigger than personal terminals?
“How much longer?” he asked.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes,” Deet said. “I’m having to burrow through several layers of security, and I can’t tell if any of this is linked to the bomb. I’m going slower than I normally would.”
Rogers made a frustrated noise, but before he could continue being useless in this situation, the datapad beeped on again.
“Rogers,” the Viking called to them. “There’s a lot of these bastards. Are you still alive?”
“For now,” Rogers said. “Deet says fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” the Viking said. “You don’t have ten! They must know you’re down there; they’re sacrificing units to cover a group’s escape. I think they’re headed in your direction. Pyaah!”
The transmission was interrupted for a few seconds as the Viking engaged in all sorts of battle yells, metallic crunching noises, and disruptor pulses.
“Rogers,” Deet said. “A reading of your vital signs indicates you are either on the verge of having a stroke or are feeling extremely aroused. Are you sure this is the appropriate time for these sorts of feelings?”
“I’m not going to have any vital signs if you don’t start saving the ship and stop dedicating processing power to analyze my libido,” Rogers said. He was breathing pretty heavily, though. He pulled the datapad closer to his ear, hoping the Viking would make at least a few more noises b
efore she cut off the transmission.
“Hurry up,” the Viking called. A small explosion crackled the speakers. “I can’t get marines down to the communication deck. They keep tearing panels off the ship and using them to build columns that are getting in our way. Where did they learn how to do that?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Rogers said.
One last shout of rage, and the datapad clicked off. Droids. Coming here. Now. And nobody in this room had any weapons—except Deet’s droid fu, and that was pretty useless. And boring.
What the hell was he supposed to do?
“I have to say,” Klein said. “I preferred the old posters.”
Rogers turned to find whatever Klein was staring at. A propaganda poster was on the wall of the mainframe room, clearly a piece from Ralph’s . . . later artistic period. A rainbow—well, something that resembled a rainbow but was shaped more like a multicolored piece of bacon—was draped across an open-space background peppered with stars and something that looked like jellybeans. In the middle of the rainbow, a human and a droid flew hand in hand, a jet stream of yellow stars trailing behind them. Underneath were the words I FEEL SO FREE.
“You see what I mean?” Klein said. “No inspiration at all. How is anyone supposed to derive morale from something like that? I bet it was one of those Parivani hippies.”
Rogers stared at it for a moment. Something about the picture, aside from making him a little nauseous, tugged at him. What was he forgetting?
“That’s it!” he yelled.
“No, it’s not,” Deet said. “I’m not there. I’ve managed to disable some of the older droids remotely, but it’s only temporary. It’ll still take—”
“No,” Rogers said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He turned to the admiral. “Klein—where are the controls for the gravity generator on the ship?”
Klein looked at him, frowning. “I’m not telling you. You’re just going to hang yourself and leave me all—”
Rogers slapped him in the face.
“I’m not going to kill myself, you idiot!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “I’m going to stop the droids from killing all of us.”
Klein rubbed his cheek, tears forming in his eyes. For a brief—very brief—moment, Rogers felt bad for slapping his superior officer. But then he realized that it was probably the most enjoyable thing he’d done in weeks.
“You didn’t have to hit me,” Klein said. “The gravity generator is on the outside of the ship.”
Rogers felt his heart sink. “How did you disable mine, then?”
“Disabling rooms isn’t a problem,” Klein said. “But you’d have to turn them all off individually, room by room.”
“We could split up,” Deet said. “Disable them as fast as we can.”
“There are too many droids in too many rooms,” Rogers said. “Why is the gravity generator outside of the ship?”
Klein shrugged. “Something about generating magnetic fields and all that. You can’t even access it from Engineering.”
Rogers swore. What was he supposed to do with the generator on the outside of the ship? Grab one of the starfighters, fly out there, and blast it? There wasn’t any time to go find one of the pilots—chances were, they were all still flexing in front of their mirrors, anyway—so he’d have to do it himself. But he had no idea how to pilot any attack ship. The Awesome didn’t have any weapons on it.
Rogers got a sinking feeling in his stomach as he realized what he had to do.
“Deet,” he said, “get as far as you can in the next thirty seconds, and then we’re getting out of here.”
Deet beeped apprehensively. “Where are we going? We can’t go up against all those droids. You faint in combat.”
Rogers’ face reddened. “I do not faint.”
“Yes, you do. I read the report,” Deet said. “I’m plugged into the main computer, after all. This video is hilarious.”
“Look, it doesn’t matter, alright? We’re not going to be fighting any droids.” Rogers whipped out his datapad. “Hart, are you there?”
“Yeah,” Hart called back. It sounded quiet on his end. “Your boy Tunger took off, though; don’t know where he went. Mumbled something about his children. We think we’re almost through disabling this bomb, but even if we do, there’s still the problem of having a bunch of boominite containers stacked in one place. One stray disruptor shot and this ship goes boom.”
“Alright,” Rogers said. “When you sent a message the other day that ‘she’s all done,’ did you mean the Awesome?”
“No,” Hart barked back, “I meant the god-damn biscuits I was making. Yes, I meant the Awesome was done! Why?”
“I need to get in it. We’ll be there as soon as we can. Can you help me get it to the closest hatch?”
“Meet you in hatch control,” Hart said. “Lopez, it’s your show. Don’t—” He cut off.
Rogers put his datapad in his holster. “Alright. Let’s get the hell out of here before the droids show up on the communication deck.
“Droids on the communication deck!” someone shouted over the public address system. A disruptor pulse rang over the speakers, and the voice went silent.
“Can nothing go right?” Rogers wailed as they made a hasty exit.
They raced through the confusing maze that was the communications deck, the halls eerily silent. Wherever the droids were, they weren’t in this area yet.
“Where are they all?” Rogers asked out loud.
“I gave them a surprise before we left,” Deet said. “I scrambled the ship’s maps for this area. They’ll be walking around in circles.”
“Nice going,” Rogers said. “Now how do we get out of here?”
“I don’t know,” Deet said. “I scrambled the maps. Were you listening to me at all?”
Rogers groaned as they began to work their way frantically through the narrow, empty hallways, turning the other direction whenever they heard the loud clanking noises of droids nearby. He quickly lost all sense of direction. After a minute or so of turns, he probably couldn’t have found his way back to the mainframe room if he’d tried. One particularly harrowed communications troop was actually walking in a box pattern in the middle of one of the hallways, going absolutely nowhere and muttering to himself incoherently.
“We’re going to end up like that guy,” Rogers said as they passed him and turned down a corridor he was simultaneously sure he’d seen three times before and had also never seen. “Didn’t you think to make a backup map?”
“I’m sorry,” Deet said, “I can only execute one EXPLETIVE stroke of absolute EXPLETIVE genius at any given moment. What have you done today?”
Rogers spared him an annoyed grunt but kept walking. “If I ever find the person who designed this place, I’m going to—”
“Rogers,” Klein said suddenly. He stopped in the middle of the hallway. “There’s something I have to do.” Turning away, he began to jog down the hallway. “I need to get to the public address system. I’ll see you later!”
“Hey!” Rogers said. “Where are you going, you idiot? You couldn’t find your way out of a parking lot! Come back! A speech isn’t going to work! ”
But Klein was already gone, having turned a corner. Rogers shook his head. As long as they didn’t need his access codes again, good riddance. He was tired of babysitting, anyway. What was all that babbling about duty and heroics?
They walked through the hallways silently, careful not to alert any nearby droids. After what seemed like half an hour, they ended up at the in-line, which was blessedly free of any metallic resistance or nattering admirals.
“They must already be at the mainframe,” Rogers said.
“That’s unlikely,” Deet said. “I changed the mainframe location on the map so that it was in the kitchens.”
“But the kitchens are all on fire,” Rogers said.
“Exactly.”
Thankfully, the in-line was still in operation. Rogers was sure the
droids would have shut it down, but perhaps he’d overestimated their ability to mess with the ship. They zoomed through the belly of the Flagship, Rogers tapping his foot nervously, until they came to the deck where the engineering bay was located. The in-line dinged, and for a moment that stretched out in time, the doors slowly opened.
“Get ready,” Rogers said.
The doors opened to reveal exactly no one in the hallway. It kind of seemed like a letdown.
“For what?” Deet said.
“I don’t know,” Rogers said as he exited the car and jogged down to the entrance to the Pit. “I just felt dramatic. Leave me alone.”
He and Deet burst through the large cargo doors into the Pit to find the entire engineering staff working like bees, so far unmolested by droids. Hoverlifts zoomed back and forth across the floors as the crews desperately tried to undo all the potential damage done by stacking explosive containers like morons.
“Rogers!” someone called.
“Lopez,” Rogers said, jogging over to where Lopez was busy directing the entire Pit crew. She passed a datapad to a starman, who trotted off. “No droids yet?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But that won’t last for long. Captain Alsinbury sent a message that there was a squadron of them on their way down here and that we should expect a fight.”
“Damn it,” Rogers said. “How soon?”
“She didn’t say. But she’s sending reinforcements as soon as she can.”
“Good luck,” he said. “Where’s Hart?”
Lopez pointed to the far end of the Pit, which connected to the engineering docking bay. There was a small room that bridged the gap between the two areas that looked like the top of an old-fashioned air-traffic control tower, a dodecahedron with windows on every side.
“He’s in there trying to get the cranes to move your ship to the right place and open the hatch so you can launch.” She looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “What are you planning?”
“They might still be listening,” Rogers said. “Let’s just say I’m about to fire the head chef.”
“Please,” Deet said, “no more chef references. I really don’t have the processing power to deal with your MALE BOVINE EXCREMENT.”
