Klein looked up, his gaze icy. “Excuse me, Lieutenant?”

That look almost made Rogers loose his nerve, but Deet had filled him in on enough of the admiral’s shortcomings that it made Rogers feel a little invincible.

“Don’t ‘excuse me, Lieutenant’ me, Admiral,” Rogers said. “I know your secret, and I’m not going to be your monkey anymore. You don’t know the first thing about running a fleet.”

Klein bristled, slowly pushing back the speech he was working on and putting the archaic quill pen back in its holster. “I’ll have you know, Lieutenant, that I am a professional military man, with a flawless track record and two decades of military experience under my belt. And I am certainly not accustomed to my executive officer calling me an idiot.”

“That’s because they keep hanging themselves instead of confronting you,” Rogers said. “And I know why. You don’t do a damn thing on this ship except write speeches. Your executive officers are being tasked with things above and beyond their specialties so that you can go on practicing your Toastmasters magic. The only reason we haven’t blown ourselves up yet is because you have competent ship captains elsewhere in the fleet and we’re not at war.”

Klein calmly folded his hands in his lap. “Oh?”

Rogers held up his datapad, which had an array of information on it that had been sent to him by Deet. The amount of information the robot had on the admiral was a little disturbing, but it certainly served Rogers’ purpose right now.

“You failed almost every class except public speaking at the Academy,” Rogers said. “You even got a C+ in golf. Golf, admiral.”

The admiral’s visage cracked, though only slightly. “Where did you get that?”

“You’ve routinely been counseled for royally screwing up basic tactical situations, but talked your way out of getting actual paperwork,” Rogers continued. “You’ve broken nearly every simulation you’ve ever participated in because even the computer hadn’t expected inputs so fantastically wrong.”

Klein’s eyes were imperceptibly widening. “I’ll have you thrown in the brig for rifling through my personal records,” he said, obvious restraint in his voice.

“And you’ll follow me after I release all of this to the entire 331st,” Rogers said. “You’re a fraud, Klein, and a dangerous one. You’re nothing but a master of toast. A charismatic member of the Society of Burned Bread.”

A pregnant silence hung over the room like a piano sailing through the air before it finally crashed down on the unsuspecting pedestrian. Deet, who had entered the room behind Rogers to avoid being tackled again, made a disconcerting beeping noise.

“What makes you think,” Klein said slowly, “that my previous executive officers actually hung themselves?”

Rogers felt every muscle in his body tense as he realized that Klein wasn’t just a fraud. He was a murderer. A narcissistic psychopath who erased lives any time they got in the way of him keeping his admiralty. Rogers had just made a very, very bad mistake.