“One order, eight months ago? Is that the order for all the posters that have gone up lately?” Rogers asked. He realized his own voice was getting louder.

“YES.” Ralph banged away at the keyboard, and Rogers stepped behind him to look on the screen. A very simple graphical editing program was up, and Ralph was dragging around pieces of stock art and putting them together. He had an awful lot of pictures of ships, cannon fire, droids, and a surprisingly large database of really useless things like flowers and striped candies.

“Do you print them here?”

“NO.”

Well, that meant that whoever was putting the listening devices in them—they must have been exceedingly small—was either in the printing room or the framing room. Rogers was sure he could find out more if he visited wherever that location was.

“Who prints them?”

“I DON’T KNOW.”

Rogers sighed. Of course Ralph didn’t know. Gosh, he was typing fast. Rogers looked down at the keyboard and noticed that most of the letters on the keyboard were worn away from overuse except the one for that squiggly thing that nobody knew what the hell it was for.

Well, if he couldn’t solve the problem of the listening devices here, maybe he could just solve the problem of the ubiquitous, tacky posters. They really were annoying, and Rogers had a feeling they were having an opposite effect on ship morale. He wasn’t going to revitalize the 331st with all that crap on the walls.

“What if I told you I wanted a high-priority order to interrupt the one you were working on?” Rogers asked. “You might not know this, but the stuff you’re kicking out now is kind of making people lose their minds.” He remembered his old friend Hart spouting off the strange rhetoric in the kitchen, and how it had made Rogers feel like he had an army of spiders crawling around in his underwear.

“NO CAN DO.” Ralph said/screamed, his voice cracking. How did he even have vocal cords left? “ALL ORDERS HAVE TO BE COMPLETED BEFORE MOVING ON TO THE NEXT ORDER.”

Rogers sighed. “Could you at least not type them in all caps?”

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.”

“Right,” Rogers said. “Of course.” He pulled on his beard, thinking. Snapping the Flagship out of whatever craziness had hold of it would be a little more effective if he didn’t have information ops working against him. Who had made that order, anyway? Perhaps he could get into the system later, right after he figured out where they were printed and framed.

“HEY,” Ralph said. “WHAT RHYMES WITH OBEY?”

Rogers stopped pacing around the room and stepped behind the computer again. On the screen was a very dark, mysterious shadow of a silhouetted face, under which was currently written WHEN YOU OBEY . . .

“I don’t know,” Rogers said. “Okay? Play? Delay?”

“THANKS.”

Ralph finished typing so the phrase read WHEN YOU OBEY . . . THINGS ARE GOOD.