“Actually, sir,” Tunger said, “you were kind of a jerk about it.”

Rogers shrugged. “Whatever. I outrank both of you. McSchmidt, chill out. Tunger, get the marshmallows out of your cheeks.”

The two of them looked at each other with icy disdain, but there was no further hair-pulling.

“Fine,” Tunger said finally, breaking his absurd staring contest with McSchmidt. “I’m going to go feed the children. You all have a great time talking normally.”

Tunger sauntered off, and Rogers saw that there were claw marks on the back of his trousers.

“Anyway,” Rogers said. He slid McSchmidt’s datapad across the table so he could look at it. He’d never seen a raw intelligence report before—he’d only ever gotten the distilled information through briefings—and now he realized that he was perfectly happy with that. The report was written in a style so old, it was almost comical, all capital letters with hash marks and slashes in all these strange places. It was almost impossible to read.

“What is this crap?” Rogers asked, gesturing at the report. He could see some of the stuff that McSchmidt had talked about in the middle of the document, but it was bracketed on both the top and the bottom by such an incredible amount of textual gibberish that it looked like someone had disemboweled a keyboard.

“Oh, that?” McSchmidt said. “It’s a bunch of routing information. It says where the report came from and where it’s supposed to go.” He squinted and leaned forward again. “At least, I think so.”

Deet beeped in that sort of way that told Rogers he wanted to say something.

“What is it?”

Deet’s neck craned over the top of the datapad, and he gave another few beeps.

“This isn’t all routing information,” he said.

“How would you know?” the Viking said. “You’re just a droid zombie.”

“Hey,” Rogers said. “I made this droid zombie.”

“EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE yourself,” Deet said.

The Viking snorted. “He can’t even swear? What use is he?”

Deet hung his head. “It’s not my fault.”

“Can we please focus?” Rogers said. “What is it on the top of this report that makes you curious?”

Deet looked back at the report and pointed at the top of it with one of his three-fingered hands. Rogers hadn’t done the best job of putting him together, he supposed; one of the fingers was attached at a very strange angle.

“This is all a primitive droid code,” he said. “I can’t read all of it, though. I’m too new for it and this programming language was on its way out before I was commissioned.”

“Oh,” McSchmidt said. “That makes sense. The droids do most of the routing in the systems.”

Rogers looked at him sideways. “They do?”

“Sure,” McSchmidt said. “Some of the other intel guys tell me that it was part of an initiative to make things more efficient a couple of months ago. Klein signed off on it. The droids do some of the number crunching for the statistical analysis, and they make sure it’s all routed properly.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I think they do a final proofread before it’s disseminated, too.”