“With that lovely imagery out of the way,” Rogers said, “let’s take a look at our options.”

“Get out while you still can!” Deet cried. Clank. Clank. Sparks. Clank.

“Go get ’im, buddy,” Rogers said lazily. “Okay, here we go.” He had pulled up a map of the interior of the Flagship, which seemed like the first thing you were supposed to do when planning any sort of big battle. Maps were important. Now, according to everything he’d ever learned about waging war from the movies, he was supposed to point to different areas of the map and say meaningless things in a confident voice.

“Here we are,” he said, pointing at the refuse deck. “And here is the command deck.” He paused. This wasn’t really as easy as he thought it would be. “Here’s the Uncouth Corkscrew. And here’s something that looks like a cookie.” He blinked. “Doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Tunger said.

“Rogers,” the Viking said, “are you just pointing at stuff and telling us where it is?”

“Yes.”

The Viking punched him in the arm. He felt the impact all the way down to his foot. “Don’t be an idiot. Give me that and leave the battle planning to the marines.”

Rogers thought his heart was about to pound out of his chest, and not at all because there were two droids fighting over his life a few feet away. The Viking turned the datapad upside down so that the orientation was backward for her but correct for everyone else.

“Alright,” the Viking said. “We need to disable two things: the droids and the bomb, and we need to do it at almost the exact same time. We know the bomb is in Engineering, so that’s easy. But what about the droids?”

“Hey, Deet,” Rogers called over his shoulder. “Any idea where the droids’ central database is located?”

“Well, that’s not going to help you much,” Deet said as he battled furiously onward. “They can back up their systems using the closed network they built through the mess hall power ports. If I wasn’t over here sacrificing myself for your lives, I might be able to concentrate enough to come up with a better plan.”

Rogers twisted around in his seat, raising an eyebrow. The Up-Line still hadn’t moved, thanks to Barber Bot jamming his scissors in the call button, and Rogers was slowly learning to appreciate the flame-retardant construction of the car, with all the sparks flying around.

“Don’t be stupid,” Rogers said. “You’re a droid. You can’t concentrate. You’re one big deferred procedure call.”

“I’ll defer your EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE!” Deet said.

Rogers shook his head and turned around, leaving Deet to continue playing the role of divine aegis. “Well, back when the droids first started coming in, they stared putting a lot of new equipment in the mainframe room of Communications. That seems like as good a place as any.”

“So, we’ll have to plug into the mainframe and erase the droids’ memory banks but make sure that their secret network is disabled when we do it, and also make sure that they don’t find out about it so they don’t blow up the ship.” The Viking pointed at the three points on the Flagship’s map: the commissary deck, the communications center, and the engineering bay.