“Now, are you coming to the mainframe room, or should I just go find the nearest AIGCS droid and call him a shiny?”

“You really shouldn’t say racist things.”

“Klein!”

“Alright,” the admiral said. “Alright. Let’s go. But I want a real sandwich first. I might be dumb, but I am not dumb enough to fall for such a stupid trick as a phantom sandwich.”

“This is really good,” Klein said as he munched two pieces of bread with a thin layer of mayonnaise in between them. “Really excellent, Rogers. What did you say it was called again?”

“Ghost sandwich,” Rogers said. He pulled his datapad from his pocket and pressed a couple of buttons. “How are things going with you two?”

The crackling voice of McSchmidt came back at him through the datapad. “Lots of cooks in the kitchen,” he said. “We think we have a good idea about how to keep them busy. We’re heading to engineering now.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Uf curse it is!” Tunger’s voice came through. “We’re a team!”

“Shut up!” McSchmidt barked. Rogers thought he heard the sound of someone being slapped in the face, then the howling of a monkey, the high-pitched scream of someone absolutely terrified of said monkey, and then the transmission cut out.

“I hope they know what they’re doing,” Rogers muttered. He switched communication channels, and Mailn’s voice came through.

“What do you want?” she asked. She sounded irritated.

“Just checking in,” Rogers said. “Is everything okay? You don’t sound too happy.”

“Because I’m friggin busy,” she said, “and some boob is calling me to check up on me. How would it feel if someone was breathing down your neck every ten seconds of every day?”

Rogers paused. “. . . Normal?”

“Ugh,” Mailn said, and the transmission went out.

They exited the up-line onto the communications deck, which was mostly an unnavigable maze of hallways leading to various offices, server rooms, and one Popsicle stand that had been shut down during Rogers’ leave of absence from the military. As the electronic nerve center of the Flagship and the entire 331st, the communications deck was a huge, important, incredibly complex section of the ship. Rogers had always avoided it like the plague; Communications was the red-headed stepchild of Engineering. The personnel were also notorious for being teetotalers, which was one step above politician in Rogers’ book.

He pulled up a map of the comm deck on his datapad and tried to figure out how the hell to get to the IT center that connected to the mainframe room. The whole layout of the deck literally looked like someone had crumpled up a long piece of string and thrown it on the floor. It was nearly impossible to figure out which way led to which room.

“I can’t make heads or tails of this stupid map. Deet, can I short-burst transmit this thing to you so you can use your, uh, droid powers to automatically navigate us to the IT desk?”