“I’m an engineer, not EOD,” Hart said. “I don’t like explosives. But Lopez’s here, and I have some other crew that crossed over. We’ll see what we can do. Get that monkey out of my face!”

The datapad clicked off. Rogers looked at the door again. Were the marines going to be able to subdue the droids? If they did, would the droids just set off the bomb?

Rogers paced back and forth in the tiny mainframe room, which didn’t exactly give him a lot of pacing space. What was the point of having a whole room dedicated to mainframes that were barely bigger than personal terminals?

“How much longer?” he asked.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes,” Deet said. “I’m having to burrow through several layers of security, and I can’t tell if any of this is linked to the bomb. I’m going slower than I normally would.”

Rogers made a frustrated noise, but before he could continue being useless in this situation, the datapad beeped on again.

“Rogers,” the Viking called to them. “There’s a lot of these bastards. Are you still alive?”

“For now,” Rogers said. “Deet says fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” the Viking said. “You don’t have ten! They must know you’re down there; they’re sacrificing units to cover a group’s escape. I think they’re headed in your direction. Pyaah!”

The transmission was interrupted for a few seconds as the Viking engaged in all sorts of battle yells, metallic crunching noises, and disruptor pulses.

“Rogers,” Deet said. “A reading of your vital signs indicates you are either on the verge of having a stroke or are feeling extremely aroused. Are you sure this is the appropriate time for these sorts of feelings?”

“I’m not going to have any vital signs if you don’t start saving the ship and stop dedicating processing power to analyze my libido,” Rogers said. He was breathing pretty heavily, though. He pulled the datapad closer to his ear, hoping the Viking would make at least a few more noises before she cut off the transmission.

“Hurry up,” the Viking called. A small explosion crackled the speakers. “I can’t get marines down to the communication deck. They keep tearing panels off the ship and using them to build columns that are getting in our way. Where did they learn how to do that?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Rogers said.

One last shout of rage, and the datapad clicked off. Droids. Coming here. Now. And nobody in this room had any weapons—except Deet’s droid fu, and that was pretty useless. And boring.

What the hell was he supposed to do?

“I have to say,” Klein said. “I preferred the old posters.”

Rogers turned to find whatever Klein was staring at. A propaganda poster was on the wall of the mainframe room, clearly a piece from Ralph’s . . . later artistic period. A rainbow—well, something that resembled a rainbow but was shaped more like a multicolored piece of bacon—was draped across an open-space background peppered with stars and something that looked like jellybeans. In the middle of the rainbow, a human and a droid flew hand in hand, a jet stream of yellow stars trailing behind them. Underneath were the words I FEEL SO FREE.