“You see what I mean?” Klein said. “No inspiration at all. How is anyone supposed to derive morale from something like that? I bet it was one of those Parivani hippies.”

Rogers stared at it for a moment. Something about the picture, aside from making him a little nauseous, tugged at him. What was he forgetting?

“That’s it!” he yelled.

“No, it’s not,” Deet said. “I’m not there. I’ve managed to disable some of the older droids remotely, but it’s only temporary. It’ll still take—”

“No,” Rogers said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He turned to the admiral. “Klein—where are the controls for the gravity generator on the ship?”

Klein looked at him, frowning. “I’m not telling you. You’re just going to hang yourself and leave me all—”

Rogers slapped him in the face.

“I’m not going to kill myself, you idiot!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “I’m going to stop the droids from killing all of us.”

Klein rubbed his cheek, tears forming in his eyes. For a brief—very brief—moment, Rogers felt bad for slapping his superior officer. But then he realized that it was probably the most enjoyable thing he’d done in weeks.

“You didn’t have to hit me,” Klein said. “The gravity generator is on the outside of the ship.”

Rogers felt his heart sink. “How did you disable mine, then?”

“Disabling rooms isn’t a problem,” Klein said. “But you’d have to turn them all off individually, room by room.”

“We could split up,” Deet said. “Disable them as fast as we can.”

“There are too many droids in too many rooms,” Rogers said. “Why is the gravity generator outside of the ship?”

Klein shrugged. “Something about generating magnetic fields and all that. You can’t even access it from Engineering.”

Rogers swore. What was he supposed to do with the generator on the outside of the ship? Grab one of the starfighters, fly out there, and blast it? There wasn’t any time to go find one of the pilots—chances were, they were all still flexing in front of their mirrors, anyway—so he’d have to do it himself. But he had no idea how to pilot any attack ship. The Awesome didn’t have any weapons on it.

Rogers got a sinking feeling in his stomach as he realized what he had to do.

“Deet,” he said, “get as far as you can in the next thirty seconds, and then we’re getting out of here.”

Deet beeped apprehensively. “Where are we going? We can’t go up against all those droids. You faint in combat.”

Rogers’ face reddened. “I do not faint.”

“Yes, you do. I read the report,” Deet said. “I’m plugged into the main computer, after all. This video is hilarious.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter, alright? We’re not going to be fighting any droids.” Rogers whipped out his datapad. “Hart, are you there?”

“Yeah,” Hart called back. It sounded quiet on his end. “Your boy Tunger took off, though; don’t know where he went. Mumbled something about his children. We think we’re almost through disabling this bomb, but even if we do, there’s still the problem of having a bunch of boominite containers stacked in one place. One stray disruptor shot and this ship goes boom.”