Unscrewing the cap, Rogers took a whiff. The Scotch smelled like heaven in a bottle, like a long-lost friend that had come back for, well, a few drinks.

Rogers sat down, put his legs up on the console, took a drink, and waited. And if he heard even one beep from that console, he was going to press the self-destruct button.

Just as the gravity generator came into sight, his console beeped.

“Damn it!” he said, leaning forward. “What? What is it? What now?”

“Rogers!” came a voice through the communication system. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Rogers said, standing up and putting the now-empty bottle of Jasker 120 aside. He’d have to be drunk to do this. “Who is this? You’re breaking up.”

“It’s Corporal Mailn,” she said. “What are you doing out there? I swear, if you’re jumping ship . . .”

“I’m not jumping ship,” Rogers said as he prepared to jump ship. “How’s the fighting going?”

“Bad,” she said. “The Viking took a hit to the shoulder but won’t sit down, and Tunger lost a gaggle of geese. The droids are everywhere. The Viking said you had some kind of plan. Whatever it is, you’d better get a move on, because I don’t think we can hold out much longer.”

“I’m working on it,” Rogers said. Looking at the schematics again, he made absolutely sure that what he was looking at was indeed the gravity generator. The shape was right, the location was right, and there were words painted on the outside that said, NEWTON'S GRAVITY GENERATOR MK 300: KEEPING YOU GROUNDED. Rogers was pretty sure it was the right spot.

“Listen,” he said just before he put his helmet on. “I’ve got to go. Hold on to something, okay?”

“. . . Why?”

“Just do it. And if I don’t see you again . . . thanks for everything.”

Mailn was quiet for a second. “Rogers, what are you up to?”

Rogers cut the communication, disabled the Awesome’s emergency evasion features, and set the engines to a timed acceleration. Then he got his ass out of the cockpit and over to the escape hatch as fast as he could. The ship’s warning sirens were starting to blare, the computer warning of an imminent collision, even though they were still a bit away from the Flagship.

Rogers felt like he was going to vomit as he opened the hatch to vacuum and flipped on his VMU. Standing with his head out of the escape hatch, he watched the Flagship getting bigger and bigger by the second. He needed to make sure the Awesome was at maximum speed when it collided, but he also needed to make sure he wasn’t on it when it happened. He was going to have to use nearly all of the energy in the suit to stop himself from becoming a space bug on the Flagship’s windshield. And if he didn’t get inside before the Awesome hit, he risked getting impaled by high-speed debris.