Rogers cleared his throat and cut the communications. “Admiral?”

“I’m ready,” Klein said. “I want to thank you, Captain Rogers.”

He’d promoted Rogers to captain—the only one on the whole Flagship^I—and proceeded to take up the job of full-time jaw-jacker in the form of a motivational speaker. Since Klein was departing, that meant Rogers was, in effect, the admiral of the fleet unless they transferred someone from another ship. And that was kind of scary.

“If I hadn’t caused multiple executive officers to hang themselves and hadn’t met you, I wouldn’t have realized what real duty was. When I talked down that droid in the hallway, I realized I had another calling in life. When I saved the ship with that speech right before the AGG went out—”

“You were late with your speech,” Rogers said. “And it didn’t change anything. If you haven’t learned that fancy speeches aren’t all that makes an admiral, I haven’t done you any favors.”

“There are other people that need to hear what I have to say.”

Not really, Rogers thought. The people that have been hearing what you have to say just need a break.

“Good luck to you,” Rogers said, extending his hand.

Klein shook it. “Your global agility and critical battlespace effects—”

“Just go,” Rogers said.

As soon as he left the bridge, Rogers felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders. He turned to watch the empty space outside, broken occasionally by a low-relative-speed asteroid floating by with different orbital parameters from the Flagship. They could have blasted them out of space, of course, but having a couple of large rocks in their orbit was preferable to having millions of small ones.

Rogers looked at the communication tech. “Any reports from the other ships in the fleet?”

“No, sir. They all checked in after you gave the order for them to dismantle their droid inventory and haven’t reported any problems. We’re still piecing back together the sensor array after the droids corrupted all the data.”

Nodding, Rogers turned over to a video display, where he called up a screen in the infirmary that he’d been looking at pretty constantly for the last couple of weeks.

“Get that off of me!” the Viking screamed, backhanding one of the medical techs, who was attempting to attach part of a vital-reading machine. “I’m fine. You people have kept me cooped up in here for two weeks. I need to get back to shooting things or I am going to go out of my mind.”

She must have noticed that her local vidscreen had turned on, for she locked eyes through the camera with Rogers.

“Rogers!” she said. “Get me the hell out of here, will you?”

Rogers grinned at her. “How does the shoulder feel?”

“Like someone shot it with a disruptor rifle two weeks ago. How do you think it feels?”

“I wanted to let you know we’re getting ready to see the admiral off and perform the funeral ritual for McSchmidt. I’ve asked the comm tech to tune in your vid display so that you can watch from there.”