All thoughts vanished from his mind as he turned the last corner on the way to his quarters. Outside his door was a hulking monster of a woman. Gargantuan in stature, she must have stood well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and hands that looked like they could crack open a coconut without a hammer. Her dark hair was cropped shorter than Rogers’, and Rogers was almost certain he wouldn’t have been able to fit in her boots without stuffing socks in them. She wore the uniform of a Meridan Marine and the rank of captain, two ranks higher than Rogers’ new rank.

She was perfect.

Forcing himself to stop staring and start walking, Rogers put on his best smile. For some reason—divine blessing, he thought—she was standing right outside his door, clearly waiting for him. Had she heard about the dashing young ex-sergeant-turned-ensign that had come back to liven up the Flagship ? Word always did travel fast on a giant hunk of metal on which most people had nothing to do but gossip.

“Well, hello there,” he said, his smile widening. His palms were actually sweating. He’d barely been sweating when he’d thought he was going to jail. God, she was beautiful. “What can I—”

“Is this your room?” the giant vixen interrupted. Rogers looked at her nametag, and saw that it said Alsinbury on it. Captain Alsinbury. R. Wilson Alsinbury. Hmm . . .

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “it is. Would you care to come inside for a—”

She hit him in the face so hard that for a moment, he thought that someone had opened the airlock and turned off the gravity generator, because he couldn’t breathe and he was no longer touching any hard surfaces. He had a brief, fleeting sensation of landing on the ground before the not-so-brief and not-so-fleeting sensation of head trauma settled in and filled the world with a thousand gossiping old women with shrill voices and sledgehammers.

“That’s what you get for trying to put robots in a human’s job.” Captain Alsinbury’s voice somehow cut through the rushing river of pain flowing in between Rogers’ ears.

“Mrrrh,” Rogers began, but at the moment, forming words was about as easy as standing up after being hit in the face by a marine.

“Take your droids and stuff ’em. Nobody goes on the ground but me and my marines, and don’t you forget it.”

Rogers dimly registered the fading footsteps of the captain and looked up just in time to see her rumble away to another part of the ship. He thought about following her, trying to explain why she had misconstrued his intentions and shouldn’t they drink themselves silly and talk about their future until they sorted all of this out, but his muscles didn’t quite feel like functioning at the moment. He held the image of her walking away in his head as he pulled himself to lean against his door and tried to stop the ship from spinning.