“Oh, come on,” he said.

“I love this song!” Tunger exclaimed, shaking his hips in a very disturbing way.

Pressing the fifth button turned the song off—why allocate two buttons to that?—and the sixth button didn’t appear to do anything at all. The seventh button, however, brought up a high-definition display of a single combat droid that rotated, displaying the health of each of its components in a gradient color system. To the left was a list—Rogers guessed from the number that it was a list of the droids under his command—and on the bottom, there was another set of buttons that were clearly combat commands.

“Finally,” he said. “Here we go.”

He pressed the “all” button on the side, and instantly all the droids were highlighted. Then he pressed the “draw weapons” button and nearly died.

A horrible clanking of metal erupted as the chest compartment of every droid in the squadron opened up, out of which sprang a modified disruptor rifle, fully charged and ready to go. They snatched them into their glossy hands in a crisp, unified motion that, together, sounded like a spaceship had just gotten stepped on by one of the sand dragons on Dathum.^I Rogers was standing so close to one of the droids that it elbowed him in the shoulder, sending him ricocheting into another droid that thankfully pushed him outside the formation. Rogers fell backward and rolled to a stop, the command pad slapping him in the face and sliding to the floor.

“Wow,” said Tunger.

Groaning, Rogers pulled himself to his feet, his heart racing. The ketchup packet that had been in his hand had spilled most of its contents onto his fingers. He wiped as much of it as he could on the floor, not really wanting to stain his uniform, but his hand was still much redder than it had been a moment before.

“That was . . . enthusiastic,” Rogers said. Oh One made no reply. The red-faced badger now looked like a red-faced badger-killer-robot. Rogers wasn’t sure he liked the change.

It took another few seconds—and unlocking the command pad twice—before Rogers could figure out how to get the droids to turn in place. It took another few tasteless pop songs before Rogers could even begin to understand how to make them find a target and take aim. The last thing he wanted was all of them facing different directions, shooting whatever they liked.

“Let’s maybe just start with you, Oh One,” Rogers said. He highlighted Oh One in the list of droids and pressed the button for “attack target.”

So quickly it blurred in Rogers’ vision, Oh One snapped his rifle up, took careful aim, and with deadly precision, shot the ceiling of the training room.

Both Rogers and Tunger ducked reflexively, despite there not being anything to duck away from. The floor vibrated as the disruptor rifle blasted a hole in the ceiling the size of a small melon, sending disintegrated metallic dust showering down like silver snow. A larger chunk broke off, colliding with the head of one of the droids in the second row and sending it sprawling to the floor. Its motion knocked another droid down, and soon there were four or five of them down, legs and arms flailing as they tried to get back up. The one that had been hit in the head wasn’t moving; its eyes were no longer shining blue, and, for all intents and purposes, it appeared to be “dead.”