Slowly, Klein peeked up from his hand. “Days?” he said.

Rogers took a small step back, inching precariously close to the edge of the command platform. “Um.”

“You have two hours to catch up,” Klein said. “Meet me in my stateroom when you’re done.”

Two hours later, Rogers felt like he’d been punched in the face by the Viking again. His eyes were made of old, crackling glass. His fingers were numb from tapping incessantly on the surface of the multiple datapads. His vertebrae were starting to separate from extended periods of time trying to do all of this in the null-g environment of his stateroom.

Rogers had never seen such an incredible amount of minutiae in all of his life. Amidst requests from the captains of the other ships for approval regarding menial, stupid things like inspection schedules and whether or not it was authorized to pet droids on their heads, Rogers could discern almost nothing of actual strategic value. Messages flew in quicker than Rogers could delete ones that he’d already taken care of or didn’t really contain any useful information at all. Admiral Klein had a habit of using the messaging system as an internal monologue; many of the notes were clearly stream-of-consciousness and couldn’t possibly be applied to anything Rogers could do. One particularly cryptic one said something about whether or not sandwiches tasted the same if made upside down.

Some of the messages actually were orders for Rogers to make a sandwich, though they had been sent days before. Apparently, in addition to secretary, Rogers was also going to function as the admiral’s valet, housekeeper, and chef.

His network terminal beeped and reminded him that in three minutes, he was to remind himself that in two minutes he needed to be in the admiral’s stateroom. Rogers stared at the screen, blinking tears out of his eyes. Had he really set that absurd of a reminder? How quickly was he going to transform into a soulless bureaucrat?

When the second reminder went off, he gathered up his things and prepared to head into the lion’s den. Already he was feeling exhausted after only a few hours of work, namely because he wasn’t very accustomed to doing work at all. How was he going to get out of this?

As he turned around to float over to the doorway, he noticed that at some point someone had put an entire rack of uniform jackets in his room, all with the admiral’s rank on them. Some of them had floated off their hangars and were now decorating his room like tasteless drapes. To the rack itself had been attached a coarse brush. The instructions were so obvious, they needed no accompanying message or task order.

Two of each came through at that moment, anyway.

“Two strokes right shoulder,” one of them said. “Three strokes left shoulder. Turn jacket around. Repeat.”

Rogers shut his eyes tight, ignored the task for the moment, and left his room. Instantly, he was surrounded by people attempting to salute him or requiring salutes of their own because of their rank, and the vigorous physical activity/monotony actually helped Rogers take his mind off his situation for a moment. By the time he got to Klein’s door and rang the buzzer, he was sweating.