“It wasn’t my choice. Nor was I particularly good at it.”

“Very often, good men are propelled to greatness in ways they do not expect,” Klein said, his voice suddenly taking on the thick quality of a man behind a podium. It seemed to startle him. It certainly startled Rogers. Klein cleared his throat. “Anyway, you use your best judgment.”

Rogers’ bad feeling deepened. Why in the world would an experienced fleet commander defer to a lieutenant ex-engineer who was also a failed combat commander about battle formations? Why was he behind his desk drafting speeches? Why—

“Rogers,” Klein said, not quite barking. “What are you doing over there? Are you making a sandwich or thinking?”

“Um,” Rogers said. “Both, sir?”

“Stop whichever one of those things doesn’t get me my lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

A Carefully Thought-Out Decision to Get the Hell Out of Dodge

“It has to work,” Rogers said as he finished tying two sheets together. He bounced off a piece of furniture and jetted to the other side of his room, where he lashed it on to one of the light fixtures. He checked that it was secure and took a deep breath. “It has to.”

Three days. It had been three days since his first meeting with Klein on the bridge, and every waking moment afterward—and every moment was waking, since the admiral hadn’t let him get much sleep—had been consumed with messages, task orders, brushing uniforms, polishing buttons, and everything in the world that sucked. The man wasn’t just a bureaucrat; it seemed as though he pursued bullshit with relentless fervor.

Worse, he deferred to Rogers for almost every decision. Communiqués back to Merida Prime. Patrol patterns. Cleaning schedules for the latrines. Things that Rogers knew nothing about. Rogers hadn’t even gotten to hear any of the intelligence briefings to find out what was really going on; Klein kept him too occupied with making major command decisions that were way above his pay grade. It didn’t make any sense. Any admiral should understand things like the boundaries of plasma wash from ships being too close, or maintenance rotation cycles. And he still hadn’t pronounced Thelicosa correctly once. Rogers had a sneaking suspicion that the admiral didn’t know who the Thelicosans were.

In fact, given everything he’d seen, Rogers had a sneaking suspicion that Admiral Klein was an idiot.

But when Klein stood up and addressed the bridge, or the mess hall, or the engineering bay, or any place he went to strut around and talk to the troops, Rogers couldn’t possibly think he was an idiot. He was eloquent, powerful, dramatic. Incredible. Every word that came out of that man’s mouth when he was in front of other people was pure genius. It was when they were behind closed doors that Rogers wondered whether or not the admiral knew how to actually do anything useful.

It wasn’t doing good things for his love life, either. He’d had a chance to talk to the Viking a few more times, but every time it seemed like anything was about to happen, like the kind of kiss where she’d hold him so tightly, it would almost be suffocating, or she’d challenge him to a wrestling match or really even simply continue standing there talking to him, he’d heard that infernal call over the loudspeaker: