“What do you mean, you need to clean it?” Belgrave looked at him sideways, then narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you the admiral’s new executive officer? Don’t you have more important stuff to do?”

If you only knew, Rogers thought. His fingers were permanently stained off-gray from polishing so many buttons.

“We’re short on staff,” Rogers said. “I need to go outside the ship to clean it manually. It’s got space bugs on the screen and I need to wash them off. If you keep the computer on, the cleaning fluid will short out the system.”

“Space bugs?”

“Yeah. Space bugs. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of space bugs?”

“It’s just that I didn’t think that bugs could survive in—”

“Oh my god,” Rogers said, slapping his forehead and leaning back dramatically. “He’s never heard of space bugs. How have you never heard of space bugs?”

Rogers walked up to one of the large windows in the bridge and put his finger to the glass. When it came away, a small speck remained (it was a drop of Lopez’s vile concoction).

“This!” Rogers said. “This right here. You’ve got space bugs on your window from flying around, and you don’t even know it.”

“How is that possible? We’ve been stationary for years,” the helmsman said, but he was starting to look a little worried.

“Only relative to yourself,” Rogers said. “Didn’t you study orbitology at all? The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit!”

Rogers took a few steps toward Belgrave, who was definitely getting nervous. He kept shifting his eyes between Rogers and the smudge on the window.

“Do you want the admiral to find out that you’ve never heard of space bugs?” he nearly shouted.

“Keep it down!” the helmsman hissed, crouching into his seat. “Do you want the admiral to find out that I’ve never heard of space bugs?”

“1500 hours,” Rogers said. “Shut it down for at least twenty minutes. And go study Newton’s laws of interplanetary relativity!”

“You want me to give you what? ” Ensign McSchmidt said.

“I need a pressure suit and a vacuum mobility unit. With a full air chamber.”

“I’m not giving you a VMU,” McSchmidt said.

Rogers pointed to the shiny new rank on his collar.

“I’m not giving you a VMU, sir,” McSchmidt said, his face turning down in a scowl. “Our maintainers need them for repairs on the outside of the ship.”

“Didn’t I say I was going to help you with running the engineering squadron and all that?”

“You did,” McSchmidt said, his expression flat. “And I haven’t heard from you since.”

Rogers shook his head slowly and made an exasperated noise. “You know, I had more faith in an Academy officer. I thought they taught you duty, and devotion, and when to understand that you have to give complicated and valuable equipment to people who ask for it.”

“I’m afraid I skipped that class,” McSchmidt said.