“Ah!” Rogers jumped in the air and turned around—no small feat with the added weight of the VMU—expecting to find Admiral Klein, or, worse, Barber Bot standing behind him.

But there was nothing. Nobody. Just piles of trash.

“What the hell?” Rogers said, his voice reverberating through the interior of his helmet.

Though . . . as he peered into the nearest pile of junk, there was something about it that looked familiar. He stepped forward and realized that it wasn’t just a pile of scrap metal; it was a pile of droid parts. A graveyard of shinies, as it were. And these weren’t just any shinies; some were the former members of the AIGCS that had been destroyed during the incident in the training room.

Rogers couldn’t remember the details, having been wounded during the courageous execution of his duty, of course, so he’d never gotten to see the extent of the damage. Now he could see it looked like a twisted surgeon suffering from tremors had taken a plasma cutter to them in the middle of an earthquake. They were barely recognizable; in fact, Rogers wouldn’t have known they were the droids at all except for one head that had somehow remained intact. Thick, jagged cuts ran all the way down their midsections, spilling their metallic and silicon interiors onto the floor, and a sort of strange engineering curiosity made Rogers bend down and examine them. How did they make these, anyway?

He saw computer boards, hydraulic systems, wires, actuators. Standard stuff, stuff you’d see in just about any piece of computer technology in modern times. One thing, however, stuck out to him. It was an open-faced cube of old-looking parts integrated with magnetic coils and other sophisticated tech, but Rogers had seen it before. It was a power generator that fed off the inertial motion and magnetic charges of artificial gravity generators. Really technical, smart stuff. The droids would never run out of power as long as they were inside a ship that had a modern gravity generator on it.

A question nagged at Rogers’ brain, but he was too busy screaming like a wounded lemur to focus on it at the moment, because something had grabbed him again.

He tried jumping up—jumping up just sort of seemed like what you do when you were startled—but he’d been squatting by the pile of destroyed robots. He succeeded, instead, in falling backward hard and doing a very poor impression of an inverted turtle, arms and legs flailing as he forgot how to control his own body.

“Who’s there?” he yelled, and received a poke in the kidney as an answer.

“Stop that!”

Another poke.

“When I find you, I’m going to press that red button and—”

Click.

The mobility switch on the back of his helmet had been turned on.

“Congratulations on activating the mobility mode of your Vacuum Mobility Unit!” a voice intoned in his ear. “You are entitled to one free—”

“Noooo!” Rogers cried as the movement of his foot caused the pressurized air in his suit to blow outward. He shot rapidly away from the trash pile and embedded his head firmly in another one, this one thankfully full of scraps of cushioning rather than metal rods and sharp edges. He reached up to free himself, and the air pockets in his arm units made sharp hissing noises as they reacted to his movements, sending him spinning around on the floor. The red light of the garbage chute turned the whole thing into a spinning-wheel painting, something out of a zip jack addict’s art studio.