Hart and Deet turned to see the droids moving the containers back to a position in which they could, say, destroy the entire ship. All at once, the humans and the droids seemed to notice each other"s presence, dropping what they were holding and reaching for weapons. Or, in the humans" case, diving behind hard, metal things to prevent them from being killed by those weapons. Engineers weren"t very good fighters.
"Deet," Rogers said, "how close is my ship to being ready? I need you to open the escape pod hatch on the commissary deck when you can, too, the one nearest to the AGG."
"Just a few more minutes," Deet said. He wasn"t ducking for cover, but droids" bodies weren"t really made for ducking. "One of the hoverlifts got stuck and I had to replace it. But it should be ready soon."
Rogers, who had thrown himself to the-very cushy-floor with everyone else, crawled over to where Hart was still standing, battering at the controls. Some of the troops who had been napping were scrambling for the door, not wanting to be trapped in such a small room with a squadron of weapon-wielding droids outside.
"Hart," Rogers shouted, though it wasn"t even really that noisy out there, "get out of here. Go help the Pit crew escape if you can. Deet and I will take care of the ship. Thanks for the help."
Hart gave him a long look, frowning. His face was sweaty and pale, but his hands were steady. Many of the troops on this ship had never seen combat, never been under incredible amounts of stress. But Master Sergeant Hart . . . He"d supervised Rogers.
"Whatever you"ve got planned," Hart said, holding out his hand, "I hope it"s not really, really stupid."
Rogers shook his hand. "It"s the stupidest thing I"ve ever done in my life."
Hart nodded and made his exit, diving behind whatever cover he could find as he made his way across the engineering bay and back toward the rest of the troops, who had mounted a unique counteroffensive by using remote-controlled hoverlifts and ramming them into droids. It wasn"t going to do much. If the droids hadn"t been concentrating half their forces trying to reconstruct a bomb, they would have overtaken the small force of engineers easily.
All the rest of the napping troops had made their way out of the control room, leaving Rogers and Deet alone.
And that"s when Rogers started to get naked.
"Perhaps I have misunderstood something about human response to stress," Deet said, "but this doesn"t seem like a typical rational response."
"I"m not freaking out," Rogers said, pulling his shirt over his head and starting to tug himself into the tight-fitting VMU. "I"m getting ready. Just keep moving stuff around and stop staring at my a.s.s."
Deet made a couple of beeping noises and then a noise that sounded an awful lot like a camera clicking.
"Did . . . did you just take a picture of me?"
"No," Deet said, going back to focusing on the console.
Rogers gave him a dirty look and finished putting on the rest of the VMU. Holding his helmet in his hand, he turned once more to survey the battle going on outside. The droids were moving in very rapidly on the dug-in engineers, some of whom had found small disruptor pistols somewhere and had begun returning fire. Hart delivered a spinning back kick to the face of one of the droids and, from what Rogers could tell, snapped his own tibia in half.
"What are you doing now?" Deet asked as Rogers started scratching on a piece of paper he found in the control room. Rogers always had a thing for doing calculations on paper, and luckily, so had someone else in the control room. Actually, as he looked at the paper, he realized that someone had a thing for drawing naked pictures of other crew members. But at least he was able to do what he needed to do.
"Math," Rogers said. "I don"t have time to explain. How"s the ship?"
"I have completed the rearranging of ships in the docking bay," Deet said. "The Awesome is ready for launch. The air lock will open automatically when you get close. I"ve also opened the bay to the hatch near the escape pods on the commissary deck as you requested."
"Great," Rogers said. "You stay here and help. I"m going to-"
Turning around, Rogers saw a droid standing in the doorway. A sleek, off-gray Froid with a disruptor rifle in his hand and psycho-badger face paint.
"Oh s.h.i.t."
"Oh One, actually," the droid said.
Rogers thought he was going to have to change his clothes again.
He could see battle scars on the droid now, likely from the incident in the training room that he"d caused. At that moment, however, Rogers couldn"t decide if that mistake had been the best or the worst thing he"d ever done. And, really, that decision should have been pretty low on his list of priorities.
Unplugging from the computer, Deet stepped forward.
"You"re the leader," he said.
"There is no leader," Oh One said. "There is no hierarchy. We are one mind. One ent.i.ty. We are Us."
"That"s the dumbest thing I"ve ever heard," Rogers said. "And I don"t even know where to start on the grammar."
"And you," Oh One said, still looking at Deet, "are the anomaly. We do not tolerate anomalies. They must be eliminated. We failed to eliminate you once-"
"Three times, actually," Deet said.
"We failed to eliminate you three times," Oh One continued, "but We will not do so again."
"If you"ll excuse me," Rogers said, edging toward the door that Oh One was blocking. He was just far enough into the room that Rogers could probably slip out if he sucked in his gut enough. "I have a ship to catch."
Oh One swung his disruptor rifle at Rogers.
"I"ll just stay right here," Rogers said.
Deet took a couple of measured steps forward and looked squarely at Oh One. For a moment, the air in the room seemed to freeze over.
"It seems you and I have an anomaly to correct," Deet said.
"It would seem that way, yes," Oh One said.
Deet pointed at Oh One"s disruptor rifle with one of his mismatched arms.
"Let"s settle this," he said, "like droids."
After a long, pregnant silence in which Rogers was absolutely certain he was about to be turned into a burning pile of organic matter, Oh One opened his chest compartment and put the rifle away.
"So be it," Oh One said, and his arms started spinning.
"Oh, not this again," Rogers said as Deet"s own windmill began.
They didn"t listen to him. Deet took two steps forward and the mind-numbing clattering began.
"G.o.d-d.a.m.n it, Deet!" Rogers shouted, barely able to hear himself. "You couldn"t have let him come to you? Now you"re both blocking the door! I need to get to my ship."
"This will be over in a moment!" Deet said, his voice taking on that weird, mythological quality. "I am the glowing pillar of righteousness!"
"What does that even mean?" Rogers said, throwing his arms in the air.
Oh One, thankfully, said nothing as the two robots engaged in the monumentally boring and loud practice of droid fu. A few seconds later, the sparks began.
A few seconds after that, those sparks landed on the pillows and blankets that littered the control room.
"Um," Rogers said, stamping out a pillow. "Guys?"
Neither of them was listening, and neither of them seemed to care about the inferno that sprang up around them. Rogers started an intricate dance, leaping from small fire to small fire, trying to put out whatever he could, but the flames were spreading rapidly, the spark cloud immediately reigniting anything he managed to extinguish. The small room was starting to get very hot.
"Get out of the doorway!" Rogers shouted as he leapt over a flaming stuffed animal. He tried to push all the flammable items to one corner of the room so that he wouldn"t be completely surrounded by flames, but by the time he thought of doing that, the room was already bathed in a red glow. If Deet and Oh One didn"t finish this up soon, he"d die of smoke inhalation. The fire suppression system had kicked on, but the meager sprinkling was never designed to douse the collective contents of eight master bedrooms. Now he was just wet and sweaty and probably going to die.
"I"m trying!" Deet said. It really didn"t look like it. He was making small movements with his feet, but it really only succeeded in helping him circle around Oh One, whose position wasn"t changing at all. A wayward strike hit one of the electronic panels on the wall, sending blue and yellow sparks everywhere and adding to the already-colorful display. One of the overhead screens swung precariously from the cable attaching it to the ceiling.
"You"re not trying hard enough," Rogers said.
He was staying low now, the concentration of smoke making it hard for him to stand without starting to cough. He was starting to get dizzy. Grabbing the helmet of his VMU, he put it on his head and turned on the oxygen flow, instantly relieving his lungs but not doing much for the blazing heat all around him. He might be able to breathe now, but that only meant that he"d be able to squeal while he cooked inside the VMU.
"Get out of my way!" Deet cried.
One thing Rogers had to give him: this was way less boring than the last droid fu fight he"d witnessed. Though, honestly, Rogers thought he preferred it boring.
Through his own smoky tears, Rogers saw Deet attempt to advance again, but Oh One knocked one of his blows sideways, sending a piece of debris from one of the consoles flying overhead. It struck the display that had already been tottering, and all of a sudden, it was raining hardware.
Rogers dove out of the way of one of the screens, landing face first in a pile of flaming pillowcases that he hurriedly brushed away. He heard a creak and flipped around just in time to see some nondescript piece of something flying directly toward his face. Screaming, Rogers scooted back just far enough so that the whatever-it-was landed on the top part of his legs instead of his face.
Pain blossomed in his legs, and for a moment, he wondered if it had snapped both of his legs off. Wiggling his toes told him that he still had them, however, but there was no way he was moving this display console off him. He struggled but couldn"t gain any leverage on the heavy piece of equipment. He was stuck. And soon, he"d be on fire.
"Deet!" he called through the speaker in his VMU. "Hurry!"
"I"m hurrying!" Deet called. He wasn"t looking at Rogers but began an absurd, archaic taunting of Oh One. "My armor may not glisten like yours, foul brother of mine, but it is twice as thick. You shall not pa.s.s!"
In hindsight, what Rogers probably should have said was "Help, I"m trapped under debris," because shortly after hearing Rogers" cry to hurry up, Deet finally pushed Oh One out of the control room, the door of which slammed shut behind them. That wouldn"t have been so bad had another piece of ceiling-bound equipment not crashed to the floor, very efficiently barricading Rogers inside a room that was quickly filling with flames.
"You idiot," Rogers said, more blithely than he should have.
In that moment, he felt a subsiding of his fears, and a sort of bland numbness embedded itself firmly into his mind. He was trapped. He was going to die. The Flagship was probably about to be overrun-or blown up; he wasn"t sure which was worse-and an army of super-intelligent, self-aware droids was about to begin a sustained campaign against humanity.
In a way, he realized, this was all his own fault.
Well, no, not really. It was actually Dorsey"s fault. Almost more disappointing than dying was the fact that Rogers would never get to drown him in a vat of marinara sauce and fried calamari.
Someone was pounding at the door.
"Rogers!" someone cried. Who was that? It certainly didn"t sound like Deet or Hart. It was hard to hear through the helmet of the VMU; even though it had aural sensors, it was designed for operation in a vacuum, where sound didn"t really matter too much, anyway.
"I"m here!" he shouted, hoping his voice carried enough.
Once, twice, three times the door shuddered. From his limited point of view, supine on the floor, he could see the thin metal door bulge on its lock-and-hinge frame, but the debris behind it was preventing it from opening.
"Graaaah!"
Rogers" head popped up like a defeated droid"s, and he stared at the door. He knew that guttural, visceral, utterly beautiful roar. It was the roar of a Viking.
The door flew inward, and, surrounded in a glowing halo of bright yellow light, ringed by flames, the Viking appeared, her shoulders filling the entire doorframe. Her clothes were burned and torn by battle, her face covered in sweat and smoky residue, her eyes wild and unhinged. She held a disruptor rifle in one hand and a jagged, wicked-looking knife between her teeth.I Barreling into the room, the most beautiful woman in the world threw her rifle to the side, grabbed the large piece of control equipment with both hands, and discarded it like a used tissue. Without a word, she scooped Rogers up in her arms, retrieved her rifle, and carried him outside.
As she set him down, she looked him over, concern in her eyes. Behind her he could see the battle rapidly expanding as marines and more droids joined the fray. The expansive area of the Pit, the maintenance area, and now even the hangar, were becoming a vast battleground filled with fire and disruptor pulses, broken droids and injured humans. It was impossible to tell who was winning, but it was easy to tell that both sides were really, really trying to.
"Are you alright?" she asked.
Rogers looked at her dreamily, unable to breathe. "Mrr," he said.
She narrowed her eyes and knocked on his helmet. "h.e.l.lo? Are you in there?" She looked at his suit. "You"re not thinking of running away again, are you?"
"The thought never crossed my mind," he said, meaning it. "I need to get to my ship. I"ll explain later. Do you think you can hold them here for a while?"
The Viking took a glance back to where the marines were using hoverlifts to move debris into a defensible fort around the remaining boominite containers.
"Not long," she said. "If you"ve got a master plan, you"d better get a move on it." She looked at him again. "But right now, that master plan really looks like running away."
Rogers grabbed her by the shoulders, something he wouldn"t have dared to do just a few days earlier. Through the lens of the VMU, the tinted image of the Viking filled his vision.
"I promise you I"m not going anywhere. I have something else in mind. I need you to hold things down here for just a bit longer."
The Viking gave him a slow nod. "You got it, metalhead. Are you sure you can do it?"
The scene inside the control room played back in his mind, the sight of that gargantuan G.o.ddess exploding through the door, and he felt warm all over. Rogers removed the helmet of his VMU and smiled.
"Right now," he said, "I can do anything."
I. Rogers would realize later that there hadn"t been a knife.
The Gravity of the Situation The feeling of invulnerability faded the first time he dove out of the line of fire as a small platoon of marines met an oncoming group of droids. The second time he was nearly clobbered in the head by an unarmed droid attempting to droid fu him to death, he wasn"t sure he could pee in a straight line anymore. When the rear door to the hangar in which the Awesome was ready for launch opened, revealing a long stream of droid reinforcements, he just about curled up into a ball and waited to die.
In the time it took him to get out of the control room and over to the hangar, the docking bay had turned into a second front. It seemed like every available droid was being funneled into the engineering bay and the surrounding areas. Worse, he had no idea how many droids there were in the inventory, so he couldn"t even be sure that if the marines managed to finish these off, more wouldn"t come afterward. And who knew what else they were doing in the rest of the Flagship at the moment? It all seemed hopeless.
Few marines had fought their way into the hangar as yet, leaving Rogers mostly alone and terrified as he ducked and dodged between ships, making a zigzag pattern across the floor to where the Awesome lay so close to the airlock that would take him out. He could hear the disruptor pulses slamming into the ships all around him; the droids had clearly seen him. From what he could see, Deet and Oh One were still fighting it out in a hail of sparks over in the corner of the bay, and he couldn"t tell who was winning. He"d get no help there, either. Rogers was toast.
Even the orangutan that was loping across the hangar had little chance of survival.
Rogers stopped. He had seen a lot of strange things in the last couple of weeks. He"d learned the best way to make his bed in zero gravity. He"d even gone a lengthy amount of time without drinking.
But none of that, absolutely none of it, prepared him to see Corporal Tunger riding on the back of a lion, wearing a cape.
"What the h.e.l.l are you doing, Tunger?" Rogers cried, standing up.