I followed Cobb through the too-clean corridors of Platform Prime. Why were we walking back to the fighter bays?

He counted off the doors until stopping next to the dock where I kept M-Bot. Increasingly confused, I followed him through the small door. I’d expected to find the ground crew beyond, doing M-Bot’s normal post-battle services. Instead, the room was empty save for the ship and one person. Rodge.

“Rig?” I asked, using his old callsign from when he’d been in Skyward Flight. That had only lasted a few days, but he was one of us all the same.

Rodge—who had been inspecting something on M-Bot’s wing—jumped as I said his name. He spun to find us there, and blushed immediately. For a moment he was the old Rodge: earnest, gangly, and not a little awkward. He almost dropped his datapad as he quickly saluted Cobb.

“Sir!” Rodge said. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”

“At ease, Lieutenant,” Cobb said. “How goes the project?”

The project? Cobb had said something about a project earlier—it involved M-Bot?

“See for yourself, sir,” Rodge said, then tapped something on his datapad.

M-Bot’s shape changed, and I actually yelped in surprise. In an instant, he looked like one of the black ships that were piloted by Krell aces.

His holograms, I realized. M-Bot was a long-range stealth ship, designed—best we could tell—for spy missions. He had what he called active camouflage, a fancy way of saying he could use holograms to change what he looked like.

“It’s not perfect, sir,” Rodge said. “M-Bot can’t turn himself invisible, not with any real level of believability. Instead, he has to overlay his hull with some kind of image. Since he’s not exactly the same shape as one of those Krell ships, we had to fudge in places. You can see here that I made the hologram’s wings bigger to cover up the tips of his hull.”

“It’s incredible,” I said, walking around the ship. “M-Bot, I had no idea you could do this.”

Rodge looked at his datapad. “Um…he sent me a text here, Spin. He says he’s not talking to you because you muted him earlier.”

I rolled my eyes, inspecting Rodge’s work. “So…what’s the point of this?”

Cobb folded his arms where he stood near the door. “I asked my command staff, scientists, and engineers to tackle the hyperdrive problem. How do we find a way off this planet? All the ideas I got back were wildly implausible, except one. It’s only mildly implausible.”

I stepped up beside Rodge, who was grinning.

“What?” I asked him.

“You know all those nights,” he said, “when you’d come wake me up and force me to go on some insane adventure?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I thought maybe I should get some revenge.” He turned and swept his hand toward M-Bot, and the new, confident Rodge was back. He grinned widely, his eyes alight. This was a man in his element. “M-Bot has extremely advanced espionage capabilities. He can create detailed holograms. He can eavesdrop on conversations hundreds of meters away. He can hack enemy signals and computer systems with ease.

“We’ve been using him as a frontline combat ship, but that’s not his true purpose. And as long as we use him just to fight, we’re not utilizing his full potential. When the admiral asked for ideas on how to get ahold of the enemy hyperdrive technology, it occurred to me that the answer was staring us in the face. And occasionally pointing out how odd our human features look.”