Toasty 4: The biscuit Maker

Chapter 4 - The Biscuit Maker

If a rover could vomit, Toasty that would be what Toasty would be doing right now.

While he could hold onto the hex driver while it was in use, he wasn’t strong enough to hold his wheels down, too.  Whenever he used the driver, the little rover ended up spinning around the bolt like a maniac.  It turned out that a hex bolt designed to be opened by a 200 kilogram maintenance rover was a bit of a challenge for a 10 kilogram toaster.  What invariably happened was that Toasty would be spinning like a clock while holding onto the driver until the tool’s battery popped out.

Toasty again considered if just going out the window was the better option, and decided against it only because he wouldn’t be able to open the airlocks to get back in.

The problem was that Toasty’s tiny battery wasn’t able to provide enough power to magnetize his wheels enough to hold onto the deck.  He glanced at his wheels, they were after market just like all of his other parts save the all important Toaster.

He just needed to power them more, but where could he get more power?

Toasty grabbed the battery and drove back over to the tool.  Seventh times the charm, right?

Ae he started to push the battery back in place, Toasty realized something.  Grumbling, he drove over to the maintenance bot and pulled used his laser cutter on the other side of the wiring conduit for the useless tool arm.  With that detached, Toasty drove away rationalizing his cannibalistic attack on the other rover as something the maintenance both should be able to repair.

<With its tool arm>

Exactly, thought Toasty.  Stripping the wire, Toasty reached into his access panel and checked his own wiring.  Because he was the ship’s maintenance department’s project, most of the modifications were pretty well labeled.  He quickly found the wiring for his magnetic wheels and soldered the wire in place with the cumbersome human sized tools in the maintenance closet.  He soldered the other ends onto the battery while ensuring that it could still be inserted.

A quick squeeze of the squishy trigger caused the driver to spin and his wheels to lock firm against the floor.

Armed with this new capability, Toasty drove over to the airlock socket and got the tool into position.  With his understanding of how the driver worked, Toasty placed the hand held potion against his frame and used his arms to activate the trigger.  Before the modification this action would push him aside and then leave him spinning with the tool, now his wheels stuck firm and the tool couldn’t budge him.

With a crunching sound, the airlock door opened and Toasty drove in prepared to repeat the process.  As he closed his side of the airlock and opened the other there was a whistling sound as air flooded into the compartment.

Nasty smokey air filled the airlock.

Great, all of the food will taste like smoke now, thought Toasty.

The rover quickly figured out why, most of the crew wasn’t busy fixing the ship.  There was some kind of party ongoing, he could tell by the low warbling quack of the ship’s pa system as well as the flashing strobe light.

Now Toasty was upset, the crew should have been tending to the ship instead of partying.  He even found another member of the crew when he pulled into the kitchen, she wasn’t moving which just spoke to her inherent laziness.

Scanning the crewmember’s uniform, Toasty spotted her name.  Sheela.  She must work in the kitchen on the Muffin machine.  For a nanosecond Toasty considered not reporting her, but she had failed in her most important duty.  Breakfast must be served.

Toasty rolled into the mess hall and then into the galley beyond.  Both doors were open entirely in breech of standard protocols.  Why if the ship had been attacked while both doors were opened, there could be a lethal atmosphere breech.

Pushing aside a floating crewmember, Toasty was relieved to see that the compartment’s pressure was good and the passive filtration system was doing it's best to clear out the contaminates.  Checking the panel there were gasses such as cadaverine, putrescine, indole and skatole in the air mixture.

“Great, this is going to wildly throw off my flavor profile.”

Toasty rolled over to the autostove and waited a moment before remembering that without wireless he would not be able to communicate with it.  That seemed botheresome, but Toasty never used his wireless.  Thankfully he brought a communication wire and after a bothersome moment to find the device’s connection port, he managed to link up.

Only to find that the galley’s entire power grid was down.  Who would do that?  They were on a warship!  A warship ran on its stomach!  Without a galley there would be no meals.  And what was the most important meal?  Breakfast.

Toasty grumbled and yanked out his cable.  He fumed as he looked around and found the engineering panel in the kitchen, it was supposed to provide the breakfast eaters with a quick summary of the ship’s status and so Toasty easily found the problem.

The backup power was being fed almost entirely to a single, spoiled, room.  Breakfast would be late, why would anyone choose to power the brig instead of the galley.  It made so little sense to the toaster that he couldn’t even conceptualize it.  None of his programming was well enough written to determine what series of priorities could concoct such a catacotic conclusion.

Toasty drove up the wall to the panel, extended his manipulator arm and clicked down on the manual reset button.  Idly he wondered if this would restore gravity to the ship which would have it's own pros and cons.  The con was he wouldn’t be able to drive up walls.  The pro was that eggs cooked better in gravity, so between the ability to fly and cook eggs it was a no brainer.

The error message took him a good three seconds to parse.

<Error: Power reset failed, all power is manually routed to Brig>

Stupid eater language.  Why couldn’t they just say all of that in machine code like normal people.  However, Toasty now knew that some moron had routed all the power to the brig, probably the stupid force fields, instead of where it was most critically needed: the Galley.

Resolved, Toasty drove out of the galley and down the hall.  He would give whomever had done this a piece of his mind.  Barring that, he could at least resolve this most terrible sin against the most perfect meal.

***

The air was getting thin and the sergeant was running out of clever motivational sayings about this.  They had been in the brig for hours, initially he feared they were going to be interrogated but it turned out the aliens had gotten whatever they needed and that just meant they were being left for dead.

The force fields in the brig had been recalibrated to use the emergency power cells to stay active, meaning they were going to remain online for days if not weeks.  It would have been better to be shot, thought Johnson looking back at his troopers.

There were enough of them here that if they could just get out and get to their weapons, they might be able to take back what was left of the ship.  If.

“Anything Ernie,” he asked.

“No Sarge,” replied the technical marine.  “I don’t have any of the tools I need and I’m not having any luck with whatever I’ve been able to cobble up, it's going to take a miracle to get out of this.”