Toasty 6: The Guardian Angel

Chapter 6

Toasty raced down the hallway.  His Admiral was in danger and if she died it would be terrible.  She couldn’t eat breakfast.  Toasty couldn’t even contemplate a world where breakfast was not served, no matter how hard he tried.

Suddenly he heard some unusual sounds that were no in any capacity related to breakfast.

*System Alert: Weapon fire detected*

‘See,’ thought Toasty, ‘not breakfast related.’  That screaming started again.

*System Alert: Toastbot should help*

Toasty stopped.  That didn’t make any sense, how would helping out achieve any of his mission goals.  Confident in his decision, Toasty continued down the hallway until he got to an intersection.

The deck plates clattered as inhuman feet began clattering on top of it so Toasty shifted into his toaster configuration.  Moments later several more crab people moved past, each carrying some form of heavy weapon.  Unfortunately, they had turned in the direction he was planning on traveling.  After a moment, Toasty continued forward albeit more cautiously.  He couldn’t serve breakfast if he was destroyed.

He continued wheeling towards the bow of the ship, where the Admiral was, unfortunately, that seemed to be where all the weapon fire was coming from.  There were a dozen breakfast eaters in a shootout with another dozen crabs.  As he watched one of the humans fired a burst from their railgun, blowing a crab in half.

‘See,’ thought Toasty as one of the crabs returned fire, half evaporating a crewman.

*Human forces are losing*

‘They got this, I believe in them,’ thought Toasty.  That was a lie to himself though, as Toasty absolutely didn’t care.  While he waited, he examined the battlefield.  There was a small compartment that served as a cargo transfer passage between the armored hull that composed the bow of the ship and the core where Toasty currently was.  There was a garage holding a large maintenance bot for hauling cargo built into one wall.  Opposite that, the heavily armored airlock door that allowed cargo into the ship was closed and so heavily armored that even the crab’s plasma weapons had no obvious effect on it.

The breakfast eaters had entered the large passage from the core of the ship, whereas the crabs had wisely blocked them by coming in near the passage to the bow.  This meant that the humans had to fight through all of the crabs before they could get to where the admiral was.  Toasty didn’t need to worry about that though, as a utility bot he could just take a maintenance passage and slip through.

Though he’d have to do that quickly, the crabs were more heavily armed and armored.  They were doing an excellent job of keeping the humans away from the buffet, in Toasty’s estimation.  All he had to do was drive over and who would dare shoot at a toaster?

The moment he pulled out a stray bolt of plasma nearly hit him.  Grumbling Toasty swung wide only for several more stray bolts to explode near him.  Toasty’s sensors spotted the shooter, who was terrifically bad at aiming, firing at nothing while every shot exploded near-poor Toasty, who was just trying to drive behind all of the crabs to access the maintenance door.

Why would a crab be shooting at him?  It's not like he was a remote-controlled explosive of some sort, all he wanted to do was get to the maintenance hatch where a half dozen crabs were stationed.  They were being unreasonable.

Well, if they were going to be unreasonable, so would Toasty.

Driving up the wall to the room’s control panel, Toasty brought out his handy comm cord and plugged it into the data port.  Instantly he got a barrage of messages informing him that the ship had been compromised and that all onboard devices were supposed to perform a memory wipe before going offline.

Toasty must not have been included in that, because those sorts of messages were sent wirelessly and he hadn’t received it.

First Toasty tried to just open the airlock as that seemed the most expedient way to send the crabs away.  Unfortunately, there were safeguards in place that prevented both airlock doors from opening simultaneously.

‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense,’ thought Toasty, ‘How am I supposed to kill them by blowing them out the airlock if it has safety features?’

Fortunately, Toasty’s included electronics warfare package included the ability to hack the terminal.  Someone wise must have realized that the needs of breakfast would outway the needs of the few or the one.  With his hard-line connection, Toasty was easily able to bypass the safety protocols and a moment later the system activated.

Both heavily armored airlock doors opened in one go.  Toasty, secure around a corner, and magnetized to the hull, was safe.  So were the humans, not that they had really factored into his equation.  Unfortunately, so were the crabs whose own magnetic boots locked them onto the hull before they had a chance to go flying into space.

And now they were shooting at him.

Toasty fumed, all he was doing was trying to clear the way so he could serve the Admiral breakfast.  This would not do.  Activating the heavy hauler rover located in the nearby garage, Toasty used his advanced processor to calculate the best route to clear the crabs from his path and turned the thing onto overdrive.

While all the crabs had been focused on him, none of them were paying attention to the massive SUV-sized rover which tore out of its garage at nearly 90 kilometers an hour.  It could achieve those speeds because the SUV had breaks that were designed to stop it well short of anything dangerous like a person or an outer airlock door.  Toasty had disabled all of those pesky settings, and the rover and dozen crabs went flying out of the airlock into deep space moments later.

Annoyingly, that impact didn’t kill many of the crabs.  Even now they were getting their directional jets in line and trying to return to the ship.  That would complicate his critical mission, so Toasty instructed the cargo-hauling robot to load the crabs into its storage bin.  Those bins were set up to receive packages of 10 by 10 by 50 or the jumbo 10 by 10 by 100.  Unfortunately, the first two crabs it grabbed were neither of these dimensions and the act of stuffing them into the bins was probably fatal in the mid-term.

One of their plasma rifles was crushed into the mix and moments later the entire point became academic as the rover exploded violently, killing the nearby crabs and peppering the remainder with hot bits of rover before they had a chance to determine the outcome of their packing.  This still left several unarmed crabs nearby, but lacking weapons they were much less of a threat.

Toasty closed both doors, the blast of air was making driving difficult, and stuck out one of his little arms to wave at the crabs.  When they didn’t shoot at him, Toasty finally managed to drive towards the maintenance hatch and open it glad to be rid of this terrible place.  Nothing and nobody would stand between him and his Admiral.  Toasty didn’t care what he had to do, she would get her toast!

***

“Another miracle,” asked Ernie as he stomped over to the Sarge.  Things had been pretty tight until the airlock opened up.  As it sat three members of the squad were down and who knew how much deeper into the ship they’d have to go.

“I figure we got a guardian angel,” replied Sarge, “And it's probably one of the maintenance technicians.”

Ernie thought about that for a moment, “Probably, but whoever they are, they really seem to care about us.”

“Damn straight,” said Sarge.