3.08 - Toasteroid belt

The cannon's rumblings shook the Afterthought and knocked Daniel to the ground.

“I think Trak might have done something, Alitma,” Daniel said, pulling himself upright.

‘Nah, I’m not buying it,” Alitma said.

The reddish light of the Z-Klik cannon shined into both bridges and mingled with the blue of the dreadnought’s energy weapons, which Alitma had continued to fire at the Afterthought.

The combination of the two lights painted each crew a dark magenta.

“Getting the Z-klik cannon to shake is a nice touch though, Trak,” Alitma said.

“Belmont radiation from the cannon has increased another 400 percent,” Rachel-7 announced.

"Of course it as," Alitma said sarcastically.

The radiation began to interfere with the Afterthought’s already faulty equipment.

It blurred the images of Alitma’s face on the viewscreen, making him look like he had antlers. It garbled the ship’s music synthesizer program, and the program began to perform a mix of Altarian funeral dirges and 19th-century style human yodeling.

The depressing sounds actually fit the mood nicely.

The radiation also shorted out the timing mechanisms of a number of toasters on the ship’s hull, causing them to pop up early. As one, 54 of the small kitchen appliances shot a spray of lightly-cooked bread into space. They instantly froze solid in the vacuum of space.

In the weightlessness, the yeasty asteroids floated in all directions and bounced off the Onean headlight shield and the Afterthought’s hull.

“Wait, why did the toasters have bread in them?” Rachel-7 said.

“The little machines looked lonely without bread,” Trak said, unaware of how odd that sounded coming from a 10-foot-tall former killing machine. "I told the repair cloud to assemble some for them. That was a few weeks ago."

Daniel raised an eyebrow at Trak.

"I was bored," Trak explained.

"Ah," Daniel said.

Alitma watched as the cloud of toast expanded around the Afterthought.