The evening stillness of Workshop Bay 12 was broken by the sharp, metal clang of a heavy light metal food bowl bouncing wildly across the poured concrete floor.
Toby stood in the center of the bay. He held a pair of stainless-steel kitchen tongs and stared down at his boots in sheer, sputtering disbelief. A puddle of steaming, grey-brown tactical beast mush—standard military issue, fortified with man-made proteins, bone meal, and dehydrated kelp—was splattered in a wide, greasy arc across the floorboards.
Vesper sat atop Titus’s highest shell plate. She had her uninjured left paw extended in mid-air, her claws fully retracted, her expression one of supreme, majestic disgust. Her left ear, neatly stitched with black silk stitches, swiveled backward with a heard, shrugging nasal chuff: pffff.
“She did it again!” Toby yelled, waving the kitchen tongs toward the overhead pipes. “That’s five hundred credits of high-protein Vanguard ration mash! It has sixty percent crude protein! Cadets in the forward trenches would trade their sidearms for a bowl of that. She just swat-swatted it across the room like toxic waste! Look at my boots, Arthur! There’s dehydrated kelp on my laces!”
From his spot across Arthur’s boots, Grimm lifted his massive black head, took one look at the spilled mash on the floor. Then it began creeping forward on his belly, his pink tongue licking his chops with hopeful, thumping eagerness: thud, thud, thud.
