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Now, time to get that pocket door situated.
You punt your way over to what is left of the manual crank, noting how the drone shifts slightly as you float by. Clearly, the thing is doing its best to keep you in the spotlight for as long as it can without putting itself too close to the walls, or backing away from the breach. Seeing such deliberate behavior does nothing to ease your nerves. Clearly, the thing has a lot more going on upstairs than you originally assumed. And while of course that does make you more nervous, there is also an increasing sense of excitement, as the smarter the drone is, the more it is going to be worth - and that is not even considering that if you are able to take it in operable condition, you might be able to use it for the rest of your shift here, assuming you had some reliable way of keeping it under control.
That is a big 'if' though. Still, in spite of everything, you are actually feeling pretty good about your prospects here - at least until you turn your attention to the door, at which point, the realization of how much you are betting on a mechanism, half of which looks broken, the other half is just gone. You are able to get a hold of yourself though. Sure, the lock and the crank-wheel and the bells and fucking whistles are all gone, but the stud is still in there, and the gears behind it - everything else would have just been in the way. You drag your toolbox over to you, and then you fish out your grease gun. In the light from your suit, the wisps and the eye of the drone, you dump as much thermal lubricant as you possibly can into the shell of the mechanism, then you kiss the paste with your wrecking torch, just a few times. Then you wait for the light gray color of the paste to change to a darker shade, indicating that everything within the ball of thermal lubricant has been heated up to a safe operating temperature.
This stuff works a lot like the thermal flux that you use with cutting, except instead of wicking away heat, to prevent expansion, shattering, spalling - and creep, when working heavy - this paste is used for mechanical systems that are intended to be operated at standard conditions. If you were to try to open or close this door with any real speed, you would probably end up turning the mechanism into a floating cloud of metal toothpicks - and you cannot even imagine what you have left if you tried to do it with the impact driver without taking any precautions.
Before you take the impact to it through, you decide to try it out with hand tools. Lucky for you, the socket and ratchet with the crank-style cheater works well enough - though admittedly you were a little spooked when the drone jolted backward as the door opened. You return the hand tools to your box, and haul out the impact - the only the third time in your two months of wrecking that you have ever needed to use it - when you get a good look at the torques and speeds that this thing is capable of.
