Intercept sat on the workbench, patiently waiting for Acey to ask the next question in the approved heuristic startup cycle. He knew she had left the room, but she would be back. At least, she was supposed to be back. Wasn’t she?

He became confused when the shipwide alert system upgraded. There were no detectable emergencies. Why would the ship go to alert? Intercept didn’t mind, of course. He just upgraded his own alert systems to match, which released control of his threat response and battle systems.

His engine idled quietly. He did a quick scan of the room and logged the results for later analysis. His sensors produced a comprehensive physical map of the location, complete with magnetic, temperature, radiation, acoustical, barometric and thermal atmospheric gas analysis datasets. Everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. He was pleased all his systems were working so well. He knew Acey would be proud. The little blue badge indicator on his hood snapped off. He was no longer in communication with the Commander. He concluded after a brief analysis it must have been because she moved out of range. A secondary explanation was that she had either deactivated her commlink or switched it to another channel.

His cloaking systems activated and the little police car vanished from sight. He performed another analysis of his systems logs and realized it was because of his defense reflex system. Something had happened. He knew he wasn’t supposed to go active until he had evaluated the threat, so he used his visual pickups first to see if anything had changed in the room.

It had.

A few yards away, an alien probe roughly the size of a volleyball was floating in mid air over one of Acey’s fabrication machines. It’s hull was smooth silver with dark blue markings. Green indicator lights blinked ominously from its external panels. Two dangerous looking probes extended from one of its sides.

Intercept moved with battlefield precision. His top priority orders were to protect the ship at all costs. He crept across the length of Acey’s workbench with his cloak still active and all his systems at maximum alert level and power output. He stalked the little alien probe like a cybernetic metal housecat. Intercept knew if he got to the end of the workbench before the probe detected him, he might be able to use his weapons to disable it and protect the ship. He didn’t activate his transmitters, however, as it would be easy to detect communications from such a short distance even with his cloak active.

The probe pivoted in space, bringing its other instruments to bear. A conical blue laser-like light appeared and began to sweep the room from floor to ceiling.

“Halt! Identify yourself!”

Blinding white spot beams illuminated the probe from lamps on either side of Intercept’s windshield. He had disengaged his cloak and powered up all his weapons systems. The little security vehicle was ready for just about anything.

The probe bolted. It streaked across the room and stopped at the hatch that led out into the deck four center corridor. It started running an electronic bypass on the door locks. Intercept picked up the transmissions and calculated he had about five seconds to stop it. He lit up like police cars should and activated his sirens, peeling backwards on the workbench like it was a parking lot outside a bank robbery. Smoke drifted from his tires as he performed a textbook J-turn and accelerated down the workbench.

He passed the other mini-bots like a black and white racehorse. Somewhere deep inside Echo’s complex circuitry, an automatic reflex system activated. She heard something way in the distance that sounded like a siren, but it couldn’t be her siren, could it? She was asleep! Her power systems reported a full charge, and she initiated a cold restart.

By now Intercept had soared off the workbench and bounded across the floor. His high-performance suspension combined with his electromagnetic ground contact field kept his tires in contact with the floor. He maneuvered frantically around chairs, equipment and more workbenches. The lights in the lab went dark as one of the power relays overloaded and burst into flames from the alien probe’s signal. The suddenly disabled deck hatch opened and allowed the alien probe to escape into the ship. Intercept activated his other siren, which filled the room with urgent alarm. Moments after the probe rounded the corner and rocketed up the corridor, Intercept skidded across the deck behind it and accelerated in pursuit, headlights strobing and lightbars flashing angrily.

He activated every transmitter he had and began broadcasting on every frequency he could find. “Intruder! Intruder! Intruder!”

A scramble signal nobody besides Commander Hunter had ever seen before began blinking on the Fury bridge signals station. The Officer of the Watch noticed it first and leaned closer to see what it was.

Exactly 716 nanoseconds later, Echo detected Intercept’s microcode designator and noted the emergency deck alarm bit was flipped to the “on” position. She and Intercept initiated a lightning-quick dialogue via the fleet command net that took a grand total of 68415 nanoseconds, which was a televised-presidential-debate-magnitude amount of time for two datanet-connected minibots to engage in negotiations. Finally Echo agreed to give Intercept the benefit of the doubt as to his identity. 206 nanoseconds later, Echo’s own lightbars activated. Her red rotating emergency beacons swirled around the dark lab. She activated the fleetwide hailing channels.

“Emergency! Emergency! DSS Fury! Intruder protocols! Sensor section forward! Security to deck four!” Echo revved her engines and only managed to cause an unholy racket on the workbench as the torque almost ripped the suspension rack she was sitting on out of the wall. Her obstacle navigation systems took over and she overshifted her transmission to put maximum pressure on the structure. Her back wheels spun free and shrieked against the surface. The friction created an enormous white cloud of smoke. A few moments later there was a loud wrenching sound just before half the mechanism was literally ripped out of the wall. Echo peeled forward and barely avoided pitching off the workbench in a screeching back-wheels-up forward skid. She reversed and swerved, bouncing over the twisted remains of the power connector and rack and finally freed herself, only to tear across the empty bench, dive off the edge and fall backwards into a scrap metal can.

Meanwhile, crew members of the Fury were coming out of hatches to see what all the commotion was. More than a few of them had to dive out of the way as the strange flying device howled past followed by what looked for all the world like a toy police car in hot pursuit, sirens blaring. Finally the alien probe made a wrong turn and ended up in a dead end corridor. It slowed before attempting to reverse its course, and Intercept had his shot. Both LAC guns activated simultaneously and fired. Gun Two glanced a shot off the probe’s hull. Gun One speared it center-mass. It worked.

Well, it should have worked. Intercept discharged all four of his capacitors at the exact moment the probe accelerated back in the opposite direction. The resulting pressure wave from the electrical discharge threw the little car back. Intercept tumbled over and over before coming to rest on his roof several yards away.

The probe raced back around the corner and stopped suddenly. There in the center of the corridor, strobes flashing and lights spinning, was Echo. Her chassis and outer body were still scorched and smoldering with wisps of dark colored smoke from the virtual destruction of the scrap metal can, but she was fully operational and in no mood for foolishness.

The probe and minibot fired within a few milliseconds of each other. The probe’s particle beam was a direct hit, and blasted Echo’s relatively minimal battle screens into a non-functional state. Echo’s weapons, however, were far more effective.

One of the things most of the technicians and engineers who evaluated Echo’s design overlooked due to their focus on her medical and scientific capabilities was the little ambulance’s acoustic weapons. Not only were they capable of producing all kinds of destructive sound waves, but they were also capable of changing air density and air pressure. Properly configured, they were even capable of ionizing an enclosed atmosphere given enough time.

With her reserves at 100%, she was by no means at a loss for the power to do what was necessary. She poured overload-level energy into her emitters and changed the gas mixture in the narrow corridor so quickly that the bulkheads began to vibrate. The resulting combination of temperature differential and cratering air pressure conjured a short-lived but violent tornado on Deck Four. Its effect on precision electronics was as predictable as it was devastating. The subsonic waves from Echo’s emitters shook the probe until it was reduced to scattered debris.

Ten seconds later, the first Fury security detail arrived to find Echo helping Intercept back on to his wheels. They watched as the two little vehicles deactivated their lightbars and made their way back to the lab with Echo in the lead.