Echo rolled about in the station cafeteria and then down the long corridor. All her short range scanners and sensors were on maximum gain, looking for anything unusual on the virtually abandoned station. There was a brief moment of excitement when she came across a maintenance crew member doing inventory on cleaning supplies, but he was wearing a proper fleet ID badge, so she said hello and moved on.

The little vehicle’s onboard sensor suite had an audio component which continued beeping softly as she traveled from place to place. If those watching didn’t know better, they would think she was a toy ambulance or truck of some kind. Until they heard the beeping and the sing-songy humming. She sounded like a girl of about five dressing up her stuffed animals for a pretend tea party.

What made Echo particularly dangerous to potential enemies was the fact she was patched in to the Task Force command net, and had the same authority as Commander Hunter to sound general alerts, activate the threat board, engage security protocols and so forth. On more than one occasion, Echo had been the difference between a prepared crew and a lot of casualties.

She had been engaged in a long-running conversation with Butterfly about whether pink or yellow was a prettier color, and just for fun, she had kept her audio patch open so anyone nearby could hear both sides of the discussion.

Those sounds were just confusing enough that Echo saw the intruders before they saw her. There were five of them. They were heavily armed and they had no identifying signals of any kind. In fact, Echo’s on-board radar tried to ping their location for range and got no signal back.

There was a brief, soundless moment as the little vehicle looked up at the darkly dressed humanoids and they looked back at her.

And then all hell broke loose.

“Emergency! Emergency! Intruders! Requesting assistance! SOS! Survey Station Nineteen deck six! Mayday! Mayday! Sound the alarm! The British are coming!”

Echo lit up like a pachinko machine. Her strobes, spinning lights, flashers, power-loss lights, threat indicators, targeting lasers and tiny little red light bars went into full operation. She looked like the ground floor of a casino on wheels.

“Red Alert! Battle stations! Code Three! Abandon ship! Evacuate! Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle! Man overboard!”

As the torrent of high-pitched panicked noise poured from the little vehicle, she peeled backwards with a startling rate of acceleration, turned sharply and roared back down the corridor at an unsettling speed. After a few more seconds, a full power ambulance siren went off and mixed with her chattering alerts. The most annoying car alarm ever invented would have literally deflated if put up against the storm of sound Echo produced. Her voice was audible all the way up and down the curved corridor, reflecting off the metal surfaces and making it sound like she was running into a canyon. She definitely lived up to her namesake.

Two of the unidentified intruders gave chase, only to find another vehicle parked right in the center of the corridor and blocking their path. This one looked like a camouflaged gas can on tank tracks. It was pointing a non-trivial-looking gun of some kind at them.

“Identify yourself!” it shouted. The voice was that of about a seven-year-old boy trying to start an after-school fight. “You better listen ‘cause Echo already said you were intruders!”

One of the men made the mistake of pointing a weapon at Rebel. His first shot ricocheted off of the tiny tank’s shields. The little armored unit returned fire. The painfully bright blast tore a six-foot gash in the ceiling fixtures. Ripped and blasted metal clanged on the floor. Sparks rained down as the corridor lights flashed and strobed, then went out.

The two intruders fired wildly in Rebel’s direction and quickly retreated. The little tank gave chase. It was basically an iguana pursuing racehorses, but Rebel did his best.

“Butterfly! Butterfly! Where are you?!”

A small helicopter fluttered into the corridor just as Echo screamed past, lights still flashing brightly enough to illuminate the corridor for ten feet in all directions.

“Where did you go?” Butterfly said softly, pivoting around and flying back into the medical lab just as Echo came roaring back out.

“Butterfly! Where are you?!” Echo skidded out the door, swerved and continued down the hall, shouting for her friend, sirens blaring.

“I’m here, Echo! I’m here!”

Finally after a couple more near-misses, the two little craft found each other.

“Butterfly! We have to tell Acey! There’s intruders! And they’re wearing all black clothes! And they have guns! And they’re not supposed to be here because Acey said nobody except people with fleet IDs are supposed to be on the station, and we gotta–” If Echo weren’t built on wheels she would have been jumping up and down while shouting.

“Echo! I can’t understand you when you talk so fast! Do you remember the code for Acey’s designator?”

“Uh huh!” Echo sounded like she had just run the length of a football field.

“Okay, then can’t we use that code to call her for help?”

“Uh huh!”

“Okay, then why don’t we do that? She can help us!”

“Okay!” Echo was operating on a completely different energy and panic level than Butterfly was. The little helicopter was far less excitable but was also far more likely to fly somewhere and hide rather than get involved in the action.

“Acey! Acey! It’s Echo! Remember when you said to call you for help when there was trouble?”

It would later be viewed as fortunate that Echo had engaged the fleet-wide emergency channel. Her transmissions sounded in the pickups of nine signals officers and the entire landing party at once.

“Echo, this is Acey. Go ahead.”

“Intruders on Deck Six! Rebel shot them! And I sounded all my alarms! Even the really loud ones! And then Butterfly said we should call you, and–”

“Okay, Echo. Calm down. You did fine. We received your alert,” Hunter said reassuringly.

“Then everything’s okay?” Echo asked. “Are you okay? Do you need help? Butterfly and me will come help you if you need help!”

“No, Echo. We’re fine. Go to alert condition four, can you do that for me?”

“Okay!”

“Then what I need you to do right now is monitor the intership and tell me if any of our signals officers calls. Can you and Butterfly do that for me together?”

“Okay! We’ll tell you if anyone calls!”

“Affirmative, Echo. Hunter out.”

The other officers stared at their Skipper. They had never heard someone reassure a robot before.

“She gets... excited,” Hunter said. “Tom, raise the Exeter and use her command codes to transmit Echo’s tactical data. I want a marine shock platoon with Echo’s targets down here in sixty seconds.”

A small metal object rolled into the records lab.

“Grenade!” Commander Huggins grabbed Hunter and dove towards the mainframe cage.

A violent explosion shook the entire deck!