Echo’s spinning lightbars illuminated the dim service corridor with flashes of red. She had found her way to deck three and was using the starboard electrical service corridor to bypass most of the damage below. Her little headlights gave her enough visibility to avoid the largest pieces of debris, but she still kept her speed low as she picked her way towards the forward section of the ship.

Occasional explosions and rumbling could be heard in the distance. The ship was ostensibly at general quarters, but intraship communications were out and all of the fleet’s voice channels were being jammed. Artificial gravity was failing intermittently, but the activated electromagnetic plates built into her chassis kept her firmly on the floor. They would continue to do so as long as she stayed on metal surfaces. The damage she had suffered in the Station Nineteen battle was problematic, but not serious enough to affect her combat worthiness. She was still 88% functional.

Echo had the ability to pierce the local interference well enough to establish contact with Fury’s crew, but the advanced programming Jayce had installed for her higher functions argued otherwise. Giving away her position could be catastrophic. Even though she was a medical unit, she still understood battle protocols and she knew well the possible price of not maintaining radio silence.

What Echo’s core programming insisted on was far more important: Go to Acey. From the time she was nothing but a circuit board and a battery on a wheeled chassis, Echo had learned that if anything went wrong, she was to go back to wherever Acey was. That was her top priority no matter what. Years ago, it meant when she got lost in a maze, or got caught in a rainstorm or got one of her wheels damaged, she should return to her builder’s lab for repairs. Now, “go to Acey” meant she needed to locate her commander, because the fleet needed her, and if Acey was hurt, Echo might be the difference between the fleet having a commander and not having one.

The little ambulance was always the one that came home. Commander Hunter had spent hours and sometimes days tracking down her other units. Given their relative weight, flight and amphibious capabilities, that sometimes put them places where it wasn’t as easy to retrieve them as a young cybernetics specialist would have liked. Rebel always seemed to end up disabled in a hole or canyon somewhere. Lunar often ended up without power hundreds of feet above the deck. Then there was the weekend Butterfly got confused during a hide and seek game and went dark. It took four bots and one commander the better part of two days to find and catch her.

But every time one of them got hung up somewhere, or got confused or lost, Echo was always the one to come home. Sometimes it took minutes. Other times it might take days, but she would always find a way, and she would always lead Acey back to the other minibots.

Echo had made several attempts to locate the rest of her minibot team, but so far had been unsuccessful. Having Butterfly around would certainly make it easier for a wheeled vehicle to get past the broken machinery, conduits and junk in the access corridor. Even having Rebel here would help, as he would just push it all out of the way for her.

But so far, the only thing Echo had established for certain was that whatever jammed the fleet communications was also preventing the minibots from reaching each other, and that meant Echo was on her own. She certainly wasn’t helpless, however.

The little ambulance was transmitting a multi-frequency ultra-wideband ECM screen that made her all but impossible to locate with any known tracking technology. She was fleet frequency silent but monitoring nearly twenty thousand channels for any sign of a friendly unit. She also had both of her high-energy subsonic emitters fully charged. A burst from either one could knock a full grown human being unconscious at ranges of up to fifteen yards. Sustained signals from either one could incapacitate an entire room full of people. Her old-style fire truck banger siren was also more than capable of scaring the hell out of her opponents, human or animal, if necessary.

But all of that aside, Echo had a mission.

Go to Acey.