The call cried out repeatedly into the vacuum of space:-
'Is anyone out there? Anyone? Please? Anyone?!! I'm alone here, now. My home is lost, my family all lost and everyone here is either dead or disappeared. I'm losing hope and I need help. Please come if you hear this message! Please... I'm desperate to escape here. There are other people on this world but too far from me to reach and they're all in need of the same help as me. If anyone can come, we need help. We need medical supplies and rescue. Please help! Anyone! Please!'
The message was broadcast by a lone young woman on what what had become a doomed world by the name of Kerno, a former Sakaari colony which had been 'liberated' by Prosperity after the defeat of the Sakaari Republic. The words of the female voice had been put on a loop. Some ships had heard something from the broadcast, but ignored it, assuming it was some kind of a trap laid there by either pirates or some rogue war drones, left lying around after the Long War or remnants of the old Sakaari defense forces back in the day. Many of these drones were used to imitate distress calls and lure many a spaceship to its doom. So, for that reason, many a ship preferred to pretend they hadn't heard it or to assume that whoever had created it had long since died.

As each ship passed the orbit of the devastated world, the girl continued to send out the same message, and sometimes add new ones, just to confirm to any potential rescuers that she was a real person and not just a looped recording of a long-perished victim. But as she did so, the few who did pass, carried on, either not hearing the added pleas for help or just choosing to assume it was all a fake distress call from a crafty killing machine lying in wait for them.
Bríídj Rua Dermin, the girl calling out so desperately, did sometimes manage to make out the faint image of the occasional ship that just so happened to be passing close enough to the planet's orbit to be seen, and whenever she saw them pass without even trying to respond, she felt like another little part of her died. She felt alone and doomed on her forsaken world, but she had to hope. She had to at least try and believe that someone would hear her and come to take her away. She'd survived for all this time, it was only fair that she should be able to get a break from this misery after surviving it for so long. She'd managed to get this far, she had to believe that it wasn't going to be all for nothing. She just had to! And hope was about all that she had left now. Her family were all dead and she felt like she was going to go mad completely if she had to wait much longer for someone to arrive. Everyone else she'd known had tried to evacuate and had either died trying or been unable to return for one reason or another. Some of them could be heard blasting out similar messages. Some voices she recognised from being with her group, which helped give her some hope that at least someone was also alive out there, and with that she persisted with her own relentless broadcast. Food was running low by now. Even the stuff which had lasted for years was dwindling in supply. She felt her health beginning to fail her, now, too. Her strength was definitely not what it used to be, and she was constantly failing in menial tasks and falling asleep at inopportune moments. But she had to survive, she kept telling herself. She owed it to both herself and to her family as she was now, as far as she knew, the last one left. She tried to feel determined...
She dreamed the same dream almost every night of her lost family and of being rescued. She always woke up the next day in a state of despair upon realising that it was all just a dream. She didn't want to give in to this despair, to give up and just crawl away and die, but it was starting to look more and more as though she was coming towards her last days of being alive.
It was nearing a year now since she and her family first settled in this last place of refuge and, for so many months now, she had been alone. Almost half of the time she'd been there. Sleep seemed to be her only refuge and there was always an ever-increasing feeling of danger that one day she'd just go to sleep and not wake up...

One night, she had felt particularly weak. All of that day, she had had to force herself to prepare food, to wash herself with the minimal cleaning apparatus left to her by now, and she had barely been able to listen out for any sign of passing ships. As she lay down on her rough, makeshift bed, she drifted off to sleep and dreamed what seemed to be the most vivid dream of her life. She was with her her parents and her uncle. They were all together in a much more comfortable home. It felt beautiful to be here with them all again. It felt like she was coming home, finally, after a long and horrible journey into despair. She wanted this to be reality and all the rest of the past year to have all been just one long, horrible nightmare. This was perfect:- Her family were back together! Her parents alive once again and her uncle returned from his journey to the other region to find help which she'd assumed that he'd probably never found. She felt ecstatic, but something was saying to her in her head that this was too good to be true... that she was delirious and on the edge of dying from a fever. She had been feeling very ill lately, that was true, but hoped that this was just paranoia. She tried not to spoil it with such negativity. She wanted this experience to be real. It was all she had left, now.

She felt like she was drifting in and out of consciousness. Like she couldn't tell what was real and what was a dream. She felt something picking her up. She saw her father smiling at her like he did when she was little and her mother's voice singing old folk songs so beautifully, just how she used to sing them. Suddenly, she saw something else. Not her father at all, but a terrifying sight. In the place of her father were now a pair of terrifying and evil-looking red eyes. The unmistakable eyes of one of the old killer droids from the grim historical tales she'd heard as a child of the old empire. The nightmarish stories of the Deathdroids, as they were called, which had been used to kill people like her and her family.
She screamed out in terror at these eyes looking at her, and then they faded and became her father's eyes once again. This blurring of images from one thing to another was terrifying and causing her serious stress. She was panicking but felt too weak to move. She felt more helpless than she'd ever felt in her entire life. She felt that, after all of what she'd been through, that this was it. This was her death and she just felt like crying at the cruel reality of it, but she felt too weak to cry. This confusion between dream and nightmare went on for some time and she couldn't decide any more what to believe was real and what was hallucination.
She'd felt something under her as she lay there. Huge mechanical, claw-like hands picking her up and carrying her away. She was Petrified. Frozen with fear. She hoped and almost prayed that wasn't happening. That it wasn't real. But in her gut, she felt that it was all too real! Please don't let them take me, she thought. She was scared, but she hoped it was all a nightmare.
A voice spoke, 'Shush, girl. You're safe now.' Then there was the sound of communication devices and other voices coming through them. The voice above her spoke again:-
'I've found the source of the signal. It's a girl here on her own. She's in a bad way, but I'm pretty sure we can save her.' This voice sounded unusual. It had all of the humanity of her father, but it didn't sound human or like an organic life form. It sounded like a machine. Like one of those old notorious Deathdroids. But, from what she'd heard and read of them in her childhood, they never talked like this. The official history of them , especially since Prosperity had conquered this world, was always quite clear on the cold brutality of these machines. Bríídj was never one to blindly believe official Prosperitan history, but she was always wary of such things as machines designed for the purpose of killing people! She must be dreaming, she thought. This just didn't make any sense at all.
The voice spoke again. 'Yes, it's just her. She's feverish. Looks like no one else survived. This place is fucked up. I'm surprised she's lasted this long! I'm heading back to the ship'.
She thought she must be dying. Her food had been low so she'd been eating less and trying to make it last as long as she could. there was also the possibility that she'd perhaps poisoned herself on something stale or rotten. She cursed her stupid carelessness! She felt weird. This couldn't be real! She faded into her dreamworld of her father and mother smiling at her and she felt happy and relaxed like she was falling into a deep sleep and dreaming beautiful dreams. The kind of dreams of a dying person drifting away from their pain. She felt happy in her fading consciousness. She didn't worry anymore...
As she drifted off, the giant machine, carried the young girl away in his arms. This young girl, almost a woman, but still a young, juvenile girl. The girl called Bríídj Rua Dermin of one of the old settlements on the world of Kerno. The girl who'd lasted for a year in this transmission station, most of that time alone, had been heard and tracked by a ship and found just in the nick of time. She barely even knew it was happening to her in her delirious state. Her saviour had been the most unlikely kind, too, especially considering how the official stories of Sakaari Deathdroids went. Cold, ruthless machines which will track you down and cut you in two without a second thought of their single-functioning, killer programming. How different so many of these machines turned out to be in reality! However, their reputation was deliberately sealed and perpetuated in official histories as like a kind of bogeyman that parents warned their children of if they didn't behave. The propaganda demons of a darker age before Prosperity 'saved the day' and who made convenient scare stories and phantom terror threats to easily-brainwashed Prosperitan citizens. For that reason, this old droid would be as unlikely a rescuer as it was possible for so many people to imagine.
This Sakaari droid, dating back to the dark old days of the infamous Sakaarh Empire, designed as a killing machine, had a special talent for such unexpected compassion and for rescuing helpless people. This was not the first time he'd been a young girl's saviour, or anyone else's saviour for that matter! It went without saying that it wouldn't be the last, either. He had a special talent for using his special sensors, designed for tracking down prey for the final kill, to track down people and to save their lives. It made him smile, Or at least as well as a machine of his design could smile! And it made his friends and comrades smile a lot, too. Vandioch, as he was called, with his terrifying appearance, hid a compassionate soul. More compassionate than some people he'd met! He was what you might call a soul of mechanical and synthetic irony! He was not the only one of his kind, either. Vandioch was one of the numerous Deathdroids which had become self aware and had joined the rebellion they'd been created to crush. He remembered well his part in that famous Droid Revolt which had helped to overthrow their own emperor and change the course of history. He always felt proud of the role he'd played in that.
Sometimes, mercy comes in the most unlikely form. Vandioch was always proud to be such an anomaly. Bríídj, like so many others before her and after her, owed her survival to him. And like so many others who had found out the true nature of this droid, she never forgot it, and she never let him forget how much he was appreciated. Like so many others Bríídj formed a strong bond with this old Sakaari Deathdroid. A bond which would not be broken anytime soon.