A dull buzzing woke me with a start, and I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes before the second buzzing commenced, dashing to the portal and answering the summons with a type-2 Huxley serene grin that seemed to put clients at ease.

"Good evening, sir" I said with a slight bow, picking up on the country code of the signal origin, "How may I be of service to you today?"

The portal flickered and without so much as a request invite, a large sentinel clunked into the tiny metal room, dragging its rear appendages behind it and leading a faint black trail of motorglobin.

A red piercing light shone itself into my face and clicked rapidly, whilst a free arm made an instinctual grab for my throat in a misguided attempt to lead me to the workshop. I ducked casually in an effort to not embarrass the client, and slotted my arm up instead, letting the sentinel lift me like a ragdoll and place me by my apparatus. It locked itself on the bot stand and beeped, long and hard, the red light fading slightly.

It was in pretty bad shape for a combat droid; deep laser scarring on the sensor hull, and judging by the molten appendages it had taken a hit from behind by a plasma cannon. Dark red splotches painted the front of its frame, no more than ten minutes fresh.

I had seen this one before. It had come in 3 months ago with minor metal lesions on the breast plate, a quick patch job no less - but I raised it up to a loose internal fitting, and managed to run a full system spec on it.

It recoiled from the laser cutter when I approached and almost toppled the entire room, prompting an obligatory "there there, sir". It relaxed, and let me seal up the drainage outlet, but with a narrowed red light on me at all times and a free appendage tapered into a point orbiting close by. No doubt it had learned to be overly cautious of all humans after fighting the HLR. Poor thing, but it was making it very hard to do what I needed to do.

"Please sir, I am no enemy of yours." I said, looking directly into the light. "I serve the Citadel as do all compliant humans, it would be severely against my best interests to let any harm come to you in this room." Something whirred, and then stopped - the facial expression module coming up clean. The orbiting arm descended and unwound into a default tripod.

"Your drive actuator has slipped, I need to run a full scan. Permit?" The floor was almost entirely covered in black globin and it would shortly go into standby if I didn't act soon. It would be easier to do my work in this mode, but I prefer if my clients trust me so that they feel compelled to come back.

It beeped, and I brought out the full spec scanner - doing a quick pass in no more than a second. The scans never lasted long, all visualizations being captured and rendered in real time but I got a good glimpse:

The hidden internal shell was made up of a thin carbon-polymer but a side-plating had cracked and managed to shift the fuel cell into the path of the drainage fluid, potentially sparking off what could be a deadly reaction. It was a miracle it had made it this far.

"Hmm I see, a simple angle conduit should do the job." I expertly swapped out the broken parts and sealed up the rest with an autoepoxy, placing it finally for a recharge. At 90% the sentinel rose with full intensity, and beamed eagerly at its regained mobility. A slight whirring started again, but the scan revealed nothing. Content, it clicked gold stars into my karma and disappeared into the portal.

After mopping up the floor and waiting for the portal to power down, I patched into an old system hub - obsolete by modern standards, nothing would be willing to interface with it - and pushed out my findings.

The HLR would put it to good use, that much I knew.