Dream Girl

	Steph had requisitioned a bunch of extra speakers, and seeing as it was work-related, she'd gotten them. Spread across the orbital listening post's air-filled workroom, a half-dozen public channels blared, one of them occasionally switching to another, pseudorandomly sampling media and opinion makers from across the Tularan planetary intranet. Not as loud but more numerous, a dozen speakers gave a similar pseudorandom sampling of private conversations across the planet. The tularan were aquatic, and given how well sound travels in water, of course their primary communication mode was sound; Steph had cracked the major translations in her first month here. All across the planet, filtered through this scattershot slicing method, she listened to an entire species love, hate, fuck, fight, and live. It was, after all, a listening post.
	Her eyes, on the other hand, were busy playing Nines Up against the computer. She had nearly won, with control of the top third of the board, when all that sound suddenly cut out. A coded message had been received. She set aside the game to pull it up. One of the Concord military codes, but nothing fancy. That was fortunate, because even though the A0 gear she had on the listening post was enough to cut through Tularan encryption like a toasting knife through butter, security people were increasingly trying to promote A1 codes, which she couldn't even decrypt properly on the listening post.
	Inside it was flagged as a distress signal. It also included planetary coordinates and a time, two minutes in the future. It didn't include any message text, just an audio stream, so Steph played it, on all speakers at once.
	"This is Red 139, I hope you're listening." A female voice, a rich contralto, at once stressed and forcing herself to keep calm. She sounded beautiful. "There's a military base hidden on Tulara. I was engaged by Sphere forces there. I'm retreating, but I just saw them scramble a Tattersail, and mech legs won't get me away. I'm going to make a stand, at the enclosed place and time. If you're doing your job —" Her voice cracked. Steph felt a stab of guilt. "— you'll report on the Sphere hardware that kills me. Red 139 out."
	What Steph was manning was just a fucking listening post. She didn't have the EW gear to directly detect Sphere forces, especially not passively, so her job was just to passively monitor the tularans. The Sphere wasn't in the habit of keeping secret from sublight civilizations, and if any Sphere species or known Sphere military hardware showed up on a Tularan vlog, it'd be all over her workroom. The listening post was stealthed — VTSS, RAAM, syn car, the works — so the Sphere would never see her. But apparently, they'd set up a base on Tulara, and kept it secret from the Tularans. She queued a copy of the distress signal for the listening post to beam towards Earth by slow wave, and plotted the coordinates.
	With her current orbit, she'd nearly pass over the spot only after Red 139 made her stand. Steph set a minor course change, slow burning on cold reactionless, to bring the listening post into a low orbital pass right over the appointed coordinates at the appointed time. Even if all she could do is watch, she'd do that.
	But that wasn't all. She had two SQUID dishes trained on vulnerable spots in the planetary intranet, where hardlines went up over land. That's how she listened. But she could also speak up. She pulled up a stock vid of a Krupp TAF-62 Falcon-Stab interceptor, Concord reporting name Tattersail, and shopped it to look like it was taken from shallow water on Tulara, using weather patterns she could see over the appointed coordinates. She encoded it in a Tularan video format, including the coordinates of a nearby body of water, and wrapped it in a Tularan message format, basically a UFO report to a local news clearinghouse. She then kicked one of the SQUID dishes into high gear to insert her message into their planetary intranet.
	That had taken a precious minute. She had a pretty good view of the site now. She didn't have active sensors, her visual gear amounted to glorified cameras. If the Tattersail had been modified with VTSS on top, then she'd never see it directly. But seen from below, silhouetted against the sky, VTSS wouldn't do a damned thing. There'd be characteristic shadow caustics if it had solo car stealth underneath, and she searched the view for such caustics in the rough shape of an interceptor.
	She needn't've tried that many steps ahead. Once she knew roughly what to look for, she quickly found an interceptor-shaped shadow being cast by nothing in particular, zooming along. VTSS all around. That meant they didn't take the Tattersail out very often, or possibly kept it ground-bound for unguessable reasons. She set it to track, interpolating the interceptor's position from the angle and clarity of the shadow.
	An alert sounded in the silence, and Steph jumped. A high-priority match. By reflex she put it on speaker.
	It was a vlogger discussing the vid she'd submitted. She stifled a giggle. Clearly her algorithms were correctly detecting the appearance of Sphere military hardware on the Tularan planetary intranet. The vlogger was discussing his cousin readying an ultramarine to investigate, which was impressive, but would be entirely too late.
	The appointed time arrived. Red 139 sent another message, same code, from the appointed location. "My last stand begins. I hope you're watching. Red 139… out."
	Steph replied, on a narrowband transmission to that site. "S-L-T Stephanie Harper, watching and listening. I'm tracking the Tattersail. Are you armed to hit it if I spot for you? Over."
	The reply was virtually instant, and dripping with relief. "Yes! Please do. I've got three shots with a particle cannon. Over."
	This time the message included a comm ID. Steph opened a spotter link to that ID, slaved it to the shadow on her cameras, and sat back to watch. A moment later the shadow disappeared.
	But it left behind caustics — Steph hurriedly reslaved the link to the caustics, but it'd gone silent for nearly a second from Red 139's perspective. Steph sat back again, but gritted her teeth, mentally berating herself. Yes it had solo car, but it didn't waste the energy until it reached the battlefield. Steph didn't distract Red 139 with an apology.
	An agonizing second passed.
	Then another.
	Then the camera flared white, briefly dazzled by a particle beam lancing into the Tattersail, and spraying a radiation splash all around. When the picture returned, a chunk of broken hardware was visible hurtling through the air. The shadow was clearly visible again. VTSS punctured, solo car defeated. The interceptor was banking crazily, pulling a few dozen gees in a sharp turn out towards the beach. And beyond, over the shallow water.
	Steph silenced her notifications.
	The interceptor had turned around, heading back in the general direction of Red 139's first transmission, but the damage had been done. Within seconds, Steph's notification list lit up with UFO reports by tourists vacationing in those tropical waters.
	Steph filtered her notifications, and amid that haystack was one message from Red 139. That, she put on speaker.
	"Okay, maybe you're better at your job than I thought. Red 139 still here. Thank you. Over."
	Steph exulted in the relief and praise, but schooled her voice before replying. "Harper here, you're welcome ser. I submitted a Tularan UFO report in response to your message, and now I see a bunch from nearby tourists. It looks like the Sphere forces here are hidden no longer. Anything I can help you with, ser? Over."
	A reply, quick and short. "Ser?"
	Steph's cheeks burned. She'd had been busted down to SLt and stuck in this can for disorderly conduct, at a critical moment. If she hadn't fucked up she'd be outranking mech pilots by now. "Well, yeah. I'm just a sub-lieutenant, you're piloting a mech so you're at least a full lieutenant, right?"
	The reply began with a throaty chuckle, a comfortable sound worth getting lost in. "Intelligence agencies use police ranks. So, uh, good work, ser. Know any good ruthenium deposits, so I can ISRU my VTSS? Over."

		*	*	*

	"I mean, we're not even in the same chain of command. I'd say we don't even have a rank relationship. So… call me Steph? Over."
	Once she finished composing, the sounds of Tulara faded back in. Red 139's audio was crystal clear, even though she was in a mech running a heavy metal refinery, and Steph wanted to offer a similar clarity, so she set her listening-post audio to drop out and fade in for her recordings and Red 139's playback. Unprofessional. But, she was no stranger to being unprofessional on the job. While she waited for a reply — and the delay seemed to be running long — she worked on a report to her CO about the Sphere base. She'd already written them a quick message; she'd included the orbital vid of the fight, a vid forwarded by Red 139 of engaging ground vehicles near a hangar and then seeing the Tattersail launch, and a handful of Tularan pocket secretary vids of its return to base. But even after you've done the paperwork, there's always more paperwork to do.
	"If you say so, ser." Her voice was so thick with delicious mirth, though, that it had to be a joke. "Call me Ruby."
	"So, Ruby, are you gonna need selenium next, or are you good?"
	The Tularans were abuzz about the sighting. Steph had guided Ruby to a cluster of small metal deposits a ways away from the site, and sure enough, half a dozen ultramarines were combing around the site. Quite a few vloggers were talking about adding to that number. Steph wanted to establish open contact before the Sphere did, put a War In Heaven spin on it, but Concord policy said otherwise.
	"I'll need more than I have for this repair, yeah. But, Steph, don't you have better things to be doing? I'm good for the platinum group and rare earths, I can find the rest myself."
	"I have paperwork to do, but nothing crazy. I'm kinda more busy and less busy, now that the secret is out. If you'd rather go it solo and maintain radio silence, then that's fine, but I'm happy to hear your voice." She sent it before really thinking about it, but that last was… a little too honest. And she caught it a little too late.



		Concept

	Dude is solo manning a listening post near a "pre-warp" civ, and the front line of the war is starting to near. He gets a distress signal, coded properly and everything, and responds. Turns out, the enemy has set up shop on this planet, they knew it was monitored so they maintained scrupulous SIGINT, and the distress signal was from an agent of his side basically checking up on him. She's been in a fight with enemy forces, she's just got a single mech. He plays her VoiceWithAnInternetConnection, and guides her to safety. In the process, they start flirting, which he's very solicitous about, and she's more circumspect about. Eventually, they've gotten her escape platform refueled and she's ready to go, and he wants to meet up, and she's like "<sigh> I'm a Nightmare-class mech". All this time discussing specific mech parts, she wasn't in/on the mech.



		Discards

	The Tularan had learned to be circumspect about wireless signals; they had learned to encrypt everything; but their computing technology was well behind Condord standards, and she was cracking their