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"Yo, Mira to dumbass."
Lila looked up from her deep dive into a coffee mug and blinked at her coworker. "I was listening."
Gino flashed a mouthful of jagged teeth, his equivalent of a smile. "You were 100 klicks away."
Lila rubbed her eyes and tried to perk up. What coffee couldn't manage, sheer guts might. "So, about the special requests."
"You know it's shit planning when two are scheduled at the same time."
"You've mentioned. I'll refuel Hector's skell when he comes in, if you'll grab Barrett's."
"Fine by me. Give me a skell with meat anyday, not that precious asshole's precious baby skell."
"Take refueling bay 2. That way you can keep an eye on Ricky. I'll reach out to Barrett, see if he can put it off by an hour."
"Aw, fuck that. We can handle it, Lila. If Harrier himbos want to tear up the planet, we gotta help get it on asap, 'cause I've heard things about how they don't last."
Lila's snort was cut off by a huge yawn. "Sorry. I didn't sleep well last night."
"Shut your face. I'm the king of no sleep. You ain't shit." Gino shifted uncomfortably and flashed his teeth again.
Lila snuck a glance at Gino, but kept her worries to herself. Gino's insomnia was well known, and Lila wasn't above calling him in for special early morning shifts if she saw he was blasting social media with his nonsense. Neither admitted that it was less to make the regular day shifts smoother and more to give him something to do when he couldn't rest. Neither admitted that Lila was lucky to manage three hours a night herself and also needed those early morning starts for more than business.
"I'm usually not bothered by it, but last night was something special." She stretched, yawned again, and took another swig of coffee. "I can handle staring at the ceiling. Having intrusive thoughts, not so much."
Gino squinted at her. "The voices aren't telling you something nasty, right?"
"Don't worry. It was more like intrusive disco. Songs kept popping into my head and I couldn't make it stop. One song especially. Over and over."
To Lila's surprise, Gino burst into genuine laughter. "Oh shit, Lila, your true love is listening to something on loop."
"Not that old fairy tale."
"It's the real deal, Lila! I've heard about it happening to people in NLA. Your true love listens to music, you hear it in your own damn head. Only thing to do is listen to something loud and hope they get a return headache."
"It is NOT real, Gino." Lila tidied away her mug and grabbed a wrench. Bay 3's fuel line connector would need to be changed if she was going to service H.B.'s skell, and she might as well start on it now.
Gino tagged after her, waving his hands excitedly. "Is so, fool. Somebody was saying that mims can synchronize, or share the same frequency, or bleed radiation. Quantum entanglement, I don't know. I tell ya, it's been happening around town."
Lila stopped, hands on hips, wrench in one fist, and glared at him. "If it happens, then why did I never hear about it on the Whale?"
"Shielding! Besides the Whale was huge compared to this punk town. The Habitat Unit was just a growth on her belly, a tick on the teat of the ship, a canker on the Whale's ..."
Lila cut him off. "Thank you, I get the idea." She didn't mind Gino's crude metaphors, but remembering the Whale still hurt. The massive ship, six kilometers and counting, had saved them from the destruction of Earth, and even before that terrible summer day, it had been the focus of all of Lila's energy and devotion. To lose it was to lose hope. The skell refueling station was a sorry replacement, but it was the best that Lila had. "Excuse me, somebody needs to start working."
Gino stopped dogging her tracks, but he wasn't done with his opinions. He shouted at her back, loud enough for the upper Administrative level to hear him, "Fine! Sure! Walk away, you sour faced bitch. But I'm telling you, you find that playlist, you find your man. God help him!"
Lila was glad that she'd prepped the refueling systems when H.B. showed up eight minutes before his appointment and acting as if she had already delayed him from greater things. "Chop chop," he said. "I haven't got all day to fiddle around."
"Good morning, Hector," Lila said with pointed professionalism. "Trying to speak like the common folk today?"
"I had intended to put you at ease. I knew I shouldn't have bothered. Let me explain what your duties are today."
"No, thank you. Your request ticket was perfectly...."
He ignored her, repeating the instructions that she had already memorized. She listened with half an ear, on the off chance that something had changed, while she locked his skell in place and started wrangling the fuel hoses that snaked across the station's deck. H.B. finally ran out of words and left to monitor her from the comfort of the minimally furnished waiting area. With him gone, Lila's thoughts ran smoothly. She reviewed what she knew of his mission plans: Oblivia, multiple stops, possibly all the way to the northern coast, weather report hinted at rain, for other pilots she would have gone with a heavier ratio but H.B. tended to go heavy on the acceleration and tight maneuvers. Lila hesitated, then punched in the code for a lighter fuel mixture with a hint of a dirtier but more powerful additive just released from development. She'd be sure to clean the ignition points at his next fueling. She had just slapped the green GO button when a familiar tune nosed its way into her brain.
She turned around, looking half-heartedly to see if someone with a speaker system was marching through the hangar area. It wasn't impossible. Some of the pilots had rigged their skells with impressive subwoofers that blasted astonishing choices at even more astonished indigen. No such luck. Her gaze passed over H.B., and a chill shot up her spine. He had uncharacteristically slipped ear buds into his ears and was nodding his head, slightly off tempo, but clearly to an unseen but shared beat.
"Oh please, for the love of clams, no." Something like physical pain flickered behind Lila's eyeballs, but after one breath she had herself under control. She resolutely placed all the tools in their appointed slots, accompanied by a personal and internal soundtrack. She was relieved when the music stopped after only one rendition. When the last wrench snapped into place, she squared her shoulders and walked over to the waiting area.
H.B. had hastily stuffed his comm device into one of the pockets of his immaculate armor as she approached, which made her question even easier. "What were you listening to?"
"What do you mean?"
"I saw you bopping to something. Must have been pretty decent if it had you itching to dance. What was it?"
"It was nothing."
"Let me help you out. It's not a band I would have heard of, right?" She grinned a challenge at him.
"Actually, you might have. It's not exactly current."
"Ouch."
"I'm only considering the obvious truths." He considered her for a moment too long, then admitted, "I was watching a video from the competition."
Lila shook her head. "What competition?"
"Oh that's right," he said with a relieved tone. "Civilians haven't seen it yet. Right now, it's being streamed live, exclusively for BLADEs."
"Spit it out."
"Well, I'm not sure it's supposed to be discussed with the ordinary population."
Lila chose not to slap the pleased smirk off his face. "You said 'yet'. I guess I can wait however many weeks before it's released." She savored the whiff of disappointment that H.B. released. "Or leaked. Watch out that no one steals your comm device until then."
"Really, there's no need to escalate to threats. It's merely a morale boosting contest." He gave here a quelling frown. "Not like that one."
"I don't know what you could possibly mean, Hector." She knew exactly what he meant. That contest had ended with a beefcake shot of the uppity but superbly built Pathfinder plastered on the BLADE tower jumbotron. As well as a photo of the Commander, also with its own morale boosting aspects. Lila's face was blank like a spore fog.
"This is a dance contest."
"A dance contest," Lila repeated.
"Yes, you heard me. Members of BLADE have been performing short routines for the viewing pleasure of their fellows-in-arms. The Mediators insist that community building measures improve fighting capacity. Clearly, I have my doubts."
"Uh huh. And you were just watching yours, because of course you've recorded it." You've been watching it all night long, you brat, she thought.
H.B. had the good grace to blush. "Nothing of the sort. Mine isn't until ... not until later. I was merely trying to gather inspiration." His blush deepened.
"Lemme see."
"No."
"Lemme see and I won't hurt you."
"Fine. I must say, you are particularly brutish today." He pulled out his device, swiped a few times, and held it up to view. "This is more of a warm-up exercise. I have several improvements planned for the final version." A diminutive version of H.B. stomped and shook to a driving beat that managed to make Lila's molars rattle even with the limited capabilities of the comm device's speakers. "If I can time the wrist flicks during the coda, I feel that...."
Lila beamed at H.B. This wasn't the song that had haunted Lila's night. "I'm sure they will be very impressed. You've got a few minutes before your skell is finished. Feel free to practice in the waiting area. No one will mind."
Later, much later, when the station was shuttered and the last of the invoices cleared, Lila pulled out a rarely used device from a lower drawer of her desk. It was an older model comm device, heavier even than was common for that series, with a few extra input slots and a battery that would have interested Sakuraba Industries R&D department. It didn't take Lila much effort to find the contest stream. Wait for a traffic bump, follow the views, and there it was. She was lucky: as she clicked the file, she saw an old friend, Alexa, doing something that looked like a sizzling solo samba around the feet of, what else, a fully tricked-out skell. It wasn't the music in her head either, but it certainly was something. Lila had to resist hitting the thumbs-up button in support.
The stream was supposed to be wiped from existence as soon as each performance finished. Reality was rarely what it was supposed to be. Lila found traces and followed them stubbornly back to remnants of videos from that morning. She knew the time to within a few minutes, which helped. She could only detangle small sections, corrupted, incomplete, but the blats of audio matched the ones from her anonymous internal dj. The video was harder to retrieve. A figure, blurry, large, undulating to a synthetic sting, wearing a dark...
... tank top ...
... and bulky pants ...
Lila started sweating. She snapped the applications shut and chucked the device back into its hole. Some things she didn't need to know yet.