Chapter_76_Twelve_Suits

The hammers at the Arsenal had not stopped since dawn. The men Song Laixi had pulled from the districts the night before were all at their stations, two shifts deep — the day shift showing no sign of leaving, the night shift already half spent. On the long table stood a row of blank shells, ore-cart deck steel, double layer, riveted. Eight were riveted through; four had come off the shear that morning, edges still burred. Song Laixi crouched by the furnace checking work-tickets — one read, one ticked — then squared the stack and set a brick on top.

Nobody had been told who would wear what came off these blanks. The list sat at the accounting house. Where the armor itself would come from, nobody knew. When Chen Jin walked in, nobody looked up. The hammering opened a half-lane for him and closed again.

The back room had been cleared out the day before, the old bellows moved against the wall, the table wiped down three times. Chen Jin went in alone and pulled the door shut behind him.

When the panel lit, the only light in the room was the grey coming through the window paper. He had read that line on the store shelf for three years — Standard Power Armor, fragment replica, eight hundred. The first year he did not have eight hundred. The second year he had it, and the money went to a rifle. The third year it went to guns, to lamps, to grain. He reached out and pressed it.

[Redeemed: Standard Power Armor, fragment replica −800]

[Embers: 1080]

The armor came down on the table without a sound. One suit, dark grey, laid open to a man's measure — shoulder, chest, waist, legs, plates biting together in order, the kind of thing you could take apart and put back the same way. Across the surface ran ground-down scars, one over another, shallowing out like ink strokes someone had smoothed away with a thumb on an old ledger. The lining inside was clean. No sweat smell, no blood smell. Whoever had refinished it had replaced even that. He stood a while, looked once more at the number one thousand and eighty, and went out to call people.

This suit had been on the shelf since the first day it was listed. Three years he had looked at it. Today was the first day he could afford to touch it. He didn't say it out loud. Regret doesn't go in the books. Old rule.

Xiao Mao came in with furnace ash still on his hands. He stopped in front of the table, walked around the suit three times, and didn't touch it.

"Look first," he said. "Then take it apart."

Three circles done, he asked: "Where did it come from?"

"Traded for it," Chen Jin said.

Xiao Mao didn't ask again. The whole shop knew the work-officer had gear nobody could place. Ask too much, and the work stops coming to you. He put out a finger and traced the longest scar on the breastplate. Traced it twice.

"Ground down after," he said. "Put them side by side and look — different depths, same hand that did the finishing. This armor has been hit."

"More than once," Chen Jin said.

Xiao Mao nodded, turned, and called for Da Liu at the door. Then he added: "Carry it easy. This suit has seen action. We're not adding new scars to it."

Da Liu arrived before noon, empty left sleeve tucked into his belt as always, tape measure in his right hand. Shoulder to ankle, measuring a section and calling a number, Xiao Mao writing each one down. When he finished he put the tape away and said the suit was cut to a man, closer fit than ore-cart deck — taken in half an inch at the waist.

At the knee he had Chen Jin lift the leg so he could look at the sole plate. The soles were worn worst of all, wear marks layered on wear marks. Da Liu said the man who wore this had walked far. Chen Jin said he might not have walked far, but he had walked on hard ground; that much was certain. Xiao Mao said nothing at all.

At the shoulder joint he crouched and went in with the driver, backing out the outer plates one screw at a time, each plate laid on the table edge in order, nothing mixed. The rod inside came into view, and he leaned close.

"This joint," he said, after a long look. "We can't copy it."

"Say it," Chen Jin said.

"Too clean." Xiao Mao held the rod in his palm. "Iron beaten by human hands doesn't obey like that." He had said it before, the year he first looked at an official blueprint. This time he didn't put it down. He kept going. "But taken apart, it's one piece at a time, same as anything. Every piece has a number to it. Anything with a number can be copied. What can't be copied — we don't copy."

"Which parts?" Da Liu asked.

"The joints." Xiao Mao set the rod back in its channel and stood, dusting his palms. "The shells, I'll make. The rods —" he tipped his chin at the window, "those scrapped loaders out in the yard are due for work."

He laid the padding he'd removed in a row on the table. Three pieces, each thinner than the last, the thinnest sitting under the buckle, worn down to a fringe. He compared their widths, then said to Chen Jin: the padding went on layer by layer, less in heat, more in cold. Whoever built this armor had counted four seasons for the man inside it. Chen Jin didn't answer. He put the three pieces back where they belonged.

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At noon a note came over from the accounting house, Zhou Zhengting's hand: armored squad, twelve men, picked from the old three hundred, mine men first, list by evening. At the bottom, one smaller line — rations for the armored squad at wartime scale, double. Chen Jin read it, folded that line into his reply, and wrote back a single row. Zhou Zhengting had already counted what a man in armor eats over a man in cloth.

He carried the reply back himself that afternoon. Zhou Zhengting was checking the work register and looked up once.

"How many suits?"

"Twelve first."

"Two thousand men in this city," Zhou Zhengting said, pen not stopping, "twelve suits."

"Twelve suits teach two thousand men how to move with armor," Chen Jin said. "Armor needs a man in it. The man needs someone at his shoulder. The shoulder needs a relief. Twelve suits will teach all three."

Zhou Zhengting filed the note in the register and asked nothing further. At the end he added one thing: "Top page of the roll."

"Top page," Chen Jin said.

The yard work came in the afternoon. Nine scrapped loaders, dragged back when the rail port was stripped, all rusting in a pile by the south wall. They had stood in the weather for two years; bolts fought the wrenches before they gave. Xiao Mao's crew spent the whole afternoon on them — cutting torch walking the rod roots, sparks falling, swept up, falling again. By late sun, twelve whole hydraulic rods lay flat on the yard ground, paint gone off them, the iron underneath still bright.

The old oil came out of the lines, black and thick, half a bucket caught. Xiao Mao said none of that oil was going anywhere near anything; the rods would be washed three times in new oil until the iron showed true, then greased.

"Nine machines, twelve rods," Da Liu counted at his elbow. "Not one to spare."

"Not enough either," Xiao Mao said, crouched at the rods. "Twelve suits, one rod to a joint. The few we're short, we make up with straight shafts. Shorter travel, that's all. The man inside gives up half a measure of labor and keeps half a measure for fighting."

Somebody asked whether eight hundred for one suit was worth it. Xiao Mao didn't lift his head. "Shells, we make. Rods, we strip. What the eight hundred bought is the set of measurements inside those joints. Get the measurements, and they're ours. Worth it."

The blanks were finished that night. Four new ones into the furnace, eight riveted through. Xiao Mao stood at the table calling parameters while the men wrote: padding, three fingers thick, inner face ground smooth. Seams, double-riveted, a hand-span between. The collar — he stopped there.

"The collar's alive this time," he said. "Buckles face out. A man inside opens them himself."

The armor they used to make had a dead collar. A man stuck in it needed a pry bar and neighbors. He had carried that fault for two years. One sentence closed it.

Before bed he put two lines in his ledger. The jars: quiet, fifteenth day. The boats: not back, thirteenth day. The sky column took its usual one stroke of nothing. He pressed the ledger under the brick by the furnace and went back on shift. The hammers ran all night.

Third day, noon, the first suit stood up.

Rods into shells, padding into lining, buckles one by one. Xiao Mao spent the whole morning on inspection and called parameters longer than he ever had: rivets, forty-eight, not one missing. Rods, three full travel trials, no sticking. Buckles, every one opened and closed twenty times, every time true. He finished with one more line: the rest belongs to the man who wears it.

Old Qin was first into the suit.

It took three men: one to lift the shell, one to hold the padding true, one to run the buckles. No one man could do it alone, and no one man had to. Old Qin stood in the middle of it with both arms out flat. Da Liu watched from the side and said one thing: armor isn't one man's business. You'll know once you're in it. When the padding closed against his back, Old Qin swayed; the man holding the liner braced him and waited until he steadied himself before letting go.

The suit closed, and the room went quiet for a breath. Old Qin stood, took two steps, and the ground carried each step with a small shiver. He raised his arms, went down into a squat, came up. The longest scar on the breastplate caught the window light.

"Lighter than an ore cart," he said. He had pushed ore carts half his life.

He walked the room once — three steps and a halt, five steps and a turn, the suit moving with him, no drag, no sway. At the door he came back and knocked his boot sole on the sill, armor meeting stone, a dull knock. The men laughed. Old Qin didn't. He walked one more round and said: done.

Da Liu put it in the ledger. Armor, twelve suits. Men, twelve.

Late afternoon, twelve men stood in a line below the wall. All from the old core, ten of them mine men, the other two from the crew that held the East Sluice gate that night. Old Qin stood first. Twelve suits, one shade of dark grey, the scars on them all different depths — no two suits alike. Chen Jin walked from the head of the line to the tail without a word, and only turned when he got there.

"Armor protects the man," he said. "The man holds the city."

The twelve answered as one. On top of the wall a row of kids lay on the parapet watching, dead quiet. In the crowd below, a man who knew iron pointed at the scars and started reading them aloud — this one took shrapnel, that one — until an elder pressed his arm down. The armor's account, he said, is for the man who wears it to keep.

After the drill the suits went back on the rack in the shop. The rack had been built for twelve, and one slot in it had stood empty since it was built — held for armor. Now twelve suits stood in a row and the slot was filled, dark grey down the line, like a file of soldiers waiting for their names to be called. Xiao Mao put the tools away piece by piece, and last of all wrapped the joint set stripped from the sample suit in oil-cloth and set it at the back of the rack. What the store had traded them, the measurements of it were in his head now. The iron itself — kept for later.

Night shift left one lamp burning. Xiao Mao lined up the next three days: practice suiting up, practice on the wall, practice getting a man out of the suit fast. Practice taking it off first, he said. A suit you can't get out of fast is a cage. Nobody answered, but every man keeping the parameter book added a line of his own.

At dusk another note came, Zhou Zhengting's hand again, longer this time: nine villages outside the walls, grain, wells, people — all three still out there. Bringing them in will take someone to cover the road.

Outside, the first lamp of the night shift came on. Chen Jin folded the note into his coat and looked back at the rack.

"Three days of drill," he said.

"And the fourth?" Da Liu asked.

"We go bring them back."