Chapter 27 Impact Belongs Somewhere

The core went into the left socket at half past two, on a concrete floor which now carries a dent nobody put there deliberately.

Fitting took eleven seconds, the plating closed over that core exactly as it had over the shell chip, and then both gauntlets tried to move together.

Jackal Right went forward hunting a wound that was not in the room, while Ironback Left braced against an impact nobody had thrown.

'Both hands just answered different questions... and neither one asked me first,' Ossian stood with his arms fighting each other, 'shit, they are not a pair yet.'

The dent in the floor came from the left hand finding somewhere to put a load it had been holding since the freight yard.

Blocked impact does not evaporate when a fight ends, and the socket had been carrying one small swipe of ape for two days without anywhere to file it.

"Impact belongs somewhere," Maelle crouched over the dent with a torch, "and if you do not choose the somewhere, the floor gets chosen for you."

Ordered memory is her phrase for what the gauntlets are doing, delivered in the flat manner she keeps for every term that cost her a career.

Each hand keeps a record, every one of those carries an order of business, plus a socket holding no such instruction discharges into whatever it happens to be touching.

'A filing system that hits people... hell, I have been walking around with paperwork bolted to my arms,' Ossian looked at his own left palm, 'give the thing an order, then.'

Two hours of that produced no order at all, since a man cannot file a record he has never been asked to describe out loud.

Calista made him say the jobs out loud, in the office, standing up, with the whiteboard behind him.

A demonstration would not do and a nod satisfied her even less, given that a man unable to name a job will not perform it under pressure.

"Which hand hunts," she asked it with a marker in her fingers, "which one receives, plus what happens when both of them want the same second."

Right hunts, left receives, and whichever of them wants a second the pursuit gives way, given that a chase costs far less to lose than an arm.

He said all of that badly the first time, better the second, and by the fourth attempt it came out as one sentence.

'She is drilling me like a porter learning a strap... and every time I say it the hands argue less,' Ossian watched her write on the board, 'the naming is doing something.'

Two days of that produced one clean result in a drainage job under the fish market, on a scavenger nobody would put in a report.

The animal came off a ledge, Ironback Left took the whole charge flat-palmed, and the plating held the load rather than passing it into his shoulder.

Held is the correct word there, since the load sat stored and available in that socket like a coin in a pocket.

Blocking is the only job that arm has done since the nest, and this was not that.

"One impact retained," Maelle read her meter at the top of the ladder, "and now we find out what a man does with somebody else's punch in his hand."

The Directorate machine is what found out first, at the compulsory profile check every unregistered claimant sits after a Class Four incident.

Machines like that measure output, assign a band, print a card, then everybody goes home with a number they can argue about at a pub.

His card came back three times over, each printing carrying a different band, a result the operator had never seen in nine years of pressing that button.

Capability Four came out when the right hand held the plate, a Two when the left one did, then a Six with both at work while the printer gave up halfway.

'It cannot decide what I am... one man, three answers, and the paper does not know which one to say,' Ossian read all three cards, 'nobody has a box for this.'

[Variable Profile]

[The city measures animals it has already caught, and a thing it cannot measure is a thing it has not caught yet]

Variable Profile is what the system called it before the Directorate had any word for the thing, which fits the pattern of his whole year.

Odile was the impact assessor who filed Dreadweight as scrap equipment three weeks ago, in a two-line note that cost him a licence route.

Scrap classification put those gauntlets outside every registered channel, so the armourer who handed them back a fortnight ago had a filed note to point at.

Now the freight yard insurers want to know why a piece of scrap equipment is on a Class Four incident report with four thousand two hundred credits attached.

Insurers hold no opinion whatsoever on hunters and a very strong one on liability, so they asked the Directorate for that classification in writing.

'Nobody there is doing this for me... they want protection from a bill for a stack that fell on a monster,' Ossian read the notice, 'the answer comes out the same either way.'

Not one person at that company has ever met Ossian or intends to, while every last one of them wants a document naming whose equipment failed.

Odile sat in a room with two insurance lawyers and a copy of her own two-line note from three weeks earlier.

She filed the corrected capability annotation at four that afternoon, aloud, with both lawyers listening and a stenographer taking the whole thing down.

"The classification was made on visual inspection," she read it out flat, "and visual inspection was inadequate to the equipment presented."

Nobody apologised to anybody in that room, and an apology would have been worth considerably less than a corrected note in the record.

That annotation stands as the first official document in the city admitting Dreadweight is a weapon, and it arrived through an insurance argument nobody invited him to.

'Nine weeks of scrap, undone by a company that does not know my name... and that is how this city actually works,' Ossian folded the notice into a pocket, 'take the paper, ask no questions.'

Paloma filed the annotation against the licence route inside forty minutes that afternoon. Three larger guilds answered with template objections before evening, each claiming a Variable Profile could not hold a safe operating licence.

Bastien pinned all three profile cards to the office wall in a row, level with the pigeonhole labels, without saying one word about doing it.

Five quieter days followed, during which the ribs bound under Ossian's shirt stopped clicking. The opening leg still swelled after stairs, while the Mantis scar kept two fingers stiff every morning.

Rent came out that morning, six hundred credits against the three thousand seven hundred and sixty left after Paloma's share.

'Paid a landlord out of an ape... first month of my life where the sum worked,' Ossian watched Paloma close the ledger, 'do not get used to it.'

Then the Directorate wrote to the depot, and that envelope is the first post the building has taken in since the shutter went up.

A machine returning three results on one claimant is a fault or a hazard, and the department has procedures for exactly one of those.

Mandatory evaluation, fourteen days, attendance required, no representation permitted beyond a registered guild officer.

'They cannot classify me so they will schedule me instead... and the letter came to a door I paid a deposit on,' Ossian read it twice, 'damn it, that is what an address buys.'

Fourteen days is enough time to learn one thing well, and Maelle said that out loud before anybody asked her opinion on the schedule.

Paloma is the registered officer, which means she attends and nobody else from the depot gets through that door.

Then Maelle read the letter over his shoulder and laughed once, without any warmth in it at all.

"They evaluated me in a room like that one," she took her visor off the chain, "so think hard about which hand you show them."