Chapter 31 The First Bad Stack

The public proving yard on Aldren Street costs twelve credits an hour and anybody holding a capability card can book a bay.

Six bays, a wire fence, a bench along one side, and on any weekday morning four guild teams working within thirty metres of each other.

Ossian booked bay three for two hours, since the depot floor already has one dent in it and Maelle wanted the test under a meter.

'Four teams, one fence, and I am about to try something nobody has done... in front of all of them,' Ossian put the gauntlets on at the bench, 'that is the price of a roof.'

Two imprints now sit in the same socket, both of them in the left hand, and no panel anywhere explains what happens when they fire together.

Maelle calls that a stack, and she had forty pages of notes on the subject written up before either of those cores existed.

Order is the word she kept saying out loud, and it went past Ossian every single time she said it.

He put Furnace Salamander over Ironback, heat sitting on top of impact, given that a fresh imprint always feels like the more interesting answer.

Stacking that way took him under one second, while the undoing ran to nineteen minutes and two other people.

Heat arrived first with nowhere at all to go, as the impact underneath filled that socket and left the salamander no route out.

Superheated plating shut on both hands together, fingers and wrists alike, with the metal against his skin turning the colour of the animal it came from.

'Both hands are shut and neither one is mine any more... and the plating is still climbing,' Ossian went down on one knee in bay three, 'shit, I cannot open them.'

Locked armour on a man who cannot open it is a countdown to bones, and Maelle put a number on that inside four seconds.

"Eleven minutes before the metacarpals go," she was already dragging a water drum off the bench, "and I need both arms flat on the ground now."

Calista arrived over the fence rather than through the gate and got his forearms down while Maelle broke the drum open.

Cooling superheated plating with water produces steam, noise, plus a great deal of shouting from a bench full of people who have stopped training.

Four guild teams watched a Class Four claimant kneel in a wet bay with two women pouring drum water over his arms.

Nobody laughed. Nobody filmed it either, which surprised him more than the cooling did.

'Every team on this street is watching me fail at my own equipment... and nobody has said a word,' Ossian knelt with his hands in a puddle, 'shit, they have all been here.'

Nineteen minutes, two drums, one hand working again at the fence and the other not until evening.

Bastien carried the second drum in from the van without being asked, then stood at the fence keeping the bench back from the bay.

He has poured water on a burned man once already, in a haulage yard, twenty years before he ever met Ossian.

"My brother kept both hands but never carried another shift," Bastien said when Ossian looked at him.

Maelle had her meter on the whole thing and came out of it with the first honest measurement anybody in this city has taken of a stack.

Stack Burden is her word for it, a measured figure covering what a man pays to hold two imprints in one vessel.

Every stack carries a burden, the wrong sequence drives that figure up, plus a bad order charges the whole amount to the man rather than the equipment.

"You built a lid," she said it kneeling in the water beside him, "heat on top of a full socket has one place left to go, and that place was your hands."

Nothing about the gauntlets had failed in that bay, given that a vessel does what its owner tells it and the telling was wrong.

'The equipment worked perfectly and the man operating it did not... which is the version I have to say out loud,' Ossian sat in the water with his arms out, 'my order, my hands.'

Reversing it takes no equipment, no repair, and no money, since the only thing wrong was which imprint sat underneath.

Impact under heat builds a lid, whereas the reverse order gives a stored load somewhere to become, and anything holding a route out stops being dangerous.

He did it again forty minutes later in bay three, in front of the identical audience, with both hands still shaking from the first attempt.

'Do it here, in front of them, or every man on this bench remembers only the first one,' Ossian stood up in a wet bay, 'again, right now.'

Charging that left hand takes a drop weight and four seconds, hired from the yard office at two credits a go.

Salamander underneath and Ironback above it, two hundred kilograms of fresh load sitting over eleven seconds of furnace.

The pulse came off his open palm as one flat wave, went into the target block, then took that concrete apart in three pieces.

No plating locked and no temperature climbed, while the metal on both forearms stayed cool enough to touch.

Stored impact turned into heat then left the vessel, the thing an ordered stack does and a bad one never will.

Four guild teams watched the same claimant do the thing properly forty minutes after failing at it in public.

'They saw the cost and then they saw it work... that is worth more than doing it right the first time,' Ossian looked at the bench, 'nobody here thinks this is free now.'

Nobody at that yard clapped for any of it, and one man off a Chalk Ward team walked over to ask what the second imprint was.

Paloma handed him the depot address and nothing further, the reply she has decided this guild gives to every such question for the rest of the month.

One booking fee, one target block, plus a demonstration nobody in that yard had paid a penny to see.

'A bad stack, burned hands, then the right answer forty minutes later... damn it, failure has a measurement now,' Ossian sat on the wet bench, 'write the burden down.'

Two of the four teams packed up early that morning and neither of them booked bay three for the following week.

Word about a claimant with two imprints will be through the freight district by Thursday, and nobody at The Unmasked has any way of slowing that down.

Then Dreadweight opened a panel in the middle of the bay, in daylight, with a wire fence and four teams thirty metres away.

[Two faces have been carried in order and neither one has broken]

[A creature that can hold two shapes at once is no longer the creature that started]

The plating went dark along both forearms and the sockets rebuilt themselves in front of everybody watching.

Second evolution, ordered memory across both hands, with the sequence held in the plating rather than rebuilt every time a man wants it.

'It changed in a public yard with a meter running... and forty people saw the whole thing,' Ossian watched his own arms rearrange, 'damn it, that is not staying quiet.'

Maelle put a hand flat on the cooling plating and said the sentence she has been building toward for four years.

"Behavioural memory, ordered, in a bonded vessel," she said it with her visor up and her voice unsteady, "which I published in a paper they took my name off."

Nobody at that fence knows her name, since the papers carrying it have three other names printed on the cover.

'Every person here just watched her be right and none of them will ever know it was her... shit, that is the actual theft,' Ossian looked at the bench, 'fix that later.'

Four guild teams, one wire fence, plus a blacklisted engineer standing in a public yard being proved right where anybody could hear it.