Chapter 34 The Unmasked Take a Contract

The licence came through on a Monday, five weeks after three larger guilds told the Directorate the application would never be granted.

Class Four operating licence, guild number 4417, issued to The Unmasked at a haulage depot with eighty pigeonholes and a shutter that sticks. The Directorate had rejected all three template objections filed after Odile's correction.

Paloma pinned it above the pigeonhole labels next to three profile cards, and nobody in that office said anything for about a minute.

'A number, a door, a paper with our name printed by the city... nobody can say we do not exist,' Ossian looked up at the wall, 'that is enough.'

Their first client is a cold storage company with a Site Event in a disused chilling hall, and the man who hired them asked for Calista by name.

Asking for her by name is normal enough, given that she cleared six Site Events for Ivory Banner on a public record.

Nothing normal appears in the line listing Ossian under equipment support, at a porter's day rate, with Bastien on the row above him.

'Filed under equipment, at ninety a shift... and the man wrote that after reading a Variable Profile,' Ossian read the brief at the table, 'shit, he thinks the gauntlets are hers.'

Calista read the same line and did not argue with the client about it.

What she did instead was rewrite the operational order that evening and put Ossian in command of the route.

"You take the route, I take the perimeter," she said it with the plan on the table, "and I will tell the client after we have finished rather than before."

Route command means every decision inside the building belongs to him, from entry to withdrawal, including when to stop.

His ribs had knitted, though the opening leg still swelled after stairs and the Mantis scar kept two fingers stiff each morning.

Nobody has ever given Ossian command of anything, and the last order he received in a guild building was a routing clause he never read.

'She is handing me the inside of a building... after watching me burn my own hands in a public yard,' Ossian looked at the plan, 'do not thank her, do the job.'

The chilling hall runs ninety metres, holds four rows of pillars, plus a mezzanine walkway around three sides of it.

Site Event means the Gate stayed open long enough for the local weather to change, and the hall sits at four degrees with frost on every surface.

Frost Vermin nest in cold rooms, arrive in numbers rather than one at a time, and each of them is small enough to hide behind a pillar.

His plan is to sweep the ground floor in four sections, holding each one before moving, with Bastien on the door counting bodies out.

Calista taped a colour strip to her left glove, as that hand could no longer tell cold from safe. Bastien checked the strip by hand whenever the team secured another section of floor.

That plan is slower than Calista's by about forty minutes and she said so once, in one sentence, then followed it anyway.

The Mantis measures cost, which means she spent that entire sweep watching forty minutes bleed away and feeling every one of them.

"Section two is clear," she said it over the comm with nothing else attached, and the effort behind that restraint was audible.

'She is holding her tongue at a cost I can hear... the Mantis is pricing my forty minutes for her,' Ossian moved into section three, 'go faster, then.'

He kept the slower pace, and the decision earned its cost later.

Frost Vermin came out of the mezzanine in section three, nine of them, above a man who had cleared the ground rather than the walkway.

Because he had held section two rather than pushing, Bastien and the client's two staff were already outside the building.

Ironback Left took the first three off the walkway with an open palm and put all of it into the floor.

Jackal Right went after the wounded ones, the way it always does, and this time he let it rather than fighting the pull.

Twenty-six minutes for nine animals, no casualties, plus one man walking out of a chilling hall under his own power.

Calista came in at the end to find him standing in the middle of a cleared hall, both hands cold and working.

"Forty minutes slower," she said it looking at the floor, "and nobody is in a hospital, so I am going to think about that for a while."

'That is the nearest she has ever come to admitting a plan of hers was worse... in front of a client,' Ossian pulled the gauntlets off, 'shit, make nothing of it.'

Nobody outside that hall understands what a held section costs, while everybody inside it now knows what one bought.

'Forty minutes of her sitting on her hands, nine things off a walkway... damn it, the slow plan held,' Ossian walked out past the door count, 'tell her that tonight, out loud.'

The client paid inside four hours, in full, with no deductions and no argument about the equipment support line. Paloma transferred her eighteen-hundred share as soon as the payment reached the guild account.

Nine thousand credits, clean, into an account belonging to a guild with a licence number and a door.

The founder loan went next, with Calista crossing out all eleven notebook lines instead of tearing out the page.

Every payment before this one arrived through a court ruling, an insurance panic, or a foreman who had no other option.

'Somebody hired us, we worked, they paid... hell, that is the first ordinary thing all year,' Ossian read the transfer notice, 'and it feels stranger than the ape.'

The completion certificate came through with it, filed under guild 4417, in the public record where anybody can read it.

Three guild masters told a Directorate panel in writing that The Unmasked would never hold a Class Four licence, and every one of those letters sits in the same public record.

Nobody at the depot posted a word, spoke to a reporter, or answered one message about it, on Paloma's advice and against everybody's preference.

"Let the certificate sit next to the letters," she said it putting the kettle on, "and let every reader in this district do the arithmetic without our help."

Nine thousand credits against outgoings near two thousand a month, with a repair invoice still to arrive from a workshop nobody argues with.

'The first month where the money came in before the emergency did... damn it, that is what a company feels like,' Ossian read the ledger over Paloma's shoulder, 'spend none of it.'

Bastien built a proper rack for the gauntlets that evening out of two brackets and a length of shelf.

He measured the forearms first, twice, in the way a porter measures anything he intends to hand back.

Maelle measured the frost damage on the left plating and wrote an invoice for four hundred credits. Paloma paid it the same day, leaving twenty thousand seven hundred in the account.

Calista wrote route command into the standing order and did not discuss the change with anybody.

'Five names, one licence, one relic, a certificate on the wall... this is a company now,' Ossian sat on a crate in the loading bay, 'somebody will come and take it.'

Nineteen applicants wrote to number 4417 in the fortnight after the licence: porters with useful Classes, discharged prospects, two uninsurable healers, plus six people whose applications had never reached a guild desk.

The guild turned every one of them down, since a company this small cannot carry a trainee into a Site Event.

Paloma wrote each rejection herself and put a reason in every letter, on the grounds that anybody refused without one goes looking elsewhere.

Then a man was waiting outside the shutter at nine that evening, in the rain, holding a folder.

Ossian recognised him from the applicant list, one of nineteen refused by letter in the fortnight after the licence came through.

Nothing in that folder was an appeal or a complaint, and he opened it standing in the rain without being invited inside.

A printed advertisement, glossy and professional, offering a mask worn on the body to any rejected applicant willing to sign with the Veil Court.

Nobody in this city advertises a thing that is supposed to be impossible, and somebody has printed four colours of it on good paper.