The rammer lurched. Ash let the trigger go the last breath and pressed.
The Silver Stag snapped. The round found the new hydraulic elbow tucked behind a fairing, where someone had decided armor was good enough and math would do the rest. Pressure failed into vapor. A white jet scribbled on air and then fell in a glittering sheet. The ram nose-kissed the gate with an off-axis thud and stuck in its own hesitation.
[SYSTEM PROMPT]Field disabling shot: hydraulic elbow (long-range). Difficulty: mid. +200 Mechanic XP / +300 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv4:875/1000.
"Good hit," Hale said. He didn't smile. He didn't need to.
The drone lifted from behind the loader, smaller than the dead one, caged light tight and mean. It bobbed above the gate line, lens hunting for a seam to accuse. Hale's hand found a bolt from a forgotten tray on the catwalk; his arm moved like a machine with a purpose. The bolt hit the drone's cage with a sound like a small bell, didn't break anything, but made the camera flinch and look at its own shadow.
"Keep it dumb," Hale said.
Nightshade troopers reached for a torch at the personnel door weld—arc light licked blue-white and mean. Ash slid the Stag to a fresh perforation in the screen, found the regulator body on the cylinder, a fragile lump in a world of plates, and pressed.
Glass and gauge spit. The arc sizzled into nothing. The torch whined, then sulked dead.
[SYSTEM PROMPT]Field disabling shot: torch regulator (long-range). Difficulty: mid. +150 Mechanic XP / +200 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv4:1,025/1000.
The panel's blue deepened.
[SYSTEM PROMPT]Mechanic profession leveled up → lv5.Minor attribute increase applied. Work efficiency improved.
Clarity ticked. No fireworks. No miracle. Just less drag in the gears.
Lantern Jaw tried voice again because machines had gone silent on him. "This is obstruction." He sounded scandalized, like gravity had been rude. "You will be cited, fined, and—"
"Logged," Admin said, tone flat with a recorder's dignity. "Attempted breach by ram. Cutting of welds. Destruction of facility lighting. Inspection conducted without tribunal."
"Tribunal's asleep," Lantern Jaw said.
"Then this will be here when it wakes," Admin said, and his voice had the kind of tired that keeps the lights on anyway.
The loader drivers remembered their pedals at the same time. First unit moaned with a blown vein. Second knocked the gate with its ram locked crooked, more push than plan, and shuddered off.
The gate shivered. The crossbar rattled like a giant's knuckle. The chain sang a hard note and asked to be listened to.
"Bars," Ash said.
He dropped the Stag, slid to the braces, and leaned on the turnbuckle until the chain made a tighter song. Hale slammed his shoulder under the crossbar, not to hold it back but to keep its posture honest. Admin jammed the wedge pins to seize the saddles, the same practiced movements as men who had built things before they were asked to break them.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Emergency brace: re-tension chain + pin lock. Difficulty: simple. +5 Mechanic XP / +10 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv5:30/1000.
The second ram reversed, reconsidered, then took three meters and tried again because some men only know how to repeat. The crooked head met the gate, bit its own error, and translated thrust into noise. The posts didn't move. The brace held like truth.
The drone drifted toward the catwalk, clever now, trying to peek over the lip and mark faces. Hale didn't throw this time; he flicked his pocket light on and off in a quick strobe through the perforations. The drone's autoexposure hiccupped, blinked, and the camera wrote notes to itself about glare instead of people. It wobbled backward, trying to see.
"Cute," Ash said.
"Rude," Hale said. "Effective."
Lantern Jaw stopped counting threats and shouted orders instead. Troopers fanned, shields lifted. One man pointed toward the hinge; another toward the seam. The second ram eased enough to line the crooked head with the bolt strip that interlocked the door slabs.
"Hold," Hale said softly. "Let him think."
Ash put the Stag's muzzle back through the screen and watched angles, not men. The head moved. The crooked geometry offered up a grease nipple on the actuator block for exactly one breath as the driver tried to correct.
Press.
Metal clinked. Grease blew dusty; the pin tore free; the head lost a piece of its pivot and refused to agree with the rest of itself. The driver swore loud enough to be funny and killed power before the ram ate its own teeth.
[SYSTEM PROMPT]Field disabling shot: actuator grease nipple/pin (long-range). Difficulty: mid. +200 Mechanic XP / +300 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv5:230/1000.
The drone lowered to sniff the hole the shot had traveled through, as if it could smell intention. Nono rolled to the edge of the catwalk and extended a rag on a wire, smug. Hale took it, knotted a washer in one end, and snapped it through the perforation like a boy whacking a hornet. The rag slopped onto the drone's cage; the washer dragged it across the lens. The image went to milk. The drone backed into its own flood and watched a white wall it had made.
Lantern Jaw recognized the part of the play he could still perform. "By count of thirty," he called, "stand clear. We will escalate to—"
"—paper," Hale said under his breath, amused and disappointed.
"—breach," Lantern Jaw finished, insulted by reality.
"Nineteen," Hale said conversationally, because if the man wanted numbers, he could have them. "Eighteen."
Admin's hand touched the catwalk rail—one, two, three little taps—then stilled. "Log: second unit mechanical failure," he murmured, old reflex.
Outside, troopers shifted in their armor like men who didn't want to meet the part of the door that worked. The drone, blind and sulking, hovered at a height that suggested compromise in all the wrong places.
"Nine," Hale said.
The yard went quiet enough to hear the chain talk. Nono looked at Ash with square patience.
"Three," Hale said.
No impact came.
Instead, engines throttled down. Someone in a coat with a better seamline walked up to Lantern Jaw and spoke in his ear. Lantern Jaw didn't take the advice; he took the instruction.
The man with the better coat stepped forward and cupped his hands, voice smooth as a lawyer's boots. "East Gate, this is Nightshade liaison. We have orders for full integration. Your refusal is recorded. We will return with proper authority."
"Log," Admin said, already doing it.
The liaison added, louder for the recording: "Keep your workshop ready for inspection and attachment. And tell your mechanic his queue is ours when we come back."
Hale's jaw made a small square. He didn't waste it on words.
Engines reversed. The second ram backed out of its sulk. The loader with the blown hose dragged a wound across the yard like a painter who hated the canvas. The drone bobbed, defeated by laundry. Boots retreated with more doctrine than conviction. The floodlights went down. The yard exhaled to its usual ugliness.
Silence moved in like debt.
Ash kept his cheekbone on the stock and waited three breaths, then two more. He lowered the Stag and let his shoulders admit they were muscles, not stone. Admin recorded the dead air like evidence.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Gate status: secure. External threat: withdrew (temporary). Recommendation: damage audit and reinforcement.
"Time to be honest," Ash said. "What did we break that we can keep."
They unlocked the crossbar, bled a hair of turnbuckle tension, and climbed down to the inner face of the gate. Close up, the steel wore scuffs where the crooked ram had kissed and failed. The bolt strip showed a new shine but kept its shape. The posts sat proud, stubborn and a little smug.
Hale crouched at the floor seam, fingers on the concrete like a man reading braille. "We've got crush at the slab edge by the third bollard," he said. "Nothing big. She'll live."
Admin ran a hand along the seam and found a wrench-scrape of daylight where a gasket had been young once. "I'll paint this for tribunal," he muttered. "And for me, when I'm old enough to pretend there's one."
Ash tapped the saddle pins deeper, then added a wire tie to keep their minds made up. He spread a little dry lube along the bolt strip to make the next cycle less insulting, then rewound the chain a quarter-turn and locked it hard.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Reinforcement: pin security + strip lube + chain set. Difficulty: simple. +30 Mechanic XP / +50 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv5:260/1000.
"Trip-fails," Hale said.
Ash nodded. "Two, not three." He and Hale planted wedges where the posts rose, thin enough to be invisible under casual look, thick enough to bite if the slab tried to flex. He tucked a sheer pin into the crank plate of bollard one that would snap before the post gave, making any unauthorized crank jam into embarrassment instead of motion. Nono pinged pleased and handed him a tag labeled NO in its blocky little font. Ash wired it to the crank as a joke that also behaved like a warning.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Defensive prep: wedges + sheer pin fail. Difficulty: simple (higher-tier item). +10 Mechanic XP / +15 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv5:270/1000.
They climbed back to the catwalk. The yard lay empty but for the puddle of hydraulic fluid and the stink of pride cooking off under floodlight ghosts.
Admin closed the control post panel and patted it like a cow you hoped would keep giving milk. "I'll post a guard," he said. "A real one, not a clipboard."
"Post two," Hale said. "And don't let them bring clipboards either."
They slipped out of the catwalk door and into the service corridor. The chalk marks waited like a remembered insult. Hale smeared one more with his thumb. It smeared easier than it should have.
Ash's right arm informed him it existed in the way a stove informs a fingertip. He flexed, breathed, let the new lv5 sharpness carry a fraction of the burden.
They were a corridor turn from the stair down when Admin's radio popped in his pocket—one of those little polite sounds machines make right before they ask for more than you want to give.
"West Gallery," a voice said. "Movement. Not Nightshade insignia. Multiple. Might be ours. Might not."
Admin's face did a math it hated. "Say again."
"Multiple," the voice insisted. "No lights. Sounded big."
Hale's head turned like a compass. "Move."
Ash tightened the Stag's strap, adjusted the kit satchel, and kept step as Hale set pace that didn't look fast until you measured how the floor went by. Nono bumped his heel, ready, square, ridiculous, perfect.
They hit the stair up toward the gallery. The air changed there, a cold that wasn't night and wasn't fear and was maybe both.
Admin's radio whispered once more like a man about to take back a sentence. Then the line went quiet.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] New external variable: unknown contact at West Gallery. Risk: elevated. Recommend: recon with minimal exposure.
Hale didn't need the recommendation. "Eyes first," he said. "Then decisions."
They ghosted into the next throat of the haven where light chose not to belong.