"Ten minutes," the clerk said, gentle and formal.
"Now," the liaison said, teeth behind silk.
Ash set two fingers on the blue seal across his knife switch and let the room be a scale. "Your 'no movement' is bench," he told the clerk. "Not feet. I leave the bench locked. You do your photos. I take three rifles for field check with your eyes watching. No parts swaps. I bring my belt kit, not the bench. Hale holds this door."
The clerk considered the sentence like a man testing a ladder with his weight. "Acceptable," he said. "Scope: re-zero verification on three, no tool removal from the bench."
"Count them out loud," Admin said, already writing. "Three. Not thirty."
The Nightshade inspector opened his mouth; Hale didn't move; the mouth chose to be smaller.
Ash clicked his belt kit shut—caliper, short torque wrench, front-sight tool, threadlocker vial, paint pen, bore light, rag. He took A-07, A-19, A-31—the same bench-verified rifles because lies like to try again—and flagged each with red chamber cards. He handed the clerk the tags; the clerk wrote REMOVED FOR FIELD CHECK and pocketed the stubs like a priest with wafers.
"Door," Hale said.
They walked. The corridor breathed the way a place does that has been asked to learn new rules. The East range sat behind a metal roll-up with its teeth showing; beyond it, a long, narrow lane of concrete with old acoustic foam and new bullet scars. A downrange trap took lead into a box that had been emptied with a shovel too many times. A Nightshade patrol owned the near line with noise; one trooper had his cheek welded to a stock like it was a woman leaving.
"Mechanic," the sergeant said without turning, voice pleased to recognize a pretext. "Your work made our sights lie."
"Protocol," Ash said, and the word cut the air clean. He set A-07 on the bench, muzzle downrange, chamber card bright. "Three rifles. 25-meter reduced zero for 200. Iron sights baseline. If optics, we verify riser height and mount torque first. Three rounds per group, adjust, three to confirm. No one else fires while we set. Clerk counts. Admin logs. Inspector co-witnesses with no attachments."
The clerk took position with his clipboard, blue seal bag closed, pen open. Admin stood just inside the door, radio hanging from his hand like a gavel. The inspector fondled his clicker and tried to be content.
"Ammo," Ash said.
A loader handed him a box that said 5.56 on one face and .223 on the other because the world had lost the habit of making one truth at a time. Ash eyed the headstamps; mixed. He swapped in a consistent row from the side of the box, headstamp LC all match. He palmed the rest back. "Use one lot for zero. Save your mix for missing people, not paper."
The sergeant made a face that wanted to be offended and settled for bored.
Front sight first. A-07 wore an optic on a riser that sat a hair taller than the rear's plane. Ash set the rifle, cracked the riser bolts with the short wrench, and the metal told him a truth Nightshade hadn't liked: loose. He aligned the riser square to the rail—no daylight under corners—torqued to a number he trusted because his wrist had learned it before numbers were a luxury, and then set the paint—a thin strip across screw-to-mount so later eyes could see if a bolt had learned to migrate.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Field QA: optic mount torque + witness paint. Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
He popped the rear aperture to small, set the optic brightness to not stupid, and then—because iron tells you the truth that glass tries to decorate—removed the optic entirely for the first group. The riser stayed torqued and painted; the glass went to the steel table like a man asked to wait his turn.
"Boresight," the inspector said, hopeful for gadgets.
"Eyes," Ash said. He popped the upper, looked down the barrel at the 25-meter square on the trap face—white cardboard taped in the center—and coaxed the rifle on the bags until the bore made a small, purposeful circle around the bull. He lifted his eye to the rear and ran the front post to line that truth with the sight's lie.
Front post tool, turn up/down—clean clicks—no burrs because he refused to let machines be slovenly in his house. The post bottomed early. He backed it out, set the detent with a tiny pick because someone had half-crushed it with bad pliers in a past life. The detent clicked honest again.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Field service: front post detent reset. Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Clear line," he said. The patrol stepped back two paces with the resentment of men asked to stop playing on their playground.
Ash loaded three, settled behind the iron sights like a man using an old language, exhaled into the stock until the rifle remembered it owed him, and pressed. The trap spat, the cardboard twitched, and Nono—having rolled itself into a corner with a white pen—marked A next to the hole without being asked because it liked systems.
Two more. He cleared, flagged, laid the rifle down. The group lived low-right, two inches and two inches, a triangle that said front post down two clicks, windage left four.
He adjusted. He loaded three again. The second triangle found the bull's left shoulder and wanted to come home. The third—confirm—punched a tight clover in the center that made the inspector's clicker hiccup and then behave.
"A-07—zeroed," the clerk said, pen blunt, voice respectful of craft more than of men. He wrote 25→200 in the margin.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Calibration: iron-sight re-zero (A-07). Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Ash re-mounted the optic, torqued to the witness paint, and re-verified with two at center. Good. He set a thin line of blue threadlock at the screw tips—not enough to drown, enough to discourage—and painted the heads. He handed A-07 to Admin, who tagged PV+Z and moved it to the polite side.
"Next," Ash said.
A-19 had no glass, just iron with a front post bent so subtle you wouldn't notice unless you were a man who had once watched a front sight try to leave a rifle on a bad day. He saw it in the light's edge. He took the post tool, backed the post out, rolled it on the steel table; it wobbled like a man lying badly. He opened his belt kit's small tin and took out a spare—not bench stock, belt stock—stamped long ago with an H because some habits predate Nono's printer.
He looked at the clerk.
"Spare is belt," the clerk said, recording. "Not bench. Approved."
Ash installed, clicked, boresighted by eye, shot his three. Low-left, two inches. The next adjustment slid it home. Confirm—center.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Field replacement: front sight post (A-19). Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.[SYSTEM PROMPT] Calibration: iron re-zero (A-19). Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Behind him, a Nightshade trooper tried to prove something to a friend by clearing his own carbine while talking. The mag stuck; he yanked; the bolt pulled a round and then tried to feed another on top of it. Double-feed—classic fear geometry.
Ash didn't turn his head. "Cease," he said, and the sergeant's voice found its own echo—"Cease." Air obeyed.
"Lock back," Ash told the trooper, voice unraised. "Mag out. Tilt, shake. Now strip the top round. Don't pry with the mag. Don't carve your bolt face into a liar."
The trooper followed, hands shaking, and the two brass enemies fell to the floor with a sound like a little fight losing interest.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Safety assist: double-feed clear. Difficulty: simple (higher-tier item). +10 Mechanic XP / +15 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Again," Ash said, and the trooper did it again, slower, this time with an angle that would avoid inventing the same story later.
A-31 wore a cheap riser two millimeters taller than the one on A-07. The inspector tried to pretend risers were all the same. Ash cracked the screws, measured with the caliper because sometimes numbers must humiliate, and showed him 2.0 on the jaws. He swapped the riser for the lower one from A-07's case—same rifle's kit, same lot, belt screws—kept the glass aside until iron zeroed, then mounted to the same witness paint scheme.
Three, adjust, confirm. Center.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Field QA: riser height correction (A-31). Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.[SYSTEM PROMPT] Calibration: iron → optic carryover (A-31). Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Three rifles, zeroed," the clerk said, pen making a little PV+Z flower on his page. He signed FIELD CHECK COMPLETE and turned the page for Admin. Admin countersigned, and his stamp made a small, proud noise.
The liaison stepped into the moment like a man using a toast to sell his house. "Half the batch, now," he said. "We deploy. Your own test proves—"
"Your own mounts were loose," Admin said, tired and done. "Three are zeroed. The rest rotate by queue."
"Half," the liaison said again, showing teeth a second time in the same hour as if the first had gone unnoticed.
Hale wasn't here to fill the doorway with physics, but his absence had left a shape that resisted anyway. The clerk raised a gloved finger without meeting the liaison's eyes. "Scope is three, not half. Audit remains open; throughput follows protocol."
The sergeant, bored of sentences, gestured a trooper forward with a head he wanted to use as a hammer. "We'll re-zero on our own time," he said. "Give me that one." He touched A-19 because fate enjoys patterns.
Admin took one step that looked like nothing and said, "Loan under sign-out only. You break it, it's logged as yours."
Ash slid A-19 across to the sergeant with the barrel downrange and the tag facing up. The sergeant took it right, which felt like the day learning to sit.
At lane two, a different trooper had been muttering into his cheek weld, his optic's dot turned up to sun, the glass blooming into a red smear. He cranked brightness down, because even fools sometimes remember a class, and pressed. The shot sounded soft—that small, wrong thut—a squib so quiet you hear the powder's failure whisper to itself.
Ash's skull knew it before his ears did. "Stop!" he shouted, already moving, because a squib lives in the barrel like a snake and the next round turns that snake into shrapnel. The trooper didn't hear stop; he heard habit. His finger slapped; the bolt started to run.
The muzzle came up, not far, not enough to frighten a god, plenty to frighten men. The inspector's clicker froze. The clerk's pen hesitated over a word that would be blood if you let it.
Ash lunged, hand under the handguard, shoulder into the line of the rifle, shoving the barrel downrange and the stock out of the pocket, his other hand already finding the charging handle to lock back before geometry could teach glass how to fly.