He lifted the receiver off the mat and let the silence sit in the inch before anyone decided to move.
The liaison smiled with paperwork. "Stand aside." He held up the stamped Provision Twelve like a saint's bone. Behind him: the sergeant, two soldiers, the smaller inspector with his pad, and the taller one behind a sulking scanner cart whose mast LED had learned to blush.
Hale didn't step, didn't tense, didn't flare. He existed in the doorway like load-bearing structure. "No."
Admin didn't look at Hale; he looked at the paper. "Oversight protocol active. Attachment blocked." He flicked his pad so the liaison could see the Admin stamp and the line that said VIEW-ONLY—FIRST SLOT—ROTATION—NO ATTACHMENT. "Move anything in here without my countersign and we log it as improper seizure."
The sergeant's cheek ticked. "Log all you want."
The bench light flickered once, then steadied. Something in the generator coughed far away and decided it would live.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Shop status: monitoring. External variable: seizure team present. Risk: high.
The taller inspector nudged his cart forward until its rubber feet kissed the sill. "Clamp," he told himself, comfortable with verbs. He reached for the wand and put his eyes on Ash like he expected betrayal to catch fire if you stared at it.
Ash had already slid the knife switch to isolation. The ground strap bit the bench frame and ran to the old water pipe like a vein under a knuckle. He set the receiver down, picked up a padlock the size of a tired mouse, and snapped it through the knife switch ear. Then he wrote LOCKOUT—VALE on a red tag with a stubby pencil and hung it where intent could see itself.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Panel control: lockout/tagout applied (bench isolation). Difficulty: simple. +5 Mechanic XP / +10 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
The inspector's wand found the rail and got a polite nothing. He frowned at the cart like it had betrayed him in front of new friends.
The liaison didn't like being ignored. He flicked the wire twist on his seal and pretended it had mass. "Micro-jig is non-compliant tooling. Seize the fixture."
A soldier leaned, gloved hand angling for the small length of angle iron bolted in the vise—the jig Ash had cut and tapped an hour ago to shoulder stepped pins. Ash put his hand on the vise handle first, easy, then spun it a quarter turn to clamp. His other hand looped a short chain through the jig's body and the vise ear and cinched a tiny turnbuckle until the chain sang, then clipped on a DO NOT REMOVE tag that carried Admin's scrawl in ugly honest letters.
"Tool is locked out under Admin," he said. "You break that, it's your name in the book when some kid's latch fails on a ladder tomorrow."
The liaison didn't look at the tag. He looked at Ash's face, found the wrong kind of calm there, and shifted to the finished lot in the rack. "Outputs," he said. "Seize and seal."
"Installed in queue," Admin said, voice clipped. "Tested. You want to seal anything, seal your own cart."
The smaller inspector jammed his jaw forward and tried the clamp probe again on the rail. The rail ignored him like a continent ignores a straw.
Nono edged between the cart's wheels and pretended to be very square. The cart's mast LED flickered white-blue-red like a child practicing. The taller inspector knelt, tugged his power sled cable like he could improve it by will. The sled's fan took a breath, then coughed as if someone had once upon a time tucked a rag near the intake that now remembered it had opinions.
"Your intake is partially obstructed," Ash said without warmth.
"I'm aware," the inspector said, because pride hates help.
Ash didn't stop working. He took the last three rifles in the Nightshade stack and closed them like a man finishing a letter while dogs bark outside—mag latch assemblies in, springs live, pins shouldered, tolerance checks with a caliper you could shave with. Hands ran faster now and cleaner; Adaptive Fabrication had etched the process order into muscle.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Repair complete (batch install): latch assemblies. Difficulty: mid. +200 Mechanic XP / +300 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
[SYSTEM PROMPT]XP reconciliation: Mechanic leveled up → lv7.Minor attribute increase applied. Work efficiency improved.
Clarity ticked again. No angels, no choir. Just less friction when mind told muscle what the part wanted.
The sergeant had read enough bedrooms to know when a man had just gotten better at something. He did not like it. "Seize the fixture," he told the soldier a second time.
"Don't," Hale said, conversational as a cold river. His voice fit the room like weight fits a scale.
The soldier, to his credit, looked at the padlock and the Admin tag and hesitated the way a foot hesitates over a step that might not be there. The liaison made a small tsk in the side of his mouth that said ambition needs to hear itself.
"Bench is hot," Ash said, and he wasn't lying. He thumbed the bench jig arm to show the trap holding a live snap cap from the last test, then slid a red flag in two receivers, bolts locked open, chambers bright and empty. "Any movement is unsafe without purge. You want to move my rail under load? You sign the safety sheet first." He tapped Admin's pad. Admin's pencil arrived like a witness.
"Safety is secondary to authority," the liaison said.
"Not today," Admin said. "Not in my haven."
The taller inspector, reduced to proving something to himself, dragged the wand over the Stag's soft case. The case gave him more nothing than a sermon. He swore into his sleeve and tried a different outlet; the cart's mast LED flared blue, then smoked in an ugly sweet curl that carries the taste of plastic and regret. The fan wound up, choked, and died into a little death rattle.
"Sabotage," he said automatically, because blame is faster than thought.
"Blocked intake, overheated driver, poor lid discipline," Admin said, voice flat as a table. He leaned, sniffed, and wrote OPERATOR ERROR—SELF-HEAT on his pad in letters big enough to be read by a blind man. "Logged."
The liaison's mouth did a long travel from smile to line. "Enough. Sergeant."
The sergeant nodded and the two soldiers stepped in—not a rush, a trained entry meant to move men the way gravity moves water. Hale's shoulder moved the way landscape does when it shifts. The first soldier's chest met it and discovered the physics of no. The second tried the hinge; Hale put one hand on the frame and one on the soldier's vest and translated him back into the corridor without changing his face.
"Stand aside," the liaison said, softer, like a knife you hide behind your back.
Ash didn't stand aside. He purged. He cleared the jig arm, walked the last live-jam drill through again with snap caps, flagged each receiver, and stacked them on the outgoing rack upside down—his own quiet language that meant safe to the people who worked where he worked. He set the micro-jig in the vise and added a second tag: ENERGIZED WORK—NO MOVE. Admin signed it. Hale looked at the liaison and let the idea of tribunal grow three inches taller in the air.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Safety protocol executed: bench purge + flag/stack. Difficulty: simple (higher-tier item). +10 Mechanic XP / +15 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Demonstration," Admin said, tone the shape of an offer that knows it won't be refused unless someone wants to be stupid. "We publish a standard. You pick three from the batch. We run them at the range under oversight—no attachment, just watchers. If they pass your sustained cycle without fault, you acknowledge the lot as compliant under Admin stamp. If they fail, we eat the queue and you get your tribunal argument. Today."
The liaison didn't answer immediately because his hand was doing math with his mouth. He glanced at the sergeant, at the smoked cart, at Hale's quiet mass, at the tags on the vise that would look like murder in a report if he ordered a break. He didn't glance at Ash. You don't look at the wrench you don't want to admit you need.
The smaller inspector tried to put dignity back on like a coat. "Your micro-jig is unregistered."
"It's a piece of angle with two holes and a stop," Ash said. "If you can seize geometry, take the sky too while you're about it."
"Your parts," the watcher said from the seam, finding courage in someone else's coat. "Seized."
"Logged," Admin said. He stamped FABRICATION LOT A—PINS/SPRINGS and numbered them 1–32 on his pad. "Countersigned."
The liaison exhaled something that had politics in it. "Range is closed," he said, going lateral. "External activity. You locked it with your tantrum earlier."
"Then pick your three and watch the bench," Hale said. "You want numbers? Count function."
The bench light flickered—a quick dip, a scuff of power. Ash's eye cut to the knife switch—isolated—then to the overhead fixture. The flicker steadied into a reliable square. Somewhere below, the generator rolled through a load change and found its rhythm again.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Facility load: transient spike handled. Status: stable.
The soldiers had not left the line where Hale had put them. The one who'd met chest to shoulder stared at Hale's collarbone like it was a puzzle with no right answer. The liaison's fingers worried the seal as if wire could turn into steel with enough rub.
"Seize the jig," he tried again, because some men only know forward.
A glove moved. The soldier's hand extended—a polite, tentative theft. His fingers touched the chain that held the jig to the vise and plucked it like a string.
"Don't," Hale said.
The word fit the room like a bolt finding threads.
No one breathed for the length of a trigger break.