Chapter 15: The Hold

At 2:11 on Sunday morning I stood behind a pickup with a flashlight, a pencil and no bullets.

Two claws stood on the road in front of me.

The guide had a chapter called Resource Exhaustion, and I was in it.

I could still use my eyes.

The Appraise card on the nearest claw said what it wanted, in the same flat voice as everything else.

[Claw. Class II. Health 85 of 300. Condition: Following noise.]

[Seam: right elbow, under the shell lip.]

"Chief," I said. "I can't sign anything until six."

"I heard you the first time."

"But I can still see the Seam, and I can say it out loud."

"Maybe your men can hit the spot I call."

I did not know whether it would work, and I suspected it would not.

The alternative was three hours and forty-nine minutes of nothing.

I wanted to be wrong about a rule for once.

Crandall looked at the claw, then at me, and he keyed his handset.

"Line, Chief. Boy's going to call a spot. Fire on his word, single shots."

"Right elbow, under the lip," I said. "The one at eighty-five. Now."

A sergeant on the berm took one breath and fired a single round.

I saw it go in.

It went into the Seam, clean as a key into a lock, and I heard the flat tick of a hit.

[Unsigned. The round entered the Seam. No effect.]

The claw did not flinch.

[Claw. Health 85 of 300.]

"Again," Crandall said, and a second man fired, and a third.

Eleven men hit the elbow on a called shot, and I read the same two words in my window eleven times.

Nobody on the Line could read them.

They could see the claw standing there with eleven rounds in the exact place I had named, and nothing happening.

The sergeant lowered his rifle.

"Chief," he said, in a high voice for a man of forty. "That's the spot."

"I know," said Crandall.

"I put it in the spot."

"I know, Sergeant."

I had read the word Unsigned forty times that day, and for the first time it was somebody else's problem.

"It's not your aim," I told them.

I said it to the sergeant, and to the berm, and to the dark.

"It's the name on the round. There isn't one. The Registry doesn't count it."

Nobody said anything.

For a long moment the only sound on the Trail was a claw clicking its right arm against the pavement.

The Line learned it that way, with their hands, in the dead middle of the night.

"All right," said Crandall. "Everybody off the trigger. Conserve."

It was the first order I ever saw him give that nobody argued with.

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