They hung his face over the docks at sunset.
Sergeant Sean Piers watched it happen from under a walker's left knee, flat on his back in the staging yard with oil up to his elbows. The banner came off the crane arm in one long roll and dropped open over the cargo stacks. Ten meters of canvas. His jaw, his regulation haircut, his eyes fixed on something noble in the middle distance that he had never once seen.
Under the face, in letters as tall as a man, they'd printed his purity score. It was the number the Empire gave every citizen for how human they were, how clean the scan read. His was the highest ever recorded. Somebody in an office on the far side of the Empire had decided that made him a recruiting tool.
"Sir," Lieutenant Ottilie Quarbrook said in his earpiece. "Your face is blocking the sunset."
He could hear her grinning. Ottilie had a laugh that didn't belong in an officers' mess. It came out of her all at once, like a door kicked open, and the whole company could hear it over the comm.
She outranked him. A lieutenant commanded the marines and a sergeant ran the frames, and on paper she could give him orders. She had called him sir since Teska Ridge anyway, half as a joke and half because nobody in the garrison knew what else to call the man on the posters.
"Take it up with the Ministry of Information," Piers said. The Ministry printed the posters. It had printed his face on most of them.
"I did. They said it's your good side."
"I don't have a good side. I have a side that's been in a drain since lunch."
The walker over him was named Granny, and her knee was the problem. It had been the problem for three campaigns. She was the oldest frame in the sector, twelve meters of armored hull on two legs, retired twice and recalled twice because the Empire never threw out anything that could still walk. A frame was a war robot's body, and soldiers called the whole robot that too. Granny was his. So were eleven others.
The bushing in her knee joint had worn down to a sliver of bronze. The depot said a new one would take six weeks. The depot also called him Sergeant Poster in the requisition notes, where they thought he wouldn't look.
So he had cut a bushing out of a drop pod's landing strut with a borrowed lathe and a lot of patience. It wasn't regulation. It would probably earn him a write-up. It was also the right diameter, give or take a hair, and the raid was tonight.
He set it in the joint and pressed it home with the heel of his hand until he felt it seat.
"Try it, old girl," he said, and slid out on the creeper.
Granny stood. Her hull rose past the stacked containers like a building deciding to leave. She took one step, then two. On the third step the old grind came back, softer now, a sound like gravel shifting in a coat pocket.
Piers listened with his head tilted. It would hold. She'd walk all night on that knee.
Around him the company came awake for the raid. Twelve frames stood in a ragged line on the yard's cracked plating, their gray paint scabbed down to primer at every joint.
Biscuit, his best heavy, flexed his shield arm with a hiss of hydraulics. Hinge, a scout drone the size of a large dog, hovered at knee height and drifted slowly to the left. One of his rotors had been out of true for a year. Piers had tried to fix it three times and finally given up and named him after the problem instead.
Crank stood at the end of the line. He was a rifle frame, steady on his feet and a good shot, with a trigger relay that stuck when the air got cold. Piers had fixed that four times too. During the pre-check he walked down the line and tapped the relay housing with two fingers, the way a man might tap a sleeping friend's shoulder. The relay clicked free.
His old corporal used to say he took their pulse. Maybe he did.
The company channel crackled.
"A week's beer says your old lady's knee goes before mine does."
That was Sergeant Leopold Thornridge, who ran the sister company on the cordon tonight. He had been trying to lose money to Piers for six years and had not yet managed it.
"Your walker's twenty years younger than Granny," Piers said.
"My walker's smarter than Granny. That's why I never put her up front." Thornridge laughed. "Leopold always keeps one in his pocket, Poster. You'll see her out on the left, nice and safe, while yours limps into a window."
"Your pocket's going to get you killed one day."
"My pocket's going to buy me beer."
Everybody called him Poster now. It had started as a barracks joke and spread across Quenenis like a cold. Quenenis was a frontier world on the Empire's rim, all dust and dock cranes and customs halls, and it had very little else to talk about. From Thornridge, Piers didn't mind it. From the depot, he did.
"Briefing in five," Ottilie said. "You're late, sir."
"I'm under a walker."
"You're always under a walker. Get out from under the walker."
The briefing took place in the back of a cargo hauler with a map projected on the wall. A rebel cell had moved into the dock warrens three weeks ago, two floors above a ration bakery with a maze of old tunnels underneath. They might be smugglers. They might be something worse. Somebody up the chain wanted the place cleared before tomorrow's parade.
Tomorrow was Founding Day, the Empire's birthday, with speeches and a march past the cranes and a sky full of fireworks. Piers's face would be up there over all of it, smiling at nothing.
Ottilie stood in front of the map with her helmet under one arm. She was broad in the shoulders, solid as a bulkhead, with copper hair cropped to regulation. Her nose had been broken once and set a little crooked. She said it gave her character. Her marines said it gave her a reason to hit people.
"Civilians on the ground floor," she said. "Bakery workers on the night shift. Nobody gets hurt tonight who isn't holding a gun. Clear?"
"Clear, ma'am," said eight voices.
"Frames go first through every door," Piers said. "Your marines follow. If a door's rigged, I'd rather lose a can than a corporal."
"Copy." Ottilie gave him a long look. "You'd rather lose a can than a corporal. Then you'd cry over the can."
"I'd fix the can."
"And then you'd cry." She put her helmet on and the visor slid down over the grin. "Let's go, Poster."
Her marines filed out past him toward the hauler's ramp. Corporal Torridge, a lean woman with a scar through one eyebrow, paused to look him up and down.
"Sergeant," she said, "is it true they made you wear makeup for the banner?"
"It's true they tried."
"Did you let them?"
"I let them powder my nose. Then I went back to fixing a walker, and the powder came off on the walker."
Private Falgard, the youngest of the squad and the only one who still saluted him without being told, leaned in. "My mother has your poster on her kitchen wall, Sergeant."
"Tell your mother I'm sorry."
"She says you look like a man who eats his vegetables."
"I eat ration bricks, Private. Ask your lieutenant."
"He eats ration bricks," Ottilie said from the ramp, "standing up, with a wrench in the other hand. Move, marines. The man's face is not a briefing item."
Piers followed them out into the dark. Over the docks, the banner moved a little in the wind off the landing field, so that the enormous face seemed to be nodding at him.
He didn't nod back.
They walked the last half kilometer through the night market, because a column of war robots on a hauler would have warned every rebel in the district. Twelve frames on foot drew enough stares as it was. Stallholders pulled their awnings back to let Granny pass, and a boy selling skewered fish held one up to her as if she might want it.
A woman at a noodle stall looked from the banner to Piers and back again.
"That's you," she said.
"It's a man who looks like me," Piers said.
"It's you. You're shorter."
"Everyone's shorter than ten meters."
Ottilie walked beside him with her rifle slung, close enough that her shoulder plate knocked his arm now and then. "You know what your problem is, sir?"
"I have one?"
"You hate the banner, and you're too polite to say it, so it just sits on your face like a smell."
"I don't hate it. I don't recognize it. That man has never been under a walker in his life."
"That man," she said, "has very good teeth."
"So do I."
"You've got a chipped one, bottom left. I've seen it when you laugh, which isn't often." She bumped him again, harder. "Head in the game, Poster. We're here."
The warrens smelled of bread and machine oil, and they went in at full dark.
Biscuit took the first door with his shield up. It blew, as Piers had expected. Shrapnel rang off the shield arm and scorched a black star into the paint. Biscuit didn't even rock. Behind him Ottilie's marines poured through in powered armor, rifles high, calling the rooms in short flat voices.
Piers ran the company from the middle of the stack. The orders went out through the handset on his wrist, and the frames carried them out. That was how it was supposed to work.
It had never quite worked that way for him.
"Crank, stairwell," he said, and Crank's head was already turning toward the stairs a half-beat before the order reached the handset. Piers had noticed it years ago. Every frame in his company turned its head when he spoke, the way a dog looks up before you've finished saying its name.
He called it good maintenance. Clean contacts, fast receivers, frames that were kept the way they were meant to be kept. Ottilie called it witchcraft.
"Your cans are doing it again," she said on the channel.
"They like me."
"They're machines, sir."
"So they've got taste."
Down in the tunnel under the bakery, Hinge drifted left the way he always did. That was how he found the side passage. There was a gap in the brickwork behind a flour rack with cold air breathing out of it. A drone that flew straight would have gone right past.
Three rebels came out of the gap at a run, and Biscuit's shield arm met them in the dark. They went down hard and didn't get up.
Upstairs, two more surrendered when Granny's hull filled the window. People rarely argued with a walker that was looking into their bedroom.
That made five. Cuffed and kneeling on the safehouse floor, in the long room over the ovens where the heat came up through the boards.
One of them, a wiry man with grease under his nails, looked up at Piers and laughed.
"Look at that," he said. "It's the poster boy. They sent the actual poster boy."
"They sent a sergeant," Piers said. "Stay on your knees and nobody gets hurt."
"You hear that?" the man said to the others. "Nobody gets hurt. Does it say that on the banner?"
"Quiet," Ottilie said.
"Or what, Lieutenant? He'll smile at me?"
"Or I'll sit on you," Ottilie said. "I'm heavier than I look, and the armor's heavier than that."
The man shut up. Piers walked down the line checking cuffs, because a cuffed man you hadn't checked was just a man with his hands behind his back.
"Clear upstairs," a marine said on the channel. "Clear tunnels. Bakery staff are fine. They're asking if we want bread."
"Tell them yes," Ottilie said. "Tell them the sergeant's buying."
And one more.
She was sitting on a crate in the corner with her hands already raised. She wore Imperial customs gray, with a small silver badge at her collar. Her black hair was cut in a short, sharp bob that looked like she'd done it herself with a ruler and a steady hand.
A customs inspector, in a rebel safehouse, on the eve of Founding Day.
"Well," Ottilie said, pushing her visor up. "That's a story."
"Stand up, please, Inspector," Piers said.
The woman stood. She was tall and narrow, and she stood very still, weight even, like someone who had spent years at a gate while lines of strangers filed past her. A faint crescent of freckles curved under her left eye.
She looked at him.
Not at the marines, not at the frames. At him, the way someone looks at a face they've seen ten thousand times on a wall. Her eyes were pale gray and she didn't blink.
Piers had been stared at a great deal since the posters went up. He knew the usual looks. Recognition, curiosity, sometimes contempt. This wasn't any of them. This was a mechanic checking a part against its drawing.
"You want to tell me what you're doing here?" he asked.
She said a sentence instead.
"Thirty-one lamps, and one left burning. Come home."
He knew it.
That was the first thing. He knew those words the way you know a smell from a kitchen you can't place. A woman's voice, low, somewhere in the orphanage dark. Thirty-one lamps. He had never known where the line came from. He had never told a living soul that he remembered it.
Then the hum stopped.
Piers had always heard a hum in machines, a low note under everything, like a held breath. He'd assumed everyone did. Every frame he had ever worked on carried it, and he had learned to read it the way a doctor reads a pulse.
Now it went quiet. All of it, all at once, as if twelve machines had stopped to listen.
Biscuit lowered his slug cannon from the prisoners.
The four rifle frames lowered theirs, one after another down the line, Crank last. The mortar tube tilted toward the floor. The loader folded its welding arm. Granny, framed in the window, let her main gun sag on its mount with a long sigh of hydraulics.
Every barrel in the room came down off the woman in gray.
Then twelve heads turned, servos whining in unison, all in the same direction.
To him.
They waited. He could feel them waiting, like a note held on a string. His handset was dark on his wrist. He hadn't given an order.
The room had gone silent. Even the prisoners had stopped breathing. Below them, the ovens ticked as they cooled.
"Sir," Ottilie said.
Her voice was wrong. It had gone flat and careful, the voice she used on drunk privates holding knives.
"Ottilie," he said. "I didn't do that."
"I know you didn't, sir. That's what worries me."
He turned his head slowly.
Every barrel lowered, twelve heads turned to him, and Ottilie's rifle slowly coming around to find his back.
