Halvers freight yard holds forty containers stacked four high in two rows, with one narrow lane running the length of them.
Dawn came up grey over the water and the whole yard smelled of rust, diesel, plus something underneath both that nobody wanted to name.
The morning shift was due at six, and the foreman had nine men standing at the gate with their hands in their pockets.
'Nine men on that gate, six hundred credits, an animal nobody has a picture of... going well already,' Ossian counted heads at the fence, 'keep them out here.'
Two men tried for a picture on the previous evening, both of them ran, and one has not come back to work since.
Calista went up the crane gantry with the drone case and got a picture of the whole yard inside four minutes.
Container nineteen has a hole punched through the end wall from the inside, the steel folded outward the way paper folds.
Nothing about that hole came from a tool, and no cutting torch leaves an edge which bends away from the operator.
"It went in through the roof, out through the end wall," Calista's voice arrived flat over the comm, "and both of those are eight millimetre plate."
Maelle set up ninety metres back on a loading ramp, behind nothing at all, with a hand meter clipped to a tripod.
"That distance is not safe," Ossian said it while walking past her, "and I have no authority to make you move."
"Correct on both counts," she did not look up from the meter.
An Ironback Ape stands the height of a man at four times the mass, with plating across both shoulders and down the spine.
Grey, wrong-shaped, quiet, and it came out of container nineteen without any sound a body that size has permission to make.
'It walked out of an eight millimetre box like a man leaving a shed... nothing carrying that mass should move that quietly,' Ossian stopped where the lane began, 'shit, do not run at it.'
He ran at it anyway, since the right gauntlet decided that before the rest of him got a vote.
Jackal Right hunts damage, drags the fist toward whatever is already broken, and an Ironback carries no wound anywhere on its body.
With nothing to lock onto, the pull went vague and turned into ordinary aggression, the worst possible cargo to carry into this yard.
The first punch landed square across the shoulder plate and the animal absorbed every bit of it.
Absorbed is the correct word, given that no part of the animal rocked back or folded, while the plating took that force somewhere inside itself.
'It ate that... I put my whole weight through the shoulder and the thing did not shift a foot,' Ossian came off it backward, 'where did that go.'
Where it went became clear one second later, at the moment the animal decided to give the thing back.
That blow carried an ape's mass with a man's own punch riding inside it, so Dreadweight held while the arm behind it failed.
He went sideways into a container wall hard enough to leave a shape in the steel, then slid down it onto the concrete.
[Ironback stores what it is given]
[You have handed a stranger a knife and asked politely for a demonstration]
'It stores impact... every hit I land gets loaned back to me at interest,' Ossian got a knee under himself, 'damn it, stop punching the thing.'
Maelle's meter had already said the same in figures, and she read those out over the comm without one word of comfort attached.
"Return coefficient sits near one point four," she said it like a weather report, "meaning it hands back four tenths more than you put in."
Nothing in the Directorate handbook covers a monster that gets stronger the harder anybody fights it.
Damage output is what every hunter build in this city runs on, the one commodity that feeds this particular animal its breakfast.
'Every instinct the Jackal hands me is wrong in this yard... and the mask does not know that,' Ossian watched the ape walk down the lane at him, 'the right hand is the problem.'
Bastien had the nine workers off the gate and behind the weighbridge before anybody asked him to, counting them twice by hand.
He has done evacuation drills for thirty years in a job the city calls unskilled, and he did not wait for a hunter to tell him the order.
Nobody thanked him for it either, since that man measures a morning by whether every worker walks back out of the gate.
Calista took over the comm at that point and started giving him geometry instead of tactics.
Container stacks, lane widths, the gap at the third row where a unit had been lifted out the previous week.
She carries the Mantis, a mask which measures cost, and it put the same price on every straight line a man could walk down that lane.
"Do not fight it in the lane," she cut across him mid-sentence, "you fight it in the lane and it has one direction to guess."
Meanwhile the foreman had started arguing with Paloma at the gate about the invoice, in front of every man on his own shift.
Six hundred was the figure for a nuisance clearance, agreed on a phone call at twenty past ten the previous night.
What is standing in his yard falls nowhere near a nuisance, and the classification for a force-storing animal has its own line in the city schedule.
"Irregular Handling," Paloma turned the tablet around for him, "four thousand two hundred, plus the penalty for filing a Class Four incident as a nuisance."
The man went the colour of the containers and paid at the gate with his whole crew watching from behind the weighbridge.
'She charged a man seven times his own quote in front of his crew... and he could not say a word,' Ossian heard it over the comm, 'hell, she brought the schedule.'
Nobody at that gate will forget that number, which means every foreman in the freight district hears it before the week ends.
Back in the lane the ape had stopped walking and started watching instead, a far worse development than any amount of charging.
Twice more Ossian went past it, on both occasions the animal turned early, and by the third pass it moved before he had committed a foot.
'That thing is reading me... it is not guessing, it is watching which leg loads first,' Ossian broke off and put a stack between them, 'it has seen the pattern.'
The pattern is Grave Rush, four committed steps, direction chosen before the first foot lands and no way to stop halfway.
Four steps is all the Jackal has ever given him, all he has needed until today, plus a sequence any patient animal can count to.
Dreadweight carries an empty socket on the left, which cannot answer a question the right hand keeps asking wrong.
'The right is hunting a wound this animal does not have... and the left is an empty socket,' Ossian flexed both fists behind the stack, 'hell, I brought half a loadout.'
He used it anyway, since the crew were behind a weighbridge made of concrete and the ape had turned toward them.
Step one carried him along the container roof, step two took him across the gap, step three put him above and behind the shoulder plating.
The fourth step is where the weight lands, and the ape had waited through the other three to reach it.
It caught his forearm in the air, closed a hand around Dreadweight, then swung him down the lane without any effort in the motion at all.
Three containers took him in sequence, and the last of them stopped him.
Twenty metres of yard went past underneath a man who had chosen every part of that journey except the direction.