blinders

Tyler Keevil

I don’t got no friends, really, among the union crowd, so I’m sitting alone in the canteen when the union officer comes over to my table. I know him, of course. Paulo. He’s a tall guy—maybe six-five or so—and thin, all bones and joints. Tattooed on his neck is the union starburst. His sleeves are rolled up and the forearms are flecked with tiny scars, like fragments of shell: the tell-tale sign of a life-long shredder.

“Anyone sitting here?” he asks.

“You’re all right.”

He drops his tray, so that the plates and cutlery clatter, and climbs onto the bench opposite with the spindly grace of a spider. At first, he don’t say nothing. He just digs into his gruel—a weird porridge mix of proteins and carbs—and spoons it back, sitting in silence, as if we have breakfast together every day, the two of us.

“You’re Mad Aggie’s guide dog,” he says.

It’s not a question, but I nod anyway.

“Big day,” he says. He’s holding his spoon halfway to his mouth. A thread of gruel slides off it, extending, then drips back into his bowl. “We wanted to do something—give her a proper sending off, like. But you know Aggie.”

“Not one for ceremony.”

“Hell—not one for people.”

He puts the spoon down, places his fingers together, one at a time, to form a steeple between us. He says, “She puts up with you, well enough.”

“She has to. Blinder can’t weld without a guide.”

“Still. She talks to you.”

“Would be a long shift out there on the sails, if she didn’t.”

“Does she listen to you, too?”

Now it’s my turn to put down my spoon. I can see where this is going, sure enough, and I don’t got much appetite for gruel no more.

“When she has a mind to.”

He considers this. Considers me. His eyes are heavy-lidded, seemingly indifferent to the point of weariness. But I don’t buy that. That’s just his poker face.

“You know what’s going on.”

Again, it ain’t a question. And again, I nod. The union’s building a case against the company, to win worker’s comp and debility payments. They want Aggie to be part of that, on account of her reputation. Among blinders, her skill is legend.

“Aggie tell you which way she’s leaning?”

“Aggie keeps her own counsel.”

He reaches for his coffee, sips it—not taking his eyes off me.

“You looking to get your ring, ain’t you?” he says.

He means my union ring, and membership, and all the benefits and protection that brings: guaranteed hours, set pay increments, even overtime.

“Sure,” I say, guardedly, “like any apprentice.”

“I got some sway in that regard.”

“I know it.”

“Just like you got some sway with Aggie.”

He drains his coffee in one long, deliberate gulp, and places the cup between us, like an offering. He says if she puts her weight behind their cause, they got a better shot of winning the case, and that’s better for her, better for all of them. Company’s been hurting workers, shredding and burning and blinding us, for too long—all with impunity. I don’t got any idea what that word means. But I sure as hell know what he wants.

After breakfast, I meet Aggie where I always do: at the observation deck, where she takes her morning coffee before a shift. Today she’s sitting at the window, her head angled away from me. As I approach, I can see her reflection against the blackness of space: this ghost version of her, with stars for eyes. It’s early in the time-cycle, and still darkside. There’s no night or day up here but they try to give us some sense of normality by rotating the plant on a twwenty-hour schedule. Why twenty and not twenty-four? They say it’s to do with the physics of it, but us grunts know it’s because they’re sheering hours off our lives. We still pull nine-hour shifts, and sleep for eight. We just lose downtime, and time in the bar.

Aggie must hear me coming, because she says, without turning to look, “Bore da.” Good morning. Welsh is her mother tongue. “You get your gruel in you, greenhorn?”

“As much as I could manage.”

I smile, to hide my nerves. If I’m going to tell her about my visit from Paulo, now is the time. But I don’t. I just let the moment stretch, then snap, like an elastic flying away from me.

“You see the work order?” she asks.

“Just a little patch job. They’re letting you off easy, Mags.”

Only I call her that, to her face. Mags: short for Mad Aggie.

“Trying to butter me up, I reckon.”

“We’ll make a meal of it.”

She does turn, then. Her glasses are on the table beside her, so I can see her eyes. The whites are webbed with red, and the lenses clouded with cataracts. The real damage, though, is invisible: what they call macular degeneration, and retinal damage, from the glow of the torch. First it leads to blurred vision, loss of colour saturation. Later it’s worse. The company has better protective gear, now, but they’re rolling it out slow, taking their sweet time to save a bit of coin. It came too late for the old-timers like Aggie, anyway.

“Ready to suit up?” she asks, and holds out her hand.

“Good to go,” I say, and help her to her feet. She has no trouble pulling herself up. She’s well past seventy but still strong as a farm girl. I can feel that strength as we walk, elbows locked, toward the elevators that drop five levels to the gear locker.

When the doors open, a guy in a suit is waiting for us. His jacket has broad blue lapels, and he’s wearing a pair of augmentation glasses, with a wire running from the left hinge to the nape of his neck, all plugged in and jacked up with juice. Behind those lenses, his eyes are wide-open, bulging to the point of hypertension—a side effect of spending too much time in the mainframe: scrolling feeds, running reports, doing company dirty work. Blue collar, white collar, or no collar: the company machine will grind you down like a cog.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says to Aggie.

He holds out his hand, and I have to guide hers to his. Down here, in this artificial half-light, her vision is even more limited. Just fuzzy shapes and faded colours. A world all underwater. Whatever she sees right now doesn’t seem to impress her. She lets the rep shake her hand but she don’t shake back, and she don’t smile at him.

“You’re a company man,” she says.

He grimaces, as if he knows it’s not a good thing to be.

“The company wanted to extend its regards. It’s a big day, in more ways than one. Your last shift, and the beginning of a new life, a well-earned retirement package.”

Aggie’s arm finds my bicep, and I stand tense and alert, waiting for any signal from her that we’re done here.

“What do you want?” she says.

The rep’s smile cracks, falls apart. He brushes an invisible speck off his lapel, and his eyes seem to quiver in their sockets, sourcing data and scrolling codes, trying to pick the best angle of approach.

“I’m wondering if you’ve considered the company’s offer,” he says. “We’d love to reward you for your long period of service, and also provide an example of what loyal workers can expect.”

Aggie hacks laughter, each gasp coming out of her lungs like the chop of an axe. “You mean you want to cut off the union campaign before it gets up a head of steam.”

“That’s a given,” he says. “It would be costly, embarrassing, and nobody would win.”

“You certainly wouldn’t,” I say, “if we go on strike.”

He looks over at me for the first time. I fancy I catch the flicker in his lenses as he snaps me, stores me, feeds me back to the mainframe. We’ve all got files, and my comment ain’t gonna do me any good, in the long run.

“We’re hoping to avoid that,” he says.

Then he turns back to Aggie. I’m nothing: a guide dog, that’s all.

“Just think,” he says. “We’re not just talking about a renewed payment plan. We’re also offering to repair the damage done to your eyes, fit new lenses and restore the retinas.”

He holds out his hand, as if the new eyes are there, ready for taking. She looks down at the open palm, unimpressed.

“I got to get to work,” she says.

His own eyes are bulging even bigger: now, bulbous and disturbing as a bug’s.

“The offer’s only good till the end of the day,” he says. “After that, your working contract finishes and we can’t make any changes to the retirement plan.”

Aggie takes a step forward, as if she hasn’t heard. I move to stay with her, keeping pace. There’s some space to go around the rep, but she just ploughs on through, forcing him to move aside. He ought to defer to her, anyway. They all ought to.

As usual, we’re a bit early for our shift. Aggie don’t like the gear locker when it’s rammed, and the majority of union guys—burners, builders, blinders—won’t be in for another quarter hour. There are some, though and they each nod respectfully at Aggie as she passes. Sometimes I pretend like those nods are for me, but there’s never any eye contact. I’m just an appendage, another piece of equipment. About as respected as Aggie’s welding torch.

At her station, Aggie palms the lock and starts suiting up: welding suit, boots, tool belt. While she does, I give her torch and Tokamak unit the once over: testing the gauges, checking the fuel cells, studying the torch for signs of wear. It’s thin as a wand, but heavy as gold, made from a carbon-duranium alloy. I put on a new tip—Aggie insists on a new tip for the start of every shift—and check the trigger. The resistance is maybe a little light for Aggie’s taste, so I tweak that, then load it in its holster on the side of the welding trolley.

We’re both suited up, and good to go, when Paulo approaches us. I didn’t spot him coming in the gear locker, but it’s busier now, with more workers arriving every few minutes. Paulo’s weighed down by his shredding suit, which is made from heavy, impact-reinforced duranium. He doesn’t look at me at all—just touches Aggie’s shoulder by way of hello.

“Saw that company man scumming around,” he says. “Waiting for you.”

“He found me,” Aggie says.

“Offering you some kind of deal, what I heard.”

“You heard right.”

“You thinking of taking them up on it?”

Aggie cocks her head, looking up at him. As usual I get the sense that she can see more than the rest of us, not less. His face must just look like a blob of flesh to her, but she peers at it as if she can see past it, to what’s beyond. The same thing she does on a weld.

“I ain’t said one way or the other, not that it’s any concern of yours.”

“You know it is, Aggie,” he says.

“I ain’t thinking about that. I’m thinking about the job in hand, like I always have.”

Paulo glances at me, shrugs, then clears his throat. “Figured on that, Aggie. Which is why me and the boys got you a little something—to send you on your way. Come on over.”

She looks to me, as if checking my acquiescence, or advice. I mutter that we got a few minutes before our shift starts, and why not? So me and Aggie, we follow Paulo over to the other side of the locker, where the shredders and blinders and burners have gathered. They’ve got a little box made up for her, all wrapped real nice in gleaming red paper. She opens it on up, and inside there’s some Welsh cakes and a pair of glasses, and a box of those diapers for grown-ups. It’s a little tense until Aggie smiles, and one of the girls jokes about her getting incontinent in her old age, and then we all sing a round of the union song, ending on the “union makes us strong”. And it does. Or just then, at least, it feels as if it does.

The area where we’re welding is way the hell out on the main sail, near the tip of the mast. It’s quite the trek: maybe three hundred metres. The mast stretches out in front of us: a tube as thick in girth as an oak tree. On the surface, you can see marks from the boots of previous workmen who’ve made this journey to repair the sail. The sail extends out from the left side of it, thin and sheer and elegant as the fin of an angelfish.

Before getting going, I give a quick tug on the line that connects me to Aggie.

“Ready?” I ask her.

“When you are.”

We set out, one step at a time, with me in the lead and Aggie keeping pace about five yards behind. It’s hard work, trudging in those boots. You learn to use a particular kind of lurching step, since you’ve got to make contact with one foot, activating the magnetic lock in the sole, before the other will release. It’s a health and safety thing: a way of keeping you from spiralling off into space, which wasn’t uncommon in earlier models.

On top of that we’re hauling our welding trolley, laden down with the Tokamak unit, Aggie’s torch, scaffolding, and the replacement duranium solar panel. The mag-locks on the wheels have low friction—it hums along real nice—but it still has some resistance, even in zero-gravity.

What I’m saying is: it ain’t easy.

“How you holding up, Aggie?”

I can hear her through the comm-link, sucking wind. She has to take a deep breath before answering on the exhale: “Retirement is sounding pretty sweet right about now.”

It ain’t like her to mention it, even as a joke, and I reckon it’s as much of an opening as I’m liable to get. So I say, “You thinking about that offer?”

“Which one?”

“Got your pick, eh?”

“Looks like it.”

I pause, mid-step, since it ain’t easy to talk and walk—not for me and damn sure not for Aggie. I’m bamboozled that the union made a counter-offer. I figured they would have counted on her sense of loyalty. Guess they ain’t taking chances.

“You got a hankering?” I ask.

I listen to her breathe for a while. It’s familiar, that sound. We’ve logged so many shifts together, so many hours, connected by the cord at our waists, and the comm-link in our ears. Then there’s the vital signs monitor, hovering at the edge of my vision. I sometimes feel like a baby, still attached to the umbilical.

After a minute, she asks, “What would you do?”

“New eyes are tempting. That costs.”

I don’t know if I’m saying this out of guilt—going against the suggestion Paulo’s put in my head—or because I know Aggie’s a natural contrarian, and part of me figures I might be able to influence her in a backhanded way, using a clunky kind of reverse psychology.

“If I settle like that, it’ll play hell with the union’s case.”

“What’s the union offering in return?”

I glance back. The sun’s coming up in that direction, behind us, and Aggie’s welding suit is all ablaze with it. Her shield is flipped up on her head, and I can just make out her face behind her helmet’s visor. She’s grinning or grimacing—it’s hard to tell.

“They can’t compete with company coin.”

“Seems a straightforward choice, then.”

I’m joking, of course. But she takes it at face value.

“Malu cachu,” she says, which means something like stop talking nonsense. Then her visor darkens, either reacting to the increase in sunlight, or because she’s done it deliberately, to shut me out. “Better keep moving,” she says, “or my last shift will be some kind of record.”

“We’re getting there.”

By the time we do, the spaceplant has rotated further toward the sun, and its rays are catching the sail, the whole surface gleaming like obsidian. Looking back the way we’ve come, it’s quite the sight. We’re near the tip of the mast, and the sail stretches in a sweeping triangle toward the hub of the spaceplant: a silver ring about five miles in diameter. And extending out from it, at regular intervals, are the other sails: eight in total, all built to the same size and specs. On their own, they really do look like sails, but from here, looking back, the whole get-up resembles a kind of massive pinwheel in space. It rotates like a pinwheel too—only instead of wind, the sails are catching the sun, channelling and harnessing the energy to feed back to Earth, through the monstrous cable that stretches like a tentacle from the plant core down toward the planet surface. We burned up every other resource so the spaceplants are what we got.

“You gonna help me set up?” Aggie says, “or stand their gawking like an earthborn?”

“I am an earthborn,” I say, turning back to her.

“You were still in diapers when you left.”

“Don’t remember nothing about it,” I say. “But one of my first memories is being on that refugee ship. Me and all those kids.”

“They had you packed in there like grubs.”

“Toilets overflowing. All of us puking from gravity sickness.” I can still remember a girl, having some sort of fit: the blood flowing from her nose, her skull drumming against the steel floor. I held her hand, cradled her head, cried until it stopped, and she stopped breathing. There was nobody to help.

“And now you’ve lived here for twenty-odd years,” Aggie says. She’s half-crouched, adjusting the tip of her torch. “Far as I’m concerned, that makes you spaceborn.”

“Wouldn’t know it, from the way the union short-shrifts me.”

“Don’t pay attention to those clowns.”

“If you hadn’t apprenticed me, they’d still have me repairing welders below deck.”

She grunts, which is her signal for being done with talk. I start sliding the scaffolding poles from the base of our welding trolley. Each is five feet long, but they telescope to nearly twenty-five. As I extend the first, one segment at a time, I’m still thinking about it all.

“Why did you apprentice me?” I ask.

At first, Aggie don’t answer. Her back’s to me, and I can’t read nothing in her body language. Then I hear her comm-link click, in the way it does before somebody speaks.

“I was there,” she says, “when all those ships came in, and you kids came out. I was doing a weld job on one of the mining tugs in the hangar bay. So I seen you all. Not you specifically—there were thousands of you—but I seen it. All of you crying and wailing.”

I stand real still, hearing that. Six years I’ve known her, and she never told me this.

“And later I heard what the Multitude had done to your folks, back earthside...I don’t know. It stayed with me. So when I seen that on your application status, it clicked.”

“And you took pity on a poor little orphan.”

“A smart little orphan. Your machine intelligence scores were off the charts.”

“It meant a hell of a lot to me.”

“There’s a way you can pay me back.”

“Anything.”

“I just took a piss—could you empty my Foley bag?”

Then she’s laughing—cackling—in that witch-like way of hers. When she’s caught her breath, she says, “Ah, hell, kid. I’m sorry. But let’s save the sentimentality for when we clock off and start drinking, yeah?”

I give her a little salute—aye-aye—and lay down the first pole.

The way it works is this: the ribs of the sail that extend from the mast aren’t strong enough to support us. And the duranium mainsheet is thin as celluloid. So the scaffolding pole clicks into place on the mast, and runs cross-wise over the ribs, stretching out to the spot where the sail is damaged. Then I do the same with the other piece of scaffolding; together, the poles create a ladder across the sail that allows us to reach the patch-site safely.

Before guiding Aggie out, I attach my carabiner to the tether between the poles, and deactivate my mag-boots. Hand over hand, I shimmy along the poles—free-floating in zero-g except for my grip. I stop at each of the ribs to clamp the poles in place, securing them, and when I reach the end, I inspect the sail damage. A hole about the size of a football has been torn in the duranium membrane. The stuff is tough as all get-out—the most durable material they’ve been able to create—but when stretched as thin as a sail it’s still not indestructible. In this case it was probably a piece of space scrap, or a meteor, that did the damage. It’s a decent tear but me and Aggie have seen a lot worse.

“How’s it look, greenhorn?” she says to me, from back on the mast.

“Nothing you can’t handle.”

“Well get me on out there, and let me have at her.”

“Just laying down your platform.”

I unsling it from my back: a two-by-three-foot tensile sheet that fits perfectly between the scaffolding, giving Aggie a place to work from. Once it’s affixed to the poles, I shimmy my way back to the mast. When I reach her, Aggie is examining her torch again.

She asks, “You calibrate this?”

“Sure—and put on a new tip, as usual,” I say.

“Trigger’s a bit tetchy.”

“I checked that too.” Aggie’s always like this, before a weld. Fussy, peevish. It makes sense, considering the stakes. “You want me to check it again?”

“We’re dragging ass already. Maybe on break.”

“Just let me know.”

Getting Aggie to site is the most important part of my job as her guide. Ain’t no way she’d be able to do it on her own. Manoeuvring on the scaffolding in zero-g is tricky enough for somebody with all their faculties, but for a blinder at the end of her run, who only sees through a burnt-out haze, it would be damn near impossible. What we do instead is clip together, piggy-back style, which is a challenge in itself.

“Just clamping you on here, Aggie,” I say.

There’s a carabiner on the front of her breastplate, which affixes to a U-bolt on the back of my suit. I position myself in front of her and guide her into place until I hear the click. I got to grip her by the hips, as if we’re performing some kind of odd dance move.

“Watch those hands, greenhorn,” she says. “No getting fresh, now.”

“You know me.”

She cackles. “Only too well. And you ain’t never had no girlfriend but me. “

“No time. Got to log my hours, fulfill those union requirements.”

“Forget the union. You ought to be aiming higher. Go back to school. Designing or engineering. You got that aptitude. Otherwise you’re just gonna end up like me. “

“Can think of worse things.”

I clip myself back onto the scaffolding tether and give it a quick tug. This time, it won’t just be my life on the line out there. When I’m sure it’s secure, I lean forward and get a grip on the poles and start pulling us along.

“Besides,” I say, “I might know machines, but I never took to book learning. I need a trade. Need that union ring. And if I’m gonna get it, I got to keep working on my weld.”

“They letting you use the real kit, yet?”

“Nah. Still hacking away with an old laser rig.”

She whistles, soft and low, through the comm-link.

“Well—after that, welding with the Tokamak torch will be easy.”

“If they ever let me tackle the Tokamak. Guys who been apprenticed shorter than me are getting their union rings, taking the training.”

“You’re fighting an uphill battle, is all. But you’ll get there. If you want it.”

“You wanted it.”

“It’s the only thing I was any good at. And look where it’s got me: I’m an old woman with burnt-out eyes, asthmatic lungs, getting ready to be put out to pasture.” She cackles, and it ends in a vicious hacking cough, as if to emphasize her point. “And all for what? Nothing.”

“That ain’t true,” I say. “Earth needs juice. You keep the planet lit up, keep people alive.”

A tear like the one we’re repairing can affect an entire section of sail: resulting in widescale blackouts and brownouts, back earthside. And more victims for the Multitude.

“Somebody has to,” Aggie says.

Progress along the scaffolding poles is slow. Aggie don’t add any extra weight—we’re both weightless—but she does add momentum. I can feel her bobbing around, jostling me from side to side. And if I slow down or stop she’ll keep going, so I got to be careful not to build up a head of steam. Our safety rig—tether, poles, clips—has a limited capacity for tension. You go too fast, your blinder can pull you right off. It happens. That, or space debris, or a ripple in the sail: flick you off like a fly. It don’t take much. There are health and safety support workers, who are supposed to be tracking our progress, monitoring us. But the company’s been cutting back lately, using rookie contractors or automated drones instead of trained union crews. As a result, there’s been accidents. Casualties. And fatalities, too.

“You’re getting out at the right time, Aggie,” I say. “Least you won’t have to deal with any more cutbacks, and bullshit wage reductions.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Company screws us over, any chance they get.”

“Maybe Paulo’s case will do some good.”

“Hope so,” I say, and leave it at that.

We’re coming up on the worksite, now, and I let us float—trailing my hands along the scaffolding poles to slow us with friction. Now comes the tricky part. I got to disengage Aggie from the U-bolt on my own suit, and help her into position on her welding platform—all while staying tethered to the scaffolding, and not having either of us float off into space. The first time, it took me damn near half an hour to get it right, even with all the training I put in ahead of time. Now, though, I’ve got it down pat. I unclick Aggie and swing her around me in a do-si-do, then get myself behind her and guide both her hands to the platform. The magnets on her boots snap her secure.

“I’m gonna miss all that clumsy manhandling,” she says sweetly.

“We can keep it up,” I say. “I’ll drop by your place.”

Her laughter haunts my helmet, as I shimmy back along the scaffolding.

I return for the welding trolley. It clamps right onto the scaffolding poles, which makes it a little easier to haul than Aggie. I drag the unit along, back out to the worksite. Aggie is waiting for me there. The sun is in full view, her face turned toward it.

“Careful,” I say. “You’ll hurt your eyes.”

She chuckles politely. “Can’t do much more damage,” she says. “Besides, I can actually see the sun better, now. All the details that are too flared out for you lot to see.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Like God’s asshole.”

I position the trolley just behind her, locking it in place on the scaffolding. I check the gauges again—deuterium fuel cells, reactor core temperature, tip integrity—and initiate the pre-weld start-up sequence. It takes three minutes and forty-one seconds, and while it’s running I detach Aggie’s torch, adjust the tip to the length she uses, and hold it out to her. She’s reaching back, ready for it like a relay runner patiently awaiting the baton. I place it in her palm and feed out cable so she’s got enough for freedom of movement, but not so much it’ll get in her way.

Next I remove the replacement sheet of duranium. It’s stretched taut on a frame, like a painter’s canvas, so sheer and smooth I can see my reflection, like a black mirror. I crouch beside Aggie and position it over the tear in the sail, making sure it’s exact. It may be the most durable substance ever created, but the stuff’s a bitch to work with. The melting point is fifty-five hundred degrees Celsius: as hot as the surface of the sun. That’s where blinders like Aggie come in: the only welders skilful enough to wield a Tokamak fusion torch. Not even automatons can match them.

“Think the bots will ever be able to do this, Mags?”

“Not for a long while,” she says. “Too intuitive. It’s an art, not a science. You work by feel. How do you programme a bot to do that?” She says it scornfully, and with a touch of pride. “We’ve still got that on them. We’re cheap, disposable, old-school organics. And we learn through muscle memory, repetitive action, in a way bots haven’t managed.”

“Guess we don’t got to worry about them replacing high-spec welders, then.”

“Yet.”

We’re both kneeling there now, in the full light of the sun, like worshippers partaking in some ancient ritual, teleported to space. I want to tell her, then: I want to tell her that the union approached me, that they’re trying to use me to turn her to their side. But the channel’s being monitored, and if I’m going to come clean I’d prefer not to announce it to everybody.

“Guess it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is, yeah?” Aggie asks.

“Reckon so.”

“Let’s fire her up.”

I back away from her, reverently, and get into position behind the welding unit.

My job is to monitor the welding unit while she works, making adjustments as needed. When the Tokamak reactor fires up, there is no change in the welding unit: not that you can see or hear, anyway. But you can feel it. I fancy I can, at least. And I can definitely feel it when I touch my glove to the chassis: the vibrations of the plasma heating up, of the torus whirling like a top. The power of the sun, generating right in front of me. Then the dials begin to move: the temperature cycling up by the thousands, the fuel cells flashing green.

I tell Aggie that we’re all a go, and a few moments later the tip of her torch starts to glow. She hasn’t even fired it yet; that’s just the pent-up energies. Even on the lowest setting it’s white-hot, blinding. For me, anyway. Aggie peers directly at it, protected by her visor but not her welding shield, making some fine-tuning adjustments. She told me once that it’s the only way she can still see: by the light of her torch.

When that’s done she passes the torch once across the surface in front of her, like a water dowser getting a sense of the terrain. Only then does she lower her shield, which offers a second layer of protection, beyond the tinted visors built into our helmets. I do the same.

I say, “Ready to light up the sky, one last time, Mags?”

“Watch and learn, greenhorn,” she says. Then she laughs. “Better not, actually—or you’ll end up blind as a bat, like me.”

Then she triggers her torch. A burst of white-hot plasma materializes at the welding tip: spectacular, and brutally bright, like a seed of fire held in her hands. She lowers the torch and makes contact with the duranium at the seam where the sheet meets the edge of the damage. The seed blossoms into a flower, enveloping her so that she ain’t much more than a silhouette to me. A halo surrounds her. There aren’t any sparks, like you’d see on a classic MIG or TIG welder. But there are curling off-shoots of plasma, like sun-flares, that flick out and retreat. Petals continuously unfolding.

I can’t see her actual weld from where I am, huddled by the unit. Nobody but a welder is supposed to look directly at the join, where the tip makes contact, and they pay a price for it. The welding shield only does so much. It can’t prevent the slow-burn over time, as your retinas are burned, and burned again. As the world goes slowly dark before your eyes.

Aggie adjusts, shifting left on her platform and following the edge of the duranium patch. The weld she’s just finished comes into view by her right elbow. It’s still molten, glowing like a laser. As ever, Aggie’s line is straight and true. That’s not the case for all the blinders, and it’s why she’s held in such high regard: by the company, by the union. Hell, even by the bigwig art welders, earthside. It’s true what they say about her welds: when the heat fades you can’t even see the join. It’s literally seamless. Magic. Makes my welds with the laser look like butchery, in comparison. There’s no sign, as she ages and loses more and more sight, that she’s losing her touch. If anything, she’s getting better.

It’s mesmeric, but even gazing at the flare-out ain’t good for your peepers. When I look away, I can still see the halo glow, and Aggie’s shape, seared onto my own retinas. I blink it away, but of course it stays for a time, flashing against the underside of my eyelids.

It lingers until Aggie makes a dissatisfied sound over the comm-link.

“What is it, Mags?”

“I’m burning hot. You got my readings?”

I check the gauges. She’s right. The tip-temp is creeping up. Should have clocked that, instead of gawking. A solid duranium weld should burn at 5,500 Celsius, and we’re at 5,800. I adjust the plasma flow, lowering her torch output. The needle begins to drop.

“How’s that?”

“Better.”

She lifts the torch, having completed the first line of her weld. The bead runs cross-wise in front of her. Next is the line on the right side of the patch. She removes one hand from the torch, shakes out the wrist, and does the same with the other. Then she tilts her head back and forth three times. It’s a nervous habit, her way of loosening up. A tiny ritual that keeps her focused. She leans forward—at an angle that would be impossible if there were any gravity—and the halo-glow blossoms again, surrounding her.

I keep an eye on the tip-temp. It’s been hovering just above 5,500, and as soon as she triggers her torch it starts climbing up, swiftly, the digits cycling skywards. “Bloody hell,” I say, and make further adjustments.

“What is it, greenhorn?”

“Tip temp’s on the rise again.”

“Feeling it. Get it sorted or I’m gonna vaporize this seam.”

“You better hold off a minute.”

Aggie leans back, cursing me out a little: “Coc y gath,” she says, which means something like “cock of the cat” in Welsh, or the equivalent of “What the hell?” In my suit I’m sweating, not from the heat but from nerves, anxiety, embarrassment. Her last job and I’m screwing things up, here. I try the plasma one more time: no luck. Instead I bypass the outputs and go straight to the source: the fusion reaction is powered by deuterium. If I can’t lower the plasma output, I can reduce its fuel source like dampening a fire by starving it of wood. I tap at the controls, but they’ve gone dead. Just a dark display. No digits. Nothing.

“We’re in some shit, here, Aggie.”

“You’re telling me. My trigger’s not reacting. Torch is going haywire.”

She holds it out to one side, for me to see. The tip of her torch is still firing, even though she’s not working it. And that, combined with the overflow of plasma, is making it burn way too hot. The temp is skyrocketing.

“No way,” I say, shaking my head. “No bloody way.”

Then I’m panicking, telling her I checked it all, babbling about the gauges and her torch being fine, perfectly fine, back in the gear locker. I go on like that until she cuts me off, curt and short: “Shut up. I believe you. That don’t matter. We got to get help—do it. Now.”

I open another channel and hail the emergency crews. All that comes back is silence. I don’t know who’s on shift, if anybody, but they sure don’t seem to be reading my S.O.S.

“You hearing this, Aggie?”

“I’m hearing it.” Then, after a minute, she curses in Welsh.

“What’s going on, Aggie?”

“Somebody isn’t waiting for me to pick a side, apparently.”

It takes a second for me to clock what she’s on about. When I do, I’m actually speechless. I just stare at her back, my mouth gawping like a goldfish, stunned to stupidity.

“Talk to me, greenhorn. What’s going to happen?”

I shake myself, take a breath, check the dials.

“Temp’s still rising. If you peak...“

I don’t say what that means. I don’t even want to think it.

“What can we do?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Talk it through with me. Nice and slow. Just talk it through.”

I explain that because her trigger’s permanently firing, and the torch is channelling too much plasma, the reactor core is overheating. And since the plasma control is shot, I can’t lower the output from my end. The deuterium override isn’t responding. So we’ve got a miniature fusion reactor, building to critical capacity, with no way to reign it in.

“It’ll blow like a baby H-bomb, Aggie. The sail will go. And we’ll go with it.”

“Unless we get off the sail.”

I calculate, try to imagine hooking her up, hauling her back to the mast, then guiding her along the walkway to the hatch, both of us slow-plodding in our mag-boots.

“That would take half an hour. We got ten minutes, tops.”

“You could, without me.”

That hangs between us.

“I’m your guide. I ain’t leaving you.”

“Better one dead than two.”

“I ain’t leaving, okay? Now hold on a minute and let me think.” Then—“We pitch the unit. Into space.”

“No good. Too much mass. A shove won’t give it enough momentum. It’ll drift beside us, too close.”

“Shit.” I stare for a time at the welding unit. Talking it through with her has calmed me some. I’m still convinced the deuterium is key. Sometimes, when we were repairing the units in the machine shop, we’d get one that was running hot like this. Usually the displays were fine; but when they weren’t, we could still run calibration tests if we cracked open the control panel and adjusted the deuterium stream by hand. It wasn’t hard.

The only hard part for us now is getting in there: the outer casing is built from pure duranium. But even so we got a route in.

“Aggie,” I said, “I need you to do a weld for me.”

“You’re taking the piss, greenhorn.”

“No—serious, like. Cut open the control box for me.”

“It won’t be pretty. This thing is burning so hot I’m liable to frag our faces.”

I check her temperature: seven thousand and counting. At nine, we’ll be in the red.

“Just don’t crack the fuel cells and we’re good.”

“Put me in place, then.”

She holds the torch away from us in her left hand, literally keeping it at arm’s length, and reaches toward me with her right. I lead her around to my side of the unit, position her on the platform behind it. The control box is atop it, right in front of her. I take her hand and put it on the box, to show her its location. She feels around it—her eyes still suffering from afterburn—and when she gets a sense of it, she moves her torch toward it. The tip is glowing a beautiful, brilliant blue now. I’ve never seen that.

“Just a straight cut, left to right,” I say. “Should be enough for me to pop it off.”

“When I weld,” she says, “it’s gonna burn huge. Don’t look anywhere near it, okay?”

“What about you?”

“I can’t see shit anyway.”

She kinks her neck—left, right—and says, “Here we go.”

I angle my head away, and the space around us explodes with crackling blue. I’ve never been near a weld of this magnitude. The nearby space seems to change, almost like it’s bending, warping around the power. A cocoon of light envelops us, achingly brilliant, and when I close my eyes, it glows right through the skin of my lids.

“Damn that’s bright,” Aggie says, with a sense of awe. “I can see clearly, for once.”

It’s only a six-inch burn. When she’s done Aggie holds the torch away again. The glow around us diminishes. I have to blink repeatedly, and even then I’m seeing everything through a vague black mist. Afterburn—worse than any I’ve ever had.

“How’d I do, greenhorn?” Aggie asks.

As the burn fades, I can make out the control panel. Half of the control box housing has vaporized, but the line of her weld is as straight as ever, and the depth is perfect: no damage below. I can see the fuel cells in there, and the manual controls. I pry the panel back on its softer steel junction with the plyers from my tool belt. Then it’s a matter of reaching inside, and adjusting the deuterium stream. I’m half-expecting that not to work, either, but it does: the flare of Aggie’s torch dims, shifts from cobalt blue to purple, then white. And as it does the temperature gauge drops from eight thousand Celsius, to seven, to six. Soon enough we’re sitting pretty at the mean temp of fifty-five hundred, and I pat Aggie on the back and start laughing.

“Bloody ace, Mags. That did it.”

“Well done, kid,” she tells me. “Earned your keep today.”

There’s a moment’s lull, a sense of total peace and quiet, until our comm-link bleeps and a voice hails us: “Welding Team 3—this is central. Everything okay out there? Somebody on the observation deck spotted some kind of energy surge on your sail.”

I’m about to answer when Aggie does for us: “This is Welder 3. We been trying to hail the emergency crew, jerkoff. Our rig just went haywire, and nearly fricking blew.”

“Oh my god!” The kid manning the comm clearly isn’t trained for this. He starts swearing and shouting to the people around him: “Mad Aggie’s rig almost blew!” There’s a lot of background squawking, and then it cuts out, suddenly, as the channel gets switched.

“Aggie,” a new voice says, “Paulo here. Emergency has no record of your call.”

“I’ll bet they don’t.”

“You better get back in here. We’ll sort this out. If the bots have glitched up...“

“Job ain’t finished, Paulo,” Aggie says, flatly, and puts him on hold.

I look at her, incredulous. “Aggie...“

She says, “Any reason you can’t control the temp for me, greenhorn?”

“No, but—”

“But nothing,” she says, and re-opens the channel to Paulo. “Tell them we’ll be in when we’re done.”

Then she cuts him off. A series of hailing messages start pinging straight away, as they try to get back in touch.

“What should I say, Mags?”

“Don’t say anything. Just work.”

She’s already manoeuvring her way back around the trolley, to her platform. I move to help her, guide her back into position. Her weld on the sail is only half-finished.

“You sure about this?” I ask her.

“I ain’t walking from my last job, leaving people earthside in the dark.” She holds her torch in front of her. Scans it back and forth in the way she does, only a few more times than usual. “The only problem is my vision is so scorched, I can’t see, even by the glow of the tip.”

“Maybe that’s a sign we call it a day. We can finish it tomorrow.”

“There won’t be a tomorrow, once it gets out that we were set-up.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Like hell we don’t.”

She leans forward, and the glow of the welder ignites on contact. I keep one hand on the manual controls, adjusting the stream to compensate for the heat increase. After a minute, though, Aggie starts muttering and swearing and sits back on her knees.

“Goddamn shield,” she says. “Dim gwerth rhech dafad.”

And she flips it up, and leans back in—as if it’s nothing. The glow blossoms again, enveloping her, and she says, “That’s better.”

I call her name, tell her what she’s doing is crazy: her visor isn’t enough on its own, without the shield. Her eyes might as well be fully exposed. She might as well be staring at the sun. But she just tells me to mind my gauge, do my job, let her do hers. I could use the manual controls to cut off the feed of deuterium, snuff out the reaction. I consider it, but I don’t do it. Instead what I do is shift to one side, so I can see past Aggie. And I gasp.

Her face, veiled only by the tint of her visor, is lit up by the blaze of white-hot fusion. I’ve never seen her face while she works. Her expression is taut, intense, utterly immersed: her lips slightly parted, her eyes peering into the glare. In the corneas I can actually see the reflection of the blaze, raw and unchecked. It’s like something in her is burning, burning, burning. The core of the universe, the stuff of stars, blazing out through her eyes.

After shift I try to coax Aggie into visiting the sick bay—she’s hiding her eyes and the damage behind her glasses—but she tells me she’d rather go to the canteen for a whisky. I don’t know who needs it more, after what we been through. Probably me. I knock the first one back, and the second, and before I can down a third, Aggie orders us a couple of beers.

“Slow down, greenhorn. Don’t want my last shift with you to be a repeat of my first.”

When I first started with her, Aggie took me out for a drink. I ended up puking over some other union guys and passing out in the toilet. They were gonna haze me something fierce but Aggie, she stepped in and guided me back to my dorm. The blinder guiding the guide.

Guess it’s always been partway that, with us.

The canteen is pretty packed: mostly with union guys, but a few company men too. Word’s got around, and every so often somebody stops at our table to express their shock and get the full story. Both Paulo and the company rep from this morning are around—I’ve seen them in passing—but so far they’ve kept their distance. Waiting each other out, maybe.

We’re sitting by the window, overlooking the darkside of the plant, and she’s gazing out at the stars, the mast, the sail. The skin of her face is all red and burnt and blistered, from when she raised her shield

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

She looks back at me, expressionless.

“It always hurts,” she says.

We’re halfway through those beers when Paulo approaches, picking his way toward us with that long-legged, spidery gait. He stands by our table, but I don’t ask him to join us and Aggie don’t either. She turns and looks up to him. She must be guessing where he’s at, since I sure as hell don’t think she can see anything, no more.

“That was a hell of a thing, today,” he says.

“Sure was,” Aggie agrees.

“Company’s got a lot to answer for, Aggie.”

“You can say that again.”

Each time she answers, her voice is toneless, flat. As if she’s reciting by rote.

“You thought any more about what we discussed?”

As he says it he glances at me, once, significantly.

“I’ve thought a lot about it,” Aggie says, drumming her fingertips on her beer bottle. “Just like I thought about who might have had access to our welding unit. Who might have tampered with it, when my little farewell sing-along was going on, this morning.”

“After I done the safety check,” I say, and it’s only just occurred to me.

“Sure weren’t no company men in the gear locker.”

Paulo stands very stiff, very still, for maybe five or six seconds.

“That’s a pretty wild accusation, even for you, Aggie.”

“Ain’t no accusation,” she says. “Just speculation. Like I said. I been thinking.”

“What in the hell would we get out of that?”

I knock back the rest of my brew and drop the bottle—plonk—on the table top. “Maybe you worried she was gonna take the company up on its offer—become a poster girl for their retirement plans. That wouldn’t have helped your case none. But if the best spaceside welder got killed in a workplace accident? Hell. Don’t look good for the company. Neither does the fact that the emergency crews were in no shape to help, when it all went wrong. Two birds with one stone, that is. They’ll need to staff those crews better.”

Paulo looks down at me, his mouth tight. Right then, it seems the time to tell her, finally. To confess.

“They asked me to talk to you, you know,” I say. “Try to bring you around.”

She turns her head to me, smooths her palm across the table top.

“Figured as much. Tempted, were you?”

“With a union ring on the table? Too right.”

“Thought you were overly interested in it, earlier.”

We’re talking as if Paulo’s already gone, already a moot point, and I guess he is. I guess he realizes it, too. He plants his palm on the table and leans over me and hisses that I sure as shit can forget about my union ring, now.

“You can wallow in the repair shop,” he says.

“Don’t reckon so,” I say. I’m warm and full of whiskey, feeling loose. “I figure I’m done with the whole thing. Gonna go back to school. Study a bit of mechanical engineering. Maybe design a new fusion rig for the union. Clearly there’s a few flaws in the one we got.”

Aggie laughs, and so do I, and we touch glasses. We’re still laughing as Paulo stalks quietly and quickly away. And we’re still laughing when he’s replaced by the company rep, who approaches timidly, maybe worried that he’s missed his last chance to fulfill his orders. The poor bastard even has a hard copy of the contract in hand, hoping to get her to sign.

“I hear you’ve had quite the day,” is how he starts his pitch, and of course that sets us laughing all over again.

“Quite the day—that’s one way of putting it!” Aggie howls, palming the table.

He smiles uncertainly, and his glasses flash.

“Have you had any more time to consider the company’s offer?” he says. “Remember, it expires today. If you want to take advantage of the enhanced retirement plan, and the eye repair surgery, you’ll have to act now.”

The way he says it sounds more like a salesman than ever.

“Yeah, Aggie,” I say. “Act now, and take advantage of this limited time offer.”

“I’d love to,” she says. “I really would.”

His smile broadens, and he places the contract in front of her, along with a pen. Around us, the room is going quiet. The union guys know why he’s here. We all know what’s at stake. Aggie picks up the pen, and for a second I think she’s gonna do it. I want her to do it. For her sake. But she pauses, her pen hovering above the signature line.

“There’s just one thing,” she says.

The rep’s smile freezes, going brittle, threatening to crack.

“My eyes—I’m not sure they’ll be able to repair the damage, see.”

And she removes her sunglasses. The people around us, who are close enough to get a look, actually draw back. The gasp is audible. Aggie’s eyes are scorched. The corneas are completely bloodshot, cherry red, giving her the crazed look of some rabid animal. The skin around them is burnt, peeling away in flakes, and the tear ducts are leaking pus. It’s hideous and nightmarish. And the rep reacts as if he’s having a nightmare: stumbling back, half-falling over a chair. He stammers something about being sorry, about checking to see what can be done, if anything can be done, regarding ocular damage of that magnitude.

“Don’t bother, buddy,” Aggie says. “I ain’t signing your toilet paper.”

Then she shouts at him to piss off, to get going, and he back-pedals away, still mumbling, and stumbles right out the door. In the ensuing quiet Aggie drains her beer. She puts it carefully back on the table, turns to the room, and shouts, “Anybody else want to try to bribe me or threaten me or cajole me? Anybody else want to have a go, while we’re at it?”

No answer. Then, somebody begins banging a mug repeatedly on one of the tables. Others follow suit. Soon the whole canteen is full of the noise, deafeningly loud, and when the applause dies down, the atmosphere has changed. I tell her we should get to the infirmary, right away, but she’s already ordered us another round. She still hasn’t put her glasses back on and while we wait for the beers I gaze, in horror and fascination, at the damage.

“Did you mean it?” she says. “About going back to school?”

“Reckon I don’t got a choice, now.”

“I could pull some strings. Lean on the union for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

She allows herself a short, satisfied grunt. Almost inaudible, but I catch it.

“Is that what you wanted me to say?” I ask.

“What I want don’t matter. But if you got a talent, you ought to pursue it. For me, it was welding. For you, it’s machine work. You proved that every shift you did with me, and you proved it again today. You stick with that. Stick with it and see where it takes you.”

She turns back to gazing out the window, and the serene expression on her face is at odds with the ravaged, wounded appearance of her eyes.

“What do you see out there, Aggie?”

She blinks once, as if testing the difference in light, with her lids closed.

“My weld,” she says. “I see the afterburn of my last weld.”

She smiles at me, fondly, with tears of pus and pain and bitterness still streaming down her cheeks.