Cole whipped his head forward, snapping the welding mask in place and causing the world around him to fall black as blindness. He pulled the torch’s trigger and a blast of plasma illuminated his workspace in an eerie, greenish glow. Popping a few dollops of steel at a time, he worked along the joint and tacked the sheet of metal into place. Once it held, he ran back the length of the seam with a steady burn of the flame, concentrating on making a good, strong connection. Behind the torch’s passing, he left a long bead of beautiful, red, puddling steel.

The weld complete, he shut down the torch, lifted his visor, and watched the molten alloy cool—the rivulets of lava turning gray and then a dull silver. Cole stood up. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the nearly completed box. On the opposite side of the cage, two other workers finished the wiring as they secured the last connection between the grav panels and the three separate power supplies. Cole nodded to one of the men who kept glancing up to survey his work, then moved to the next joint that needed welding. He was just about to flip his visor back down when a voice like dripping honey interrupted him:

“I hear you came up with this.”

Cole turned. Penny stood behind him, her hair as bright as liquid steel.

“Yeah,” Cole said, beaming. “Ryke said I get lifetime clever points for this.”

Penny pouted. “If it works.” She appraised the box skeptically, one hand perched on her hip, the other reaching out to touch a vertical strut. “You actually think anyone’s gonna risk their lives in one of these things?”

“Are you kidding?” Cole smiled at her. “It’s flawless. C’mere, step inside.” He ducked under one strut and stepped over another, entering the cage of steel. Penny followed. She even accepted Cole’s proffered hand and allowed him to steady her as she crawled through. When they stood up, they found themselves in a box just two meters on a side, divided in half by two solid walls of steel, pressed up together. Cole’s head had just enough clearance to stand upright.

“A little tight to jump inside of,” Penny said.

“We’ll be balled up, hugging our legs. Besides, we shouldn’t have more than one person in them at a time. Here’s how it works.” He slapped the solid walls standing vertically in the center of the box. “You’ve got two steel plates facing each other, right? At the moment, they’re just tacked in place with a few spot welds. There’s grav panels in each one, just like the panels in a ship’s decking.”