Before long, a cygment and a half had passed with her sitting in a fog of stalled ideas at the bottom of a yawning chasm in her understanding. She stood from the assembly on cramping legs and considered it blankly. How could such a complex hunk of equipment remain so utterly inert? It confounded her. A cube of purchased and pilfered parts, capable thus far of generating only frustration.

She rubbed her eyes, grunted. Time for work. She drank down the rest of the jha, wheeled the machine over beside her sleeping nook, and draped it in a blanket. What exactly am I doing? she thought. Hiding it? She laughed. No one could possibly know what it is, because not even I know what it is. Yet it represented years of work, so here it was under a blanket, for anyone looking at it to say: someone’s trying to hide that.

Time had gotten away from her. She gave her armpit a sniff and, not being too offended, opted out of rinsing and stepped into her work overalls. She looped her brother’s puzzle amulet over her head, grabbed her helmet before locking up her dig and hopped on an underground vacuum shuttle along with the other pipefitters. In a quarter cygment, she arrived at the centralized power station on the surface, one of five thousand just like it dedicated to bringing power to the Dawn Ring: a thin, habitable band that ran longitudinally around the planet. The station was just inside the outermost edge of the Ring, where things started to get hot.

Naecia debarked and made the short walk to a second bank of magnetic shuttles, where smaller groups of pipefitters were ferried deep into the star-side territory. Once the shuttle had accelerated to cruising speed, the crews wordlessly donned special radiation suits made of a light, metal alloy-foam. “Light” was relative. It only meant the suits wouldn’t crush you immediately. The hunched posture of the older workers suggested it took a little while.

The shuttle rocketed south, stopping along its route every few hundred mylics to let a worker out, with the most senior exiting first, at the highest – and least sweltering – latitudes. That was the way the union had set it up. Having only been with the crew for less than a hundred cycles-galactic, Naecia was dropped at a platform near the end of the line, over a thousand mylics from the central power station in the Dawn Ring. She knew she’d appreciate the whole seniority thing once she’d been around a while, but right now it was a beating.

The only other person there was Embo Lial, another newish grunt, who, being done with his shift, stepped tiredly onto the shuttle with a nod and blasted back toward home.

The gridspace spread out before her was a star-baked yellow wasteland without shelter or water. Add to that the high pressure pipeworks and the landscape took on the feel of a place that was waiting to kill you. Naecia had to be vigilant – a feature of the job she welcomed. It allowed her to forget the stupid machine for a while.