The last drops of coffee flowed down my throat as I made it to the back door of the dock bay just in time for the dull ding of the time clock just inside the door to signal that the next shift should clock in. I leaned down to look into the retinal scanner to unlock the door, then pulled it open and got in line after the two coworkers also needing to clock in.

“Down to the last second every time, Christa,” Joannie snickered, saluting me with her own travel mug full of coffee.

“You really shouldn’t be surprised anymore,” I said and leaned forward to clink my mug against hers in greeting. Joannie was one of the few women I felt truly understood me, a sister from another mister.

The man in front of Joannie muttered about it being too early as he finished clocking in and stepped aside, making a bleary beeline for the communal coffee pot. Coming in for your shift not hung over, even by just a little bit, was pretty much unheard of and it was essential for the big bosses to devote a substantial portion of the company budget to ensuring enough coffee was purchased each month. It was so necessary for most workers’ survival through the day that it was obvious that one of the boss’ assistants was tasked for a large portion of his day to keep the communal coffee area clean and the coffee flowing. It made sense, if coffee ran out there would end up being a line of people too disgruntled to return to their work without getting a cup. Then the line would build up to the point where one pot wasn’t enough to get through everyone, so a new one would have to be waited on to be made and during that time the line would build up again and the cycle would repeat. I had been in that perpetual line a few times before the company got it through their heads that it was a non-negotiable and unspoken requirement for work to keep getting done and shipped out.

“So what did you do last night?” Joannie asked while typing in her employee number and leaning down to let the machine scan her iris.

“You already know,” I chuckled, “I don’t know why you even bother to ask anymore.”

“I’m trying to be polite, don’t be a bitch about it.” She turned around once the scanner had verified her identity and stuck her tongue out at me.

“Don’t tempt me,” I teased. It was a well known joke to everyone on morning shift that Joannie and I would spend a good portion of our day pretending to hit on each other and play a game of sexual tension chicken.

“You wish,” she said, placing her hand playfully on my arm then running her nails up the fabric of my suit to make a scratching sound not unlike ripping fabric. “But really, I keep hoping you’ll take my advice and get out some night, meet someone other than the people you work with and have some fun.”

“You just want to get me out on a date.” I took my place at the scanner and had to think far too long to recall my employee number. I had been working at the same company with the same number for almost seven years now, it was probably a sign that I was still drunker than I felt.

“Three, nine, four, three, six, seven, two,” she recited helpfully.

“Thanks.” I put my eye to the scanner and felt a hand rest on the small of my back.

“Oh you know we can’t be together, they don’t let employees date,” Joannie said while teasing her hand just a bit lower down. I knew it was all in fun but I might have kept bent over for a bit longer after the scanner had completed verification and enjoyed the attention a bit more than she intended. She did have a point in that it had been quite a while since I had a significant other or been on a date. “I just think you’re wasting away in that apartment of yours every night, there’s more to life than whatever game you’re hooked on now.”

“It might not be a game,” I said with indignation as I stood up, holding in a shiver as her hand dropped down my butt and grazed over my upper thigh before she stepped back from me.

“It is.” Joannie knew me too well. “It’s always a game, not that games are bad, it’s just that I think you should do something else sometimes too. Variety is the spice of life, as my mother would say.”

She followed me as I trekked across the back of the production line to the central employee lounge to refill my empty coffee cup. I thought about the idea that I should get out more as we exchanged pleasantries with other coworkers either joining our pilgrimage or getting their protective gear ready to start their tasks for the day. It wasn’t that I was afraid to go out or really thought much against the idea, it just seemed like once I got home at the end of the day all I wanted to do was get out of my work clothes into something comfortable, then that made me want a drink to loosen up, then my brain automatically got curious about what what happening in whatever game I had been working on and I started playing. Next thing I would know I had sunk another twenty bucks into a new expansion pack, my bottle was empty, and it was suddenly three in the morning. The next day I would feel like garbage, suffer through the day at work, then come home and want comfort again, starting the whole process anew. I was pretty sure it had all started with one really bad day at some point near the beginning of my employment, if I thought hard about it I could probably pinpoint the day. There were a lot of shit things that happened around that time, one of them probably got to me enough to start the viscous cycle and I had been perpetuating it ever since.

“Oh thank the gods that be.” I sighed happily at the sight of a brand new pot of coffee just about to finish brewing.

Usually I had pretty terrible luck at getting to it when it was just the dredges that had sat on the burner for too long. Fancy places to work with professional dress codes probably had brewers that made everyone a fresh cup of coffee on demand, but we were stuck with big industrial machines that the company had probably purchased in bulk from an old school diner shutting down. They were workhorses that could pump out the juice all day, but they often scorched the coffee if not enough was left over to buffer the heat. I wasn’t complaining, I personally would drink it no matter how burned it was, but it always felt like a good day if I managed to get to it while it was still fresh. We both filled up our mugs and looked longingly at the old, beaten up sofa and chairs in the corner of the lounge.

“Long night for you too?” I asked, noticing her own red eyes and death grip she had on her mug.

“Something like that,” she said with a slight flush to her face. This was something new, she was typically not someone who would get flustered.

“Oh really?” I raised an eyebrow and gave her a wink. “Sounds like someone had a good evening.”

Joannie didn’t reply, just looked away and let out an awkward laugh.

“It must have been really depraved then.” I clutched the collar of my jumpsuit like an old lady clutching a string of pearls. “My Joannie is embarrassed about what she did last night? I never thought I’d see the day.”

“I just… um…” She laughed again awkwardly and finally managed to make eye contact with me. “A friend of mine asked me to escort her to a club she heard about because she was too scared to go on her own.”

“Yeah okay, so it was a club, you love clubs.”

“I do, but this was a very, um… different kind of club.” She raised her eyebrows up and down for emphasis and burst into a laughter. “I didn’t really partake in the main events, but I did get smashed trying to work up the courage to join.”

I glanced over to the clock above the coffee pot and let out a long groan. Management was willing to let us use the first five minutes or so of our shift to get situated and caffeinated, but any longer than ten was pushing it. “Okay Joannie, you owe me a story at lunch.”

“Normal place?”

I nodded and gave her a firm smack on the behind as I followed her out of the lounge to the work floor. We worked in the same general area, though in slightly different capacities, sometimes we would be lucky enough to be positioned close enough to each other to be able to sneak in conversation here and there, but it was really luck of the draw. Today I was set up to start welding together the outside of the ship’s hull, a long seam running all the way to near the ceiling of the building down to the ground, I was finishing securing a large panel that covered a lot of expensive electronics that had just been installed over the past several days by Joannie’s team. Basically she was a part of the brainy team that knew how to do all the electrical, wiring, and installation of vitally important equipment that kept people alive in the vast void of space and I was a part of the brawn that came behind them and sealed it all shut so it wouldn’t fall out on takeoff.

My welding coworkers, usually all men, were waiting on me, though they weren’t upset about it. They liked that I often lingered a bit, pushing the boundaries on just how long I would stretch management’s flexibility on start up time. They figured that if someone got them in trouble for chatting and sipping coffee for too long at the start of shift they could always just blame waiting on me. Management was keen on finding reasons not to fire me, not only was I really good at my job, I was a token female in a male dominated section of the plant. They often used me in recruitment material, particular in the advertisements for their in house “academy” for training new welders to get their welding certificate while learning the job. Having an active and long term female welder made them look really attractive and progressive, enticing young women to come give the career a try. I suspected that they made decent money through the program since you had to pay for your supplies and for the classes directly from your paycheck as you worked and they would just reuse another failed recruit’s hand my downs on someone new if they quit, which they usually did. For a good long while I tried pretty hard to get younger people to stay, especially women, most of my coworkers were male and older than me by at least a couple decades, it was sometimes rough to find something in common with them. After the first couple dozen of failed new hires I gave up on the idea and laid down that it was a physically demanding and sometimes dangerous job from the get go and then it basically became a revolving door. The welding supervisor sat me down to ask what exactly I was saying to drive them off, but couldn’t really fault me for telling the truth.

“She finally graces us with her presence,” Howard said, setting his coffee cup aside and bending to lace his boots tightly. Bent over I could clearly make out a balding spot on the very top of his head that he had been very careful to keep combed over and hidden, unfortunately for him it was very bald and shiny, reflecting the industrial lights overhead like a beacon. Glee flowed through me as I filed away that information for an appropriate time to bring it up.“Got caught up chatting with your girlfriend?”

“You’re just mad I have one and your wife hates you,” I fired back with a sweet smile.

The other four men in the team snickered and gave him convivial punches to his shoulder and pats on the back. Howard was always the first one to start complaining about the new thing his “bitch of a wife” said or did that morning to piss him off, but I was the only one brave enough to use it against him. He was the type of guy to make it known to everyone in a seven mile radius that his love for his wife had fallen apart after the kids were born and her body was no longer that of nineteen year old. It wasn’t that I hated him or he hated me, he just thought that women didn’t really belong in his career and I thought he had a personality of a soggy cardboard box. The others in the group respected my bravado in willing to fire back at him and took the effort to intervene and make it all just one big group joke so he wouldn’t sit and stew about it all day.

“Just this panel today?” asked Joey, pointing up to the side of the huge star ship.

We were working on perhaps the biggest ship I had ever been a part of. It has seemed massive but not overwhelming when the initial skeleton had gone up, but layers upon layers had been added in the months since then and it was now nearly pushing the limits of the space we had to work with. It was supposedly the biggest cargo vessel being built to date and was a sort of experiment to evaluate how long it would be able to last in service and if it was economically feasible to replace the smaller ships with less of the bigger versions. If it turned out they were going to be what’s built from now on, I could see the company needing to remodel or even move to a new, bigger site to handle the space requirements. We could make do now squeezing things in where they could fit and technically not following safety laws one hundred percent of the time, but this was with only this one vessel and another smaller one being built where typically we might be able to fit four into the building. Unless we were only going to build one massive ship at a time, which I couldn’t see the company doing, we were at capacity as is. This was before even taking into consideration how many more hands were needed to build something so massive, sometimes on small ships I could use a jack or other lifting tools on my own to lift and secure pieces into place so I could weld, but everything about this ship was a multi-person job.

“Yeah,” Andy answered, “the boss says if we can manage to get it fully secured we’ll be doing well. We need to be very careful with it, I’m confident that we did a good job getting it tack welded pretty secure yesterday, but if we bang it around with the lift system or slip and smack into the side of it and some of the support breaks it is almost eight thousand tons of metal. I don’t think I need to spell out exactly that could do if it fell on anyone.”

“Christ,” Joey muttered.

“Yeah you’d probably be seeing him,” Andy said with a laugh. He picked up one of the sets of rigging for the lift system and stepped into it, pulling it tight around his hips before putting on the upper part of the harness to secure his shoulders. “Everyone suit up and make sure it’s good and tight, we don’t want any avoidable risks today. I know this will be hard for you guys, but no goofing off today, we need to focus and get this secured with clean, strong welds that no one dies for.”