Neu Frankfurt, European Federation — February 2035

  Elisabeth Müller is a long way from her days overseeing artillery shell production. Now she works as a foreman on a construction site, helping to rebuild Frankfurt, just a few kilometers from the still-ruined city center.

  “Saturdays were always the hardest,” she says. “We worked six days a week, and with the power rationed, even the rare day off felt more like a punishment than a break. Winter nearly broke us. Inge, my daughter, came down with bronchitis, and poor Frank nearly lost his mind when he heard. Even from the front lines, he went mad knowing his little girl was suffering in a place that was supposed to be safe.”

  “Six days a week?” I ask.

  She nods. “Sometimes seven, if things got bad enough. When the backlog piled up, they just kept us going until someone cracked. A friend of mine worked engineering, maintenance on the auto-loaders and the old feed systems. She was pulling twelve to fourteen-hour shifts. Eight in the morning until ten at night, no overtime, just a bowl of soup and a nod of thanks.”

  “Through the cold, the sickness, the bad news from the front... you kept going.”

  She takes a long breath. “When I learned Frank had died, I still had to show up the next morning. My boss told me I could go home, but what was the point? Just to sit in that freezing shell of a house the state issued us and two other families, abandoned sometime in the ‘90s, barely insulated, no lights, no hot water, and reminisce about our honeymoon? No. I worked.”

  She pauses, brushing a tear from her cheek with the back of a calloused hand.

  “I didn’t tell Inge. Couldn’t bring myself to. I asked the nursery worker to do it. She was better with children anyway.”

  She shifts in her seat, clearly wanting to move on.

  “The nursery was well run, though. Heating maintenance had top priority, even over the factories. Those kids stayed ten hours in a room, sure, but it was warm. And it didn’t cost us a cent. Not that we had money to spare even if they’d charged us. Salaries were capped in euros to stop the inflation spiral, but we still got by. The cold, the news, the uncertainty, we managed. We always had something to eat. Not much meat though. Beef and lamb were nearly impossible to get. Eggs too, and anything made from them. Soft drinks, chocolates, pre-war stuff? Forget it. But we had ration meals at the factory, free of charge. Kept us going, though sometimes I wonder if the real purpose wasn’t just to keep us working longer.”

  "How hard was the work?" I ask.

  She cracks a faint smile, flexing her arm slightly.

  “Didn’t get these muscles from sitting behind a desk. We were handling 155mm shells, twenty kilos each, and that’s not counting the casings or the pallet loads. Sure, the machines did the bulk of the lifting, but you still had to guide them into place. Align them just right. Sometimes the hydraulics froze or the sensors misread. Then it was up to us. Manual override with cold fingers and a prayer. And the shell lines never stopped. Day shift, night shift, weekend runs. The air smelled like oil and propellant dust. You’d come home coated in it, feeling like a walking fire hazard. Have fun taking a cold shower every night. Didn't have an union so to say, they were outlawed by then. But we still managed to negotiate and army field shower. Just a container box with plastic tarps and metal tubing. But at least the water was warm. ”

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  She leans back, staring out the wndow toward the cranes shifting along the skyline.

  “You learned fast not to think too much. Just focus on your hands, your steps, the next shift. The girls on my line, most of them were just like me. Mothers, widows, too stubborn to break. The war was far away, but you could feel it in every clang of metal. Every time the sirens cut through the shift change. We weren’t soldiers, but we fought in our own way.”

  Elisabeth continues, voice steady but low, as if recounting a memory she had half forgotten.

  "Modern artillery shells, even back then, were not just hunks of steel and powder. Each one had to be perfect. We were not allowed to call them munitions. They were products. You had a base casing, machined elsewhere, shipped in by autonomous freight or repurposed rail. Then came the inserts, sensors, and the explosive filler. Smart charge modules. Fuse heads. All built to specification. At least, when they arrived."

  She lets out a short dry laugh.

  "Some days we did not do a thing. Whole shifts standing around because the sensors from the United States did not make it through customs. Or because the ballistic coating compound froze in transport and became unusable. Sometimes the Chinese lithium chips got held up. The entire line would just stop. We would sweep floors, restock tool kits, do endless safety checks. All just to stay busy. They could not send us home. That would have triggered panic. Idle workers meant something was wrong. And during war, perception was everything."

  "Did that happen a lot?"

  "More than they admitted. Our logistics guys were half civilian, half military. Some like a girl right out of her twenties who used to run a pizzeria two years earlier, now trying to keep a ballistic supply chain running through half collapsed Europe. They did their best, but the system was a mess. Black market resales. Parts lost in transit. Once, an entire rail container of fuses exploded in a Spanish railyard because someone did not declare the contents properly. After that, everything slowed down."

  She pauses for a beat.

  "But it was the accidents inside that really haunted us. Machines are not forgiving. You mishandle one at the wrong stage, and that is it. We had full face visors, reinforced gloves, anti static suits. It did not matter. One time, a girl maybe nineteen was clearing a jammed loader when it slammed shut on his arm. Crushed it. Another time, a woman dropped a half filled casing. It bounced harmlessly, but the sound nearly stopped every heart on the floor. They pulled her off the line after that. Said she was not mentally cleared anymore."

  "Did you ever see one go off?"

  She nods grimly. "Not on our line. I wouldn't be here if I did. But we heard about it. One of the plants up in Marseille. A smart shell detonated during testing. Took out half the testing bay and four operators. Nobody said it out loud, but we all thought the software was rushed. Smart munitions are only as good as their firmware. And I still wouldn't trust my life and that of my colleagues on a string of 1 and 0's."

  Despite the heaviness of her words, there is a kind of pride in the way she sits.

  "Still we made everything. High explosive, precision guided. Deep penetration. Thermobaric. Cluster shells. Variable delay fuses. Designed to knock out beetles on the move with one shell, disrupt mobile columns, wipe hatcheries of the map. They told us each one could end a battle before it started. You could not help but believe it. We made power, even if we did not wield it."

  She exhales slowly, her eyes glassing over for a moment.

  "And then after your shift, you would go home. Your back screaming. Your hands sore. Your ears still ringing from the machinery. You would sit by the candlelight, try to heat some soup, and pray your kid had not caught something from the nursery again. Then you slept. If you were lucky, without dreaming about what you had built that day."