Suddenly Icebreaker was not years or months from being ready, but weeks. Prickly with anticipation, Chiku visited the berthing chamber as often as her administrative workload allowed. While the lander was being prepared for the expedition, it had been crusted over with a dense plaque of scaffolding and pressurised support structures. Now most of that had been dismantled or swung away, leaving only a handful of vacuum-suited technicians still working on the final details. The three-hundred-metre-long lander had been gutted and stuffed with enormous fuel tanks, giving the craft’s clean lines a swollen, bee-stung look. Even a Post-Chibesa engine needed fuel, and lots of it.Once in a while, from some hatch or service port, stuttered the hard blue flash of a welding torch or laser. Even there, they were down to the last few tweaks. Inside, too, the bulk of the work had been completed. In the tiny nucleus of the ship that would be filled with air and warmth, the skipover caskets had been installed and tested.After much deliberation, the final complement of crew would be twenty.
