She returned to her seat in the command module and pulled up a video feed from the interior of the shard. Its walls were now thin enough to admit some sunlight, and so it had become a sort of vast pellucid amphitheater where all of those robots could look inward to the smooth beryllium pod—a neutron-reflecting shroud—surrounding the reactor core. Formerly this had been buried in ice; the recent excavations made to fuel the big perigee burns had left it exposed, also revealing the smaller pod of the boiler room mounted on its side, and the system of hoppers and augers that fed it. Aft of that was what remained of the ice cavern of the nozzle bell, now mostly melted away to expose the blackness of space beyond. The only thing now holding the reactor chamber in place was the massive central thrust pillar, a tree trunk of ice that grew from its forward end and extended straight up to the solid nose of the shard, where the command module was embedded.