Outside the well, on the cold side, Sen’s crews were laying walkways.
Mara went up to see them while the second pair’s thermal test ran. Up the cold stair from the lowest chamber, through the service passage where the pipe crews had freed the panel fasteners weeks ago, to the cold side’s long gallery: the space behind the well’s outer wall where the sockets were, and the old ribs, and the seam housings for the collar.
The crews had been working there for days, on the walkways and nothing else.
Steel plates, each the width of a person and the length of two, laid across iron brackets bolted to the gallery’s wall. A path. Running along the cold side from the stair head to the far end, past every socket and every seam housing, at the height where a person could stand and reach each one. With a rail on the outer edge. With a lamp bracket every ten paces.
Half of it was done. The other half was brackets on the wall, waiting for plates.
“They’re not needed today,” Sen said.
She had come up behind Mara. She stood at the stair head and looked along the half-finished path.
