"I still think you've made it a little too ugly."
At a bustling Sun Ship repair site, Old Qin sat beneath a canopy on top of a sand dune, blew a smoke ring, and couldn't help complaining to Lord Ma beside him, who was looking over the blueprints:
"It was a perfectly good Sun Ship, and you've cut away at least a third of it. Whatever way you look at it, what's left isn't pretty."
"What do you know? Ever heard of a modular system?"
Faced with Old Qin's uninformed criticism, Lord Ma—already in a foul mood after getting up at the crack of dawn—replied without looking up:
"You think it looks ugly because we haven't put on the outer hull yet. The sections we cut away still need to be sorted and reassembled, too. It'll take a while. Give us three to five days, and you'll see the Origin Vanguard reborn.
"This design came from a group of top designers back home after several rounds of all-nighters. Its blueprint was an experimental concept for a future air-combat spacecraft that we'd been developing back home. We'd already tested the model in a wind tunnel, so the aerodynamics and outer shape are definitely sound."
"Is that so?"
Old Qin took a skeptical drag on his cigarette, then turned his gaze toward the makeshift repair yard beside the sea of sand.
When they had gone to seize the Millennium Quicksand, they had also hauled over all the repair equipment the Sangha people had installed there. After they used the data left behind by the Eden program to activate the ship's autonomous maintenance robots, repairing and rebuilding the Origin Vanguard became the next item on the agenda.
Today was the fourth day of repairs. Under the experts' direction, the autonomous maintenance robots—a crucial