Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the notebook to steady them. She took one breath, then another.
Then she walked to the Titan.
Thirty-six men watched a janitor's daughter step up to a machine they had declared dead. Some watched with contempt. Some with curiosity. One or two watched with something that might have been hope.
Commander Hayes pulled a metal folding chair from the wall and sat down. He crossed his arms. He checked his watch.
"The clock starts now," he said.
Avery placed her palm on the engine block. Cold iron under warm skin. She closed her eyes for two seconds. Then she opened them and reached for the first wrench.
The bay was silent. No laughter. No phones. No whispers.
Just the sound of metal on metal and the young woman who had waited her entire life for this moment.
Avery started with the fuel rail. She knelt beside the Titan's port-side cylinder bank and ran her fingers along the secondary fuel rail. The steel tube curved from the high-pressure pump to the injector manifold across cylinders one through eight.
Every engineer in the room had inspected this rail. Every engineer had signed off on it. Every engineer was wrong.
Avery opened her father's notebook to a page tabbed with blue electrical tape. The diagram showed the fuel rail's correct mounting angle, 14 degrees off horizontal measured from the pump outlet flange.
She held the notebook up next to the actual rail. Even from three feet away, the difference was visible.
"This rail is sitting at 10 degrees," Avery said.
She did not raise her voice. She spoke the way her father had taught her: clear, factual, no emotion. Let the machine speak.
"The original design calls for 14 degrees. The four-degree difference changes the fuel atomization pattern in the combustion chamber. At low rpm, you won't notice, but at full load, the pressure differential across the injector tips creates microcavitation in the fuel stream. That's why the engine seizes under power. It's not a metallurgical failure. It's a geometry error."
She pointed to the mounting bracket. "Look at the bolt pattern. Whoever reinstalled this rail used the secondary mounting holes instead of the primary ones. The secondary holes were drilled for a maintenance access position. They were never meant to be the permanent mount."
Silence. Complete, suffocating silence.
Derek Simmons was the first to move. He walked to the rail and crouched beside it. He pulled out a digital angle gauge from his tool belt and placed it on the rail surface.
"10.2 degrees," Derek said.
His voice was flat. He did not look at Grant.
Commander Hayes uncrossed his arms. He leaned forward in his chair.
Grant stood at the edge of the group with his jaw locked. He said nothing. His eyes moved between Avery and the notebook in her hands.
The notebook with the original drawings.
The drawings he had copied 15 years ago but never fully understood.