Marcus felt the floor of his stomach drop out entirely. two hours, 90 minutes of careful work, and barely 30 minutes of margin between finishing and whatever was about to happen in a courtroom across town. "Then we don't waste another second talking about it," Marcus said. "Ethan, whatever you need, say it and it's yours." Ethan finally looked up and for the first time since he'd walked through that gate hours earlier, something like real pressure showed on his young face. Not panic, but the tight focused urgency of someone who understood exactly what was riding on his hands.
Now I need everyone to stop talking, he said. And I need somebody watching that clock telling me exactly how much time I've got left every 15 minutes without me having to ask. I've got it, Dutch said immediately, already checking his watch. Then let's go," Ethan said and turned back to the engine with a focus so total it seemed to swallow every ounce of doubt and fear that had gripped the rest of the garage whole.
The next 15 minutes passed in near total silence, broken only by the occasional murmur of Ethan working through calculations under his breath, the soft click of tools being set down and picked back up, and Dutch's low, steady voice marking time like a countdown. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge out loud. "90 minutes left," Dutch said quietly. Ethan didn't look up. "Software calibration's done."
"That's three," Marcus breathed something between relief and terror in his voice. "Three out of four pressure issues the last one," Ethan confirmed, already moving toward a different section of the engine thermal scanner back in his hand. "And it's the hardest one. This is the one that actually causes the shutdown once the other three problems line up. What's causing it?
Sal asked, leaning in despite himself. Professional curiosity overriding whatever wounded pride remained from his own 16 failed hours. There's a valve here, Ethan said, pointing to a small component tucked deep against the engine block that's supposed to release excess pressure once it builds past a certain threshold. Except it's been set to a threshold that made sense for the original engine spec before all those years of upgrades and modifications. The engine's stronger now than whatever this valve was calibrated for.
So when the heat issue, the timing gap, and the software mismatch all stack up together, pressure builds faster than this valve is designed to release it, and the whole system reads that as a critical failure and shuts everything down to protect itself. So you just recalibrate the valve, Dutch asked. I wish it were that simple. Ethan's jaw tightens slightly. The valve's fine.
It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do for the spec it was built for. The problem is the spec itself doesn't match the engine anymore. I either need to replace the valve with one rated for the actual output this engine's producing now or I need to physically modify this one to release at a higher threshold. Which is faster? Marlene asked, checking her own watch now.
Modifying this one, Ethan said. But it's riskier. If I get the new threshold wrong, even slightly, I could either send it right back to shutting down the same way, or I could let too much pressure build before it releases. And that's not just a bike that stops running anymore. That's a bike that could genuinely fail catastrophically.
The word catastrophically hung in the air like smoke. How catastrophically? Marcus asked carefully. Ethan met his eyes. I'm not going to lie to you and pretend there's zero risk.