By Day Fifty, the CA-90 still sat in Hangar Three like a museum exhibit: beautiful, expensive, and useless. Preston Caldwell had stopped sleeping properly. You could see it in the grayness of his skin, the coffee stains on his teeth, and the tie that never seemed perfectly straight anymore.
Sixteen days remained before the Pentagon delegation arrived. Sixteen days stood between Caldwell Aerospace and the $500 million defense contract Preston believed would secure the company's future. If the aircraft could not demonstrate reliable flight, the opportunity could disappear.
Preston called an emergency all-hands meeting in the main hangar. Every engineer, mechanic, department head, and senior supervisor came. Even Colleen Archer appeared, a freelance technology journalist who had been circling the story for weeks because she sensed that the grounding was becoming more than a technical failure.
Preston stood on a raised platform in front of the CA-90. He did not bother with pleasantries.
"Fifty days, fifty mechanics, $8 million, and this aircraft still can't hold an idle for two minutes," he said. "The next team that fails is done. Not reassigned. Not suspended. Done. I'll personally walk you to the parking lot."
Nobody moved.
Then Preston made his announcement. "I've brought in an independent evaluator, Dr. Lorraine Sutter, former NASA propulsion engineer. She will assess our diagnostics and deliver a final recommendation before the Pentagon review."
A murmur moved through the room. Everyone in aerospace knew Lorraine Sutter's name. She had spent roughly thirty years at NASA working on propulsion systems and had retired five years earlier with a reputation for technical rigor that still carried enormous weight.
When Dr. Sutter said an engine was safe, regulators listened. Preston had not brought her in because he trusted anyone at that point. He had brought her in because he was running out of options.
While Preston made threats from the platform, Neil Garrison was making a quieter decision in the back of the hangar. He had been working with Faith for three days, discreetly and outside the normal chain of command. Faith still had not touched the aircraft.
She observed. She listened. She asked questions.
After hours, when Todd Whitmore had gone home and the hangar was quieter, Faith sat on an overturned crate near the nacelle and asked Neil to start the engines twice. Each time, she closed her eyes and tilted her head slightly, listening to frequencies and rhythms the way Elton had taught her.
She asked for the diagnostic logs from every failed run. Neil printed them all, nearly three hundred pages. Faith spread them across the hangar floor and spent hours moving between them on her hands and knees, comparing timing, fault behavior, fuel pressure, and control-system responses.
Then she asked for something nobody had thought to do.
"Can you overlay the left and right engine logs? Same time axis, side by side."
Neil stared at her. In fifty days, every diagnostic protocol had treated each engine as an independent system. Technicians checked the left engine, then the right engine, because that was standard practice.
Nobody had compared both engines millisecond by millisecond as parts of a single interacting system.
Neil ran the overlay.
When the two data streams appeared together on the screen, he sat down slowly and stayed silent for a long time. Faith's theory suddenly had evidence behind it.
But knowing and proving were different things. Faith was a homeless civilian with no degree, no aerospace credential, no FAA license, and no formal standing inside Caldwell Aerospace. Her explanation could be brilliant and still be dismissed before anyone with authority took it seriously.
She needed a witness whose word could not be ignored.