Victoria turned toward the aircraft. There was a long pause in which nobody laughed, nobody objected, and nobody tried to impress her. She had forgotten what that kind of useful silence felt like.
"Then let's ask better questions," she said.
Noah returned several minutes later carrying a rugged maintenance laptop and a folder of authorization forms. The manufacturer's senior technical representative joined them remotely through an approved service terminal, and the licensed inspection lead reviewed what records could be examined without altering the aircraft. Richard stood at the boundary of the work area with a displeased expression, but Victoria refused to allow him to dominate the room by speaking over everyone else.
Caleb looked at the authorization forms before he touched the computer. He was used to people treating him as unqualified, but he would not let his desire to prove them wrong make him careless. He pointed to the procedure allowing a read-only comparison of stored maintenance events, and Noah confirmed it was within the review scope approved by the technical representative. Only then did Caleb take a chair.
"One question," Victoria said, watching his hands settle on the keyboard. "If you find something, can you make it worse by trying to repair it?"
"Absolutely. That's why we'll preserve the original evidence and let the qualified team approve any corrective action. I'll help you find the fault and verify the reasoning, but nobody's going to gamble on a passenger aircraft because we want a good story about a man in coveralls."
Victoria sat down beside him. She was beginning to understand that what she had been missing for eight days was not confidence, or even talent. It was a culture in which someone could admit uncertainty without being humiliated for it. The irony was not lost on her. Only an hour earlier she had torn a report in half because a man had finally told her he did not know, and now she was watching a stranger whose strength began with exactly that admission.
"All right, Mr. Richardson," she said.
"Show me what the records say."
The first thing Caleb did was ask Noah to confirm the time on the maintenance station. The second was to request a copy of the last successful initialization before the update, and the third was to request the complete record of the first failed initialization afterward. He did not begin by opening a fault-code catalog or searching for the component most often associated with an unsuccessful start. He began with a timeline, because he had learned that nearly every complicated failure became less mysterious once somebody stopped treating the machine as a collection of disconnected parts.
The computer displayed line after line of recorded events, each associated with a sequence identifier and a time. Victoria leaned in and recognized almost nothing. Noah recognized more, but even he found it difficult to follow the transitions because the records were normally read by automated tools. Richard's summary software had condensed thousands of events into a neat green report, removing the very details that now mattered.