Isaac did not.
He had seen those numbers before.
Not these exact numbers.
Their shape.
Their rhythm.
Their direction.
He looked at the timestamps.
Ninety-three minutes.
Every orbit.
The same incremental deviation after shadow transit.
The same partial recovery under solar heating.
A pattern buried beneath what looked like noise.
Isaac turned three pages at once.
“How long?”
Eleanor answered immediately.
“Thirty-one days from this morning under the present model.”
“Until what?”
“Attitude-control authority drops below the minimum threshold needed to maintain reliable orbital correction burns.”
Isaac looked up.
“Current altitude?”
“Roughly two hundred forty miles.”
“Orbit?”
“Polar.”
“Mission duration?”
“Twenty-one months.”
His jaw tightened.
“Who built the propulsion assembly?”
Eleanor did not answer.
She did not need to.
Isaac looked back at the data.
“Nexora.”
“Yes.”
“Prometheus architecture.”
“Yes.”
“Mark Two valve body?”
“Modified Mark Two.”
Isaac closed his eyes.
For a moment, he was no longer in Harlow.
He was thirty-eight again.
Standing at the head of a glass conference table.
Forty-seven slides behind him.
Eleven people already deciding how much his warning was going to cost them if they listened.
He opened his eyes.
“Controlled deorbit?”
“Not currently available.”
“Why?”
“Mission geometry. Fuel budget. Guidance authority.”
Isaac looked at Eleanor.
“So if the valve deteriorates enough, you lose precision over the correction sequence.”
“Yes.”
“And once you lose it, you can’t guarantee what the vehicle does on descent.”
“Yes.”
He tapped the telemetry.
“When did this start?”
“First detectable anomaly approximately seven weeks ago.”
“When did you recognize the orbital correlation?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“You found my report after that?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I searched every archived technical document containing the regulator part number and thermal cycling tolerance.”
Isaac looked at her more carefully.
Most executives did not search archives themselves.
Eleanor seemed to understand the assessment.
“I’m an engineer before I’m a director.”
“That tends to stop eventually.”
“Not for me.”
Isaac looked back at the folder.
“Your analysts think this is thermal fatigue.”
“That is the current working theory.”
“They’re wrong.”
Eleanor said nothing.
Isaac pointed at the pressure profile.
“The heat is only half of it.”
He flipped to a blank sheet and took a pencil from the workbench.
“The original valve housing has a narrow mechanical resonance band.”
“We knew that.”
“No.”
“Nexora knew it separately.”
“That’s the problem.”
He drew two rough curves.
“One team modeled orbital thermal cycling.”
“Another modeled structural vibration.”
“They never put the transfer functions into the same model.”
Eleanor watched.
Isaac continued.
“When the vehicle transitions from full solar exposure into shadow, the housing contracts.”
“Not much.”
“But enough to shift the natural frequency.”
“When the pressure regulator cycles during the same interval, the excitation frequency crosses the resonance band.”
“Again, only briefly.”
“Briefly, every ninety-three minutes.”
He looked up.
“For twenty-one months.”
Eleanor’s attention sharpened.
“The valve isn’t failing because it gets cold.”
“It’s failing because thermal contraction moves the structure into a frequency where normal operation makes it vibrate itself apart.”
Eleanor opened her tablet.
Isaac pointed toward the telemetry.