“We lose reliable authority over orbital correction burns.”
“And then?”
“If the degradation continues, uncontrolled descent becomes possible.”
Isaac’s eyes returned to the page.
“Orbit?”
“Approximately two hundred forty miles. Polar.”
“Period?”
“Ninety-three minutes.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
There it was.
Exactly where it would be.
Eleanor watched him.
“The report you wrote in 2017 described cumulative tolerance failure in the secondary pressure-regulation assembly under sustained sub-thermal cycling.”
“Who found the report?”
“I did.”
“Where?”
“Classified archive.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Why?”
“Because it wasn’t classified when I wrote it.”
Eleanor did not respond.
Isaac turned another page.
“What happened to it?”
“According to the archive history, it was reclassified as part of the Prometheus Drive technical package.”
Isaac laughed once.
No humour in it.
“That’s one way to bury something.”
“You’re saying that was deliberate?”
“I’m saying people rarely hide inconvenient engineering by setting it on fire. They move it somewhere nobody has a reason to look.”
Eleanor let that settle.
“You warned them.”
“Yes.”
“Specifically?”
“Yes.”
“They said your model was invalid.”
“Yes.”
“They launched the design anyway.”
Isaac closed the folder.
“Apparently.”
Eleanor stepped closer.
“I know what is failing.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“You know what it looks like.”
“I have engineers in Houston.”
“I’m sure they’re excellent.”
“They are.”
“They still came to Harlow.”
That ended that part of the argument.
Isaac looked again at the folder.
“Why me?”
“Because your report predicted the timing window within months.”
“That doesn’t mean I know how to fix something already in orbit.”
“No.”
She paused.
“But nobody else has been thinking about this failure for six years.”
Isaac’s face tightened.
“You’re assuming I have.”
Eleanor held his gaze.
“I’m assuming some things don’t stop because you leave the building where they happened.”
For the first time, Isaac looked angry.
Not visibly enough that most people would have noticed.
Eleanor did.
He stood.
“Come back in two hours.”
“What happens in two hours?”
“I finish Raymond’s truck.”
“Mr. Merritt, the satellite—”
“Has had a bad valve for twenty-one months. It can survive another two hours.”
He pointed toward the road.
“Raymond has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and no other vehicle.”
Eleanor stared at him.
Then nodded.
“Two hours.”
She returned to the Suburban.
Isaac slid back underneath the Ford.
His hands knew what to do.
That was useful because his mind no longer belonged to Raymond’s truck.
Six years earlier, on a Thursday afternoon in the spring of 2017, Isaac Merritt had stood at the head of a conference table on the twelfth floor of Nexora Aerospace headquarters in Houston and told eleven people that the Prometheus Drive propulsion assembly carried a hidden failure mode.
At the time, Isaac was thirty-eight.
Senior propulsion-systems engineer.
Twelve patents.
Two internal technical achievement awards.
One design review commendation from a government customer.
Fifteen years in aerospace.
He had entered the industry believing engineering organizations were rational machines.
Input evidence.
Perform analysis.
Accept result.
His father had warned him that organizations were made of people, not equations.
Isaac had considered that old-man cynicism.
By 2017, he understood his father had been optimistic.
The presentation took forty-seven slides.