The colour in Cameron’s face changed.
Barely.
Enough.
Isaac did not yet know why that reaction mattered.
But he remembered it.
Cameron left six minutes later.
Outside, he sat in the rental car without starting it.
Then made a call.
Giselle Hartmann answered on the second ring.
“We have a problem,” Cameron said.
The call lasted less than two minutes.
Eleanor arrived an hour later.
She walked into the garage carrying a laptop bag and a temporary consultancy packet.
“NASA oversight authorized you.”
“Temporarily?”
“Pending clearance and legal review.”
“Meaning Cameron called somebody.”
“Yes.”
“How much time did that cost?”
“Twelve hours.”
Isaac looked toward the workbench.
“That’s expensive.”
Eleanor set down the paperwork.
“What are these?”
Five sheets covered in calculations.
“The full resonance model.”
She picked up one.
“You did this last night?”
“Started around two.”
“By hand?”
“I don’t have the software licenses.”
She scanned the page.
“You remember the governing relationships?”
“I remember the system.”
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment.
Then removed a satellite phone.
She called one number.
When the other end answered, she said, “Bring the equipment in.”
Forty-eight hours later, half of Merritt Motor & Machine looked like an improvised engineering lab.
Three large monitors sat on a steel table normally used for cylinder heads.
Encrypted communications equipment occupied the old parts counter.
A portable satellite terminal stood on a tripod in the yard.
Extension cables ran along the floor under rubber covers.
Two additional engineers arrived.
The youngest was Adrian Cole.
Twenty-six.
Master’s degree from MIT.
Internship at JPL.
Three years in orbital propulsion analysis.
Adrian had read Isaac’s original report during the flight.
Three times.
The first time, he searched for the flaw that would explain why Nexora rejected it.
The second time, he focused on the methodology.
The third time, he stopped assuming there had to be a flaw.
Still, when Adrian entered the garage, he could not fully reconcile the report’s author with the man tightening a clamp on a farm truck beside an oil-stained workbench.
Isaac noticed.
He said nothing.
Their first disagreement came twenty-three minutes into the work.
Adrian pointed to a model parameter.
“You’re assuming the assembly’s stiffness change remains linear through the transition.”
“No.”
“That’s what this equation shows.”
“That equation is local.”
Adrian looked again.
Isaac flipped the page.
“This is global.”
Adrian read.
His expression changed.
“You split the transition.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the mounting interface stops behaving uniformly above this temperature differential.”
“That isn’t in the heritage model.”
“That’s why the heritage model missed it.”
Adrian was quiet.
Isaac returned to the screen.
Thirty minutes later, Adrian asked another question.
This time there was less scepticism.
By the end of the first day, it was gone.
Not replaced by hero worship.
Isaac would have hated that.
Replaced by technical trust.
On the second afternoon, pressure telemetry produced a small feature near the end of the thermal transition.
Adrian classified it as noise.
Isaac leaned closer.
“No.”
“What?”
“That.”
“It’s below significance.”
“Filter around the secondary harmonic.”
Adrian did.
The feature sharpened.
“What am I looking at?”