Pressure stayed inside the recovery band.
Another orbit.
Then another.
On the third cycle, the primary display moved to green.
The harmonic flattened into the noise floor.
Grace exhaled loudly over the speaker.
Adrian clapped once before seeming embarrassed.
Then the room followed.
Not an explosion. Not cheering loud enough to shake walls.
Applause, relief, shoulders dropping, people laughing quietly because the alternative emotion was harder to manage.
Isaac did not turn around.
He watched the green trace hold.
Twenty-one months of orbital data, six years of silence, four weeks of institutional resistance, and one garage full of handwritten math had ended in a line that stopped moving the wrong way.
He stepped back from the console area.
Then he walked out.
Eleanor found him in the hallway thirty seconds later.
He stood with his back against the wall beneath white acoustic ceiling tiles, eyes closed.
She said nothing.
The silence lasted long enough that a staff member passed them, looked concerned, and kept walking.
Isaac opened his eyes.
"I thought I'd feel different."
"Different how?"
"Right."
Eleanor leaned against the opposite wall.
"You were right."
"That's a technical condition. I mean inside."
She understood.
"Six years doesn't disappear because a graph turned green."
"No."
"Maybe it shouldn't."
He looked at her.
"That's a depressing thing for a NASA director to say."
"I'm an engineer. We prefer accurate to cheerful."
He smiled for the first time she had seen without resistance in it.
"That we do."
They went back inside.
The satellite still had work to do.
So did everyone who had built the system that nearly lost it.
The formal anomaly investigation began before Isaac returned to Harlow.
Any major propulsion event on a classified mission triggered a reconstruction of technical decisions, test history, change control, risk acceptance, and contractor representations. The purpose on paper was not punishment. It was to understand how a hazard had entered flight hardware and survived long enough to become an operational emergency.
That distinction mattered because investigations built around blame tended to stop at the first person who looked guilty. Investigations built around causation had to keep going until the process itself made sense.
Eleanor insisted on the second kind.
The review team included propulsion specialists, systems engineers, contracting officers, government counsel, quality representatives, and one independent technical chair who had never worked for Nexora. Isaac was asked to participate as a technical witness regarding his 2017 analysis and the recent remediation effort.
He almost declined.
"You don't owe them testimony," Eleanor told him.
They were sitting in a small conference room at Johnson the morning after OBSIDIAN-7 stabilized. Isaac had slept three hours in a hotel and looked like it.
"That's not why I'm thinking about it."
"Why, then?"
"Because I don't want six years of my life turned into a morality play."
"Explain."
"Bad executive ignores genius engineer. Satellite almost falls. Engineer comes back and saves it. Everyone learns a lesson."
Eleanor leaned back.
"That's not what happened."
"I know. That's why I don't want them telling it that way."