Not malice exactly, more like comfort. This was the kind of moment Brent Caldwell was good at. "Come on, Reed." He said it loud. Loud enough that the receptionist behind the desk looked up.
Loud enough that it carried through the glass front window to the mechanic outside hosing down a truck. "You fix junk, not rockets." The customers laughed. Malcolm picked up the parts invoice. folded it twice and put it in his shirt pocket. He didn't say anything.
He didn't look at Caldwell again. He turned, walked out the front door, crossed back over the road, and went back into his garage. And that should have been the end of it. The way it had always been the end of it. Malcolm absorbing it, filing it, returning to the work that actually needed doing, letting the noise wash off because the noise was never the point.
Except Ava had heard everything. She was standing just inside the garage door, arms crossed her notebook pressed against her chest. She was looking at him with that expression again, not her mother's this time. This one was hers alone, and it was harder to read and more uncomfortable to receive. "Why do you let him talk to you like that?"
she asked. Malcolm pulled the invoice out of his pocket and smoothed it against the workbench. "Let's get the generator looked at." Dad. Ava, I was humiliating you in front of people.
He's done it before. And you just She stopped. You just walk away like it doesn't mean anything. Malcolm set down his tools and turned to look at her properly. She was 11 years old and she was looking at him the way people who are trying very hard not to be hurt look at someone they love.
He recognized that too. He'd practiced it himself. Come here, he said. She came over. He leaned against the workbench.
"Here's what I want you to understand," Malcolm said. "What Brent Caldwell thinks about what I can do, that has no bearing on what I can actually do?" "None. If I stood there and argued with him, what does that prove to him?" He's not looking for proof.
He's looking for a reaction. The argument isn't about competence. It's about his audience. So, you just don't care. I didn't say that.
Then what are you saying? Malcolm was quiet for a moment. I'm saying that knowing what you can do matters more than convincing strangers. He held her gaze. The work speaks, not us.
The work. Ava looked at him for a long moment, deciding something he could tell. She had her mother's habit of going very still right before she made up her mind. Then she said, "That sounds like something you tell yourself so you don't have to fight back." Malcolm blinked.
She turned and went back to her notebook. He stood there a moment longer alone with that and then went back to the generator. I was 40 minutes deep into the Henderson generator, had the injector timing circuit spread across the workbench, was correlating fuel pressure drops against RPM data he'd logged yesterday during a test run, and had actually started to forget about Brent Caldwell and the thin man with the wire- rimmed glasses and all of it when he heard the engines. Multiple engines, heavy, smooth, the particular sound of government vehicles that were new enough that they hadn't yet had any of the factory precision worn off them. He didn't look up right away.
He had a measurement to finish. Then then Ava said from somewhere near the garage door, "Dad." Something in her voice made him put down the caliper. Three black SUVs turning off the highway, passing the entrance to Titan performance motors without slowing. Brent Caldwell was standing in his lot, and Malcolm could see him watching as the vehicles continued past.
And there was something almost comical about the confusion on Caldwell's face. The slight lean forward, the I don't understand why they didn't tetop. The three SUVs slowed and stopped in front of Malcolm's garage, not in front at the way people stop when they've arrived at the exact destination they intended. Malcolm walked to the garage door and stood beside Ava. The driver's door of the first SUV opened.
A woman stepped out. She was maybe mid-40s, dark hair, pulled back, dressed in what Malcolm recognized as business practical rather than business formal. The clothes of someone who spent a lot of time in facilities where dress shoes were dangerous. She held a tablet computer secured with what looked like a hardened case. Behind her, two men in dark jackets got out of the second vehicle.
Not police, not military. Exactly. Something adjacent. One of them was already scanning the surrounding area in the automatic practiced way of someone whose job involved being aware of exits. The woman walked straight toward Malcolm.
No hesitation, no looking around to confirm she had the right place. The way people walk when they've been briefed. Malcolm Reed, she said. That's me of Reed Mechanical and Salvage. Yes.
She looked at him for a fraction of a second longer than the question required. And Malcolm understood she was doing what anyone did when a mental image they'd formed failed to line up exactly with reality. He was in work clothes. His hands were dirty. The garage behind him was organized the way a serious working mind organizes things, which is to say perfectly logical from the inside and chaotic looking from the outside.
I'm Dr. Rebecca Sloan, she said. Propulsion Reliability Director, Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville. She paused. Are you Dr.
Malcolm Reed? The word landed differently than Malcolm expected. He hadn't heard it spoken aloud addressed to him in his own garage in front of his own tools in 8 years, maybe longer. He'd stopped counting. He was aware of Ava going very still beside him.
I was, he said carefully. Your doctorate in aerospace propulsion engineering from Georgia Tech 2008 is on record. Your publications are on record. A technical paper on combustion resonance in reusable cryogenic upper stage systems published 2014 is on record. She held up the tablet.