"The alignment contractor used a non-NIST-traceable tool with an expired calibration," Ivory said. "On a Department of Defense contract. That's not just an engineering failure; that's a federal compliance violation."
She let the image sit on the screen.
Then a voice came from the back of the room: calm, measured, the voice of someone who had spent 40 years earning the right to be believed. Dr. Elaine Prescott stood.
"She's right, on all three counts."
The room turned to her.
"Resonant fatigue in harmonic drives is rare. I've seen it exactly once before, on a Mars rover prototype at JPL in 2004. The drive frequency was 2 hertz above the flex spline's natural frequency; it took our team 6 months to identify it. She identified it in three nights with a notebook and a magnifying glass." Prescott looked at Ivory, not with surprise, but with confirmation. "Most engineers with 20 years of experience would miss this. Every consulting firm you hired did miss it. She didn't. Not because she got lucky, but because she looked where nobody else thought to look. And she had the training to understand what she found."
Prescott sat back down. The silence that followed was the kind that has weight, the kind you can feel pressing against your chest: 14 people in a room, and not one of them could find a word.
Garrett Hollowell stared at the overhead screen; the expired calibration sticker stared back. Brent Calloway stared at the floor. And Ivory Young stood beside the machine she'd known since she was a child, her notebook closed, her gloves still on, waiting.
Pemberton broke the silence. "Miss Young, you've shown us what's wrong. Can you fix it?"
Ivory was already pulling the laptop from Nathan's workstation cart. "That's why I brought my backpack."