Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Then he made his announcement:
"I've brought in an independent evaluator, Dr. Lorraine Sutter, former NASA propulsion engineer. She will assess our diagnostics and deliver a final recommendation before the Pentagon review."
A murmur went through the room. Everyone in aerospace knew that name. Dr. Sutter had spent 30 years at NASA designing propulsion systems for spacecraft. She'd retired five years ago, but her reputation hadn't. When Lorraine Sutter said an engine worked, the FAA didn't argue. Preston was bringing in the biggest gun in the industry—not because he trusted her, but because he'd run out of options.
While Preston was making threats from his platform, Neil Garrison was making a decision in the back of the hangar. He'd been working with Faith for three days, quietly, off the books—after hours when Todd Whitmore had gone home and the security cameras were on a loop that Neil had memorized over 18 years.
Faith hadn't touched the engine, not once. She'd only observed. She sat on an overturned crate near the nacelle, and she listened. She asked Neil to start the engines twice; both times, she closed her eyes and tilted her head like a dog hearing a frequency no one else could detect. She asked to see the diagnostic logs—all of them, every run from the past 50 days. Neil printed them out: 300 pages. Faith spread them across the hangar floor and crawled between them on her hands and knees for four hours.
Then she asked for something no one had thought to do: "Can you overlay the left and right engine logs? Same time axis, side by side."
Neil stared at her. In 50 days across 50 mechanics, not a single person had compared both engines simultaneously. Every diagnostic protocol treated each engine as an independent system. That was standard procedure. That was how it was taught. That was how it had always been done.
Faith wasn't trained in how it had always been done.
Neil ran the overlay. And when he saw what appeared on the screen, he sat down slowly and didn't say anything for a long time. He knew, right then, she was right.
But knowing and proving are two different things. Faith was a homeless civilian with no credentials, no clearance, and no standing in the aerospace industry. Her word meant nothing in that building. She needed a witness—someone whose word meant everything.