It wasn't a maintenance badge. It wasn't an employee badge at all.
It had his photo, his name, and a title printed in clean block letters beneath it.
Special Technical Adviser. Office of the Chief Executive. Ashford Aeronautics.
Caleb looked up at her. For once, he didn't seem to know what to say.
Vivien gave him the smallest nod.
Then she turned around and faced Dorian Voss, and the warmth went out of her face entirely.
"And I came here," she said, "to ask you one question, in front of all of these people. Why did you fire the man who found the flaw you were trying to hide?"
No one moved.
The wind snapped the flags on the poles by the entrance.
Dorian's face went from red to white, and then slowly back to red.
He opened his mouth, closed it, and glanced toward the building, as if someone might come out and rescue him.
No one did.
"This is absurd," he said finally. "I don't know what he's told you, but..."
"Then let's find out together," Vivien said. "Inside. Everyone is welcome."
* * *
20 minutes later, the main lobby was packed wall-to-wall. Mechanics in coveralls beside accountants in cardigans.
The compliance team had connected a laptop to the big display screen. And the lead investigator, a gray-bearded man named Raymond Keller, stood beside it.
Vivien didn't give a speech. She didn't tell anyone that Caleb was a hero, or that Dorian was a villain.
She simply nodded at Keller. And Keller began to put the evidence on the screen, one piece at a time.
The unapproved air data module, photographed in place on test article 2.
The purchase records, routing it through a shell supplier in Nevada.
The maintenance report Caleb had filed in July, recovered by the compliance team from a server backup, with a deletion log showing exactly when it had been erased.
The photograph of the collared breaker.
And finally, the block of code, highlighted in red, that turned every failure into the word normal.
The lobby had gone silent.
Dorian stepped forward. He had recovered some of his composure, and he used it.
"This is an engineering failure," he said loudly. "I'm operations. I don't write code. I don't install sensors. If the engineering team pushed through bad changes, that's on them. I signed what they put in front of me, the same way every director in this company does every day."
Caleb had been standing silently beside the screen. Now he took the remote from Keller's hand.
"May I?"
Keller gave it to him.
Caleb clicked through to a single page. A spreadsheet. Two columns of dates and times, side by side.