“No.”
She placed Jack’s copied reports on the desk.
“Find out exactly where these went after he submitted them.
Quietly.”
Marcus read the first page.
“These are from Miller?”
“Yes.”
“The janitor?”
Catherine’s eyes lifted.
Marcus corrected himself.
“Jack.”
At seven, she summoned the head of engineering and two senior systems specialists.
She did not tell them Jack’s conclusion.
Instead, she ordered an isolated stress test on the launch architecture using a workload pattern derived from his notes.
The first run passed.
The engineering chief relaxed visibly.
“Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not showing.”
Catherine glanced through the glass at Jack, who had arrived after barely sleeping and now sat awkwardly in a borrowed visitor chair outside the lab.
“Run it longer.”
The second test produced two recoverable timing errors.
The engineers stopped smiling.
The third test ran under sustained thermal load.
Thirty-eight minutes in, a monitoring graph began to oscillate.
A controller reset.
Then another.
One specialist leaned toward the screen.
“That shouldn’t happen.”
Jack, watching from the doorway, said quietly, “Wait twelve seconds.”
Nobody spoke.
Twelve seconds later, the system produced a corrupted processing result before automatically correcting itself.
The room went silent.
The engineering chief turned.
“How did you know that?”
Jack looked at the screen.
“Because we fought the same behavior in the original design.
We fixed it in one branch.
Apparently the asset package included an earlier branch.”
Catherine felt anger rising, but she kept her voice controlled.
“Can it be fixed?”
Jack nodded.
“Yes.
But not by pretending it’s a sensor problem.
The compensation logic needs to be changed.”
For the next six hours, status disappeared.
Nobody called Jack “the janitor.”
He stood beside senior engineers, drawing the legacy control sequence on a whiteboard from memory.
He did not know every modification Nexus had made over the years, and he said so whenever he reached the edge of his knowledge.
The current team filled those gaps.
Together they isolated the inherited logic and built a patch for testing.
By afternoon, the launch schedule had been frozen.
That decision cost money immediately.
It also prevented Nexus from shipping a defect that could have cost far more.
Meanwhile, Marcus traced Jack’s maintenance reports.
There was no conspiracy, competitor, or deliberate sabotage behind their disappearance.
The explanation was more ordinary and, to Catherine, more infuriating.
Facilities had routed them according to category.
