Carter spotted Mason walking back through the lobby and visibly pald, though he forced his usual look of contempt back onto his face out of habit more than conviction. Mason did not acknowledge him at all. He walked through the space the way a man walks when he no longer needs anyone's approval to prove his own worth. In the test shop, David handed him the full data set on the L9 failure. Mason listened to an audio recording of the engine, studied the thermal curve for only a few seconds, and said quietly that the problem was not where they had been looking for it.
The room fell silent. He asked for the third thermal valve assembly to be removed and the secondary feedback shaft inspected, a section of the engine the team had never prioritized in their investigation. David stared at him, stunned, because that exact area had never even come up in their internal discussions. Logan stormed in moments later, trying to stop the inspection, insisting Mason had no authority to touch company property. Amelia cut him off immediately, declaring Mason an official consultant, reporting directly to her.
As the engine housing came open, Mason looked at the structure inside and said quietly, almost to himself, that they had repeated the exact same mistake all over again. Mason began his inspection of the L9 prototype with Amelia, David, Evelyn, Logan, and the rest of the engineering team gathered around him, watching every move. He worked without showmanship, without inflated language, asking only precise questions that left even the most experienced engineers in the room falling silent one after another. Within the hour, he had identified a costcutting shortcut buried inside the thermal control assembly, a design choice that created a delayed response under light testing, but became dangerously unstable the moment real load was applied. The flaw matched almost exactly a variant of the same failure that had nearly destroyed the Phoenix program a decade earlier.
Mason told part of the story he had never spoken aloud to anyone at the company before. As a young engineer on the Phoenix team, he had discovered a design choice of Logans that carried a serious risk of fire inside the testing chamber. He reported it up the chain immediately, but the data was quietly altered, a signature forged in his name, and by the time the final test arrived, the system had nearly exploded in front of the entire engineering staff. Mason had manually severed the reaction chain himself, a dangerous maneuver that saved everyone in that room, and was rewarded afterward by being made the one responsible for the very disaster he had prevented. Joseph Langford had suspected something was wrong even then.