The aircraft kept climbing at the nose. Daniel had to hold significant force against the yolk and he began losing the ability to maintain air speed. Nathan told him not to drop the nose too sharply. If the fuel shifted while the aircraft changed angle too quickly, it could create an oscillation severe enough to cost Daniel control entirely. Nathan asked him to pull the third lever.
The release valve did not open. The display showed the controller refusing the command. Still convinced the aircraft was in an active fuel transfer state. An engineer suggested sending a direct software override. Nathan said that wasn't possible.
If Robert had altered the signal wiring, the software no longer had any reliable understanding of where the physical valve actually sat. They needed a mechanical signal the controller could not fake. Daniel reported that air speed kept dropping. He asked for altitude. 1500 ft.
Daniel said, "I can't climb any higher and I can't drop the nose enough to gain speed. " The stall warning shifted from intermittent to continuous. At that moment, Audrey received a security report. Robert had reached the server room and connected a personal storage drive. She ordered every door locked and revoked his access to delete anything. Robert called her directly, warning that if she kept him confined, he would tell the press that she herself had pressured the flight to happen.
Audrey answered that every order and every call was already being recorded. Robert realized he no longer controlled her. Security entered the server room. Robert tried to destroy the drive, but was stopped before he could. The drive held purchase contracts from Meridian, a list of payments, and a copy of the original design files bearing Nathan's name before it had been edited out.
Even so, exposing Robert did nothing to solve the danger overhead. Nathan still had to bring the aircraft down. While searching for the old design schematics, Nathan noticed his lunchbox sitting on a nearby table. A small piece of paper fell out. Emma had written in a child's uneven handwriting, "Bring them home safe. " He did not linger on it.
The note simply reminded him of a principle he had built into the system years earlier. If the computer could not determine the aircraft's true state, a mechanical system had to be triggered by a physical condition that could never be falsified. He remembered that the prototype's gravity release valve had only opened when it received a mechanical signal confirming the landing gear was extending. The rule existed specifically to prevent the valve from opening by mistake at cruising speed. Robert had erased the procedure from the documentation, but he could not remove the mechanism itself because it was built directly into the airframe.