The laboratory grew so quiet that the faint, high-pitched whine of the cooling fans inside the unshielded testing rigs sounded like a dentist’s drill against bone.

Paul Gregson, lead engineer of the A9 project, turned slowly away from the massive diagnostic monitor, his face flushing a mottled shade of angry crimson. He looked down at Dean Miller—at the faded, grease-stained facilities shirt, the calloused hands gripping a battered steel toolbox, and the tired, hollow eyes of a man who hadn't slept a full night in months.

"Did the janitor just speak?" Gregson asked, his voice dripping with condescending disbelief as he looked toward Sloan Hutton. "Is this some kind of team-building exercise, Ms. Hutton? Are we taking suggestions from the floor maintenance crew now?"

Sloan didn't answer immediately. She stood with her arms crossed over her tailored charcoal suit jacket, her sharp gray eyes fixed entirely on Dean. There was no amusement left on her face now—only a cold, analytical curiosity.

She had built Hutton Aerospace by backing aggressive instincts and ignoring conventional hierarchies. But this? A maintenance worker challenging a team of MIT-trained propulsion specialists in front of the entire division?

"You're standing near the vent, Miller," Sloan said smoothly, her voice cutting through the heavy air. "Not the console. You haven't seen the telemetry data, you haven't run the diagnostic simulations, and you certainly haven't looked at the stress matrices."

"I don't need to look at the monitor to know your telemetry is lying to you," Dean said quietly. His voice didn't shake. It carried the steady, unpretentious weight of a man who had spent two decades solving problems that math models couldn't reach.

Gregson let out a sharp, mocking bark of laughter. "Oh, brilliant! The man who unclogs our washrooms is an expert in magneto-hydrodynamic propulsion. Please, enlighten us, Mr. Miller. If our stress simulations are lying, what’s destroying the outer casing?"

Dean stepped closer to the blast-resistant glass partition. He didn't look at Gregson; his eyes were fixed on the dormant, scorched A9 propulsion core resting inside the vacuum chamber.

"You're pulsing the fuel injection at four thousand hertz," Dean said.

Gregson’s mocking smile faltered just a fraction. "That's the standard resonance frequency for uranium-plasma acceleration. Any aerospace engineer knows—"

"Any textbook engineer knows," Dean interrupted, his tone chillingly precise. "And textbooks assume ideal conditions. They assume a perfectly uniform magnetic bottle. But your containment field isn't uniform. Look at the cooling jackets on sector four. You've got a micro-vortex forming because the coolant return line is two millimeters too narrow."

Gregson scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. "Two millimeters? That's within standard manufacturing tolerance!"

"It's within tolerance for a static load," Dean replied, turning his gaze directly to Gregson, his eyes flashing with a sudden, intimidating sharpness. "At full operating frequency, that two-millimeter constriction creates a harmonic back-pressure wave. It hits the outer titanium-carbide casing every 0.25 seconds. Your simulations aren't showing fractures from overheating, Gregson. They're showing structural fatigue from acoustic resonance. You're beating the casing to death with sound waves from the inside out."

The lab was dead silent.

Gregson opened his mouth to retort, but no words came out. He looked back at the diagnostic monitor, his fingers flying across the keyboard to pull up the acoustic vibration logs for sector four.

For thirty agonizing seconds, the only sound was the clacking of keys.

Then Gregson stopped.

The color drained entirely from his face, leaving him looking ashen and sick. The vibration spectrum on his screen showed a massive, jagged spike at precisely four thousand hertz, perfectly matching the acoustic feedback loop Dean had just described.

Sloan Hutton saw the shift in Gregson's posture before he even spoke a word.

"Is he right?" Sloan asked, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper.

Gregson swallowed hard, his throat dry. "The... the acoustic feedback spike is there. If we widen the return line and phase-shift the injection frequency by twelve hertz..." He trailed off, looking at Dean as if he were staring at a ghost. "It... it would eliminate the harmonic wave entirely."

Sloan turned back to Dean. The playful, arrogant mockery from minutes ago was gone, replaced by a terrifying intensity.

"Who are you?" she asked softly.