The first sign of sabotage was subtle—a pressure reading that fluctuated by point-zero-three percent outside acceptable parameters during the pre-launch systems check. Most engineers would have dismissed it as sensor drift or calibration error, but Eli had spent enough years with OrionX's systems to recognize when something was deliberately wrong.
He stood in the main control room at 3:47 AM, the facility humming with the quiet intensity of a space program in its final countdown phase. The Saturn mission's main vehicle sat in the assembly building two kilometers away, its systems networked to the control room through fiber optic cables that carried the digital heartbeat of humanity's most ambitious space exploration project.
"Run the pressure diagnostic again," Eli instructed Marcus Webb, the night shift systems operator who had called him in to investigate the anomaly.
"Same result," Marcus reported after five minutes of computation. "Fuel tank number seven is showing intermittent pressure fluctuations that aren't consistent with thermal expansion or normal system cycling."
Eli pulled up the diagnostic logs, his fingers moving across the interface with the practiced efficiency of someone who had memorized every subsystem in the spacecraft. The data painted a disturbing picture: someone with intimate knowledge of OrionX's systems had introduced a flaw that would manifest as a catastrophic failure approximately eighteen hours after launch.
"Marcus, I need you to pull up the maintenance logs for fuel tank seven. Every person who had access to that system in the last seventy-two hours."
"Already on it." Marcus's fingers danced across his workstation, pulling up personnel records and security logs. "Twelve people had authorized access. But Eli... look at this timestamp."
The maintenance log showed that fuel tank seven had been accessed at 11:34 PM the previous night by someone using Dr. Milo Harlan's security credentials. But according to the facility's badge scanner records, Milo had left the building at 6:15 PM and hadn't returned.
"Either Milo came back and somehow bypassed the badge scanners, or someone used his credentials without authorization," Eli said, feeling the familiar cold certainty that came with discovering evidence of sabotage.
"There's another possibility," Marcus said quietly. "The access could have been remote. If someone had Milo's system passwords, they could have performed the maintenance protocol from outside the facility."
Eli stared at the data, understanding that they had uncovered evidence of sabotage that had been designed to manifest as an apparently random system failure during the most visible phase of the mission. The Saturn probe would launch successfully, perform normally for the first eighteen hours of flight, and then suffer what would appear to be a fuel system failure that would destroy the spacecraft and end OrionX's role in space exploration.
"Marcus, we need to wake up the entire engineering team. If there's one system that's been sabotaged, there could be others."
For the next six hours, they conducted the most thorough systems audit in OrionX's history. Every component, every circuit, every line of code was examined for signs of tampering or unauthorized modification. The process revealed two additional sabotage attempts: a navigation subroutine that would gradually drift off course after clearing Earth's gravitational influence, and a communication system modification that would prevent the spacecraft from reporting its actual status during the critical mission phases.
The sabotage was sophisticated, subtle, and designed to make the Saturn mission appear to fail due to OrionX's incompetence rather than deliberate intervention. Someone with intimate knowledge of their systems and access to their security protocols had planted three separate failure modes that would destroy the mission without leaving obvious traces of foul play.
"Eli, you need to see this." Marcus had been analyzing the network logs while the engineering team examined physical systems. "The remote access that modified fuel tank seven? It came from an IP address registered to Meridian Aerospace Solutions."
The name hit Eli like a physical blow. Meridian Aerospace Solutions was the company that had built the navigation systems for the failed mission that had killed three astronauts five years earlier. According to corporate records, Meridian had been dissolved after the disaster, its assets absorbed by larger defense contractors.
But apparently, Meridian had retained enough operational capability to conduct sophisticated cyber attacks against OrionX's systems.
"Marcus, I need you to document everything we've found and send copies to my personal servers, to Dr. Vale's medical research systems, and to Valeria Cortez at the Tribune. If something happens to the primary investigation team, I want this information to survive."
"You think they'll try to silence us?"
"I think that whoever is behind this has already committed murder to protect their interests. Industrial espionage and computer sabotage are relatively minor escalations."
As the California sun rose over the OrionX facility, Eli realized that they had uncovered evidence of a conspiracy that extended far beyond corporate competition. The sabotage attempts were too sophisticated and too well-coordinated to be the work of a single disgruntled employee or rival company.
This was an organized effort to destroy OrionX's role in space exploration, carried out by people with access to military-grade cyber warfare capabilities and detailed knowledge of aerospace systems.
The question was whether they could expose the conspiracy before the conspirators realized that their sabotage had been discovered and took more dramatic action to protect their interests.