Chapter 6 - After Hours
The highway stretching toward the industrial park outside the city gates was almost empty at this hour. Streetlights flickered yellow against the damp asphalt, casting long, lonely shadows from the guardrails.
I kept my foot steady on the accelerator. My phone rested on the passenger seat, silent, its screen dark except for the persistent notification icon from base compliance reminding me of the 0800 deposition.
Colin’s text message hadn't offered details. Hawthorne Flight Systems headquarters was housed in a low-profile glass-and-steel building near the municipal perimeter. At night, the parking lot was usually a ghost town, save for the security cruiser idling near the main entrance.
When I pulled up beside Colin’s sedan, his hazard lights were blinking in the empty bay.
He was standing near the glass doors, leaning against the brick pillar with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. As my headlights swept across his face, he pushed off the wall and walked toward my driver’s side window as I cut the engine.
“You got my text,” he said. His voice was flat, devoid of the defensive swagger he’d worn that morning at the expo.
“I got it,” I said, opening the door and stepping out into the cool night air. “What are you doing here, Colin? Hawthorne security is tied into the base monitoring network. If you trigger an alarm—”
“I didn't trigger anything,” he interrupted, holding up a heavy brass key ring. “Arthur Vance gave these to me last year when I helped him move his boat trailer. He forgot to take my name off the spare access list for the auxiliary annex.”
I looked at the keys, then up at the darkened glass facade of the building. “An unauthorized entry into a defense contractor facility isn't fixing things, Colin. It’s a felony.”
“I don't want to break the law, Diana. I just wanted to see the physical archive before the audit team seizes the servers in the morning.” He swallowed hard, looking toward the dark windows. “Dad said Robert used your name as a rubber stamp for the engineering clearances. I wanted to see if my application was the only file touched, or if the whole system is built on forged signatures.”
The wind rustled through the dry palm fronds lining the fence. A few hours ago, I would have told him to go home, trust the chain of command, and let the investigators handle it. But after seeing my own name appended to a system I had never touched, the idea of waiting for a clean institutional fix felt naive.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We slipped through the side maintenance door using Colin’s key. The interior was cool, smelling of industrial carpet cleaner, ozone, and old paper. The emergency lights cast a pale green glow down the long hallway leading to the administrative wing.
Colin led the way to the second-floor executive archives—a secure room where historical contract data, developmental logs, and physical sign-off binders were kept under lock and key.
He unlocked the heavy oak door and flipped the wall switch. Fluorescent tubes flickered overhead, buzzing softly before flooding the room with stark white light. Metal filing cabinets lined the walls, labeled by fiscal year and program tier.
“Where do we start?” Colin whispered, though there was no one else in the building.
“We don't look for your file,” I said, walking straight to the central processing console connected to the internal document vault. “We look for the master validation log for the Horizon program.”
I sat down at the terminal, my fingers flying over the keyboard. The system prompt requested administrative credentials. I didn't have Robert Vance’s login, but I knew how corporate legacy systems were architected. Most partners used standardized root passwords for cross-branch maintenance.
After two failed attempts, the system blinked green.
WELCOME, SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.
The directory opened. Folders for logistics, procurement, flight test, and executive compliance scrolled down the screen. I clicked into executive compliance, navigating directly to the sub-folder for engineering sign-offs.
My breath caught.
There it was. Not just a single digital stamp, but an entire ledger of authorizations spanning four years. Every flight-control baseline, every wind-tunnel stress report, and every stability margin calculation for the Horizon prototype bore my electronic signature.
And right beside my name, tracking every single altered document, was a secondary audit trail linking directly to Robert Vance’s private terminal—and, tucked deeper in the metadata, a matching authorization code from Arthur Vance.
Colin looked over my shoulder, his face pale under the fluorescent lights. “Look at the dates, Diana. Look at when those files were modified.”
I scrolled down to the timestamp column.
The modifications weren't made three years ago. They had been updated systematically, batch by batch, over the last six months—coinciding exactly with the timeline of Colin’s pilot application and the approach of the federal defense audit.
“They didn't just use my name to push old designs through,” I whispered, the realization finally clicking into place. “They were rewriting the flight parameters to match the safety margins of a completely different aircraft class.”
“Which aircraft class?” Colin asked.
I pulled up the comparison spec sheet. The numbers weren't for a standard civilian cargo conversion or a research drone. They were calibrated for an experimental heavy-lift military transport—the exact type of aircraft Colin had been logging hours in for his regional cargo runs.
The door behind us suddenly clicked.
The heavy oak office door, which we had left ajar, swung completely open.
Standing in the doorway was Robert Vance, holding a black leather briefcase in one hand and a set of car keys in the other. He looked older than he did in family holiday photos, his gray hair slightly disheveled, his expression neither surprised nor angry.
May you like
Just tired.
“Well,” Robert said quietly, stepping into the room and letting the door latch shut behind him. “I was wondering when someone in this family would finally look past the front page of the ledger.”
