“What was your record?”
Daniel sighed.
“You were doing well until that question.”
Before the review, Jensen asked Daniel why he was wearing a contractor badge at all.
He gave her the answer he had been giving everyone: because that was his contract.
The fuller answer was more personal.
After retirement, Daniel had tried staying completely away from ranges. For nearly a year he succeeded. Then a former student called about a target system that kept failing in ways the maintenance team could not reproduce. Daniel drove out for one day, found that he enjoyed solving the problem more than he missed carrying a rifle, and began taking occasional technical contracts.
The work suited him.
Machines did not care about reputation. A worn spring remained worn whether the person inspecting it had thirty years of experience or three. A loose connection did not become correct because a senior person insisted it was fine. The evidence either supported the conclusion or it did not.
Daniel liked that honesty.
He also liked working beside civilian technicians who had no interest in old war stories. They asked whether he could repair a target actuator, not whether he had once held a record. When he got something wrong, they told him.
“Best professional development I ever had,” he told Jensen.
She laughed. “You were impossible before retirement too.”
“Exactly.”
The contractor rotation at Logan’s range had another purpose. The motorized rail system was nearing replacement, and Daniel had been asked to document failure patterns from the maintenance side because he understood both how the mechanism behaved and how shooters interpreted it. He had spent nine mornings watching the system cycle before dawn, listening for changes in the motor and checking parts after training.
That was why the rifle bench caught his attention too. Precision problems rarely came from one dramatic cause. Small shifts accumulated. Equipment changed. Weather changed. People changed. The dangerous moment came when someone became so invested in one explanation that they stopped checking the others.
Daniel had watched Logan move in that direction all morning.
After the optic issue was documented, he asked the safety officer to inspect two other rifles from the same rack. They were fine. The problem was isolated, which meant the maintenance process worked exactly as it should once someone listened.
The supply specialist who had approved Daniel’s rotation approached him during lunch. Her name was Petty Officer Nina Chen. She looked furious.
“He told me to find somebody qualified.”
Daniel nodded. “I heard.”
“I wanted to tell him who you were.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because Chief Miller told us not to treat you differently.”
Daniel smiled. “Good order.”
Nina did not smile back. “It did not feel good while he was throwing your things in mud.”
Daniel’s expression softened.
“No. But now you know something useful about the range. Not the equipment. The people.”
She looked toward Logan, who was speaking with the senior range officer.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
