Maya allowed herself a brief smile. “Keep the laser on standby. We may need to repeat this if the crack reopens.”

Lukas nodded. “The flare raised the temperature of the satellite’s outer skin by about 15 °C for roughly ten minutes. That thermal gradient is enough to cause differential expansion between the mirror substrate and the coating. If there was a microscopic flaw—a grain boundary or an inclusion—right there, it could have acted as a seed for the crack.”

The OI‑2 constellation, consisting of twelve satellites in near‑polar sun‑synchronous orbits, promised to finally give humanity a clear, actionable picture of the planet’s protective shield. The world held its breath. And then the first crack appeared. Cape Canaveral, Florida, 12:17 UTC, 14 May 2036.

But then, at 12:49 UTC, a single pixel in the data from satellite flickered. The AI, trained to flag anomalous spectral signatures, raised a CRITICAL ALERT : Spectral outlier detected – potential sensor degradation.