She personally pulled thirty-one trapped, burning sailors out of a flooding hull.”

The whispers in the room escalated into audible, horrified gasps.

The Pacific Star disaster had dominated global news cycles five years earlier.

It was a massive Navy logistical supply vessel that had caught fire in the South China Sea.

It burned for seven agonizing hours because the primary emergency fire-suppression systems—and the automated blast doors—had catastrophically failed to deploy.

My father’s company, Harrington Defense, had been the exclusive supplier of those exact systems.