If any drone transmits a single valid temperature reading, my assumption of "total sensor failure" is wrong. If the fog lifts by 200 meters of visibility, I can revert to standard navigation.
It wasn't ordinary fog. It was a data fog . mas 2.7
The fog lifted at dawn. The drones were recovered. The data was intact. And the software patch? It had a memory leak in the sensor-fusion module—exactly the kind of bug that only appears when multiple systems fail at once. If any drone transmits a single valid temperature
Her first officer, Julian, spread six printouts across the chart table. "Captain, the geology team says the drones are fine—just a magnetometer glitch. Comms says it's solar interference. Engineering thinks it's a software patch we installed last Tuesday. And the weather office in Guam says 'wait six hours.'" It was a data fog
The crew. Everything else—drones, data, schedule—is secondary.