CLOUDSDALE — Adler Voss spoke for nine minutes on Tuesday and then stood up. The former chief of the Wall Wing had not taken a question about Reedline in 394 days. All nine went to a denial.
"There was absolutely no internal betrayal," Voss said, in the east hangar, with the doors pinned against a 14-knot crosswind. "Not in the Wing. Not in the factory. Not on the shift." He did not leave the page he read from. He took no second question.
Reedline sits under the east stacks, 60 miles and one ridge from Post Three. On the night in question the Gale Report had the front held: latch closed, expected load 12 knots, arrival listed for the sixth hour, status routine. At the fourth hour the Post Three gauge read 48. The front was already in the streets. The town clerk's morning sheet listed 19 roofs off, 4 bridges shut, 220 ponies in the upper barn, and 4 pegasi treated for latch-burn. The schedule the Wing had given the Canterlot Council that afternoon still said held.
The Wonderbolt press office carried the hangar. Spokespony Della March read Voss's line twice, once for the pencils and once for a crystal that kept fogging in the crosswind. She said questions about who was on the latch belong to the spring exhibition packet, where the names are printed. The packet runs 36 pages. Reedline is absent from it. March called the exhibition and the wall different duties, and called the mixing of them the way rumors start.
Director Sila Bram of the East Stack Factory attended and sat apart from Voss. He said the cloud stock that week was "inside the seasonal band," and that a band covers the season. Asked who signed the latch closed, Bram said the factory signs for vapor. Headcounts, he said, can be filed with the Council like any other request. He then gave the density of the east product as 0.8. That is the figure the factory gives when the product is fine.
Tess Harlow was crew chief on the late shift at Post Three. She was on the shift she has worked for six years, the one that starts when the poster flights have landed. She was not in the hangar.
"I sent fourteen slips up the tube between the second hour and the fourth," Harlow said. "Wind was already off the card. The latch pin was seated wrong, and I wrote that on slip nine. The tube came back empty. You don't need a sold key for that. You need nopony at the bench where the tube ends."
She kept the duplicates in a tin under the crew desk, dated, timed, and blank on the received line. The Canterlot Institute borrowed them in the spring, counted them, and brought them back. Harlow has kept the tin where it was.
Ivo Brant was twelfth on the spare sheet that night. He is on no poster the Wonderbolts have run since. He lives twenty minutes from Post Three. The spare rule says you dress if the gauge twitches, so he was in his suit at the eleventh hour.
"They told me the card was full and the front was held," Brant said. "I asked which card. The pony on the tube said the exhibition card, and that reserves don't get called on a routine front. I sat on the stoop. I heard Reedline before any recall. There was no recall. At dawn I signed a book that had two names on it, under a roster of six."
The public roster still shows six pegasi for Post Three, qualified, for the whole night. Harlow's book shows two signatures before the fourth hour, and Brant's after sunrise. The other four names were on the exhibition card at a west-field flypast, 90 miles off the stacks. Asked if a pony can hold a latch from a west-field flypast, March said the press office does not handle travel times.
The Canterlot Council's inquiry has sat 11 months, with seats, a clerk, and no finding. Voss was called to the chamber. He picked the hangar, which is Wing property, and he took one question. The clerks left without the page. In the Gale Report archive the night still reads held, beside the 12.
Windfall Margin keeps the Institute's slip tally and draws no Wing pay. The week before Reedline, he said, produced sixteen advance notices, each filed routine, each a day old or older when the gauge moved.
"A pile is a pile until somepony stamps it," Margin said. "Nopony stamped these."
Asked for the minutes Post Three held the latch with one flier on it, March said that figure was not in the statement. Harlow's book has it at fifty-one.
