Sun sensors wake like shy animals. One quadrant brightens: sunlight, not a proton sparkle. KILO folds that vector together with the IMU’s memory of your recent turns.

“Attitude estimate coarse but stable,” KILO says. “Beginning detumble. Reaction wheels first. Thrusters in short, computed bursts only.”

The spinning disks in the belly of Starling whine up. The hula-hoop feeling eases, notch by notch, as if someone were turning down a carnival ride with a responsible adult at the booth. Jax’s killer-whale sticker stops describing circles.

Mira’s shoulders drop a centimeter. “We do not light the main engine while the nose is still drawing corkscrews. A burn while tumbling is a shove in a random direction. Random is how you kiss air or climb into worse weather.”

The rates are not zero. They are becoming polite. Battery voltage is not polite. The solar arrays are still feathered, edge-on to everywhere, dining on nothing.

KILO: “Recommend complete detumble, then array track.”