Parkowski understood very little of it, this was more up DePresti’s alley, but she knew enough to know that it had no connection to the ILIAD mission or Bronze Knot. It was just a different special access program, hence why it was secured on the same network.
The remaining folders that had been accessed were more of the same, some at technical levels well beyond Parkowski’s understanding. One was a deep-space sensor, another was a radar warning receiver, and some she couldn’t make heads-or-tails of despite her background in engineering and her space experience. They might have made sense to someone more versed in the classified side of the space world, but not to her. None of the others had Bronze Knot data.
She was back to square one.
Parkowski went back to the “BKT Logs” folder and opened a few of the logs. To her surprise, she did learn something new — the fields in the log files for the packets that had been previously blanked out were now filled with numbers or alphanumeric codes. Unfortunately, none of them meant anything to her.
But, she now knew through her conversations with her boyfriend and her own research that the data itself — the ones that had been masked — were considered to be protected under the Bronze Knot program. Why they were protected, and what they were protecting, she still did not know, but part of the SAP was to protect some specific telemetry data between Venus and the ground station on Earth.
But why though? Why would the military care about the ILIAD mission so much that they needed to safeguard some of its data behind the highest level of classification that it could muster?
She opened up each log file. None offered any more information. Parkowski would need a higher-level document, some kind of decoder ring or something, to make heads-and-tails of what she was seeing. Numbers in and of themselves didn’t give her any more understanding, they had to be put into context.
On a hunch, she tried to go up a level of the folder directory, to a folder with a vague name.
Access denied.
She tried to go one level up beyond that.
Jackpot.
All of its subfolders were locked down, but their names were all readable on the screen.
It was a high-level overview of Bronze Knot. Parkowski quickly scanned the folder names. Some pieces were missing, but Bronze Knot, or at least the piece of it on this network, involved nothing more than protecting certain pieces of data. There was a guard, potentially located in the server rack in this same room, which filtered that data from a classified high side to the low side environment that the ILIAD mission used.
But why? Why would a scientific mission need to protect data, especially at the TS//SAP level? Why were they even connected to a SAP network?
She didn’t have the answers. It seemed like every time she figured something out, two new mysteries presented themselves.
There was one file left to open, an.ini file that she had overlooked when she had initially opened the folder.
Parkowski opened it using a text editor. It confirmed some of her earlier suspicions; the box in the server rack was a cross-domain guard that filtered the Bronze Knot data before it hit the ILIAD virtual environment.
She tried to follow the logic in the configuration file but it didn’t make any sense. From what she could gather, the data traveled through a path from the ACHILLES robot to the two relay satellites to MICS to the ground station. From there, it should go directly to El Segundo — but it didn’t. Instead, it went to something called AFAMS-Orlando before coming to the Aering facility.
Orlando. In Florida.
She opened up a few of the log files. Sure enough, there was more evidence there that confirmed that fact.
In fact, the entire ILIAD environment was hosted on a cloud server located in Orlando.
Why Orlando? No one had ever told her that the Venus environment was locally hosted, but no one had indicated that it existed anywhere else, either. That would introduce a small amount of additional lag as packets had to travel via fiber optic lines across the country. That was illogical, no one would ever do that, but here was evidence that it was the case.
There was nothing else here she could do. Parkowski closed out of the folder and logged out of the account. She placed the login information back where she found it and turned off the light.
She then left the way she came, making sure she stayed out of the view of the security cameras.
Parkowski drove back to her apartment with her mind in a swirl. She had completed her “mission” yet had opened up another can of worms; each answer raising another dozen questions.
But she now realized that she was being lied to, by someone, and that was not something she was ok with. The military had to be involved, she was sure of it, as was NASA. But there had to be more to this mission than met the eye.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The rest of the week was quiet.
Parkowski kept framing and reframing the problem in her head but it made no sense. ILIAD was a science mission. They were exploring Venus. There was no connection to the military. None. Zip. Zilch. It was a purely civilian endeavor. The only slight connection was the fact that Aering also did military contracts out of the same building where it ran the ILIAD mission.
But then there was Bronze Knot.
It was a special access program, the highest level of classification afforded by the U.S. government. From the research she had done, mostly through Google searches on her phone and her conversations with DePresti, it protected very sensitive technologies, associations, and operations.
And, from what she could gather, Bronze Knot was hiding bits and pieces of packets in the communications pathway between Venus and Earth.
Why was that so important?
She had to find out why. It was the only thing on her mind. The engineer in her needed to know how everything fit together.
“Everything ok, Grace?” DePresti asked as they sat on the couch in his apartment on Saturday afternoon, watching a college football game. They had planned to go hiking, but a rare November rainstorm had ruined their plans.
She nodded slightly. “I’m fine.”
“You seem like you’ve got something on your mind.”
Parkowski wanted nothing more than to open up to him, to tell him about the weird “NASA room” with all of the SCI and SAP computers, to tell him her suspicions on what Bronze Knot was, but she wasn’t ready to. Not yet at least. “Just some stuff.”
“It’s not about us, right?” They had fought the night before over what movie to watch, a silly argument that had spiraled out of control.
She laughed. “No, not us, not you, just some stuff at work.”
“Got it,” her boyfriend replied. “Well, if you want to talk, you know I’m here for you.”
He’s going to think I’m crazy, fixated on this topic, Parkowski thought.
She did need to talk to someone about it though.
Parkowski considered calling her parents and seeing if her dad had any insight into this, but thought of a better idea.
She would use the screenshot she had saved of the mission log with Bronze Knot, combined with her research, and bring it up with Dr. Pham — who she knew by now had to know more than he was letting on.
All of what she learned in the NASA room was just icing on the cake, an additional confirmation of her suspicions. Parkowski didn’t have to bring any of that up. Her own experience inside of the VR environment and the screenshot were enough to hopefully force Pham to spill the beans on what was really happening with the ILIAD mission.