Monday was a slow day. A few of the ILIAD team were out of the office and only one mission, an afternoon transit run, was on the schedule. The operational cadence didn’t pick back up until the next day.
It was a perfect opportunity to see if she could shake more information out of her supervisor.
Parkowski checked Pham’s calendar. He had meetings all morning but was free at eleven.
“Hey, Dr. Pham,” she said at five past the hour as she leaned on the doorway into his office, holding a piece of paper with the screenshot printed on it, folded in half. “Can I talk with you for a little bit?”
He looked up at her from his computer. “Yes, Grace, come on in.” Pham motioned at the chair across from his desk. “Anytime.”
Parkowski closed the door behind her.
He raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.
She sat down in the chair and looked at him.
“Is everything ok, Grace?” Pham asked. The same question DePresti had asked her over the weekend.
She wanted to just burst with questions, to ask them rapid-fire to Pham and hopefully receive answers back just as quickly, but she held back.
“We need to talk,” she said.
The other eyebrow was now raised. “About what?”
Parkowski put the piece of paper with the screenshot in front of him. “This.”
Her boss put on a pair of reading glasses and took a look at it. After a quick scan, he looked up at her. “Grace, where did you get this?”
“From the mission logs before they got pulled off of the shared drive,” she answered.
Pham shook his head. “You weren’t supposed to have seen this.”
“What do you mean, ‘not supposed to have seen this?’” Parkowski said, a hint of anger in her voice.
Pham looked at the door as if making sure it was closed, and then back at her. “Grace, I…”
“What is Bronze Knot?” she asked her voice up an octave. “You told me you didn’t know, but here it is, clear as day, in the ILIAD VR environment.”
He sighed. “Ok, you’re right. I figured one of you junior engineers would find out sooner or later.”
“Find what out?”
“There’s a little more going on than we’ve let on. Nothing that you need to be worried about, though.”
That last bit got under her skin.
“But I’m worried,” Parkowski said. “Both times I’ve been on the sticks, things have gone wrong. I want to know why. I don’t want it to happen again.”
“I know, you’re an engineer, you need to know why,” Pham said, a heavy emphasis on the last word. He leaned back a little in his chair. “Grace, what happened on your missions is easily explained. And it’s not related to what you showed me.”
A lie.
He had to know more, there was no way he didn’t know what Bronze Knot was and how it was connected to her mission.
“Ok, so what happened?”
“The first time the package was incorrectly compiled, hence the dragon showing up. The second time the communications box on the relay satellite around Venus just lagged out. Perfectly normal stuff.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Ok, so why the secrecy?” She held back on just how much she knew about special access programs.
Pham lied again. “Ok,” he said, looking at the door for a second time, “here’s the thing. There’s rumors of some financial impropriety at Aering making the rounds.”
Parkowski hadn’t heard that. “Really.”
“Yes,” the older man said, nodding, “and my understanding is that all of the secrecy is due to the fact that some of the… impropriety was done on the ILIAD mission. With regards to our communications gear built in-house and installed on the robots and relay satellite. And that’s all I am comfortable saying at this time.”
“So that’s why all of the logs were taken away?”
“Yes.”
That made even less sense to Parkowski than ILIAD being connected to the military. “And Bronze Knot is then…”
“It’s some kind of mechanism for protecting data associated with the ILIAD mission,” Pham replied. “I don’t know all of the specifics, sorry.”
He took a breath. “I know how you feel, Grace, but you need to let this one go.”
“Ok,” Parkowski said. It was now her time to lie. “Will do.”
“I need to keep this,” Pham said, showing her the screenshot.
She nodded.
“One more thing,” Pham said.
“Yes?”
“We’re taking you off the schedule,” he said. “At least temporarily. Leadership isn’t sure if it’s you, or your gear, or just a coincidence, but consider yourself temporarily removed from active duty on the ACHILLES units.”
That stung.
Parkowski fought back a tear and nodded.
“It’s not personal, Grace,” Pham added. “Nothing that’s happened has been your fault. We just need to figure out what’s going on.”
She nodded again.
“Have a great rest of your day,” Pham said. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. We’ll figure it out.”
Parkowski finally found her ability to talk.
“See you later, boss,” she said in a scratchy voice as she opened the door and left.
Parkowski was furious.
Now, she had to do what she was dreading all weekend — coming clean to her boyfriend about what she had done the previous week.
"You did what?" DePresti cried out when she finally fessed up that evening at her apartment.
“I got into the locked room using the code,” she said quietly.
“Grace, that is a huge security violation,” the Space Force officer said. He stood up from the table where they were eating pizza. “You weren’t cleared for what was in there!”
“So?”
“If they find out they’re going to pull your clearance.”
“So what?” she said, a little annoyed. This was why she hadn’t wanted to have the conversation.
“Grace, in this industry, not being able to hold a security clearance is a death sentence,” DePresti explained. “Even if your job, like your current one, doesn’t require one, the company you work for wants the flexibility to move you to one that does. If you can’t hold a clearance, you’re going to have a hard time finding work.”
“But I need to know what’s going on,” Parkowski replied.
“Why? Why do you need to know?”
“Because I’ve spent the last two years of my life thinking I was doing this one thing, to advance science, to use my engineering skills, to be among the first people to explore Venus,” she said angrily. “And now I’m learning that there’s some stupid black project, special access program bullshit behind all of this, connected to my ILIAD mission I’ve busted my ass for. Which makes no sense. And now, you think I’m crazy. That I’m either seeing things that aren’t there or am digging too deep into something that I don’t need to concern myself with.” Parkowski took a deep breath. “And now they’ve taken me off of the schedule. I’m not crazy, Mike, I know I’m fixated on this, but it’s eating me up inside. My promotion, my future at the company, relies on me having successful trips in the VR gear.”
He nodded, but let her talk and get it all out.
“We should be having a nice dinner right now but I’ve been trying to figure out why the military cares so much about my mission to create a special access program for it,” she finished.
“Hey, it might not be the military,” DePresti said as he took her hand in his. “The intelligence community has them too.”
“That’s not the point!” Parkowski said, with an emphasis on the last word.
“Then what is?”
“That the government is hiding stuff from us, specifically me, that is preventing me from doing my job. And it’s impacting my job performance. How would you like it if some black ops bullshit showed up on your performance report?”