DePresti sat back down. “Grace…”
“What?”
“Do you have any idea how many SAPs there are?”
“No.”
“I know a guy who’s been read into a thousand.”
“A thousand?” she said incredulously.
“Yep. And he knew of at least five hundred Navy ones he wasn’t read into.”
“What does that mean? There’s a lot of SAPs?”
“It means that Bronze Knot is just one piece. One amongst many others. It’s just a SAP, who cares what it’s protecting? You told me over the weekend that no one is saying that what happened during your missions is your fault. Just forget any of this ever happened. If it shows up again, Grace, I promise you, I’ll help you figure it out, but right now you need to let it go.”
They ate the rest of their meal in silence.
Finally, as they were cleaning up, still not talking to each other, DePresti spoke up. “Grace, you’re going to get yourself in trouble.”
“I know.”
“Just be aware of the consequences,” DePresti said, “because I hope it’s worth it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Parkowski’s roommate asked as the Aering engineer sat with her knees to her chest on the couch, watching a trashy reality show, at eight o’clock the next morning.
“Yes, I should be at work,” Parkowski said, a little annoyed, “but I’m here. I don’t have anything until the afternoon and I worked more than enough billable hours for the pay period last week. I’m fine.”
“Ok,” her roommate replied with a shrug. “Are you hanging out with Mike tonight or do you want me to cook?”
“I’ll figure it out myself,” Parkowski said. “Don’t worry about me.”
After her roommate left, she got up and paced the small living room.
Parkowski was scheduled for a Thursday mission with the two ACHILLES robots. She had originally been taken off of the schedule, and replaced with a “training mission” for one of the newer operators. Leadership hadn’t wanted to give her another chance. But, the new operator hadn’t been available, so Parkowski went back onto the schedule.
She was supposed to spend her week planning for her third time on the sticks, but her motivation just wasn’t there. She had debated calling in sick, but knew she had to be in the office.
The argument with DePresti last night had left her in an awful mood.
She made herself a cup of coffee and sat back on the couch.
Parkowski had woken up in the middle of the night with a thought. Maybe the reason her boyfriend was so dismissive of her concerns was that there was a covert military link to the ILIAD mission. Just before she went to bed, she’d read an article about an upcoming U.S. Space Force launch to cislunar space between Earth and the Moon. The USSF’s satellite’s orbit was said to be the highest ever achieved, a near rectilinear halo orbit with the Moon as its epicenter.
This spacecraft was supposed to keep tabs on both orbital activity around the Moon as well as the giant volume of space between the Earth and its only natural satellite. Most of the details were classified, but the concept itself got Parkowski thinking.
If the U.S. military was concerned about the Moon and the space around it, why wouldn’t they also be concerned about Mars, and by extension Venus? The commercial use of space had exploded over the last decade. And where business interests went, the military followed, even out into the stars.
The whole Bronze Knot affair seemed illogical unless one went down that rabbit hole.
Maybe DePresti didn’t know what exactly was going on, but the U.S. military was a huge organization spread out across the country, with thousands of sub-organizations within it. Maybe someone, somewhere, put some kind of sensors or other military hardware on either the ILIAD landing craft or the relay, as a way to either watch for or defend against Russian or Chinese military activity. The information was held in a SAP, Bronze Knot, at a higher level than what DePresti or even Dr. Pham had access to.
At least, that was her going theory.
Parkowski had a sneaking suspicion that one of the two men had some knowledge of what was really going on, just under a different name than Bronze Knot, but she couldn’t know for certain.
But what she did know was that there was more information on special programs in the “NASA room” that she had gotten into last week. There had been no indication that anyone had detected her break-in, no negative repercussions at all. Maybe a second time through the TS//SAP workstation would yield her the clues she needed to unlock the secrets of Bronze Knot.
She groaned and got her bag together. Time to go to work.
Parkowski got in at around eleven, but no one seemed to notice her late arrival.
Her first meeting wasn’t until one thirty, so she had some time to get settled. Parkowski checked her email and then went out into the hallway to see if there were any changes in the security system from the previous week.
There were none.
No one knew that she had been in and out of the locked room.
She stopped by Dr. Pham’s office and had a brief conversation about her upcoming mission. There was no mention of their talk from the previous day.
It was lunchtime. Parkowski grabbed a sandwich and bag of chips at the cafeteria and ate at her cubicle.
She needed to get back into that room. Parkowski had left too early last time without unlocking all of its secrets.
Her plan the last time had been successful. Why change it? She would sneak in after everyone had left, using the same route to get to the room, type in the code, and continue her search for what Bronze Knot really was and why it had manifested itself in both of her missions on Venus.
The afternoon was spent planning for her next time on the sticks.
Parkowski’s mission was much simpler than the previous two. She had to get both ACHILLES units to the same point near a larger crater south of the initial landing site. From there, the next operator would take them to an area where a Soviet spacecraft named Verena 4 in the 1960s had noticed a magnetic field anomaly during its mission.
She had a high-fidelity model of the Venusian surface pulled up on her workstation with a small model of an ACHILLES robot in the center of the screen. She controlled it with the keyboard’s arrow keys, much like a video game.
Parkowski had her notebook open as well as the mission planning software as she tried to find the best route for each of the two robots from their starting positions to the final waypoint.
But she was still distracted. Parkowski couldn’t remember a time when she was ever as single-minded in her pursuit of knowledge as she was now. She had to know what Bronze Knot’s association with the ILIAD mission was.
That night, she waited until the Aering facility emptied. Unlike last time, there were a few stragglers, but by eight-thirty, she had the high bay to herself.
Parkowski got up from the cubicle and walked quickly to the hallway door. She peeked out and saw all of the office doors closed and locked.
Game time. She took a breath and slid along the side of the hallway to avoid the cameras and then leaned over to the far right corner.
She remembered the code. Time to get back in.
One.
Five.
Three and two together.
Four.
No click.
She scrunched her nose and rubbed her temples. That was right, she was sure of it, but it didn’t work.
Puzzled, Parkowski tried it again.
Still no click.
She heard a rustling in the hallway towards the special projects high bay, a scuffle of a shoe against the floor.