Parkowski ate her energy bar and a bag of grapes while she watched the company’s employees file out of the building in groups of twos and threes before walking to their vehicles in the parking garage across the street. She tried all of the passwords on the “guest” network for a second time, but still, none of them worked.
Something nagged at her, though. A voice in the back of her head was telling her that she hadn’t exhausted all of her options. But she had, hadn’t she? She had been through every single permutation of passwords with networks. And none of them had worked.
She got the notepad back out and looked through them. DePresti’s handwriting was strangely clear and easy to read — he might be the only engineer on the planet with good penmanship. Parkowski went down the list and checked for any typos or misread words, but there were none. None of them worked.
“Fuck,” Parkowski said to herself, slamming the keyboard with her fist in frustration. She didn’t like to feel helpless, but here she was, stuck in an old Chevy truck in the OuterTek parking lot.
Parkowski went through the list again. She had the feeling that something was wrong with the passwords — that DePresti hadn’t remembered them correctly — but nothing jumped out at her as being incorrect.
She went line-by-line, word-by-word. Same thing. All twelve phrases were logical passwords for a space- and Mars-obsessed company to use.
Parkowski slammed the laptop closed. Nothing was going right.
Suddenly, she had a revelation, based on an experience that Parkowski had had her first week in Los Angeles.
Parkowski had been talking with Rachel Kim and another female Aering engineer over lunch in the Rayleigh cafeteria about her commute into work from her apartment in Marina del Rey down to the Aering plant south of LAX. She had described her route to the point where she got onto I-405 South, “the highway,” as she had called it.
Kim and the other woman had quickly corrected her.
“Freeway,” Kim had said. “In California, they are all ‘freeways.’”
“What do you mean?” Parkowski had asked. “A highway is a highway.”
“Unless it’s in California, where it’s called a freeway,” the other engineer had said.
DePresti, like Parkowski, was from the East Coast and called an interstate a “highway.”
OuterTek was located in Hawthorne, California. Where an interstate was called a freeway.
She grabbed the notepad and looked at the list. Where had she seen “highway?”
The second entry was “Highway to Mars.”
Parkowski grabbed the pen and scribbled out “Highway.” In its place, she wrote “Freeway.”
She opened the laptop back up and selected the guest network.
“Freeway.to… Mars,” Parkowski said to herself as she inputted it on the HP’s keyboard.
It took a few minutes, but finally, at last she was connected to the wireless network.
“Yes!” she said as she pumped her fist into the air. Parkowski was in.
She opened up a browser window.
Bang!
There was a loud knock on the Silverado’s door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Parkowski jumped. The laptop went a few inches into the air and then back down into her lap.
She put the laptop on the driver’s seat and looked to see if DePresti was back from his site visit to the facility.
It wasn’t him.
Instead, a harried-looking young Asian woman stood there, her arms crossed and an unhappy expression on her face.
Parkowski’s heart raced with panic. Had the real reason for her boyfriend’s visit to the OuterTek facility been discovered? She carefully rolled down the passenger’s side window. “Can I help you?”
“I need you to move,” the woman said, obviously annoyed. “The lead singer of the band Muse is coming to visit our founder, and this is the spot that I told his driver to park in.”
Parkowski blinked. “What?”
“You need to move your truck,” the woman said. “Now.”
She didn’t want to cause any trouble. The last thing that she needed was for the other woman to call security.
“Fine, no problem,” Parkowski said as she painfully switched seats over to the driver’s side, her shoulder burning every step of the way. “Can I park in a visitor’s spot?”
“Sure, whatever.” The woman flipped her hair. “Just don’t be here.”
Parkowski nodded and turned the ignition. She had never driven a pickup truck before and now, with her bad shoulder, wasn’t a good time to learn. But it wasn’t as different from driving her little Camry as she had thought. She managed to back up out of the “4” spot, drive fifty feet closer to the small parking lot’s entrance, and park in one of the now-empty visitor spots.
Satisfied, the woman turned on her heel and went back inside.
Parkowski finally exhaled. That could have been a lot worse.
She grabbed her laptop and got back onto the OuterTek guest network after having momentarily lost connection. Parkowski opened up the web browser first. She was greeted with the OuterTek internal splash screen — the browser was smart enough to take her automatically there.
There was a username and password location on the top right of the screen. She inputted DePresti’s login information and was taken to a second screen showing his personalized homepage. Almost everything there had to do with the Shrike Heavy launch that took the ILIAD probe to Venus. It had been the twenty-first flight of the launch vehicle, so much of the data was abbreviated SH-21. The numbering and naming conventions took some getting used to, but Parkowski adapted quickly.
OuterTek used two main systems to track their software and hardware designs and data and to manage their agile approach to launch vehicle and satellite design.
The first was called Mosu, short for Mosura, the Japanese name for Mothra from the Godzilla movies. All of their engineering work was done in that tool via issue tracking and workflows.
The second was Sangam, a documentation tool from the developers of Mosu named after the Sanskrit word for a river confluence. All of the notes and evidence for engineering decisions were kept there. It was somewhat more locked down than Mosu, but DePresti’s account still had limited access to it. It also had an integrated calendar that linked to the Microsoft Office suite and directly hooked into the Mosu database.
Thankfully, there was a wealth of data available to her. As a part of their government contracts, OuterTek had to provide almost all of their data to their customers. Then, the Space Force performed a pedigree review of that data and looked for errors or gaps that could impede mission success.
Parkowski of course knew none of this until she met and started dating DePresti, and now she knew more than she ever wanted to know. She never thought she would use any of it until now.
The first thing that she looked for was any obvious links to the program Bronze Knot or its trigraph BKT.
She searched for “Bronze Knot” and “BKT” in the search bar, looking for any indication that OuterTek was involved with that special access program. And, she did find one, but just one — a BKT Read-In on an executive-level calendar. More interestingly enough, that call-in had people from the CIA on the invite — their email addresses linked back to the agency’s website.
The CIA again.
OuterTek was most definitely involved.
But why, she wondered, why would the launch company have to be read into a special access program protecting something about the ILIAD mission? They were just the ride to orbit, NASA took over once the probe separated from the second stage.
It probably had to do with the launch processing. Whatever was so special about the ILIAD probe or the ACHILLES robots that had to be protected at the highest levels, it was probably obvious to the OuterTek technicians and engineers installing the payload on the top of the payload attach fitting and then integrating the entire stack onto the rocket’s second stage. Those people — and their management over them — would have to be read in so they could protect that secret.