“To be honest with you, I have no idea,” her boyfriend responded. “I bet this launch was going in the direction of whatever they switched it with and they just swapped the payloads. I wonder if they’re going to declare a mission failure, claim they lost contact with the ACHILLES units, and then cannibalize it for parts. Or, they could pull another swap and roll out this payload stack for another, real launch since they have the infrastructure in place.”
Another piece clicked. The OuterTek post-launch report, with all of the weird burns.
She recounted it again to DePresti.
“But why would they need to make so many different burns?” he asked her. “Did they provide a trajectory map?”
“No, just the performance data,” she answered.
“That’s weird,” he said. “They always provide some kind of trajectory depiction, usually with the accuracy data. But, in this case, I get why they didn’t.”
Parkowski’s mind still raced. But, she had a warm feeling come up through her that made her surprisingly happy despite the predicament that she and DePresti were still in.
She had solved the Bronze Knot mystery.
Parkowski and DePresti still needed to escape the secure facility and make it back to civilization.
They spent a few more minutes observing the ILIAD payload stack and MICS simulator as well as the server racks. Parkowski hoped for some more SAP stickers; some new trigraphs for her to further her investigation, but there were none — just BKT.
Then, they moved to the small cubicle farm. It almost looked out of place to Parkowski but she remembered that she, too, worked in a cube farm located inside of a satellite processing high bay — an odd symmetry to the whole affair.
Each of the cubicles had a workstation with a pair of monitors and a thin client, meaning that the desktop environment was physically located elsewhere, probably in the server rack. Parkowski tried to log in, but they were locked down tight. To get in, she would need a username, a password, and a code from a two-factor authentication keyfob. Even if she had been successful at getting login information like she had at Aering and OuterTek, she didn’t have the two-factor keyfob.
In the drawers, though, they hit the jackpot.
DePresti held up a handful of car keys. “I think these are what we were looking for,” he told Parkowski. “Which one do you want?”
She laughed. “Just pick one. It doesn’t really matter.”
He grabbed one and threw the rest back into the cubicle’s desk drawer.
Parkowski looked for something to record what they had just learned.
The Aering engineer knew what they had seen here, no one would believe them. The ILIAD launch and mission were national news. Fox News and CNN had both carried the launch live, and it had warranted a front-page New York Times article the morning after. NASA released regular updates on the scientific value of the mission, both to keep the public informed as well as to push for funding of future missions to other planets.
Unless they had hard evidence that the ILIAD mission was sitting in an obscure hangar on Cape Canaveral; that the data that NASA was presenting to the public was fraudulent, they would be dismissed as cranks or conspiracy theorists.
She, too, got lucky.
In one of the bottom drawers, she found a trio of smartphone boxes, each with an older smartphone inside next to a charger.
Now, it was Parkowski’s turn to laugh. “Why would they leave these here?” she asked DePresti with a smile on her face.
He took a look at them and snorted. “These were the ones we issued the NASA and Aering ground crews when they were here for the launch campaign,” DePresti told her. “A lot of them had service providers that didn’t have great coverage here. It was easier to just buy them phones and let them use them for the launch campaign. Afterwards, we gave them back to the Cape Canaveral support team, and I didn’t know what became of them. Turns out they ended up here with a bunch of other junk.”
That’s what was in the rest of the drawers — junk from the Shrike Heavy launch. Launch notebooks, remove-before-flight tags, tools and hardware, press pamphlets and scripts, it was all there. This was where the local Space Force team, who must have been in on the Bronze Knot deception, stored everything after the rocket went up.
Thankfully for Parkowski and DePresti, that included the GOV keys and the smartphones.
Parkowski took one of the phones out of its box and plugged it in. She got lucky again. Not only did the phone boot up on its first try, there was no passcode. And, to top it off, the phone had service, getting three bars from a nearby cell tower.
She waited for the phone to get about a quarter-charged and then removed it from the charging cable.
Parkowski then went to the area of the high bay that the payload and flatsat were in. She took dozens of pictures, showing the payload stack from every possible angle, as well as the flatsat and server racks
