There was too much going on that she just had to know more about. She didn’t work in a classified environment like her boyfriend; there was nothing about the ILIAD mission that should be kept from her. If she wanted her third mission, as well as any future missions beyond that, to go well, she needed to know what was going on with the anomalies.
Parkowski knew from her dad, and her own experience, that unless you had a lot of top cover from your leadership, it wasn’t a great idea to blow something up by asking a lot of questions. While some of what she had encountered seemed innocuous, Parkowski had a sneaking suspicion that if she started posing questions to her leadership at Aering, their opinion of her might change, and not necessarily for the better. So, any investigation of hers would have to be under the radar.
But, she could ask her boyfriend. She had a good idea of what the Space Force did in general, but what DePresti did in particular, she wasn’t sure. Maybe he could help her with the weird error and associated message she saw today.
As she drove north, DePresti called. “Hey, want to come hang out tonight? I just got off work.”
She laughed. “I was just thinking about you,” Parkowski replied. “Yeah, I’m halfway home though. Let me turn around and head back in your direction.”
“Come to my place,” DePresti offered. “I’ll order takeout.”
An hour later, she sat at his kitchen table, eating from a big bowl of Chinese food that DePresti had gotten from a local restaurant. He was still in his uniform, but she had changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt.
“So how did it go today?” DePresti asked, getting up to grab a beer from his fridge.
“Better than last time,” she replied. “But not great.”
“Any dragons, or even worse, aliens, this time?”
She shook her head. “No, but there was a weird error I got at the end of the mission,” Parkowski explained. “They lost the connection to the ACHILLES robots for about ten minutes or so.”
“What did it say?” DePresti asked as he took a sip from his bottle.
“Error, special access program, Bronze Knot, special access required,” Parkowski repeated from memory.
DePresti spit out his beer.
“It did not,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“It did,” Parkowski insisted.
“Bullshit,” DePresti said, “there’s no way.”
“Uh, there is a way, because I saw it,” she replied. “Just like I saw the dragon.”
“I’m more apt to believe you saw a dragon than that error message.”
“Why?”
“Grace, do you know what a special access program is?”
She thought for a moment. “No.”
He took another sip of his beer and leaned on the kitchen counter. “Let me see if I can explain this without getting myself into trouble.”
Parkowski tilted her head slightly. This was getting somewhere.
DePresti took a deep breath. “So, to start, there’s three general levels of classification for government secrets. In ascending order of secrecy, they are Unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret.” He paused, then continued. “Those are a blanket level of security. Within each of those levels, there are subcompartments that you can only access if you have a need to know
“For some security levels, in particular Secret, everyone can see what’s held at that level, so it’s called collateral — a common level. In case information needs to be kept close-hold for whatever reason, it’s kept in a special access program, which limits the access.”
Parkowski thought for a moment. “So, I have a Secret clearance that I got when I first started at Aering. Everyone did, regardless of what program they worked on. I’ve never used it though. What does that get me?”
“It gets you access to Secret-level information,” he told her. “But nothing more. If you needed information from a special access program — which we call a SAP — you would have to be read into the program specifically.”
“Ok, got that part,” she said. “So what’s the problem? Aering has all kinds of contracts with the military and intelligence agencies in addition to NASA. Maybe Bronze Knot is a part of some other mission?”
DePresti laughed. “Oh, that might be possible, but there’s no way that it was in the environment, or even in the same network.”
“Why?”
“SAP data needs to be on its own enclosed network,” he explained. “There’s no way anyone would let it be on an unclassified network. In addition, SAP data needs to be in a SCIF or SAPF.”
“What are those?”
“SCIF is Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, SAPF is Special Access Program Facility, but a lot of SAPFs are called SCIFs,” DePresti answered. “Data classified at that level needs to be in a certified facility, it’s not stuff you can take home. It’s why you’ll never see me with anything from work like you have the VR stuff on my gaming PC. Almost everything I do in the office is classified.”
