She had used her hand to feel around in the insides of the cabinet and brushed alongside a scrap of paper. Parkowski carefully removed it from the cabinet door without tearing it and saw that not only had the person carefully written down their SCI username and password, but they had also included the SAP one.
Parkowski went to the first computer she could find with the “TS//SAP” banner on it and used the SAP login information to get on.
It took almost five minutes to get to the desktop, but she was finally in. She opened the file manager and started to look around.
Unfortunately, whoever she was logged in as seemed to have their permissions extremely restricted. When she tried to open up anything on the shared network drive she ran into “permission denied” and “access not granted” error messages.
She tried opening up the browser. Nothing, just another error message. This computer was not connected to the outside internet or any internal network that contained web pages like Aering’s SharePoint.
Parkowski sat back, stumped. Maybe this person didn’t really use this network at all and just had access as part of something else, hence why they needed to write down their login information. They didn’t use it that much, so they needed to keep it somewhere to refer back to when they did access the network.
But why did they have access then in the first place?
There had to be something on this machine that she could get to.
Parkowski tried the network drive again. Still no access.
She tried to get into the computer's own drive — the one physically located inside the computer — but it was locked down as well. But at the top left of the window, she saw the recently accessed folders. Whoever had used this login last, they had left a trail of where they had gone on the SAP-level network.
Finally, a breakthrough.
Parkowski opened up one of the folders named “BKT Logs” and all of the missing files from her previous missions were there, in addition to the ones from the rest of the missions, all the way up until yesterday. Someone had taken them off of the low-side Aering network and moved them to this protected system.
She tried another folder from the recently accessed list. This one was named “SAR-HBX CONOPS and Specifications” and as per the name contained a CONOPS (CONcept of OPerationS) and a series of high-level system specs for a reconnaissance satellite that Aering was offering to build for the government.
Parkowski understood very little of it, this was more up DePresti’s alley, but she knew enough to know that it had no connection to the ILIAD mission or Bronze Knot. It was just a different special access program, hence why it was secured on the same network.
The remaining folders that had been accessed were more of the same, some at technical levels well beyond Parkowski’s understanding. One was a deep-space sensor, another was a radar warning receiver, and some she couldn’t make heads-or-tails of despite her background in engineering and her space experience. They might have made sense to someone more versed in the classified side of the space world, but not to her. None of the others had Bronze Knot data.
She was back to square one.
Parkowski went back to the “BKT Logs” folder and opened a few of the logs. To her surprise, she did learn something new — the fields in the log files for the packets that had been previously blanked out were now filled with numbers or alphanumeric codes. Unfortunately, none of them meant anything to her.
But, she now knew through her conversations with her boyfriend and her own research that the data itself — the ones that had been masked — were considered to be protected under the Bronze Knot program. Why they were protected, and what they were protecting, she still did not know, but part of the SAP was to protect some specific telemetry data between Venus and the ground station on Earth.
But why though? Why would the military care about the ILIAD mission so much that they needed to safeguard some of its data behind the highest level of classification that it could muster?
She opened up each log file. None offered any more information. Parkowski would need a higher-level document, some kind of decoder ring or something, to make heads-and-tails of what she was seeing. Numbers in and of themselves didn’t give her any more understanding, they had to be put into context.
On a hunch, she tried to go up a level of the folder directory, to a folder with a vague name.
Access denied.
She tried to go one level up beyond that.
Jackpot.
All of
