Parkowski sighed and rolled over to her nightstand and checked the time. 2:04 AM. Who could be calling her in the middle of the night?
She thought about ignoring it, she recognized the Los Angeles area code but not the number itself, but then remembered that the automated Aering remote notification system sometimes used new or unique numbers to reach the company’s employees scattered throughout the area.
She hit the green “answer” button on the phone’s screen.
“Hello,” Parkowski said.
At first, there was no response. Had she messed up whatever the Aering notification system was trying to tell her?
“Hello,” she said again.
This time someone spoke up, an unfamiliar, deep, gravelly male voice she had never heard before. “Grace Parkowski,” the strange voice said slowly but clearly. “You are endangering national security. Cease your investigation into ‘Bronze Knot’ before it is too late.”
“Wait… what?” Parkowski said, confused, but the call had already ended.
She sat up in bed, bewildered — and terrified.
Ok, Grace, deep breaths, she thought.
How did anyone know about her unofficial investigation of sorts? The only people she had spoken the words “Bronze Knot” to were DePresti and Dr. Pham. The former had admittedly asked around at work but hadn’t used her name, the latter she wasn’t a hundred percent sure had gone to anyone else. Her roommate had access to her computer and the screenshot on it, but she was significantly less technically adept than Parkowski and likely wasn’t snooping around anyway.
The call itself was bizarre.
How could she be “endangering national security” as the caller put it?
ILIAD was a science mission, run through NASA, not some Department of Defense boondoggle like what DePresti worked on. And “cease your investigation before it is too late,” was that a threat?
She was a little worried now. Parkowski looked up the non-emergency number for the LAPD and started to dial it, but canceled the call.
Parkowski couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. She just lay there, staring at the ceiling or tossing and turning.
At six, she finally got up and out of her bed feeling more tired than when she had gone to sleep. Her roommate snored away in her room next door. Parkowski wanted to do just that; call out of work, tell Dr. Pham she wasn’t feeling well, and just stay home all day. But she knew that she couldn’t. She had to finish planning her mission and maybe do some more poking around to see if she could tease any more information about Bronze Knot out from the Aering internal network.
Parkowski got in at eight, checked in with her boss, and went through her email. She should have finished her mission plan for her mission on Friday morning, less than 24 hours away, but put it off to the afternoon.
After a brief hesitation, Parkowski did some more digging on the SharePoint site. She was particularly interested in anything to do with deep-space sensors or Aering's involvement in any of the cislunar military missions currently on the drawing board.
She surprisingly found quite a bit of both. Aering was working with a smaller business to develop a long-range electro-optical sensor that could detect movement at up to a million kilometers, and all of it seemed to be unclassified. Aering also had recently won a contract to build a small satellite that would be a secondary payload on an upcoming launch to the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point. However, all of the details of that mission were classified.
Parkowski had brought her lunch and ate at her cube while organizing all of her computer’s files. DePresti had texted her that morning, asking to take her out to dinner that night, but she hadn't responded. She was still kind of upset with him, the two had barely talked since their argument Monday night, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him or not. It might just make things worse.
Just as she was finishing her lunch, her cubicle’s telephone rang.
She narrowed her eyes at the phone.
It was her normal cube, sure, but they didn’t have permanent seating — all of the desks were hot-bunked — and the junior engineers swapped desks fairly often so the phones were usually used for outgoing calls, not incoming ones. Who would be calling her?
Parkowski answered it. “This is Grace.”
“Ms. Parkowski, this is James with the security team,” she heard in a thick Southern accent — a rarity in SoCal. “There’s a visitor here to see you.”
“A visitor?” she said. Parkowski wasn’t expecting anyone.
“Yes, a visitor,” the security guard replied.
“Be right there.”
Parkowski hung up the phone and got up from her cube.
