She had an odd thought. How could they have been shot at for over sixty minutes, with their opponents expending hundreds if not thousands of rounds, and neither she nor DePresti were hit once?
She knew that they were trying to capture them, not kill them, but the odds of neither of them getting hit had to be astronomically low.
Even more shocking was the complete lack of brass around the boulders.
“There’s no way,” Parkowski told her boyfriend. “I watched them fire at me from this spot,” she continued, pointing at the rear of a large, distinct rock.
DePresti frowned. “I don’t see anything, outside of a few hits that must have been from your weapon, here,” he said as he pointed at a few small holes in the rock.
“Yes, I know,” Parkowski said. “But they were firing at me from here.”
“They must have policed their brass,” he said, crossing his arms.
“But how? They weren’t picking it up in the middle of a firefight.”
“Maybe they came back at night and swept it all up into bags,” DePresti suggested.
She was about to protest but he raised a hand. “Listen, I’m just spitballing here,” he said, “but it looks like they wanted to remove any trace that they were here.”
A few yards away they found a blood stain on the dusty desert floor.
“I hit one of them,” Parkowski told her boyfriend. “It must have been here.” Or was it? The whole previous night was a blur.
There was a short trail to the next rock, then it stopped. She knew what had happened here.
“They bandaged whoever I shot, then got them out of the combat zone,” Parkowski said.
DePresti gave a slight nod.
They looked for something, anything that they could use to identify their attackers, but there was nothing. After reaching the road, the two headed back to the house.
There was no food in the upper portion’s refrigerator, so they raided Chang’s studio apartment for some ramen and beef jerky for lunch. It wasn’t enough, but it had to do.
“What do we do now?” Parkowski asked.
“I guess we can go check the spot on the ridge where they were firing at the house from,” DePresti suggested, “but I think we both know what we will find.”
“Nothing.”
“Precisely. These people are professionals, Grace, they’re not going to leave a trace.”
“So what do we do now?” she repeated.
Her boyfriend had no answer.
They weren’t in a good position.
Chang had taken them in, sheltered them when they had nowhere else to go, and helped guide their investigation into the Bronze Knot mystery. And now he was gone, taken by the mysterious adversary that had dogged them since the Manhattan Beach pier.
They were rudderless.
She recalled the other two suggested investigative branches: the NASA complex at White Sands and Panspermia Game Studios, the developers of the virtual environment. But, Parkowski quickly ruled both of them out.
White Sands was just a ground station, a pass-through for the data coming from Venus through MICS to Earth. She had already seen the logs, seen the Bronze Knot references. It was unlikely that they would find anything new if they were to travel in person to the NASA site.
Panspermia was the same. Parkowski already had all of their data, including the entire virtual environment, in her cloud storage drive. The environment took in inputs from external sources and displayed them in virtual reality. It was totally dependent on those inputs, which is what Bronze Knot seemed to be protecting. Unless Parkowski could pin down exactly who coded and documented the interface to the Bronze Knot data, a trip there would be for naught.
All of their leads in Los Angeles had been played out or were otherwise unavailable to them.
That left one place to go.
“We need to go out to the Cape,” Parkowski told DePresti.
He snorted. “That’s a long trip.”
“It is,” she agreed, “but it’s the only way out of this.”
“How so?”
“We need to stick to the plan,” Parkowski explained. “Get as much information on Bronze Knot as we can, threaten to go public with it, trade the information with these people to get them off our backs. I think the only chance we have to get that information and figure out what’s behind Bronze Knot is to go east. To Hangar AZ.”
“To where it all started,” DePresti said with a smile.
“Yes.”
He thought for a moment. “It’s not the worst idea,” the Space Force captain said. “I was the government manager for the launch, sure, but there’s plenty of spooky stuff that happens at the Cape that I wasn’t aware of. There could have been some kind of addition, some kind of dual-use technology that would be protected by a SAP that was done either above or below my level. And that Hangar AZ reference that you found, that could be the place where we break the whole thing open.”
“So what are we waiting for?”
“Nothing. Let’s go east.”
They made it to Florida in one piece, driving Chang’s old Chevy truck cross-country without stopping, and checked into a small, locally-owned motel in the beach town of Cocoa Beach.
