“That makes too much sense,” her boyfriend responded, “and is probably the cause of all of the anomalies that you saw while you were in the VR gear.”

“That’s what Bronze Knot is protecting,” she said in agreement. “The fact that the virtual environment isn’t calling Venus at all — it’s calling this building, A99, out here. We just didn’t see it because we didn’t have the full network architecture. They didn’t need to protect the details, or the ‘big secret’ if you will, because they didn’t have to. All they needed to do was to conceal the fact that the data from Venus wasn’t being pulled from MICS through White Sands. We had the answer all along but just weren’t able to put it into the right context.”

DePresti put a hand up against the PAF and sighed. “All of this, and for what?”

She didn’t have an answer for him. But, all of the things that she had found over the last few weeks, large and small, now fit in place.

There was no real-time interface between the Panspermia environment and the feed coming in from MICS because it wasn’t needed — all of the packets coming in were artificial. Since whoever had integrated all of this had control of both sides of the interface, there was no need for data conditioning.

There was lag — artificial lag — that was needed in order for the Panspermia environment to react as it had been programmed in. It was expecting a ninety to one-hundred-twenty-second delay, and if it didn’t receive that, the virtual environment software wouldn’t work as planned. When it had gotten smaller than that in some of her missions, the errors had started, leading to the cryptic messages exposing the Bronze Knot name.

The changes in part number for the second stage of the Shrike Heavy were real and poorly documented by OuterTek. Given their history of last-minute configuration changes, a few swapped part numbers wouldn’t be totally out of the ordinary.

It was a lot to take in.

Her entire job for the last year had been a lie.

She joined him next to the OuterTek PAF with the ILIAD probe on top of it.

“If this is here,” DePresti mused as he ran his hand along one of the thick wires that connected the ILIAD probe to the wall and gave it power. “Then what went up on the Shrike Heavy?”

Parkowski had no idea.

Her mind flashed with a million possibilities, each more implausible than the next, but none of them made any sense.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I don’t either,” DePresti said in response. He laughed. “I’m not sure it matters now, does it?”

“Nope.” It was another mystery, sure, but Parkowski felt a great deal of satisfaction in solving the one that had bugged her for months. “At least we know what Bronze Knot is.”

They followed the cables to the scattering of electronic gear on the folding tables. DePresti and Parkowski both instantly knew what it was. “That’s a flat-sat,” she said, pointing at the contraption, referring to a set of satellite parts, mostly avionics, arranged on the ground for rapid testing of software upgrades. “But for what satellite?”

DePresti bent over it, studying the components. He turned to her. “It’s a MICS simulator, and a very high-fidelity one at that. Those are all space-rated parts or models of space-rated parts. I bet you’re looking at close to a million dollars of hardware there.”

Parkowski blinked. “Why would you spend that much on a simulator?”

He laughed. “Grace, the payload stack there cost over a billion dollars. A million dollars is a drop in a bucket to these people.”

It took a bit for that to sink in.

“Why would someone pay over a billion dollars to build a science probe that never launches?” she asked rhetorically.

“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.”