[It was love at first sight] Ray made her own copy of the memory stick that Ashanta held, and noticed the craftsmanship. The little and rather pretty metal pendant hid it perfectly, parting neatly with the seam hidden in the pattern of the metalwork. It felt ... special, and it took a moment of staring at it for Ray to realize that nobody in the colony wore jewelry, and almost nothing was hand-made. The cool precision of the memory stick underneath the the metal was almost jarring against the slightly irregular silver and black pattern. Her own storage wasn't so elegant, but perhaps more secure. She stared at the screen and practiced the passphrase to the place she stored it. Six words, seemingly random. It'd keep someone without a lot of time on their hands from getting in, not that she intended to tell anyone else on the colony about her new found connections. "Alright. Now what?" "Aim the dish at the edge of the earth. You're going to have to hit the satellite from the side. The main antennas point downward, but the ones that hop from satellite to satellite actually face the moon if you catch them at the right time. The connection is going to come and go a little bit, but you should be able to use it." Ray's fingers flew over the console. She could do the math to do the aiming in her head, but she double-checked her figures with the computer anyway, just making sure. She knew she couldn't actually hear it, but she imagined the groan of the motors moving the dishes from their usual place, expectantly awaiting the next signal from earth, to a slightly different position, aiming just a little to the side. Ray made a mental note to program them to reposition back to their regular spot before the earth came into view. "Alright. Now try to connect the usual way." Ray did, and the connection came online. "This is the best spot for getting into the Darknet we run, too. We don't have to hide from this access point so much." Ashanta leaned in to key in address after address. Ray caught the smell of her. There _was_ patchouli in there. News flooded in, stories. The usual AP-Reuters ones were there, too, though skimming the titles, there were a few that wouldn't make it past the censors. Ashanta watched Ray pause on each one. "Unpublished drafts. It's amazing how much you can learn from what the censors redact. We've had some people in the major media organizations for a few years now. Haven't been caught leaking this stuff yet." Ray stopped short, hovering over one news article in particular before she told the computer to retrieve it. _ESA Bulletin: Moon colony attacked_ The article was actually a copy of the bulletin, though there wasn't much information in it. Typical of the ESA, taking a page of text to say not much in particular, even when it was important. Why hadn't this come over the emergency channel? It wasn't so much information that it couldn't be broadcast over the emergency link, making it to the moon even before the radio blackout ended. Surely this was important enough to spend the energy on a high-power transmission, Ray thought. Then she spotted it. At the foot of the document stood the stark letters in bold type. "High sensitivity. Do not release." They couldn't send it over the uncoded emergency broadcast if they didn't want everyone to know. Ashanta was almost shaking in her seat. "Is there a terminal I can use?" Ray shook herself out of reading the document. "Oh! Yes!" She scrambled in a pile of parts in the corner for a moment before returning looking triumphant. "It's old, but it should do." It didn't take long before she had the equipment connected and sitting awkwardly on the little desk next to her own workstation. She watched Ashanta type fluidly, but glanced at the screen and realized she couldn't read a word of it. "Multnomah. It's a modern version of Kiksht, one of the tribal languages from where I grew up. It doesn't trip up the censors, since the words don't really register to them. I've a couple friends who might be able to scare up some more information than that bulletin has in it."