[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"Unpublished drafts.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."