Swiping the page to the side, Molly dragged up a new one from the bottom. The few times they’d been connected to the Net in the past two weeks, the datastream had been too thin to do even the most rudimentary of tasks. The remote Lokian villages had suffered from poor connectivity and bandwidth, even when they were lucky enough to find an available signal. A seemingly countless number of items had built up over the past weeks that she really wanted to check on, but first there were a few she had to.

Using the virtual keyboard, she typed: “Molly; Fyde; Navy,” and hit enter. Hundreds of hits registered, but she could see most of them were junk. Lots of false positives and a ton of spelling suggestions for “mollified.” She sorted the results by date, looking for something recent, but there wasn’t anything within the last two months.

She swiped that away and tried: “Parsona; Ship; Navy.”

“You looking for newss about thosse sshipss?” Walter asked. “The oness from the bright light?”

“No. I probably know more about them than the Bel Tra do. Not that that’s saying much. I’m actually looking for news about us. Trying to find out how much trouble we’re in.”

Walter pushed up from his chair and leaned forward. “You ssearching on Latticse?” he asked.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about—”

Walter leaned over the table and snatched the computer away from her. He pecked furiously at the keys while Molly tried to snag it back. “I said not to worry about—”

Walter relinquished the computer. Molly glanced at the screen and nearly dropped the device. She looked behind herself, scanned the crowd, then moved the tablet to her lap and stared at the screen.

It showed the welcome page for the GN Naval database.

“How did you do that?” she whispered.

“Eassy. I already had the passsword.” He slurped through ice cubes for the last of his drink, then looked around for their waitress.

“Is this how you hacked the missiles?”

He frowned at her as if the question didn’t merit answering. “Com-pletely different,” he said.

The waitress came up from behind. Molly moved the computer under the table and threw her napkin over it. Some more water was sloshed in their glasses—their one free refill. Walter was told the gelate top-up would cost. He demurred, peering at the pads of his fingers. Molly glared at him, jerking her head to the side to let him know she needed some privacy.