Kujen had built the base cunningly, but not cunningly enough to fool moth-senses. And why should he? No one was going to chat up a moth to ask it where the base was.
Jedao sensed the break in the surface, the artificial mechanism hidden beneath layers of rock. Was Cheris still breathing? Jedao looked inside her, detected the minute fluctuations of pressure and density in her lungs, and was reassured that she hadn’t abandoned him yet.
Abandoned, hell. If not for him, she wouldn’t be in this fix. The least he could do was get her out of it, even if he didn’t like her.
Cheris had informed him that Kujen’s base would open its outer sanctum to anyone, since Kujen needed to be able to access it in whatever body he chose. Jedao had doubts born of a short lifetime serving Kujen, but he was also out of options. He might be able to recover from whatever weaponry slammed down onto the surface, but Cheris needed shelter now.
The door ground open before him. With little atmosphere on the moon, there wasn’t sound as such, and Jedao didn’t think he had hearing left anyway; the agony in his skull suggested he’d done something bad to his eardrums. The vibrations rumbled against his soles, however—and for fuck’s sake, he didn’t need the reminder that the bones in his feet throbbed as though they were starting to splinter or whatever his body did after abuse like this.
Jedao would have liked nothing better than to flop to the ground and wheeze in agony while waiting for his body to knit itself back together. But that would mean conceding victory to the Shuos. Close, close, close, there are hostiles out there. The door seemed to be in no hurry, so instead he hastened deeper into the throat of the base, as though he were a sacrifice begging to be eaten.
Bad thought; remembered hunger twinged at the pit of his stomach. He gagged as the airlock cycled, tasted the air with its sweet oxygen, and the slight fragrant hint of perfume, how like Kujen to care about things like that. (Had he never considered that one of his anchors might have a heretofore unknown allergy?) I’m not hungry, he told himself. He couldn’t be that badly hurt. Wouldn’t allow himself to be.
Still, there had better be a stockpile of food in this base—even Kel ration bars—just in case.
Too bad he didn’t have the luxury of slumping with Cheris in his arms, awkwardly webbed to him as she was, and enjoying the simple fact of breathing. Now that he’d entered the base—
The transmission arrived on schedule. His nerves jangled and for a moment he wondered if he’d caught on fire. It would serve him right. But no: it was a burst transmission to his augment, specifically of a number. A very, very large composite number.
Cheris was supposed to deal with Kujen’s fucking math problem. She had sounded so enthusiastic as she explained the principles of the calendrical lock to him, and even more enthusiastic, momentarily forgetting that she disliked him, when he revealed that he knew what prime factorization was. Too bad she had despised Kujen, because Jedao could imagine the two of them discussing disgustingly incomprehensible mathematics for fun over milk tea and custard buns. In his haste to escape the hostiles, however, Jedao had accelerated too fast and the knocked Cheris out.
One step at a time. Panicking over the enormity of what he was about to try didn’t help. He broke it down to easily digestible steps (ha, ha). He couldn’t give up this close to achieving his goal.
Jedao retrieved the knife he had pocketed earlier and slashed Cheris free of the webcord. Then, cradling her head so he didn’t cause her further trauma, he set her down near the wall. He wished he could offer a softer surface than the floor, but it couldn’t be helped.
He backed up two steps, turned his back to her, and stared at the knife. The hole in his chest had healed shut; he could even feel the familiar map of scars that reconstituted itself every time. It’s only pain, Jedao reminded himself. It doesn’t matter.
Even so, he bit down on a hiss as he cut himself open. It’s only pain. For the first time, he wondered how warmoths felt when they sustained injuries in the course of battle. He’d never thought to ask one.
Cheris kept her tools sharp, considerate of her. The knife didn’t snag on his flesh, or what passed for flesh. Jedao wiped the blade clean, then shoved it into his belt.
Next Jedao reached into the wound and dug out the device, grimacing at the squelching as he tore it free of the tendrils inside himself. He wiped the case as clean as he could on his clothes, then cut through the skinseal and opened it. To his relief, the device nestled within appeared undamaged.
The number in his augment sizzled against his awareness, as though he’d been poured full of lightning. The augment had interfaced with the local grid. It informed him that he had three minutes and sixteen seconds left to disarm the security system.
Next time I piss off a near-immortal with secret bases, Jedao thought, I’m going to make sure it’s a thug who uses regular locks and not a fucking mathematician.
Even as he entertained the happy fantasy of a lock he could simply cut his way around, or even better, an unlocked door, Jedao transmitted the composite number with its staggering number of digits to the device using his augment. His head ached, which was partly due to the changes to the augment’s contents. He had some peripheral awareness that the base’s initial transmission had simply erased a large amount of data, from interface functions to backed-up memories of irrelevant trivia about dueling competitions. (Jedao hadn’t trusted a device to keep his secrets from the Shuos.)
Time for the hard part. Jedao heard the Shuos moths singing as they fought, although he wasn’t going to give himself away by attempting to address them. Did moths of different factions object to fighting others of their own kind? Something to ask Harmony later if it survived. He was tempted to call out to it, but he didn’t want to distract it. For all he knew, it blamed him for the hit it had taken.
With any luck, the crews on those shadowmoths were distant enough that Jedao wouldn’t have to account for them when he attempted to modify the local calendar to a heretical one in which the factorization device could function. Kujen’s weakness had been his extreme attachment to the high calendar; he’d never anticipated that someone using a heretical device would try to break into his base, or he’d believed that by that point the base would be compromised anyway. Cheris was unconscious, and therefore of no help, but at least she would be—how did they say it in math?—a constant factor.
Jedao accessed his augment and set up the initial computations for the ritual despite the screaming pain in his chest. It’s only pain. As far as he could tell, Cheris would have been able to do the math in her head, lucky her. He was just a runaway, not the savant who had almost single-handedly wrecked the hexarchate. He needed a computer algebra system.
Dimly, Jedao sensed the shadowmoths treeing the Harmony. It had landed, and the particular dense mass that was Cheris’s servitor friend had wedged itself... in the cargo hold? It must be hiding from search parties.
The device tracked fluctuations in the local calendar. Unfortunately, its readouts hadn’t been designed for the sightless. Jedao growled and wasted precious seconds piping them to his augment so he could interpret the raw data. While he’d heard of people blinding themselves to avoid Andan enthrallment or Rahal scrying, usually in the context of dramas or specialized pornography, the hexarchate only thought about the unsighted in a military sort of way, such as Shuos infantry operating in the dark, or computers providing voice access to people who were waiting to have replacement eyes grown and installed after trauma. Whoever had designed the device hadn’t thought about the needs of temporarily blinded individuals who couldn’t regrow their eyes fast enough to beat what was probably a self-destruct countdown.