Jedao had gathered up his cards and began shuffling them. He almost dropped the deck twice. The hexarch observed this with a curious mixture of exasperation and pleasure. “Consider me warned,” Jedao said pleasantly.
Consider me warned. Surely Jedao wouldn’t be suicidal enough to attempt to breach the base after the hexarch himself had warned him? Because if the figure out there wasn’t the hexarch, Jedao was the next likely candidate. At least, Hemiola hoped that no one else knew about Tefos’s location, or what was the point of a secret base?
“This person’s thermal signature doesn’t indicate any anxiety,” Hemiola said. “Surely that’s a good sign?”
“Shut up,” Rhombus said, “I’m factoring.”
“Me too,” Sieve said. “Want to help?”
Hemiola suppressed a flicker. Instead, it wondered what the intruder was doing. Like most servitors, it could track visuals in multiple directions at once. Its attempt at further conversation dimmed when it returned its primary focus to the monitor.
The figure had brought out a complicated device, all loops and wires and semiprime circuits, with a small panel displaying an unfamiliar user interface. Unbothered by the countdown, the figure fiddled with some controls, then set the device down. The figure began a meditation in front of the ashhawk alcove.
“We should intervene,” Hemiola said, suddenly concerned. “Look at the calendrical gradient. It’s shifting away from high calendar norms, and not in a way that’s doing anything for the lock.”
“If you distract Kujen and he messes up,” Rhombus said, “we’ll all get killed even faster! In what universe is this a good idea?”
“I have to agree,” Sieve said.
Hemiola gave up on speaking to them and returned to unpuzzling what the figure was up to. If it was going to perish, it might as well learn something in its last—Don’t be morbid.
The figure was reciting chants in an older form of the high language, one that survived in ritual use. The hexarch had lapsed into it from time to time during his stays. The chant came from a litany for one of the festivals devoted to chocolates.
Four minutes left.
Even stranger than the choice of festival were the calibration readings in the chamber. Because of the figure’s observance—it hadn’t escaped Hemiola’s notice that it was timing all its recitations to the clock’s downward count—the local calendar was deviating even further, almost to heretical degrees.
And the change was propagating throughout the base. The grid flashed red with a belated alert, warning Hemiola of the calendrical rot.
Three minutes left.
For someone concerned about its impending death, Rhombus was arguing passionately with Sieve about—how had they gotten on the topic of landscaping anyway? Especially since they only ventured outside every century, during the hexarch’s visits?
The figure straightened and slammed a hand down on the terminal. Hemiola presumed it was answering the grid using its augment. Inputting large prime factors manually wouldn’t be practical, not with slow human fingers.
Two minutes left.
The device blinked. Hemiola longed to take it apart and find out what it did. Something to do with factorization or otherwise bypassing the lock, surely.
“Don’t scare me like that, Kujen,” Rhombus muttered in a frantic magenta.
“He’s not done yet,” Sieve reminded it.
The figure rapidly executed three meditations, orienting itself at precise angles with respect to the chamber’s walls. The local calendar shifted yet again.
The lock disengaged. The timer went dark. Hemiola chided itself for having doubted the hexarch, and never mind his unusual choice of body, or his gear.
“Well, we should see to his needs,” Hemiola said, unable to keep from tinting blue-green in relief.
Rhombus flashed rudely. “As if Kujen ever hesitated to summon us for whatever manual task he needed an extra pair of grippers for. You just want to gawk.”
Hemiola didn’t deign to respond. Instead, it hovered out of the control room at a decorous speed. Around it, the base came alive in response to the hexarch’s arrival. Human-breathable air circulated through the rest of the complex and lights turned on. Hemiola remembered the rock garden that it and Sieve had arranged during the last visit, when they’d surfaced to see to the hexarch’s voidmoth. It wondered, not a little wistfully, if the hexarch would take notice of the garden this time.
The hexarch had removed his suit by the time Hemiola arrived to greet him. He was indeed a womanform, his hair cropped short in a disconcertingly military style that framed a yellow-pale oval face with dark eyes. His clothes were of plain dark fabric. No lace, no scarves, no jewelry except a pendant tucked under his shirt. He’d already unzipped his jacket and folded it over a spare chair.
Hemiola was considerably surprised when the hexarch addressed him directly. “Hello there,” he said. “What would you like me to call you?”
Flustered, Hemiola went dark. How was it supposed to respond to that?
More importantly, why was the hexarch speaking not in his accustomed dialect, but in a drawl? It knew that drawl—
“Let me guess,” the hexarch said, his speech forms uncharacteristically informal. Not impolite, just informal. “There’s confusion about who I am.”
Deciding that it didn’t want to risk offending the hexarch, or whoever it was, Hemiola flashed a simple acknowledgment, then waited.
“The hexarch is busy with other matters,” said the not-hexarch. “I’m Shuos Jedao.”
Shuos Jedao. The Immolation Fox, and the hexarch’s sometime lover. Why was he here without the hexarch?
“You must have a lot of questions,” Jedao said, “but it’s been a long voyage. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”
Hemiola emitted a mortified gleep. Surely it should be serving tea, or wine-of-roses, or whiskey.
Jedao smiled the tilted smile that Hemiola remembered so well, constant across every body he’d appeared in. “No, really, whatever you have.”
Over the servitors’ channel, Hemiola explained the situation. “Help?” Hemiola asked. Sieve acknowledged.
“Someone’s coming with a glass of water,” Hemiola told Jedao, unthinkingly using Machine Universal.
“Thank you, much appreciated,” Jedao said.
Hemiola colored pink in mortification when it realized what it had done.
“I can understand your language if it doesn’t go by too quickly,” Jedao said with a series of finger-taps in Simplified Machine Universal. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
True, the absence of color and the geometrical placement of lights flattened the language’s nuances. But Hemiola was disinclined to quibble. It hadn’t expected to be addressed in its own language at all.
Just then, Sieve entered with a tray containing the requested glass of water and, even more mortifyingly, a ration bar. In the past, the hexarch had always brought his own food. He’d replenished the store of ration bars each visit—the bars were rated for up to 240 years under standard conditions, whatever that meant—in case of emergency. Nevertheless, Hemiola couldn’t help but feel responsible for the lack of decent edibles.