Dragonfly by Erica Hayes

better. I couldn’t let my temper—or my hormones—jeopardize the mission. I had to make him trust Lazuli, respect her. Not think her foolish, hot-headed, intemperate.
    I watched him from the bottom of the stairs while he studied the display, entering decryption parameters on the console by touch, reflected equations glimmering in his dark eyes. He was cracking crypto, no doubt the data he’d stolen from the neurospace.
    I wandered over, casual. “What’s that, a Zykovski space?”
    He flicked me a cool glance. “Want to try?”
    “Me?”
    He shrugged and stood, swinging the chair toward me. “You said you wanted in. It’s Zykovski six-gen, or maybe four. Recalcitrant son of a bitch.”
    Excitement clinched, and I sat down, the padded seat warm from his body. I studied the math he’d done so far, and unease glimmered inside. There were abbreviations, incomplete fractal sketches, leaps of deduction I couldn’t follow, and the first half of it baffled me completely, but the whole thing fit together perfectly. Elegant, efficient, intuitive.
    Exceptional , Surov the cat-man had said of Dragonfly. He hadn’t exaggerated. I was impressed, and I didn’t want to be. Damn it. Did the scumbag have to be clever as well?
    I bit my lip and concentrated. He’d stopped partway through a rapid factoring construct, the kind of thing that etherwave hackers would wet their pants over, and that sent cold sparks of terror down the biotech-riddled spines of the infosec creeps at intelligence division. Since Petrova and Solitsin at New Moskva Tech discovered the new math, even neural circuits couldn’t codebreak as quickly as a human brain. Cryptosystems are based on one-way functions—arithmetic that’s simple to do, but impossible (or at least violently impractical) to undo. For instance, it’s much easier for a computer to multiply two numbers together than it is to figure out from the answer what those numbers were.
    Even neural computers still factorize by brute force, starting at one and trying every prime number on the way up. When you’re talking million-digit numbers, that takes a lifetime, unless you can take a short cut by eliminating sets of options.
    That’s the sort of thing hyperalgebra is for, and when you consider that everything we do is based on information security, it’s the scariest mathematical discovery of the millennium. The upside is that almost no one understands it. But coupled with black-art intuition, it can wreck a cryptosystem in record time, so long as you’ve got a genius on hand.
    Luckily for me, my new pet genius had already done most of the work. It took me twenty clumsy minutes of guesswork to complete his construct and execute. Error. I transformed a variable and ran it again. Still an error.
    Dragonfly watched, tapping the console’s glass edge softly. “So what’s your name?”
    “I told you already.” I added an imaginary constant and tried again.
    “No, I mean really. Lazuli sounds like an Imperial codename.” He watched me for a reaction. “But it wouldn’t be yours, would it?”
    I kept my face blank. “What do you mean?”
    He reached over me to point, pressing against my shoulder. “Try seven alpha i there.”
    I couldn’t see the connection. I shifted my thighs, warmth creeping over me. His damn smell was all over the place, along with my concentration. “Sorry, what?”
    “I said, your left-hand side there reduces to an isomorphic field. Try seven alpha i .”
    He glanced at me, his gaze flicking downward, then he flushed faintly and glanced away. Now I was getting somewhere. I wasn’t above dirty tactics—why should I be, if he and his rebels weren’t?—and if he wanted me, we might as well get it over with. I could take it. I’d just pretend he was someone else. And then he’d tell me what I wanted to know. They always did.
    I licked my lips and leaned closer. “You can’t run seven alpha without transforming the whole thing.”
    He swallowed and shifted