《Petrolea》


 1: Gasoline

    It was raining gasoline.


    Victor Toledo had his wipers on, but the little squeegee didn''t do much except smear the petrochemicals over the visor of his environment suit.


    <blockquote>


    Visibility: 3 meters


    Outside temperature: -180¡ã C


    Suit batteries: full


    O2 tanks: full


    Signal strength: excellent


    Handshake gauntlet status: standby


    </blockquote>


    Beyond the glowing readouts projected onto the inside of his visor, Victor could just make out the edges of his harvester, mostly defined by the endless churning movement of the caterpillar treads on either side of him. Ahead, beyond the bumper of the huge forestry machine, he could see nothing but falling fuel.


    The access road and the jungle beyond were invisible, but every few minutes, the glassy blade of the low-hanging vane of a Windmill tree sliced the curtain of rain. Mechanoids scurried over those vanes on mechanical legs like clockwork spiders. The feral robots froze as the harvester passed, tracking the machine with hungry sensors.


    A human figure, clumsy and bulbous in his environment suit, swam out of the rain. Al-Waheed, one of the few biologists who hadn''t joined the strike, planted his feet and stuck up his left hand up to signal Victor. His right arm stuck out in front of him, providing a roost for his tame Punisher. The eagle-sized, helicopter-winged mechanoid hunched in the rain, a heap of dripping iron pinions and glowing red headlights.


    "They''re close," said the biologist over the comms net. Victor didn''t know whether "they" meant the striking scientists and engineers he was supposed to rescue or the Tanker trees those strikers were risking their lives trying to protect. Both, he supposed.


    He slowed the harvester, crunching over whatever metallic weeds had self-assembled there since the last time this road had been used.


    "Where are their lights?" he asked. "Are the strikers just waiting for us in the dark?"


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    "Of course, they are," said Al-Waheed.


    Why wasn''t he running this mission? Victor''s place in the hierarchy had more to do with his driver''s certification than his skills in leadership or wilderness survival, and he''d obviously just asked a stupid question. Why would the strikers keep their lights off? Oh. "Because lights would attract mechanoids?" he asked.


    "You got it, boss," said Al-Waheed. "Even Merchant and her tree-huggers don''t love the critters that much."


    "All right. Switching to global address frequencies." Victor brought the harvester to a grumbling halt and called up an eye-movement menu in his visor, scrolled through options¡­


    "Maybe," said Al-Waheed, "switch on your sonar?"


    "Uh, right." That was another finicky eye-menu. The software was designed for command by wrist-mounted keyboard, but of course Victor''s left wrist was occupied by his handshake gauntlet.


    "Dr. Merchant, if you''re listening," Victor raised his voice, as if that might give his signal more power. "Stop this nonsense."


    "Nonsense?" The answering voice was crackly, faint with distance and interference from jungle life, but the behavioral biologist''s glossy accent was unmistakable. "You bloody fool, you drove the harvester out here to arrest us?"


    She spoke so quickly. Victor concentrated, making sure he understood her and his response was grammatically correct English. "Nobody will arrest you, Dr. Merchant," he said. "But you and your people are not safe out here."


    "Neither are you," she said. "Who is this?"


    "Victor," said Victor. "Victor Toledo, I¡ª"


    "Damn it, Toledo, why did they send you out here in that thing?"


    "I know you oppose the use of the harvester, but the resources we extract with it go into your paychecks as well, you know." Victor stood, leaning forward, breathing hard as his suit''s software painted his visor with sonar and infrared. "I don''t understand why you protest like this."


    Ah. There they were. The strikers stood hand in hand, in a human chain stretched across the road into the forest. Behind them, outlined in the slick grays of sonar imaging, bulked the fat cylindrical trunks of the Tanker trees, each one a living store of hydrocarbon energy big enough to keep a space station running for a week.


    Titan, with its chemical resources, low gravity and outer-system real estate, would have been a tempting target for exploitation even without the famous photos taken by the Huygens probe. Cryovolcanoes capped with forests. Iron trees spreading windmill leaves over plains of methane snow. Robotic predators wading through petrochemical lakes, buzz-saw mouths gaping. The impossible bulk of a Leviathan in flight. The fiery battles of mating Dragons. An entire ecosystem evolved, apparently, from ancient alien mining machinery. Why shouldn''t humans step in and claim the resources those aliens had abandoned?


    Now, not even two years since Xanadu had become the first permanent base on Titan, the whole plan was falling apart.


    "We''re protesting the wholesale destruction of yet another ecosystem," said Dr. Merchant. "Now, listen to me, Toledo, you have to turn about and leave right away."


    ?Mi¨¦rcoles! Victor had lost focus, given her the chance to make one of her speeches. He knew how she''d look on the cameras she had undoubtedly set up to document her great statement. The shining heroine making her stand in the gasoline rain, surrounded by hostile jungle and vile corporate shills like Victor.


    "Look," said Victor, "Al-Onazy says he''s going to give you what you want. Caps on harvesting, redrawn logging routes so we don''t disturb the local environment too much. But we must continue harvesting."


    "You are not the only thing harvesting out here, Mr. Toledo."


    Victor lost patience. "Get your people up on my vehicle. Al-Onazy is willing to negotiate, but not¡ª


    Something flashed through the darkness and Al-Waheed shouted, "Gob-swarm!"

 2: Gob-Swarm

    The Gob''s arrowhead shape barely had time to register before the flying mechanoid burst into a cloud of thumbnail-sized wafers. The wafers pattered against the bumper of the harvester and stuck there. When they sprouted antennae and scuttling legs, Victor knew them for what they were: a swarm of assembler-dissembler Van Neumann robots. What the biologists called "factors."


    The factors scurried like ants, searching for metals and plastics to carve out and make into more little robots. Surely that chewing noise was in Victor''s imagination, not his earphones.


    "If you directed that Gob to attack us, you are putting in danger the lives of yourselves and others," said Victor into whatever feeds back to Earth''s media-sphere the strikers had running. "Now please¡ªare you going to get rid of that Gob or what?"


    "I''m trying, sir." Al-Waheed''s tame Punisher spread four wings like helicopter rotors and launched itself. Its body shifted, streamlining as the factors that made up its skin and muscles tightened their grip on each other. A device like an eagle-taloned harpoon swung into position.


    The Punisher''s helicopter blades sprayed gasoline rain as it fired its claw into the swarm of the Gob''s hungry factors. The little robots scattered, but the talons closed around the behavioral and somatic processors at the swarm''s core. Static swept the comms net as the Punisher hacked into the Gob''s brain, and, as if hypnotized, the factors emerged from their hiding places and marched into the open mouthparts of the predator.


    The Gob died, but not before Victor saw another squid-like flash, and another. The harvester rang with the impacts of more Gobs. Blobby masses swarmed over the harvester, too many for the Punisher or even Victor''s gauntlets to deal with.


    "Stop attacking us!" Victor winced at the shrill register of his voice. There were larger creatures down there now, scuttling up from the mud to gnaw apart his vehicle. Something like a metal caterpillar with Dragonfly wings wrapped around his wrist, but the slave-factors in Victor''s gauntlet severed a couple of the creature''s legs before Victor hurled it away.


    "You''re attracting them," came Merchant''s voice over the electronic death scream of the mechanoid. "Listen to me, Toledo. You must leave immediately before something worse attacks."


    Victor scraped bits of caterpillar off his gauntlet, fighting to bring his voice back down. "Are you threatening us, Dr. Merchant?"


    "No, you ass. The jungle''s more dangerous than it''s ever been, and we''re a crowd of humans with floodlights making a bloody ruckus in it!"


    Certainty trickled down Victor''s back, cold and viscous as crude oil: someone had screwed up here, and it was probably him. His ears pricked, as if that would do any good in his suit. And anyway that vibration wasn''t in his suit pickups; it tunneled up from his feet. A low rumble, almost like the harvester''s engine. Except the harvester wasn''t moving.


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    They had to get out of here. "The faster you cooperate," said Victor, "the faster we''re all back safe in Xanadu Base."


    "Safe?" said Merchant. "Were you not listening to me? Have you even looked at my reports? Every week since we''ve been here, the native life has grown steadily more aggressive. Attacks on humans and human artifacts have multiplied exponentially. Give us a week and there will be mechanoids chewing on your executive swivel-chair."


    How stupid was it for Victor to feel hurt? At least he restrained himself from yelling, I don''t have a swivel chair! I''m one of you! Because Victor wasn''t an intrepid field-biologist, he was a programmer, full of theory about how to hack electronic brains, but bereft of practice. He didn''t give a damn about profit margins or the long-term viability of the native ecosystem. He was rated to drive the harvester, and he did what he was told. In this case, that meant, "drive the harvester into the jungle and pick up the protesters before they run out of air or get eaten." He was the good guy, damn it!


    The vibration wasn''t subtle any more. A wave of displaced air washed over the harvester, setting the whole machine swaying like the branches of the Windmill trees in the shadow of a great, descending bulk.


    "Leviathan," said Al-Waheed. "It''s¡ª" He swore in Arabic. "It''s right on top of us, boss."


    "?Mierda!" Victor almost beat his extremely expensive and important handshake gauntlet against the armrest of his seat before he forced himself to calm down. "I mean, mi¨¦rcoles." Not that any of these people cared if he swore in Spanish. God, he wished he was back in Lima.


    "Okay," said Victor. "All right. Reverse the engine." He reversed the engine. "I''m getting us out of here. Strikers, I, um, order you to climb aboard."


    None of the spacesuited figures moved.


    "I won''t let you die out here." Victor stood in his pilot''s seat and waved his arms. "Get those strikers on this harvester before something eats them."


    "Come down off that harvester before the Leviathan eats you," said Dr. Merchant.


    Victor wished he could strangle the woman. But there was absolutely nothing he could do to force the strikers to cooperate, at least nothing he could think of in the time he had before the Leviathan arrived. Victor imagined landing gear extending in the murk above the Windmill trees like the legs of a monstrous crab.


    "Dr. Merchant," he said on her private channel, "Feroza. It isn''t too late to surrender. Save face. Leave under protest. But leave. Get on the harvester, please."


    An intake of breath over the teeth-rattling groan of approaching treads. "Oh, you bloody idiot. You don''t really think we can ride home on that machine, do you? Not now that you''ve attracted something that''s big enough to eat it."


    The rain stopped.


    Or, no, Victor realized. The rain was still falling. He could see it at the edges of his headlights'' beams, hear it through his suit''s pickups. It just wasn''t falling on his head.


    He looked up.


    The giant metal maw gaped wide as it dropped from the dark sky.

 3: Leviathan

    The concussion the Leviathan''s proboscis made when it hit the ground rang through Victor''s suit. The harvester jerked under him, slewed sideways as it was lifted from the mud.


    The vehicle Victor piloted was 16 meters long and 5 tall, 20 tons of caterpillar treads, loaders, delimbers, grapplers, and a train of cradles to hold the denuded trunks of the Tanker trees. It should have been too damn big to move anywhere that Victor didn''t want it to go.


    The Leviathan was bigger.


    The belly of the beast broke the clouds overhead, a whale breaching in reverse. A butterfly that dreamed it was an aircraft carrier. Clouds streaming from air-paddles, the Leviathan plummeted towards them. The jaws on the end of his hose-like trunk clenched around the harvester.


    Victor''s visor flashed with warning colors. Temperature readouts spiked. Radiation fluxed. The reactive glass dimmed against the light of the monster''s smelter throat.


    Something swooped through the air toward him. Another predator, or maybe some symbiont of the Leviathan homing in on Victor''s radio signals, ready to peel and devour his suit or just swallow him whole and shit out the indigestible water and bone meal¡­


    Talons cinched around his torso, tugged him up and away. Victor stared between his swinging legs at the Leviathan''s maw clamped down on the multi-million-dollar vehicle he had been given to drive.


    The braided skin of the proboscis flexed, the teeth at its mouth glowing cherry-red as the furnace inside softened metal for the claws and saws of disassembler mechanoids. Other, larger symbionts scurried down the proboscis. Things like man-sized metal mantis-shrimp unfolded Swiss-army-knife limbs to snatch whatever their brethren left behind.


    Victor was swung in a circle and dropped to the ground. The creature that had saved him released its grip and Victor almost fell at the feet of the woman who was its mistress.


    "Dr. Merchant."


    Her Punisher perched on her shoulder, rotors folded, talons clenched, sensors extended toward Victor as if waiting for him to make a fool of himself.


    "Do you," he gasped, "have a way out?"


    He couldn''t see her expression, but the strike leader pointed back into the jungle in the direction the Victor had come from.


    "Mi¨¦rcoles," Victor cursed, lips numb. "You want us to walk home?"


    Her voice crackled in his earphones. "No, you fool, we have to run."


    Gobs darted through the air and oozed across machinery and spacesuited people alike. Mantis-shrimp mechanoids sliced chunks off the harvester with burning claws. Bloated creatures like giant fleas lapped at spilled fuel. And the Leviathan, with great efficiency, ate the harvester Victor had been so stupid as to drive into the middle of this metal-eating jungle.


    Dr. Merchant was right, a thought which probably didn''t give her much comfort as she watched her people fall under diamond-serrated limbs and sun-hot mandibles. And a jet of flame in the sky signified something worse was coming.


    "Dragons!" Dr. Merchant yelled. "On the ground!"


    Victor hit the mud at the same time as the landing gear of one of the giant, flying predators. The Dragon flamed as its wings tilted, jet engines blasting craters into the mud, its narrow head pointed directly at one of the strikers.


    "Punisher, fetch!" Dr. Merchant commanded, and flung out an arm.


    The mechanoid launched itself off her back, churning through the rain toward the stricken human. It buzzed between the Dragon and its prey, claw jabbing like the stinger of a giant wasp. Surely that wasn''t natural behavior. How could Dr. Merchant have trained the creature so well without using a handshake gauntlet? Despite himself, despite everything, Victor was impressed.


    The Dragon was not. As the Punisher wrapped its claw around the man it had been ordered to save, the Dragon spread its mouthparts and snatched the smaller mechanoid out of the air. It didn''t bother to cut apart the Punisher''s structural elements, just hacked its processes, stole its factors, and sucked dry its reserves of oil and liquid oxygen. The skeleton of metal and plastic splashed into the mud, and the Dragon turned its headlights back toward its human prey.


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    Even in his restrictive suit, the striker should have been able to escape, but the Dragon pulled back its buzzing, steaming mouthparts and extended the long, black tube of its flamethrower. A little pilot light kindled. Victor''s visor lit up with a new danger symbol.


    Oxygen.


    Fire bloomed again, igniting the gasoline rain.


    When he could see again, the oxygen had burned away, and so had the striker. The Dragon rooted through a mass of bubbling plastic that had been an environment suit, clenching its mandibles in apparent frustration when it found nothing but useless meat inside.


    "I''m going to crawl toward the edge of the jungle," Dr. Merchant said.


    Victor''s limbs twitched. Had he just been lying in the mud waiting to be devoured by the damn feral robots? "I didn''t come to Titan to die," he said, mostly to himself. "?Dios! I haven''t even had a chance to do¡­" he stared up at the huge and hungry machines, "...my job."


    The hope was even more painful than the despair. Sharp and hot as the mouthparts of the Dragon''s head, now swinging into position above him.


    His body wanted to lie down and roast in that fire. Rolling back to his feet was the most difficult thing Victor had ever had to do.


    Victor stood up, and the Dragon''s two headlights swiveled to fix on him. Antennae extended from their housings along the giant predator''s grooved head. Mouthparts opened and liquid oxygen drooled and evaporated.


    "Oh," he said. "Oh mi¨¦rcoles." He would never say mierda in front of a lady.


    "What?" said Dr. Merchant. "Get down, you fool, before¡ª"


    Victor held up his arm.


    "Handshake," he said. And his gauntlet went to pieces.


    Unlike the biologist, Victor didn''t have a single tame mechanoid clinging to his wrist. He had about a thousand.


    The slave-factors, each the size and shape of a thumbnail, flaked off his hand and scattered like dropped coins. Even as they fell, they synched with each other and the transponder in Victor''s suit. Fast as army ants, they crawled up the Dragon''s body, wire legs blurring, stumpy antennae waving, broadcasting to the animal''s native factors that they were friends.


    They lied.


    The parasites'' code burrowed into its electronic nervous system, and the Dragon froze.


    Victor took a tentative step forward, put his hand on the Dragon''s neck. It shivered and bowed as new windows opened on his visor.


    "What do you propose we should do now?" Dr. Merchant demanded. "What possible good can it do you to hack a Dragon?"


    "Well," said Toledo, "if my Dragon attacked the others..."


    "It would be torn to shreds along with everybody else." But Dr. Merchant stood beside him, so she must have some confidence in him. Some other plan.


    "Yes?" Victor said.


    "You fly that thing to Xanadu Base and tell them. Try to mount a rescue if you think it will do any good."


    It wouldn''t. Most of the other Dragons ripped at the remains of the harvester, but Victor could see another of the giant predators slithering toward them on its caterpillar-tread belly.


    "Um. I don''t think I can actually tell this thing where to go." Victor scrambled up the Dragon''s flank anyway, over its folded wings. The beginnings of a plan crystallized under the pressure of his fear. "I''ve never worked with Dragons before, but I''ve worked with Punishers, and the somatic programming is very similar..."


    "The emergent behavior is entirely different, however." Dr. Merchant took his hand and scrambled up after him onto the Dragon''s back. "Look for the reward complex connected to its hunting instinct. That should lead to a command to tell the satiated animal to fly home."


    "Fly home." Even as he repeated her words, a summary of the Dragon''s runtime environment flashed in Victor''s visor. "Got it," he said, and air-typed commands into the mechanoid''s brain. EndProcess:Feeding.


    Instinctive responses cascaded out from that simple instruction. The wings unfolded, angled down for vertical take-off. The jet intakes spun up and the mechanoid''s long neck retracted. Its puffy, feathered outline smoothed out, condensing and stiffening as the factors that made up its body held each other close, preparing for flight.


    The other Dragons and various associated monsters did not try to stop Feroza and Victor''s lift-off. Predators and parasites gamboled and capered in the red light that shone from the lights on the Leviathan''s proboscis as it ripped into the vehicle. Most of the other people were gone, fled into the jungle, and Victor hoped they would have enough oxygen to get home. He hoped that he would.


    "I''m sorry for what we are about to do to you," said Doctor Merchant.


    Victor wasn''t. He clenched his fist within his gauntlet and the rain vanished into the blur of acceleration.

 4: Dragon

    Consciousness came to Dr. Feroza Merchant like a hammer between the eyes.


    Not a big hammer. More like one the little ones that upholsterers used.


    Ting ting ting ting. And the sofa had a new pattern.


    She opened her eyes. Focused on the blinking hazard lights in her visor.


    Ting ting ting low oxygen.


    Feroza tried to move and found that she couldn''t. The arms and legs of her spacesuit were welded into the fuselage of the Dragon. Toledo had done that, she remembered, hacking the somatic processor that controlled the way the factors built and maintained its body, trying to grow a cockpit around them. Apparently he hadn''t gotten far before the acceleration had knocked him out, but that was better than being knocked off the Dragon entirely.


    Feroza imagined Toledo tumbling through the nitrogen/methane atmosphere of Titan, screaming until he hit the ground or another Dragon snatched him in its jaws. She tried to enjoy the image and couldn''t. Contemplating his death wasn¡¯t as satisfying when it was his skills that would keep her alive.


    Ting ting ting.


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    Feroza twisted as much as she could. She couldn''t see much of Toledo, only that he was there behind her, welded to the Dragon''s fuselage just as she was. A few system messages directed into her microphone confirmed he was still alive, although unconscious. No doubt he had more oxygen in his tanks than she, and had no alarms to awaken him.


    Ting ting.


    She almost gave the radio call to summon her Punisher before she remembered. She had captured its mother herself, watched with wonder as the aquiline creature had opened her abdominal cavity to discharge a gleaming collection of machine parts, as intricate and beautiful as the inside of a pocket-watch. The mother Punisher''s own factor swarm had split itself in two to seize those parts and assemble them into a home and factory: the body of a baby mechanoid.


    Now the Punisher was dead, armature abandoned to the scavengers of the jungle, its factor swarm stolen and assimilated into the Dragon under her.


    Feroza looked down at her body, imbedded in the side of the sleeping mechanoid. Had a human ever been so close to a Petrolean apex predator? Had any sapient mind before traced the sleek contours of their head assemblies, the flight surfaces like metal pinions, the bulky, powerful jet engines? Next to these marvels of nature, nothing mattered, not her poor dead Punisher, nor the people she had abandoned in the jungle. Not Toledo''s survival, and least of all her own.


    The feeling was oddly liberating. It might not be so bad to die when the Dragons woke up and peeled her space suit off her like the skin of a banana.


    Ting ting ting.


    Feroza had expected to return from her demonstration. Chastened, perhaps, or even defeated, but alive, surely. Surely Al-Onazy and his vile exploiters wouldn''t let half of Xanadu Base''s staff die out in the jungle. Surely they wouldn''t be so stupid as to send an enormous pile of metal out into a metallic ecosystem without the support of their biologists?


    Now, who knew how many kilometers from base and more than a billion kilometers from home, with her cause smashed and her career in ruins, Feroza considered the possibility of her death. How would Mummy and Daddy and Bubbli react to the news that she had been devoured by the subjects of her studies? Probably not with pride.

 5: Hangar

    "Alright, beasties," she said, "it is time for you to learn that Feroza Merchant shall be no one''s breakfast."


    The first order of business must be to unstick herself from the side of this Dragon. Toledo, if conscious, could simply command the factors holding her to let go. Since Feroza had not the means, the skills, nor the willingness to enslave the creatures'' minds, however, she must set about to tame them.


    She twisted her head, working with eyes, suit cameras, and software to get a glimpse of her surroundings. The nest, or possibly she should call it a "hangar," had floor, walls, and ceiling made of rusty, corrugated scrap iron. The place could almost have been cobbled together in some backwater village to house a Raj-era crop-duster, except for the curved walls and impossibly delicate welding. And the huge, gaping hole into the empty air would have given any human engineer heart palpitations. And there were the LED eyes twinkling from the shadows, not to mention the Dragons, themselves.


    They sprawled on the floor of the hangar like beached orcas. Two adults and two man-sized juveniles snapped lazily at the vermin in the shadows, slid their noses across each other, or simply lay still except for the lung-like pumping of their bellows as they forged new tools inside their bodies. None seemed interested in her.


    Feroza considered the nature of her hosts. Dragons were the apex predators of this latitude, flighted because nearly all pursuit predators flew in the high-density atmosphere of low-gravity Titan, their ecological niche something like tigers or great white sharks. Not much social behavior, but like the Punishers to which they were related, Dragons were viviparous. Their young were not constructed in factory-hives, but by fabricators tucked inside the body cavity. Surely that implied parental investment in young. And even tigers didn''t live together as mated pairs. Assuming a mated pair with children was what she was seeing here.


    Ting ting ting ting the oxygen warning drove upholstery tacks into her thoughts.


    Warnings. Distress signals. With her gloves trapped in the skin of the Dragon, Feroza could only interface with her suit by means of eye movement tracking, a slow and frustrating process made no easier by the damn tinging of the alarm. Like the angel of death tapping her skull with his bony index finger...


    There. Directing her radio to transmit at the Dragon she''d decided was the mother might get her some attention. It might get her ripped apart. The Dragon to whose side she was attached, the father, might decide to scratch her off his hide, but at what cost to the integrity of her suit? Feroza needed an example of what gentler instincts she could expect from these giant predators, and that meant child-rearing. She aimed her transmitter at the nearest sleeping Dragonlet, and flicked the device on at its narrowest beam and highest setting.


    It was the equivalent of clapping her hands in front of the face of an infant. The Dragonlet''s headlights flared on. It thrashed and reared up. And it cried.


    Feroza double-checked that her receivers were recording as the Dragonlet woke up one of its parents. Fortunately, not the one to which Feroza was currently glued.


    The mother mechanoid slid from the shadows like an enormous serpent, wings, engines, and landing gear tucked up on her back, sensors extended on a flexible neck-like tube of helically linked factors. She bumped her iron snout against the distressed baby, nuzzling it, feeling down its flanks for damage. Finding none, she began to turn away, but Feroza activated her transmitter and the baby cried again.


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    Feroza could almost imagine the sigh of resignation as the mother Dragon pulled back her mouthparts and vomited a black stream of nourishing gasoline into her progeny''s gaping maw. A pause and a muffled clank as machinery re-aligned within the mother''s head, and the baby got a sip of the precious liquid oxygen needed to burn that petroleum.


    The baby stopped crying and curled up. Carbon dioxide frost steamed off its belly as it began to distill its meal.


    Feroza waited as long as she dared before rebroadcasting the signal. Wide beam, this time.


    The father Dragon shifted under her and the mother came to investigate. Headlights focused on her. Antennae rose in what Feroza could only interpret as a quizzical gesture: What could such a strange creature be doing on my mate?


    She broadcast the infant distress signal again.


    A metallic probe bumped against her chest plate, hard enough to set off more warning claxons. Then, vibration along her sides as the two Dragons dragged their snouts around her.


    A deeper vibration. A shiver and burst of heat she could feel even through her suit. Toledo wasn''t the only one who could communicate with and control factors. The tiny robots clamped to her suit released all at once.


    Feroza sprawled to the floor of the hangar. Behind her, the father Dragon reared, the edges of the hole in his skin zipping smoothly back together. He unhinged his mouthparts and gaped a threat at the tiny human who had invaded his domain.


    Feroza pulled her legs and arms under her, making herself small, willing the Dragons to forget about her. They were just animals, after all, with no instincts regarding organisms like her. Her human outline should make no impact on their awareness, but if a Dragon decided to sample a bite of her environment suit¡­


    Deal with that later. For now, she had more pressing concerns, such as breathing. Feroza could switch out her oxygen tank for the emergency spare, but that wouldn''t give her enough time to fly back to the base. Even if she wouldn''t be arrested there. Even if she could persuade Toledo to mind-rape one of these animals again.


    She turned her head, daring a glance at the human body still glued to the back of the male. He was still there, still unconscious.


    In the same way she was aware of the Earth, hurtling through space two billion kilometers away, Feroza knew that if she cannibalized Victor Toledo''s suit, she would gain oxygen and electricity enough to keep her alive for another day. That was what the Dragons would do, were they in her position: reclaim the resources necessary to survival. It was what a tiger, if there were any tigers left alive on polluted, overpopulated Earth. But Feroza was a woman, not an animal, and she was not capable of murder, even to save her own life. She turned her attention from Toledo to the Dragons.


    Feroza could almost see the question passing between the two animals: What could this thing be?


    The father''s head drew closer. Factors decoupled under the lenses of his eyes. Sheets of metal pulled back to expose the clamps, spikes, and torches of his feeding apparatus. Perhaps it will taste good.


    The mother slithered between Feroza and the sleeping young. Or perhaps it is a threat.


    The blunt tube of her flamethrower clicked into position. Liquid dribbled onto the rusted floor of the hangar-nest, where it boiled into vapor.


    A warning flickered in Feroza''s visor: oxygen. Exactly what she needed. And exactly what she knew how to request.


    Feroza triggered the distress signal again and held her hands up before the mouth of the serpent.

 6: Smells Bad on the Outside

    "You''re doing it wrong," said Victor.


    Dr. Merchant''s head turned inside her fishbowl helmet, little more than a dark smudge under the slick of oil and boiling oxygen. "Ah," she said. "You''re awake."


    She lifted her dripping hands toward the terrifying maw of the Dragon, as if Victor might have missed it. "You see I am using the Dragon''s maternal instincts to win for us a fresh supply of oxygen."


    What Victor saw was Dr. Merchant kneeling before one Dragon, holding up an oxygen canister while another dribbled liquid oxygen onto it. Most of the stuff away in the -160 air, so only a few drops actually managed to bubble into nothing on the rusty floor.


    Victor blinked at her for a few moments, first trying to figure out what she thought she was doing, then waiting for her to see the obvious flaws in her plan.


    "You know you''ll never fill the canister that way," he said.


    Dr. Merchant didn''t put down the useless canister. "So help me. Can you program the factors in your gauntlet to make a funnel and valve?"


    Victor tried to imagine a device he might persuade his slave factors to construct that would mate a standard oxygen canister with the flamethrower nozzle of a Dragon. "It''s impossible."


    "Do not tell me what is impossible," she snapped. "Help me, man, if you want to survive."


    Victor bit back the first response that came to his mind and tried to focus on the problem of respiration. "We need a compressor or refrigerator to condense the oxygen back into liquid for storage."


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    "Unnecessary," she said. "The Dragons compress and refrigerate oxygen inside their bodies. Now, if it were possible to train the Dragons to hold still long enough¡­"


    If his hands had been free, Victor would have waved away the biologist''s speculation. Instead he just lay there, welded to the other Dragon, and said, "I have a better idea." Dr. Merchant was a biologist. Her specialty was the whole, but Victor''s specialty was the parts, and he knew what parts he needed.


    Victor blinked and rolled his eyes and selected a command from the menu in his eye-tracking interface. The factors he had programmed to grab him relaxed, and he tumbled to the floor. He tried to flip over and got a shove on his back for his trouble.


    "Stay down." Merchant had stopped propitiating the Dragon and thrown herself over his back. "Try to look serpentine."


    "What?"


    "Like a snake, man. Like a Dragonlet."


    Victor tried to squirm.


    "Good, good," said Merchant, although whether to him or the Dragon, Victor didn''t know. "Now you listen here, you utter fool." That was definitely to him. "Do you realize how close you came to being eaten by the father Dragon? You are quite unequipped to survive out here. So respect my orders without question, and do nothing without my permission."


    Said the woman who''d been trying to milk oxygen from a Dragon. Said the woman who''d nearly gotten him killed. Who had almost certainly gotten all those people killed in the jungle. This sneering, privileged academic princess deserved to suffocate here and be eaten by her adopted robot-parents.


    Victor would do the right thing and save her, but he certainly wasn''t going to let her ego interfere with his efforts to save both their lives. Silently, he activated his handshake gauntlet.


    The slave-factors were still inside the body of the Dragon, tapped into the behavior processor, or brain. In order to infiltrate the somatic processors, Victor had to command his factors to physically relocate, then set up a network to synchronize their execution. It was a tricky bit of work, but at least he didn''t have to write the programs for them to execute. This was something he''d been playing with at the base, though on smaller animals. The executable''s name was "smellsBadontheOutside."


    "So what do you propose to do in order to get the oxygen we need?" asked Dr. Merchant.


    "This," said Victor, and executed the program.

 7: Access to those Organs

    The Dragon''s body ballooned outward and burst open. The head struck the ground and bounced, throwing the beams from its dying headlights across rib-like structural supports and glistening fabricators, now open to the air. Steam puffed from the inner recesses of what had once been the animal''s body, and was now a life-support module.


    Victor should have predicted what happened next. It wouldn''t have changed his decision to...what was Merchant screaming at him? "Murder an innocent creature and their only hope for survival." But they needed pressurized oxygen and the Dragon''s internal organs were designed to pressurize oxygen. Now they had access to those organs. If Victor had warned Merchant, she might have tried to stop him. Then again, they might have done something about the other Dragon.


    The animal reared over Merchant''s head and brought itself down between the biologist and Victor, wings splayed, engines growling, face plates pulling back to expose the nozzle of its flame thrower.


    Victor dove away from the stream of fire the beast belched at him.


    You had to really work at it to dive in Titan''s 0.15 gees. Victor had a good couple of seconds hanging helpless in the air while he contemplated the choices he might have made.


    At least the stupid animal tracked him with its fire. The body of the first Dragon didn''t catch. The precious oxygen in its compressors did not explode and kill them all.


    Ah, the floor. Victor braced for impact. Instead, he pressed down before bouncing off it, sliding across the floor.


    Thank God he hadn''t jumped the other way, or he''d have flown out the window and into the cold, empty air. Thank God he didn''t need to be touching the ground to work his handshake gauntlet.


    He wiggled his fingers and factors detached themselves from the body of the dead Dragon and scuttled across the floor toward its enraged mate.


    "No."


    For a second, Victor couldn''t figure out the telemetry. Then he got it. Merchant had stepped on one of the factors. Just put her foot on the irreplaceable tool and smudged it from existence.


    "?mi¨¦rcoles! Do not...do that!" It wasn''t easy to land, control his factors and speak English all at the same time. "If that thing raises the temperature in here, the oxygen will explode. Right? So control the Dragon."


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    "Control her? You killed her mate." Merchant was shaking so hard, he could see the tremors through her environment suit. But she slid to the side, much more practiced at moving on Titan, and rolled to her feet. Now, standing between the Dragon and the wall of the cave, the biologist spread her arms and legs and broadcast white noise from her suit''s transmitters at maximum volume.


    The Dragon reared back.


    "Bhaag ja!" she shouted. Or something like that. "Hoosh!"


    "Good," Victor said. "If you can make it go ¡ª "


    "Drive a mother away from her offspring? Don''t be ridiculous."


    "Offspring?" said Victor.


    Three giant metal slugs tumbled away from Dr. Merchant. She followed them, yelling and waving her arms at the Dragon ¡ª the mother? ¡ª which stretched its neck toward her. But it couldn''t flame her without harming its young and it couldn''t reach her before the first Dragonlet crawled over the edge of the window and dropped out of the hangar.


    "Yes," she said. "Good. Now you, help me!" The biologist ducked and skidded toward the other baby Dragons, heading one off as it humped toward the safety of its mother''s side.


    Victor shuffled after the other as fast as he dared. The adult Dragon looked up at him and Dr. Merchant took the opportunity to grab her baby and heave it over the edge.


    The Dragon turned back to blast her and Victor kicked the last baby, which rolled up like a giant pill bug and plopped out the window.


    The mother Dragon screamed across the AM band. It scooted sideways across the iron floor, head dipping, wings rotating back into flight position.


    "Go away." Merchant lowered her arms. "Bhaag ja."


    The adult was much more graceful than the young had been: an elephant seal rather than a giant maggot. Its long, sleek body twisted in the air, coiling around a parachute/jellyfish shape Victor realized must be one of the Dragonlets in flight mode. When mother and child touched, factors moved and the parachute condensed into a little lump on the Dragon''s fuselage. The nosecone moved, questing for the other Dragonlets. The wings flexed and tilted.


    "Once she brings the Dragonlets back," said Dr. Merchant, "she will kill us for what we did to her family."


    Victor turned back to the corpse of the first Dragon, which was already chugging away at fabricating its first human-compatible oxygen canister. Water and food would come next, rendered out of the petroleum these monsters used for blood.


    "Well," he said, "at least we''ll be alive for her to kill us."

 8: Berg

    The bus-sized mechanoid made no response, but Feroza could feel the vibration in her chassis, see the factors of her flesh growing more sluggish in their reactions. I am tired, when can I rest?


    "


    Toledo was still talking. "...but it''ll need more oxygen to burn in its fabricators. And


    Feroza looked down at her steed.


    "So intelligence is the sine qua non


    "It depends, mi se?oraorders


    Feroza stopped with her mouth open, the Dragon rumbling under her. She thought they''d been arguing. Had Toledo thought they were flirting


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    Toledo must finally have realized that he''d upset her. "L


    "I am not sure you understand the extent of the..." suffering


    "You want to force the mother Dragon to eat


    Cannibalize?

 9: Self-replicating meat

    Feroza turned away from the Dragon to look down the slope of the forest-mountain. Below were the superconducting spires assembled by the Berg itself, its flanks had been colonized by a dense underbrush of spinning windmill vanes and pinwheel leaves.


    The alien race that designed and sent their mining robots on their long and lonely mission on Titan had probably envisioned something like what Toledo and his ilk wanted: a massive tower of industry, a petrochemical distillery the size of a planet.


    But nature had intervened. Feroza theorized, and her learned colleagues agreed, that the factors had once been repair robots servicing the automated oil-rigs whose descendants had become the Bergs. But the factors'' programming had mutated. Mistakes multiplied, directed by the blind wisdom of natural selection. Over the course of silent eons, the machines had evolved.


    The Berg no longer accumulated petroleum and the oxygen to burn it for the benefit of some interstellar master. Instead, it served its own goal: reproduction. Feroza gave wide berth to the snout of an immature Rocket-seed, the blunt-tipped shaft thrusting up from the metallic ground, preparing to blast off and carry the Berg''s genetic legacy to some distant part of Titan.


    And to think people like Toledo would undo all of this natural innovation. Chop off the inflorescence of mechanoid biology and reduce Titan back to a mining colony of dumb robots. It made Feroza sick in her heart.


    When she tried to articulate the feeling to the engineer, however, he refused to understand.


    "Nonsense. Titan isn''t alive. It''s just covered by a bunch of self-replicating machinery."


    "So then what is a cow or a goat, but self-replicating meat?" she countered.


    "I guess that''s what it is," he said.


    Something moved between the twirling leaves and Feroza froze. But it was just a Gob: much too small for a Dragon''s sustenance.


    "And what about you, Mr. Toledo. What are you, but meat?"


    "Thinking meat? Dreaming meat?" He had a smile in his voice, but Feroza couldn''t guess why. She was getting too far from the Dragon, but there was no large prey for her to flush. What if she tried to attract some food, instead?


    "Anyway," Toledo said, "so what? You make it sound like Petrolean life has more right to these resources than we do."


    "Of course it does," she said. "Even if the mechanoids weren''t already here when we arrived, every sentient creature deserves to live."


    "Huh? There is no intelligent life on Titan."


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    "Yes," she said patiently. "''Sapient'' means ''intelligent.'' ''Sentient'' means it has feelings. And you can''t deny the mechanoids have feelings. You can''t deny," she said, over his hemming and hawing, "that the father Dragon suffered as you ripped his body apart."


    "All right," said Toledo, "so maybe it suffered. So what? A chicken suffers when one kills it."


    "Even in the Middle Ages, Jains and Brahmins could live without killing," she said, "and this isn''t the Middle Ages. We have no need to be cruel to animals to survive any more. We were just coming to realize that on Earth, and then," she said, mostly to herself, "we discovered Petrolea."


    Feroza examined a clear spot of ground, but a few whacks with her field shovel confirmed that under the oily mud was the nose of another nascent Rocket-seed. It was an excellent source of concentrated fuel and oxidizer, of course, but impossible to break into. She moved on.


    "Oh yes," said Toledo. "I forgot. You think meat is murder, but I bet you''ve never had to eat a chicken or starve."


    Feroza turned her path into a circle with the Dragon in the center, looking for places where she could tap into an oil line. "But don''t you see, Toledo? That is nothing but the wealthy and influential West not caring to give the poor an alternative to meat."


    "Oh, ''the poor,'' you say?" Toledo actually growled into his microphone. "You self-indulgent little princess. Do you know anything about ''the poor'' or where we come from? There were times when I would have killed someone for a chicken to eat."


    "But that''s just it," said Feroza. "You didn''t need to ¡ª "


    "No. This is crazy. You''re crazy. I''m crazy for having this stupid conversation with you. You took the oxygen from the dead Dragon and when I reprogram its fabricators, you will eat and drink the stuff they make because if you don''t, you''ll die."


    "It is better to die than live at the expense of others?" Feroza''s frayed patience finally gave way. "And why am I in this position, where I might die like the friends and colleagues you killed with your incompetence?"


    "My incompetence," Toledo''s English was deserting him. "...the Leviathan! The stupid¡­stupid...?Estupidez ideol¨®gica de una ecochiquita privilegiada, desenfrenada y decadente!"


    From the French and Latin cognates, Feroza assumed that was not complimentary. "If I regain my original beliefs and determination to uphold them, both of us will die. So consider carefully what you say to me."


    The only response was the whistle of the carrier wave.


    Fuming, Feroza tromped through the forest, flushing nothing but Gobs, stray factors, and families of Helicopter butterflies. Finally, she found a likely clear spot at the base of a superconductor spire where the Berg''s oil-lines came close enough to the surface for her to breach one with her shovel.


    Black hydrocarbon slurry bubbled in the light of her torch, spilling down the slope in a river of nutritious and tempting food. It wasn''t long before something moved among the windmill leaves and hopped down to investigate. A laterally compressed body topped by a swiveling turret of sensors. Its powerful legs folded, its undercarriage a-bristle with piercing and cutting tubes, pipes, and sponges. The Gambol looked like a metal flea the size of a motorcycle.


    "There you are, finally."


    "What did you say?"


    Feroza wasn''t aware she''d spoken aloud.


    "A Gambol," she said.


    "Ah," Toledo sounded embarrassed. "That''s good, yes? Why is that good?"


    "I have prey for the Dragon."

 10: Gambol

    "Are you sure you can handle it? I thought Gambols were dangerous parasites."


    "Yes," said Feroza. "Just like the organization you work for."


    He sighed. "You know we aren''t just dumping the petroleum into the sun. We aren''t wasting it. The fuel and plastics and hydrocarbon feedstock...they keep people alive in space stations and habitats all the way back to Luna. We need Petrolea."


    The Gambol dragged its head back and forth, scooping up food. It was almost close enough. "We need Petrolea like a child needs his ice-lolly."


    "So let him have his damn ice-lolly. Food can''t complain."


    A camera twitched in her direction and Feroza held her breath.


    "Alright, maybe you disagree that mechanoids deserve basic rights, but what about people?" Toledo asked. "What about the people in the jungle when you brought the entire ecosystem down on our heads?"


    "I didn''t kill those people," Feroza watched the enormous parasite waddle closer to her, unaware of the danger it was in. Unaware of the meal that it would soon be. "I know you''re not responsible, either, but you did bring the harvester into their territory. It was too tempting a target. You should have listened to us when we said that Petrolean life had become too aggressive to ¡ª "


    "I tried!" he said. "And I was never supposed to be sent into the jungle to arrest you. I am a programmer, for God''s sake!"


    Feroza couldn''t afford to let herself become as emotional Toledo. Forcing her breathing to slow, she bent her legs a precise 160 degrees and jumped, shrieking static across the AM bands.


    The Gambol launched itself away with a kick from its piston-like hind legs. Feroza watched it arc through the air, flipping those legs around, turning them into springs with which to cushion its fall. A fall which brought it nearly on top of the mother Dragon.


    The Gambol squealed over Feroza''s radio and kicked its piston-legs, but they weren''t oriented at the right angle to do any damage. Hooked mouthparts scrabbled and sparks flew as the buzz-saws in the Dragon''s mouth bit into the carapace of the giant metal flea.


    "Dr. Merchant?"


    Feroza realized she''d been staring at the fighting monsters, breathing heavily, for far too long. How was her oxygen? Good. Fine. It was fine.


    "Dr. Merchant? Feroza? What has happened?"


    "The Gambol is down," she reported. "It''s scattering."


    Factors sloughed off the Gambol''s steel skeleton. Some of the little robots managed to escape, but most fell prey to the dragon''s overpowering radio voice and fell into line as members of its own swarm. They marched into their new master''s body cavity, not even pausing to disassemble and transport the armature, organs, and other tools they had so painstakingly fabricated. Nor the fuel tanks they had just filled.


    The Dragon tore into the skeleton, bright trails of light behind the hot tips of her cutting mouthparts.


    Feroza edged forward and snatched up a steel bone from where it had fallen. Feeling rather like a cavewoman, she took the tool back to the gash she had made in the forest oil-pipeline. Petroleum streamed from the wound, already the center of a writhing clump of factors. Some of the little machines formed lines leading back to their nests in the undergrowth, stealing the resource. Others piled on top of each other within nets of spun plastic, self-assembling into impromptu walls, reservoirs, and claws to protect this breach in the Berg''s body.


    Feroza swung her bone-steel staff through them.


    "What are you doing now? What''s that noise?"


    "Killing the Berg''s repair-factors." She took a deep breath. "Keeping the blood flowing." Another breath. "Waiting for more parasites." She backed away from the honey pot. Hid herself again. "My plan is working, and so we might live out the day."


    Toledo was silent for a while, digesting that. "Dr. Merchant," he said eventually, "I am sorry I argued with you. I want to thank you. Without you, I would have nothing to feed into my still. We keep each other alive, right?"


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    "We all keep each other alive, Mr. Toledo. That''s what ecosystems do."


    "Eh? Yes, I suppose."


    Feroza didn''t have long to wait before the next Gambol arrived. And the next, and the guardians the Berg summoned to protect its oil, and the larger things that would prey upon all three mechanoids.


    "I feel like Mr. R.M. Renfield," said Feroza, "feeding flies to spiders and spiders to ants and ants to birds¡­"


    "I don''t know what that means," said Toledo.


    "All for the glory of the great Count Dracula." Feroza raised her right arm and broadcast a specific radio signal. "Come to me."


    The Dragon crashed through the undergrowth, mouthparts agape.


    The first Gambol died before it even noticed the onrushing predator. It fell, sparked and dissolved into bones, organs, and squirming factors.


    Feroza pointed and whistled again and the Dragon attacked another Gambol just as it compressed its spring legs. A leap to freedom became a sideways flop and a terminal shudder.


    The forest guardian, a creature of plates and spikes like a car-sized metal hedgehog, died in a blast of fire, its plastic organs melting. The other predator sprang into the air, a jackal compared to the tiger Feroza had unleashed. It spread helicopter rotors, but the path of its unlucky leap took it past Feroza. She braced herself and swung her bone-steel staff like a featherball racket. The little predator crashed into the ground, where a jab with the staff and a stomp from her boot convinced the factors that made up its skin that they had better chances of survival elsewhere.


    Feroza watched the creature disassemble, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Certainly, she could reduce her impact on Petrolea if she left. When they reached Xanadu Base, Al-Onazy would be only too happy to send her back to Earth on the next rocket, probably in chains. But then what? He or someone like him would go on merrily draining the moon of its resources until none were left. Who would stop him if Feroza was in jail on Earth or dead in the jungle?


    The honey-pot she had made was now a-swarm with orphaned factors. Some tried to reclaim their abandoned armatures of bones and organs. Others tried to self-assemble without them. Most fled or died in the clutches of Gobs and other scavengers. Feroza tried to bag as many as possible for the still. If a person could survive indefinitely in the Petrolean jungle, what works might she accomplish? How might she act against the exploiters?


    "You know what?" said Toledo as she worked. "I am thinking of what we can do with all this feedstock you''re collecting. Why stop at food and water and oxygen, after all?"


    Why indeed? But Feroza was too busy with the slaughter to answer him.


    "I have programs that will make a plastic film to cover the entrance. The walls, floor, and ceiling will need to be covered as well, to prevent oxidation."


    Feroza leaned on her staff, breathing hard, feeling her suit''s cooling fans whir. "We won''t have any leakage if you just keep fabricating spare oxygen canisters."


    "Leakage? Oh no. I want to flood the chamber with breathable air. I want to be able to take off this damned suit."


    Take off the environment suit. The sensual impact of that fantasy stopped Feroza in her tracks, imagining air on her skin. Sloughing away this plodding, restrictive armor. Feeling warmth over the invisible hairs on her body...


    No. No, she couldn''t allow herself to say what was on her mind. Couldn''t allow herself to even think of the decadence of¡­ "I suppose a bath would be out of the question?"


    Silence. Feroza cringed. How had Toledo described her? As privileged? Self-indulgent? Not to mention hypocritical. Feroza was the woman who had prepared to walk into the jungle and make her environment suit into her tomb. Who had told Toledo he should regret every Petrolean life he feed into his still. And now she would use those precious resources to make soap and hot water?


    "I apologize," Feroza said. "Please forget that I said¡­that I wanted¡­it was wrong of me."


    "Oh, no. I don''t think it''s wrong, Dr. Merchant." Toledo''s voice had gone husky. "I was only visualizing how...what resources we would need to requisition. Heating the water should be easy. Soap...I think I can fabricate. A bath...hm."


    "A bath?" She said mortified. A princess of Petrolea, indeed! How could he think she would demand a bathtub? "No, no, I was thinking of a sponge bath," she assured him.


    "Sponge..." he said "...bath. Oh. Oh. That would be...feasible, yes." He cleared his throat. "I will make a curtain, of course. For privacy."


    And Feroza understood. ''I was just visualizing,'' he had said. And then she had suggested a sponge bath. Of course. The point of life was reproduction.


    Feroza''s cheeks burned against the pads of her helmet. What must he think of her? And what was she thinking of him? Toledo would be out of his suit, as well. And would she perhaps enjoy giving him one?


    Once Feroza allowed herself something so louche as a bath in a Dragon''s nest, a bath with a man in a Dragon''s nest hardly seemed worse. And whether they agreed about environmentalist philosophy or not, the two of them were going to be stuck together for some time. Adrift. Benighted. Bereft. With lots of free time...


    "This is not the time. Nor ¡ª even remotely! ¡ª the place." Feroza picked up her bonesteel staff. "So we shall concentrate merely on staying alive." She swung, and clubbed the nearest mechanoid to death.

 11: Princess

    "Almost done." Victor hunched over his work, hands furiously air-typing as his slave-factors danced over the corpse of the Dragon.


    "What did you say?" There was another "oof" of exertion from Dr. Merchant''s microphone and the distant sound of something shattering.


    "I''ll have fresh air for you when you come back," said Victor. "I decided it was easier to fabricate new oxygen canisters than design something that can mate with," he was blushing again. "I mean ''connect to,'' the ones we already have. Metal is not in short supply. And as for food..."


    What had been the male Dragon''s abdominal cavity was now a still. The rib-like struts of the central torso cupped a hissing, burbling life-support system of rough steel cylinders, clusters of golden spheres, and black glass tubes, all of it held together with plastic cobwebs and copper wire. It no longer even remotely resembled the Dragonlets, currently sleeping on the other side of the hangar.


    "I''ll bring more food for your beast," Dr. Merchant grunted. "Have no fear."


    "More food for us," Victor corrected her. "My next product is water and protein paste, but that will use up the hydrocarbon reserves of the, uh, father Dragon."


    "Reducing a creature to its component parts at our convenience," she grumbled.


    Victor didn''t want to start that argument again. "Well," He cleared his throat. "Anyway. We''ve been working on these wilderness survival programs for some time. This was the first field test, but I''m optimistic."


    He watched plastic bladders fill with something heavy and paste-like and thought about Dr. Merchant eating his food. Drinking his water. Bathing in it. Victor tried to remember what she looked like out of her environment suit.


    Small, he remembered vaguely, and usually angry about something. There had been jokes back in Xanadu about her mustache and unibrow, but at the moment, Victor couldn''t visualize either feature. He queried his memory for more details, but couldn''t be sure whether what he got back was real recollection or hopeful fantasy.


    He''d been quiet too long. "Uh. Everything okay down there?"


    "Yes," she said. "Yes, no problems at all." A grunt and a crash, then more silence.


    Victor chewed his lower lip. "Don''t worry, we will not have to live on paste for long. Once both of us are fed, we can go back to Xanadu, right?"


    "You can go back to Xanadu."


    Victor snorted. "And you will go where? To the jungle castle of the Princess of Petrolea? You will die out here."


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    "I will be arrested if I go back there," she said.


    Victor frowned. "No," he said, "they wouldn''t do that. Well. They might. But if they blame you, they blame me too. Then we''re both in jail together," he looked around at the rusty hangar, "and not much has changed, hey?"


    She grunted and killed something down on the slopes of the mountain.


    One of the Dragonlets twitched and broadcast a radio signal Victor had come to recognize meant "feed me." He tossed one of its father''s vertebrae at it, and it quieted down.


    He wanted to hear Dr. Merchant speak more. She had attractive voice. "All right," he said. "What would you do if you were in charge? What do you actually want from people?"


    "Aside from that there be fewer of them?"


    "When people say we should reduce the human population, they never volunteer to be the part of the population that gets reduced." Too late, Victor remembered he wanted her to like him. "Um, I mean we''re in space now. We have the resources to support a growing population."


    "Unfortunately. We''ll just be going faster when we hit the Malthusian wall." And before he could ask her what the hell that meant. "And now we have a whole new biome to bring down with us."


    "You act like we''re all doomed." Victor grinned as he worked. "If Mumbai is really so bad, you come live in Lima with me, he? Thanks to space industry, it''s a cleaner and more beautiful place than before."


    "Only at the expense of a dirty and ugly Petrolea," said Dr. Merchant. "You drove through the clear-cut area around Xanadu Base. Didn''t it sicken you?"


    "No? What do I care about the Petrolean jungle? I don''t have to live there."


    Dr. Merchant paused for a moment, panting. "Clearly, you do."


    That made Victor laugh out loud. "You''re right," he said while he worked in the Dragons'' lair. "It''s too bad we didn''t pave over this part of the solar system. Wouldn''t it be great if we already had electricity and air? I could take you out to eat at the Burger King down the Berg. Ooh, or maybe Bembos could open a branch on Titan. You''ve ever heard of Bembos?"


    She sighed. "My point is that if we did live here, if we moved out of the artificial and unsustainable technological shells we''ve built around ourselves, we''d have more respect for the natural environment."


    He scrolled through options in his eye-tracking menu. "You think it would be better if we all lived in villages in the jungle?"


    Doctor, I know people who used to live in the jungle, and they thought the slums around Lima were a big improvement."


    "So the slums keep growing. More and more people piled on top of each other until the whole global environment collapses underneath us."


    Victor snorted. "Nothing collapsed under me. I learned how to code and moved my family out." He hoped the automatic bank transfers he''d set up were still beaming money back to his friends and family. He hoped the investment funded by space industry kept flowing, and Lima kept blooming. That way even if he died here in this den of monsters, his nephews and nieces might grow up in a better, more prosperous world.


    "And once this job is over, you plan to move up again, do you?" She asked. "Dubai, maybe, or London? Along with every other upwardly-mobile young professional on Earth."


    "No, I''m going to stay in Lima, because it is a lovely city," said Victor. "But if everyone else wanted to move in with me...why not? If the whole human race lived in my city, the rest of the planet would be free, hey?"


    "A city of eight billion people? Are you joking? How could we possibly feed that many people? Can you imagine the amount of garbage they would produce?"


    "We''re feeding and dealing with the garbage of the human race right now," said Victor. "Packing those people together would make everything more efficient."


    She laughed for some reason. "Save us from social engineering by real engineers."


    That stung. But it was good to hear her laugh.

 12: Warm Organics

    "Oh, pucha.


    "I thought they were treated in some way ¡ª ay


    Victor''s eyes went from the crawling Gob to the bag of breakfast paste. "Pucha


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    Surprised and gratified.


    "Oh," said Victor, "oh, mi¨¦rcoles.

 13: Symbiosis

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    Feroza couldn''t help but share the sentiment. She peered through the fishbowl helmet at the man inside, and saw Victor''s eyes were red-rimmed and wide with fear. His large nose dripped. His skin was gray and slick. "I''m reasonably certain Dragons can''t count," she assured him. "The mother will care for us and

 14: Ecological Karma

    What must he think of her? Feroza''s cheeks flamed. "A slip of the tongue." And that


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    "Would you stop saying ''enslave''? You can''t enslave a machine to do what it was designed

 15: Parental Investment

    "Mi¨¦rcoles,


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    Victor threw up his arms. "This is ridiculous. I was looking at her active processes. It wasn''t an instinct that told her to eat you. Your dependency privileges were overwritten


    Or when your body is flooded with adrenal secretions, you want to strike out at the people trying to help you.


    Victor''s hand came down on her shoulder and she twitched. "Dio,

 16: Condensation

"The still can replace our air. And it''s not my foam," Victor staged an elaborate bow and felt only a little silly doing it, "it''s Petrolea


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 17: In Xanadu

    What had he been thinking about surviving a day with the Dragons? What had he been thinking about Feroza?


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    "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree


    "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea

 18: Proboscis

    Petrolea spread under them, a cloth of black silk embroidered in silver, gray, and red. Windmill leaves churned beyond the wings of the Dragon they rode, creatures walked and flew and attacked each other. Victor made a nauseated swallowing noise and his arms tightened around her waist.


    "If you don''t like the view," Feroza told him, "don''t look."


    Their mount flew with outspread wings, feather-like control surfaces splayed. Every few minutes, the long body would clench and surge upward with a burst from its jet engines.


    "Can''t we make this thing go any faster?" asked Victor.


    "You know exactly how fast we can go," Feroza said. This trip to Xanadu might well kill the mother Dragon and, by extension, the two Dragonlets that remained in the hangar. Perhaps, Feroza allowed herself to think, there would be time to help the mother Dragon after they had arrived at Xanadu Base. And she, Feroza, had left it.


    "How many people do you think made it back from the jungle?" asked Victor.


    Feroza winced. "Most, I hope. We are all trained in wilderness survival and we had enough oxygen to walk back, I made sure of that. But once you brought that harvester into the jungle and attracted all those large predators..."


    "Why?" asked Victor. "I wasn''t the first person to drive a harvester into the jungle."


    "You were, however, the first to do so without any support from the biologists and our tame mechanoids to drive away the wildlife," said Feroza. "Wildlife which has been growing steadily more aggressive since we''ve begun intruding into their habitat."


    Victor nodded grimly. "I had to overwrite the Dragons'' perceptions of us again this morning, did you know? This ''eat humans'' command springs up whenever they look at us."


    "We are covered in slabs of delicious raw materials." Feroza patted the thigh of her suit. "It should be no surprise when mechanoids target human equipment. We''ve been tracking that behavioral change since almost the beginning. Adopting ever-more expensive countermeasures."


    "We engineers always thought you were exaggerating about that."


    "I trust you understand better now," said Feroza dryly. "Perhaps we should have taken more of you on field trips like this one." Well, perhaps not exactly like this one. Feroza could hardly expect to individually seduce the entire staff of Xanadu Base.


    Is that what she had done? Was seduction even possible when the seductee all but melts into a puddle of willing ardor at the mere sight of one''s face? Feroza smirked, remembering the blush that had pinked his face under the stubble on his cheeks and head. Victor had resembled a pink-fleshed kiwi with a nose.


    Still, whatever animal instincts that had put them both in such need of release, Feroza couldn''t think of a single other person at the base who would have made a more enjoyable partner than the eager and unexpectedly skilled Victor. Which would make her certain arrest at Xanadu Base that much worse.


    Below them, flying creatures congregated around the column of an enormous Rocket-seed, a bigger flock than Feroza had ever seen. And there...she squinted and the visor of her helmet zoomed in on the direction of her gaze.


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    Odd. Three Leviathans flying together. That shouldn''t happen; there was no concentration of food on Titan high enough to support more than one of the massive mechanoids. And yet there they were, great articulated paddles flapping along their sides, proboscises coiled, skimming over the jungle like segmented metal zeppelins. Also odd that they were heading in the same direction as Feroza and Victor, toward Xanadu Base.


    "Don''t worry about what happens when we get back," Victor said, who had not been distracted by the wildlife. "Even if." He swallowed. "Even if nobody else has made it back, I''ll tell them that what happened in the jungle was an accident. A natural disaster. They happen on Earth, too."


    Feroza watched the Leviathans. Flying mechanoids sported like dolphins around the colossal scavengers, jetting around their patiently beating air-paddles, cork-screwing around each other as if in anticipation of a coming feast.


    "Why do you think Al-Onazy will believe you?"


    "Huh?"


    "Look at it from his perspective," Feroza said. "The most outspoken member of a faction of environmentalists is one of only two survivors of a deadly and extremely expensive fiasco. The other survivor is someone who knows how to control mechanoids and make them, for example kill everyone else."


    "Never! That would be..." Victor sputtered, "evil. Al-Onazy can''t think you''d kill people!"


    "Al-Onazy might very well have lost two thirds of his workforce. We know he lost his precious harvester. I''ve accomplished exactly my stated purpose: stop human exploitation of Petrolea." Feroza stared into the distance, where the cleared land was already visible. An ugly scar in the forest perpetrated by people like Victor. "Al-Onazy will need someone to blame."


    "I''ll tell them it was my mistake that got everyone killed. You don''t have to be punished for all this¡­" Victor''s gloved hands shifted over her armored waist. "All of Petrolea."


    "Someone must atone," said Feroza. "Why not me?"


    "Atone?" Victor repeated as if searching his mental dictionary. "Why?"


    "Why? We slaughtered a family of Dragons to give ourselves a place to have sex."


    "Asu!" He said, "You and your guilt! No pleasure without pain, hey? What are you, a nun?"


    "And you are a chimpanzee," she said, "or a spoiled child. Never considering the consequences ¡ª "


    "And what would be the consequences of you dying alone in the woods, huh? Is there some karmic scale here you think you''re balancing?"


    "Not karma," said Feroza, "martyrdom. Maybe my incarceration will send a message."


    "What message? In God''s name, animals on this planet literally have gasoline for blood. People won''t stay away from Titan even if one of those Leviathans eats Xanadu Base!"


    They swooped over the line of logging, nothing below them but methane streams running between broken debris and self-assembler weeds.


    Feroza remembered the speech she had prepared for the strike''s last stand. How grand she had thought herself, how noble and self-sacrificing. Except she had sacrificed everything except herself. Her life stretched before her, cold and lonely as the greasy wasteland below.


    Victor stayed silent until the habitat was in sight. "Look," he said. "I''m...not happy about how we met each other, but what happened after that...I am glad to know you." He patted her, gloves thumping against the belly of her suit.


    Feroza didn''t answer. She stared, dry-eyed and thin-lipped at the dome and tower of Xanadu base in the center of a broad circle of chewed-up battleground.


    "What on Earth?" she squinted. Commanded her visor to enhance the image.


    And saw the full magnitude of the disaster before them.


    The enormous mechanoid squatted atop the remains of Xanadu base like a vulture on the carcass of an elephant. Its huge wings were folded, its proboscis flexed, wormlike, through a crack in the dome. Even from here, Feroza could see the white smear of the habitat''s outgassed and frozen air.


    "Victor," she said, "turn us around."


    "What?" he said, "I don''t¡­I can''t ¡ª "


    "Turn us around!" Feedback squealed against Feroza''s scream as the feeding tube curved up, turned. Cage-like teeth spread and a red searchlight stabbed up at the clouds.


    Across all the meters of murky frigid air, Feroza felt the weight of the Leviathan''s regard.

 19: Cannonball

    The Leviathan munched greedily on the dome of Xanadu Base, a grub the size of a sperm whale. The hose at the front snuffled up another wad of irreplaceable equipment, and flocks of smaller creatures wheeled like crows around the wreckage of human settlement on Petrolea.


    "Maybe it didn''t kill everyone," Victor said. "Maybe they escaped. Evacuated. They could be waiting on the Orbital Station. We can¡­" Victor swallowed. "We can still go home. We can find a radio down there. Contact them. We can¡­"


    "It sees us," said Feroza. "We have to get out of here," Feroza reached out to stroke the Dragon''s back.


    She was right. The habitat was a hulk, a relic, as dead as a sunken ship. Torn open by monsters of the abyss, self-assemblers spreading windmill branches out of portholes and airlocks. Victor didn''t want to see that, hear the clicking of the scavengers down the dark corridors of his workplace. But¡­ "if we want to contact the Orbital Station, we have to access the communication equipment down there, before something eats it."


    The hose of the Leviathan swung below them, red light stabbing up at them from between its gaping jaws.


    "It''s eaten everything already," said Feroza. "And now it''s targeting us."


    "Why would it target us? Nothing that big can get airborne in time to..."


    Sparks flashed along its flank. Victor was reminded of fireworks, muzzle flash, a cannonade.


    Feroza was beating on the Dragon now. "Faster! Turn us around, Victor. Get us out of here get us ¡ª "


    The Dragon dove out from under them.


    Victor commanded the factors of the animal''s hide to grip him and Feroza more tightly. Wind and acceleration clawed at them as it banked and swerved, the devastated ground wheeling. The Dragon had gone insane. It was going to kill them all.


    Victor wiggled his fingers safe in their gauntlet.


    "Trying to establish handshake..."


    "Don''t," said Feroza, and something like a lead watermelon barreled past them. "We have to trust her instincts."


    "Her instincts almost got you eaten yesterday," said Victor. "What the hell was that thing that flew ¡ª oof!"


    The Dragon''s wings flared and Feroza''s back smashed into Victor''s chest as their dive flattened out. Victor caught the gleaming curve of another cannonball sizzling under them before the Dragon rolled sideways and he was upside-down. A lurch, and the third cannonball passed. This one was close enough for Victor to count its coiled segments, see his helmet reflected in a dozen black, swiveling lenses. The Leviathan was firing some kind of living munitions at them.


    The ground loomed out from behind the Dragon''s thrashing wings, a great deal closer now. Victor blinked and it was gone, replaced by a gray sky. That should have been an improvement, except for the hundreds of black dots curving in toward them. The closest cannon-ball creature popped open like an umbrella, slowing, swerving toward them, reaching out with folds of barbed netting.


    Victor wanted to hijack the Dragon''s behavior processor to fly them out of range of the cannonball creatures, but Feroza was right. Victor was no crack Dragon-pilot, and anything he could do would just interfere with their mount''s own efforts to get away. The Dragon dodged and dove, but now the attacks were coming from all sides, and it had no way to avoid them all.


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    "Fire," Feroza yelled, "fire." And, yes, the Leviathan was firing. More flashes. More Cannonballs. Why was the giant beast bothering? Why waste so much effort on two measly humans when it had a whole giant habitat to devour?


    Victor was just opening his mouth to ask Feroza when the Dragon spun him into another black umbrella.


    There was sudden weight, clinging and amorphous, like a sack of cornmeal had been dropped on his head. The Cannonball collapsed around Victor like a metal-and-plastic jellyfish. The factors that made up its body dissolved into a roiling swarm that coated him, pressed him down, and started to chew.


    Alarms rang. Whatever protective coating Victor''s suit retained made no impression on the little robots as they dug in. Victor scrabbled frantically over his chest, trying to find the Cannonball''s organs by feel. If he could find and destroy the somatic or behavioral processors, if he could get his own slave factors to fight off the Cannonballs, he might not end up digested by his own field of expertise.


    "Fire," Feroza commanded again.


    "I don''t have any damn fire!" Victor brushed and scratched uselessly at the river of voracious robots. Points of heat bloomed on his neck, shoulders, and elbows. Then needles of cold as his atmosphere escaped.


    "I''m not talking to you," shouted Feroza. "Come now, my darling! Fire!"


    And there was fire.


    Victor''s visor was already red, his ears already rung with alarms, but the new alarms were louder. "Heat Flux," they said, "Coolant System Malfunction."


    The crawling mass over his face plate evaporated and Victor found himself staring past Feroza down a cone of flame ending in the kerosene gullet-spewing of their Dragon.


    How had she done that? With no handshake gauntlet to command the creature to attack, she just told it what to do? What if ¡ª


    His ears popped. Victor could see the little geysers of steam where his suit was leaking into the Petrolean atmosphere. No. Some of that steam was from the bubbling remains of the Cannonball''s factors. He smeared his left hand through the still-half-molten plastic, tried to plug as many holes as he could. The alarms quieted.


    Another cannonball hit the Dragon.


    This time the Dragon wasted no time in blasting it with fire. And the next attacker that got too close, it fried right out of the air. They weren''t going to be swamped and digested by long-range ballistic octopuses, at least not until the Dragon''s fuel held out.


    The Dragon snapped up the tarry remains of the cannonball it had just roasted. Feroza said, "Hmm."


    "What?" said Victor. "Did you think of a way to escape? Because I ¡ª "


    "No," she said. "Escape is impossible. Forward is the only way. Downward."


    "To the habitat?"


    "To the Leviathan."


    Victor looked at the blimp of bloated malevolence squatting on the ruins of human life on Petrolea. "Uh¡­"


    She made an impatient noise. "The cannons cannot fire straight up. The Fusillade Wyrms would hit the hot air cowlings."


    "What kind of worms? You mean the cannon-ball creatures?" Victor glanced at his readouts. He didn''t have enough oxygen to make it back to the hangar, even if they could escape. "No. I get it. Okay. But what then? We can''t just hover over the damn Leviathan''s back."


    "We can land on it."


    "Are you kidding? What if there are worse things riding it? Cannon-ball creatures. Other kinds of epiphytes?"


    "The word is ''symbionts,''" she said, "or ''parasites.'' Or just ''commensals.'' And yes. I plan to feed them to her." She patted the Dragon''s side. "You hear that? I will feed you. Good food."


    "I don''t think talking to it will make any difference. It''s as likely to eat you as anything."


    The Dragon ducked under another volley of high-velocity death.


    "She will only eat me if you let her. Does the code in her behavioral processor show any tendency to regard me as food?"


    "You mean her runtime environment, or active processes, or behavior cue?"


    "What?"


    "Never mind. The answer is no, and I can delete or overwrite the command when it appears," said Victor. "But I can''t tell her where to land."


    "I can tell her where to land."


    "How?" He still did not want to go anywhere near that horrible Leviathan.


    "By example. Make it let go of me," Feroza said. "Victor, the factors. Make them let go."


    "But you''ll fall."


    Feroza turned to meet his eyes. "The Dragon will catch me."

 20: Falling

    Feroza wished she could feel the wind on her face as she fell.


    Encased as she was by the inviolate shell of her environment suit, she could only watch the onrushing constellation of Fusillade Wyrms. They hung as if suspended in syrup, buds of metal and plastic that bloomed into amorphous flowers as she approached.


    They reached for her, but Feroza tucked her arms and legs together and dove past them, toward their home and symbiotic master. The Leviathan swelled in her vision, less organism than factory; a mobile Berg. Although it could no longer fire Fusillade Wyrms at her, the flexible trunk could bend up and back and open beneath her. Feroza stared into that abyss and cameras stared back at her.


    The human interlopers had finally met their match. The harvesters had been harvested. Where Feroza might blame greedy humans for choosing to obliterate an irreplaceable community of life, she could not blame this giant machine for performing its function, this animal for following its instincts. The destruction of Xanadu Base was a tragedy and a folly, like a little boy sticking his arm into a laundry press.


    They didn''t understand mechanoids and their behavior, but Feroza did. The mother Dragon would dive to catch her. The attack in the hangar had been a fluke, a malfunction of the slave-factors Victor used to control her. Given her own free will, the Dragon would recognize Feroza as her child. She must.


    Victor had less faith. "Ay, mierda! I mean ?mi¨¦rcoles! Move, you stupid animal! Dive, dive faster. Dios m¨ªo, l¨ªbrame de ecochicas paracaidistas. You crazy woman! When this is over I will tie you down ¡ª ?pucha!"


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    He went on in this vein, but Feroza''s plan had worked. The Leviathan''s airspace was far above them now; it could not fire its Wyrms at such high angles as this.


    Meaning that she, along with Victor and the Dragon, would be safe. Safe enough to die on the Leviathan''s back or back in the hangar or somewhere else when Victor finally ran out of things to kill and use to prolong their human lives. Maybe it would be better if the Dragon did not see Feroza as her child. If she let the human brood-parasite fall into the gaping maw that opened below her.


    With a roar of engines Feroza could feel through her suit and the intervening air, the Dragon matched speeds with her. The animal hung in front of her, a column of metallic flesh the length of a bus. A mass of violence and confusion and the need to make decisions. Feroza opened her arms to it.


    Iron wings flared, engines strained, and Feroza''s arms were nearly ripped from their sockets, but their fall smoothed out into a climbing glide. And Victor''s arms were hauling at her, pulling her into a sitting position against his chest.


    Feroza squeezed her legs around the fuselage, felt the factors reach up to hold her in return.


    "Thank you," she said.


    "You are welcome, you crazy woman," said Victor. "I should push you off this thing. I should...I don''t even know. We are the only two people left. Do you understand? Everyone else is dead and you throw yourself off the Dragon like you don''t understand how..."


    His microphone clicked off, but their suits were pressed together tightly enough for some vibration to propagate. Feroza sat there in front of Victor, wondering if he knew she could feel him weeping.


    He was right. Everyone was dead. So were they, sooner or later. But there was nothing to do now but push that death later into the future. Victor was counting on her for that.


    The Dragon slowed. The wings tilted up, the landing gear down. The vast metallic landscape of the Leviathan''s back stretched out before them.


    "Get ready," said Feroza as the Dragon settled onto the metallic carapace.


    "Ready for what?" asked Victor, and something attacked them.

 21: Parasites

    ?Hurra


    Victor wasn''t so sure. What if he


    "I am saying that I''m not just useful


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    "Doesn''t that bother you?" he said. "I mean you''re using her. I mean you''re using it." He meant using me


    "On the contrary," said Feroza. "Unlike many people, I don''t mistake animals for stupid humans or for disobedient machines. They do not exist for or against us. They just are


    "I can''t argue with that." Victor watched the Dragon as it slithered back and forth in front of them, crunching and flaming, working its way through the crowd of creatures with mechanical satisfaction. "Not that I''m complaining," he said, "but why do those things keep feeding themselves to our Dragon? Can mechanoids even get


    "Look," he said. "I know I''m not a biologist or anything, but animals don''t work planetwhy


    "They will rather repair

 22: Tripwire

    Feroza searched for another corpse to glue onto his suit. "It''s a trick we started using in the field when the mechanoids got too aggressive. I think it''s less about blending into the environment than masking our human nature. Endoparasites camouflage themselves with your own body''s proteins against your immune system in the same way."


    Victor frowned, and not only because of the metal tentacle she was wrapping around his arm. "Is that what you think is going on with these mechanoids that attacked us? Are they like the immune system?"


    "No," Feroza said to herself, or maybe to the buzzing thing she held up to her visor. "An ecosystem is a balance of competitors. Your body is composed of genetically identical cells that cooperate and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the whole."


    Feroza, he wanted to tell her, you jumped off a damn Dragon! You fell away from me! Don''t do that. Don''t ever do that.


    Instead he said, "But these little creatures certainly act like cells in the body of the Leviathan."


    Feroza persuaded the wild factors to glue another metallic skeleton to his shoulder. "You''re trying to map these creatures and their behavior onto Terran biology, and you are doomed to failure."


    "But the same thing happened in the jungle when everything attacked us. And we know that Gambols and Dragons and Gobs are all different species, right?"


    "Different morphotypes, yes. Their somatic code is incompatible."


    "Alright. So what happened in the jungle wasn''t some kind of immune reaction, and neither was what happened to Xanadu Base. You don''t see an Amazon research stations leveled by jaguars and sloths or something."


    Feroza just nodded absently and strolled to the edge of their safe zone, where the Dragon presented her with another half-dead mechanoid. Eat, eat, he almost heard the creature say. You''re too skinny. How are you going to grow up into a flying carnivore the size of a school bus if you don''t eat your parasites like a good little Dragon?


    He shook his head and looked back at Feroza, thinking of her walking out with her strikers to possibly die in the jungle, jumping from the back of their Dragon. The Dragon itself, no longer eating the parasites it killed, but killing anyway, spurred on by its love for them, apparently. And in their hate, the Leviathan''s parasites continued to attack.


    "These mechanoids," he said, "they don''t act like animals. They sacrifice themselves."


    "Why not?" said Feroza, accepting another gift from the Dragon. "We humans sacrifice ourselves."


    He winced. Was she playing with him?


    But she went on as if unaware of what she was saying. "People join into armies to defend their territory. If space aliens landed on an aircraft carrier, the crew would notice and try to stop them, wouldn''t they?"


    "You think those things are soldiers?" Victor pointed at a bouncing hoop-shape that uncoiled in the air to become a serpent with a cluster of tentacles for a face.


    Feroza caught it, pulled it apart, and welded it to his chest. "I told you, they don''t need to fit into one of your categories. They just are."


    "But their behavior still has to make sense," he said. "Why do they keep coming? Is there some sort of Petrolean Parliament issuing orders? A Petrolean police to make everyone obey?"


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    "Hm," said Feroza, looking out at the attacking monsters. Their Dragon lurched to snatch up something that looked like a crab made of barbed wire. "It''s a good question. Why else would they behave so selflessly?"


    "They do not!"


    "What?" she turned to face him. "What''s wrong?"


    "Selfless? Pucha, Feroza, this is not good. It is not noble! Normal creatures don''t just dive into death like, like¡­" like you, he wanted to say. Why was he such a coward? He would lose her to this horrible world, one way or another.


    Feroza sighed. "''Selfless'' was shorthand, Victor, like ''love.'' I meant that they do not behave in ways that would be selected for if they were the sole carriers of their genetic information."


    "They''re stupid, in other words."


    "They can hardly be stupid if they are nothing but machines, Victor."


    "But the machines might be used stupidly."


    "What? By with a handshake gauntlet? Someone like you?" Feroza went on before he could protest. "Or, ha, better yet, the aliens that created them have returned to wreak vengeance upon us sinful apes, have they?" She gestured at the line of food marching into the Dragon''s maw. "If the mechanoids were being remote-controlled, I would expect them to respond to us more intelligently."


    "Maybe this is an automatic thing," said Victor. "Like a security system."


    "A security system that covers the whole planet?" said Feroza. "That hijacked the normal functions of thousands of mechanoids and piloted them here?"


    Victor thought about that. "Huh," he said. "Yes. Some kind of...what''s the word? Trap? Tripwire? Some kind of hidden program that recognizes when the aliens'' mine is being tampered with."


    "Well of course you see programming in all of this," said Feroza, wiggling a bit of her camouflage. "You''re a programmer."


    "And you want to see instinct in all of this," said Victor. "But think about how the Dragon attacked you. She was under the grip of the tripwire program. I saw it happen, Feroza. And then you go and trust her again¡­"


    Feroza looked up at the hitch in his voice. "It isn''t a matter of trust. Dragons are nothing but animals, pulled this way and that by their urges and impulses." She looked down. "I was simply¡­limited in my understanding of those impulses."


    "Yeah? Well, what about now?"


    Feroza spread her hands to indicate their camouflage. Their human outlines were almost gone under the weird spoofing the factors had welded onto their suits. And yes, the parasites were dispersing, or at least settling down to eat the corpses of their fellow mechanoids. The red light dimmed as the huge feeding tube above uncurled and dropped out of sight beyond the curve of the Leviathan''s shell.


    They were safe.


    "What do we do now?" said Victor. "We have no radio. No way to contact the orbital station and tell them we''re still alive. No way to go home."


    Feroza took his hand. "The Dragon is right there. She can take us home."


    Alarms went off in Victor''s helmet. Low oxygen. He had lost too much air when the cannonball thing attacked him. That would explain the auditory hallucinations. "We can''t go home, I said."


    "We have the hangar," Feroza said, "Our pleasure dome. Come on." She pulled him toward the Dragon.


    "No," said Victor. "No." He took his hand back. "I can''t."


    Message windows flashed up in her visor. "Oh, your oxygen. You can use my spare canister, while we ¡ª "


    "No!"


    The Dragon looked around at them almost as if it had heard Victor''s shout.


    "We were only supposed to stay there one night," he said. "We were supposed to come home. To be home now. Xanadu Base. I''m not leaving."


    "And you accused me of being suicidal?" Feroza advanced on him. "You''re not thinking clearly. I''ll put you on that Dragon myself."


    "I won''t let you!" Victor swung his arms at the beast. "Go! Go away! We are not your children!"


    And as if the Dragon had heard him, it left.

 23: A Slum

    Metallic trash scattered in the backwash from the mother Dragon''s engines.


    Feroza stared up at her. She wanted to run to the beast, wave her arms, shout to her not to leave her children behind. But, of course, her real children were still back in the hangar.


    "All right," Victor said, "I can hack her behavioral processors ¡ª "


    "No." Feroza exhaled. "Let her go. It''s the right thing to do."


    "Is it?" Victor stared at her.


    "What do we need her for? To take us back to the hangar? To guard us? To keep us company? Let her go back to her family, Victor, what''s left of it."


    "Well...pucha." Victor''s legs gave out. He didn''t so much fall as sink, drifting downward until his bottom rested against the Leviathan.


    Feroza knelt to swap out his spare oxygen canister. "Come, we''ll think on just how to survive for the next few hours. Do you have the materials you need to make another still?"


    "I''ll have to start again from nothing."


    "But you can keep us alive?"


    Victor took a deep breath of fresh air. "Feroza, we can never go home again."


    Feroza looked at him, remembering the large and manifold family he''d told stories about in the hangar. How long would it be before Feroza''s own parents and sister found out what had happened to her? What version of events would they hear? Would mummy and dad still be proud of her, stranded a billion kilometers from home?


    "Maybe," she said, "we can make a new home."


    "What? Here?" Victor looked around. "On the back of a giant flying lobster?"


    "Well, we could live anywhere, with your skills. We could go back to the hangar ¡ª "


    Victor bumped his helmet against hers. "What do you want, Feroza?" he said. "To live here permanently? In God''s name, why?"


    "What choice do we have?" she said. "I know you don''t like Petrolea ¡ª "


    "Es verdad."


    " ¡ª but maybe you will come to like it."


    "Like the Beautiful Girl and the Beast? This place has killed so many people."


    "We don''t know that," said Feroza. "The people in Xanadu Base might have escaped. Leviathans aren''t fast. They could be up there now waiting for a signal from us."


    "And how are we going to send a signal, even if you''re right? We lost the comms station at Xanadu," Victor hung his head. "And even if I could get a communication satellite into orbit, even if there is someone alive up there to listen to me, who would want to? After what I did?"


    "I''m sorry I blamed you for what happened in the jungle. You weren''t responsible for that, and you''re not responsible for the destruction of Xanadu Base, either," said Feroza. "They violated the rules, and Petrolea turned on them."


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    "It? What it? Are we talking about some kind of planet-sized brain? Because that''s more ridiculous even than alien overlords or eco-terrorists with handshake gauntlets."


    "I agree." Feroza lifted an eyebrow. "Petrolea doesn''t have a brain any more than this Leviathan. And yet the Leviathan flies."


    "The Leviathan flies." He repeated slowly, thinking. "What do you mean the Leviathan doesn''t have a brain?"


    "It doesn''t have a central behavior processor. It''s not really one animal. It''s an ecosystem. A community. Like a whopping great, flying Berg."


    "Well," said Victor, "there were some programs I was preparing to use to hack a Berg."


    "Is that even possible? Hacking a Berg would be like hacking...." She wiggled her fingers. "Like hacking a whole city. No, even less, because in a city, you could bribe the mayor, and a Leviathan doesn''t have any executive control of the kind. It makes decisions with a distributed net of agents connected by radio."


    "And what do the agents look like?"


    Feroza spread her arms as if to embrace the demonic legions around them.


    "The parasites?"


    "Among other morphotypes, yes. The parasites are networked to each other and to whatever mechanoids are at work under the Leviathan''s skin. Information flows through all of them."


    "In other words everything is jury-rigged at the last minute with no planning. Only constant tinkering keeps everything working. Everyone talks to everyone else." Victor was becoming more animated. "It''s a slum." He shook the last of his slave factors from his gauntlet.


    "I''m afraid I don''t see the significance of that," said Feroza. But she imagined little Victor and the stories he''d told her of his life in the pueblos j¨®venes, where animals were food or competitors for food, plants were what grew between piles of garbage, and the only clean, orderly place was the world beyond the screen of his phone.


    "Alright," she said. "So you might hack a Dragon if you just find the right place in the mental hierarchy and insert your command. The Leviathan, however, has no brain, no authority on the basis of which to issue commands."


    "How about starting rumors?" Victor said. "Rumors such as, ''there are no humans here?''"


    Feroza began to understand. "Or, ''this would be a good place to build a pleasure dome?''"


    "Why not?" Victor''s fingers twiddled. "Oh, this is an inefficient way to get anything done. At least it''s familiar."


    Feroza imagined the children moving randomly around the network, shouting and texting at each other about everything interesting they see. What''s interesting to them? A pot of stew, a dead cat, a stranger with shiny shoes, a gun. Summarize that as ''food'' and ''danger.''


    The response was nearly immediate. The parasite population, which had been thinning out, again grew denser. Except now, rather than rushing the human intruders in a rabid frenzy, the creatures organized themselves. With their concentric circles of builders and rayed supply lines, the parasites now behaved less like an immune reaction and more like the imaginal cells of a metamorphosing insect. Or the stem cells of a fetus, differentiating into bone and muscle, gut and brain.


    "What next?" mumbled Victor. "A slum will have grandmas, coordinating the information-stream coming from the children with what they hear from their daughters, cleaning toilets or picking trash in the city. One such daughter might call with news of a job opportunity, or a particularly good haul of metal and almost-intact furniture."


    The aircraft-carrier bulk shifted under them. Hot-air cowls bulged up on either side of its vast carapace like hills on the horizon.


    "Finally," said Victor, "there are the official sources of news: the radio, the political enforcers, and the churches. Come down too heavy there, and the little old ladies, oh, they''ll pull in the opposite direction. But if the Leviathan''s distributed brain is as contrary as my grandma, I might as well give up now."


    Feroza watched a group of tentacle creatures twine their limbs together and fuse into a new still, much larger than their old one in the hangar. "Just how much of this are you controlling directly?" she asked.


    "Almost none," said Victor as crab-sized mechanoids locked their bodies together to become building blocks. "They''re doing this by themselves." From the cracked shell of the Leviathan, a new pleasure dome began to rise. "It''s what they were made for."


    Victor braced himself as his colossal mount writhed into the sky.

 24: Longing

    The column of exhaust rose into the gray Petrolean sky. Like a harpoon thrown into a dark, upside-down sea, the gleaming needle at the white tip of that cloud broke through the pall of smoke over the badlands where Xanadu Base had once stood. Feroza stood atop the back of the Leviathan and watched the Rocket-seed pierce the heavens.


    Interesting. There were no Bergs near the site of Xanadu Base, but perhaps human pollution had stretched farther than she assumed. Stressed, the factors had built themselves an escape capsule and blasted off, hoping to find better pastures. Feroza wished them luck.


    Other mechanoid life was not so picky. Gazing out past the air paddles that fringed the Leviathan, Feroza could zoom in on the cracked ground around them. The clear-cut land was a broken jigsaw of grays and glossy blacks, pin-pricked with the red lights of scavengers signaling to each other. The humans had not allowed themselves to be destroyed without inflicting massive casualties upon the land, but already Petrolea was growing back.


    Profits swung their stilt-like legs over the wreckage of the human''s vehicles, stabbing down at hopping battalions of Gambols, fat with all the hydrocarbons they could pump out of the habitat''s holding tanks. Flightless juvenile Leviathans, only the size of passenger trains, humped their way between the weedy furrows dug by earthmoving equipment. The gutted hollows and scraped flats had already developed a fuzz of self-assembler growth.


    If Victor''s theory was right, Feroza was observing at work the unseen hand of the original designers of the mechanoids'' Van Neumann ancestors. Colonize empty land. Mine raw materials and convert them into tools you can use to mine more raw materials. Destroy what stands in your way.


    From such a perspective, what difference was there between the creatures she had dedicated herself to protecting and her fellow humans? Ecosystem or economy, forest or factory, in the end everything came down to selfish self-replication. Eat and breed or be eaten so that others can breed.


    And here was Feroza, connected to the net of life as she stood in her crudely camouflaged suit, a bonesteel spear in one hand and a string of butchered mechanoids in the other: the successful hunter taking food back to her mate.


    Their hut was a dome sunk into the center of one of the Leviathan''s broad carapace plates. The man-sized still steamed under the mast of the antenna Victor had caused to be grown there. Their quaint and rusty home.


    "I''m home," Feroza broadcast to Victor.


    A crackle from her earpieces. Then, "Good. Did you bring feedstock for the still?"


    "I return victorious, yet again," said Feroza.


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    She fed her catch into the hopper, leaned her spear against the hut, and crawled through the airlock tube, feeling more medieval by the moment. How did the poem go?


    "Longing for the emperor''s arrow," she recited, "the game leapt and jumped so in the hunting ground/ That the wild animals, wishing they could run faster, envied the speed of the birds."


    "I have no idea what you are talking about." Victor looked up from his housekeeping.


    "I am talking about, or rather quoting, Abu Talib Kalim, poet laureate to the Mogul Shah Jahan."


    "Uh. Oh?"


    How good it was to see Victor out of his environment suit. Feroza had missed being able to see those dark, serious eyes. That large, rather hooked nose. The firm lips. Her gloves and helmet were such a chore to remove, but with them on, how could she run her fingers over the sharp, tiny hairs on his face and scalp? How could she kiss him?


    After some time, Victor was able to open his eyes and frown at her. "You''re in a good mood," he said.


    "I''m alive, am I not?" She took a deep breath of the air her lover had oxygenated for her. "Cold," she said, "and it smells even worse than the hangar, but it is breathable. Your magic works again."


    "It worked even better the second time," he said, nodding at the holes in the wall for air, food, and water, the LEDs embedded in the ceiling. "And no, it''s not because I had extra time to tinker with the programs. The parasites are actively helping us build this place, even though we have to keep feeding them to the still."


    "Our flying steed abounds with abundance, oh tender of my hearth," said Feroza. "By the grace of God and this giant airborne lobster, we shall never lack for sustenance or shelter."


    "Whatever you say." Victor prodded the curving wall of their little shelter. The individual creatures that made up its bricks were now invisible under the layer of insulating foam they had secreted. "I''m still not entirely sure this place isn''t going to fall in on us and eat us."


    "Of course it won''t," said Feroza. "And this shelter makes perfect sense if you think about it. You''ve made a bubble of hot, poisonous gas. The Leviathan does with oxygen what it does with any other irritant. It builds a cyst around it."


    "I guess," he said. "But what about the improvements to the still? The¡­the architecture of this place seems wrong. I never told any of the mechanoids to build a door in this cyst."


    Feroza had her theories, but decided to let them cook a while longer before feeding them to Victor. "Perhaps we must simply respect the Leviathan''s hospitality," she said. "It encysts."


    Victor squinted at her. "Was that a joke?"


    It was a rather insulting just how shocked he sounded. Feroza sniffed. "A pun. And if it wasn''t up to your standards, I apologize. I haven''t had cause to make many jokes recently. Perhaps my skills have atrophied."


    "Oh," said Victor. "So you should practice more¡­" he looked like he was doing calculus in his head, "so your puns might win¡­a trophy."


    Feroza put a hand over her mouth. "I have created a monster."


    "That''s usually my job," he smiled and she kissed him again.

 25: Vending Machine

    "Hm," she said after another while. "Could you fabricate a razor and shaving cream with this still?"


    He shook his head. "I shouldn''t need to. I''m done with the radio."


    Ah, the radio. "Victor," she said, "have you considered what you want to say into the radio?"


    "I already did. It wasn''t complicated." He still had his handshake gauntlet on, whose fingers he fluttered. "''We''re alive. Everything on Petrolea is programmed to kill humans. Please rescue us.'' I''m waiting for a response."


    Feroza settled herself against Victor, considering how to put this. Pragmatically, probably. "We have a new still. We have much better access to resources. We have everything we need."


    He drew back from her, head shaking. "We''ve determined that the entire moon wants to kill us."


    "Pah." She jerked her chin toward the suits with their macabre decoration of rusting corpses. "Once we find the tripwires, we can avoid them."


    "And live as squatters in someone else''s mining facility?" Victor shook his head. "And anyway I don''t want to die on Petrolea. I want to go home."


    Feroza sat back on her haunches. "We won''t be going home, but to prison."


    "Just how is that different from staying here?"


    "Because there will be other people there."


    Feroza didn''t ask whether he''d prefer the company of a bunch of criminals and prospectors to her. That would be unfair. People needed the company of other people. Like any other social animal.


    "What do you want, Feroza?" Victor asked. "To become a martyr for the anti-exploiters? To be eaten by the mechanical rainforest? To be one with nature? To stay out of prison? To save Petrolea? Or just prevent the deaths of the next idiots who come here?"


    "Yes," said Feroza. "There''s no reason I can''t do all of those things. Just some of them¡­later than others. We will have some time to decide." She put her arms around him, rested her head against his chest. "It will be alright."


    He shifted against her, hugging back. "What if I think we can do more good for Petrolea up there than down here?"


    "How?"


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    "I don''t know. Telling people what we know. Going on the media. Lobbying."


    "What on Earth do you know about lobbying?"


    "Well," said Victor. "We''ll be in a position to save people''s lives at least. Tell them about the tripwire program buried in the brains of every Petrolean creature."


    "Now that they''re sensitized to humans and human technology, extraction will become much more difficult," mused Feroza.


    "So maybe there won''t be any exploiters to lobby against at all," said Victor. "Maybe we''ll have to find some other source of hydrocarbons in the outer system. Some other way to crack space open."


    He sounded so disappointed at the prospect. Feroza imagined factories in space, sending energy and goods down to an unpolluted Earth. Dense cities separated by vast swaths of uninhabited wilderness. In a way, Victor''s hyper-technological fantasy was a better, greener vision of the future than her own back-to-the-wilderness dream. But if her future could come about only after the deaths of nine tenths of the human population, Victor''s was dependent on technology that didn''t exist. To build an extraterrestrial industrial base, one would need...


    "Factors!"


    "What?" Victor mumbled, as if woken from a doze.


    "All your wilderness survival!" crowed Feroza. "It wasn''t wilderness at all! A cave-man learning how to steal food from a vending machine. Victor, that''s what the mechanoids are for!"


    "What are they for?"


    "Think about it," said Feroza. "They make life-support facilities, food, radios. They build habitats. They carry people around. My goodness, they even collect metals and hydrocarbons together, pack them onto rockets, and blast them off into space! They couldn''t be more perfect for space industry if they were specifically designed for it."


    "Except for when they eat people."


    "But don''t you see?" Feroza propped herself up on his chest and turned around so she could look at him. "The tripwire program means that they are still obeying their original instructions. All of the instincts and behaviors they''ve evolved can be overridden."


    Victor slowly nodded. "What if instead of killing the mechanoids, we domesticated them?"


    It was actually rather sad. The animals became equipment far more completely and fundamentally than any battery farm hen or feedlot cow. Was Feroza a fool for devoting her life to these creatures, which were really nothing but the toys of departed masters? Or had she found the solution, the compromise, that would save her life''s work?


    "Just how could we go about doing that?" she asked.


    "Well, the camouflage is a good start," said Victor. "But we don''t want to hide from the old tripwires, we want to fool them. Spoof the mechanoids into thinking we''re the old masters come back. Hit the right combination of cues, and the whole place might just open up to us. Dio, what could I do with user-friendly behavioral programming."


    "What would those cues look like?" asked Feroza.


    "Let''s think about that."


    They spun their castles in the air until the visor of Victor''s helmet lit up red.


    SOS. The message from the orbital station scrolled down the visor. SOS. SOS.

 26: Poosh!

    "Petrolea shot


    "No, it doesn''t," said Victor. "It doesn''t make any sense at all. Petrolea shotrocket?Pucha!


    Feroza sucked in a breath and for a second, Victor wondered if he''d slipped and said puta.


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    "We''re


    "What??pucha!Everyone


    Orbital stations didn''t just get annihilated by missile attacks and waves of flesh-eating robots. Victor knew what made sense in the world and what didn''t, and that map told him that there weremust

 27: Space Pirates

    "I''m not certain radiation would do much to a mechanoid, but yes," Feroza said. "Humans would want to destroy the Petrolean ecosystem along with its inconvenient defenses, then come down and extract whatever was left."


    "Alright," said Victor, "of course."


    "Of course." Feroza''s lips thinned. "So what happens if the attack does not only fail to succeed, but also further antagonizes the ecosystem?"


    "Let them," said Victor. "Now that we know what''s happening, we''ll fight back. The only reason a Rocket-seed destroyed the orbital station was because they didn''t see it coming. A real battle between humans and some ancient mutant robot ecosystem ¡ª "


    Feroza made a ball with her hands and exploded it with a "Poosh!"


    "Exactly," said Victor. "We''d win. We''d blow the damn moon to pieces!"


    "No," said Feroza. "I meant ''poosh, we would cause the moon to sporulate.''"


    And again his mental map lead him to a dead end. A cliff over a waterfall with sharp rocks at the bottom. Victor closed his eyes. "I don''t know what ''sporulate'' means."


    "Imagine more than one rocket launching at the same time," said Feroza. "Imagine all of them launching all at once."


    Obediently, horribly, Victor did imagine it. A puff of silver specks flying out from Titan like the seeds from a dandelion. But not drifting randomly on the winds of space. These Rocket-seeds would direct themselves toward orbital stations, ships, even groundside bases in the inner system. Human weapons might blow apart a rocket, but so what? Its payload of mechanoids would spread out through space, waiting until the little robots hit a metallic asteroid or something else digestible, like a space-craft. He imagined waves of factors overwhelming a trans-Jovian liner, an iron spider-crab clicking across a Martian dome.


    "It would make sense in many ways," said Feroza. "Both scatter your genetic material and reduce your competition."


    "We have to warn someone," said Victor. "Even if," it was physically impossible to say "if no rescue comes," his throat would not open to let the words through. They could not be true. "No matter what happens. If this place...sporulates, it could threaten people all over the solar system. Hell, what if one of those things falls on Earth?"


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    Feroza looked thoughtful. "The mechanoids inside would probably die of oxidation."


    "Well, alright, but what about the Jovian stations, or Mars or any of the other habitats? Not to mention uninhabited asteroids. These things could digest the solar system right out from under us! We have to get the word out so they can ¡ª "


    "What?" said Feroza. "Put Petrolea in the autoclave and sterilize the place? Because that''s what we do with competitors, don''t we, stupid apes that we are. The second our precious patch of real estate is in danger, we drop all our enlightened talk of peaceful research and start clawing and biting."


    "The enlightened thing to do," said Victor, trying to keep his voice low, "is to stop this threat to the lives of millions of people."


    "Thousands of people at most, if we are still discussing the off-Earth population. And just how shall we stop Petrolea? By interfering with it more? This place was entirely quiescent until humans landed here, and it took us just two years to antagonize the ecosystem to the point of threatening our civilization. And now you want to pile even more folly and arrogance on top of that?"


    "You''re talking like you think humans will just leave Petrolea alone." Victor spread his hands and waved them, miming their boss back in Dubai: "Oh, we just lost an entire extraction facility and orbital station. I''m sure that that''s nothing we should investigate!" He dropped back into his normal voice. "They will come to rescue us."


    She grimaced at him. "That is not the topic I thought we were discussing."


    "Oh no," said Victor, "because you won that argument didn''t you? You think you can just stay here and heal the animals and hug the trees. And when you come back to the rustic hut, oh, it''s Victor waiting for you with a pot of Petrolean stew and a big wet kiss."


    Feroza snorted. "Who kissed whom? I didn''t ask you to claim me as your jungle bride. I didn''t ask you to follow me or ¡ª "


    "Or save your life?"


    "Victor, we''ve both saved each other''s lives such a lot of times. Do you really want to keep a running tally of the debt?"


    Victor couldn''t think of a way to respond to that without sounding like an asshole, so he decided it was time to storm off.


    Given their living situation, that wasn''t easy. Victor had to spend a frosty five minutes strapping himself into his environment suit again. And crawling on his hands and knees through the airlock tube was humiliating.


    But at least Feroza didn''t see the Dragon knock him over.


    Victor''s helmet didn''t even have a chance to warn him before the conical head caught him in the side and bowled him over. Victor flailed on his back like an overturned cockroach while the metallic face rushed toward him again. Headlights and stiff tactile antennae swept over him. Mouthparts unlatched themselves and reached out towards him. The feeding tube extended.


    With a gurgle, the mother Dragon poured jet fuel over Victor''s head.

 28: Rusty

    "Welcome home." Feroza did not straighten from her crouch, but continued to crawl, keeping her body in the serpentine position forced upon her by the shape of their tunnel-airlock.


    "Feroza, get back," Victor whispered. "Stay still until I''ve got slave factors into her."


    But the mother Dragon was already stretching her neck out to give Feroza her own nutritional ablution.


    "There is no need. My camouflage works," Feroza said, rubbing her hands over the Dragon''s snout. "But why are you here, I wonder?"


    Her eye caught movement on the ground. One of the Dragonlets came chugging around the curve of the hut.


    "They''re looking for more food, I''m sure," Victor said. "Like cats coming back to the woman who gave them scraps. Or tigers." He made shooing noises at the baby, which snapped at his fingers.


    "Stop teasing the Dragons, Victor," said Feroza walking around their habitat. "I wonder if the other baby is here."


    "What does it matter?" broadcast Victor. "As soon as I get my bugs back in these creatures, they''re all flying back to their hangar. And if you won''t help me defeat Petrolea, you can fly back with them."


    "Don''t tempt me," said Feroza. "And stop talking about defeating Petrolea. You don''t defeat an ancient alarm system. You avoid tripping it. If humans just stay away from this place, everything will be fine."


    That only got him swearing in child-friendly Spanish again. Victor was too emotional to listen to her, which was fine because suddenly Feroza had more important things to do than to listen to him. She had found the second Dragonlet.


    The little heap of metal lay on the carapace when the mother must have dropped it. It heaved with labored breathing, much too small, and entirely the wrong color.


    Feroza''s first, human-centric thought was skin condition. But there were no metal-eating fungi on Petrolea, no viruses that might give a mechanoid the pox. Feroza could see no parasite factors crawling on the Dragonlet''s mottled, brownish armor. What could cause those rotten patches? They were like mange or bread mold or...


    "It''s rust." Feroza backed away as if she might catch the same infection, but of course that was impossible. This was no infection, but oxidation.


    "It''s what?" said Victor. "What are you saying? Did you find the other ¡ª "


    "Victor," she said, "look at the other Dragons. Do you see rust on them?"


    "No," he said, then after a pause. "Yes. I do. Ah. They must have breached the environment I made back in the hangar. Damn. It''s not as if I wanted to go back there, but they''ve probably wrecked everything. Chewed through the damn walls, and then, as you say ''poosh.''"


    A wave of warm, wet oxygenated air flowing over the helpless mechanoids¡­Feroza felt as nauseated as she had seeing the image of the space station being digested.


    "Aha," said Victor, "there go the slave factors. Sit, boy. Stay." He shuffled around the habitat and back into Feroza''s line of sight. "Odd. Are you hearing the signals the mother Dragon is transmitting at us?"


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    Feroza tuned into the radio frequency the Dragons used for their short-range communication. The pattern of squeals and hisses she heard didn''t sound like the "feed me" or "help" calls the babies used.


    Feroza stroked the side of the rusty Dragon, which shuddered. "Perhaps she is asking us to help her."


    "And how the hell are we going to do that?"


    "With your slave factors gathering resources and facilitating repairs on these creatures."


    Victor spread his arms. "Dio, Feroza. Just a minute ago you were ¡ª ?Mi¨¦rcoles!"


    The Dragonlet, diseased and rotten though it was, lunged at him. A single working mandible pawed ineffectually at his stomach as it humped its way up his body, shedding flakes of rust. Victor raised his arms and the Dragon humped harder.


    Feroza reached out to the grievously wounded Dragon, which shuddered and spread mangled mouthparts at her. "Don''t hurt it."


    "I wasn''t planning to." Victor stepped back, allowing the rusty Dragon to slump back into resting position. "That''s interesting."


    "What is?"


    "I may be learning how you behaviorists work your magic. Watch this." Victor slowly raised his arms. The Dragonlet''s buzz saw spun up. When he lowered his arms, the saw wound down. "I think they hate arms."


    Feroza stood up and shuffled to Victor. She put her own arms around him. Cold comfort in an environment suit, but still. "I promise I shall find a way to protect humanity from Petrolea."


    "And I will help fix these creatures." Victor extended an arm to the rusty Dragon, and it tried to bite him.


    He swore and waved his handshake gauntlet like a demented South American wizard, and soon the wounded creature lolled under a blanket of Victor''s slave factors. The little robots swept back and forth across the ruined chassis, clustering around the places where she''d cut away the worst of the rust, soldering, welding, reconnecting, ferrying raw materials from the piles of metal shavings and hydrocarbon pap Feroza had prepared for them.


    Victor amused himself by playing with his camouflage, removing rusty flanges and cages of wire from his suit, examining the reactions of the other Dragonlet.


    "What are you going to do when the Dragon recognizes you as human and its trip-wire program comes on?" Feroza asked.


    "I''ll hold it still while I command the slave factors to rebuild my suit," he said, "as if that were obvious."Hm. Yes, it''s definitely the arms that Dragons don''t like. When I let it see my real profile with two arms, the tripwire program blinks on. But..." he folded his arms behind his back and the Dragon visibly relaxed. "Maybe these things'' original masters had no arms? How''s it going over there with Rusty?"


    "Rusty?"


    "Well, if it''s going to be your pet, he should have a name."


    "By that logic¡­" Feroza looked at Victor capering before his Dragon. "Yours reminds me of a fat and friendly pony I used to know. I shall call him ''Mr. Biggles.''"


    "I am not calling him Mr. Biggles. He isn''t fat, he isn''t friendly, and he isn''t my Dragon. He''s a poorly-optimized machine."


    She shook her head. "Think of him that way and you''ll never understand his behavior."


    "I don''t want to understand his behavior."


    "Of course you do. That''s why you''re experimenting with your camouflage, trying to understand his instincts, behavior, and ancient coding."


    "I suppose," grunted Victor.


    "Let''s think about this," said Feroza. "If you learn to love Dragons, I''ll learn to love people."


    His head jerked up. "Which people, exactly?"


    "I don''t know," Feroza raised an eyebrow behind her visor. "Do you think I should start with the aggregate and work my way down to the individual, or the reverse?"


    Victor grinned at her.


    So did Rusty. Or at least, it gaped its slavering mandibles, and the new buzz-saw and soldering torch clicked into place.

 29: Space to Live

    "I think his feeding apparatus might handle some live prey," said Feroza. "I ought to go hunting."


    "Wait," said Victor. "I had an idea before¡­well. Before. And I wanted to test it. Now that we have three big carnivores guarding us, I think the experiment might be safe."


    "An experiment?" asked Feroza.


    "More of a proof-of-concept." Victor wiggled his fingers and lights blinked on across the blasted landscape of the Leviathan''s carapace. "I''ve been trying to figure out how much control we can get out of this thing."


    "''This thing'' being a fundamentally decentralized communal mechanoid with no more executive function than a colony of pyrosomes."


    "I have no idea what that means," he said, still air-typing.


    "The Leviathan is a like a slum, right?" said Feroza. "No mayor to bribe?"


    "In that case," said Victor. "I have held elections"


    The engineer tapped his finger on the air and Mechanoids scuttled out of cracks in the Leviathan''s armor. The little creatures converged on Feroza and Victor in an eerie repetition of the day they had landed here. But rather than attacking, the mechanoids climbed up onto the Dragons'' backs, clamping their legs donating their factors wholesale into the Dragons'' swarms.


    "I have my control programs installed in every factor the Leviathan produces," said Victor. "By now, almost every parasite and processor cluster''s bugged. I could make the Leviathan''s proboscis wave hello to you, but I thought this would be more impressive."


    Rusty grew before Feroza''s eyes, his skeleton elongating as other mechanoids fused themselves to him.


    "What on earth did you do?" asked Feroza. He didn''t seem to be controlling these creatures explicitly, just calling them to assemble. And yet what naturally evolved behavior would so abrogate these animals'' interests?


    That thought allowed Feroza to answer her own question. "You activated more old code, like you did to build our habitat."


    Victor nodded. "It makes sense for the aliens to build safety features into their machines as well as booby-traps. So if a miner got cut off from base, the mechanoid would build a habitat for him." He jerked his thumb at their cozy little igloo.


    Feroza looked down at the shifting shape of her Dragonlet and realized something. "Rocket-seeds are the same. They were designed for this purpose."


    "Eh?" said Victor. "What were Rocket-seeds designed for? Planetary defense? Killing humans?"


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    Feroza shook her head. "Spreading adaptable, programmable devices, digesting bare rock and metal and," she gestured at their neat little home, "turning it into space habitats."


    "The mechanoids aren''t just a weapon," Feroza said. "They are a tool."


    "These things could terraform the Solar System," said Victor.


    "Yes," said Feroza. "Here is your value, engineer. Something much more precious than petroleum: space to live."


    "At the cost of all the infrastructure we''ve already put in space."


    "What''s more important," she asked, "machines or people?"


    "Well all right, but all this only assumes that the mechanoids won''t kill us humans on sight. Petrolean biology didn''t exactly make improvements to Xanadu Base or the orbital habitat."


    "But it did make improvements to our living arrangements," said Feroza. "So what''s the differences between the way we treat the mechanoids and the way everyone else does?"


    "Assuming they haven''t just decided to save you and me for desert," said Victor, but Feroza knew she''d captured his imagination. "Dio, we could stop the sporulation and send out a warning and go home if we could control the mechanoids¡­and we can!" The Dragons'' snouts followed him as he jumped for joy.


    All three mechanoids had all benefited from Victor''s ministrations. The mother and Mr. Biggles positively gleamed, and Rusty was more new material than old. The little Dragon stretched, flaking off the last of his rust, and Feroza hissed in surprise.


    "What?" Victor''s head turned in his helmet. "Are you all right?"


    "Yes, yes," she said, "but Rusty isn''t. Look. The factors are repairing him wrong." She tried to shoo the creatures away from the tumorous mound they were constructing on the baby''s back. "There must be something wrong with their programming."


    Victor shuffled toward her. "There can''t be anything wrong with their programming. They''re plugged straight into his somatic processor."


    "Then the processor must be damaged. Its blueprint is corrupted," said Feroza.


    Rusty''s back, formerly a smooth tube of articulated iron, bulged up grotesquely. Even as Feroza watched, the repair factors added yet more material to the hump, extruding a weird, rounded protuberance like a horn behind a metal frill. Knobbed lumps of metal marched down the creature''s flanks, too symmetrical to be any kind of Petrolean cancer.


    "Some kind of parasite in the code, maybe?" Feroza searched for analogies. "A mechanoid virus?"


    "I''m looking at the runtime environment," said Victor, "but there''s nothing¡­huh. There''s nothing new, but a whole new bunch of tags...mi¨¦rcoles. Tripwires."


    They both slid back from the baby. "What is the code doing?" asked Feroza. Was Rusty gestating some horrible weapon of the mechanoids'' alien masters? Would the lump on the Dragon''s back sprout claws and fangs and attack them?


    But no. "It''s just shaped metal," Feroza reassured Victor along with herself. "There''s no internal structure."


    "Well, the aliens definitely wanted their mechanoids to grow these things." Victor turned in a slow circle. "Look. You can see lumps on the other baby and the mother too, just not as big yet."


    "They haven''t had to rebuild their entire chassis." Feroza stared at the Dragons, which rolled on their sides to present their new growths to their¡­masters?


    "Good God," Feroza said. "I think they are growing saddles for us."

 30: Rocket Nursery

    "Okay, I have an idea. You don''t have to go to jail if we save the solar system." Victor hugged Feroza as she scanned the jungle below.


    "Well, I''m glad we got that problem dealt with," Feroza twisted the projection she called "the horn" and Victor thought of as "the joystick." The mother Dragon executed a lazy dive, tame as a well-trained horse. "Now, what''s for lunch?"


    "No, I''m serious," he said. "And I mean ''save from Petrolea'' and ''save for the future.''"


    Feroza waggled her head. "If there is a Rocket-seed growing out there, if we can find it, and if I can determine whether it''s slated for launch into space rather than merely the upper atmosphere, then we can launch your communication satellite."


    Victor brushed his fingers across the surface of the mechanoid clasped around his chest. The creature he privately referred to as his "slave mechanoid" was a much-modified former parasite, a giant tick, which had now become a powerful transmitter on legs. Dropped onto a Rocket-seed, the creature should be able to attach itself firmly enough to survive the trip into orbit. There, it would begin transmitting.


    Victor''s reverse-engineered alien commands would wash this moon, convincing its wayward mechanoids that their rightful masters had returned at last.


    "Or," he completed his thought out loud, "if we don''t manage to domesticate Petrolea, we can at least send out a warning of the sporulation we will have triggered."


    "We will domesticate Petrolea," Feroza said. "In fact, we are already doing so. Look!"


    Victor followed her pointing finger. So did Mr. Biggles. The little Dragon zipped up behind them like a jet-powered seal and playfully tried to bite Feroza''s hand off.


    "They really don''t like arms," Victor said. "We''ll have to add more spoofing."


    "Never mind that. We''re passing the hangar where we stayed. Do you see it?"


    The formerly pointed tip of the Berg where the mother Dragon had built her nest was nearly unrecognizable, buried inside a segmented globe like a skewered tangerine. Lights dotted the equator of the metal balloon, and a steady stream of mechanoids flew in and out from the window where the stem would be.


    "Is it¡­" Victor squinted. "Is it spinning?"


    "Merciful God but the ancient aliens had terrible taste in architecture," said Feroza. "Unless you want to take credit for that post-modern monstrosity."


    "No," said Victor. "It must be more tripwire programming. A reaction to an oxygen environment."


    "And we know that there is still an oxygen environment inside the space station," mused Feroza. "I wonder if some similar inflorescence is being built above us right now. If any of the original crew turned their life boat around and returned to it¡­"


    "¡­they''d be eaten," said Victor. "At least if they return before I get my Radio Tick into orbit."


    "There!"


    Victor''s eyes twitched up, but this time Feroza did not tempt Mr. Biggles or Rusty with an outstretched arm.


    "''There'' what?"


    "Is it working?" she asked. "Did I share my map with you? Ah. No. I see."


    The map blipped on in Victor''s visor. South and east of their flight-path lay the edge of a crater. In real life, the shell of the extinct cryovolcano was a curving sheet of rock erupting from the jungle like the curtain wall of a European castle, but on the map it was just a graphite-colored circle. A green dot pulsed within the circle.


    Victor entered commands to the Dragon, and map and reality merged as they gained altitude. The volcano wall curved into the distance, became the lip of a gray bowl. And there a smooth cone protruded above the fractal branches of the pinwheel trees like a firecracker in a salad.


    A string of firecrackers.


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    "Are those more Rocket-seeds?" Victor could see four of them, spaced evenly around the first. And beyond them, even more.


    "This whole crater is full of them," said Feroza. "A rocket...nursery? A spore capsule?"


    "Does it matter?" asked Victor. "One rocket or many, we have a way to get our slave mechanoid into orbit."


    "I suppose so," said Feroza. "If anything, the fact that there are so many Rocket-seeds in one place must mean they were grown for offensive purposes. I was worried how we would be able to distinguish between the new interplanetary sporulators and the old intercontinental ballistics...whoa!"


    Victor had been trying to pilot the Dragon closer to the crater, but misjudged the angle of their turn. Feroza and he wobbled and the factors holding them clenched.


    "Slipped!" said Feroza. "Damn stirrups."


    "If that''s what those lumps are," said Victor. "I''m not sure the mechanoids'' designers had feet."


    "They weren''t built for anything like humans, in any case," said Feroza. "If I try to fly with both hands on the horn, I completely unbalance myself."


    "Perhaps I could try a redesign," said Victor. "There could be a whole library of...user-friendly designs like this."


    The Dragon lurched under them and Feroza cursed.


    Victor looked around for the next life-threatening catastrophe. "What''s wrong?"


    "Nothing," she said, but Victor noticed they''d drifted off course. He banked the Dragon, more slowly this time. The repaired Biggles and Rusty fired their engines and sped past their mother, weaving across her flight-path like impatient puppies. They dove and the mother Dragon''s nose tipped forward to follow them, but Victor brought it back up.


    This time the Dragon stayed on course for only a few seconds before it lurched and dove again. The angle of attack was much steeper this time, and when Victor brought the nose level, a wing dipped.


    "Victor, why are you turning us?"


    "I''m not." Victor maximized his coding windows. "More tripwires. Something''s telling the Dragon to fly back the way we came. I overwrote the process and put us back on course."


    They were nearly over the crater lip now. There were whirligig trees there, and larger structures like windmills, but the sheer sides of the escarpment were bare of self-assemblers. The only movement there was from the headlights of animals. Dragons, he realized.


    The Dragon-haunted cliffs grew, and Victor realized they were diving again.


    "She doesn''t want to cross into that crater," said Feroza.


    "It''s nothing ''she'' wants. The tripwire programming rides the Dragon as much as we do." Victor coded as cleverly and efficiently as he could, setting up macros to run macros to delete or overwrite or counteract the alien instructions. But the tripwires kept popping up the Dragon''s flight was becoming more erratic.


    Worse, Victor''s interface was turning buggy. He would enter changes and confirm them only to see them vanish. There was a noticeable and growing lag between command and response. "This is like the old internet," he said, "what the hell is wrong with my handshake gauntlet?"


    "What on earth could all those other Dragons be doing in the cliffs?" said Feroza, as if to herself. "A nest? No. So many large predators couldn''t hope to survive in such a small area. Like the Leviathans we saw moving toward Xanadu Base before...oh hell."


    There was nothing wrong with Victor''s gauntlet. The distributed processor net in his suit was orders of magnitude more powerful than anything in the Dragon''s hardware. And yet it was the Dragon''s programs that outstripped Victor''s. It was as if everything he did was two steps too late. As if all his information was one step too old...


    "Turn around," said Feroza. "Turn us around, Victor, they''re waiting for us."


    "Impossible" said Victor. "The slave factors can''t have tripwire programs installed in them. We built the first generation from the ground ¡ª ow!"


    Feroza had just turned around and rapped on his bubble helmet. And when Victor''s startled eyes focused past his coding window and looked out his visor, he saw the other Dragons.


    The giant metal creatures were watching their flight, spreading their wings, scrambling like jets around a military installation.


    "Land us," Feroza ordered.


    "I ¡ª Feroza, I''m losing my slave factors. If I get us on the ground, I won''t be able to get us off it again. I won''t even be able to tell the factors to let go of us."


    "So tell your slave factors to let go now," she said. "We''re landing."


    Victor wanted to protest and argue, to tell Feroza that all problems couldn''t be solved by jumping off of them at high altitude. But damn him if he was going to let her jump alone this time.


    The factors released their grip. The Dragon, free of Victor''s interference, swerved out from under them. Feroza lost her grip on the joystick, and she and Victor popped off its back.


    Victor flung out his arms, reached for Feroza


    But her hands avoided his. A smile on her face, the biologist spread her arms wide in the air. Before the onrushing squadron of enemy Dragons.


    They didn''t have a chance to attack. The Dragonlets got to her first.

 31: Alien Overlord

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 32: That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

    "I have an even more apropos quote," said Feroza. "Let me see¡­ I would build that dome in air, / That sunny dome! those caves of ice!  Weave a circle round him thrice¡­


    "Oh, yes. It goes Beware! Beware!/ His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice ¡­"


    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    "Floating hair," said Feroza. "To me, that suggests my palace will be in space. Now kiss me again behind my ear. And close your eyes with holy dread¡­"


    "For we on honey-dew hath fed,/ And drunk the milk of Paradise,

 New story: WEALTHGIVER

    Hello, readers of Fellow Tetrapod. I have a new story starting and I thought you might like to know about it. You can find it here</a>.


    Caught between murder and treachery in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish war, army medic Andrei chooses escape. His fate, however, is to stumble upon a secret, cave-dwelling pagan cult.


    For a thousand years the Thracians have hidden in the mountains, killing any outsider who comes too close, waiting for their chance to reclaim their ancestral territory. Now, their prophetess sees a chance to lead her people to victory. All she needs is someone to play the part of her god.This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    Ancient myths and modern empires clash in Wealthgiver, an alternate history romance.


    New chapters every Thursday. You can find it here</a>.


    <div>


    Cover art by Artyom Trakhanov</a>


    Edited by Georgi Shopov


    Wealthgiver Playlist</a>


    The Thracian language and other looks behind the scenes on Wealthgiver.</a>