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 ¡miércoles! Move, you stupid animal! Dive, dive faster. Dios mÃo, lÃbrame de ecochicas paracaidistas. You crazy woman! When this is over I will tie you down — ¡pucha!"
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.