The parasite looked a bit like an octopus. Or a spider made of segmented metal hose.
Feroza flailed in the tangle of murderous steel pasta and Victor stared, totally frozen by his horror.
They hadn't brought any weapons. Why hadn't they brought any weapons? He could have designed some. Some program that would sever a Dragon's head and turn it into a turret-mounted flamethrower. If only he'd thought —
Fire rolled over them.
Victor toggled off some virtual controls and pulled Feroza off the Dragon with him. The mechanoid itself slurped down the charred remains of the Spaghetti Monster as its body bunched and transformed from sleek jet-shape to caterpillar.
The Leviathan's back looked like someone had tried to make an aircraft carrier out of scrap metal. What had from a distance looked like smoothly machined overlapping plates, Victor now saw were pitted and asymmetrical. Respectably-sized shrubs had self-assembled in the hollows and crevices, carving little chunks of metal from the flesh of the Leviathan to build their branches and whirligig leaves.
And of course the whole place was infested with creatures. Some were like lice, others like fleas or crabs or flatfish, and it looked like every one of them — parasite, epiphyte, or whose-a-site — was crawling from crevices in the uneven skin of the Leviathan to come, slavering, toward them. Tentacles lashed and claws flexed under the red glow shining from between the teeth at the end of the Leviathan's snake-like proboscis.
Victor fought the urge to cross himself and looked at the scene with engineer's eyes. Problem one: hundreds of horrible creatures wanted to eat them. Problem two: their ride was out of fuel, and was also hungry. The solution wasn't actually that hard to formulate. Victor didn't even have to nudge the Dragon with his slave factors. Another blast of fire and it was in amongst the parasites, eating everything that moved.
¡Hurra! Except that Victor's suit was still compromised, they still had no way to contact the orbital station and call for help, and Feroza might actually be suicidal. "We can do this, right?" Victor said. "We can survive, right?"
"Probably." Feroza had tiptoed around a lobster-sized parasite and was examining its pincers while it tried to slice her feet off. "The Dragon thinks we're her children. She'll continue to protect us even after she's replenished her fuel."
"That's a lot of trust to place on a creature that tries to eat you every chance it gets."
Feroza threw the parasite to the Dragon, which snapped it up. "She saved me when I jumped. As flying animals with high parental investment, they have an instinct for rescuing falling young."
Victor wasn't so sure. What if he had been the one who jumped?
The Dragon had herded the humans into the cover of an overhang dug into the carapace by the roots of a small windmill-tree and was now busily establishing a perimeter of dismembered robots around them. Periodically, she would nudge a partially cooked mechanic toward Feroza as if trying to feed her. Or teach her to hunt?
Victor felt he could move down his catastrophe list. Since he was unlikely to find a patch-kit or interplanetary communications equipment on the back of a flying metal whale-grub, that left psychological problems.
"So you're saying the Dragon loves you like a baby."
"I am saying that I'm not just useful to her," said Feroza, accepting a charred, twitching lump from the Dragon with a bow of gratitude. "I'm valuable. I'm precious to her."
"Doesn't that bother you?" he said. "I mean you're using her. I mean you're using it." He meant using me. "The Dragon."
She smiled at him. "The term is 'brood parasite,' and it would only bother me if I didn't return that love, Victor."
"You mean you think the Dragon is your mother?"
"No," said Feroza, "but I also value her beyond what I can get out of her."
What the hell did that mean? If the Dragon wasn't Feroza's mother or her pet or her car, what was it? And what did that make Victor? The Dragon's son-in-law?
"That's an odd philosophy for a biologist, isn't it?" he said.
"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. Complete, without need for any human reference points."
Victor tried unsuccessfully to find a parallel between that statement and his and Feroza's relationship. How could he make it clear that their night in the reverse-igloo hadn't just been a last-people-on-the-planet act of desperation? "I am glad she saved you."
And before he worked himself up to say something like "because I value you more than what I can get out of you, too." Feroza said, "We help each other, it's what symbionts do."
"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 suicidal?"
"It must be us," she said. "We represent something their instinctive programming has no way to address. Their normal behavior has been overridden."
"By the need to kill us?"
She turned to him, suit outlined in red light, monsters cavorting and burning around her. "Don't be melodramatic."
"Look," he said. "I know I'm not a biologist or anything, but animals don't work like this. All of these things attacking us." Victor pointed up at the Leviathan's mouth. "That big hose watching us. The whole damn planet massacred Xanadu Base." He fought to control his breathing. "I mean…why?"
A creature like a geodesic ball filled with claws bounced over the Dragon and sailed through the air toward Victor. Feroza swatted the thing to the ground and crushed it under her boot.
"I suppose," she said, bending to examine the spasming remains, "that once some Petrolean animals learned they could eat human technology, they sent out a signal. It was only a matter of time until we saw a feeding swarm."
Victor looked out at the gibbering hordes of creatures, trying to imagine them as seagulls flocking to a dropped sandwich. "No," he said. "We're killing these things."
"The Dragon is killing them."
"Alright. But shouldn't they figure that out and run away?"
"Perhaps we are seeing eusocial behavior, or these have some other way to store their genetic material offsite." Feroza picked up a half-dead creature and shook it briskly. Factors scattered.
Victor didn't understand any of that, but he knew what would happen if she covered herself in foreign factors. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Do you want those things to chew through your suit?"
"They will rather repair my suit." Feroza pulled the parasite's corpse apart, discarding miniature forges and fabricators until she had a skeleton of metallic strut-work. "I do have some experience with these matters, remember. Now, give me your hand."
Victor jerked back when she tried to thrust the corpse over his left glove. "What are you doing?"
"Fixing your suit," she said, "and giving you some camouflage at the same time."
"Oh I see," said Victor as she worked the cage up his arm. "You left the somatic processor intact. When you give it a power supply…"
Roach-sized factors scuttled up Victor's boots, climbed onto the skeleton, and proceeded to weld it to Victor's suit.
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?"
"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 — "
"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.