Petrolea ch14

"Petrolea shot them?"

"It makes sense," said Feroza.

"No, it doesn't," said Victor. "It doesn't make any sense at all. Petrolea shot them. With a rocket. ¡Pucha!"

Feroza sucked in a breath and for a second, Victor wondered if he'd slipped and said puta. But his eyes resolved the shapes moving in the visor of her helmet and he knew she wasn't reacting to him at all. Feroza was watching the footage from the orbital station again. Blurry and reversed though the footage was, Victor needed only a little prompting to remember what it showed.

The video was garbled and full of the off-center focus and jerky jump-cuts of an AI editor, but the dreadful course of events was clear. Most of the crew of Xanadu Base had escaped to the orbital station. The plume of gas rising above Titan, the speck growing in the feed from the station's external cameras. The impact.

Victor had nearly vomited at the sight of the horizontal tornado of air rushing out of what must have been an enormous hull breach. Next came images of people running, fighting, lying motionless on the floor. The lifeboat detaching, just ahead of the tide of little metallic bodies sweeping down the corridor. Then nothing but mechanoids picking their way through the desolation. The camera obediently tracking the helmet of a suited body as it was lifted and peeled apart by frost-rimed pincers.

The mechanoid's own cameras had focused on the head in its clutches, mouthparts drumming as if wondering what the tough, glassy globe might have once been. Tiny torches ignited, delicate saws spun, and the creature nibbled, scored, and cut the human artifact into something it might use.

"That's not a design of mechanoid I've seen before," said Feroza. "Note the magnetic couplers on its feet, the de-emphasis on support in favor of tensile strength. Those microgravity adaptations cannot be the result of natural selection. More tripwire programming, I wonder?"

Victor shuddered with the effort of suppressing the horror. "The aliens who designed these creatures, they hid instructions that turns them into damn…space pirates?"

Feroza removed the helmet from her head. "Of course they did. They knew that threats to their project could come from nowhere but space."

"We're a threat?"

"To the aliens' interests, of course. Anyone with the technology to come to Titan is a potential competitor." Feroza ran her hands through her sweat-matted hair. "I had thought the Rocket-seeds a recent exaption of some sort of planetary defense system, but now I see they have always served a reproductive role."

"What?" said Victor, nearly blind with panic. "People are dead. ¡pucha! Everyone is dead! And, if you're right about this, any humans or human technology that break atmosphere is in danger. Including any rescue parties they might send down."

"'They'?" Feroza focused back on him, frowning. "Victor, nobody is rescuing us."

She might have kicked Victor's legs from under him. Or jumped up from the floor to drive her helmeted head into his gut. That would have been less painful.

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 were people up there who would rescue him. There must be.

"I can," he swallowed and tried again. "I can get out the warning."

"How?" said Feroza. "No ground-based antenna can beam a message to…whom do you plan on alerting? The refugees from the orbital station presumably know that Petrolea is dangerous."

"They don't know the whole story," said Victor. "If I can get a relay satellite into orbit…"

"Even if that were possible, even if you had a big red button you could press and tell everyone on Earth about the big bad mechanoids coming to get them, what would happen?"

"Why," Victor blinked. "The people would nuke Petrolea from orbit."

"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 — "

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?"

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 — "

"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 — "

"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.