Petrolea ch15

"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 — "

"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?"

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 — ¡Miércoles!"

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.

"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?"

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...miércoles. 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."