"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.
"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 — 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 — 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.