Petrolea ch17

"Fold your arms," Feroza told Victor, "before Biggles and Rusty have a chance to bite them off."

Following her own advice violated every instinct Feroza had. Falling monkeys splayed their limbs, trying to snag branches and use air resistance to slow their fall, but the makers and masters of the Petrolean mechanoids had descended from anything like monkeys.

If those ancient aliens' ancestors had had trees to climb, perhaps they had done so with coils of their bodies, or with tentacles or some other organ Feroza could not, now, imagine. Certainly, though, the shape they presented when in free-fall, the silhouette they had branded onto the brains of their mechanical children, was the rod.

Feroza became a rod. A toy soldier standing to attention. Or rather, tipping forward as gravity tugged on her top-heavy environment suit. Victor's face passed above her horizon, and Feroza's vision was full of the whirling depths of the jungle below, the lead-colored cones of the Rocket-seeds, and the black silhouettes of the oncoming Dragons. Their burning headlights.

Were there other calderas like this one scattered across the surface of Titan? Other clutches of rocket eggs with their own guardian Dragons? Was this a localized reaction of the Petrolean defense system, or a planet-wide call to arms? If the latter, Victor and she had most likely just triggered the very sporulation they had tried to prevent.

"Feroza!" Victor's voice came in her suit radio. "Biggles has got me."

"Hold still," said Feroza. "Trust him. Trust me." And metal scraped along her back.

Warning lights pulsed against the approaching headlights of the enemy Dragons. Rusty was coiling around her, squeezing and ablating her much-abused environment suit. But the little Dragon was much-abused as well, with a good third of his chassis rebuilt under Feroza's careful ministrations.

And what of Rusty's mind? On the leash of his designed tripwire programs, the little mechanoid should have bitten Feroza in half for violating the sanctity of the crater. At very least, he should have flown away.

But Feroza had seen how a Dragon's naturally evolved behavior, if strong enough, could circumvent the wishes of its ancestral programming. Evidently, Rusty could feel gratitude, or at least reciprocal altruism.

More warnings as the juvenile Dragon spread his little wings and engaged his jet engines. Hot streams of exhaust bracketed Feroza's body, pointing downward at the onrushing protectors of the crater. One large Dragon veered away from those columns of hot gas, but another opened its jaws, pilot light flaring at the end of its flame-thrower.

It was gone in a bright burst of sparks and a dark blur of tangled metal. Feroza looked up to see her would-be attacker fall, while the mother Dragon looped around to defend her children.

They passed over the edge of the crater in a cage of fire.

"They're going to kill the mother Dragon," said Victor. "We have to do something to help her."

Feroza's heart was thumping too fast to be warmed by her lover's devotion to Petrolean wildlife. "The question is 'how do we deactivate this alarm system?'"

"You mean," said Victor, "how do we make friends with the other Dragons?"

The mother Dragon belched flame into the face of an onrushing attacker.

"That's one possibility," Feroza said, "but is there any way you can get your slave factors into those other Dragons?"

"My slave factors have been compromised. The clean ones are all back on...the...Leviathan. Okay," he said, "I have an idea."

Feroza could guess what it was. But it would take time for the giant mechanoid to arrive, and while Victor was working on hacking their behavioral code from the inside, she would work from the outside.

She looked down, past her feet and the columns of exhaust to the up-thrust noses of the rockets below. "What would an alien overlord do?"

Victor's answer was a deafening blast of white noise from his Radio Tick. An electromagnetic roar designed to carry his message to the other side of Saturn.

Every flying thing in the Petrolean sky converged on him.

"Victor!" Feroza flung up her arms and Rusty, chasing them, climbed, engines screaming. "Copy and rebroadcast these signals."

Frantically, she scrolled down menus in her visor, broadcasting the draconic communication signals she had recorded on the Leviathan's back. "Help," she broadcast. Her suit's built-in transmitter was a puny thing next to Victor's Radio Tick, but its range was more than wide enough to catch the attention of the Dragons. "Feed me," She cried across the AM bands, "I'm afraid. Take care of your baby."

Another modulated thunderclap from Victor's Radio Tick, and the attack formation scattered. Sleek black bodies banked, swooped, dove, curved into arcs. Victor fell between them, arms and legs pressed against his body, juvenile Dragon coiled around him like a winged, robotic Rod of Asclepius.

The other Dragons had fallen into Victor's thrall. They funneled down after him, tightening their formation like a whirlpool, spinning in flaming helixes, caught between attack and rescue, ancient impulse and modern calculation, hate and love.

Those that could fly gathered around Feroza and Victor, tugging them upward, encasing them in swirling nested spheres of metallic bodies, singing their praises across the airwaves.

The Dragons soon joined the song.