Petrolea ch2
Petrolea ch2
Consciousness came to Dr. Feroza Merchant like a hammer between the eyes.
Not a big hammer. More like one the little ones that upholsterers used.
Ting ting ting ting. And the sofa had a new pattern.
She opened her eyes. Focused on the blinking hazard lights in her visor.
Ting ting ting low oxygen.
Feroza tried to move and found that she couldn't. The arms and legs of her spacesuit were welded into the fuselage of the Dragon. Toledo had done that, she remembered, hacking the somatic processor that controlled the way the factors built and maintained its body, trying to grow a cockpit around them. Apparently he hadn't gotten far before the acceleration had knocked him out, but that was better than being knocked off the Dragon entirely.
Feroza imagined Toledo tumbling through the nitrogen/methane atmosphere of Titan, screaming until he hit the ground or another Dragon snatched him in its jaws. She tried to enjoy the image and couldn't. Contemplating his death wasn’t as satisfying when it was his skills that would keep her alive.
Ting ting ting.
Feroza twisted as much as she could. She couldn't see much of Toledo, only that he was there behind her, welded to the Dragon's fuselage just as she was. A few system messages directed into her microphone confirmed he was still alive, although unconscious. No doubt he had more oxygen in his tanks than she, and had no alarms to awaken him.
Ting ting.
She almost gave the radio call to summon her Punisher before she remembered. She had captured its mother herself, watched with wonder as the aquiline creature had opened her abdominal cavity to discharge a gleaming collection of machine parts, as intricate and beautiful as the inside of a pocket-watch. The mother Punisher's own factor swarm had split itself in two to seize those parts and assemble them into a home and factory: the body of a baby mechanoid.
Now the Punisher was dead, armature abandoned to the scavengers of the jungle, its factor swarm stolen and assimilated into the Dragon under her.
Feroza looked down at her body, imbedded in the side of the sleeping mechanoid. Had a human ever been so close to a Petrolean apex predator? Had any sapient mind before traced the sleek contours of their head assemblies, the flight surfaces like metal pinions, the bulky, powerful jet engines? Next to these marvels of nature, nothing mattered, not her poor dead Punisher, nor the people she had abandoned in the jungle. Not Toledo's survival, and least of all her own.
The feeling was oddly liberating. It might not be so bad to die when the Dragons woke up and peeled her space suit off her like the skin of a banana.
Ting ting ting.
Feroza had expected to return from her demonstration. Chastened, perhaps, or even defeated, but alive, surely. Surely Al-Onazy and his vile exploiters wouldn't let half of Xanadu Base's staff die out in the jungle. Surely they wouldn't be so stupid as to send an enormous pile of metal out into a metallic ecosystem without the support of their biologists?
Now, who knew how many kilometers from base and more than a billion kilometers from home, with her cause smashed and her career in ruins, Feroza considered the possibility of her death. How would Mummy and Daddy and Bubbli react to the news that she had been devoured by the subjects of her studies? Probably not with pride.
"Alright, beasties," she said, "it is time for you to learn that Feroza Merchant shall be no one's breakfast."
The first order of business must be to unstick herself from the side of this Dragon. Toledo, if conscious, could simply command the factors holding her to let go. Since Feroza had not the means, the skills, nor the willingness to enslave the creatures' minds, however, she must set about to tame them.
She twisted her head, working with eyes, suit cameras, and software to get a glimpse of her surroundings. The nest, or possibly she should call it a "hangar," had floor, walls, and ceiling made of rusty, corrugated scrap iron. The place could almost have been cobbled together in some backwater village to house a Raj-era crop-duster, except for the curved walls and impossibly delicate welding. And the huge, gaping hole into the empty air would have given any human engineer heart palpitations. And there were the LED eyes twinkling from the shadows, not to mention the Dragons, themselves.
They sprawled on the floor of the hangar like beached orcas. Two adults and two man-sized juveniles snapped lazily at the vermin in the shadows, slid their noses across each other, or simply lay still except for the lung-like pumping of their bellows as they forged new tools inside their bodies. None seemed interested in her.
Feroza considered the nature of her hosts. Dragons were the apex predators of this latitude, flighted because nearly all pursuit predators flew in the high-density atmosphere of low-gravity Titan, their ecological niche something like tigers or great white sharks. Not much social behavior, but like the Punishers to which they were related, Dragons were viviparous. Their young were not constructed in factory-hives, but by fabricators tucked inside the body cavity. Surely that implied parental investment in young. And even tigers didn't live together as mated pairs. Assuming a mated pair with children was what she was seeing here.
Ting ting ting ting the oxygen warning drove upholstery tacks into her thoughts.
Warnings. Distress signals. With her gloves trapped in the skin of the Dragon, Feroza could only interface with her suit by means of eye movement tracking, a slow and frustrating process made no easier by the damn tinging of the alarm. Like the angel of death tapping her skull with his bony index finger...
There. Directing her radio to transmit at the Dragon she'd decided was the mother might get her some attention. It might get her ripped apart. The Dragon to whose side she was attached, the father, might decide to scratch her off his hide, but at what cost to the integrity of her suit? Feroza needed an example of what gentler instincts she could expect from these giant predators, and that meant child-rearing. She aimed her transmitter at the nearest sleeping Dragonlet, and flicked the device on at its narrowest beam and highest setting.
It was the equivalent of clapping her hands in front of the face of an infant. The Dragonlet's headlights flared on. It thrashed and reared up. And it cried.
Feroza double-checked that her receivers were recording as the Dragonlet woke up one of its parents. Fortunately, not the one to which Feroza was currently glued.
The mother mechanoid slid from the shadows like an enormous serpent, wings, engines, and landing gear tucked up on her back, sensors extended on a flexible neck-like tube of helically linked factors. She bumped her iron snout against the distressed baby, nuzzling it, feeling down its flanks for damage. Finding none, she began to turn away, but Feroza activated her transmitter and the baby cried again.
Feroza could almost imagine the sigh of resignation as the mother Dragon pulled back her mouthparts and vomited a black stream of nourishing gasoline into her progeny's gaping maw. A pause and a muffled clank as machinery re-aligned within the mother's head, and the baby got a sip of the precious liquid oxygen needed to burn that petroleum.
The baby stopped crying and curled up. Carbon dioxide frost steamed off its belly as it began to distill its meal.
Feroza waited as long as she dared before rebroadcasting the signal. Wide beam, this time.
The father Dragon shifted under her and the mother came to investigate. Headlights focused on her. Antennae rose in what Feroza could only interpret as a quizzical gesture: What could such a strange creature be doing on my mate?
She broadcast the infant distress signal again.
A metallic probe bumped against her chest plate, hard enough to set off more warning claxons. Then, vibration along her sides as the two Dragons dragged their snouts around her.
A deeper vibration. A shiver and burst of heat she could feel even through her suit. Toledo wasn't the only one who could communicate with and control factors. The tiny robots clamped to her suit released all at once.
Feroza sprawled to the floor of the hangar. Behind her, the father Dragon reared, the edges of the hole in his skin zipping smoothly back together. He unhinged his mouthparts and gaped a threat at the tiny human who had invaded his domain.
Feroza pulled her legs and arms under her, making herself small, willing the Dragons to forget about her. They were just animals, after all, with no instincts regarding organisms like her. Her human outline should make no impact on their awareness, but if a Dragon decided to sample a bite of her environment suit…
Deal with that later. For now, she had more pressing concerns, such as breathing. Feroza could switch out her oxygen tank for the emergency spare, but that wouldn't give her enough time to fly back to the base. Even if she wouldn't be arrested there. Even if she could persuade Toledo to mind-rape one of these animals again.
She turned her head, daring a glance at the human body still glued to the back of the male. He was still there, still unconscious.
In the same way she was aware of the Earth, hurtling through space two billion kilometers away, Feroza knew that if she cannibalized Victor Toledo's suit, she would gain oxygen and electricity enough to keep her alive for another day. That was what the Dragons would do, were they in her position: reclaim the resources necessary to survival. It was what a tiger, if there were any tigers left alive on polluted, overpopulated Earth. But Feroza was a woman, not an animal, and she was not capable of murder, even to save her own life. She turned her attention from Toledo to the Dragons.
Feroza could almost see the question passing between the two animals: What could this thing be?
The father's head drew closer. Factors decoupled under the lenses of his eyes. Sheets of metal pulled back to expose the clamps, spikes, and torches of his feeding apparatus. Perhaps it will taste good.
The mother slithered between Feroza and the sleeping young. Or perhaps it is a threat.
The blunt tube of her flamethrower clicked into position. Liquid dribbled onto the rusted floor of the hangar-nest, where it boiled into vapor.
A warning flickered in Feroza's visor: oxygen. Exactly what she needed. And exactly what she knew how to request.
Feroza triggered the distress signal again and held her hands up before the mouth of the serpent.
For more info, see the the Petrolea Index
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