Petrolea ch3

"You're doing it wrong," said Victor.

Dr. Merchant's head turned inside her fishbowl helmet, little more than a dark smudge under the slick of oil and boiling oxygen. "Ah," she said. "You're awake."

She lifted her dripping hands toward the terrifying maw of the Dragon, as if Victor might have missed it. "You see I am using the Dragon's maternal instincts to win for us a fresh supply of oxygen."

What Victor saw was Dr. Merchant kneeling before one Dragon, holding up an oxygen canister while another dribbled liquid oxygen onto it. Most of the stuff away in the -160 air, so only a few drops actually managed to bubble into nothing on the rusty floor.

Victor blinked at her for a few moments, first trying to figure out what she thought she was doing, then waiting for her to see the obvious flaws in her plan.

"You know you'll never fill the canister that way," he said.

Dr. Merchant didn't put down the useless canister. "So help me. Can you program the factors in your gauntlet to make a funnel and valve?"

Victor tried to imagine a device he might persuade his slave factors to construct that would mate a standard oxygen canister with the flamethrower nozzle of a Dragon. "It's impossible."

"Do not tell me what is impossible," she snapped. "Help me, man, if you want to survive."

Victor bit back the first response that came to his mind and tried to focus on the problem of respiration. "We need a compressor or refrigerator to condense the oxygen back into liquid for storage."

"Unnecessary," she said. "The Dragons compress and refrigerate oxygen inside their bodies. Now, if it were possible to train the Dragons to hold still long enough…"

If his hands had been free, Victor would have waved away the biologist's speculation. Instead he just lay there, welded to the other Dragon, and said, "I have a better idea." Dr. Merchant was a biologist. Her specialty was the whole, but Victor's specialty was the parts, and he knew what parts he needed.

Victor blinked and rolled his eyes and selected a command from the menu in his eye-tracking interface. The factors he had programmed to grab him relaxed, and he tumbled to the floor. He tried to flip over and got a shove on his back for his trouble.

"Stay down." Merchant had stopped propitiating the Dragon and thrown herself over his back. "Try to look serpentine."

"What?"

"Like a snake, man. Like a Dragonlet."

Victor tried to squirm.

"Good, good," said Merchant, although whether to him or the Dragon, Victor didn't know. "Now you listen here, you utter fool." That was definitely to him. "Do you realize how close you came to being eaten by the father Dragon? You are quite unequipped to survive out here. So respect my orders without question, and do nothing without my permission."

Said the woman who'd been trying to milk oxygen from a Dragon. Said the woman who'd nearly gotten him killed. Who had almost certainly gotten all those people killed in the jungle. This sneering, privileged academic princess deserved to suffocate here and be eaten by her adopted robot-parents.

Victor would do the right thing and save her, but he certainly wasn't going to let her ego interfere with his efforts to save both their lives. Silently, he activated his handshake gauntlet.

The slave-factors were still inside the body of the Dragon, tapped into the behavior processor, or brain. In order to infiltrate the somatic processors, Victor had to command his factors to physically relocate, then set up a network to synchronize their execution. It was a tricky bit of work, but at least he didn't have to write the programs for them to execute. This was something he'd been playing with at the base, though on smaller animals. The executable's name was "smellsBadontheOutside."

"So what do you propose to do in order to get the oxygen we need?" asked Dr. Merchant.

"This," said Victor, and executed the program.

The Dragon's body ballooned outward and burst open. The head struck the ground and bounced, throwing the beams from its dying headlights across rib-like structural supports and glistening fabricators, now open to the air. Steam puffed from the inner recesses of what had once been the animal's body, and was now a life-support module.

Victor should have predicted what happened next. It wouldn't have changed his decision to...what was Merchant screaming at him? "Murder an innocent creature and their only hope for survival." But they needed pressurized oxygen and the Dragon's internal organs were designed to pressurize oxygen. Now they had access to those organs. If Victor had warned Merchant, she might have tried to stop him. Then again, they might have done something about the other Dragon.

The animal reared over Merchant's head and brought itself down between the biologist and Victor, wings splayed, engines growling, face plates pulling back to expose the nozzle of its flame thrower.

Victor dove away from the stream of fire the beast belched at him.

You had to really work at it to dive in Titan's 0.15 gees. Victor had a good couple of seconds hanging helpless in the air while he contemplated the choices he might have made.

At least the stupid animal tracked him with its fire. The body of the first Dragon didn't catch. The precious oxygen in its compressors did not explode and kill them all.

Ah, the floor. Victor braced for impact. Instead, he pressed down before bouncing off it, sliding across the floor.

Thank God he hadn't jumped the other way, or he'd have flown out the window and into the cold, empty air. Thank God he didn't need to be touching the ground to work his handshake gauntlet.

He wiggled his fingers and factors detached themselves from the body of the dead Dragon and scuttled across the floor toward its enraged mate.

"No."

For a second, Victor couldn't figure out the telemetry. Then he got it. Merchant had stepped on one of the factors. Just put her foot on the irreplaceable tool and smudged it from existence.

"¡miércoles! Do not...do that!" It wasn't easy to land, control his factors and speak English all at the same time. "If that thing raises the temperature in here, the oxygen will explode. Right? So control the Dragon."

"Control her? You killed her mate." Merchant was shaking so hard, he could see the tremors through her environment suit. But she slid to the side, much more practiced at moving on Titan, and rolled to her feet. Now, standing between the Dragon and the wall of the cave, the biologist spread her arms and legs and broadcast white noise from her suit's transmitters at maximum volume.

The Dragon reared back.

"Bhaag ja!" she shouted. Or something like that. "Hoosh!"

"Good," Victor said. "If you can make it go — "

"Drive a mother away from her offspring? Don't be ridiculous."

"Offspring?" said Victor.

Three giant metal slugs tumbled away from Dr. Merchant. She followed them, yelling and waving her arms at the Dragon — the mother? — which stretched its neck toward her. But it couldn't flame her without harming its young and it couldn't reach her before the first Dragonlet crawled over the edge of the window and dropped out of the hangar.

"Yes," she said. "Good. Now you, help me!" The biologist ducked and skidded toward the other baby Dragons, heading one off as it humped toward the safety of its mother's side.

Victor shuffled after the other as fast as he dared. The adult Dragon looked up at him and Dr. Merchant took the opportunity to grab her baby and heave it over the edge.

The Dragon turned back to blast her and Victor kicked the last baby, which rolled up like a giant pill bug and plopped out the window.

The mother Dragon screamed across the AM band. It scooted sideways across the iron floor, head dipping, wings rotating back into flight position.

"Go away." Merchant lowered her arms. "Bhaag ja."

The adult was much more graceful than the young had been: an elephant seal rather than a giant maggot. Its long, sleek body twisted in the air, coiling around a parachute/jellyfish shape Victor realized must be one of the Dragonlets in flight mode. When mother and child touched, factors moved and the parachute condensed into a little lump on the Dragon's fuselage. The nosecone moved, questing for the other Dragonlets. The wings flexed and tilted.

"Once she brings the Dragonlets back," said Dr. Merchant, "she will kill us for what we did to her family."

Victor turned back to the corpse of the first Dragon, which was already chugging away at fabricating its first human-compatible oxygen canister. Water and food would come next, rendered out of the petroleum these monsters used for blood.

"Well," he said, "at least we'll be alive for her to kill us."