"Almost done." Victor hunched over his work, hands furiously air-typing as his slave-factors danced over the corpse of the Dragon.
"What did you say?" There was another "oof" of exertion from Dr. Merchant's microphone and the distant sound of something shattering.
"I'll have fresh air for you when you come back," said Victor. "I decided it was easier to fabricate new oxygen canisters than design something that can mate with," he was blushing again. "I mean 'connect to,' the ones we already have. Metal is not in short supply. And as for food..."
What had been the male Dragon's abdominal cavity was now a still. The rib-like struts of the central torso cupped a hissing, burbling life-support system of rough steel cylinders, clusters of golden spheres, and black glass tubes, all of it held together with plastic cobwebs and copper wire. It no longer even remotely resembled the Dragonlets, currently sleeping on the other side of the hangar.
"I'll bring more food for your beast," Dr. Merchant grunted. "Have no fear."
"More food for us," Victor corrected her. "My next product is water and protein paste, but that will use up the hydrocarbon reserves of the, uh, father Dragon."
"Reducing a creature to its component parts at our convenience," she grumbled.
Victor didn't want to start that argument again. "Well," He cleared his throat. "Anyway. We've been working on these wilderness survival programs for some time. This was the first field test, but I'm optimistic."
He watched plastic bladders fill with something heavy and paste-like and thought about Dr. Merchant eating his food. Drinking his water. Bathing in it. Victor tried to remember what she looked like out of her environment suit.
Small, he remembered vaguely, and usually angry about something. There had been jokes back in Xanadu about her mustache and unibrow, but at the moment, Victor couldn't visualize either feature. He queried his memory for more details, but couldn't be sure whether what he got back was real recollection or hopeful fantasy.
He'd been quiet too long. "Uh. Everything okay down there?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes, no problems at all." A grunt and a crash, then more silence.
Victor chewed his lower lip. "Don't worry, we will not have to live on paste for long. Once both of us are fed, we can go back to Xanadu, right?"
"You can go back to Xanadu."
Victor snorted. "And you will go where? To the jungle castle of the Princess of Petrolea? You will die out here."
"I will be arrested if I go back there," she said.
Victor frowned. "No," he said, "they wouldn't do that. Well. They might. But if they blame you, they blame me too. Then we're both in jail together," he looked around at the rusty hangar, "and not much has changed, hey?"
She grunted and killed something down on the slopes of the mountain.
One of the Dragonlets twitched and broadcast a radio signal Victor had come to recognize meant "feed me." He tossed one of its father's vertebrae at it, and it quieted down.
He wanted to hear Dr. Merchant speak more. She had attractive voice. "All right," he said. "What would you do if you were in charge? What do you actually want from people?"
"Aside from that there be fewer of them?"
"When people say we should reduce the human population, they never volunteer to be the part of the population that gets reduced." Too late, Victor remembered he wanted her to like him. "Um, I mean we're in space now. We have the resources to support a growing population."
"Unfortunately. We'll just be going faster when we hit the Malthusian wall." And before he could ask her what the hell that meant. "And now we have a whole new biome to bring down with us."
"You act like we're all doomed." Victor grinned as he worked. "If Mumbai is really so bad, you come live in Lima with me, he? Thanks to space industry, it's a cleaner and more beautiful place than before."
"Only at the expense of a dirty and ugly Petrolea," said Dr. Merchant. "You drove through the clear-cut area around Xanadu Base. Didn't it sicken you?"
"No? What do I care about the Petrolean jungle? I don't have to live there."
Dr. Merchant paused for a moment, panting. "Clearly, you do."
That made Victor laugh out loud. "You're right," he said while he worked in the Dragons' lair. "It's too bad we didn't pave over this part of the solar system. Wouldn't it be great if we already had electricity and air? I could take you out to eat at the Burger King down the Berg. Ooh, or maybe Bembos could open a branch on Titan. You've ever heard of Bembos?"
She sighed. "My point is that if we did live here, if we moved out of the artificial and unsustainable technological shells we've built around ourselves, we'd have more respect for the natural environment."
He scrolled through options in his eye-tracking menu. "You think it would be better if we all lived in villages in the jungle?"
Doctor, I know people who used to live in the jungle, and they thought the slums around Lima were a big improvement."
"So the slums keep growing. More and more people piled on top of each other until the whole global environment collapses underneath us."
Victor snorted. "Nothing collapsed under me. I learned how to code and moved my family out." He hoped the automatic bank transfers he'd set up were still beaming money back to his friends and family. He hoped the investment funded by space industry kept flowing, and Lima kept blooming. That way even if he died here in this den of monsters, his nephews and nieces might grow up in a better, more prosperous world.
"And once this job is over, you plan to move up again, do you?" She asked. "Dubai, maybe, or London? Along with every other upwardly-mobile young professional on Earth."
"No, I'm going to stay in Lima, because it is a lovely city," said Victor. "But if everyone else wanted to move in with me...why not? If the whole human race lived in my city, the rest of the planet would be free, hey?"
"A city of eight billion people? Are you joking? How could we possibly feed that many people? Can you imagine the amount of garbage they would produce?"
"We're feeding and dealing with the garbage of the human race right now," said Victor. "Packing those people together would make everything more efficient."
She laughed for some reason. "Save us from social engineering by real engineers."
That stung. But it was good to hear her laugh.
Victor was fiddling with his gauntlet, trying to figure out how to print out walls to hold in an oxygen atmosphere, when something moved on the still.
"Oh, pucha. Another Gob."
The little scavenger had spread itself like a miniature city, with the cylindrical towers of its little processors pack up from the middle the mass of scurrying factors. Even as Victor watched, the little robots scuttled across the side of the still and into its inner workings. Without thinking, Victor reached out to brush them away.
Red lights in his visor. He swore for real this time and jerked back, the fingertips of his right glove scored with tiny notches. "That thing nearly chewed my glove off!"
"What?" said Dr. Merchant, "the Gob? You didn't try to touch it, did you?"
"I...it tried to eat me!"
"Well of course it did," she said. "Your suit is made of plastic and metal."
"I thought they were treated in some way — ay! It's going to break the whole still!" Error messages popped up in his visor and Victor nearly got his glove bitten off in his instinctive grab for his work.
"That still of yours is a whopping great corpse," said Dr. Merchant. "Of course you should expect it to attract scavengers."
How could she be so blasé about this? Victor poked impotently at the writhing mass of chewing factors. "How can I make it stop?"
"Piss on it," said Feroza.
"What?"
"Urine. Wee. In the field, when the repellent coating wears off and we don't have a Punisher to scare away scavengers, we empty our water reclamators into whatever we want safe. Factors don't like the heat. And organic compounds, I imagine, taste bad to them."
"But," Victor flailed helplessly at the disgusting creature as it gnawed on their life-support engine, "I can't afford to lose that water."
"Do you have any other warm organics?"
Victor's eyes went from the crawling Gob to the bag of breakfast paste. "Pucha," he said. "The food."
The paste steamed when it hit the freezing Petrolean air, and the Gob recoiled and scuttled away from it. Wasting the stuff made Victor's gut clench, but better lose a meal than his only means to make more meals.
The Gob's component factors wrapped around its central processor and re-assembled its little engines. The swarm assumed its streamlined flight-shape and zipped away from the still and circled the hangar until one of the Dragonlets woke up and snapped it out of the air.
But there were more Gobs buzzing around them or oozing along the walls. And what were those things that moved in the shadows of the hangar? Victor tried to calculate how much paste he would need to cover the whole still. "We will need to hunt more to replace this," he said. "And now will I have to smear this stuff on myself, too?"
"Hopefully not," said Dr. Merchant. "Your suit has a distasteful coating already, although that's becoming less effective as time goes on. And I have never seen Gobs try to attack people. Do not worry." She huffed as if lifting something heavy. "I have bagged enough game to repel bugs and feed ourselves."
Victor sighed with relief. He'd half believed she would abandon him up here. "I'm glad you've decided life is worth living."
"Yes," she said. "Well. I suppose feeding two people is a rather different situation from strip-mining an entire planet."
Was that a concession? A compromise? Victor tried to meet her halfway. "You know," he said, "I would not want to be...the sort of person who would strip-mine a planet."
A puffing of breath. "I am surprised and gratified to hear you say that."
Surprised and gratified. God, it was like she'd dipped her hand in chocolate and slapped him. Like she was the strict headmistress of an expensive boarding school about to take off her glasses and administer discipline.
Victor licked his lips with a dry tongue. On the other side of the hangar, a Dragonlet called out in hunger.
A sultry huff of air in his earphones. "All right. I have denuded this patch of jungle enough. We are flying back."
"Hurry home."
The Dragonlet called again and Victor reached for the pile of bones he'd saved from its father's corpse. There was nothing left but the head. Or skull or cockpit or whatever the preferred term was. The thing was the size of Victor's torso, if not its mass, and even in the light gravity it took some awkward effort to lift the thing.
When he turned, he saw one of the Dragonlets had crawled to within arm's reach. Jaw's reach. "Really," Victor said. "Hurry. The Dragonlets are hungry and I've run out of food."
"Well, get down on your knees," ordered Dr. Merchant. "We can solve this problem behaviorally. There is no need for you to enslave the baby, Victor."
As if he could enslave it. Victor didn't have enough slave factors to hack the baby. The giant metal maggot could easily kill him, either by attacking him or just knocking over the still.
"Dr. Merchant," he said as the creature advanced on him, "what should I do?"
There were no recriminations. Not even a scornful tone to her voice as she said, "Puppetry."
"Excuse me?"
"Do you still have the father's head?"
"Yes," Victor hoisted it and dangling mandibles clacked.
"Use it to trick the baby. Make it think you're its father."
"Oh…kay?" Cameras tracked Victor as he held out the skull. "There, there," he bounced the bulky machine up and down. "Nice little…larva."
"Stroke it with the nose," said Dr. Merchant, "nuzzle it."
Victor flinched back from the humping round monster. "What does 'nuzzle' mean?"
"Like what fathers do with Dragonlets."
"I don't have any children. I'm not married."
"Thank you for telling me."
Victor concentrated on petting the Dragonlet, cheeks hot. "Um. Should I feed it? Is it hungry?"
"It's an infant predator," she said. "Of course it's hungry."
"I don't have any raw petroleum left. I converted it all into food for us or damn bug repellant."
The Dragonlet wasn't looking at the puppet-head any more. Its cameras were focused on Victor's arm. Its whiskers and antennae withdrew into their sockets.
"That might be a problem," said Dr. Merchant.
The Dragon lunged. It couldn't flame and Victor dodged before it pinned him, but he felt like his arm had been shot. Pain, a red smear, and cold.
"Oh," said Victor, "oh, miércoles."
The shocking crimson of his blood vanished in a cloud of white condensation and the Dragon reared away from the burst of heat. Its mouthparts worked at the scrap of Victor's suit material. It brushed the disgusting human blood off the tasty plastic with finicky precision, then focused on his hands. Victor thought of all the metal and electronics in his handshake gauntlet.
"Toledo?" came the voice in his ear. "What happened? Are you all right?"
Victor threw the head across the room. This failed to distract the first Dragonlet, but the impact of the skull on the metal floor woke the other two, and they began to cry in hunger.
"Victor! Can you hear me? Answer immediately!"
"Suit is…" what was the word? "Ripped. Breached. Got to find patch. Got to protect the still…"
His eyes focused on the blood, steaming and freezing as it dripped down his fingers.
"Feroza, will warm organics repel the Dragon?"
"Yes." Her voice was tight and high with emotion. "Victor, what are you doing?"
"Being eaten by a Dragon," he said. "But maybe I deserve it. I eat its daddy, it eats me, huh?"
Victor smeared the blood across his glove and thrust it toward the Dragonlet's nose. Condensation billowed in the frigid air.
"I'm coming, Victor," she said. "It won't eat you. You won't die. I won't have it."
The baby pecked at his arm again, pulled back. The headlights brightened, focused on the steaming blood. The Dragon extended whisker-like probes from recesses along its nosecone and took a sample.
It drew back, repelled by the taste, and Victor nearly passed out from relief.
Thanks everyone who has read up to this point.
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