Petrolea ch7

When the oxygen rose high enough to inflate the walls, Victor gave out a whoop and jumped into the air. By the time his boots drifted back down, the foam insulation on the floor had puffed up to triple its original thickness.

"O2's gone back down," Feroza read off her visor. "I suppose it must, as your foam has trapped so much air."

"The still can replace our air. And it's not my foam," Victor staged an elaborate bow and felt only a little silly doing it, "it's Petrolea's foam." He scratched the bubbly gray paste the covered the wall. "We copied the recipe for this stuff from the mechanoid heat reaction."

A defensive mechanism, most commonly seen in the favored prey of Dragons. "So we're sitting in a giant scab?" asked Feroza.

Victor gave her a thumbs-up. "Heat and O2 should climb much faster now. I hope you like it." He craned his neck within his bubble helmet, examining their little cave. What limited space they had was mostly occupied by the knee-high tube of the airlock. "…Even if this place looks like an inside-out igloo."

Feroza gave him a pat on the shoulder, which he could not feel through the thickness of his suit. "I couldn't be more pleased if this were a Mogul palace with an army of servants."

"Well," said Victor, "since we would freeze and asphyxiate in a palace along with all those servants..."

"This is infinitely better," said Feroza. "Thank you, Victor."

They looked through their visors at each other.

Something had changed. Their conversation had gone from mostly argument to mostly agreement. They even talked when they didn't need to, sharing observations about the hangar and its denizens, bits and pieces of their very different childhoods, snatches of poetry, from Feroza at least. Victor had never been as good at human operations, but it seemed to him the two of them were building the architecture of a relationship based on more than just the next few hours of survival.

"Well, this insulation is certainly effective." Feroza turned around. "I don't see any condensation on the wall at all."

Victor cleared his tight throat. "Yeah. Just on the, uh, mouth of the airlock."

Calling it an airlock was generous. Really, it was just a series of valves composed of plastic petals. They were stiff and sticky enough to form a fairly good seal, but from here Victor could see the droplets of water forming around the dimpled hole in the center, where their air and hot water tubes lead to the still and the rest of the hangar.

"It would help if we had a sheet we could cover it with," said Feroza.

"Good idea," said Victor. "That will save us from having to look at a giant, wet plastic anus all the time, hey?"

She looked at him, eyebrows a nearly horizontal line over extremely un-amused eyes. "Quite," she said.

Victor could have slapped himself. Another uncomfortable pause later, he said, "We should have enough feedstock for a sheet for the insulated door, yes, and dinner. And then it won't matter, because we'll be able to fly back to Xanadu Base tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Feroza repeated, her voice flat.

"Yes," said Victor. "After we sleep."

The word "together" congealed in the air between them like water beading and dripping off a plastic sphincter.

"I'll just see about that sheet." Victor put on his helmet, got down on his hands and knees, and penetrated the airlock.

The still hummed along next to the airlock exit, a cage-shaped bulk covered with a growing population of guardian and repair factors. Gobs wouldn't stand a chance against the new defenses, and some judicious tinkering with the Dragon's behavioral processors ensured they'd leave the life-support engine alone.

Victor had every reason to be optimistic, even self-congratulatory. He had survived a day in a Dragon's nest. But could he survive a night with Feroza Merchant?

Sweat squished around his shaking hands as he typed commands. What was wrong with him? Victor had never been exactly suave, but he hadn't made this much of a fool of himself since he was ten and had pissed himself when a girl made him laugh. Although, given the number of times he'd peed into his catheter in Feroza's presence…ah, good. Something else to be embarrassed about.

The recipe he selected from the still's menu was a different polymer than the scab-insulation of the walls and ceiling. Rather than plaster-like paste, his new order was extruded in the shape and consistency of spaghetti. Victor's gloved hands had no hope of weaving the noodly stuff into a sheet, but it was self-adherent enough to stick together into a more-or-less flat shape when he mashed it.

Victor was trying to unstick the stuff from his gloves when the floor vibrated and shadows leapt from his hands. His helmet darkened against the sudden glare of the twin spotlights that had kindled behind him and his earphones filled with a whistling, static-filled growl.

Victor looked around at the Dragons. The exhausted mother had curled around its remaining young, one of which was awake and looking at him. The giant metal maggot crawled over its mother and approached on its caterpillar tread, the fat cylinders of its jet engines ratcheting up its back. The neck narrowed, lengthened. The head stretched toward him, mouthparts gliding open.

Only then did the alarms he'd installed go off.

Cursing, Victor began pulling stringy sheet-material off his gloves, but then his other safe-guards executed and red indicators turned green as his slave factors reprogrammed the Dragons, yet again, to reclassify him as "friend" rather than "food." The baby's mandibles closed and its whiskers and antenna extended. It gave him a sniff before turning around and trundling back to its mother.

What had he been thinking about surviving a day with the Dragons? What had he been thinking about Feroza? With a sigh, Victor turned back to his work. The spaghetti clump was as sheet-like as it would ever be, and there was still a little feedstock left…He paused for a moment, thinking. Then fantasizing. Then anticipating. He typed in his last order: a spongy blob of insulation, another plastic bag, and a powder that would become soap when mixed with warm water.

Feroza wasn't surprised to see the bath implements. Victor could tell because he could see her face.

"You took off your helmet," he said and the sponge inflated in his gloves.

Outside of the bulky space-suit, she looked tiny. Victor was no giant, but the bristly black top of Feroza's head only came up to his collar. Thick, dark brows nearly met over her severe eyes, the upper lip of her neat little mouth dotted with hair. Victor stared at her, the entirety of his mental processing power dedicated to the task of stopping himself from saying, "you're beautiful."

He was already reaching up to snap off the catches. Victor could feel himself blushing, then blushing more as he realized she could now see that reaction. See how he was staring at her. How his mouth was hanging open. He hadn't shaved in days and he probably stank like a goat.

Victor took a breath to apologize. And her smell hit him.

It should have been disgusting. Neither of them had bathed in days and despite everything the still had done to clean the air, their little habitat stank like an oil spill. If Feroza had sat down next to him on a bus in Lima, Victor would have stood up and left.

But this was the first person he'd smelled since his disastrous trip into the jungle. This was Feroza, who'd saved his life.

She rubbed a hand across her forehead as if to push back a lock of hair, and blinked when her fingers grazed her astronaut's buzz-cut. Victor's own hands went up to his throat, trying to straighten a tie that wasn't there.

Because he wasn't on a blind date with some daughter of some auntie's friend. He wasn't in some candle-lit bistro. He was on Titan, at the top of a metal mountain, in a hangar, in a tiny bubble of light and heat and oxygen.

"About that bath…" Victor said.

"Ah, yes. The sponge in your hand." Watching her smile was like smiling, himself. "You know I've been fantasizing about this all day?"

So had Victor. He breathed. Held out the sponge. "Ladies first?"

She took it. "With pleasure."

She flicked back the catches on her wrists, slid her gloves off her smooth hands, and Victor realized what he was staring at. He spun around, slipping in the low gravity. "Oh. Uh. I'll…do something."

"You can help me with my spacesuit," she said. "And I shall help you with yours."

Victor blinked around at her. "Oh," was all he could think of to say.

The clasps around her waist clacked open under his fingers.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree."

"Eh?" Victor shook his head. "Who did what with a dome?"

"Khubalai Khaan," she said, "You know, the Mongol emperor? I don't know his name in Spanish. I was quoting Coleridge."

"Oh," said Victor, feeling like he was failing history class. Or maybe Coleridge was a poet? It was hard to concentrate and take off Feroza's pants at the same time. Pants were very complicated.

Her suit-ling clung like thick rubber to her ankles and calves and thighs. "It's just orientalist rubbish, really," she said. "A bit embarrassing that I remember the whole thing."

"So Coleridge was a poet?" Asked Victor.

"That's right." She shimmied out of the shell of the upper suit. Her hand went up to the zipper at her collar.

Victor swallowed. He was almost entirely certain she was seducing him. "How does, uh, the rest of it go?"

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea."

Then the poem got sexy, and Victor was kissing her.

Snaps snapped. The pants and boots of his environment suit scraped down his legs, leaving them feeling as light and flexible as the noodly blanket he'd hung over the airlock. The heavy shell of his upper suit rose, occluded Feroza's face. Then his suit was rolling on the ground and so were they. The air on his skin when she unzipped his suit liner felt almost as delicious as Feroza, herself.

Outside their little bubble of warmth and light, the Dragons panted and steamed. Heat fountained from the mountain beneath them and life ground against itself in the jungle below. The planet Saturn shone, invisible beyond the gasoline clouds.