Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 17

Petrolea 11c

And before he worked himself up to say something like “because I value you more than what I can get out of you, too.” Feroza said, “We help each other, it’s what symbionts do.”

“I can’t argue with that.” Victor watched the Dragon as it slithered back and forth in front of them, crunching and flaming, working its way through the crowd of creatures with mechanical satisfaction. “Not that I’m complaining,” he said, “but why do those things keep feeding themselves to our Dragon? Can mechanoids even get suicidal?”

“It must be us,” she said. “We represent something their instinctive programming has no way to address. Their normal behavior has been overridden.”

“By the need to kill us?”

She turned to him, suit outlined in red light, monsters cavorting and burning around her. “Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Look,” he said. “I know I’m not a biologist or anything, but animals don’t work like this. All of these things attacking us.” Victor pointed up at the Leviathan’s mouth. “That big hose watching us. The whole damn planet massacred Xanadu Base.” He fought to control his breathing. “I mean…why?”

A creature like a geodesic ball filled with claws bounced over the Dragon and sailed through the air toward Victor. Feroza swatted the thing to the ground and crushed it under her boot.

“I suppose,” she said, bending to examine the spasming remains, “that once some Petrolean animals learned they could eat human technology, they sent out a signal. It was only a matter of time until we saw a feeding swarm.”

Victor looked out at the gibbering hordes of creatures, trying to imagine them as seagulls flocking to a dropped sandwich. “No,” he said. “We’re killing these things.”

“The Dragon is killing them.”

“Alright. But shouldn’t they figure that out and run away?”

“Perhaps we are seeing eusocial behavior, or these have some other way to store their genetic material offsite.” Feroza picked up a half-dead creature and shook it briskly. Factors scattered.

Petrolea 11b

¡Hurra! Except that Victor’s suit was still compromised, they still had no way to contact the orbital station and call for help, and Feroza might actually be suicidal. “We can do this, right?” Victor said. “We can survive, right?”

“Probably.” Feroza had tiptoed around a lobster-sized parasite and was examining its pincers while it tried to slice her feet off. “The Dragon thinks we’re her children. She’ll continue to protect us even after she’s replenished her fuel.”

“That’s a lot of trust to place on a creature that tries to eat you every chance it gets.”

Feroza threw the parasite to the Dragon, which snapped it up. “She saved me when I jumped. As flying animals with high parental investment, they have an instinct for rescuing falling young.”

Victor wasn’t so sure. What if he had been the one who jumped?

The Dragon had herded the humans into the cover of an overhang dug into the carapace by the roots of a small windmill-tree and was now busily establishing a perimeter of dismembered robots around them. Periodically, she would nudge a partially cooked mechanic toward Feroza as if trying to feed her. Or teach her to hunt?

Victor felt he could move down his catastrophe list. Since he was unlikely to find a patch-kit or interplanetary communications equipment on the back of a flying metal whale-grub, that left psychological problems.

“So you’re saying the Dragon loves you like a baby.”

“I am saying that I’m not just useful to her,” said Feroza, accepting a charred, twitching lump from the Dragon with a bow of gratitude. “I’m valuable. I’m precious to her.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?” he said. “I mean you’re using her. I mean you’re using it.” He meant using me. “The Dragon.”

She smiled at him. “The term is ‘brood parasite,’ and it would only bother me if I didn’t return that love, Victor.”

“You mean you think the Dragon is your mother?”

“No,” said Feroza, “but I also value her beyond what I can get out of her.”

What the hell did that mean? If the Dragon wasn’t Feroza’s mother or her pet or her car, what was it? And what did that make Victor? The Dragon’s son-in-law?

“That’s an odd philosophy for a biologist, isn’t it?” he said.

“On the contrary,” said Feroza. “Unlike many people, I don’t mistake animals for stupid humans or for disobedient machines. They do not exist for or against us. They just are. Complete, without need for any human reference points.”

Victor tried unsuccessfully to find a parallel between that statement and his and Feroza’s relationship. How could he make it clear that their night in the reverse-igloo hadn’t just been a last-people-on-the-planet act of desperation? “I am glad she saved you.”

Petrolea 11a

Chapter 11

The parasite looked a bit like an octopus. Or a spider made of segmented metal hose.

Feroza flailed in the tangle of murderous steel pasta and Victor stared, totally frozen by his horror.

They hadn’t brought any weapons. Why hadn’t they brought any weapons? He could have designed some. Some program that would sever a Dragon’s head and turn it into a turret-mounted flamethrower. If only he’d thought–

Fire rolled over them.

Victor toggled off some virtual controls and pulled Feroza off the Dragon with him. The mechanoid itself slurped down the charred remains of the Spaghetti Monster as its body bunched and transformed from sleek jet-shape to caterpillar.

The Leviathan’s back looked like someone had tried to make an aircraft carrier out of scrap metal. What had from a distance looked like smoothly machined overlapping plates, Victor now saw were pitted and asymmetrical. Respectably-sized shrubs had self-assembled in the hollows and crevices, carving little chunks of metal from the flesh of the Leviathan to build their branches and whirligig leaves.

And of course the whole place was infested with creatures. Some were like lice, others like fleas or crabs or flatfish, and it looked like every one of them–parasite, epiphyte, or whose-a-site– was crawling from crevices in the uneven skin of the Leviathan to come, slavering, toward them. Tentacles lashed and claws flexed under the red glow shining from between the teeth at the end of the Leviathan’s snake-like proboscis.

Victor fought the urge to cross himself and looked at the scene with engineer’s eyes. Problem one: hundreds of horrible creatures wanted to eat them. Problem two: their ride was out of fuel, and was also hungry. The solution wasn’t actually that hard to formulate. Victor didn’t even have to nudge the Dragon with his slave factors. Another blast of fire and it was in amongst the parasites, eating everything that moved.

Petrolea 10b

With a roar of engines Feroza could feel through her suit and the intervening air, the Dragon matched speeds with her. The animal hung in front of her, a column of metallic flesh the length of a bus. A mass of violence and confusion and the need to make decisions. Feroza opened her arms to it.

Iron wings flared, engines strained, and Feroza’s arms were nearly ripped from their sockets, but their fall smoothed out into a climbing glide. And Victor’s arms were hauling at her, pulling her into a sitting position against his chest.

Feroza squeezed her legs around the fuselage, felt the factors reach up to hold her in return.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You are welcome, you crazy woman,” said Victor. “I should push you off this thing. I should…I don’t even know. We are the only two people left. Do you understand? Everyone else is dead and you throw yourself off the Dragon like you don’t understand how…”

His microphone clicked off, but their suits were pressed together tightly enough for some vibration to propagate. Feroza sat there in front of Victor, wondering if he knew she could feel him weeping.

He was right. Everyone was dead. So were they, sooner or later. But there was nothing to do now but push that death later into the future. Victor was counting on her for that.

The Dragon slowed. The wings tilted up, the landing gear down. The vast metallic landscape of the Leviathan’s back stretched out before them.

“Get ready,” said Feroza as the Dragon settled onto the metallic carapace.

“Ready for what?” asked Victor, and something attacked them.

Petrolea 10a

Chapter 10

Feroza wished she could feel the wind on her face as she fell.

Encased as she was by the inviolate shell of her environment suit, she could only watch the onrushing constellation of Fusillade Wyrms. They hung as if suspended in syrup, buds of metal and plastic that bloomed into amorphous flowers as she approached.

They reached for her, but Feroza tucked her arms and legs together and dove past them, toward their home and symbiotic master. The Leviathan swelled in her vision, less organism than factory; a mobile Berg. Although it could no longer fire Fusillade Wyrms at her, the flexible trunk could bend up and back and open beneath her. Feroza stared into that abyss and cameras stared back at her.

The human interlopers had finally met their match. The harvesters had been harvested. Where Feroza might blame greedy humans for choosing to obliterate an irreplaceable community of life, she could not blame this giant machine for performing its function, this animal for following its instincts. The destruction of Xanadu Base was a tragedy and a folly, like a little boy sticking his arm into a laundry press.

They didn’t understand mechanoids and their behavior, but Feroza did. The mother Dragon would dive to catch her. The attack in the aerie had been a fluke, a malfunction of the slave-factors Victor used to control her. Given her own free will, the Dragon would recognize Feroza as her child. She must.

Victor had less faith. “Ay, mierda! I mean ¡miércoles! Move, you stupid animal! Dive, dive faster. Dios mío, líbrame de ecochicas paracaidistas. You crazy woman! When this is over I will tie you down–¡pucha!“

He went on in this vein, but Feroza’s plan had worked. The Leviathan’s airspace was far above them now; it could not fire its Wyrms at such high angles as this.

Meaning that she, along with Victor and the Dragon, would be safe. Safe enough to die on the Leviathan’s back or back in the aerie or somewhere else when Victor finally ran out of things to kill and use to prolong their human lives. Maybe it would be better if the Dragon did not see Feroza as her child. If she let the human brood-parasite fall into the gaping maw that opened below.

Petrolea 9d

Victor looked at the blimp of bloated malevolence squatting on the ruins of human life on Petrolea. “Uh…”

She made an impatient noise. “The cannons cannot fire straight up. The Fusillade Wyrms would hit the hot air cowlings.”

“What kind of worms? You mean the cannon-ball creatures?” Victor glanced at his readouts. He didn’t have enough oxygen to make it back to the aerie, even if they could escape. “No. I get it. Okay. But what then? We can’t just hover over the damn Leviathan’s back.”

“We can land on it.”

“Are you kidding? What if there are worse things riding it? Cannon-ball creatures. Other kinds of epiphytes?”

“The word is ‘symbionts,'” she said, “or ‘parasites.’ Or just ‘commensals.’ And yes. I plan to feed them to her.” She patted the Dragon’s side. “You hear that? I will feed you. Good food.”

“I don’t think talking to it will make any difference. It’s as likely to eat you as anything.”

The Dragon ducked under another volley of high-velocity death.

“She will only eat me if you let her. Does the code in her behavioral processor show any tendency to regard me as food?”

“You mean her runtime environment, or active processes, or behavior cue?”

“What?”

“Never mind. The answer is no, and I can delete or overwrite the command when it appears,” said Victor. “But I can’t tell her where to land.”

“I can tell her where to land.”

“How?” He still did not want to go anywhere near that horrible Leviathan.

“By example. Make it let go of me,” Feroza said. “Victor, the factors. Make them let go.”

“But you’ll fall.”

Feroza turned to meet his eyes. “The Dragon will catch me.”

Petrolea 9c

“Fire,” Feroza yelled, “fire.” And, yes, the Leviathan was firing. More flashes. More Cannonballs. Why was the giant beast bothering? Why waste so much effort on two measly humans when it had a whole giant habitat to devour?

Victor was just opening his mouth to ask Feroza when the Dragon spun him into another black umbrella.

There was sudden weight, clinging and amorphous, like a sack of cornmeal had been dropped on his head. The Cannonball collapsed around Victor like a metal-and-plastic jellyfish. The factors that made up its body dissolved into a roiling swarm that coated him, pressed him down, and started to chew.

Alarms rang. Whatever protective coating Victor’s suit retained made no impression on the little robots as they dug in. Victor scrabbled frantically over his chest, trying to find the Cannonball’s organs by feel. If he could find and destroy the somatic or behavioral processors, if he could get his own slave factors to fight off the Cannonballs, he might not end up digested by his own field of expertise.

“Fire,” Feroza commanded again.

“I don’t have any damn fire!” Victor brushed and scratched uselessly at the river of voracious robots. Points of heat bloomed on his neck, shoulders, and elbows. Then needles of cold as his atmosphere escaped.

“I’m not talking to you,” shouted Feroza. “Come now, my darling! Fire!”

And there was fire.

Victor’s visor was already red, his ears already rung with alarms, but the new alarms were louder. “Heat Flux,” they said, “Coolant System Malfunction.”

The crawling mass over his face plate evaporated and Victor found himself staring past Feroza down a cone of flame ending in the kerosene gullet-spewing of their Dragon.

How had she done that? With no handshake gauntlet to command the creature to attack, she just told it what to do? What if–

His ears popped. Victor could see the little geysers of steam where his suit was leaking into the Petrolean atmosphere. No. Some of that steam was from the bubbling remains of the Cannonball’s factors. He smeared his left hand through the still-half-molten plastic, tried to plug as many holes as he could. The alarms quieted.

Another cannonball hit the Dragon.

This time the Dragon wasted no time in blasting it with fire. And the next attacker that got too close, it fried right out of the air. They weren’t going to be swamped and digested by long-range ballistic octopuses, at least not until the Dragon’s fuel held out.

The Dragon snapped up the tarry remains of the cannonball it had just roasted. Feroza said, “Hmm.”

“What?” said Victor. “Did you think of a way to escape? Because I–“

“No,” she said. “Escape is impossible. Forward is the only way. Downward.”

“To the habitat?”

“To the Leviathan.”

Petrolea 9b

Victor wiggled his fingers safe in their gauntlet.

“Trying to establish handshake…”

“Don’t,” said Feroza, and something like a lead watermelon barreled past them. “We have to trust her instincts.”

“Her instincts almost got you eaten yesterday,” said Victor. “What the hell was that thing that flew–oof!”

The Dragon’s wings flared and Feroza’s back smashed into Victor’s chest as their dive flattened out. Victor caught the gleaming curve of another cannonball sizzling under them before the Dragon rolled sideways and he was upside-down. A lurch, and the third cannonball passed. This one was close enough for Victor to count its coiled segments, see his helmet reflected in a dozen black, swiveling lenses. The Leviathan was firing some kind of living munitions at them.

The ground loomed out from behind the Dragon’s thrashing wings, a great deal closer now. Victor blinked and it was gone, replaced by a gray sky. That should have been an improvement, except for the hundreds of black dots curving in toward them. The closest cannon-ball creature popped open like an umbrella, slowing, swerving toward them, reaching out with folds of barbed netting.

Victor wanted to hijack the Dragon’s behavior processor to fly them out of range of the cannonball creatures, but Feroza was right. Victor was no crack Dragon-pilot, and anything he could do would just interfere with their mount’s own efforts to get away. The Dragon dodged and dove, but now the attacks were coming from all sides, and it had no way to avoid them all.

Petrolea 9a

Chapter 9

The Leviathan munched greedily on the dome of Xanadu Base, a grub the size of a sperm whale. The hose at the front snuffled up another wad of irreplaceable equipment, and flocks of smaller creatures wheeled like crows around the wreckage of human settlement on Petrolea.

“Maybe it didn’t kill everyone,” Victor said. “Maybe they escaped. Evacuated. They could be waiting on the Orbital Station. We can…” Victor swallowed. “We can still go home. We can find a radio down there. Contact them. We can…”

“It sees us,” said Feroza. “We have to get out of here,” Feroza reached out to stroke the Dragon’s back.

She was right. The habitat was a hulk, a relic, as dead as a sunken ship. Torn open by monsters of the abyss, self-assemblers spreading windmill branches out of portholes and airlocks. Victor didn’t want to see that, hear the clicking of the scavengers down the dark corridors of his workplace. But… “if we want to contact the Orbital Station, we have to access the communication equipment down there, before something eats it.”

The hose of the Leviathan swung below them, red light stabbing up at them from between its gaping jaws.

“It’s eaten everything already,” said Feroza. “And now it’s targeting us.”

“Why would it target us? Nothing that big can get airborne in time to…”

Sparks flashed along its flank. Victor was reminded of fireworks, muzzle flash, a cannonade.

Feroza was beating on the Dragon now. “Faster! Turn us around, Victor. Get us out of here get us–“

The Dragon dove out from under them.

Victor commanded the factors of the animal’s hide to grip him and Feroza more tightly. Wind and acceleration clawed at them as it banked and swerved, the devastated ground wheeling. The Dragon had gone insane. It was going to kill them all.

Petrolea 8c

“I’ll tell them it was my mistake that got everyone killed. You don’t have to be punished for all this…” Victor’s gloved hands shifted over her armored waist. “All of Petrolea.”

“Someone must atone,” said Feroza. “Why not me?”

“Atone?” Victor repeated as if searching his mental dictionary. “Why?”

“Why? We slaughtered a family of Dragons to give ourselves a place to have sex.”

“Asu!” He said, “You and your guilt! No pleasure without pain, hey? What are you, a nun?”

“And you are a chimpanzee,” she said, “or a spoiled child. Never considering the consequences–“

“And what would be the consequences of you dying alone in the woods, huh? Is there some karmic scale here you think you’re balancing?”

“Not karma,” said Feroza, “martyrdom. Maybe my incarceration will send a message.”

“What message? In God’s name, animals on this planet literally have gasoline for blood. People won’t stay away from Titan even if one of those Leviathans eats Xanadu Base!”

They swooped over the line of logging, nothing below them but methane streams running between broken debris and self-assembler weeds.

Feroza remembered the speech she had prepared for the strike’s last stand. How grand she had thought herself, how noble and self-sacrificing. Except she had sacrificed everything except herself. Her life stretched before her, cold and lonely as the greasy wasteland below.

Victor stayed silent until the habitat was in sight. “Look,” he said. “I’m…not happy about how we met each other, but what happened after that…I am glad to know you.” He patted her, gloves thumping against the belly of her suit.

Feroza didn’t answer. She stared, dry-eyed and thin-lipped at the dome and tower of Xanadu base in the center of a broad circle of chewed-up battleground.

“What on Earth?” she squinted. Commanded her visor to enhance the image.

And saw the full magnitude of the disaster before them.

The enormous mechanoid squatted atop the remains of Xanadu base like a vulture on the carcass of an elephant. Its huge wings were folded, its proboscis flexed, wormlike, through a crack in the dome. Even from here, Feroza could see the white smear of the habitat’s outgassed and frozen air.

“Victor,” she said, “turn us around.”

“What?” he said, “I don’t…I can’t–“

“Turn us around!” Feedback squealed against Feroza’s scream as the feeding tube curved up, turned. Cage-like teeth spread and a red searchlight stabbed up at the clouds.

Across all the meters of murky frigid air, Feroza felt the weight of the Leviathan’s regard.