Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 18

Petrolea 8b

Is that what she had done? Was seduction even possible when the seductee all but melts into a puddle of willing ardor at the mere sight of one’s face? Feroza smirked, remembering the blush that had pinked his face under the stubble on his cheeks and head. Victor had resembled a pink-fleshed kiwi with a nose.

Still, whatever animal instincts that had put them both in such need of release, Feroza couldn’t think of a single other person at the base who would have made a more enjoyable partner than the eager and unexpectedly skilled Victor. Which would make her certain arrest at Xanadu Base that much worse.

Below them, flying creatures congregated around the column of an enormous Rocket-seed, a bigger flock than Feroza had ever seen. And there…she squinted and the visor of her helmet zoomed in on the direction of her gaze.

Odd. Three Leviathans flying together. That shouldn’t happen; there was no concentration of food on Titan high enough to support more than one of the massive mechanoids. And yet there they were, great articulated paddles flapping along their sides, proboscises coiled, skimming over the jungle like segmented metal zeppelins. Also odd that they were heading in the same direction as Feroza and Victor, toward Xanadu Base.

“Don’t worry about what happens when we get back,” Victor said, who had not been distracted by the wildlife. “Even if.” He swallowed. “Even if nobody else has made it back, I’ll tell them that what happened in the jungle was an accident. A natural disaster. They happen on Earth, too.”

Feroza watched the Leviathans. Flying mechanoids sported like dolphins around the colossal scavengers, jetting around their patiently beating air-paddles, cork-screwing around each other as if in anticipation of a coming feast.

“Why do you think Al-Onazy will believe you?”

“Huh?”

“Look at it from his perspective,” Feroza said. “The most outspoken member of a faction of environmentalists is one of only two survivors of a deadly and extremely expensive fiasco. The other survivor is someone who knows how to control mechanoids and make them, for example kill everyone else.”

“Never! That would be…” Victor sputtered, “evil. Al-Onazy can’t think you’d kill people!”

“Al-Onazy might very well have lost two thirds of his workforce. We know he lost his precious harvester. I’ve accomplished exactly my stated purpose: stop human exploitation of Petrolea.” Feroza stared into the distance, where the cleared land was already visible. An ugly scar in the forest perpetrated by people like Victor. “Al-Onazy will need someone to blame.”

Petrolea 8a

Chapter 8

Petrolea spread under them, a cloth of black silk embroidered in silver, gray, and red. Windmill leaves churned beyond the wings of the Dragon they rode, creatures walked and flew and attacked each other. Victor made a nauseated swallowing noise and his arms tightened around her waist.

“If you don’t like the view,” Feroza told him, “don’t look.”

Their mount flew with outspread wings, feather-like control surfaces splayed. Every few minutes, the long body would clench and surge upward with a burst from its jet engines.

“Can’t we make this thing go any faster?” asked Victor.

“You know exactly how fast we can go,” Feroza said. This trip to Xanadu might well kill the mother Dragon and, by extension, the two Dragonlets that remained in the hangar. Perhaps, Feroza allowed herself to think, there would be time to help the mother Dragon after they had arrived at Xanadu Base. And she, Feroza, had left it.

“How many people do you think made it back from the jungle?” asked Victor.

Feroza winced. “Most, I hope. We are all trained in wilderness survival and we had enough oxygen to walk back, I made sure of that. But once you brought that harvester into the jungle and attracted all those large predators…”

“Why?” asked Victor. “I wasn’t the first person to drive a harvester into the jungle.”

“You were, however, the first to do so without any support from the biologists and our tame mechanoids to drive away the wildlife,” said Feroza. “Wildlife which has been growing steadily more aggressive since we’ve begun intruding into their habitat.”

Victor nodded grimly. “I had to overwrite the Dragons’ perceptions of us again this morning, did you know? This ‘eat humans’ command springs up whenever they look at us.”

“We are covered in slabs of delicious raw materials.” Feroza patted the thigh of her suit. “It should be no surprise when mechanoids target human equipment. We’ve been tracking that behavioral change since almost the beginning. Adopting ever-more expensive countermeasures.”

“We engineers always thought you were exaggerating about that.”

“I trust you understand better now,” said Feroza dryly. “Perhaps we should have taken more of you on field trips like this one.” Well, perhaps not exactly like this one. Feroza could hardly expect to individually seduce the entire staff of Xanadu Base.

Petrolea 7e

“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.

Petrolea 7d

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.

Petrolea 7c

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.

Petrolea 7b

“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. Small scavengers like 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?

Petrolea 7a

Chapter 7

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.

Petrolea 6g

Victor threw up his arms. “This is ridiculous. I was looking at her active processes. It wasn’t an instinct that told her to eat you. Your dependency privileges were overwritten. It’s like if I zapped your brain with an electrical impulse, you’d do whatever I wanted, whatever you thought about it.”

Or when your body is flooded with adrenal secretions, you want to strike out at the people trying to help you. With an effort, Feroza put aside her anger. The Dragons were predators and she looked like food. Did a lion-tamer feel betrayed when her pet bit her on the hand? Did a marine biologist cry when her favorite jellyfish stung her? Or an electronics engineer when she put her hand in the wrong place and got a shock? Feroza should feel stupid and unprofessional. Not betrayed. Not abandoned.

Victor’s hand came down on her shoulder and she twitched. “Dio, Feroza, we need to fix your suit.”

Feroza looked up and saw the mother Dragon and the two remaining Dragonlets had slumped to the ground. Victor must have gotten his creatures into them and commanded them to sleep. Still and steaming, the giant beasts might only have been works of oddly intricate art. Except when they were cut, they bled.

“So the question is, who zapped her brain?”

“Besides me?” Victor said. “I don’t know. There’s some kind of reset-override in their behavioral scripts.”

Feroza took a shuddering breath, blinked tears from her eyes. “Can you un-reset them?”

“Yes, but then they will just be…eh, un-un-resetted? Re-reset?” Victor’s fingers twiddled. “I think I’d better get to work on building those walls. Get that pleasure dome of yours constructed, hey?”

Feroza turned away from the Dragons, toward Victor. “That sounds lovely,” she said. “How can I help?”

Petrolea 6f

“Got you!” shouted Victor as the enslaved adult pulled the smaller mechanoid off the ground and flung it against the wall of the hangar. The head tore free from the neck, the immature wings shattered. The corpse slumped to the floor, bleeding fuel.

Something snapped at Feroza’s still upraised hands. The second Dragonlet ground into view, torch-bearing mandibles extended to sever her fingers. The mother’s head was above her, though, and Feroza reached for it, rising from the floor to curl her fingers around those wicked mouthparts. She held on.

“Don’t,” Feroza said. “Don’t kill the other one.”

On the other side of the Hangar, the third Dragonlet slithered over to the body of its sibling and began to feed.

“Are you all right, Feroza?”

She jerked out of her fugue, alarms still hooting in her helmet. “The mother Dragon,” said Feroza. “She…attacked me.” Feroza hands shook in the sweaty confines of her gloves. “Why would she do such a thing.”

“I can tell you,” said Victor. “I was looking at her behavior queue and the Dragon reclassified the Feroza object from Dragonlet class to Food class and called Devour( ) on it.”

“Excuse me?”

“There was one command in there, and it was to eat you, not feed you. When I deleted it, it popped back up. The only thing I could do was switch it to the little Dragon.”

“Sacrificing it for nothing.” Feroza breathed hard, blinking the aggravating tears from her eyes. “I know these animals, Victor. Whatever instinct was telling her to eat me, a more powerful urge compelled her to…” Feroza searched for a non-jargon word, “love me.”

“Love?”

“The technical term is ‘parental investment,’ but I didn’t think you knew it.”

Petrolea 6e

“So here we are,” Victor said, “in a freezing cave in a mountain, surrounded by monsters that want to eat us.”

“Innocent animals engaging in their natural behavior.”

The floor vibrated. “Speaking of Rome, the donkey appears,” said Victor.

“What are you talking about?” But Feroza could see it well enough. ‘Speak of the Devil,’ an Englishman might have said. Here was the mother Dragon now, bringing with her more food for her hungry brood.

“Damn,” said Toledo, “she’s feeding the Dragonlets first.”

“Of course she is.”

“Can you stop her? All of my slave-factors are occupied repairing my suit.” His voice dropped. “I will have to fabricate more.”

“Don’t.” said Feroza. “We have no need of more of those things.”

She got down on her knees and shuffled toward the mother Dragon. “I’ll calm her while you finish repairing your–“

The baby saved her life.

When the mother Dragon lunged at Feroza, the baby thought it was getting a meal and moved to intercept. The mother Dragon pulled up her head and Feroza was not sliced in half by a pair of mandible-mounted buzz-saws.

“Feroza? What was that noise?”

She didn’t have time to respond, diving behind the infant. It turned on her, too. Hooked mandibles scrabbled over her chest. Warnings flashed as welding torches kindled against the fabric of her suit. Feroza kicked out, connected with the baby’s caterpillar body, and shoved herself away from it.

The mother came after her, growling static and drooling oxygen.

“Miércoles,” said Toledo as Feroza scrambled back. “I’m sending the slave-factors now.”

Feroza could not feel disgusted by the prospect, not while she tumbled backward through the air, the mouthparts of the Dragon unfolding before her like a lethal iron lily.

“Stop,” shouted Feroza, first in panic, then in determination. “Stop! I am not your enemy. I am your child.” As if genuflecting, she sank onto her knees, arms stretched over her head.

The mother Dragon leaned closer, brushing Feroza with her whiskers, raking Feroza with her headlights. Had Feroza assumed the proper position? Did she look and smell enough like a Dragonlet to stimulate her child-rearing instincts?

“I am your child,” Feroza said again as the mother Dragon pinned her in her headlights. Stretched her neck, caterpillar tread grinding, buzz-saw mandibles whining–

And struck out sideways at the nearest baby.