Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 22
March 21, 2021
Petrolea 2b
Feroza looked down at her body, embedded in the side of the sleeping Dragon. Had a human ever been so close to a Petrolean apex predator? Had any sapient mind before traced the sleek contours of its head assembly, the flight surfaces like metal pinions, the bulky, powerful jet engines? Next to these marvels of nature, nothing mattered, not her poor dead Punisher, nor the people she had abandoned in the jungle. Not Toledo’s survival, and least of all Feroza’s own.
The feeling was oddly liberating. It might not be so bad to die when the Dragons woke up and peeled her space suit off her like the skin of a banana.
Ting ting ting. Or she’d just suffocate first.
Feroza had expected to return from her demonstration. Chastened, perhaps, or even defeated, but alive, surely. Surely Al-Onazy and his vile exploiters wouldn’t let half of Xanadu Base’s staff die out in the jungle. Surely they wouldn’t be so stupid as to send an enormous pile of metal out into a metallic ecosystem without the support of their biologists?
Now, who knew how many kilometers from base and more than a billion kilometers from home, with her cause smashed and her career in ruins, Feroza considered the possibility of her death. How would Mummy and Daddy and Bubbli react to the news that she had been devoured by the subjects of her studies? Probably not with pride.
Now, if she could return home with something of value…
“Alright, beasties,” she said, “it is time for you to learn that Feroza Merchant shall be no one’s breakfast.”
The first order of business must be to un-stick herself from the side of this Dragon. Toledo, if conscious, could simply command the factors holding her to let go. Since Feroza had not the means, the skills, nor the willingness to enslave the creatures’ minds, however, she must set about to tame them.
She twisted her head, working with eyes, suit cameras, and software to get a glimpse of her surroundings. The nest, or possibly she should call it a “hangar,” had floor, walls, and ceiling made of rusty, corrugated scrap iron. The place could almost have been cobbled together in some backwater village to house a Raj-era crop-duster, except for the curved walls and impossibly delicate welding. And the huge, gaping hole in the floor would have given any human engineer heart palpitations.
And then there were the Dragons. They sprawled on the floor of the hangar like beached orcas. Two adults and two man-sized juveniles snapped lazily at the vermin in the shadows, slid their noses across each other, or simply lay, unmoving except for the lung-like pumping of their bellows and the faint glows and thumps as new tools were forged inside their bellies.
March 20, 2021
Petrolea 2a
Chapter 2
Consciousness came to Dr. Feroza Merchant like a hammer between the eyes.
Not a big hammer. More like one the little ones that upholsterers used.
Ting ting ting ting. And the sofa had a new pattern.
She opened her eyes. Focused on the blinking hazard lights in her visor.
Ting ting ting low oxygen.
Feroza tried to move and found that she couldn’t. The arms and legs of her spacesuit were welded into the fuselage of the Dragon. Toledo had done that, she remembered, hacking the somatic processor that controlled the way the factors built and maintained the mechanoid’s body, trying to grow a cockpit around them. Apparently he hadn’t gotten far before the acceleration had knocked him out, but that was better than being knocked off the Dragon entirely.
Feroza imagined Toledo tumbling through the nitrogen/methane atmosphere of Titan, screaming until he hit the ground or another Dragon snatched him in its jaws. She tried to enjoy the image and couldn’t. Contemplating his death wasn’t as satisfying when it was his skills that would keep her alive.
Ting ting ting.
Feroza twisted as much as she could. She couldn’t see much of Toledo, only that he was there behind her, welded to the Dragon’s fuselage just as she was. A few system messages directed into her microphone confirmed he was still alive, although unconscious. No doubt he had more oxygen in his tanks than she, and had no alarms to awaken him.
Ting ting.
She almost gave the radio call to summon her Punisher before she remembered.
She had captured its mother herself, watched with wonder as the aquiline creature had opened her abdominal cavity to discharge a gleaming collection of machine parts, as intricate and beautiful as the inside of a pocket-watch. The mother Punisher’s own factor swarm had split itself in two to seize those parts and assemble them into a new home and factory: the body of a baby mechanoid.
Now Feroza’s Punisher was dead, its armature abandoned to the scavengers of the jungle, its factor swarm stolen and assimilated into the Dragon under her.
Petrolea 1i
Victor took a tentative step forward, put his hand on the Dragon’s neck. It shivered and bowed as new windows opened on his visor.
“What do you propose we should do now?” Dr. Merchant demanded. “What possible good can it do you to hack a Dragon?”
“Well,” said Toledo, “If my Dragon attacked the others…”
“It would be torn to shreds along with everybody else.” But Dr. Merchant stood beside him, so she must have some confidence in him. Or some other plan.
“Yes?” Victor said.
“You fly that thing to Xanadu Base and tell them. Try to mount a rescue if you think it will do any good.”
It wouldn’t. Most of the other Dragons were ripping at the remains of the harvester, but Victor could see another of the giant predators slithering toward them on its caterpillar-tread belly.
“Um. I don’t think I can actually tell this thing where to go.” Victor scrambled up the Dragon’s flank anyway, over its folded wings. The beginnings of a plan crystallized under the pressure of his fear. “Hey, you’ve worked with Punishers. The somatic programming is very similar…”
“The emergent behavior is entirely different, however.” Dr. Merchant took his hand and scrambled up after him onto the Dragon’s back. “Look for the reward complex connected to its hunting instinct. That should lead to a command to tell the satiated animal to fly home.”
“Fly home.” Even as he repeated her words, summary of the Dragon’s runtime environment flashed in Victor’s visor. “Got it,” he said, and air-typed commands into the mechanoid’s brain. EndProcess:Feeding.
Instinctive responses cascaded out from that simple instruction. The wings unfolded, angled down for vertical take-off. The jet intakes spun up and the mechanoid’s long neck retracted. Its puffy, feathered outline smoothed out, condensing and stiffening as the factors that made up its body held each other close, preparing for flight.
The other Dragons and various associated monsters did not try to stop Feroza and Victor’s lift-off. They had enough to eat as it was. Predators and parasites gamboled and capered in the red light that shone from the Leviathan’s munching proboscis. Most of the other people were gone, fled into the jungle where, Victor hoped, they would have enough oxygen to get home.
“I’m sorry for what we are about to do to you,” said Doctor Merchant.
Victor wasn’t. He clenched his fist within his gauntlet and the rain vanished into the blur of acceleration.
March 19, 2021
Petrolea 1h
Even in his restrictive suit, the striker should have been able to escape, but the Dragon pulled back its buzzing, steaming mouthparts and extended the long, black tube of its flamethrower. A little pilot light kindled. Victor’s visor lit up with a new danger symbol.
Oxygen.
Fire bloomed again, igniting the gasoline rain.
When he could see again, the oxygen had burned away, and so had the striker. The Dragon rooted through a mass of bubbling plastic that had been an environment suit, clenching its mandibles in apparent frustration when it found nothing but useless, carbonized meat inside.
“I’m going to crawl toward the edge of the jungle,” Dr. Merchant said.
Victor’s limbs twitched. Had he just been lying in the mud waiting to be devoured by the damn feral robots? “I didn’t come to Titan to die.” He said, mostly to himself. “¡Dios! I haven’t even had a chance to do…” he stared up at the huge and hungry machines, “…my job.”
The hope was even more painful than the despair. Hope was as sharp and hot as the mouthparts of the Dragon’s head, now swinging into position above him.
His body wanted to lie down and roast in that fire. Rolling back to his feet was the most difficult thing Victor had ever had to do.
Victor stood up, and the Dragon’s two headlights swiveled to fix on him. Antennae extended from their housings along the giant predator’s grooved head. Mouthparts opened and liquid oxygen drooled and evaporated.
“Oh.” He said. “Oh miércoles.” Wouldn’t do to curse in front of a lady.
“What?” said Dr. Merchant. “Get down, you fool, before–“
Victor held up his trembling arm.
“Handshake,” he said. And his gauntlet went to pieces.
Unlike the biologist, Victor didn’t have a single tame mechanoid clinging to his wrist. He had about a thousand.
The slave factors, each the size and shape of a thumbnail, flaked off his hand and scattered like dropped coins. Even as they fell, they synched with each-other and the transponder in Victor’s suit. Fast as army ants, they crawled up the Dragon’s body, wire legs blurring, stumpy antennae waving, broadcasting to the animal’s native factors that they were friends.
They lied.
The parasites’ code burrowed into its electronic nervous system, and the Dragon froze.
March 18, 2021
Levski’s Boots beta: DONE!
My short story for the Tales From Alternate Earths 3 anthology is done!
Begun (beta draft): Thursday March 4th at 9:10am
First line: Levski’s boots hit the ground, and he ran.
Finished: Wednesday March 17th around 5pm.
Last line: “Certainly not me,” said Levski.
Total time (alpha and beta drafts): 8 weeks
Word count: 13, 516 (more like a short novella…)
I’m going to let it rest at least until Tuesday next week, then polish it off (and cut a bunch of stuff) to get it ready for submission.
Petrolea 1g
“Dr. Merchant.”
Her Punisher perched on her shoulder, rotors folded, talons clenched, sensors extended toward Victor as if waiting for him to make a fool of himself.
“Do you,” he gasped, “have a way out?”
He couldn’t see her expression, but the strike leader pointed back into the jungle in the direction the Victor had come from.
“Miércoles,” Victor cursed, lips numb. “You want us to walk home?”
Her voice crackled in his earphones. “No, you fool, now we have to run.”
Gobs darted like bats through the air, disassembling and oozing across machinery and space-suited people alike. Mantis-shrimp mechanoids sliced chunks off the harvester with burning claws. Bloated creatures like giant fleas lapped at spilled fuel. And the Leviathan, with great efficiency, ate Victor’s harvester.
Dr. Merchant was right, a thought which probably didn’t give her much comfort as she watched her people fall under diamond-serrated limbs and sun-hot mandibles. And a jet of flame in the sky signified something worse was coming.
“Dragons!” she yelled. “On the ground!”
Victor hit the mud at the same time as the landing gear of one of the giant, flying predators. The Dragon flamed as its wings tilted, jet engines blasting craters into the mud, its narrow head pointed directly at one of the strikers.
“Punisher, fetch!” Dr. Merchant commanded, and flung out an arm.
The mechanoid launched itself off her back, churning through the rain toward the stricken human. The Punisher buzzed between the Dragon and its prey, claw-harpoon jabbing like the stinger of a giant wasp. Surely that wasn’t natural behavior. How could Dr. Merchant have trained the creature so well without using a handshake gauntlet? Despite himself, despite everything, Victor was impressed.
The Dragon was not. As the Punisher wrapped its claw around the man it had been ordered to save, the Dragon spread its mouthparts and snatched the smaller mechanoid out of the air. It didn’t bother to cut apart the Punisher’s structural elements, just hacked its processes, stole its factors, and sucked dry its reserves of oil and liquid oxygen. The skeleton of metal and plastic splashed into the mud, and the Dragon turned its headlights back toward its human prey.
March 17, 2021
Flight of Foundry Convention
It’s official! I’ll be at the Flight of Foundry virtual convention in mid-April. Among other things, I’ll moderate a panel on #speculativebiology. Who wants to join me? https://flights-of-foundry.org/schedule/
Petrolea 1f
The giant metal maw gaped wide as it dropped from the dark sky.
The concussion of the Leviathan’s proboscis made when it hit the ground rang through Victor’s suit. The harvester jerked under him. Slewed sideways as it was lifted from the mud.
The vehicle that Victor piloted was 16 meters long and 5 tall – 20 tonnes of caterpillar treads, loaders, delimbers, grapplers, and a train of cradles to hold the denuded trunks of the Tanker trees. It should have been too damn big to move anywhere that Victor didn’t want it to go.
The Leviathan was bigger.
The belly of the beast broke the clouds overhead, a whale breaching in reverse. A butterfly that dreamed it was an aircraft carrier. Clouds streaming from articulated air-paddles, the Leviathan plummeted towards them. The jaws on the end of his hose-like trunk clenched tighter around the harvester.
Victor’s visor flashed with warning colors. Temperature readouts spiked. Radiation fluxed. The reactive glass dimmed against the light of the monster’s smelter throat.
Something swooped through the air toward him. Another predator, or maybe some symbiont of the Leviathan homing in on Victor’s radio signals, ready to peel and devour his suit or just swallow him whole and shit out the indigestible water and bone meal…
Talons cinched around his torso, tugged him up and away. Victor stared between his swinging legs at the Leviathan’s maw clamped down on the multi-million-dollar vehicle he had been given to drive.
The braided metal skin of the proboscis flexed, the teeth at its mouth glowed cherry-red as the furnace inside softening metal for the claws and saws of disassembler mechanoids. Other, larger symbionts scurried down the proboscis. Things like man-sized metal mantis-shrimp unfolded Swiss-army-knife limbs to snatch whatever their brethren left behind.
Victor was swung in a circle and dropped to the ground. The creature that had saved him released its grip and Victor almost fell at the feet of the woman who was its mistress.
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March 16, 2021
Petrolea 1e
“Safe?” said Merchant, “Were you not listening to me? Have you even looked at my reports? Every week since we’ve been here, the native life has grown steadily more aggressive. Attacks on humans and human artifacts have multiplied exponentially. Give us a week and there will be mechanoids chewing on your executive swivel-chair.”
How stupid was it for Victor to feel hurt? At least he restrained himself from yelling, I don’t have a swivel chair! I’m one of you! Because Victor wasn’t an intrepid field-biologist, he was a programmer. More importantly for his bosses, Victor was rated to drive the harvester, and he did what he was told. In this case, that meant, “drive the harvester into the jungle and pick up the protesters before they run out of air or get eaten.” He was the good guy, damn it!
The vibration wasn’t subtle any more. A wave of displaced air washed over the harvester, setting the whole machine swaying like the branches of the Windmill trees in the shadow of a great, descending bulk.
“Leviathan,” said Al-Waheed. “It’s–” he swore in Arabic. “It’s right on top of us, boss.”
“¡Mierda!” Victor almost beat his extremely expensive and important hand-shake gauntlet against the arm-rest of his seat before he forced himself to calm down. “I mean, miércoles.” Not that any of these people cared if he swore in Spanish. God, he wished he was back in Lima.
“Okay,” said Victor. “All right. Reverse the engine.” He reversed the engine. “I’m getting us out of here. Strikers, I, um, order you to climb aboard.”
None of the space-suited figures moved.
“I won’t let you die out here.” Victor stood in his pilot’s seat and waved his arms. “Get those strikers on this harvester before something eats them.”
“Come down off that harvester before the Leviathan eats you,” said Dr. Merchant.
Victor wished he could strangle the woman. But there was absolutely nothing he could do to force the strikers to cooperate, at least nothing he could think of in the time he had before the Leviathan arrived. Victor imagined landing gear extending in the murk above the Windmill Trees like the legs of a monstrous crab.
“Dr. Merchant,” he said on her private channel, “Feroza. It isn’t too late to surrender. Save face. Leave under protest. But leave. Get on the harvester, please.”
An intake of breath over the teeth-rattling groan of approaching treads. “Oh, you bloody idiot. You don’t really think we can ride home on that machine, do you? Not now that you’ve attracted something that’s big enough to eat it.”
The rain stopped.
Or, no, Victor realized. The rain was still falling. He could see it at the edges of his headlights’ beams, hear it through his suit’s pickups. It just wasn’t falling on his head.
He looked up.
March 15, 2021
The Mountain in March
The Mountain in March
Behind cold and windy clouds.
Daffodils tremble.
