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.
