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.”