Petrolea chapter 1

This is a sample of my novella PETROLEA. For the moment, it’s still open to critiquers, so comment or tell me if you want to read the rough draft.

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Chapter 1

 

It was raining gasoline.

Victor Toledo had his wipers on, but he little squeejee didn’t do much except smear the petrochemicals over the visor of his environment suit.

 

Visibility: 3 meters

Outside temperature: -180 C

Suit batteries: full

O2 tanks: full

Signal strength: excellent

Handshake gauntlet status: ready

 

Beyond the glowing readouts projected onto the inside of his visor, Victor could just make out the edges of the harvester on either side, mostly defined by the endless churning movement of the caterpillar treads. Ahead, beyond the bumper of the huge forestry machine, he could see nothing but falling fuel.

The access road and the jungle beyond were invisible, but every few minutes, the glassy blade of the low-hanging vane of a Windmill Tree sliced the curtain of rain. Feral mechanoids scurried over those vanes on mechanical legs. The feral robots froze as the harvester passed, tracking the loggers with hungry sensors.

A human figure, clumsy and bulbous, swam out of the rain. Al-Waheed, one of the few biologists who hadn’t joined the strike, planted his feet and stuck up his left hand up to signal Victor. His right arm stuck out in front of him, providing a roost for his Punisher. The eagle-sized, helicopter-winged predator hunched in the rain, a heap of dripping iron pinions and glowing red headlights.

“They’re close,” said Al-Waheed over the comns net. Victor didn’t know whether “they” meant the Tanker trees he was supposed to harvest or the striking scientists and engineers trying to stop him. Both, he supposed.

He slowed the harvester, crunching over whatever metallic weeds had self-assembled there since the last time this road had been used.

“Where are their lights?” he asked. “Are the strikers just waiting for us in the dark?”

“Of course, they are,” said Victor’s other biologist guide, he thought the man’s name was Gallagher.

Why wasn’t he running this mission? Why wasn’t Al-Waheed? Victor was just the manager of this jaunt, a field promotion that had nothing to do with his actual skills as a programmer, and he’d obviously just asked a stupid question. Why would the strikers keep their lights off? Oh. “Because lights would attract mechanoids?” he asked.

“You got it, boss,” said Gallagher. “Even Merchant and her tree-huggers don’t love the critters that much.”

“All right. Switching to global address frequencies.” Victor brought the harvester to a grumbling halt and called up an eye-movement menu in his visor, scrolled through options…

“Maybe,” said Al-Waheed, “switch on sonar?”

“Uh, right.” That was another finicky eye-menu. The software was designed for command by wrist-mounted keyboard, but of course Victor’s left wrist was occupied by his handshake gauntlet.

“Dr. Merchant, if you’re listening,” Victor raised his voice, as if that might give his signal more power. “Stop this nonsense. You can’t stay out here forever.”

“Neither can you.” The voice was crackly and faint with distance and interference from jungle life, but the glossy Mumbai accent was unmistakable. “The limiting factor here is neither our oxygen nor our water, Mr. Toledo, but your profit margins.”

Victor stood, leaning forward, breathing hard as his suit’s software painted his visor with sonar and infrared. “They’re our profit margins. You’re chewing up your own paychecks, here.”

“Better than chewing up a world.”

Ah. There they were. The striking scientists and engineers stood in their ruggedized environment suits, hand in hand in a human chain stretched across the road into the forest. Behind them, outlined in the slick grays of sonar imaging, bulked the domes of the Tanker trees, each one a living store of hydrocarbon energy big enough to keep a space station running for a week.

Titan, with its chemical resources, low gravity and outer-system real estate, would have been a tempting target for exploitation even without the famous photos taken by the Huygens probe. Cryo-volcanoes capped with forests of ceramic pressure towers. Iron trees spreading windmill leaves over plains of methane snow. Robotic creatures wading through petrochemical lakes, mouths full of buzz-saws and welding torches. The impossible bulk of a Leviathan in flight. The fiery battles of mating Dragons. An entire ecosystem built atop an ancient alien mining site. Why shouldn’t humans step in and claim the resources the aliens had abandoned?

Now, not even two years since Xanadu had become the first permanent base on Titan, the whole plan was falling apart.

“Your business is more fragile than you realize,” said Dr. Merchant. “Certainly more fragile than the entire ecosystem of Petrolea.”

Miércoles! Victor had lost focus, given her the chance to make one of her speeches. He knew how she’d look on the cameras she had undoubtedly set up to document her great statement. The shining heroine making her stand in the gasoline rain, surrounded by hostile jungle and vile corporate shills like Victor.

“In our arrogance and greed, we have destroyed the innocence of this world,” said the rogue biologist. “And now it turns against us. Every day, the Petrolean ecosystem becomes hungrier for human machines, and more adept at eating them.”

“Look,” said Victor, “Al-Onazy says he’s going to give you what you want. Caps on harvesting, we can redraw the logging routes so we don’t disturb the local environment. We’re willing to—”

Something flashed through the darkness and Gallagher shouted, “Ifrit!”

The Ifrit’s arrowhead shape barely had time to register before the flying mechanoid burst into a cloud of thumbnail-sized wafers. The wafers pattered against the bumper of the harvester and stuck there. When they sprouted antennae and scuttling legs, Victor knew them for what they were: assembler swarm-bots. What the biologists called “factors.”

The little robots decoupled from each other, and Ifrit’s body smeared itself across the front of the harvester. The factors scurried like ants, searching for metals and plastics to carve out and make into more little robots. Surely that chewing noise was in Victor’s imagination, not his earphones.

“That was an attack on company property,” said Victor into whatever feeds back to Earth’s media-sphere the strikers had running. “And dangerous to—are you going to get rid of that Ifrit or what?”

“I’m trying, sir.” Gallagher was frantically wiggling the fingers of his handshake gauntlet, but his Punisher stayed stubbornly on his wrist. Al-Waheed had better luck. His own tame mechanoid spread four wings like helicopter rotors and launched itself into the petroleum downpour.

The Punisher’s body shifted, streamlining as the factors that made up its skin and muscles tightened their grip on each other. A device like a gun-mounted eagle’s talon swung into position.

The Punisher’s helicopter blades sprayed gasoline rain as it fired its claw into the swarm of hungry factors. The little robots scattered, but the talons closed around the behavioral and somatic processors at the swarm’s core. Static swept the comns net as the Punisher hacked into the electronic brains it grasped, and, as if hypnotized, the factors emerged from their hiding places marched into the open mouthparts of the predator.

The Ifirit died, but not before Victor saw another squid-like flash, and another. The harvester rang with the impacts of more Ifrits.

The timing was too good. The field biologists had tamed the Punishers and several other types of mechanoid. Surely they must have set these Ifrits on their own co-workers.

“Stop attacking us!” Victor winced at the shrill register of his voice. There were larger creatures down there now, scuttling up from the mud to gnaw apart his vehicle.

“You’re attracting them,” came Merchant’s voice over the electronic death scream of another Ifrit. “You have to leave the jungle.”

Victor fought to bring his voice back down. “Are you threatening us, Dr. Merchant?”

“No, you ass. The jungle’s more dangerous than it’s ever been, and we’re a crowd of humans with floodlights making a bloody ruckus in it!”

Certainty trickled down Victor’s back, cold and viscous as crude oil fresh from a Tanker tree: someone had screwed up here, and it was probably him. “We just want to harvest the Tanker trees.”

“You are not the only thing harvesting out here, Mr. Toledo.”

Victor’s ears pricked, as if that would do any good in his suit. And anyway the vibration wasn’t in his suit pickups; it tunneled up from his feet. A low rumble, almost like the harvester. Except the harvester wasn’t moving.

They had to get out of here. “The faster you cooperate,” said Victor, “the faster we’re all back safe in Xanadu Base.”

“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, full of theory about how to hack electronic brains, but bereft of practice. He didn’t give a damn about profit margins or the long-term viability of the native ecosystem. He was rated to drive the harvester, and he did what he was told, which in this case was to drive the harvester into the jungle and pick up the protesters. Simple.

The vibration wasn’t subtle any more. The ground shook with the weight of some enormous oncoming mechanoid.

“Leviathan,” said Gallagher. “It’s headed right for us.”

“Mierda!” Victor almost beat his extremely expensive and important hand-shake gauntlet against arm-rest of his seat before he forced himself to calm down. “I’m mean,” he said, “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.

“We are not afraid to die,” said Dr. Merchant.

“Well, I am. I mean, I won’t let you.” Victor stood in his pilot’s seat, waved his arms. “Arrest those strikers.”

“We do not consent to being arrested.”

Victor wished he could strangle the woman. Activate his gauntlet and enslave the native life to knock some sense into her. Because she was right, damn her. The strikers had taken the best and most rugged environment suits and they outnumbered the tiny “security detail” the project manager had cobbled together and placed under Victor’s command.

“Dr. Merchant,” he said on her private channel, “Chinni. 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? I thought you brought it here are bait.”

Victor stared stupidly down at the enormous pile of metal he was sitting on. There were already mechanoids chewing on it, and an even bigger one grinding its way toward the feast. It was like he’d driven into the Serengeti in a bus made of pressed meat.

“Get off the harvester,” he told himself, “get off the harvester.”

The rain stopped.

Or, no, Victor realized. The rain was still falling. He could see it at the edges of the light, hear it through his suit’s pickups. It just wasn’t falling on his head.

He looked up.

The giant metal claw gaped wide as it dropped from the dark sky.

The concussion 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 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 Victor didn’t want it to go.

The Leviathan was bigger.

A wall of metal heaved out of the darkness, bristling with sensors and swarming with its own mobile ecology of factors, parasites, and hangers on.

These moved aside as the Leviathan’s maw opened.

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.

The proboscis strained and the harvester was hoisted up, forward.

Something swooped through the air toward him. Another predator, or maybe some symbiote of the Leviathan, homing in on Victor’s radio signals, his body heat, ready to peel and devour his suit or just swallow him whole and shit out the indigestible water and bonemeal…

Pincers synched around his torso, tugged him up and away. Victor stared between his swinging legs as the Leviathan’s maw clamped down on the front of the multi-million-dollar vehicle he had been given to drive. Red-hot teeth sank into the chair where he’d just been sitting.

Victor was swung in a circle and dropped to the ground. The creature that had saved him released its grip and Victor stumbled and almost fell at the feet of the woman who was its mistress.

“Dr. Merchant,” he gasped.

Her Punisher seated itself 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 Leviathan had come from.

“Miércoles,” Victor cursed, lips numb. “You want us to walk?”

Her voice crackled in his earphones. “No, you fool, we have to run.”

Ifrits darted through the air and oozed across machinery and space-suited people, alike. Spindly mantis-like mechanoids sliced chunks off the harvester with burning claws. Bloated creatures like giant fleas lapped at spilled blood and fuel. And the Leviathan, with great efficiency, ate the harvester Victor had been so stupid as to drive into the middle of this metal-eating jungle.

Dr. Merchant was right, a thought which probably didn’t give her much comfort as she watched people fall under diamond-serrated limbs and sun-hot mandibles. And a jet of flame in the sky signified something worse was coming.

“Dragons!” Dr. Merchant yelled. “On the ground!”

Victor hit the mud at the same time as the landing gear of one of the giant, flying predators. The closest Dragon flamed as its wings tilted, its jet engines blasting craters into the mud, its narrow head pointed directly at one of the people, striker or scab, Victor didn’t know.

“Punisher, Fetch!” Dr. Merchant commanded, and flung out an arm, pointing.

The tame mechanoid launched itself off her back, churning through the rain toward the stricken man. It buzzed between the Dragon and its prey, grappling claw 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 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 dry husk splashed into the mud, and the Dragon turned its headlights back to the human.

Even in his restrictive suit, the man should have been able to escape, but the Dragon pulled back its buzzing and steaming mouthparts and extended the long, black tube of its flamethrower. A little pilot light kindled and 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 other astronaut. The Dragon rooted through a mass of bubbling plastic, clenching its mandibles in frustration when it found nothing but carbonized meat.

“I’m going to crawl toward the edge of the jungle,” Dr. Toledo said.

“You want to get chewed up and spat out by a bunch of damn feral robots?” snapped Victor. “You may have some stupid martyr fetish—”

“No martyrs on Petrola,” she said, “dying is too easy here.”

Victor ignored that. “—but I didn’t come to Titan to die. Dios! I haven’t even had a chance to do…my job…” The hope was even more painful than the despair. Sharp and hot as the mouthparts of the streamlined head now swinging into position above him.

His body wanted to lie down and roast. Rolling back to his feet was the most difficult thing Victor had ever had to do.

“Oh.” He said. “Oh miércoles.”

“What did you say?” Dr. Merchant’s head swiveled around in her fishbowl helmet. “Doesn’t that mean ‘Wednesday’?”

“It means I didn’t want to say mierda in front of a lady.” Victor stood up.

“What? Get down, you fool,” hissed Dr. Merchant. “Get down,  before—”

The Dragon noticed him. Antennae extended from their housings along the giant predator’s grooved head. Spotlights focused on him. Mouthparts opened and liquid oxygen drooled and evaporated.

Victor held up his arm.

“Handshake,” he said. And his gauntlet went to pieces.

Victor wasn’t a biologist. He didn’t have a single tame mechanic clinging to his wrist. He had about a thousand.

The slaved factors, each the size and shape of a thumbnail, flaked off his suit and scattered. 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 face, wire legs blurring, stumpy antennae waving, broadcasting to the animal’s native factors that they were friends.

They lied.

The Dragon froze as the parasites’ code burrowed into its electric nervous system.

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?” she said. “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.” But Dr. Merchant stood beside him, so she must have some confidence in him. 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 ripped at the harvester, but Victor could see another of the giant predators slither 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, over its folded wings. “I’ve never worked with Dragons before, but I’ve worked with Punishers, and the somatic programming is very similar…”

“But the behavioral processor is entirely different.” 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, it should lead to a command line to tell the satiated animal to fly home.”

“Fly home.” Even as he repeated her words, a line of the Dragon’s mind-code flashed in Victor’s visor. “Got it,” he said.

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.