Victor was fiddling with his gauntlet, trying to figure out how to print out walls to hold in an oxygen atmosphere, when something moved on the still.

"Oh, pucha. Another Gob."

The little scavenger had spread itself like a miniature city, with the cylindrical towers of its little processors pack up from the middle the mass of scurrying factors. Even as Victor watched, the little robots scuttled across the side of the still and into its inner workings. Without thinking, Victor reached out to brush them away.

Red lights in his visor. He swore for real this time and jerked back, the fingertips of his right glove scored with tiny notches. "That thing nearly chewed my glove off!"

"What?" said Dr. Merchant, "the Gob? You didn't try to touch it, did you?"

"I...it tried to eat me!"

"Well of course it did," she said. "Your suit is made of plastic and metal."

"I thought they were treated in some way — ay! It's going to break the whole still!" Error messages popped up in his visor and Victor nearly got his glove bitten off in his instinctive grab for his work.

"That still of yours is a whopping great corpse," said Dr. Merchant. "Of course you should expect it to attract scavengers."

How could she be so blasé about this? Victor poked impotently at the writhing mass of chewing factors. "How can I make it stop?"

"Piss on it," said Feroza.

"What?"

"Urine. Wee. In the field, when the repellent coating wears off and we don't have a Punisher to scare away scavengers, we empty our water reclamators into whatever we want safe. Factors don't like the heat. And organic compounds, I imagine, taste bad to them."

"But," Victor flailed helplessly at the disgusting creature as it gnawed on their life-support engine, "I can't afford to lose that water."

"Do you have any other warm organics?"

Victor's eyes went from the crawling Gob to the bag of breakfast paste. "Pucha," he said. "The food."

The paste steamed when it hit the freezing Petrolean air, and the Gob recoiled and scuttled away from it. Wasting the stuff made Victor's gut clench, but better lose a meal than his only means to make more meals.

The Gob's component factors wrapped around its central processor and re-assembled its little engines. The swarm assumed its streamlined flight-shape and zipped away from the still and circled the hangar until one of the Dragonlets woke up and snapped it out of the air.

But there were more Gobs buzzing around them or oozing along the walls. And what were those things that moved in the shadows of the hangar? Victor tried to calculate how much paste he would need to cover the whole still. "We will need to hunt more to replace this," he said. "And now will I have to smear this stuff on myself, too?"

"Hopefully not," said Dr. Merchant. "Your suit has a distasteful coating already, although that's becoming less effective as time goes on. And I have never seen Gobs try to attack people. Do not worry." She huffed as if lifting something heavy. "I have bagged enough game to repel bugs and feed ourselves."

Victor sighed with relief. He'd half believed she would abandon him up here. "I'm glad you've decided life is worth living."

"Yes," she said. "Well. I suppose feeding two people is a rather different situation from strip-mining an entire planet."

Was that a concession? A compromise? Victor tried to meet her halfway. "You know," he said, "I would not want to be...the sort of person who would strip-mine a planet."

A puffing of breath. "I am surprised and gratified to hear you say that."

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Surprised and gratified. God, it was like she'd dipped her hand in chocolate and slapped him. Like she was the strict headmistress of an expensive boarding school about to take off her glasses and administer discipline.

Victor licked his lips with a dry tongue. On the other side of the hangar, a Dragonlet called out in hunger.

A sultry huff of air in his earphones. "All right. I have denuded this patch of jungle enough. We are flying back."

"Hurry home."

The Dragonlet called again and Victor reached for the pile of bones he'd saved from its father's corpse. There was nothing left but the head. Or skull or cockpit or whatever the preferred term was. The thing was the size of Victor's torso, if not its mass, and even in the light gravity it took some awkward effort to lift the thing.

When he turned, he saw one of the Dragonlets had crawled to within arm's reach. Jaw's reach. "Really," Victor said. "Hurry. The Dragonlets are hungry and I've run out of food."

"Well, get down on your knees," ordered Dr. Merchant. "We can solve this problem behaviorally. There is no need for you to enslave the baby, Victor."

As if he could enslave it. Victor didn't have enough slave factors to hack the baby. The giant metal maggot could easily kill him, either by attacking him or just knocking over the still.

"Dr. Merchant," he said as the creature advanced on him, "what should I do?"

There were no recriminations. Not even a scornful tone to her voice as she said, "Puppetry."

"Excuse me?"

"Do you still have the father's head?"

"Yes," Victor hoisted it and dangling mandibles clacked.

"Use it to trick the baby. Make it think you're its father."

"Oh…kay?" Cameras tracked Victor as he held out the skull. "There, there," he bounced the bulky machine up and down. "Nice little…larva."

"Stroke it with the nose," said Dr. Merchant, "nuzzle it."

Victor flinched back from the humping round monster. "What does 'nuzzle' mean?"

"Like what fathers do with Dragonlets."

"I don't have any children. I'm not married."

"Thank you for telling me."

Victor concentrated on petting the Dragonlet, cheeks hot. "Um. Should I feed it? Is it hungry?"

"It's an infant predator," she said. "Of course it's hungry."

"I don't have any raw petroleum left. I converted it all into food for us or damn bug repellant."

The Dragonlet wasn't looking at the puppet-head any more. Its cameras were focused on Victor's arm. Its whiskers and antennae withdrew into their sockets.

"That might be a problem," said Dr. Merchant.

The Dragon lunged. It couldn't flame and Victor dodged before it pinned him, but he felt like his arm had been shot. Pain, a red smear, and cold.

"Oh," said Victor, "oh, miércoles."

The shocking crimson of his blood vanished in a cloud of white condensation and the Dragon reared away from the burst of heat. Its mouthparts worked at the scrap of Victor's suit material. It brushed the disgusting human blood off the tasty plastic with finicky precision, then focused on his hands. Victor thought of all the metal and electronics in his handshake gauntlet.

"Toledo?" came the voice in his ear. "What happened? Are you all right?"

Victor threw the head across the room. This failed to distract the first Dragonlet, but the impact of the skull on the metal floor woke the other two, and they began to cry in hunger.

"Victor! Can you hear me? Answer immediately!"

"Suit is…" what was the word? "Ripped. Breached. Got to find patch. Got to protect the still…"

His eyes focused on the blood, steaming and freezing as it dripped down his fingers.

"Feroza, will warm organics repel the Dragon?"

"Yes." Her voice was tight and high with emotion. "Victor, what are you doing?"

"Being eaten by a Dragon," he said. "But maybe I deserve it. I eat its daddy, it eats me, huh?"

Victor smeared the blood across his glove and thrust it toward the Dragonlet's nose. Condensation billowed in the frigid air.

"I'm coming, Victor," she said. "It won't eat you. You won't die. I won't have it."

The baby pecked at his arm again, pulled back. The headlights brightened, focused on the steaming blood. The Dragon extended whisker-like probes from recesses along its nosecone and took a sample.

It drew back, repelled by the taste, and Victor nearly passed out from relief.