"Let her hunt again," said Feroza.

"Will it be able to feed all her Dragonlets and the still as well?"

Feroza turned her palms up. "We left a rather large pile of corpses halfway down the Berg. If she gets back to them before the scavengers have dragged them all off — "

His suit clanked against hers. Victor had grasped her arm. "Don't go with it this time. Stay here."

"With you, you mean?"

Feroza tried hard to analyze her reactions. She disagreed with Victor on the most fundamental levels about the most important things. And yet, she found she liked the man. Wanted to spend more time with him. "I suppose the mother Dragon is well enough to hunt by herself. And you can work faster if you needn't worry about being eaten."

"Work," said Victor, "yes." He lifted himself up by the elbows. "I will fabricate patches for my suit, then walls, then more food, since we can't actually eat if we can't take off our suits."

"So we will need that pleasure dome you planned, after all," said Feroza.

He stared up at her from his prone position. "Pleasure dome?"

What must he think of her? Feroza's cheeks flamed. "A slip of the tongue." And that double-entendre only made her blush more.

"Heh. No problem." Victor pulled himself upright and twiddled his fingers. The mother Dragon stiffened and a column of little black factors pushed their way out of her skin and plopped to the ground.

"Your slave factors," said Feroza. "You're freeing her?"

"I don't have enough to work on me and it at once," said Victor. "And if you are staying here, I won't worry about that thing attacking you."

"You shouldn't worry anyway," Feroza said, "I know how to handle her."

"Oh. Uh." Victor looked up at her again. "I guess you do. Of course. Well, we can trust it to hunt and return by itself, yes? Then I can use the slave-factors to work on my suit until it gets back. Then I can work on figuring out how to make the Dragon fly us back to Xanadu."

Whatever warmth Feroza had just been feeling drained away. "No," she said.

He frowned up at her. "No going home or no comfort?"

"No harming mechanoids," she said, watching the Dragonlets. Fed and satisfied, they had curled up on the other side of the hangar and gone to sleep. "Which you must continue to do until you are off Petrolea."

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Victor marched his slave-factors into the still. "Until we exploiters are off Petrolea?" He snorted. "And you will stay here, the Princess of the Robot Jungle? Breathing what, the fumes of good ecological karma?"

"I see you're feeling better." Feroza was rather impressed with how level she kept her voice. "I am beginning to think I should have ridden the Dragon back down the mountain."

"I'm just trying to solve problems," said Victor. "That's all I'm ever doing. Solving problems. And people seem to hate me for it."

The slave-factors emerged from the rattling still. Feroza stepped aside as they scuttled toward Victor, carrying little bits of metal and plastic.

"Sometimes people don't want their problems solved," she said.

"Nonsense. If you don't want to solve a problem, then it isn't a problem. That's what the word 'problem' means."

The factors swarmed over Victor's suit, affixing patches with inhuman speed and precision.

"Sometimes the solution is worse." Feroza gestured at the little slave-creatures. "I know you didn't just invent these uses for Petrolean life at the drop of a hat. Al-Onazy was planning this. Xanadu was planning this. Not content with draining the petroleum blood from this biosphere, he wants to enslave it to his purposes."

"Would you stop saying 'enslave'? You can't enslave a machine to do what it was designed for," said Victor. "Why do you think those ancient aliens put the mechanoids here?"

"Why are any of us here? Not to be destroyed by someone more powerful, certainly."

Victor laughed, which was probably better than the reaction she'd been aiming for.

"So here we are," he said, "in a freezing cave in a mountain, surrounded by monsters that want to eat us."

"Innocent animals engaging in their natural behavior."

The floor vibrated. "Speaking of Rome, the donkey appears," said Victor.

"What are you talking about?" But Feroza could see it well enough. 'Speak of the Devil,' an Englishman might have said. Here was the mother Dragon now, bringing with her more food for her hungry brood.

"Damn," said Toledo, "she's feeding the Dragonlets first."

"Of course she is."

"Can you stop her? All of my slave-factors are occupied repairing my suit." His voice dropped. "I will have to fabricate more."

"Don't." said Feroza. "We have no need of more of those things."

She got down on her knees and shuffled toward the mother Dragon. "I'll calm her while you finish repairing your — "

The baby saved her life.

When the mother Dragon lunged at Feroza, the baby thought it was getting a meal and moved to intercept. The mother Dragon pulled up her head and Feroza was not sliced in half by a pair of mandible-mounted buzz-saws.

"Feroza? What was that noise?"

She didn't have time to respond, diving behind the infant. It turned on her, too. Hooked mandibles scrabbled over her chest. Warnings flashed as welding torches kindled against the fabric of her suit. Feroza kicked out, connected with the baby's caterpillar body, and shoved herself away from it.

The mother came after her, growling static and drooling oxygen.