The Gob'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: a swarm of assembler-dissembler Van Neumann robots. What the biologists called "factors."

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.

"If you directed that Gob to attack us, you are putting in danger the lives of yourselves and others," said Victor into whatever feeds back to Earth's media-sphere the strikers had running. "Now please—are you going to get rid of that Gob or what?"

"I'm trying, sir." Al-Waheed's tame Punisher spread four wings like helicopter rotors and launched itself. Its body shifted, streamlining as the factors that made up its skin and muscles tightened their grip on each other. A device like an eagle-taloned harpoon swung into position.

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

The Gob died, but not before Victor saw another squid-like flash, and another. The harvester rang with the impacts of more Gobs. Blobby masses swarmed over the harvester, too many for the Punisher or even Victor's gauntlets to deal with.

"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. Something like a metal caterpillar with Dragonfly wings wrapped around his wrist, but the slave-factors in Victor's gauntlet severed a couple of the creature's legs before Victor hurled it away.

"You're attracting them," came Merchant's voice over the electronic death scream of the mechanoid. "Listen to me, Toledo. You must leave immediately before something worse attacks."

Victor scraped bits of caterpillar off his gauntlet, fighting 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: someone had screwed up here, and it was probably him. His ears pricked, as if that would do any good in his suit. And anyway that vibration wasn't in his suit pickups; it tunneled up from his feet. A low rumble, almost like the harvester's engine. Except the harvester wasn't moving.

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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. In this case, that meant, "drive the harvester into the jungle and pick up the protesters before they run out of air or get eaten." He was the good guy, damn it!

The vibration wasn't subtle any more. A wave of displaced air washed over the harvester, setting the whole machine swaying like the branches of the Windmill trees in the shadow of a great, descending bulk.

"Leviathan," said Al-Waheed. "It's—" He swore in Arabic. "It's right on top of us, boss."

"¡Mierda!" Victor almost beat his extremely expensive and important handshake gauntlet against the armrest of his seat before he forced himself to calm down. "I mean, 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 spacesuited figures moved.

"I won't let you die out here." Victor stood in his pilot's seat and waved his arms. "Get those strikers on this harvester before something eats them."

"Come down off that harvester before the Leviathan eats you," said Dr. Merchant.

Victor wished he could strangle the woman. But there was absolutely nothing he could do to force the strikers to cooperate, at least nothing he could think of in the time he had before the Leviathan arrived. Victor imagined landing gear extending in the murk above the Windmill trees like the legs of a monstrous crab.

"Dr. Merchant," he said on her private channel, "Feroza. 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? Not now that you've attracted something that's big enough to eat it."

The rain stopped.

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

He looked up.

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