The parasite looked a bit like an octopus. Or a spider made of segmented metal hose.

Feroza flailed in the tangle of murderous steel pasta and Victor stared, totally frozen by his horror.

They hadn't brought any weapons. Why hadn't they brought any weapons? He could have designed some. Some program that would sever a Dragon's head and turn it into a turret-mounted flamethrower. If only he'd thought —

Fire rolled over them.

Victor toggled off some virtual controls and pulled Feroza off the Dragon with him. The mechanoid itself slurped down the charred remains of the Spaghetti Monster as its body bunched and transformed from sleek jet-shape to caterpillar.

The Leviathan's back looked like someone had tried to make an aircraft carrier out of scrap metal. What had from a distance looked like smoothly machined overlapping plates, Victor now saw were pitted and asymmetrical. Respectably-sized shrubs had self-assembled in the hollows and crevices, carving little chunks of metal from the flesh of the Leviathan to build their branches and whirligig leaves.

And of course the whole place was infested with creatures. Some were like lice, others like fleas or crabs or flatfish, and it looked like every one of them — parasite, epiphyte, or whose-a-site — was crawling from crevices in the uneven skin of the Leviathan to come, slavering, toward them. Tentacles lashed and claws flexed under the red glow shining from between the teeth at the end of the Leviathan's snake-like proboscis.

Victor fought the urge to cross himself and looked at the scene with engineer's eyes. Problem one: hundreds of horrible creatures wanted to eat them. Problem two: their ride was out of fuel, and was also hungry. The solution wasn't actually that hard to formulate. Victor didn't even have to nudge the Dragon with his slave factors. Another blast of fire and it was in amongst the parasites, eating everything that moved.

¡Hurra! Except that Victor's suit was still compromised, they still had no way to contact the orbital station and call for help, and Feroza might actually be suicidal. "We can do this, right?" Victor said. "We can survive, right?"

"Probably." Feroza had tiptoed around a lobster-sized parasite and was examining its pincers while it tried to slice her feet off. "The Dragon thinks we're her children. She'll continue to protect us even after she's replenished her fuel."

"That's a lot of trust to place on a creature that tries to eat you every chance it gets."

Feroza threw the parasite to the Dragon, which snapped it up. "She saved me when I jumped. As flying animals with high parental investment, they have an instinct for rescuing falling young."

Victor wasn't so sure. What if he had been the one who jumped?

The Dragon had herded the humans into the cover of an overhang dug into the carapace by the roots of a small windmill-tree and was now busily establishing a perimeter of dismembered robots around them. Periodically, she would nudge a partially cooked mechanic toward Feroza as if trying to feed her. Or teach her to hunt?

Victor felt he could move down his catastrophe list. Since he was unlikely to find a patch-kit or interplanetary communications equipment on the back of a flying metal whale-grub, that left psychological problems.

"So you're saying the Dragon loves you like a baby."

"I am saying that I'm not just useful to her," said Feroza, accepting a charred, twitching lump from the Dragon with a bow of gratitude. "I'm valuable. I'm precious to her."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Doesn't that bother you?" he said. "I mean you're using her. I mean you're using it." He meant using me. "The Dragon."

She smiled at him. "The term is 'brood parasite,' and it would only bother me if I didn't return that love, Victor."

"You mean you think the Dragon is your mother?"

"No," said Feroza, "but I also value her beyond what I can get out of her."

What the hell did that mean? If the Dragon wasn't Feroza's mother or her pet or her car, what was it? And what did that make Victor? The Dragon's son-in-law?

"That's an odd philosophy for a biologist, isn't it?" he said.

"On the contrary," said Feroza. "Unlike many people, I don't mistake animals for stupid humans or for disobedient machines. They do not exist for or against us. They just are. Complete, without need for any human reference points."

Victor tried unsuccessfully to find a parallel between that statement and his and Feroza's relationship. How could he make it clear that their night in the reverse-igloo hadn't just been a last-people-on-the-planet act of desperation? "I am glad she saved you."

And before he worked himself up to say something like "because I value you more than what I can get out of you, too." Feroza said, "We help each other, it's what symbionts do."

"I can't argue with that." Victor watched the Dragon as it slithered back and forth in front of them, crunching and flaming, working its way through the crowd of creatures with mechanical satisfaction. "Not that I'm complaining," he said, "but why do those things keep feeding themselves to our Dragon? Can mechanoids even get suicidal?"

"It must be us," she said. "We represent something their instinctive programming has no way to address. Their normal behavior has been overridden."

"By the need to kill us?"

She turned to him, suit outlined in red light, monsters cavorting and burning around her. "Don't be melodramatic."

"Look," he said. "I know I'm not a biologist or anything, but animals don't work like this. All of these things attacking us." Victor pointed up at the Leviathan's mouth. "That big hose watching us. The whole damn planet massacred Xanadu Base." He fought to control his breathing. "I mean…why?"

A creature like a geodesic ball filled with claws bounced over the Dragon and sailed through the air toward Victor. Feroza swatted the thing to the ground and crushed it under her boot.

"I suppose," she said, bending to examine the spasming remains, "that once some Petrolean animals learned they could eat human technology, they sent out a signal. It was only a matter of time until we saw a feeding swarm."

Victor looked out at the gibbering hordes of creatures, trying to imagine them as seagulls flocking to a dropped sandwich. "No," he said. "We're killing these things."

"The Dragon is killing them."

"Alright. But shouldn't they figure that out and run away?"

"Perhaps we are seeing eusocial behavior, or these have some other way to store their genetic material offsite." Feroza picked up a half-dead creature and shook it briskly. Factors scattered.

Victor didn't understand any of that, but he knew what would happen if she covered herself in foreign factors. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Do you want those things to chew through your suit?"

"They will rather repair my suit." Feroza pulled the parasite's corpse apart, discarding miniature forges and fabricators until she had a skeleton of metallic strut-work. "I do have some experience with these matters, remember. Now, give me your hand."

Victor jerked back when she tried to thrust the corpse over his left glove. "What are you doing?"

"Fixing your suit," she said, "and giving you some camouflage at the same time."

"Oh I see," said Victor as she worked the cage up his arm. "You left the somatic processor intact. When you give it a power supply…"

Roach-sized factors scuttled up Victor's boots, climbed onto the skeleton, and proceeded to weld it to Victor's suit.