Feroza searched for another corpse to glue onto his suit. "It's a trick we started using in the field when the mechanoids got too aggressive. I think it's less about blending into the environment than masking our human nature. Endoparasites camouflage themselves with your own body's proteins against your immune system in the same way."

Victor frowned, and not only because of the metal tentacle she was wrapping around his arm. "Is that what you think is going on with these mechanoids that attacked us? Are they like the immune system?"

"No," Feroza said to herself, or maybe to the buzzing thing she held up to her visor. "An ecosystem is a balance of competitors. Your body is composed of genetically identical cells that cooperate and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the whole."

Feroza, he wanted to tell her, you jumped off a damn Dragon! You fell away from me! Don't do that. Don't ever do that.

Instead he said, "But these little creatures certainly act like cells in the body of the Leviathan."

Feroza persuaded the wild factors to glue another metallic skeleton to his shoulder. "You're trying to map these creatures and their behavior onto Terran biology, and you are doomed to failure."

"But the same thing happened in the jungle when everything attacked us. And we know that Gambols and Dragons and Gobs are all different species, right?"

"Different morphotypes, yes. Their somatic code is incompatible."

"Alright. So what happened in the jungle wasn't some kind of immune reaction, and neither was what happened to Xanadu Base. You don't see an Amazon research stations leveled by jaguars and sloths or something."

Feroza just nodded absently and strolled to the edge of their safe zone, where the Dragon presented her with another half-dead mechanoid. Eat, eat, he almost heard the creature say. You're too skinny. How are you going to grow up into a flying carnivore the size of a school bus if you don't eat your parasites like a good little Dragon?

He shook his head and looked back at Feroza, thinking of her walking out with her strikers to possibly die in the jungle, jumping from the back of their Dragon. The Dragon itself, no longer eating the parasites it killed, but killing anyway, spurred on by its love for them, apparently. And in their hate, the Leviathan's parasites continued to attack.

"These mechanoids," he said, "they don't act like animals. They sacrifice themselves."

"Why not?" said Feroza, accepting another gift from the Dragon. "We humans sacrifice ourselves."

He winced. Was she playing with him?

But she went on as if unaware of what she was saying. "People join into armies to defend their territory. If space aliens landed on an aircraft carrier, the crew would notice and try to stop them, wouldn't they?"

"You think those things are soldiers?" Victor pointed at a bouncing hoop-shape that uncoiled in the air to become a serpent with a cluster of tentacles for a face.

Feroza caught it, pulled it apart, and welded it to his chest. "I told you, they don't need to fit into one of your categories. They just are."

"But their behavior still has to make sense," he said. "Why do they keep coming? Is there some sort of Petrolean Parliament issuing orders? A Petrolean police to make everyone obey?"

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Hm," said Feroza, looking out at the attacking monsters. Their Dragon lurched to snatch up something that looked like a crab made of barbed wire. "It's a good question. Why else would they behave so selflessly?"

"They do not!"

"What?" she turned to face him. "What's wrong?"

"Selfless? Pucha, Feroza, this is not good. It is not noble! Normal creatures don't just dive into death like, like…" like you, he wanted to say. Why was he such a coward? He would lose her to this horrible world, one way or another.

Feroza sighed. "'Selfless' was shorthand, Victor, like 'love.' I meant that they do not behave in ways that would be selected for if they were the sole carriers of their genetic information."

"They're stupid, in other words."

"They can hardly be stupid if they are nothing but machines, Victor."

"But the machines might be used stupidly."

"What? By with a handshake gauntlet? Someone like you?" Feroza went on before he could protest. "Or, ha, better yet, the aliens that created them have returned to wreak vengeance upon us sinful apes, have they?" She gestured at the line of food marching into the Dragon's maw. "If the mechanoids were being remote-controlled, I would expect them to respond to us more intelligently."

"Maybe this is an automatic thing," said Victor. "Like a security system."

"A security system that covers the whole planet?" said Feroza. "That hijacked the normal functions of thousands of mechanoids and piloted them here?"

Victor thought about that. "Huh," he said. "Yes. Some kind of...what's the word? Trap? Tripwire? Some kind of hidden program that recognizes when the aliens' mine is being tampered with."

"Well of course you see programming in all of this," said Feroza, wiggling a bit of her camouflage. "You're a programmer."

"And you want to see instinct in all of this," said Victor. "But think about how the Dragon attacked you. She was under the grip of the tripwire program. I saw it happen, Feroza. And then you go and trust her again…"

Feroza looked up at the hitch in his voice. "It isn't a matter of trust. Dragons are nothing but animals, pulled this way and that by their urges and impulses." She looked down. "I was simply…limited in my understanding of those impulses."

"Yeah? Well, what about now?"

Feroza spread her hands to indicate their camouflage. Their human outlines were almost gone under the weird spoofing the factors had welded onto their suits. And yes, the parasites were dispersing, or at least settling down to eat the corpses of their fellow mechanoids. The red light dimmed as the huge feeding tube above uncurled and dropped out of sight beyond the curve of the Leviathan's shell.

They were safe.

"What do we do now?" said Victor. "We have no radio. No way to contact the orbital station and tell them we're still alive. No way to go home."

Feroza took his hand. "The Dragon is right there. She can take us home."

Alarms went off in Victor's helmet. Low oxygen. He had lost too much air when the cannonball thing attacked him. That would explain the auditory hallucinations. "We can't go home, I said."

"We have the hangar," Feroza said, "Our pleasure dome. Come on." She pulled him toward the Dragon.

"No," said Victor. "No." He took his hand back. "I can't."

Message windows flashed up in her visor. "Oh, your oxygen. You can use my spare canister, while we — "

"No!"

The Dragon looked around at them almost as if it had heard Victor's shout.

"We were only supposed to stay there one night," he said. "We were supposed to come home. To be home now. Xanadu Base. I'm not leaving."

"And you accused me of being suicidal?" Feroza advanced on him. "You're not thinking clearly. I'll put you on that Dragon myself."

"I won't let you!" Victor swung his arms at the beast. "Go! Go away! We are not your children!"

And as if the Dragon had heard him, it left.