"I think his feeding apparatus might handle some live prey," said Feroza. "I ought to go hunting."

"Wait," said Victor. "I had an idea before…well. Before. And I wanted to test it. Now that we have three big carnivores guarding us, I think the experiment might be safe."

"An experiment?" asked Feroza.

"More of a proof-of-concept." Victor wiggled his fingers and lights blinked on across the blasted landscape of the Leviathan's carapace. "I've been trying to figure out how much control we can get out of this thing."

"'This thing' being a fundamentally decentralized communal mechanoid with no more executive function than a colony of pyrosomes."

"I have no idea what that means," he said, still air-typing.

"The Leviathan is a like a slum, right?" said Feroza. "No mayor to bribe?"

"In that case," said Victor. "I have held elections"

The engineer tapped his finger on the air and Mechanoids scuttled out of cracks in the Leviathan's armor. The little creatures converged on Feroza and Victor in an eerie repetition of the day they had landed here. But rather than attacking, the mechanoids climbed up onto the Dragons' backs, clamping their legs donating their factors wholesale into the Dragons' swarms.

"I have my control programs installed in every factor the Leviathan produces," said Victor. "By now, almost every parasite and processor cluster's bugged. I could make the Leviathan's proboscis wave hello to you, but I thought this would be more impressive."

Rusty grew before Feroza's eyes, his skeleton elongating as other mechanoids fused themselves to him.

"What on earth did you do?" asked Feroza. He didn't seem to be controlling these creatures explicitly, just calling them to assemble. And yet what naturally evolved behavior would so abrogate these animals' interests?

That thought allowed Feroza to answer her own question. "You activated more old code, like you did to build our habitat."

Victor nodded. "It makes sense for the aliens to build safety features into their machines as well as booby-traps. So if a miner got cut off from base, the mechanoid would build a habitat for him." He jerked his thumb at their cozy little igloo.

Feroza looked down at the shifting shape of her Dragonlet and realized something. "Rocket-seeds are the same. They were designed for this purpose."

"Eh?" said Victor. "What were Rocket-seeds designed for? Planetary defense? Killing humans?"

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Feroza shook her head. "Spreading adaptable, programmable devices, digesting bare rock and metal and," she gestured at their neat little home, "turning it into space habitats."

"The mechanoids aren't just a weapon," Feroza said. "They are a tool."

"These things could terraform the Solar System," said Victor.

"Yes," said Feroza. "Here is your value, engineer. Something much more precious than petroleum: space to live."

"At the cost of all the infrastructure we've already put in space."

"What's more important," she asked, "machines or people?"

"Well all right, but all this only assumes that the mechanoids won't kill us humans on sight. Petrolean biology didn't exactly make improvements to Xanadu Base or the orbital habitat."

"But it did make improvements to our living arrangements," said Feroza. "So what's the differences between the way we treat the mechanoids and the way everyone else does?"

"Assuming they haven't just decided to save you and me for desert," said Victor, but Feroza knew she'd captured his imagination. "Dio, we could stop the sporulation and send out a warning and go home if we could control the mechanoids…and we can!" The Dragons' snouts followed him as he jumped for joy.

All three mechanoids had all benefited from Victor's ministrations. The mother and Mr. Biggles positively gleamed, and Rusty was more new material than old. The little Dragon stretched, flaking off the last of his rust, and Feroza hissed in surprise.

"What?" Victor's head turned in his helmet. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes," she said, "but Rusty isn't. Look. The factors are repairing him wrong." She tried to shoo the creatures away from the tumorous mound they were constructing on the baby's back. "There must be something wrong with their programming."

Victor shuffled toward her. "There can't be anything wrong with their programming. They're plugged straight into his somatic processor."

"Then the processor must be damaged. Its blueprint is corrupted," said Feroza.

Rusty's back, formerly a smooth tube of articulated iron, bulged up grotesquely. Even as Feroza watched, the repair factors added yet more material to the hump, extruding a weird, rounded protuberance like a horn behind a metal frill. Knobbed lumps of metal marched down the creature's flanks, too symmetrical to be any kind of Petrolean cancer.

"Some kind of parasite in the code, maybe?" Feroza searched for analogies. "A mechanoid virus?"

"I'm looking at the runtime environment," said Victor, "but there's nothing…huh. There's nothing new, but a whole new bunch of tags...miércoles. Tripwires."

They both slid back from the baby. "What is the code doing?" asked Feroza. Was Rusty gestating some horrible weapon of the mechanoids' alien masters? Would the lump on the Dragon's back sprout claws and fangs and attack them?

But no. "It's just shaped metal," Feroza reassured Victor along with herself. "There's no internal structure."

"Well, the aliens definitely wanted their mechanoids to grow these things." Victor turned in a slow circle. "Look. You can see lumps on the other baby and the mother too, just not as big yet."

"They haven't had to rebuild their entire chassis." Feroza stared at the Dragons, which rolled on their sides to present their new growths to their…masters?

"Good God," Feroza said. "I think they are growing saddles for us."