The concussion the Leviathan's proboscis made when it hit the ground rang through Victor's suit. The harvester jerked under him, slewed sideways as it was lifted from the mud.
The vehicle Victor piloted was 16 meters long and 5 tall, 20 tons of caterpillar treads, loaders, delimbers, grapplers, and a train of cradles to hold the denuded trunks of the Tanker trees. It should have been too damn big to move anywhere that Victor didn't want it to go.
The Leviathan was bigger.
The belly of the beast broke the clouds overhead, a whale breaching in reverse. A butterfly that dreamed it was an aircraft carrier. Clouds streaming from air-paddles, the Leviathan plummeted towards them. The jaws on the end of his hose-like trunk clenched around the harvester.
Victor's visor flashed with warning colors. Temperature readouts spiked. Radiation fluxed. The reactive glass dimmed against the light of the monster's smelter throat.
Something swooped through the air toward him. Another predator, or maybe some symbiont of the Leviathan homing in on Victor's radio signals, ready to peel and devour his suit or just swallow him whole and shit out the indigestible water and bone meal…
Talons cinched around his torso, tugged him up and away. Victor stared between his swinging legs at the Leviathan's maw clamped down on the multi-million-dollar vehicle he had been given to drive.
The braided skin of the proboscis flexed, the teeth at its mouth glowing cherry-red as the furnace inside softened metal for the claws and saws of disassembler mechanoids. Other, larger symbionts scurried down the proboscis. Things like man-sized metal mantis-shrimp unfolded Swiss-army-knife limbs to snatch whatever their brethren left behind.
Victor was swung in a circle and dropped to the ground. The creature that had saved him released its grip and Victor almost fell at the feet of the woman who was its mistress.
"Dr. Merchant."
Her Punisher perched on her shoulder, rotors folded, talons clenched, sensors extended toward Victor as if waiting for him to make a fool of himself.
"Do you," he gasped, "have a way out?"
He couldn't see her expression, but the strike leader pointed back into the jungle in the direction the Victor had come from.
"Miércoles," Victor cursed, lips numb. "You want us to walk home?"
Her voice crackled in his earphones. "No, you fool, we have to run."
Gobs darted through the air and oozed across machinery and spacesuited people alike. Mantis-shrimp mechanoids sliced chunks off the harvester with burning claws. Bloated creatures like giant fleas lapped at spilled fuel. And the Leviathan, with great efficiency, ate the harvester Victor had been so stupid as to drive into the middle of this metal-eating jungle.
Dr. Merchant was right, a thought which probably didn't give her much comfort as she watched her people fall under diamond-serrated limbs and sun-hot mandibles. And a jet of flame in the sky signified something worse was coming.
"Dragons!" Dr. Merchant yelled. "On the ground!"
Victor hit the mud at the same time as the landing gear of one of the giant, flying predators. The Dragon flamed as its wings tilted, jet engines blasting craters into the mud, its narrow head pointed directly at one of the strikers.
"Punisher, fetch!" Dr. Merchant commanded, and flung out an arm.
The mechanoid launched itself off her back, churning through the rain toward the stricken human. It buzzed between the Dragon and its prey, claw jabbing like the stinger of a giant wasp. Surely that wasn't natural behavior. How could Dr. Merchant have trained the creature so well without using a handshake gauntlet? Despite himself, despite everything, Victor was impressed.
The Dragon was not. As the Punisher wrapped its claw around the man it had been ordered to save, the Dragon spread its mouthparts and snatched the smaller mechanoid out of the air. It didn't bother to cut apart the Punisher's structural elements, just hacked its processes, stole its factors, and sucked dry its reserves of oil and liquid oxygen. The skeleton of metal and plastic splashed into the mud, and the Dragon turned its headlights back toward its human prey.
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Even in his restrictive suit, the striker should have been able to escape, but the Dragon pulled back its buzzing, steaming mouthparts and extended the long, black tube of its flamethrower. A little pilot light kindled. Victor's visor lit up with a new danger symbol.
Oxygen.
Fire bloomed again, igniting the gasoline rain.
When he could see again, the oxygen had burned away, and so had the striker. The Dragon rooted through a mass of bubbling plastic that had been an environment suit, clenching its mandibles in apparent frustration when it found nothing but useless meat inside.
"I'm going to crawl toward the edge of the jungle," Dr. Merchant said.
Victor's limbs twitched. Had he just been lying in the mud waiting to be devoured by the damn feral robots? "I didn't come to Titan to die," he said, mostly to himself. "¡Dios! I haven't even had a chance to do…" he stared up at the huge and hungry machines, "...my job."
The hope was even more painful than the despair. Sharp and hot as the mouthparts of the Dragon's head, now swinging into position above him.
His body wanted to lie down and roast in that fire. Rolling back to his feet was the most difficult thing Victor had ever had to do.
Victor stood up, and the Dragon's two headlights swiveled to fix on him. Antennae extended from their housings along the giant predator's grooved head. Mouthparts opened and liquid oxygen drooled and evaporated.
"Oh," he said. "Oh miércoles." He would never say mierda in front of a lady.
"What?" said Dr. Merchant. "Get down, you fool, before—"
Victor held up his arm.
"Handshake," he said. And his gauntlet went to pieces.
Unlike the biologist, Victor didn't have a single tame mechanoid clinging to his wrist. He had about a thousand.
The slave-factors, each the size and shape of a thumbnail, flaked off his hand and scattered like dropped coins. Even as they fell, they synched with each other and the transponder in Victor's suit. Fast as army ants, they crawled up the Dragon's body, wire legs blurring, stumpy antennae waving, broadcasting to the animal's native factors that they were friends.
They lied.
The parasites' code burrowed into its electronic nervous system, and the Dragon froze.
Victor took a tentative step forward, put his hand on the Dragon's neck. It shivered and bowed as new windows opened on his visor.
"What do you propose we should do now?" Dr. Merchant demanded. "What possible good can it do you to hack a Dragon?"
"Well," said Toledo, "if my Dragon attacked the others..."
"It would be torn to shreds along with everybody else." But Dr. Merchant stood beside him, so she must have some confidence in him. Some other plan.
"Yes?" Victor said.
"You fly that thing to Xanadu Base and tell them. Try to mount a rescue if you think it will do any good."
It wouldn't. Most of the other Dragons ripped at the remains of the harvester, but Victor could see another of the giant predators slithering toward them on its caterpillar-tread belly.
"Um. I don't think I can actually tell this thing where to go." Victor scrambled up the Dragon's flank anyway, over its folded wings. The beginnings of a plan crystallized under the pressure of his fear. "I've never worked with Dragons before, but I've worked with Punishers, and the somatic programming is very similar..."
"The emergent behavior is entirely different, however." Dr. Merchant took his hand and scrambled up after him onto the Dragon's back. "Look for the reward complex connected to its hunting instinct. That should lead to a command to tell the satiated animal to fly home."
"Fly home." Even as he repeated her words, a summary of the Dragon's runtime environment flashed in Victor's visor. "Got it," he said, and air-typed commands into the mechanoid's brain. EndProcess:Feeding.
Instinctive responses cascaded out from that simple instruction. The wings unfolded, angled down for vertical take-off. The jet intakes spun up and the mechanoid's long neck retracted. Its puffy, feathered outline smoothed out, condensing and stiffening as the factors that made up its body held each other close, preparing for flight.
The other Dragons and various associated monsters did not try to stop Feroza and Victor's lift-off. Predators and parasites gamboled and capered in the red light that shone from the lights on the Leviathan's proboscis as it ripped into the vehicle. Most of the other people were gone, fled into the jungle, and Victor hoped they would have enough oxygen to get home. He hoped that he would.
"I'm sorry for what we are about to do to you," said Doctor Merchant.
Victor wasn't. He clenched his fist within his gauntlet and the rain vanished into the blur of acceleration.