Pictured is a baby Dragon from Petrolea. Those wings haven't hardened yet. Look at that cute little telson. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/6551a4a29dc9c4f2802119b922208c3a/a65f63a99b3690e2-28/s640x960/f3206668a9fa968b4d7f1d43b8e8db5d0fbfb248.jpg]
Consciousness came to Dr. Feroza Merchant like a hammer between the eyes.
Not a big hammer. More like one the little ones that upholsterers used.
Ting ting ting ting. And the sofa had a new pattern.
She opened her eyes. Focused on the blinking hazard lights in her visor.
Ting ting ting low oxygen.
Feroza tried to move and found that she couldn't. The arms and legs of her spacesuit were welded into the fuselage of the Dragon. Toledo had done that, she remembered, hacking the somatic processor that controlled the way the factors built and maintained its body, trying to grow a cockpit around them. Apparently he hadn't gotten far before the acceleration had knocked him out, but that was better than being knocked off the Dragon entirely.
Feroza imagined Toledo tumbling through the nitrogen/methane atmosphere of Titan, screaming until he hit the ground or another Dragon snatched him in its jaws. She tried to enjoy the image and couldn't. Contemplating his death wasn’t as satisfying when it was his skills that would keep her alive.
Ting ting ting.
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Feroza twisted as much as she could. She couldn't see much of Toledo, only that he was there behind her, welded to the Dragon's fuselage just as she was. A few system messages directed into her microphone confirmed he was still alive, although unconscious. No doubt he had more oxygen in his tanks than she, and had no alarms to awaken him.
Ting ting.
She almost gave the radio call to summon her Punisher before she remembered. She had captured its mother herself, watched with wonder as the aquiline creature had opened her abdominal cavity to discharge a gleaming collection of machine parts, as intricate and beautiful as the inside of a pocket-watch. The mother Punisher's own factor swarm had split itself in two to seize those parts and assemble them into a home and factory: the body of a baby mechanoid.
Now the Punisher was dead, armature abandoned to the scavengers of the jungle, its factor swarm stolen and assimilated into the Dragon under her.
Feroza looked down at her body, imbedded in the side of the sleeping mechanoid. Had a human ever been so close to a Petrolean apex predator? Had any sapient mind before traced the sleek contours of their head assemblies, the flight surfaces like metal pinions, the bulky, powerful jet engines? Next to these marvels of nature, nothing mattered, not her poor dead Punisher, nor the people she had abandoned in the jungle. Not Toledo's survival, and least of all her own.
The feeling was oddly liberating. It might not be so bad to die when the Dragons woke up and peeled her space suit off her like the skin of a banana.
Ting ting ting.
Feroza had expected to return from her demonstration. Chastened, perhaps, or even defeated, but alive, surely. Surely Al-Onazy and his vile exploiters wouldn't let half of Xanadu Base's staff die out in the jungle. Surely they wouldn't be so stupid as to send an enormous pile of metal out into a metallic ecosystem without the support of their biologists?
Now, who knew how many kilometers from base and more than a billion kilometers from home, with her cause smashed and her career in ruins, Feroza considered the possibility of her death. How would Mummy and Daddy and Bubbli react to the news that she had been devoured by the subjects of her studies? Probably not with pride.