Pictured are swarms of factors, from Petrolea. Each equipped with four graspers, a small battery, and rudimentary intelligence, these thumbnail-sized devices form the basis of mechanoid anatomy. Some species roam freely across the ground, but others construct complex mobile armatures complete with specialized organs for sensing, moving, capturing and processing feedstock, and building more armatures. For example, Dragons. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/686d857ae5e6dd1245ecfbe3fa1684f9/e0ee77bace373601-2d/s1280x1920/e0fe2ce4ccbb8aa1d2e8ca8bb91d989e91a6a512.jpg]

"You're doing it wrong," said Victor.

Dr. Merchant's head turned inside her fishbowl helmet, little more than a dark smudge under the slick of oil and boiling oxygen. "Ah," she said. "You're awake."

She lifted her dripping hands toward the terrifying maw of the Dragon, as if Victor might have missed it. "You see I am using the Dragon's maternal instincts to win for us a fresh supply of oxygen."

What Victor saw was Dr. Merchant kneeling before one Dragon, holding up an oxygen canister while another dribbled liquid oxygen onto it. Most of the stuff away in the -160 air, so only a few drops actually managed to bubble into nothing on the rusty floor.

Victor blinked at her for a few moments, first trying to figure out what she thought she was doing, then waiting for her to see the obvious flaws in her plan.

"You know you'll never fill the canister that way," he said.

Dr. Merchant didn't put down the useless canister. "So help me. Can you program the factors in your gauntlet to make a funnel and valve?"

Victor tried to imagine a device he might persuade his slave factors to construct that would mate a standard oxygen canister with the flamethrower nozzle of a Dragon. "It's impossible."

"Do not tell me what is impossible," she snapped. "Help me, man, if you want to survive."

Victor bit back the first response that came to his mind and tried to focus on the problem of respiration. "We need a compressor or refrigerator to condense the oxygen back into liquid for storage."

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"Unnecessary," she said. "The Dragons compress and refrigerate oxygen inside their bodies. Now, if it were possible to train the Dragons to hold still long enough…"

If his hands had been free, Victor would have waved away the biologist's speculation. Instead he just lay there, welded to the other Dragon, and said, "I have a better idea." Dr. Merchant was a biologist. Her specialty was the whole, but Victor's specialty was the parts, and he knew what parts he needed.

Victor blinked and rolled his eyes and selected a command from the menu in his eye-tracking interface. The factors he had programmed to grab him relaxed, and he tumbled to the floor. He tried to flip over and got a shove on his back for his trouble.

"Stay down." Merchant had stopped propitiating the Dragon and thrown herself over his back. "Try to look serpentine."

"What?"

"Like a snake, man. Like a Dragonlet."

Victor tried to squirm.

"Good, good," said Merchant, although whether to him or the Dragon, Victor didn't know. "Now you listen here, you utter fool." That was definitely to him. "Do you realize how close you came to being eaten by the father Dragon? You are quite unequipped to survive out here. So respect my orders without question, and do nothing without my permission."

Said the woman who'd been trying to milk oxygen from a Dragon. Said the woman who'd nearly gotten him killed. Who had almost certainly gotten all those people killed in the jungle. This sneering, privileged academic princess deserved to suffocate here and be eaten by her adopted robot-parents.

Victor would do the right thing and save her, but he certainly wasn't going to let her ego interfere with his efforts to save both their lives. Silently, he activated his handshake gauntlet.

The slave-factors were still inside the body of the Dragon, tapped into the behavior processor, or brain. In order to infiltrate the somatic processors, Victor had to command his factors to physically relocate, then set up a network to synchronize their execution. It was a tricky bit of work, but at least he didn't have to write the programs for them to execute. This was something he'd been playing with at the base, though on smaller animals. The executable's name was "smellsBadontheOutside."

"So what do you propose to do in order to get the oxygen we need?" asked Dr. Merchant.

"This," said Victor, and executed the program.