Pictured is a Gambol, a motor-cycle-sized mechanoid that uses its cutting and sucking mouthparts to steal petroleum from Bergs and its enormous hydraulic jumping legs to escape predators. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/fe479702160a3fca566f6fdc5d871e07/7146fb8486f2e5e6-f9/s1280x1920/f97ed97258219a196170f8dead5af720e57cc151.jpg]

The Dragons had carved their hangar into the chimney of a Factory Berg. Already, the window was lost in the ammonia clouds. As Feroza and the mother Dragon glided down the slope of the Berg, the tapering walls above were almost as vertiginous as its foundations below.

"I'm sorry," Feroza told the Dragon.

The bus-sized mechanoid made no response, but Feroza could feel the vibration in her chassis, see the factors of her flesh growing more sluggish in their reactions. I am tired, she seemed to say, when can I rest?

"Oh, it's nothing," said Toledo's voice in her earphones. "I am confident we can get oxygen indefinitely."

Feroza decided not to tell the engineer she hadn't been apologizing to him, but to the innocent animal whose mate they had slaughtered and whose children they now held hostage while they used her to collect food and fuel. Feroza wasn't happy to be in charge of that project, riding the Dragon down the mountain like the hallucination of some mercury-poisoned equestrian. At least she wasn't forced to stay in the hangar with Toledo, though, and his macabre "still."

"This machine is great." Toledo was back up at the top of Berg in the Dragons' hangar, chattering happily as he rendered their living-space habitable. "It's already cracked enough oxygen for both of us, and I'm confident about water and even digestible food."

Wilderness survival, as Toledo referred to it. A program cooked up by some bloated, greedy business-vampire in Dubai or London: hack the native life into growing life-support modules in the field. As if we weren't disturbing the ecosystem enough already with a single base at Xanadu, let's make it possible to grow a hundred bases overnight!

Toledo was still talking. "...but it'll need more oxygen to burn in its fabricators. And hydrocarbon feedstock."

Feroza looked down at her steed. The mother Dragon had spread her wings as far as she could, her engines shut off in her exhausted glide. This was her fourth trip down from her hangar in the past hour.

"You mean blood," Feroza said. "We will need the blood of Petrolean animals. More death, so we can live. So he could die."

"He?"

"The Dragon!" Feroza wanted to scream with frustration. How could Toledo be so damn dense? "You killed the father Dragon."

"So what? You favor your own first, then others. Humans are more important than animals."

"Humans are just one species of animal. And there are eight billion of us. How many Dragons are there?"

Toledo scoffed. "Because there are more people than Dragons, that makes a person's life less valuable? We're not selling people and Dragons on the international exchange, here. The only reason to keep Dragons around is because we like having them around."

"Why? What gives you the right to decide whether another creature dies?"

"I can figure out how to kill them," said Victor, "that's what."

"So intelligence is the sine qua non for personhood?" said Feroza. "Are you prepared to offer yourself up for slavery under the next genius you happen to meet?"

"It depends, mi señora," he said, voice suddenly dark and smoky. "What are your...orders?"

Feroza stopped with her mouth open, the Dragon rumbling under her. She thought they'd been arguing. Had Toledo thought they were flirting? Surely not. "I'm not talking about me," she said. "If your dividing line is the species, what happens when we meet aliens? How would you like it if a super-technological space-man reprogrammed your body to churn out food for him?"

"If the alien was as much smarter than me as I am smarter than a Dragon? I think my feelings don't matter so much, eh?"

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

What a bleak moral philosophy. The law of the jungle applied to human interactions. But wasn't that how most humans still governed themselves, or failed to?

The Dragon was already searching for a place to land. "I'm done arguing," said Feroza, watching ground slope up to meet them.

Once a water- and methane-spewing cryovolcano, the Berg had been covered over and converted by Petrolean life into an energy plant. The vast colonial organism of cooperating factors used the volcano to distill petrochemical fuel and oxygen to burn it, storing the energy that ultimately powered the entire local ecosystem.

Landing here on the forested slopes would not be easy, but the mother Dragon might not have the strength to make it all the way down to the plains. Now it was just a matter of letting go.

Feroza weighed only13% of what she would have on Earth, but her long-haul environment suit more than quadrupled her mass. She had a great deal of inertia, and could only very slightly control her descent. A fall that would have been instant death on her home world became a long, panicked dance of shoving hands and spinning, kicking legs.

Finally, Feroza stood on the steep incline of the lower Berg, leaning against the strut of a whirligig tree and trying not to vomit. No plumes of carbon dioxide snow rose from her suit; it was intact. She would live long enough to hunt down some food for the mother Dragon and thus more effectively enslave her.

Toledo must finally have realized that he'd upset her. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry I killed the Dragon, all right? But that funnel and valve idea you had — "

"If not that, then something else," she said. "We could have found some other solution."

"Maybe. But what's wrong with this solution?"

Did he honestly not understand? "You are perpetuating a cycle of death, Mr. Toledo. You killed the Dragon, which forces me to go down the Berg to kill more creatures, all so we can stay alive long enough to kill yet more."

Feroza watched the mother Dragon circle above her, jets angling down for vertical landing. "I will hunt for her. Fill her reserves and then persuade her to give us what she can."

"Then why do you need to be down there? We could have stayed here and waited for her to come back."

Feroza watched the mother Dragon settle onto her landing gear. A healthy animal would have immediately re-formed the factors of her body into their non-flying conformation. The exhausted mother Dragon simply slumped to the ground, factors sloughing from her superstructures like shed feathers. "She needs my help."

"Alright. Whatever makes you feel better."

"I am not sure you understand the extent of the..." suffering, Feroza thought, "...stress we have caused the mother Dragon. We have added ourselves to her responsibilities and removed her mate, who might otherwise have helped her hunt. If we do not do something to redress the balance, she might simply give up on this nest and fly away to mate again."

"So you have to give her enough food to convince her to stay here," but the confidence in Toledo's voice didn't last. "Um. Can you?"

"Yes." Feroza said with rather more confidence than she felt. She'd collected her share of specimens and could have bagged any number of small mechanoids for Toledo to feed to his blasphemous life support engine. She was less certain she could fuel the metabolism of an adult Dragon as well.

"It's only that this...what we're doing here is very important," said Toledo. "For our survival. Since we're stranded in the wilderness."

Stranded in someone else's home, he meant. Toledo just took what he wanted and demanded more.

"Okay," his voice intruded. "How about this? You ride that thing back up here, we'll process one of the juveniles into feedstock for her — "

"You want to force the mother Dragon to eat one of her Dragonlets?"

"Well, why not? They're both machines. If our shuttle broke, wouldn't we cannibalize the harvester for parts?"

Cannibalize? Feroza felt ill. "She is not flying anywhere."

That was a statement of fact. The mother Dragon sprawled across the uneven ground, wings shuddering, dead factors dropping off her body. Feroza's first priority must be to feed the poor creature.

Of course Toledo had different priorities. "Okay. How about this?" he said again. "I don't have many slave factors left, but if I use the ones I have to make one of the juveniles fly down to you — "

"No!"

"The big Dragon doesn't have to eat it." Victor cleared his throat. "You can place those slave factors on the adult."

"Never!"

"But I am offering to give you my last slave factors," he said.

"No," Feroza said again. "No more slavery."

"You just said," grated Toledo, "that it might just fly off and strand me at the top of a damn mountain with no way down. Plus you're lost in the jungle with no way back up."

Feroza watched the Dragon breathe, considering the merits of that idea. Why go back to Toledo, after all? Why extend his life and hers at the expense of so many other, equally deserving creatures? Why not fly out into the jungle and live there? Her life might be shorter than if she went back to Base, but it would be infinitely richer.

No. As peaceful as might be the image of her own death at the heart of the Petrolean food web, Feroza knew Toledo would die cursing her name. In the grand scheme of nature, one naked ape hating another might count for nothing, but Feroza could not be so amoral. Toledo had saved her life, after all, and Feroza had yet to return the favor.