War Games by Karl Hansen

But that didn’t mean you were going to let them get away with it.
    If not for the elves, the crystalline forests of Titan could have been quite a tourist attraction. Swirling hydrocarbon mist condensed on the facets of leaves–liquid pentane and butane dripped from their undersides. On the rare occasions the mist lifted, Saturn-light blazed from billions of gemstones embedded in transparent plastic in a myriad of dazzling colors.
    But there were elves.
    No tourist in his right mind would visit Titan for pleasure.
    And I should have been more concerned about what lurked in concealment within the forest than I was with admiring its unique beauty.
    Too late I heard Vichsn’s warning whisper in my mind. Already I felt strong legs cradling me. Long carbide claws clicked against my armor. A furry body embraced itself around my head.
    I did manage to call myself a flyblown dumb son-of –an-elf before I froze, holding every muscle as still as I could. I tried not to move at all. If I did, I’d be dead in a few millisecs.
    The most dangerous of elven traps were airbears. One had just fallen on me, clinging around my head. They were creatures bioformed from Terran koalas. But their modifications were more than those required to adapt them to the environment of Titan. Sure, they had respiratory and digestive functions switched like all Titanians: they breathed their food and ate their oxygen. Titanian lungs extracted hydrocarbons to be used as substrate for oxidation. Titanians derived elemental oxygen from the enzymatic degradation of crystal complexes in their alimentary tracks. They had plasmids in their cells with the coding for enzymes to convert methane and heavier hydrocarbons into carbohydrate. Otherwise their biochemistry was not much different from standard Terran; they just got the raw materials in a different fashion.
    But elven genosurgeons possessed a sense of the macabre. For instead of storing free oxygen bound in brown adipose tissue, as did other Titanian creatures, airbears secreted it in distensible bladders that trailed from their backs. And they had eel bioelectricity organs in the membranes of their oxygen bladders.
    They were, in effect, living bombs.
    Pure oxygen exploded just as violently in the hydrogen/methane air of Titan as flammable gas would in the oxygen-rich air of Earth.
    Airbears’ heavy bodies were almost counterbalanced by their oxygen-filled bladders. They floated among the upper branches of the crystal forest, browsing on buds and leaves of crystalline oxides. Carbide teeth ground the gems to powder. Plastic matrix passed through their gut and became feces, binding the silicon, aluminum, beryllium, iron, chromium, calcium, magnesium, and boron residues left after oxygen was extracted. They were perfectly harmless as long as they stayed up in the trees. But if a combrid, or anything else with unaltered Terran metabolism, should pass below them, they immediately let go of the branch they were clinging to and dropped to the ground. It seems they were attracted to free oxygen. Our higher body temperatures caused us to lose minute traces of pure oxygen, which boiled through both protective monomer and armor. Airbears thought we were walking dessert. They clung to whomever happened to be below them.
    As it happened, that was me.
    Airbears actually were gentle creatures. They didn’t normally hurt anything. But they were easily startled. The elven genosurgeons made them that way.
    You were OK if you could slowly extricate yourself from their grasp. But if you scared them, they involuntarily discharged their electricity organs. This both disrupted oxygen bladders and provided a spark to ignite the contents of the bladders. The air exploded as hydrocarbon atmosphere burned with pure oxygen. The resulting concussion was relatively minor–umess you happened to be the one standing at ground zero. Then it was enough to flatten your combat armor like a crushed beer can. The flesh inside tended to take