In Favour with Their Stars

He woke and did not immediately know where he was, a thick cottony taste in his mouth, bitter, and a small stinging pain near the base of his neck and at his wrists. He was secured in wide straps crossed over his chest and thighs, and his sight was badly blurred and in black-and-white; all he saw above him was a smear of gray light. He put his hands out on instinct and met cold glass only inches away from his face. Fog spread out from his fingers. He shoved on the glass in panic, then pounded against it with his fists, bare feet kicking and toes sliding uselessly against the invisible coffin-lid, his heart thundering rapidly but it refused to yield in the slightest, and a shuddering wave of exhaustion made him fall limply back against the padding underneath.

He lay there breathing, gasping. He worked his mouth until a little moisture came into it, and he swallowed. His sight began to sharpen little by little. Faint blue outlines began to become visible on the glass above him, and nearly simultaneously, his mind began to function again. He was still in the cradle. That was the ship’s medical bay, outside him; he’d been awoken from shipsleep; and that meant—

He had barely an opportunity to look up and see the large implacable countdown display; then the cradle dropped abruptly, his stomach following a moment after the rest of him, and the walls of the launch channel rose around him. From instinct, he tried to brace himself against the lid as the roar and white blaze of propulsion echoed at his feet, as useless as that was; then the launch channel was blurring past and gone: the cradle was ejected out into the void, and ten million stars were turning in their stately course all around him.

The deep dark was comforting, familiar, and the weightlessness that let his body rise and press against the straps. Laurence breathed deeply and let his uncoordinated arms sink again. His body remained all but limp. How he loathed planetary landings: of course he knew the rationale for leaving the muscle relaxants in his system until he was on the ground, and a thousand statistical analyses had confirmed the sense of it, but he could not like the sensation of uselessness; he could not even work the cradle’s diagnostics, his fingers thick and clumsy. He could only watch, his eyes slowly regaining focus. The cradle was curving away from the ship now: he had a final moment to see her, the Reliant, sleek and silver and gleaming with the star’s pale yellow-tinged light behind her, and then the planet was rising in his view: vast and endless green, mazed with clouds, and four of its small moons ringed around it, sweeping gaps in a thin encircling cloud of rings and dust.

It was an awkward and a choppy landing, buffeted by the debris, and despite the stabilizers, the cradle tumbled over itself two dozen times before it struck the atmosphere: bottom first, the angry red-orange glow blooming at his feet, and the air boiling white over his lid, which gradually blackened with the heat even as gravity took a sure and steady grip upon him. He lay still helpless and now blind in his carbonized shell, falling endlessly. Reason said that he was in fact slowing, the cradle’s landing systems activating; but it was difficult to cling to reason in the close and stifling dark. Though his body was yet chilled through from the long sleep, the air within was stale and hot now, and sweat began to spring out on his forehead; he was still falling.

And then, quite abruptly, he was not: a massive and unexpected jerk that flung him hard against his straps, and dropped him back again into his padding; he gasped with the jolt. Had he struck on a mountaintop, or one of the trees? His mind was still sluggish, but he remembered those vividly from the endless reams of his briefing: their vast bulk, skyscraper-high and more, the latticed network of their roots like mangroves twisting furiously into the earth. The surveyors had taken dozens of holographs, panoramic, trying to convey the scale of them, of a world that seemed built for giants.

Of course, the surveyors had failed quite thoroughly to account for that unnatural size and strength, until too late. Laurence hoped very grimly that they had not also failed to properly scan: if the cradle’s systems had been given bad information about the composition of the trees, and he had run into one—but the cradle was still moving, though more gently, no longer in free fall. Laurence could not account for it; he pressed on the coffin-lid with his still-clumsy hands. The console keys glowed blue at him against the charred black, and he managed to fold all of his fingers but one down. He pressed with painstaking care one button after another: the diagnostics showed normal operation, and his elevation was decreasing rapidly; abruptly there was another thump outside, and the cradle stopped upon the ground and ceased to move.

There was a warning puff of air against the side of his neck; he held still and forced himself to relax as the needle slid in. He drew several more breaths as the purifiers washed through him, carrying away the residue of sleep and inaction; he opened and closed his fists and rolled his fingers. He had to stretch his hands fairly far apart to reach the opening controls, and then use his toes to touch the final panel at the base, an act of coordination entirely beyond the limits of any panicked thrashing, as it was intended to be.

The lid cracked and bright fresh cool air rushed in, a brisk slap to the face. The halves of the lid raised up and retracted; Laurence seized the sides of the cradle and heaved himself up sitting, teeth gritted against the near-painful heat of the metal shell, and then he looked up—and up, and up, and up: there was a dragon standing over the cradle, a dragon on a scale he had never imagined, peering down at him with narrow-slitted eyes, gleaming blue against a black and armored hide.

He stared up at it a moment; then he cleared his throat and said, voice a little hoarse and rusty, “I am Captain William Laurence—”

“I know who you are,” the dragon interrupted coldly, “—you are from the Navy, and you have been sent to tell us that we ought to let you break up our home, all for this nonsense of trinium; well, I am Temeraire, the governor of this colony, and you may as well know straightaway that we will not put up with it at all. You had much better never have come.”

Of course, the situation was nothing so simple. Young dragons always had a certain tendency to see matters in their most straightforward light, as Laurence well knew; he had worked alongside dragons in the Navy all his life, of course, and that had in no small measure marked him for this mission. But he had not entirely appreciated—nor, he thought, had his superiors—the very real, very marked difference between the kind of dragons which served in the Navy, and those ancient lines which had been sent to populate New Atlanta.

Levitas, a supply officer on Laurence’s last command, was some five meters in length, and a ton; Yu Shi, the communications officer at Viro Station, was only three meters—although her wingspan was somewhat wider—and not half a ton. Laurence did not think there was a beast in the service more than five tons, even on the heavy-armor landing crews; and he had been thoroughly impressed on the occasion he had met one of those dragons, a monstrously built—he had thought at the time—tank-like creature, who had worn her four hundred pounds of body-plating as lightly as if it had been made of lace, and had cheerfully eaten sixty pounds of solid protein-carbohydrate mix straight from the vat in a single sitting.

The laws of nearly every settled world firmly required the engineering of dragon eggs, of necessity; the mania for size that had possessed the dragon-breeders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had crowded the gene pool with tendencies toward wholly unsustainable, impractical mass. But New Atlanta was a private colony, a business endeavor aimed at the very oldest and wealthiest of dragons; the marketing Laurence had seen had promised “a pristine haven untouched by industrialization,” as the sales literature had put it, “where your eggs, having been transported in the finest commercial liner available, attended by a devoted and highly trained staff of nursery personnel, will hatch and develop to their fullest and most extraordinary potential in a lush and luxurious setting, while funds you set aside for their care appreciate tax-free in guaranteed liquid instruments.”

Only such a private colony could offer free and unfettered breeding to dragons, and those places were much sought-after by the small but fiercely proud coterie of aristocratic dragon lines still preserved from the era of pre-industrial combat. There had been only a thousand places sold, at a million federals each, shockingly outrageous prices even for a luxury colony; but they had sold nonetheless. To dragons like this.

As a second lieutenant, Laurence had once needed to step outside the Goliath mid-journey, to oversee repairs when a diagnostic system had failed; he had stood upon the hull with the slip-stream coursing past in a glittering stream and felt himself a small almost parasitical creature clinging to some immense and curving whale, dwarfed into insignificance; the present sensation was not unlike that, except the Goliath had never glared down at him, and bared serrated jaws in his direction, and complained of his presence.

Temeraire was not the size of a full warship, of course, but he would not have fit inside the Reliant’s hold, either: twenty tons at least, and forty meters long. Laurence looked down at the cradle and could see faint indentations in the casing where Temeraire had plucked it from the sky with his metal-sheathed talons, as easily as a hawk catching a squirrel.

But Laurence had stood on the Goliath’s hull, despite the low shrilling whine of the ship’s engines and the slip-stream ready to take him off in an instant and fling him into the gravity wells, to be crushed or torn limb from limb; he had done his duty. He drew a single breath, deeply, and did not quail. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I assure you that I have not been frivolously sent: we have reason to believe that the Bonapartists have learned of the trinium deposits as well, and if you do not have military protection you will certainly be under attack in short order.”

Temeraire frowned down at the Navy officer in some irritation: he had been assured via comlink, by his aunt Lien, that he needed only be certain to surprise the fellow, and speak threateningly, to cow him into immediate departure. “Humans are not used to proper dragons, anymore,” she had said, “—not our kind. If he is old enough, he may fall down stone dead from fear: I have seen it happen,” and while Temeraire did not really care to make anyone fall down stone dead, he had relied on her assurances; he had not bothered to work out what he would do if the officer did not choose to go away at once, and that left the present circumstances quite awkward.

This news about the Bonapartists was also a puzzle. Temeraire knew about the wars, of course, in a distant, vague sort of way, but it was not the sort of thing that Celestials were supposed to pay attention to. He had considerably more immediate matters to attend to, in any case. The colony was not at all what had been promised, and they had all heard the promises in the shell, along with what now seemed a most unrealistic program for the careful, painstaking development of a lush and welcoming world, which had fallen apart in almost every particular. Instead they had met an unending stream of problems. It had proven impossible to establish any kind of mine at all with the equipment they had been provided, and it consumed a week to bring down even a single tree and make it usable, which in turn stifled all their hopes for agriculture.

It was very difficult to have been promised so much—and for their progenitors to have paid so much—and received so little. With every fresh difficulty, one felt as though one had been robbed, despite all the technical protests which the developers’ lawyers and insurers made, and the laws—quite unreasonable in Temeraire’s opinion—which shielded them from liability, under this supposed excuse that it was impossible to imagine every potential challenge which a colony might face. The surveyors might have tried to cut down one tree, or dig at least one small hole; they might have been a little curious what permitted the trees to grow so large, instead of merely taking a great many falsely attractive holographs.

He prided himself on how well they had risen to their challenges, but six years of effort had only been sufficient to make them halfway secure and not comfortable, and everyone’s tempers were grown short. Their elephant and bison herds were not properly established despite all their best attempts, so they had to keep eating out of rationed protein vats, which left everyone hungry and disconsolate; they had not had sufficient time to establish proper schooling practices, and several dragons had even failed to learn to read before they had grown too old, from the necessity of pursuing mere subsistence. Temeraire had to write letters for them, often, to help them conceal the painfully embarrassing lack of skill. Even now they still did not have enough pavilions for everyone to sleep inside at night, which meant there were a dozen outstanding quarrels of precedence demanding his attention.

The only thing worse than having been saddled with this world would be to have it snatched out from under them after so much labor and effort: and all because of the trinium that was the source of their difficulties in the first place. Temeraire would not stand for it; none of them would stand for it, they were all in perfect agreement on that, if on virtually nothing else. However unsatisfactory this world, it was still theirs; Temeraire did not mean to see it torn quite apart, all so that a war about which he cared very little should be forwarded. But he did not in the least know what to do with this Navy fellow, and if it was not all just made-up nonsense about the Bonapartists, he was not sure what he should do if they did come.

“I suppose I cannot only leave you here,” Temeraire said, feeling disgruntled: they were a good hour’s flight from the capital, and the Green River was between there and here, which this tiny creature could scarcely have crossed on his own.

“I would be grateful if you did not,” Captain Laurence said dryly. “I hope you will forgive my saying that stuffing your ears makes a poor kind of answer, however much you may dislike my intelligence.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff, but consoled himself with the thought that it was sensible to bring the officer in and hear him out, not because there would be any sense to his proposals, but to know what those proposals were: it was surely the best way to be prepared for whatever the Navy might do. “Very well,” he said ungraciously. “You had better climb up, then, and try not to fall off, for I dare say I would be hard-pressed to catch you if you should happen to do so.”

Laurence could not say that he inwardly met the prospect of climbing aboard this monstrous creature with any great equanimity: and how he was to hold on, during flight, was an ominous puzzle. But he dug his survival kit from the cradle and slung it onto his back, and then hesitatingly looked up the enormous column of the foreleg: muscles larger than his body, tendons and sinew sheathed in the tiny overlapping scales of gleaming black horn, under the netting that supported the dragon’s wing-bracework. Laurence took a cautious grip of one jutting spur and pulled himself up, searching for footholds as though he were creeping over a ship’s hull in dry dock.

The bracework netting broadened as he climbed, attaching at last to a massive gleaming band molded to the dragon’s shoulders, glittering with electronics and the thickness of Laurence’s wrist; when he had managed at last to drag himself up along it onto Temeraire’s back, he drew out a length of cord and tied himself onto it, as securely as he could. He took a grim hold as Temeraire said perfunctorily, “Are you ready?” and without waiting for an answer launched himself aloft.

The air came rushing into Laurence’s face, cool and sweet and startlingly fragrant, full of earthy, organic musk: rot and nectar all together, the sulfurous tang of the dragon’s body, all of it somehow magnificently real even if anyone might have called it unpleasant, if it had been offered in a scent bottle. Temeraire beat up in shocking, enormous strokes, purely physical; the wings moved past Laurence on either side like vast black sails, limned with their silvery netting, and then Temeraire turned into the wind and his bracework hummed faintly, coming online, as he launched himself forward.

The air tore from Laurence’s lungs. Temeraire’s body and the bracework’s shielding protected Laurence from the full force of their passage, but that only saved him from being torn off, shredded; he still felt with all his body the ferocity of the wind as they shot forward through the air. He clung to the bracework and stifled an involuntary burst of wholly inappropriate, delighted laughter. He had begun as a fighter pilot, had fought in five actions and a dozen skirmishes—once even manually, during the battle of the Lilienthal Belt, when all their navigation systems had been compromised by the Tricolor virus. He had always loved the sheer intensity of a small starship, the speed and physicality of their flight; but nothing to compare with this: bare to the open sky, exposed, breathing real air, with the green world rolling endlessly below.

“Of course I can go more slowly, if you find you cannot endure it,” Temeraire said, the voice amplified and coming from the neckband.

“No,” Laurence said; he felt himself grinning like a child. “No; I thank you, I am perfectly at ease.”

He could with pleasure have stayed aloft for hours. Temeraire swept with dazzling speed and skill between the massive treetops, the shining trunks like the polished columns of some endless cathedral; Laurence pulled on one of his gauntlets from the kit and reaching out blindly caught one leaf as they tore past a branch: it was wider across than the breadth of his shoulders, the veins gleaming faintly silver, the translucent skin mottled green, with one irritated creature rather like a starfish clinging to the underside, perhaps trying in some slow, slow way to digest a scrap of it. “How long a flight have we?” Laurence asked, letting the wind take the leaf away again, when they passed the next tree.

“Only half an hour more,” Temeraire answered him, more cheerfully. Perhaps the flight was improving his temper; Laurence could scarcely imagine any irritation that could survive this experience, although perhaps it was less remarkable to a dragon. “That is the Green River, over there,” Temeraire added, and Laurence, looking, saw it first merely as a great canyon-like break coming in the treetops, a wide chasm, until they came overhead.

It was astonishingly broad: on another world, in more welcoming soil, it would surely have long since carved itself a deeper passage; here, however, fifty million years had only sufficed to make and slowly widen a gentle indent, that nevertheless gathered runoff to itself. The far side was visible only because they were aloft, and even then only by the upper boughs of the trees that stood there. Masses of green leaves floated upon the surface in great mats, small saplings rooted upon the largest and a few, trapped against the curve of the river, had become veritable islands.

Laurence looked, breathtaken and dazzled; in either direction the river ran through the towering heights of the trees in immense silence, unbroken by birds, by cicada-hum; only a soft endless whispering noise of water running.

He and Temeraire were the only things in sight moving with mortal speed. He knew the youngest of the trees, those the height of yearling oaks, were a century old; the giants were a million years and more. They conquered the unforgiving earth with patience, slow sipping of nutrients by degrees. Those few native living things that were mobile moved only a little, and then carried by the wind; this was not a world that encouraged haste.

“I suppose,” Temeraire said, heavy with scorn, turning his head back to look at Laurence, “that the first thing you will say of the river is you think we ought to dam it up.”

“At the moment,” Laurence said honestly, “I only think it lovely; but I suppose that you would dam it, somewhere, if you could. Can it be done?”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, sounding a little mollified. “Well, no; we did try, but it is just too shallow. We cannot really carve a basin, so the water only runs off, and the trees drink it up so quickly if it gets anywhere near them that it is no use. We have set up some turbines, anyway,” he added, “but they do not do very much good. There are no falls anywhere.”

Laurence felt his great sigh, the dragon’s sides belling out and the hide rising beneath him. He looked and saw a glitter of metal and light, in the distance along the river’s length, and asked, “Are those the turbines there?” Even as he asked, he knew it wrong; those were not turbines.

“No, they are much farther north,” Temeraire said. “That is the capital, where we are going, although what those lights are—” He paused mid-air: his wings described an endless circling wave in the air, while his bracework hummed.

The lights came again: a flickering pattern of green and gold. “Scatter guns,” Laurence said abruptly, cold. The Bonapartists had somehow beaten him here.

Temeraire flung himself as quickly as he could down the river: the guns were flickering again, and as he drew nearer he could hear their faint singing whine, and more dreadfully the acrid, terrible smell of burning plastics. He had never before pressed his bracework to its limits, much less beyond.

“Reliant,” the Navy officer was saying upon his back, “this is Captain Laurence; answer, if you please.” There was a low anxious note of worry deep in his voice. “Reliant, please respond,” and then he shook his head and dropped his arm, a grim expression on his face. “I do not think they could have managed to corrupt or block my connection to the ship. Not without having taken her. What grade is your planetary shield?”

“The very highest, of course,” Temeraire said. “It is up to primary-world standards; you cannot suppose our families would have consented to anything less.”

“And you are self-sufficient?” Laurence asked. “They cannot starve you out?”

“I suppose not,” Temeraire said dismally, although he by no means relished the idea of going back to a diet entirely from the vats. “But they will surely try and destroy those at once,” he added anxiously, “and our power supplies, and bring down the shield itself: everything is in the capital.” He pressed on for more speed, but Laurence reached forward and lay a hand upon his neck, restraining.

“Governor—I beg you listen to me: they will certainly have at least one gunship for aerial support. You cannot come in underneath their fire, or they will bring you down as soon as you are within range. Does your bracework have any stealth capabilities?”

“Whyever should it?” Temeraire said, beating on. “It is not as though I had ever needed to hide from anyone; oh! How dare they come here.” He was deeply infuriated, and he did not care in the least that the Bonapartists would try and shoot at him: he would not merely stand by and see their colony wrecked, and torn apart. Perhaps he might dodge their attacks—

“Then you must have more elevation,” Laurence said, “and as far as possible, keep to the cover of the trees until you can get a clear run at the gunship: if you can get us aboard, they cannot shoot us, not once we are among them.”

Despite his distorting wrath, Temeraire could not deny that this sounded like highly reasonable advice; he angled himself aloft and beat up and up, the air thinning to unpleasant degrees and making for cold and difficult flying: but he persevered, darting among the silvery thicket of branches, thin enough at this height that they yielded to him, bending if he caught against one, until he caught sight of the capital.

It did not really deserve the name of capital or even of city: they had only a tiny clustered handful of real buildings, all of them quite small—Temeraire could only just fit through the doors of the main warehouse, and not at all into the defense center; that was Perscitia’s domain. These buildings were ringed by the more skeletal frames of the sleeping-pavilions they had managed to erect—nearly all of which were presently wreathed in flames: their marvelous silken hangings, brought all the way from Earth, were smoking into ruin. Temeraire hissed in fury, trembling; it was not to be borne.

But Laurence had been quite right, there was indeed a gunship, a simple boatlike oval hovering, with half a dozen men and two smallish dragons aboard it. A boiling storm of black smoke below them illuminated in flashes as they continued to fire the guns.

“Seven o’clock from their center,” Laurence said. “They are only twenty meters from the tree cover: wait until the rear guns have fired next, and then make the attempt.”

Temeraire saw at once what he meant, and dropped himself spiraling through the thicker branches until they were on a level with the boat; another glittering cascade of fire went off, and this close Temeraire could see the cartridges themselves: long thin silver casings with their green running lights blinking like cold, cruel eyes as they plumed with yellow-gold smoke and darted down, looking for something to destroy. As soon as they had gone, he flung himself across, his bracework straining, and the entire boat shrieked like a living thing as he came down upon it.

The soldiers recoiled, shouting, bringing up their guns; but Temeraire roared at them in fury, wings and ruff spreading wide, and the two dragons quailed back, fumbling their weapons. He lashed his head forward on instinct and seized the larger by the throat, shook her violently; he felt the sharp taut strands of her bracework scraping against his teeth with a horrid sound, and she shrilled in pain. He threw her off the platform, sweeping several of the men away with her body; the rest of them leapt of their own accord, chutes opening up like blossoms as they plummeted away into the ruin they had created, and the other small dragon darted after them.

“Perscitia!” Temeraire cried over his comlink, “can you hear me at all?” He dug his talons into the edges of the madly rocking platform and looked over the side, but he could see nothing below of her, or any of the others who worked at the capital ordinarily: there were four of them, all of them smaller than this very platform; they had surely been taken by surprise, quite vulnerable.

The platform made low whining noises, and he could feel a grinding of steel beneath him, but it did not cease firing. “They will certainly have disrupted your networks,” Laurence said, sliding down from Temeraire’s side and darting to the platform’s controls. “One moment—”

He drew off the cover and was tearing cables out by the handful, with great abandon; at last the firing stopped, but a moment later the platform went listing even further over and then abruptly plummeted. Temeraire snatched Laurence up and flung himself off and free; the platform fell away end over end beneath them until it smashed with a roar of foam half into the river, upside down, and yellow flames erupted out of its belly in massive spurts.

Temeraire put Laurence back up onto his neck and circled warily around while the officer latched himself back onto the bracework. At first glance the capital looked dreadfully, plastic smeared in great blackened puddles over everything, any exposed electronic equipment a shattered sparking tangle of wire and shards of metal, but Temeraire was heartened after a moment to see that beneath the mess, the buildings they had so laboriously raised, built from the native trees and mortared with a concrete they had mixed from the riverbed sand, were quite undamaged.

The enemy soldiers were collecting themselves on the ground, regrouping; there were some twenty men altogether, and five dragons, none of them very substantial, and all were looking warily up in his direction. “We must withdraw to cover again,” Laurence said. “They are putting together a chain-gun there, and your bracework is unarmored; you cannot take a shot from that gun—”

“If you are quite certain they do not mean to surrender,” Temeraire said, “I will not let them finish it; even if they are so very small, I suppose they are larger, and better armed, than Perscitia and the others; I cannot consider that I am going against the natural order of morality to defend—”

“You are not!” Laurence interrupted. “But their small-arms fire will pierce you if you come close enough to bowl them over again: you can see they have taken up defensive positions.”

“I do not need to come very close,” Temeraire said, and wheeling away into a wide circle, gathered his breath, in steady gulps, swelling out his chest; he dived toward the strike force, and opening his jaws, let the shuddering thunder of the divine wind come bellowing out of him, the smaller trees ringing like struck bells as their branches trembled and clashed against one another. The men in the front ranks collapsed, blood dripping from their faces beneath their helmets; the dragons crying out fell to the ground. The gun emplacement fell, its nose crumpling against the ground, explosions of white dazzling electrical light bursting along its sides, cartridges detonating like tiny bombs; and as Temeraire swept over, he lashed out with his hind legs, smashing the rest to pieces.

“My God,” Laurence said, in something between astonishment and dismay; he had never heard of the like, an entire heavy-armor strike force brought low by one dragon. Temeraire was wheeling back up again, away from the wreckage; Laurence twisted around to look down at the smoking rubble and the soldiers sprawled raglike in the remnants of their gun post. Certainly Temeraire had possessed the advantage of surprise, but the sheer magnitude of destruction was extravagant.

“Now do you suppose they will surrender?” Temeraire said, circling back.

“If they remain capable of it,” Laurence said.

They landed again behind the emplacement, and Laurence secured the few surviving soldiers one after another: they were all of them in a bad way, ill and most of them visibly concussed, pupils wandering and eyes bloodshot, confused; he supposed there was some sort of brain damage there, and shuddered to see it. The dragons all huddled, flinching away from Temeraire, flattening themselves to the ground instinctively when he leaned toward them. Laurence began to think that perhaps the old breeders had not been entirely so absurd as he had always been taught to think them.

Temeraire nosed at the smoldering buildings anxiously, and abruptly a blue dragon—not half his size, though larger than any of the soldier beasts—thrust a head out and said, “Oh! Thank goodness you are here; have you cleared out those wretched soldiers, then?”

“I have, naturally,” Temeraire said, preening a little. “Laurence, this is Perscitia; I dare say she can tell us what has happened to your ship: he is that Navy officer,” he added, turning to Perscitia, “and he is not so dreadful as I supposed he would be: he knows a great deal about fighting—not, of course, that fighting is anything so very splendid, at all.”

“I should say not,” Perscitia said. “Only look at what they have done to all our instrumentation, and our equipment! I suppose everything is ruined that we did not have under cover; it is beyond bearing. As for his ship, if you mean the Navy vessel that was up there—”

“Was?” Laurence said sharply.

“Oh, it is still up there,” Perscitia said, “but they have surrendered: the Bonapartists brought a cruiser.”

That was ominous indeed. “If they have a cruiser, they will have more than one landing strike force,” Laurence said to Temeraire urgently. “Have you other installations critical to keeping up the shield?”

“There is the secondary generator, on the southwest continent,” Temeraire said, “but our six Longwings live directly by it, so I don’t suppose they will have had any luck, unless there are a great deal more of them than there were here.”

Perscitia was already orchestrating a small army of robot hands, which had trooped out of the building behind her, to resurrect the communications; very shortly a message had been received confirming that the strike force had been sent, and dispatched in what Laurence gathered was a somewhat gruesome manner. “But they would not listen,” one of the Longwings, named Lily, said, sounding quite bewildered that a fully equipped Bonapartist heavy armor strike force should have dared to persevere in the face of ground resistance, “and those guns were terrible—Temeraire, Excidium is badly hurt; we must have the full medical unit here straightaway—so once we realized how dangerous they were, we went aloft and spat on them from there; I am afraid it was quite indiscriminate, and they are all of them mostly dead. We ruined a great deal of our own gear, too, and we cannot touch anything or go into the encampment, but fortunately the housing was not harmed, so the shield is perfectly secure at present.”

“So there is no need for any more fighting, at present?” Temeraire said—sounding, Laurence thought, rather wistful.

“No,” Lily said, with a like tone of regret.

“Sir,” Laurence said, “I entirely appreciate the Navy’s interest in this matter, but having spoken with the governor, I cannot offer you the least hope of persuading the dragons to relinquish the planet; nor do I consider it even a desirable course of action. We should have to divert at least a first-rate to adequately defend the system from orbit.”

“And you in all seriousness expect me to believe that a handful of untrained, largely unequipped dragons, the better part of them from antiquated and oversized breeding lines, are going to be a sufficient ground defense instead?” Admiral Roland regarded him with marked skepticism.

“I might point out that they have already turned aside two incursions,” Laurence said, “although I grant you, we cannot rely on the Bonapartists not to find ways to address their advantages; but supplying their want of equipment and training will surely be the more efficient solution—not to mention,” he added, “that any alternative should certainly involve having to remove them by force ourselves.”

He went outside after his conversation—he suspected his suggestions had been better received for lack of any really palatable alternatives, than for his own qualities of persuasion—and found Temeraire loitering outside, in as innocent a manner as a dragon the size of a dreadnought could manage, which was not wholly successful. He looked at Laurence when he had come out and said, with an attempt at coolness, “So I suppose that now we have settled the Bonapartists, you mean to press us again to let you quarry the planet.”

“As it happens,” Laurence said, “to the contrary: Admiral Roland wishes me to inform you that the Navy will send you some proper armor: we hope that if we can make you a sufficient bar to possession, the Bonapartists will be induced to give up their attempts to seize the planet, and you may proceed with your development as you like.”

“Oh! That is very handsome of her,” Temeraire said, sitting back on his haunches. “That is quite more than I had looked for; we will be very glad for the armor. I suppose I do not need to bargain with you, then.”

“I beg your pardon?” Laurence said.

“Well,” Temeraire said, “I have persuaded—that is, we have all talked it over together, and we think if you will give us some better tools, that there is no reason we might not extract perhaps a ton of trinium every year: Perscitia is of the opinion it would be quite manageable, without doing anything untoward, or making a ruin of things. So, if you like—we will give you the trinium, and you will give us more armor, and perhaps some more silken hangings, and send us some more elephants: we hope you may find it a reasonable exchange.”

“Good Lord,” Laurence said, “I should say so; but—” He hesitated; of course for the Navy’s sake, he ought merely to take it, straightaway; a ton of trinium a year would represent nearly a quarter of the entire Commonwealth’s supply. “But I think I must tell you,” he said, reluctantly, “that such a quantity of trinium will certainly encourage the most hostile intentions on the part of the Bonapartists: they will be far less likely to leave you unmolested. You will require more armor and more weaponry as well—a secondary shield at the least, and you must prepare for regular incursions; not merely attempts at invasion but raids, to seize whatever trinium they might lay their hands on; you may also be sure that they will fund piracy against you as well. You will have to devote considerable effort to meeting their offensives, and to training as well.”

“Pirates? Are you sure?” Temeraire said, his ruff pricking up, before he hastily cleared his throat and said with a tolerable attempt at carelessness, “But that does not matter: we have agreed we think it very poor-spirited of us to refuse to mine the trinium, only because we were afraid, which we aren’t at all; and certainly we must be prepared for them to make attacks in the future, regardless. Even though, naturally, under most circumstances we would prefer by far to devote ourselves entirely to scholarly pursuits, one must be prepared to make sacrifices.”

“That is very handsome of you,” Laurence said, beginning to be amused. “Well, if you are quite certain, I can assure you that Admiral Roland will be delighted to accept, and I am confident there will be no difficulty in making you a fair exchange, nor in equipping you suitably.”

Temeraire rubbed a talon over his forehead, pleased, and then cleared his throat, a peculiar deep rumbling noise. “But I suppose you will be leaving again, straightaway,” he said. “Once your ship has been repaired.”

“That, I am afraid, will be some time,” Laurence said. “The Reliant’s systems have been thoroughly compromised: she will have to be hauled to dry dock and purged. I have been seconded to you as a military advisor for the moment, if you will have me; Admiral Roland thought I might be of some use to you.” He had known, as he sought the assignment, that it was unwise: having allowed himself to be grounded, as it were, he might well not receive another ship. But aside from a sense of duty—he had felt the need they had of such an advisor, even before Temeraire had outlined to him their intentions—he found he could not leave this world without reluctance; there was work to be done here, and in an honorable company.

Temeraire’s ruff flared momentarily. “Oh, yes,” he said, “—that is, I am very glad to hear it, Captain; your assistance has been very useful to the colony; do you suppose,” he added, abandoning his pretense at formality, “that we might take a survey together, of our settlements? I should like at once to take consideration of our defenses.”

“With all my heart,” said Laurence.