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.