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.