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.