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.”