In Favour with Their Stars
- Автор: Новик Наоми
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «In Favour with Their Stars». Краткое содержание книги:
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.