covert was already crowded into the office as well. To Laurence’s surprise, Rankin was at the front of the room, sitting by Lenton’s desk. By wordless agreement, they had managed to avoid speaking to one another since Rankin’s transfer from Loch Laggan, and Laurence had known nothing of his and Levitas’s activities. These had evidently been more dangerous than Laurence might have imagined: a bandage around Rankin’s thigh was visibly stained with blood, and his clothes also; his thin face was pale and set with pain.
Lenton waited only until the door had closed behind the last few stragglers to begin; he said grimly, “I dare say you already realize, gentlemen: we have been celebrating too soon. Captain Rankin has just returned from a flight over the coast; he was able to slip past their borders, and caught a look at what that damned Corsican has been working on. You may see for yourselves.”
He pushed across his desk a sheet of paper, smudged with dirt and bloodstains that did not obscure an elegantly drafted diagram in Rankin’s precise hand. Laurence frowned, trying to puzzle the thing out: it looked rather like a ship-of-the-line, but with no railings at all around her upper deck, and no masts shipped, with strange thick beams protruding from both sides fore and aft, and no gunports.
“What is it for?” Chenery said, turning it around. “I thought he already had boats?”
“Perhaps it will become clearer if I explain that he had dragons carrying them about over the ground,” Rankin said. Laurence understood at once: the beams were intended to give the dragons a place to hold; Napoleon meant to fly his troops over the Navy’s guns entirely, while so many of Britain’s aerial forces were occupied at the Mediterranean.
Lenton said, “We are not certain how many men he will have in each—”
“Sir, I beg your pardon; may I ask, how long are these vessels?” Laurence asked, interrupting. “And is this to scale?”
“To my eye, yes,” Rankin said. “The one which I saw in mid-air had two Reapers to a side, and room to spare; perhaps two hundred feet from front to back.”
“They will be three-deckers inside, then,” Laurence said grimly. “If they sling hammocks, he can fit as many as two thousand men apiece, for a short journey, if he means to carry no provisions.”
A murmur of alarm went around the room. Lenton said, “Less than two hours to cross each way, even if they launch from Cherbourg, and he has sixty dragons or more.”
“He could land fifty thousand men by midmorning, good God,” said one of the captains Laurence did not know, a man who had arrived only recently; the same calculation was running in all their heads. It was impossible not to look about the room and tally their own side: less than twenty men, a good quarter of whom were the scout and courier captains whose beasts could do very little in combat.
“But surely the things must be hopeless to manage in the air, and can the dragons carry such a weight?” Sutton asked, studying the design further.
“Likely he has built them from light wood; he only needs them to last a day, after all, and they need not be watertight,” Laurence said. “He needs only an easterly wind to carry him over; with that narrow framing they will offer very little resistance. But they will be vulnerable in the air, and surely Excidium and Mortiferus are already on their way back?”
“Four days away, at best, and Bonaparte must know that as well as do we,” Lenton said. “He has spent nearly his entire fleet and the Spanish as well to buy himself freedom from their presence; he is not going to waste the chance.” The obvious truth of this was felt at once; a grim and expectant silence fell upon the room. Lenton looked down at his desk, then stood up, uncharacteristically slow; Laurence for the first time noticed that his hair was grey and thin.
“Gentlemen,” Lenton said formally, “the wind is in the north today, so we may have a little grace if he chooses to wait for a better wind. All of our scouts will be flying in shifts just off Cherbourg; we will have an hour’s warning at least. I do not need to tell you we will be hopelessly outnumbered; we can only do our best, and delay if we cannot prevent.”
No one spoke, and after a moment he said, “We will need every heavy- and middleweight beast on