It’s the dark of night.
A fair wind blows through the roundish porthole of the stateroom. Salt laden air is omnipresent, coming from the ocean below as the Airship “Destiny of Chance,” on which I’m on board, cruises north towards the Border.
I button my leather flight jacket. I’m due up for the midnight watch.
As I turn to leave, I hear from the bed behind me Fiona’s snores, which are seemingly accentuated with a certain sonorous somnolent gusto that, for those crew members adjacent to this stateroom, acts almost as a timekeeping device, a nocturnal ship’s bell as it were.
I prefer to think Fiona’s snores are akin to the Call of a Valkyrie.
If only she were.
In the dark of the alabaster moonlight that invades the room, I make the lean lines of her nude back as she lays. The bed’s duvet lazily spills over her. Her corset and leather breeches are folded neatly on the wooden bench next to the bed, her goggles clean and polished, her sheathed sabre slung on the headboard’s post and ready for action; all this due to what will one day be known as O.C.D. when the D.S.M.-5 is invented and junk. But for now and is this alternate universe, suffice to say she’s described as a “just so” kinda woman.
Not that I complain. She is Captain.
“Keep us on course,” she says with a voice full of sleep. “Or it’ll be your balls in a sling.”
I nod and depart her stateroom.
I swagger up the ladder
A clear night welcomes me as I step onto the flight deck. I turn my jacket collars up. By the brilliant light of the rising moon to starboard, I make out the grubby darkness that is the run of coast that the “Destiny of Chance” is, roughly, running parallel to (or is it with?).
“Keep us on course,” says the watch.
I give her a curt smile and relieve her. Moments later, I am alone in the naked moonlight on the airship’s elevated flight deck, wheel firmly in the grip of my right hand.
The hint of wood smoke drifts in the with wind, most likely from the home fires of Bay Town a ways up the coast from the airship’s present location. I adjust my hip belt. I only bothered to pick up my espanda ropera and a pistol. And a whiskey flask, which I extract, flip the cap open, and press to my lips.
For the chill, as it were.
The liquid warmth flows through me now. Below on the port side, the moon shadow of the “Destiny of Chance” flitters across the surface of the black Ocean Deep.
A man could get lost down there. In the Deep. Much like I’m lost now, adrift in the dark of night with nary a piece of gold to my name, or a mission in my life.
Until “Destiny of Chance” and Fiona found me.
So that’s my story. Just a vagabond or even scoundrel stumbling through this world, nearer the next one, if I may be so bold.
And as I ruminate on and on and on, I run my eyes over the ship’s compass.
And surmise that we are, at this moment, off course.
mattlaneydotcom 