Chapter 3: Skipper's Log

…

Link stood at the helm, eyes glazed over as he thought. The full effect of being promoted hit him shortly after entering the Sky Line and stabilizing his formation behind the Moon's Shadow. He had spent only a year and a half as Captain Alfonzo's understudy, giving orders to airmen who often looked more inclined to tie him up and toss his scrawny hide overboard. Some have even told him so. And some had even gone as far as to try loading him into a cannon while he was asleep. As far as he knew, he had not developed the steel spine that his captain had to deal with such men. Other than Line, Link did not have many friends among the Grand Sails' crew. He wondered what kind of people the captain would provide for his crew. If he would provide a crew, Link corrected himself. For all he knew, he would be working strictly with Line for a long time.

Link knew how Skyriders found their airmen. Sailors signed up to work with one of the three airship companies that traveled about the world at any of the convenient ports where their airships docked.

He also knew that he had been more or less born an airman.

Not much really remained of Link's past anymore. For most of his life, all he knew were airships and the Skyriders. Everything before then was a vague recollection that he had every now and then. A strange face here, a building he had never seen before there… None of them made sense anymore, so he never bothered asking anyone.

A loud clap startled him out of his thoughts, and he looked over his shoulder at Line. "Link, are you okay?" Line asked. "I've been trying to get your attention for a few minutes."

Link shook his head. "Sorry," he answered. "I was just a little lost in thought."

"Don't get too lost," Line told him, "or else we might bounce of another ship."

Link, turning his head back, sighed and looked up at the aft-mast in front of him. The boom above his head gave a few shakes in response to the helm movements as he tried to keep the ship inside the Sky Line behind the Moon's Shadow. With the gaffs of the main sail and the aft sail set just slightly to port and starboard respectively, Link was able to keep a mostly steady course in this intense wind.

Mostly, he realized after he leaned to one side to look at the main mast, because the markings at the top of the sails above the throat halyard holders showed the aft gaff had been set off-center by a slightly larger degree than the main gaff.

"Line, how come you set the aft gaff off more than the main gaff?" he asked. "It's giving us a slight list."

"A trick one of the other airmen showed me," Line replied. "You offset one gaff in case we need to get out of the Sky Line as fast as possible."

Link frowned and glanced to both port and starboard. "The closest edge of the Sky Line is on our port side," he pointed out.

"Yeah, I know," Line nodded.

Link looked over his shoulder at his friend. "But with this setup, you've given us a stronger turn to starboard."

Line tilted his head in confusion. "I did?"

"More wind is getting into the aft sail. It's offset to port, which means that the ship will turn starboard at rest. If we want to get out of the Sky Line as fast as possible, it's the starboard-set sail we need at a larger angle."

"Oh," Line uttered, scratching his head. "Damn, I didn't even notice. Want me to correct it?"

Link shook his head and looked back out to the Moon's Shadow in front of him. "No. That would require us to get out of the Sky Line and then have to catch up to the convoy as soon as we got back in. I can live with the list, but don't offset the sails like that anymore; it's not very efficient for travel like this."

"Aye, sir," Line replied.

Link glanced back at him to find his friend wearing an irate expression. He felt bad and started to say, "No, look, Line, it's just—"

Line held up a hand to stop him. "No, no, Link," he interrupted. "A skipper doesn't explain his orders. The crew has to trust a skipper's orders won't lead them to disaster. If you don't want me to offset the sails like that, then I won't."

But the tone with which Line had delivered the last statement still had a defiant ring to it. "I'm just trying to—" Link started again.

"Link," Line interrupted with a harsher tone. "I'll live with it."

Link pulled back one corner of his mouth and turned to look out across the weather deck again. "Right." Feeling a little uncomfortable knowing that Line was staring at his back, he added over his shoulder, "Why don't you take lookout? There's a port coming up soon, and one of the ships ahead of us might be descending."

"Aye, sir," Line replied with an exhausted tone. Link glanced to the side to watch his friend descend from the bridge and cross the weather deck bound for the ship's bow.

A few minutes later, after Line had disappeared onto the forecastle, the airman came back onto the weather deck and signaled Link with a level hand pointed to port, two fist pumps, and a finger pointing down at the deck. Link responded by giving his head a single pat, acknowledging that the Moon's Shadow was about to descend. He reached over to the altitude controls and gave the Island Sonata a little more lift so that the descending Moon's Shadow would not drive her sails into their hull when the descent slowed her. Line crossed to the port bulwark and leaned on it to look over the edge. Ahead of them, Link watched the black ship's sails descend until the bow obstructed his view. After a few moments of hoping that he did just as was expected of him, Line stood up straight and traced a circle in the air with his whole arm. The skipper answered with a finger pointed forward, telling Line to put up the second jib.

The Island Sonata pulled forward in the convoy until Link had a view of both the next ship in the convoy (the name of which escaped him; it was a brig which he had only noticed a couple of times in the convoy) and the Grand Sails' port-aft quarter. When Line came into view again with his fists put together to show that they were back in formation, Link jerked his thumb over his shoulder to tell him to take the jib down again. That was one of the benefits of jibs, being able to adjust a ship's speed inside a fierce wind without having reset the primary sails.

Line reappeared again after a few minutes and half-jogged back to the bridge. As he reached the top of the steps, he said to Link, "We'll be descending next with the Grand Sails, but it won't be for another half-hour. Why don't I take the helm so you can rest?"

"Do you think I'll need it?" Link asked as he read the signal flags trailing the Grand Sails' aft-most mast.

Line reached forward and tugged the strap of Link's bag. "I think you'll need to relax. We've been sailing for nearly an hour, and that bag must be getting uncomfortable. Besides, you've been wearing those clothes for the past two days. Go change into a set of fresh ones and get something to eat. Maybe read a few pages while you're at it."

"Will you be okay for a bit?"

Line bumped his shoulder against Link's as if to push him out of the spot. "We're just cruising right now, Link. Besides, if anything changes, I have a good view of the captain's ship from here."

Link mulled it over for a bit before removing a hand from the wheel and stepping aside. "Then man the helm, Line," he said. "I'll be just in my cabin."

"Got it," Line answered as he took the helm, tapping on a call tube labeled "Skipper" in a less-than-professional etch.

Link nodded and descended from the bridge onto the weather deck below. For a moment, he scanned the clouds off to port, watching as they lofted by despite the Island Sonata's incredible speed. A few patches of cumulus clouds hovered about, but other than the regular haze beneath the Sky Line and the Sky Line itself, there did not appear to be much in the air. He turned and went through the door under the stairs into the aftcastle.

On the other side of the door, waiting for him, was a particularly comfortable-looking room. He had seen quite a bit of time in both his office quarters and the barracks of the Grand Sails, so it was interesting to walk into a skipper's cabin with the knowledge that it now belonged to him. The whole room took up the portside of the aftcastle just under the bridge, so it was a decent size. A table anchored to the starboard bulkhead on his left held a number of tools used for navigating the Sky Lines and the air in general, which included the map which was attached to the table itself. The tools had been spilled onto the table from the small basket sitting tipped over on top of the map, likely a result of his ungraceful entrance into the Sky Line earlier. Along that same wall were the calling tubes used to shout messages across the ship, each one labeled with a hastily-scribbled scrap of paper. Where the bulkhead met the interior surface of the hull was a small wine cabinet, bare for now and probably for a while until Link would decide to keep some form of spirits onboard. Frosted windows decorated the aft wall all the way around the port side until meeting the corner. A work desk, of a larger size and more magnificent design than the one Link regularly used in the office, took up the space in the corner across from the door, its surface decorated with pens (including an old-fashioned quill used for traditional documentation), a writing pad, three inkwells (which would be of different colors), and a series of stamps which bore the ship's emblem (all to be used for different occasions). Despite being an older vessel, someone had gone to the trouble of replacing the decking in here (which would not have been as weather-worn as the ship's exterior) and furnished the center of the room with a fine, woven rug depicting a floating island with a castle doubling its overall height.

Glancing around the short partition next to the door, Link found a hammock hanging from the wall and threw his bag onto it. He took out a clean set of trousers and a lime-green, full-body undersuit and changed into them, discarding the clothes under the hammock. Line had been right; the new clothes made him relax as he walked across the room in his stocking feet and settled into the velvet-covered chair behind the desk. He felt himself ready to drift asleep just like that in a matter of seconds.

In spite of the temptation, he avoided it and started searching through the desk. In two drawers, he found extra pieces of navigating equipment which looked like they had never been used. In another, a couple bundles of parchment.

But in the bottom drawer, he found a book. More specifically, he realized as he pulled the large tome out of the drawer, the skipper's log book, made obvious by the pan-flute-and-island emblem on the cover. He slouched in the chair, feet on the top of the desk, and opened the log book in his lap. And he quickly discovered how horrible the previous skipper's handwriting had been. The same messy scrawl that labeled the calling tubes across from him covered half of the pages he skimmed through. The other half of the book would have almost looked like another man's handwriting if not for the signature at the bottom of each page revealing otherwise. He flipped to the front cover page and found that the same man had appeared to command the Island Sonata ever since it had been put together, as the entry in the book not only bore his signature but contained the skipper's declaration of command, as far as Link could decipher.

He decided that he ought to put his own declaration of command in the log book as well, since he was technically the new skipper. Setting his feet back on the floor, he put the log book on the desktop and sat up in the chair. Then he realized that he had to stand in order to reach across the large desk to pick up a pen and dip it into the black inkwell. And it already annoyed him that he had to do so while standing since both the inkwells and the pen holder had been welded to metal plates which, in turn, had been nailed to the desktop. Turning to a blank page at about the middle of the book, he wrote the date on the top line and declared in an almost childish scrawl:

"I, Lieutenant Link, do hereby declare this ship, the Island Sonata, to be under my command as skipper on the above date as a fleet vessel of the Skyrider Company."

When he finished, he gave the pen an annoyed look when he realized that he should have used the quill to write in the log book. He switched to the quill and turned the page after he was sure the ink was dry. Then he dipped the pen and began writing out his first log in the style Captain Alfonzo had shown.

"Set out from Skyrider Port after repairs and refit were completed with only one airman aboard, destination Castle Island, purpose recognition ceremony."

He considered his log entry for a moment. Feeling that it lacked the personality Captain Alfonzo encouraged Link to write with, he continued.

"This has been a rather worrisome day for me. Not only was I promoted to lieutenant when I didn't realize that promotion was possible, but I've been given command of the Island Sonata against all expectations. Just an hour into my command, and I feel that I've already experienced conflict with Line, my only crewman. I consider Line to be one of my best friends, and I shudder to think of what kind of problems I may have with even a small crew. I can't help feeling that this is some kind of mistake, but I don't want to tell anyone else right now. Maybe if…"

Link stopped to think. Maybe if what? The first thought on his mind was to just screw up and get demoted back to an airman. But what kind of reflection would that be on Captain Alfonzo? On the company? He shook the thought out of his head and continued.

"… I just run with it for now, something interesting might happen."

He had just finished putting down his signature when the calling tubes across from him shouted in Line's voice, "Land ho, Link! We're nearly there!"