(Image taken from thegraphicsfairy.com)
 
 
A little steampunk for your day.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Gideon Lynch brought his zeppelin in to the mooring station indicated by the flagman’s spastic posturing on the walkway below him. Magdalene, as a former Union Air Force corvette, was small, perfect for fast take-offs and sudden stops and easy to fit into tight spaces. All of which the flagman must have cottoned onto, because he was sending Gideon toward the tiniest slip he’d ever seen outside of a smuggler’s hideout. It was going to be a squeeze, even for Maggie.

“Run out the grapples, Cap’n?”

“Pete, there’s only the two of us.”

“Still makes you the Captain.”

Gideon laughed. “All right, First Mate Bower, run out the grapples. Asa’ll be waiting for us.” He hadn’t seen his brother in near six months, not since the day he’d come home from a shipping run and found the family in an uproar over Asa’s illicit association with the physician’s assistant.

His attempts to defend Asa hadn’t helped set matters aright and, in the end, Asa’d high-tailed it west. To make his fortune in the gold fields, he said, though Gideon thought it was more likely he wanted to avoid the constant lectures and attempts at supervising his every move. Finding himself now in the spotlight of the family’s ire, Gideon’d followed his brother’s lead. He’d taken Maggie and moved south, drifting gradually around the country like an airship without a rudder, until a telegraph from Asa sent him to San Francisco at Maggie’s best pace.

This will be a fun story to write, once I clear a few other things off the decks. Furface is staggering along–so typical of this point in the story, when creativity has to take a back seat to logic and accuracy. And there are a couple of Christmas stories hanging around, jingling in my ears.