Minta smiled up at the airship with a beatific air. The light rushing through the tall windows of the tower gleamed off the particolored bag of gas that held the ship aloft, and cast strange colors on Minta’s pale blonde hair. “Flying will be lovely,” she murmured, either to herself or to Gerald.

Gerald grinned, “And there’s far more room than in the submarine.” He frowned across the vehicle silo at that maligned creation.

“I liked the submarine, too,” Minta said cautiously, looking around for Bessa.

As if worrying that she might be there made it so, Bessa came sliding down the nearest mooring rope with a mad smile. “So, my crew! Are we to stand about all day or are we to go somewhere? What is our assignment? Where shall we sail the Grand Magnifico?”

Minta pulled a metal tube from her crewsuit, and handed it to Bessa with a respectful bow.

“Orders!” Bessa said with a tone of not unmixed delight, and dubiously extracted a piece of paper from the tube. “For my eyes only,” she noted with a glare at the craning Gerald. “Ah,” she said with evident satisfaction, “we are to sail the Grand Magnifico to a far land of ice and pillars, where only frosty air surrounds the earth, and water is a rare commodity.” She squinted at the paper and added forcefully, “a rare, WET commodity. I’m sure it meant to say that.”

“Just in case,” squeaked Minta, “I have provisioned the Grand Magnifico with water of our own dimension.”

“Excellent thinking, Seaman Jones,” Bessa clapped her on the shoulder, “perhaps you WILL make officer someday.”

“Thank you, ma’am—I mean, sir, Captain, sir. May I ask what our task is to be in this faraway land, sir?”

“No!” barked the Captain. “Loose lips crash ships! Aboard, gentlemen!” With a haul on the mooring rope and a few vaulting leaps, she sprang aboard and let down a ladder for her crew. “Helmsman Spiggot! To the wheel! Seaman Jones, cut the mooring lines!” And as Spiggot hauled the wheel over and Jones scurried to and fro, loosing the bags of weight that tethered them, Captain Seford lassoed a great lever on the side of the silo, and pulling it, opened the great shining roof onto a kaleidoscoping sky. “Brace for entry!” Helmsman Spiggot stood straight and firm at the wheel, Seaman Jones wove an arm into the rigging, and Captain Seford gripped the railing on the prow as they rose into the confounding void.

plink The Grand Magnifico was sailing through a silver sky, glinting with ice particles that floated on the air and grated softly against the brazen hull. In the distance, a delicate metropolis rose in glassy spires from a slender pinnacle of stone. Several such islands presented themselves to the eye, their bases foundered in the icy fog.

“It’s lovely!” whispered Minta, and her breath crystallized before her.

“It’s quiet,” Gerald noted, listening to the soft shhhing sound of the crystals against the hull.

“It’s too quiet,” Bessa insisted, peering narrowly into the distance.

A great reverberating boom broke the crystal hush, and a sooty black cannon-ball smashed into one of the crystal spires of the island city. Minta cried out, and Bessa’s eyes glinted. “Pirates!” she screamed, “the very pirates we were sent here to destroy!”

Even as Minta drooped under the sight of the beautiful turret crashing down in ruin, she heard this effusion. “Pirates?” she said.

“Pirates!” yelled the Captain, “Spiggot! Back-calculate the trajectory of that cannon-ball and put us on intercept! Jones! Man the flame-jet!”

“There weren’t any pirates in the orders,” pursued Minta, showing no signs of manning any flame-jets whatsoever.

“How do you know?” said the Captain with a dangerous gleam in her green eyes, “Have you been reading confidential documents?”

“It wasn’t a confidential document,” murmured Minta. “If it said pirates, let’s see it.”

Bessa sniffed, “I ate the orders, standard practice. Now unless you want to see how many cannon-balls it takes to get to the middle of a spun-glass city, I suggest you prepare the flame-jet for maximum speed!”

With a sullen sigh, Seaman Jones mounted the rigging and waited below a complex tubing affair at the base of the balloon. “Flame-jet ready and primed,” she reported wistfully.

“Excellent.” Captain Seford peered up at Minta. “You did provision the ship with weapons, Jones?”

“Of course. There are cutlasses below, and cannon on every side.”

“Excellent! Burn the flame-jets! Three taps on my mark! Mark!”

The Grand Magnifico shot forward with all possible speed, the slender islands and the shocked faces of the pale people who lived there devolving into an icy blur. The ice crystals beat at the sailors’ faces, but ahead, a dark shape resolved itself into the menacing form of a black ship with a long cruel bowsprit. The Grand Magnifico scudded to a stop in the empty sky, and turned her port battery to the darksome sloop. Captain Seford strode to the rails and saw, across the intervening yards and interfering mist, a lean dark form with a greasy sword and a gleaming mustache gesturing defiance to the champions of good.

“Jones! Man the guns!”

“Captain! Permission to speak!” squeaked Jones.

“No, you fool! You can speak after the battle! Man the guns!”

“But, sir!”

“No, seaman! None of your lip or suggesting! Roll out those cannon or we’ll all perish!”

Minta scurried to prepare the brass cannons with every evidence of misery, as Captain Seford returned her gaze to the dark stranger. “Spiggot, spyglass!”

The spyglass duly handed, she studied the handsome features of the pirate captain. “A worthy adversary, Spiggot. A foeman worthy of my steel and shot. I can see him clearly now…”

Spiggot cleared his throat, “That’s because he’s headed right for us, cap’n.”

She dropped the spyglass to her side. “Indeed he is! He means to board us!” She drew a cutlass from her belt. “Excellent!”

“Please please, Captain, permission to speak?”

“Drivel, Jones!” said Captain Seford, wrapping herself around a loose rope and preparing to swing across to the dark nemesis. “They’re closing for hand-to-hand!” She leapt up to the rail.

“NO, sir!” cried Minta at last, breaking the bounds of propriety, “They are ramming our sailbag!”

Captain Bessa looked up in horror as the dark bowsprit tore through the cheerful sac of the Grand Magnifico, and caught too late at the rail as the ship lurched forward and down. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” she called, as she lost her footing and plunged backwards into the frigid abyss. “Jooooooooooones!”

“What were the orders?” Gerald whispered to Minta as they gripped the steering bar of the life-glider.

“To search out a rare and wonderful crystalline bird and bring its egg back for study,” Minta whispered back.

Gerald smiled, “Sounds exciting.” He stared down the rope hanging from the glider, at the Captain, roped around the ankles and staring down in an attitude of frozen terror. “Think she’ll be okay through the vortex that way?”

Minta nodded gravely, “Oh, yes. I do fear she’ll never look at heights the same way again, though.”