LAS Summer Breeze is a scout-type airship built in 1906. Weighing in at just over 120 tons fully loaded, she carries a crew of ten and is often used to communicate with and support frostland teams in the wilds. She is charged with high-pressure steam in the lift tanks in New London, fed directly from the generator, and then flies on that stored power, giving her a range of perhaps five hundred miles, round-trip. Less if they're not stingy with the propulsion. More if they don't carry cargo to drop to the frost below, and run their ballast down to the wire.

They're being sent up into an unnerving dark sky, with only faint glimmers in the distance. To fly over a vast glassy sea full of unfamiliar winds. It's unnerving. It almost makes her want to pray... But no, the delusions of 'God' are just that. Better to rely on skill and steam and steel, instead. They rise on a column of steam to 8,000 feet, then push forward on steam-driven propellers, the Summer Breeze already steadily losing height and pressure, giving it a strict time limit.

Liane is a Rigger's Mate, sharing the lowest rank aboard the craft. She scans the horizon with binoculars, wearing a heated sky-suit and standing in the dim red glow of the ship's night-lighting. Up front, another crewman wheels a searchlight in steady back-and-forth sweeps over the ocean, looking for something, anything, to note down.

That horizon is uncomfortably close, cramped, dictated not by distance but by darkness. The Gloam presses up against the edge of the searchlight like malevolent fog, chewing at the beam until it is ragged. The night-lighting barely extends beyond the airship's hull. The surface of the sea reflects the light back, refusing any hint to what lurks below.

What does pierce the darkness is the sharp-edged light cutting down from pinprick sources far above. Where it touches the sea, lucent golden streaks spread across the water for leagues. As she watches, some beams slowly twist and shift while others remain locked in place, pouring down warm Glare. 

In the distance, visible only as silhouettes in reflected Glare-light, islands large and small protrude above the water. With her binoculars, Liane can barely spot a tall-masted ship cutting through the waves under one of the larger streaks of light.

(They can at least still clearly see the orange flames of the Generator behind them, right? The shimmering electric lights on windows and streets of the City? The bright semaphore stacks of the logistics hubs? The Captain assigns one man to constantly keep a watch for home, and report the bearing towards the city every two minutes. Now is not the time to get lost.)

The crew are anxious as they observe this strange darkness, mixed with occasional strange light. It really does not seem natural. If there's fog down there, wouldn't the light reflect off it as a glaring haze, rather than being dimmed like this? Maybe the air down there is choked with black ash, and the sea with oil.

"Possible sighting," Liane reports into the speaking-tube after a few moments. "I see a sail-ship on the water, like in old books... At our two o'clock, on the streak of light pointing off to the left."

"...Confirmed," Captain Lesadi says after a few moments. "Liane, you've good eyes, go to the rangefinder and try to get a range. Walt, how's our pressure?"

"Eighty five percent!"

"I believe we can take a closer look. Helm, pitch elevators up half a degree and rudder right two, nice and gentle."

Liane hurries to the rangefinder station as the airship tilts into a slow turn. She only understands how it works in broad principles, something about optics and mirrors, but she does know how to use it. You stare through the goggles and use the little knobs and dials until the two separate pictures merge into one, and read the distance based off that. This tends to give a decent estimation of an object's range, more accurate the larger the distance between the two mirrors. This is a smallish one, only eight feet apart. Anything more would be too heavy.

How far away is the sailing ship?

The Generator's flames are indeed visible, orange fire shedding a warm glow through the infrastructure around it. The electric lights, however, are muted, fading more the further they are from the Generator. The iron and glass of the City are dull in comparison to their usual shine, as if fouled by coal smoke.

The sail-ship is near the edge of visibility, but there are no clouds or fog obscuring her view, nor wind shaking the airship, and its progress is steady and straight. When she finally gets the pictures to blurrily merge together, the dial is a little past the 40-mile mark. 

That is well beyond what a rangefinder this small can accurately estimate. All she can report is 'well above twenty miles!' The airship can cover that distance in a bit under an hour, though. As they travel they notice the unseasonable warmth- It's barely even below freezing at this height! The liquid sea sort of implied that, but actually feeling warm enough to take off some of the outer coat layers is bizarre.

They shine the spotlight down when they get closer, flashing a greeting in Consolidated Semaphore Code with metal flaps rapidly opened and closed over the spotlight, and take a closer look at the survivors below. Surely their running lights have been spotted already, anyway, the red dots outlining the shape of a spindly steel gondola dwarfed by white-painted steam tanks above.

LONDON AIR SHIP SUMMER BREEZE TO UNKNOWN SAIL SHIP

CAN YOU UNDERSTAND US?

(Altitude: Six thousand seven hundred feet, slowly but steadily falling as steam airships always do. Clock's ticking.)

When it enters the shard of Glare, the Summer Breeze experiences just that. The air is warm and moist here, and under that change, only the most perceptive crewmembers will notice a tiny pressure behind their eyes or in their chest that lets up as the light washes over them.

The ship below them has no running lights of its own, just a set of lanterns spaced around the railing, currently unlit. It's immediately obvious when the airship is noticed, as tiny figures boil into action on the deck of the ship and its course tacks sharply away.

The older hands definitely notice the sudden shift in weather. In the way mariners can almost feel the sea's moods, so have they learned the air. Any more effects will be missed for now. It's odd that the light is coming down in such a coherent beam...

Poor buggers must be scared, but they really need a bit more information. The Captain orders them to circle and observe through binoculars for twenty minutes. What do the sailors look like? Who's the captain? Is there any visible machinery or cargo? Any children? Weapons? And all the other tedious details that can be observed, down to number of portholes and the like.

They try flashing signals a couple more times. Same message. Try to angle for dropping a supply canister with a note? ...Captain decides against. They're not in distress, and being fled from is a little unnerving.

...Six thousand three hundred feet, 81% pressure. Nothing more to be learned here so if the sailors won't or can't respond to light signals, Summer Breeze will continue away from New London to begin mapping out where the falling shards of light fall down into the sea.

The ship is a somewhat battered looking cog made of an unpainted greyish wood. It seems to be heavily loaded and sits low in the water. The deck is clear except for a set of three metal cages, which are hard to see through at this distance, but whatever is inside of them either has or is wearing rust red fur. The crew have light brown skin, visible because they wear very few clothes beyond rope shorts. 

A minute after the ship first turned away, a small figure wearing a long black cloak comes out of the forecastle, escorted by someone with a light green vest and brown pants. They watch the airship for about fifteen minutes before the figure in black returns inside while the one in green stays on deck near the helm. As the Summer Breeze circles, the cog keeps tacking to try keep the distance open, though it is moving much slower than the airship. 

They strike out, then, ranging far in a line directly away from New London, in order to learn more about the new surroundings. 

Anything other than sea and darkness and light?

Well there are those islands. It looks like the cog was sailing away (northwest) from a chain of three islands located south-southwest of New London, about half again as far from the Summer Breeze as it has already traveled. They can also see the island the ship might be sailing for, a smaller one to their west. None of the closest islands are touched by the Glare, but barely visible far to the southeast rises a huge island that is.

The large island seems most important. There are going to be plenty more scout flights in the coming days. And everyone knows... Without the colonies... The City will likely starve. Any information that might change that, they need.

They can be economical with their remaining energy, even if the air is worryingly warm and thin. They will head directly for the large island.

The island is near the edge of their range - slightly under 170 miles in a direct line from London, though with the detour to investigate that ship the Summer Breeze has traveled closer to 200.

As they go, the light of the Generator wanes behind them until it is impossible to pick out through the darkness. The island ahead of them grows more visible, a massive cone rising from the sea. The tip of the cone is bathed in a steady wash of Glare. Smaller beams spiral out down the slopes in complex patterns and irregular intervals. 

When the man tracking the bearing of the Generator can no longer pick it out of the gloom with any confidence, they turn back. This blasted dark fog is really troublesome. Soot of some kind?

The only thing they see of the island is a vague shape glimmering in the distance, a plateau. Nothing more. Perhaps once they have maps of the waypoints. But for now, the comforting familiarity of New London calls. Back to the Generator, before the steam that holds then aloft is exhausted!