"One of the deck hands," the captain grated as he turned to regard his first mate.  "One of the [i]deck hands[/i]," he repeated, "has noticed?  No fucking shit Alex!  You tell him we're riding high in the chop because [i]we don't want to be seen[/i] until we locate our target!" he thundered, before turning to his sailing master.  "Maintain present speed until we sight the vessel.  Then, I want you to spool up the engines and drop in the chop until the engine's running cool.  Then, circle it [i]wide[/i], girl, until we're behind it and half a league back, yah?  After that," he continued, though he loathed giving out too many orders at once, since situations change almost as soon as the orders are out of your mouth.  "I want you to raise us up so that we're in the that sonofabitch's sunspot," he said, referring to being directly in between the sun and the target vessel so as to be hidden during their approach.  With the afternoon sun somewhat low in the western sky, and them being half-a-league behind the target, Grady fudged the numbers and guessed they'd need to raise between 200-300ft above the chop.  He trusted Elara to run the geometry of it beforehand - hell, she could probably do it in her head.

As they accelerated toward the target she'd keep lowering the [i]Aleph Null[/i], the goal being to be hidden for as long as possible before coming alongside and grappling with the ship.  Normally he wouldn't have been this worried about detection - once the vessel was spotted they could easily just race toward it and engage - except the doctor's informant had been clear that the target would sooner see the package destroyed than lost.  Every second they could shave off of their detection before boarding, and every second the boarding party was able to buy Goldenwood's crew, would maybe be the deciding factor between pulling off this mission successfully or going home empty-handed.  If that meant shunting the engine and running hot... well that's what he paid Kisaki to handle.

"I spoke to Balder," Grady said, turning away from the helm and heading toward his first mate, "His crew should be all ready soon.  We need to be careful how we handle our end of the engagement.  We need those bastards to think they're winning so they don't attempt to junk the prize, and that means keeping our party as small as possible.  But we gotta keep them pressed so they don't break anyone away to secure the cargo.  Once we engage I want us to slowly turtle up and get surrounded.  Just be ready to punch a way through when Goldenwood and his boys return.  Thoughts?"

As he spoke Grady had slowly made his way to the back hatch of the navigation room, which he swung open now before stepping out onto the balcony.  Thin wisps of their reduced steam plume drifted to meet them but quickly dissipated in the wind.  He could hear the steady drone of the sky engine, maintaining the stannum fields that manipulated the wind into keeping them aflight.  The ship had five rectangular metal panels recessed slightly into the hull at the fore, aft, port, and starboard of the ship as well as directly beneath the keel, all of which maintain the stannum fields the sky engine generates and the navigator manipulates to change course.

With both hands on the rail Grady stood with his back leg cocked straight and his front leg slightly bent as he leaned his weight forward onto the rail and idly spat over the side as he listened to any of his first mate's thoughts.  Then he turned back around as he fished a fat half-smoked cigar from his front pocket and went about relighting it.

"You want to lead the boarding party?" he asked idly as he puffed the cigar back into life.  Heavily unctuous, oily flavors reached his senses - originally the cigar'd had some subtle spice and vanilla notes but apparently the last few days spent in his front pocket half smoked had leeched out its complexity and character, leaving just a cloying bitterness.  There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, or so he wondered.  "I'm still going, of course, but it's about time you started taking over leading these boys.  Just don't fucking coddle them - you'll get more men killed trying to protect them than by pushing them forward.  Learned that in the trenches."

After a few more joyless moments puffing at the cigar he finally crushed it out against the railing and returned it to his front pocket.  Maybe it would get better again.