The airship swung listlessly in the heat of a Caribbean day from her moorings in one of the many disreputable or nearly derelict sky docks of Tortuga. The rising sun, lazily coming up over the horizon painted her long bulbous shape a tawny brown, the colour of brewing tea. The sky docks of Tortuga, called by locals Port Fadrique stood to the west of the regular nautical port of Tortuga, Port Breathern. Port Fadrique was a ramshackle mass of wood and iron gantries, cranes and derricks, ladders and elevators, shabby offices, bulging storage barns and sooty workshops mounted on platforms both on land and rising from the sea.
As lighter-then-air dirigibles, this particular airship was not much to look at, her hull plating being as patched, scuffed and faded as it's much patched and stitched canvas envelope. The whole airship had a woebegone, tatterdemalion air to her, having seen much hard and varied service under many different masters and owners. In point of fact it was arguable whether the airship or the air dock around her was in worse shape.
Kurt Ortleib, looked at the airship thoughtfully for several minutes from the hillside over looking Port Fadrique. Kurt Ortleib was many things, like the airship he was examining through his old spy glass. Derelict, outcast, mercenary, he'd been all those things in his life. He had been born in a quiet, sleepy, backwood village in the province of Prussian Saxony, in the Kingdom of Prussia, some forty three years before. He had gone to school in the village, been lucky enough to attend a technical college and learn a trade, before joining the Prussian Royal Army for his term of conscription. The artillery had been his arm of service and he had been judge competent enough by his superiors to rise to the rank of feldwebel during his seven years in the army. Kurt had joined the ranks of the Freikorps, the German mercenary fraternity, after he had finished his term, rather then try and find a new vocation in civilian life.
For some years it had not been a bad decision, although at other times Kurt had thought it had been amoung the worse decisions of his life. Kurt had drifted from Freikorps unit to unit, never staying for long, not because his peers disliked him or that they thought him a bad soldier, it was just he never seemed to be wholly comfortable with anyone or any group for long, being something of a loner at heart. Finally his drifting had left him, here in Tortuga. Perhaps that airship would be his next step, to somewhere else.
He packed the spy glass away in his haversack, and began to pick his ways down the hillside through the narrow and confusing streets of the shanty town that sprawled untidily over much of it. He glanced at the pamphlet he had found in his morning newspaper, as he walked. The advertisement said simple:
Wanted!
Airship captain, seeking a crew for privateering and mercenary service. Those with prior military, mercenary or similar experience required. Technical expertise with small arms, artillery, technical or engineering skills perfered. Please apply at Office No.553, Hallwood Dock, Port Fadrique.
Note: Feldwebel is the German Army equivalent rank of sergeant.
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