Just another day
Anika threw her jacket down on the now empty passenger seat at the back of the cabin before jumping down to the hangar deck. Her normally sunny smile was very firmly replaced with a scowl and she nodded grimly at the young deck hand who appeared and started to refuel the ship. His smirk quickly dissolved into a blank stare as Anika walked away stiffly, not even a snarky quip forthcoming. Normally they would shoot the breeze for a good few minutes, the flirting always fun and making a highlight of his day. But today it was like a small dark cloud had gathered over the young female pilot's head and as the young man hadn't seen a real cloud or any weather really for over three years it was a pretty strange atmosphere.
She didn't stop, her steady stride taking her swiftly up to Bethany's suite only to find her sister not there.
"Frak! Where in frakin' Hades are you?" she muttered, stamping her foot now she was alone and not able to be seen. She stormed across the small living area, then back again, repeating it a number of times as she let her anger boil over in the privacy of her sister's quarters. She needed to get it out, knowing she'd end up saying something she'd regret and there being no really big reason for it but unable to stop the feeling anyway. The whole day had been a disaster.
When she'd been to visit one of the families who had been carefully breeding some more of the silkworms she'd been greeted with a set of sad faces and a distraught child. The pupae had hatched, the most difficult part of the cycle and where the most losses occurred. Each moth was carrying on with the cycle, producing more eggs and more silkworms after itself having created a precious cocoon.
The child, a young boy of six, had forgotten. His excitement at going to his friend's birthday had him in a spin and he had left the door to the cupboard open, the moths escaping and being sucked into the ventilation system.
But this hadn't been the main problem, it was just the icing on a particularly bad cake.
The first stop had been on a freighter where a deckhand didn't know the meaning of 'no', and got pissy. When she came back to her plane she saw him at the back of it, and when she went to check the cargo pod there found it had been opened, and two packages were missing, and the light was gone. Parts were hard enough to come by as it was, but lighttubes were almost like a phoenix tooth, as they were impossible to fabricate. If it hadn't worked she'd just thought it had failed, but the tube was actually gone. Slamming the pod shut she'd looked around but knew there was no way she could prove it was him.
Next was a freighter where she was held off for ages, wasting fuel and waiting for something to be cleared from the hangar. When she finally managed to get on board she noticed the sullen faces of the deck hands and got the feeling there was something going on there - she just didn't know what. A few discreet questions and she knew her gut feeling was right. There'd been something in the dock the captain didn't want known around the fleet so had held the clearance up while it was being cleared away. It was obviously worth more than they cared for anyone to say anything more.
Hurrying through the next few stops she was heading for the Brownlee when she was told she was late by the controller, making her even crankier about the delay earlier. The delivery for the Brownlee was for an officer who wanted to surprise his girlfriend, but didn't put any thought into it until the last minute and expected Anika and Bethany to come up with the goods in an instant. "We're only frakin' human!" she had muttered when he'd sauntered away with the parcel in his hand and a wave that he would send them the payment. Eyes drilled holes in his back and for a moment she wished she had a gun, but managed to bite back a retort and stormed back to her plane.
Another stop and she'd been unable to pick up the newly made lace she was to deliver to the seamstresses as the woman tatting it had some sort of virus and was in quarantine so it wouldn't spread around the fleet. Disease control was a serious issue and after checking on the woman's kids she climbed aboard her plane and headed to drop off the fresh leaves for the last stop, having to go to it despite not having the lace to drop off.
A few more well directed kicks and she tensed up and silently screamed, eyes squeezed tightly shut and fingers curled into fists. When she'd finished she let her shoulders slump a little, then dropped into a chair, leg slung over the arm and head falling back on the cushion behind it. She stared up at the ceiling and shook her head slowly from side to side. She knew what was wrong and why...