Julius Rosenthal will make candy no more and other short stories by Nicholas Russell (young adult books to read .txt) 📗

Captain says he lined up a run to Tesla. You know what they say about the girls on Tesla.” Conklin pulled away and stepped back through the door turning quickly as if he was avoiding an attack and headed back down the corridor. Halfway down he held the vid-panel high and called out “Thanks for keeping the ladies warm.”

Ram rolled her eyes and slid the door closed, locking it again. She returned to the main controls and entered the corrected coordinates for Estrim. With the adjusted course entered Ram had two options, the first of which wasn’t pleasant. She could do are rapid change, but she knew the stabilizers couldn’t handle that. If the stabilizers failed the crew would be tossed about, and the last thing Ram wanted at the beginning of her shift was twelve angry ship workers banging on the door. She programmed the course correction to run itself slowly over her full shift and turned from the console.

She pulled the mini-panel from one of the side pockets of her jump suit and flicked the power on. The unit was almost five years old and wasn’t running as fast as it used to. She waited for the manufacturer’s logo to fade and the user interface to appear. Ram put her finger to the screen and guided the system to the built in to-do list. The panel was designed to update itself with the ships nav system, and as a guilded pilot she needed to update her log. With a swirl of her finger she circled the logs and slid them to the side. She had a letter from her daughter that she had been telling herself she was too busy to read for almost a week now.

Ram had put Carrie into boarding school after her father died. It was a difficult decision but she didn’t have any other choice. Carrie’s father had been a military trained guild pilot. When he died his guild license had passed to Ram and with no other options for decent money she took it. She used the last of the insurance payout to put Carrie into a boarding school and had bartered the price of flight school for three years on a garbage hauler. Ram had finished that run seven years ago and she still couldn’t get a better run than the Gemmel.

The Gemmel had a total of three pilots and they worked in shifts four hours on and eight off. Ram had stopped thinking of time in days and had begun to think instead in shifts. And by that standard, including today she had two shifts left. Thinking about how much time she had left was just one more way for Ram to push back reading the message. She double tapped the icon and was prompted for a biometric login. She placed her thumb on the small scanner at the panels top and pressed down firmly. The panel screen dimmed and displayed a message as the scanner warmed. The panel’s age showed again as it scanned her fingerprint and compared it to the one on file.

The status bar inched across the screen taking almost a minute to verify Ram was the one trying to access the letter. Just as the bar cleared and the screen brightened again the door chimed for a second time. Ram closed her eyes and looked back to the door. She kept her eyes closed and debated blowing off whoever was there. They chimed four times before Ram opened her eyes and looked towards the door. The view screen showed two people standing outside the door, Conklin and a figure that could only be Higgins. Those two hadn’t gotten along well since the run had started; if they were standing outside the door then Ram was almost sure it was a problem.

She looked back to the mini-panel and sighed. She had been avoiding the letter because she knew what it was going to say. Carrie had been talking about enlisting since her father passed and now that she was only a month from graduation she could sign the paperwork. The door chimed again and she looked back to the door. Higgins was staring into the camera now. Ram tapped the button deactivating the mini-panel and started toward the door.

Ram was starting to think it was personal that all the problems on board seemed to happen on her shift. She knew the truth though, Higgins was one of the best ship-workers Ram had ever flown with. That was the problem too. He demanded all work be done right; being a stickler for protocol didn’t make him a lot of friends among the Gemmel’s crew. It also got him reassigned to the off shift, the same as the newest pilot. Ram tapped the button and waited the half second for the door too slide open. Ram was about to give Higgins trouble for bugging her when she noticed the look on both his and Conklin’s faces. “What’s going on?”

Without saying a word Higgins turned and started towards an elevator located at the end of the hall and Conklin slipped past her. He was most of the way to the control console before Ram started to speak, but he didn’t say a word he just pointed towards Higgins. Ram was starting to get nervous, it wasn’t often that you had a cut up like Conklin and someone as straight laced as Higgins grim faced.

She stepped through the door and took a few steps down the hall when she realized Higgins was holding the door open. Ram double timed it down the hall stepping into the elevator just as Higgins let the door slide shut. He hit the button for the main cargo hold and quietly stepped to the back of the