Pixie Hazard by Archibald Bradford (top young adult novels .txt) 📕

“That’s Spanish for-”

“I get the picture.” Donnie cut off the bleary eyed pilot; “Seriously, this sector has been way too eventful for us. You two get any rack time?”

“Not yet, and a good thing too.” Eniella said around an enormous yawn.

“True enough.”

Davie echoed her girlfriend’s yawn, wiping away tears afterwards.

“Yeah their timing was perfect, I was about to hop over to relieve Maria when they showed up.”

Donnie nodded.

“Get it done. I can manage a jump here, provided you already did the hard math?”

The redhead unstrapped herself and stood with a groan, her back audibly popping as she stretched.

“Yeah, I’ve gone over the calculations four times so we’re ready. Unless you changed your mind about going back to Mung Station? In which case I’m going to need to borrow my boo’s potty mouth.”

“No, we need supplies and it’s the closest thing to a legit outpost. We can scope out our prospects there, maybe offload the transport if someone offers a good price. Nobody on Mung gives a crap about provenance. You just need to keep your sister from going after Demarco.”

Donnie activated the ship’s coms as her pilot climbed down the ladder out of the cockpit.

“Alright people, the excitement’s over. Davie’s going over to the transport for the jump. Let’s get the hell out of here before anyone else tries to mug us. Maria? You sleeping?”

The blonde’s voice came back immediately and she was not happy.

“Who the fuck would be sleeping?! Davie didn’t tell me how to shut the proximity alarm off! I thought I was about to get rammed or something!”

Eniella snerked and bit down on a stupid joke regarding Maria’s phrasing while Donnie shook her head slightly.

“Good to know you can keep your head in a crisis.” The captain responded drily.

“Oh you can all just eat me! I get paid to lay the hurt on people, not play at being a pilot!”

“Still not into blondes. Now go prep the airlock for Davie. The good folks with Juan Corps keep their sector well patrolled so once we make the jump we’ll have a few days in normal space to catch up on sleep before we make it to the station.”

Executing a jump anywhere near any sort of planetary body or active space station was rolling the dice with fate; the main limiter for space travel was how inexact a slipjump could be, so unless you had a reserved jump window you risked dropping out on top of anyone else unlucky enough to be meandering through the system at the same time.

The results of such rare collisions were never pretty and always fatal.

The standard practice for people who didn’t have access to the mega-corps’ private jump sites, or the funds to secure a jump window in controlled space, was to pick an empty spot a short distance outside of a given system and safely fly the rest of the way in normal space.

Sadly when dealing with light-years that usually meant a couple million kilometres, but at least at that distance the odds of a collision were miniscule enough for people not to dwell on the possibility.

Slipspace travel was many things, convenient it was not.

Less than an hour later they all felt the familiar hum of the slipdrive engaging, then that moment of ethereal breathlessness as the jump initiated before the drive compensated for the shift, causing their ears to pop as the interior of the ship was normalized.

Some people couldn’t handle the effects of slipspace travel, while others loved the rush of their composite molecules shifting in and out of normal space.

Donnie and most of her crew were indifferent, the mode of transport having long since become old hat. Bunny insisted that it made her horny, but as the others were quick to point out: so did light, oxygen, and non-stick frying pans.

Kitty loved her Teflon.

Quantum entanglement being a thing, slipspace was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And once faster-than-light travel and artificial wormholes were deemed technologically unfeasible, it became the only viable option for interstellar travel.

Though given the insane energy requirements needed for entry, slipspace travel was also thought to be impossible, but so too was flight once upon a time.

A common means of explaining the complicated process to children was to give them a dry apple seed and have them attempt to squish it; no matter how hard the little buggers try, nothing happened beyond their teacher looking smug.

However, if the seeds are given just a drop of lubrication and squeezed just right, they would shoot out of their grubby little fingers at incredible speeds.

The Pixie Hazard in slipspace was a lubricated apple seed.

The process began with a cascading antimatter reaction coating the hull to enable it to ‘slip’ out of normal space in a violently beautiful explosion of purple light.

At this point the ship is breaking all the rules by being somewhere that the laws of physics say it cannot be, and so the universe tries to correct this error by exerting tremendous pressure on every square inch of the hull to expel it back into normal space, only to be prevented from doing so by the ongoing antimatter reaction.

To actually get anywhere the slipdrive then has to adjust the density of the cloak of antimatter to control where the pressure of slipspace is most exerted, thus determining a direction of travel.

Since there is no light in slipspace, there is no limiter on lightspeed for vessels traveling through it, so the ship doesn’t stop accelerating until it arrives at its chosen destination.

The team of physicists and engineers that pioneered the process affectionately referred to it as ‘cheating’.

The journey ended by simply destabilizing the reaction so that the ship, or ships in the case of a tandem jump, fell out of slipspace with all the grace of a