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

arrival at Mung Station. And while they were hard at work doing that, Bryan Everson was hard at work trying to get used to the crew and their various eccentricities.

They were a lot more... colourful, than anyone he had known previously.

Of everyone on the ship he was the most comfortable around Doctor Wu: having spent a couple days under her care in the infirmary it was impossible not to trust her. He found that she was a reserved person in general, but would start to mother him a bit after a while if she deemed he wasn’t taking care of himself somehow.

Having being given a clean bill of health by the doctor he’d been required to have a fairly direct conversation with the ship’s captain.

Despite her and her crew saving his life he was sweating under the collar of his borrowed coveralls when she questioned him: never once did her direct gaze leave his face as she measured his responses.

It didn’t help that she mostly wanted to know about the Junkers, who he desperately wanted to forget.

After a time she mercifully sent him on his way with a promise of safe passage. Since then she had been polite with him, if distant, treating him as she would a paying passenger.

He didn’t see much of the mechanic Kyle, he wasn’t allowed into the reactor room, cargo-hold or armoury which was where he did most of his work.

Though there was one awkward incident when he was coming down the passageway from the bathroom, or the ‘head’ as the marines all called it, and rounded the corner to find the other man drilling into Bunny from behind as she leaned against the wall yowling in ecstasy.

The bearded man didn’t even break stride when he caught sight of their guest, just grinned wolfishly and began to fuck her harder as the mortified Bryan fled past them to reach his borrowed quarters.

Once he was out of the infirmary they had set him up in one of the guest bunks just off the hall adjacent to the common room so it was impossible to avoid the mating pair.

As for the cat-girl, setting aside the occasional bout of public nudity from her, Bunny was always trying to either make him laugh or give him a hug.

Either way she never failed to draw a shy smile out of him, no matter how hard he was blushing when she pressed her luscious fuzzy body against him.

She was the first K’or-Macka he had ever met and now he finally understood what all the fuss was about.

At first he was nervous of Eniella, with her wildly heterochromatic eyes and robotic arm, but he quickly learned that the pink-haired woman was actually quite laid back. And while he found her girlfriend Davie a bit unsettling, mostly due to the transactional nature with which the pair dealt with sex, in public no less, he saw as little of her as he did Kyle.

Eva downright terrified him.

Barely a minute after leaving the captain’s office in her quarters that first day out of the infirmary he accidently bumped into the redhead in the common room and she promptly stripped him down to his constituent atoms with nothing but a searing diatribe about ‘space-debris’ and ‘dead-beat civilians’.

If Billy hadn’t intervened to save him he was sure he would have been left as a puddle on the floor.

All that left was Maria, and in some ways she frightened him more than Eva did.

In all the chaos of their rescuing him her calming voice had kept him from losing his shit, even right before the trio were sucked into space, so it was impossible for the young man not to have strong and confusing feelings about the kindly blonde.

But once she was able to come back aboard the Pixie Hazard from the transport ship after the slipjump she was constantly and openly flirting with him, to the point that even an oblivious teen like him could recognize the cues.

The difficulty was that he couldn’t tell if the towering blonde was messing around or not: hence why she scared him.

For the last day and a half he had done his best to keep out from underfoot while trying to keep his mind occupied with a borrowed datapad.

He felt it was rude to just hide in the guest bunk so instead he spent a lot of time sitting on the couch in the corner of the common room, finding it the safest place to avoid any more incidents with Eva.

Which is exactly where he was sitting when the muscular blonde came up from below deck to get some coffee.

As soon as the powerhouse caught sight of him her face brightened and she altered her course from the galley to flounce down right next to him, thoughts of caffeine forgotten.

“Hey cutie! How’s your day going?”

She nudged up against him teasingly on the couch to start the conversation

“Fine.” He mumbled self-consciously; “How’s yours?”

“Better now.” Donnie said in a dry voice before Maria could.

Kyle and the captain were both at the table nursing their own coffee, with Bunny standing behind her man and giving him a deep shoulder rub.

Donnie didn’t even have to look up from the supply manifest on her datapad: she knew exactly what the blonde’s response would be.

Maria shot her an annoyed look but quickly turned her attention back to Bryan. She shifted herself around in a bid to get more comfortable on their shared seat, somehow ending us just slightly too close to him in the process.

“So how was it, you know, growing up dirtside? Billy said your family owned a vegetable production facility right?”

Gone were the days of people planting seeds in the soil with the worms like the primitives did on Old Earth. Most crop-growing in the universe was done in massive hermetically