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

Forty minutes after the mechanic had excised the safe from the wall the ETD unit gave a happy series of beeps to sound the all-clear.

Not long after that, Kyle and Donnie were well and truly flummoxed.

He had cut the door off of the safe with careful precision and they were now staring at its contents: a little black box, maybe a foot long on each side.

With no buttons, wires, hinges, seams, switches or labels to make its purpose clear.

Ever the cautious one, Donnie scanned it directly with the ETD, but again it came back with a negative reading.

After that Kyle tried to use one of his tools to score the surface of it only to come away with a broken drill bit.

Very briefly he considered his cutting torch but Donnie vetoed that almost immediately.

“Eniella’s toy here says it’s inert, but the stupid thing could react to heat for all we know.” She ran her hand through her hair and huffed in aggravation; “That does it then, colour me confused.”

“Yeah, I have no idea either Captain. If you handed this thing to me and told me it was an oversized paper weight, I’d accept it and move on.”

The skipper glared at the confounding package, daring it to reveal its secrets.

Neither of them could figure out what it was even made of.

Kyle hefted it in his calloused hands, turning it over and examining each of its six sides.

“Got some weight to it, smooth like silk, but it would have to be hard as diamond to break my drill bit like that. A sample of some new low-friction armoured alloy maybe?”

“A weird shape for an alloy sample. And then why was it locked away in a safe on a ship buried at the bottom of a pile of garbage? Besides, slipspace doesn’t give a shit about friction.”

Kyle frowned and shook his head slowly.

“Neither does normal space, but I’ve got nothing else. I can’t for the life of me figure this out.”

“Valuable?” Donnie asked grudgingly.

His frown didn’t waver.

“To who? We’d need a proper spectrometer just to get a clue since the handheld one we got is such a piece of shit. Beyond that I wouldn’t even know who to ask to appraise this thing.”

“What can you do with it?”

He shrugged helplessly.

“Short of farting around with lasers, we could maybe get a micro-scan of the surface with some of Billy’s equipment in medical. Won’t tell us what it’s made of, but maybe someone signed their name on it somewhere. Even then though I imagine it would take ages to go over the whole bloody thing.”

Donnie huffed out an irritated breath and shook her head.

“Fantastic. For now I’ll just call it Donnie’s magic box and store it in the armoury, a problem for another day.”

In that moment she was grateful Eniella wasn’t there to make a quip at her phrasing.

Kyle looked hesitant though.

“You sure? This thing could be a bigger find than the transport for all we know.”

“That’s just it: we don’t know. We got too much going on to try to solve this puzzle right now, and the last thing you and I need is Billy whipping us to death for breaking one of her medical gizmos trying. Can you patch up the wall where the safe was? No sense losing out on a few deks because the transport isn’t ‘mint’ anymore.”

Kyle nodded.

“I scrounged a fair bit of scrap when we are on Kentis to sort out the airlock so it’s no big deal to add this to the job. Won’t even charge you extra.”

“How generous of you. I guess this is your homework for now. Focus on the airlock first though: the wall is just beautification.”

He nodded.

“That’s my plan.”

She scooped up her magic box and sucked air between her teeth in annoyance.

“Why couldn’t this have been a block of expensive cheese or something?”

“Take a bite, I won’t tell.” Kyle chuckled as he packed his tools into his bag.

“Har har.” She said sarcastically; “I’m heading back to the Pixie, you need me to send some slave labour over?”

He shook his head and smiled as he hefted his tool bag.

“Nah, I love this kind of work. A busted up airlock is far preferable to some of the other shit I could be doing.”

“Suit yourself. Stay on coms though, last thing I need is you getting hurt and no one knowing. I’ll send Bunny over with some lunch in a bit anyways.”

“Appreciated.”

He smirked and she knew he would be having more than food for lunch.

Any other employer would be in a huff at their employee blatantly planning on taking a break from work for a nooner, but Donnie saw the big picture: Bunny needed constant affection or she would sulk them all to death.

“I’ll leave you to it then.” She declared as they reached one of the undamaged airlocks and she cycled through on her way back to the Pixie Hazard.

__________

While Kyle and Donnie were still fiddling with her box, back in the common room Doctor Wu at last had no more patients left to treat so she was hard at work sitting on her ass on the couch.

After the hectic near-disaster that was Kentis, she was unwinding in her own way, her nose in her datapad again.

Every member of the crew save Donnie believed that she was always reading medical journals or something equally intelligent.

Not so.

Though she did diligently keep up to date with various medical readings, in truth she was halfway through a thoroughly trashy romance novel, a guilty pleasure that she indulged in on a fairly frequent basis.

And she wasn’t sitting alone.

Her feet were propped up on the end table while a certain cat was dozing in her lap, likely dreaming