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

make some of these sandwiches to go? I’ll have you bring them over to your hubby on the transport.”

“Okee-dokee!” Bunny chirped as she skipped back into the galley to prepare her husband’s lunch.

“Sounds like Kyle gets to christen the other ship with a quickie.” Davie chuckled.

Donnie rolled her eyes at the lame joke.

“Keep talking and I’ll send you over with a mop once they’re done.”

__________

“Munitions, Javelin, stern block: less than nine hundred rounds.” Eniella dictated, her datapad making a note; “We’ll need to stock up.”

She was standing on a special step at a forty degree angle from Maria, just at the edge of the Pixie’s mass generation field where the gravity began to curve upwards.

Artificial gravity was impossible, but years ago some eggheads discovered that by farting around with graphene artificial mass was not, and since mass and gravity had that oh-so special connection...

The whole process required an enormous amount of energy, so it all had to start with a power-source, hence why the mass-gen was the first thing to go during a reactor cascade, as had been the case on the Junker frigate.

Riding the high of anticipation, and knowing that Bryan was no doubt doing the same, Maria was smiling and humming to herself while she helped Eniella re-connect the ammo feed for the tri-barreled railgun battery.

The pink-haired woman interlaced her robotic fingers together with her other hand and cracked her knuckles, yawning widely before giving the humming Maria an arch look.

“You’re in a good mood.” She observed.

“I am.”

“Care to share?”

She shrugged nonchalantly.

“Got me a taste of some Bryan. Gunna get laid soon as we’re done.”

“Huh, good on you. Though I think it’ll be more you doing the laying. Your taste in men has always baffled me.”

Maria’s smile broadened as she put the last locking clamp in place for the ammo feed.

“That’s because you and I are polar opposites when it comes to sex. You like it nasty and dirty, I like it nice and clean.”

Eniella snorted and stretched, cracking her back and her neck.

“What kind of woman doesn’t like getting her hair pulled?”

“I don’t know, the healthy kind? Are we done in here?”

“Yeah, only thing left are the Dobermans, and those are easy; sixty four, same as the last time I counted.”

“Just be grateful we haven’t been in a situation where we needed to do more than point them at people.”

“No shit. I’ll forward the report to the skipper, go lay some pipe.”

Maria winked and blew her a kiss before all but skipping down the passageway.

Eniella smiled as she went, glad that the kindly blonde woman was enjoying herself. She sighed though when she thought about the amount of work she had waiting for her in the armoury.

She wouldn’t be laying any pipes any time soon.

As if to drive that point home Donnie poked her head into the armoury barely ten minutes after Eniella had started working on her exo-rig.

“Here, brought you some sandwiches. How’s my suit?”

The captain set the plate of lunch and the strange black box down on Eniella’s work bench.

“Not great, but not as bad as you thought. Need to replace the armour plate, but we got enough scrap carapace for me to work with.” The Hispanic woman gestured at the hole melted through the suit’s hip with the metal pick she’d been using to clear out the emergency sealant; “Internals are intact, except for one servo-relay that’s junked, I have a replacement though.”

Donnie nodded in satisfaction as she leaned on the bench and drummed her fingers.

“Right, when you’re done with that I have another job for you.”

“Dios mio Skipper!” Eniella laughed in exasperation; “I am only one woman!”

“You want to have a cry about it? Go bunk with Bunny. I need you to look at this mystery box Kyle and I pulled out of that safe, ideally I want to offload in on Mung. You do want to get paid, right? Because if we don’t find a buyer for the transport there then I’ll be paying you lot in crackers.”

“Okay okay! Can’t a woman bellyache once and a while without catching shit for it? I’ll take a look when I’m finished with this.”

“Fair enough. What about that hack-job you and Kyle pulled on the Pixie’s sensors?”

“That wasn’t even a job worth bellyaching about. It’s already sorted.” Eniella said dismissively.

“And the inventory?” Donnie pressed.

“Already in your databank. If there are any problems with that though, you can go and peel Maria off of her new toy to sort them out.”

“I’ll trust your arithmetic.” The captain said drily; “Carry on then.”

Eniella bit back another smart remark, choosing instead to focus on scraping the last of the sealant out of the hole in Donnie’s suit.

Her attention was pulled away though as she spotted the box out of the corner of her eye.

With a frown she stretched out her robotic arm and pulled it over, turning it around in her hands for several seconds.

Finally her head drew back on her neck and her face twisted into an expression of confused annoyance.

“What the fuck even is this thing?”

It was a common theme.

Chapter 20:Naughty Boy

As Maria opened the hatch to her bunk she had to suppress a laugh when Bryan made a little yelp of surprise from the bed.

“It’s okay baby, just me.”

She let all of the wry snarkiness she used with Eniella fall away, slipping comfortably back into the role of a doting and patient lover as she took in the sight of him on her bed.

He was lying propped up against the headboard, still fully nude and already sporting half of a hard-on, it almost looked like he hadn’t moved.

Almost.

She didn’t miss the flash of dark purple lace in his hand