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

moved it from its original location to down and to the left of the flight controls: unobtrusive, but within easy reach of the pilot.

Lastly he helped Eniella update and expanded on the Pixie’s fire control console and move it in front of the rearward-facing seat. This allowed them to expand their weapon capabilities by adding two additional banks of Javelins to the bow and to include a pair of Doberman launch pods, a rarity for a ship her size.

In the end they ended up with a leaner and meaner Pixie, and a relatively spacious as well as highly efficient cockpit setup, though the crew often teased that the boost in efficiency came from the inability for the pilot and FCO to make googly eyes at each other.

When the new cockpit was completed Eniella promptly christened it by giving Kyle Davie’s mouth for the first time. The two of them were just that grateful to not have to deal with a forty year old set-up anymore.

Having already mapped out their drop-zone, they were hovering in geostationary orbit a few hundred klicks outside the atmosphere, well within Kentis’s gravity well, waiting on the captain’s order to make the drop.

They could opt for a standard entry procedure: it would certainly be safer, but then they would draw a line on the scopes of anyone who might be watching, not to mention be plainly visible to the naked eye for a solid chunk of time as they gradually descended over dozens of kilometres of open air.

No, the Pixie Hazard was a dropship, which meant they would drop straight down, barely a speck on hostile scopes and the descent over in less than three minutes.

Donnie slapped a clip against her helmet, then shoved it home in her plasma shotgun and primed the weapon. In preparation for the drop she already had her helmet on and sealed.

Only Kyle and Bunny wore regular dirty orange civvie environmental hazard suits; they could walk in space or through toxic sludge with them, but they wouldn’t stop a bullet.

The rest of them were happy to tease the two non-combatants mercilessly about their cute little orange baby suits, because like the captain they were clad in their own dull black and battle-scarred exo-armour.

It paid to survive a full enlistment term with one of the mega-corporations’ marine units.

The captain turned to her crew as they were strapping themselves into their seats and spoke through the headset in her helmet.

“Alright listen up! It’ll be late afternoon when we hit the ground at our chosen LZ, so we won’t be at it long today, I’m not picking through garbage in the dark. We work in pairs. Billy you’re with Hooker, Sledge with Kyle and the Bunny is with me. Scans show minimal rads in that heap below us, but if the wind picks up that number can spike fast, so Eniella will be watching out for us from the Pixie after we make our drop. Doc Billy gave you all your shots but I don’t want to deal with hair loss on my ship, so let’s work fast.”

They all had a chuckle at the idea of going bald from radiation, and Maria tossed few barbs Eva’s way for the wild mop of frizzy hair stuffed into her helmet.

Donnie let them get it out of their system before she continued.

“Kyle’s uploaded the image of the conduit thingy into your suit’s HUD. When we hit the ground we use the sniffers to check for iridium. If they pick it up, it will either mean industrial waste or broken ship parts. The hope is that where there are broken parts there might be un-broken parts, so if the sniffers start beeping call it in to Eniella. Kyle and Bunny have salvaged here before so if we keep our eyes peeled we should be alright, but stay in coms range of the ship and watch out for Junkers! Those fuckers will want the suits off our backs and they won’t mind putting holes in them to get ‘em. Clear?”

The marines in the bunch gave a chorus of ‘yes ma’ams’, meanwhile Kyle offered a straightforward nod and Bunny gave an enthusiastic double-thumbs up, the naively bubbly girl far more excited about the prospect of the drop than concerned over Junker bullets.

One way that she differed from most of her kind, Bunny was something of an adrenaline junky.

Donnie strapped herself in place and gripped the handles on either side of her seat.

“Alright then. Davie, Initiate the drop. Grab your balls ladies, this is the fun part!”

Sitting beside one another, Maria and Eva bumped the sides of their fists together nonchalantly as they had done in every drop they ever shared, as much a good luck ritual as it was a silent promise to have each other’s backs.

Meanwhile Bunny let out a whooping giggle and clapped her hands in glee: it was her first time actually being in the pod with them during a drop.

Davie cut the thrusters to stop fighting the planet’s gravity and the ship fell like a stone.

Even through their suits they could all hear the whine of the Pixie’s inertial dampeners as they tried to compensate for the abrupt shift in gravity, followed by the deep clunking noise of Davie disengaging them.

They were in total freefall now, simultaneously floating in place but strapped into their seats.

It was actually very peaceful until they hit the atmosphere, then the whole ship began to rattle and shake violently and their asses hit their seats hard.

Barely a minute later and Davie’s voice drawled over the coms as they shook around in their harnesses.

“Here comes the push ladies! Hope none of you are secretly carrying Kyle’s baby because that little fucker will pop out!”

Maria, Bunny, and even Eva burst out laughing.

“Fucking comedian.” Kyle muttered.

As promised Davie fired the thrusters again, gravity abruptly