Pixie Hazard, Archibald Bradford [100 best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

his decision to continue his education so far from home. But the young man was ready for an adventure, and bought into the company line that pirate attacks were a rarity and that as a valued asset he would be protected in the unlikely event of one.

He kinda felt like he’d been had.

With the two Junkers gone the hold returned to silence, save for the constant dull hum of power that people aboard a ship inevitably became numb to.

With nothing to do but wait, Bryan settled back into hopeless misery as he tried and failed not to think of his fate.

He wasn’t stupid: he knew that the company would have already written him off for dead.

It stung whenever he thought about them telling his mother. And though he shied away from the thought as much as possible, he knew that she wouldn’t take the news well.

The imagined pain on her face was worse than the wire digging into his wrists.

With helpless tears staining his cheeks he drifted off, fully aware that despite his mother’s grief there was no way anyone would be enacting a daring rescue just for his sorry ass.

Little did he know...

Chapter 1:Technical Difficulties

Millions of kilometers away from the Junker vessel a smaller, yet meaner, ship was floating in vacuum; a lonely beacon of life against the backdrop of cold dead space.

Around the corner from the armoury and just outside the engine room of said vessel, Captain Donjoon Nelson found her prized mechanic on the floor with a wall panel open and his hands buried inside.

“Captain.” Kyle gave her a nod but kept working his deft fingers in the exposed wiring.

Donnie always respected his ability to prioritize and so she got right to the point.

“How fucked are we?”

He let out a little noise of derision, gave one last twist then put the wiring back into the wall before slapping the panel shut.

“Come on down and I’ll show you.”

He spun around on his butt to face the opposite wall, where several more panels had been removed so that a complicated series of exposed pipes and cables were plain to see.

She knelt down beside him, leaning forwards, her top loose enough that he got a short but healthy look at her bra clad breasts.

She smiled at his gaze, vain enough to not mind the appreciation in his eyes, though she was certainly grateful that he stayed on track, despite the sudden titillation from the sight of her cleavage.

“See that one conduit in the back? The kind of off-white cylinder looking thing? See how she’s wobbling like that?”

Donnie poked her head into the complicated mess coming from the direction of their ship’s fusion reactor, and then followed his finger to spot the malfunctioning part.

“Okay, sure?”

“We got maybe a week or so of runtime before she gives it up. Then plasma will blow it apart and take this whole rigging with it. It’ll kill the engine for sure, and if the discharge is bad enough to take out the magnetic confinement around the reactor, it’ll kill the ship.”

“Fuck me!” She exclaimed; “How much to fix it?!”

“New part? Two thousand deks at least. We can go used though, maybe get it for twelve hundred if we’re lucky. Though who knows how long that one would last.”

“Fuck.” She cursed again; “Why so much? That’s like three months of groceries!”

He shrugged.

“It’s the powdered iridium in the lining, that and it’s just one of those parts we can’t live without and the manufacturers all know it.”

She leaned back to sit on her calves.

“Well, I don’t have two grand. Shit I don’t have the twelve hundred! Demarco fucked us over big time.”

The crooked crook’s full name was Jonathan Demarco, but everyone that knew him called him Johnny Dee, or Johnny Deebag if they thought he wasn’t listening.

They had taken a courier job from Demarco, only for him to turn around and cancel the gig once they had wasted a slipjump and several days in normal space to get to the rendezvous coordinates. To make matters worse they passed up on several other contracts to take the more lucrative job, leaving them out of work and nearly broke.

Kyle nodded his understanding; he was pretty annoyed about the situation himself.

“I have an alternative, but it would require time and a bit of luck.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Let me guess, you want to play at being a scrapper again?”

“Yup. Kentis Four would be the best bet for a part like this, all the shipyards in the system drop their crap there.”

She made a pained face.

Kentis IV was a perfectly good planet, right up until six different solar systems decided that it was a perfectly good planet for dumping all of their unwanted shit.

Now it was a wasteland of wrecked ships, toxic sludge, and all the garbage the mutated scrap-hawks could eat.

But as the ancient saying went, one man’s trash...

The planet’s orbit was crawling with an overabundance of thrill-seekers or desperate people on the end of their rope hoping some idiot threw something out that was worth a damn.

It was a hard life and if people kept at it too long they turned just as hard.

She mulled the lousy options over in her head.

“So either I start turning tricks to pay for a new part we’ll never afford, I starve the crew to maybe get one used. Or we all go and get fucked up by Junkers.”

Trash planets were natural breeding grounds for the Junker clans, since it wasn’t hard to convince desperate people to join a clan when the alternative is poverty and death at the bottom of a trash heap.

“Sounds about right Captain.” Kyle said with another shrug.

It wasn’t a decision at all really.

“The one thing we have in abundance