Pixie Hazard

by Archibald Bradford

  She tried to keep the chastisement as gentle as she could, but she was used to working with tough-as-nails marines so her bedside manner might not be quite as kindly as it once was.

  She didn’t miss the way his lip quivered, but he nodded in acceptance of her words.

  “I... I’m sorry. It itches. My wrist itches. My p-pee is fine.”

  “Nanites repairing bone can have that effect, especially in the arms. But they should have been finished by now. We’ll do another scan to see if some of them got fused by mistake during the repair process, worst case I’ll need to excise them. It’s a simple procedure so there is no need for alarm. For now try not to scratch at it too much.”

  She worked his arm and hand through a range of motions, occasionally asking him for feedback regarding his comfort and pain levels.

  Once finished she checked over the rest of his bruises to ensure that they were healing properly, then finally nodded in satisfaction and allowed him to cover himself once more.

  “All things considered you are a very lucky young man, though I don’t imagine you feel like it.”

  He nodded and swallowed a lump in his throat.

  “Where are we? I thought I felt a jump a while ago.”

  Her eyes narrowed as he dodged the subject, but she didn’t push.

  “We’re heading towards Mung Station. It’ll be a few days before we get there. You can relax, not another soul for millions of kilometers.”

  “Th-thanks.” He mumbled again.

  Realizing that she wasn’t going to get much more out of him beyond that, she brought his breakfast over.

  “And now I need you to eat. Every scrap of food on this tray. I know it’s a challenge but you won’t recover your strength unless you do.”

  Her patient accepted her help to sit down then dutifully tucked into the food.

  It took him a good half hour to clear the tray, during which Billy watched him out of the corner of her eyes as she puttered around tidying up the place.

  The assessment she had given Donnie had been accurate: physically fine, but psychologically not so much.

  She had long since gotten the sense that he was a sensitive kid to begin with, and after everything the Junkers had done to him, it would take him a long while to recover.

  Once he had finished the meal she made some more small talk with him, privately measuring his responses.

  In the end she was satisfied: he was certainly in much better state than he had been the day previous when he was sobbing into her shoulder.

  Whether she liked it or not, he was healthy enough to meet the rest of the crew, so long as Donnie was gentle about it.

  She frowned at the likelihood of that happening.

  His eyes were drooping though now that his stomach was full so she dimmed the lights and instructed him to get some more rest.

  __________

  While Billy was looking after their guest, the rest of the ship began to stir.

  Kyle was up and finishing off his breakfast by the time a happy pair came into the common room from the direction of the captain’s quarters.

  “My hubby!” The K’or-Macka enthused before throwing her arms around his neck from the side and kissing him.

  Donnie was having a good morning, she and Bunny having gotten up to some more mischief when they woke up, but when she watched Bunny jump Kyle at the table she winced slightly.

  Though she was as worldly as could be, she still felt a strange nervous energy at being ‘caught’ with the mechanic’s wife.

  Very much like she had her hand in his cookie jar.

  “Mwah, good morning darlin’.” Kyle drawled like a cowboy as he shot a sly look at the captain over the affectionate Bunny’s shoulder; “Did you have a good night?”

  To Donnie it sounded as much like he was talking to her as his wife, but it was Bunny that responded.

  “I did, I really did! And now we’re going to go to our bunk and make sure that you have a good morning!”

  Not for the first time the skipper wondered at the K’or-Macka’s carnal appetite.

  They had literally just had sex.

  His breakfast finished, Kyle was quick to agree with his wife’s intentions.

  “Be right behind you bright eyes.”

  As the cat scampered away he gave Donnie a nod by way of greeting.

  “Captain.”

  “Kyle.” She nodded back, doing her best to ignore his knowing smirk.

  Bunny had already slid down the ladder to the rec-area and crew quarters, leaving Kyle and Donnie alone in the common room.

  His smirk was undeterred as he cleaned up his bowl in the galley.

  Seriously, she just fucked his wife, why was Donnie the one red in the face?

  Sighing, she resigned herself to addressing the perceived issue somehow.

  “Quit fucking grinning at me, we cool?”

  He blinked in surprise.

  “Of course. You’ve always been good to us.”

  “Not what I meant. You know I have no interest in trying to get between you two or anything right?”

  He chuckled.

  “If you did we wouldn’t be on your ship. I knew full well what I was getting myself into when I married a K’or-Macka. This is hardly the first time I’ve seen my Bunny leaving someone else’s bunk.”

  She grumbled a bit to herself, but acknowledged his point.

  “Right, guess that was maybe a little presumptuous of me.”

  “Just a little. But it’s okay, really.” He smiled beatifically and his eyes suddenly looked a million miles away; “I get it.”

  “Lucky bastard. Go and fuck your wife, she deserves it.”

  He pursed his lips as he considered her words.

  “That an order?”

  “Uh... no.”

  A smile spread across his face as his eyes turned cunning.

  “Too bad, you see: if it was an order then it opens up all kinds of role-play ideas for me and my Bunny.”

  “Urgh.” She groaned and shot him a rude gesture with her hand; “Fine it’s an order! Just piss off already.”

  With one last laugh Kyle turned on his heel and followed after his wife.

  The last thing Donnie heard as he slid down the ladder was his sing-song voice calling to Bunny.

  “Oh darling! Our captain has given me a direct order!”

  She rolled her eyes at the absurd behaviour from the normally laconic mechanic, but then she had to smile.

  Bunny did deserve it.

  Elsewhere, still asleep in her quarters, Maria snored on, blissfully unaware of the chaotic morning lives of the crew around her.

  Chapter 15:

  Plants and Stuff

  After a day or so of rest following the slipjump Donnie and her crew set to work preparing for their 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 mech
anic 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 sealed factories, where the farmers, or rather ‘organic growth technicians’ as they preferred to be called, could control every aspect of the process and ensure a perfect harvest with zero waste.

  This was not out of any environmental concerns: if the corporations could use one hundred percent of the plant, then they could reap one hundred percent of the profit out of the plant.

  Deks made the universe go round.

  “Yeah, we grew corn mostly. Um, sweet corn.”

  She chuckled and casually put her arm around him as she looked towards the ceiling and spoke in a wistful voice.

  “I can easily picture you in some jean overalls, with a straw hat and a corn-cob pipe. Barefoot, with no shirt on? Oh yeah. That’d work for me.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about, but the arm around his shoulders was somewhat alarming.

  “Wh-where did you grow up?”

  “You’re looking at it! Not on the Pixie, though she’s old enough, but in a long range freighter. Space is where I was born and space is where I will die!”

  “Sing it sister.” Kyle said as he leaned back further, Bunny kneading his shoulders even harder than before.

  Once again she shot the peanut gallery a dirty look, but kept on with the conversation, since Bryan was a touch on the shy side.

  Or maybe more than a touch.

  “But back to you. Sweet-corn? Must be why you are such a sweety! I bet all the cute farm girls with their pigtails were all over you back home, right?”

  The red in his cheeks noticeably deepened as she jostled him a bit, her hand rubbing up and down his opposite bicep and her breast pressing into his shoulder.

  His inability to answer her rather personal question didn’t surprise her: to the galaxy-wise woman he was an open book, as easy to read as the lettering on a box of Space-O’s.

  He was still in his teens; a naive little farm boy completely out of his element, not to mention the added stress of having been nabbed and smacked around by Junkers before being dragged into the dirty ass-end of the galaxy.

  And he was just so darned cute.

  After waiting an appropriate spell for him to respond she followed through.

  “Wait a second, Bryan... Have you never had a girlfriend before?” The blonde powerhouse asked.

  To her crewmates who overheard, the skepticism in her voice was a touch exaggerated, a common tactic she used to bolster the confidence of cute young guys who didn’t know which end of their dicks to use.

  In other words, her type.

  The enormous muscular woman had almost wrapped herself around him on the couch by that point and he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “N-no ma’am.”

  Maria’s eyes narrowed and she made a clicking noise with her tongue as she booped him on the tip of his nose with her index finger.

  “Aw baby. When a woman as hot as I am is coming on to you, don’t ever call her ma’am.”

  He squirmed in his seat, his face turning even redder when he saw that Kyle was smirking from Maria’s complaint.

  He mumbled an apology and the older woman let him off the hook quickly enough before pressing her attack.

  “No girlfriends huh? How come?”

  “Good god woman, put your ovaries away.” Donnie muttered, but no one paid her any mind.

  Bryan started to speak but his voice cracked immediately and he had to clear his throat before trying again.

  “I don’t know. I’m small. Girls like b-bigger guys right?”

  Maria placed her hand on the back of his neck and massaged gently, his skin prickling with goose-bumps from the seemingly harmless contact.

  “Not me, the only guys I meet my size are usuall
y trying to kill me. I think you just need a boost of confidence.” She turned from him for a moment as she looked for some fire-support; “Hey Bunny! You can see that Bryan’s a catch right? I mean, you’d give him a throw no question!”

  Asking a K’or-Macka if she was willing to have sex with someone was the very definition of a stupid question, but that wasn’t the point.

  Because Maria’s good friend Bunny was more than happy to help a sister out.

  The cat-girl quit massaging Kyle’s shoulders and ambled over to the seated pair before squatting down in front of them, her shirt hanging loose off of her frame, giving the mortified teen more than an eyeful of her fuzzy cleavage and pink nipples.

  She tapped her chin, her ears twisting about as she examined him from head to toe, her eyes lingering on his crotch.

  Her acting skills were better than Maria’s at least as she did her part to help the blonde get laid.

  “I don’t know Mare-bear, he looks like he’s a bit on the small size, you know, in the penis area.” She turned to consider the little guy, a speculative look on her face; “Do you think you’d be up for the two of us spit-roasting you with my strap-ons? I’d go for that!”

  Bryan wasn’t sure what spit-roasting was, it sounded unpleasant, but he at least thought he knew what a strap-on was.

  As such, fear was writ on his face as he stammered out his response.

  “N-no, thank you, um... Bunny.”

  The cat-girl sighed and leaned into the couch to wrap him in one of her warmest hugs, rubbing his back and genuinely trying to help him get over the no-doubt crushing disappointment of not getting a piece of the ship’s Bunny.

  Once the hug finished, she leaned away and gripped his face with both hands before giving him a lingering peck on the lips that made his blush deepen to the point it was almost painful.

  “Sorry sweety. You’re just not my type then. Maria likes ‘em small, I like ‘em big. It’s simple physics.”

  He swallowed, frazzled by the memory of his nose pressed into her fuzzy cleavage when she hugged him, not to mention the feeling of her impossibly soft lips on his.