Crash Landing

The plague was a lie. The pirates were real. And the ship is going down.Eric Crichton is thirteen, the captain of the tramp freighter Max Jones, and very tired of adults asking where his parents are. He, his engineer brother John, and his medic sister Maryam are making their own way among the stars - and they have just signed on a new crew member: Vanessa Carmichael, a rich man's daughter with a fresh spacer's certificate and a lot left to learn.Then a corporate manager hands them a sealed medical case and a desperate job. A frontier colony called Epirus is dying of a mystery plague. Get the cure there fast. Ask no questions.They never make it to the spaceport. A pirate ship is waiting in orbit, and the only way out is straight down - a screaming dive through the atmosphere that ends with Max Jones plowed into an alien jungle, Maryam unconscious in a stasis pod, and twenty miles of hostile wilderness between the crew and help.Eric and Vanessa set out on foot with the case on Eric's back. The jungle has things in it that hunt from underground. The colony has a secret of its own. And the pirates want what's in that box badly enough to take hostages to get it.Nobody is coming to save them. They're going to have to save themselves.Crash Landing is Book 2 of Boy's Own Starship - fast, clean, old-school space adventure for readers 9 and up. Real consequences, real competence, and good guys who win because they keep their heads.