Reboot

By Barbara Lund

On an entire city rocketing through space, bursting at the seams after only eleven years, Pensa Dee and her precious daughter, her momma and her sisters and their families are heading for a new world.

Pensa Dee lost her husband, thanks to his tomfoolery and a cracked seal, but when her heart isn't breaking, she’s getting along well enough with her baby girl at home and her databases at work. At least, until she notices a glitch in the nav system that hints she and her family and the ship aren’t where them-in-charge say they are.

Suddenly, there’s secrets about: some small and some big and some downright ugly, one maybe having to do with her husband’s death, maybe meaning it wasn’t so accidental after all.

Pensa Dee doesn’t want to believe it. She doesn’t want to be involved. She really doesn’t want to be a hero, because the heroes all seem to end up dead.

But she can’t seem to keep quiet either...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Lund
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781944127299

Barbara Lund

Award-winning speculative fiction author Barbara Lund has several indie-published novels, dozens of short stories, and has been traditionally published in Daily Science Fiction and L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 37 (November 2021).She won the Writers of the Future Golden Pen (2021), along with a First Place, three Silver Honorable Mentions, and two Honorable Mentions. She won the 24th Annual Critters Best Magical Realism Short Story.She's always working on new novels and short stories.Add a husband, two kids, and a martial arts obsession, and she keeps pretty busy.

Book preview

1

It’s an entire city floating through space. They said they’d built it large enough for thirty years’ growth, but only eleven years in and it was like to burst at the seams, my momma said, and my momma was always right, from the day she left her momma’s house to the day she named me Pensa Dee to the day she scolded me for thinking too much before applying to be a settler on this same ship. Even once I had a child of my own in a semi-private room in the hospital in the floating space-city, my momma was right, and maybe even more so then.

Momma moved in with us to take care of little Reba Ann just like she had with my brother’s wives’ first babies, only since I didn’t have Seth with me anymore thanks to a faulty seal and his own damned need to show off outside in space, she stayed. Made it easier, going to work programming my share of all the puters in the whole flying city when I knew she was home with the baby who stared at me with Seth’s dark brown eyes, and if I happened to program my com device to keep a watch on our quarters, well, who could really blame me? Dunno if it was normal baby sickness or an unusual kind of baby sickness that had me loving that child so much it hurt to breathe one minute and hating her screaming all the time the next, but either way, seemed like I was a better momma when I could go away to work most of the day and my momma needed a purpose and Reba Ann was happy to give it to her.

With so many different puters in so many different parts of the ship, all with different access to the main puter, and different programmers handling different specialties—and mine was databases and reports, not navigation!—I can’t say as I’m too surprised I didn’t see it sooner, what with the floating in space, and losing my partner, and having a new baby and never enough sleep and all, but I still blamed myself when I realized. And if I hadn’t been so used to testing every last result, I’d have never…

I’m getting ahead of myself.

So there I was, with charred wire stench in my nose, balanced precariously on a chair jammed into the itty-bitty maintenance closet cause I didn’t have a cable long enough otherwise to stay jacked into the starboard sensor array to test it after I’d decided the main line between the array and main navigator had a glitch and replaced it when the test gave me a totally wrong answer. Now, like I said, I’m not a navigator and I don’t even work on their puters very often, but the usual guy was out sick or busy with a different problem, and I went through the basic courses just like everyone else and I’ve been keeping up on the star charts throughout the voyage just for fun, and what the sensor array was seeing wasn’t what the nav puter was reporting.

Like not even close.

But maybe I’d messed up replacing the line or maybe I’d somehow changed a one to a zero because everyone knows that puters give up the wrong answers every now and then just to be perverse, so I paused long enough to pull my personal com out of my pocket and check in on Reba Ann and Momma, and they were just fine, Reba Ann sitting in the crook of Momma’s arm while Momma read some fool story about a caterpillar eating too much and the both of them giggling fit to be tied, though Reba Ann was probably giggling more at Momma and Momma more at my baby than either of them at the story.

Breathing easier, I ran the test again and got the same results again. So I propped my work puter up on top of the array outlet and climbed down off that chair with maybe a swear word or two or three muttered under my breath, and then I walked decorously-like out of the maintenance closet and down the hall to the nearest observation bay. Now, I’ll tell y’all a little secret: when they say ‘window’ on