Legendary Notes
an excerpt

"Pizza?" Ben offered tentatively to the little girl sitting in the smoking mess of the ship's bridge. Puffs of pale smoke came from the navigation console. Bits of trim dangled in awkward places. There was a spark flashing irregularly over the communications console and exposed wires where there should be none. To inexperienced eyes, it was a dreadful, horrible disaster and the two young people were doomed.

Neither child was aware of the vast forces that had conspired to bring them to this time and place. Ben Lorimer was a senior at a boarding school, at home on the ship between the semesters. He knew things weren't as dire as they seemed as far as the ship was concerned. Blast walls and shields had done their job to save the ship's life, and he'd grown up on this ship, knew every nook and cranny and screw on her and how to fix it all. He was pretty sure he could get the Mosey Posey moving again.

The little girl had a dark smudge on her nose, and blood smeared across her forehead and on her hands. One knobby little knee was skinned and oozing. Large brown eyes stared at Ben unblinkingly. She looked to be four or five years old. In fact, she was precisely five years old, having been born at this exact time five years previously. Just minutes earlier, she'd seen her parents blown out a hole in the ship as the blast walls came down. Her scrapes and cuts came from the loose things that blew past her and out the opening with her parents, and her bloody hands came from pounding on the blast wall. Then she ran until she collapsed, exhausted, here on the bridge in front of Ben.

"With cheese? I make a really good pizza," Ben said. His parents, the owners of the little free trader Mosey Posey, were on the wrong side of a blast wall. He was old enough to know that meant they were dead. When the explosions occured, he'd been doing his shift on the bridge. He watched as the ship's computer slammed down blast walls and vented the damaged sectors, consigning the ship's passengers to a quick and frigid death along with his parents. He'd seen systems go down, some for safety, some from damage. The cargo areas were still solid, and the bridge and crew quarters. There was a corridor still solid, too, that led to the engines - which he'd shut down as a precaution - and to the life support systems. This was an old ship, but the life support was advanced beyond what was on the market - his mom's work. She designed life support systems and sold them around the asteroid belt and to the touristy hotels. He was very glad her system was undamaged and functioning well. Her work saved his life - and that of the little girl who'd run into the bridge and fell to a sitting position on the floor in front of him. He felt kind of silly, offering her pizza in the aftermath of this disaster. He should be checking systems, making repairs, tractoring in the bodies for identification and funeral arrangements, and contacting the nearest space station for help and setting up docking repairs. He should be mourning his parents, and all he could think of was those big brown eyes in that little face and pizza.

It worked, though. The little girl looked at him and saw him. Really saw him. She tilted her head slightly, as if this were an important decision. "Pepperoni?" she asked.

"Sure. There's a whole stick. We can make pepperoni pizza."

"OK."

Ben held out his hand to her, and she took it shyly.