Page 26 of Bonded

OK. I guess I had to play this game. “So, Earth 4040 is a planet, correct?”

“It was a planet. Correct.”

OK. I guess we were going to do this in the past tense. “So, theoretically speaking, if there was ship debris that came apart around here, would gravitational force pull some of the debris onto the planet?”

“Theoretically speaking, if there was a planet close by with the same mass as Earth 4040, then yes, it would have the same gravitational pull to attract debris and small spacecraft.”

Finally, we were getting somewhere!

The Ship refused to talk about Earth 4040, and one of these days, I would find out why. Unfortunately, today wouldn’t be one of those days.

Until then, there had to be a way to communicate without driving myself insane.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it Earth 4040. Maybe I should just call it home.

“Ship, how do you communicate with your home base?”

“I do not communicate with my home base. However, the captain sends a sound wave to his counterparts, and they can communicate that way.”

For a split second, I thought I would have had to admit defeat. But now, I was intrigued. Counterparts? That was plural, meaning more than one part. I knew there was a whole mess hall full of crew members for this ship. Just how many people were part of this crew and, therefore, that colony?

Time to focus on something specific. “Ship? How does the captain send a wave to his counterparts?”

“He has his personal console in his private quarters. Otherwise known as the captain’s suite.”

No matter how desperate I was, I would not invade his personal space. Not only because of his kindness toward me, but also because I had the feeling that he valued his privacy. “Ship, we use that as our last option. Are there other consoles that are more public that he or others would also use?”

“He can access messaging on any console.” The holo-pad lit up with a digitized map of the ship’s interior systems. There were several ports available. But they also seemed very public. And I was still a little nervous going out on my own and I didn’t want Ruzan and Vryek to know. Or at least I didn’t want them to ask too many questions.

Not that I disagreed with finding answers. Just the idea of being asked about something that I didn’t know the answers to be frustrating enough. To repeat that fact to others was not something I wanted to relive.

A lone port that looked to be in an out-of-the-way location popped up for me.

I pointed to that port on the map. “Where is this located?”

“That is in Docking Bay Gamma. That port is part of the communication area for that specific shuttle.”

“Oh, so it is on a shuttle?”

“Yes. Most of the shuttles have been decommissioned.”

That would be a great idea. It was out-of-the-way, and this was part of a decommissioned shuttle.

“So the crew doesn’t use this shuttle regularly?”

“No, they do not. For any run that they do, which is rare, they use the main shuttle.”

“That sounds great. Take me there.”

PRIYA

Gizmo, Minion, and Dash were more than happy to escort me down to shuttle bay C. I might have to re-label some of these shuttle bays as there didn’t seem to be an A or a B functional. Perhaps numbers...

My little robot friends also used the back ways, so, mostly, we traveled behind walls. At certain junctures, there were really loud conversations, and I made a note of where they were.

Not that I wanted to avoid the crew forever, I just wanted to meet them on my own time.

And right now, I didn’t seem capable of meeting anyone without freaking out. The very idea of doing so made my heart lurch.

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