Page 56 of Bonded

“That is what they are expecting. They anticipated that our navigational support would be offline.”

Considering I powered us down, we were already playing into their expectations.Something niggled at the back of my head, though. If they were just waiting to run as down, there was no way they could expect such a soon result. After all, even with a bot sabotaging the ship, there would be no telling when the ship would eventually break down.

Unless they had another contingency plan.

“Set a course for those coordinates, the ones that they are broadcasting.” Gizmo cocked its little head, but streams of data glowed, telling me he understood and was already communicating the information.

There, up ahead, were buoys cleverly disguised as points of light. But, when I saw them put together, all I could see was a net.

Ruzan was making sure that the jacks were on target babysitting the other robots. Vryek was making sure that other comms were online and there weren’t any other secret communications between the ship and those who set a trap before us.

I was directing us toward a trap.

“Easy does it, ship. You can do it.” I was giving the ship some encouragement.

So far, no one seemed to know that anything was amiss as we headed closer and closer to our doom. Good thing. Trying to defend the ship or prevent ourselves from being boarded would divert our momentum. We needed to save as much energy as possible in order for the ship to navigate as quick as possible after it hyper jumped away.

We knew that there was going to be some lag time between one transportation to the other, but there was no sense in dawdling and we wanted to make sure it had enough juice to repair itself in case something happened. This would be the first time the ship hyper jumped without a control collar.

There were a lot of hypotheticals in this plan, but despite all of those, I knew this would work. It had to.

I could sense the nerves of the ship feeding through, but all I gave it was a sense of calm.

“What would the ship look like if they completely powered it down?”

“Basically exactly what we look like now.”

“Good.”

Gizmo intercepted a few more communications between the ships hunting us. They were being very cocky now because they didn’t even bother masking their wave. One comm came from coordinates ahead of us, confirming to me that there was indeed a trap set for us.

They thought we would be easy pickings. That we would be easy targets. I would show them what we could do.

A crackling bloom of electricity powered the net in front of us, a golden shimmery web floating in space. I told Minion and Dash to disable the robots that had been sabotaging our ship.

And, with a final, bracing link to the ship, I started the chain reaction to open up a wormhole.

The lights in front of us coalesced into a kaleidoscope of streaks of gold. It was almost like we were in a tunnel of light. The star charts in front of us swirled. We were going faster than it could track. A few seconds later, we slowed as if we were going through a roller coaster and stopping.

We were alive and whole. The blackness of space appeared different. No signs of a net and also no signs of familiar stars.

When the star charts settled, it looked to be clear across the galaxy.

“Where are we?” Ithran’s grumbling voice had a tinge of concern.

Vryek answered. “We appear close to the field of disarray. This is uncharted territory, with a high probability of encountering void space. We need to be very careful not to cross over because the laws of physics don’t exactly apply here.”

“Great, that’s good to know. At least we don’t have to stay here for too much longer. We still had auxiliary power, which was amazing considering the amount of energy that was used to funnel away.”

The ship was sleeping and I could feel them hum in a peaceful lull. Good. They were unconcerned and there wasn’t any danger.

The sensors were still on, and Gizmo had a look about it, as if it was processing data. Maybe it was trying to understand what was going on outside, considering this was unfamiliar territory. Cephelas traveled far and created their own internal maps.

Gizmo’s data analysis made me gasp. He hadn’t been charting the stars or updating the ship’s nav maps. Ruzan and Vryek both immediately asked me what was the matter. Ithran crossed both sets of his arms over his chest. I tapped the portals to ensure that the video surveillance would go up on the foredeck’s screens.

“Magnify,” I said.

The bit of space that I focused on zoomed in.There. As I feared. There was a small jellybean shape behind us.

One ship that followed us did not get destroyed. We had taken it with us.

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