Chapter 6Camila

Chapter 6

Camila

Cami was bored out of her gourd. After yesterday's fiasco in the common room, she'd stayed in her quarters. But there was nothing to do here, and she was afraid to step outside lest she bump into Rehden. Or Berus.

The way the big Tallean had looked at her after the fight… It was something she'd never forget. He'd still had an angry look on his face from the brawl, but it had been tinted with need and longing, like he wanted to eat her up and protect her all at the same time. Cami wasn't sure how she felt about that, especially since when they met he'd been tearing someone to bloody shreds.

Sure, she wanted to get away from Rehden, but would she be jumping out of the frying pan and right into the fire?

Roxy had brought her some food earlier in the light cycle—actual food-food, not a nutrition bar or slave rations. It was only replicator food, but it was still a lot better than anything she'd had recently.

Other than eating that meal, she'd done nothing else. There hadn't been anything to do.

She wanted to get acquainted with the crew. She felt she should know the people who planned on helping her get to Reka 5, and she was curious as to what type of people would agree to work for Ulrek…especially the humans.

But Cami was worried that Rehden was just outside her door waiting to get her. He'd come by earlier, pounding on her door, but she'd been too chicken shit to say or do anything. She just hid under the blankets, praying for him to go away. She was hoping that if she stayed nice and quiet, he'd think she was somewhere else on the ship and go looking for her.

She wished she was a badass like Roxy. Or the brave woman who'd mated with the terrifying Ulrek of the Stellar Fortune . But she wasn't. She was just a timid girl who'd survived for the past few years playing the part of an obedient slave. She couldn't wrestle a blaster from the belt of a mutant bounty hunter and shoot him point blank with it, like Roxy had.

Sheesh, Roxy was cool! Cami was sure she was developing a healthy girl crush on her.

There was a knock at the door. Cami froze, not daring to move or make a sound in case it was Rehden, but a female voice called out from the other side in English, "It's Delaney!"

Oh! She hadn't met Delaney yet. Cami opened the door, eager to meet another Earth woman and to have something to do other than stare at the ceiling.

She was faced with an all-too-average looking woman with dark brown, nearly black, hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She was an inch or two taller than Cami's five-foot-five frame and wore a dirt-smudged apron over her clothes.

"Hey, Cami. I thought you might want to get out of your room."

"Yes!" Cami said, sounding much too eager, even to herself. "I'm going crazy staring at the ceiling."

"Great. Rehden is sparring with Ulrek, so he won't bother us." Delaney sent her a sly grin. "I told Ulrek to toy with him a while before handing him his ass on a platter so we'd have plenty of time to get to the greenroom. Come on."

Cami didn't know what the greenroom was, but she didn't care as long as it wasn't this room. Roxy had cleared out most of her stuff yesterday, and the drab gray metal of the crew quarters combined with the dull cream-beige of the utilitarian furnishings was slowly driving her bonkers.

The Revenge had once been a Dominion ship, hadn't it? No wonder Dominion officers were so grumpy all the time. Camila would want to slaughter and pillage too if she had to stare at that all day and night.

Delaney looped her arm through Cami's and led her along the ship's corridor.

"That's the training area there." She pointed down a hallway. "That's where Rehden is, so we won't check it out till later. We've got the top-tier training simulator with all the fun missions from Hullean Vision programmed into it. It's like virtual reality but done right—not the crappy stuff we still have on Earth. We have all the Earth scenes programmed into it, too, so we can go visit the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower if you like." They turned down another corridor. "And that's the way to the bridge."

The "greenroom" ended up being a jungle right inside the ship. The room was about the size of her apartment back on Earth, filled from top to bottom with plants of every kind. She couldn't even see the walls for all the plants growing on them. Every nook and cranny was filled with plant life.

This wasn't the carefully manicured garden her merchant owner had created on his estate; this was a veritable jungle. It smelled like one too. The air was green, fresh, and organic, with just a touch of humidity. For a split second, Cami forgot that she was in a tin can floating in space.

"Wow! This isn't what I expected at all! It's beautiful!"

"Thank you! The greenroom is my baby."

"You…" Cami waved her hand in amazement at the lush paradise around them. "Made this?"

"Yep! I'm the greenroom tech. I specialize in using plants to help the ship recycle the air and water. My job also includes optimizing other life support functions. The greenroom's not quite done yet," Delaney said. "Plus Nibbles took out a few plants when he was in here yesterday."

"Nibbles? He's on board?" Cami asked, shocked.

Cami hadn't been so sure about sharing her living space with the future man-eater when they first met at the mining station, but the little troublemaker's antics had made her laugh. She rather liked the creature now.

Still in his juvenile form, Nibbles didn't look anything like the formidable beast that had killed that mutant Tallean. He was furry, with large disk-shaped ears, big, round eyes and a purplish-gray coat. He was the cutest little fanged pom-pom she had ever seen.

Nibbles had hidden when the bounty hunters came and Cami hadn't realized he'd followed them onto the ship. When did that happen? Sneaky little thing. The ship must have been on the planet for ten, maybe fifteen Earth minutes, max.

"Yeah. Apparently, he's the one responsible for our clothing decontaminator going on the fritz. Chewing wires is his hobby."

So that was what the ship had been warning them about yesterday. "Um…that can't be good out in space."

"Nope. But we caught him before he could do any real damage. He's in Ckzarr's room now. They Nibble-proofed it."

There was a chime, and Delaney turned to the screen next to the door just as Ulrek appeared on it. Cami would have recognized him anywhere. He looked a bit different from the images she'd seen of him in the broadcasts since he wasn't in a Dominion uniform anymore and sported a different hairstyle, but it was him all the same.

He was shirtless, and there was a light sheen of perspiration on his face, neck, and chest like he'd just been working out. Didn't Delaney say he was sparring with Rehden to give them time to get here?

"I see you two made it safely to the greenroom." Ulrek barely looked at Cami; his attention was all on Delaney.

"We did. Thanks, hon. I owe you one." Delaney gazed at the scary Tallean male adoringly.

"Nah. It was a lot of fun to kick his ass. There is a recording, if you and Cami want to watch it later."

Delaney giggled. "For sure! Thanks again."

"Anything for my Star." Ulrek winked before the screen went dark.

Cami looked from the screen to Delaney and back at the screen, gaping. Ulrek called her his Star! That was the highest term of endearment a Tallean male could use on a female.

"You're Ulrek's mate!"

Tahra had mentioned that Ulrek was mated to a human, but never gave a name.

The other woman didn't even try to deny it. If anything, she looked absolutely smitten with the Dominion captain turned outlaw.

"I am. He's not who I thought I'd end up with, and I hated his guts before we met. Funny story: I signed the contract to work on the ship without realizing that he was the captain. The contract had listed the ship as the New Horizon , not the Revenge . I basically threw the contract in his face and told him to fuck off."

"But you're still here."

"Yeah. I really, really needed the credits to get away from my abusive ex. So, I agreed to stay long enough to diagnose the problem in the greenroom. One thing led to another, and…well…I never left. I'm glad I gave this crew a chance. Aside from Roxy, they're all either ex-Dominion or reformed convicts, but somehow, they became family."

"Wow, even Dex?" Cami asked. It was hard imagining the man with the boyish grin as a convict.

Delaney laughed. "Even criminals need a good accountant."

Delaney got to work clearing out a plant bed that looked perfectly fine to Camila. With nothing to do, Camila asked if she could help, and Delaney gave her a spare apron.

"Why are we tearing this bed out?" she asked.

"I'm putting in a water feature."

"Ooh! Like a pond?"

"Kind of, but not really. It will help clean some of the gray water from the ship so it can be reused. With so few permanent crew on board, this greenroom is overkill for air only, so I thought it would be good to branch out."

"Where did you learn to do all this?" Camila asked as she carried another bucket full of substrate out of the bed and onto a tarp Delaney had laid out.

"On Reka 5. I took a course." Delaney wiped a hand over her brow, leaving a dirt smudge on her forehead. "By the way, Roxy told us you want to be dropped off there. Sans Rehden. We're on it."

Delaney told Camila the plan. It was a simple one. Camila would pretend that she was going to leave the Revenge with Rehden until the very last moment. After he'd already stepped off the ship, the crew would get between them, and she'd run back inside. They'd "escort" Rehden out of the hangar and force him to leave.

He could kick up a fuss all he wanted, but according to the chip in Camila's thigh, she belonged to Uctarr, the merchant who'd put a bounty out on Rehden's capture, not him. As such, Rehden would be a fool to report her stolen to the authorities. She'd need to hide out on the ship while they got their business done in New Rhea, but Cami didn't mind. Not if it meant her freedom.

It would technically put Camila in Ulrek's debt, but since he'd been the one to steal her from Earth to begin with, she figured that made them even. Kind of. She didn't voice that to Delaney, though.

"When you get to Reka 5, go find a lady named Angie at the New Colonist Office. You can't miss her. She's mated to the colony's leaders, Ryek and Holden."

"Wait, she has two mates?"

"Yup. It's common for Talleans from Ryek's home planet to form triads. Something about it being too dangerous for a lone male to protect a mate. Kirek is from there: he has two dads."

Camila couldn't imagine having to please two Tallean males in the marital bed. One was bad enough. Talleans, for the most part, were better endowed than human males, and wielded without finesse, the sexual experience could be downright terrible. Luckily for Camila, she'd simply been bored with her merchant owner.

Surprisingly, her sexual encounters with Rehden hadn't been bad at all. They were, on the whole, mildly positive. It was his temper out of bed that frightened her. That, and the fact that he saw her as a possession, as property that could be replaced. She could totally imagine him killing her in a fit of rage, same as he'd destroyed his comm unit that one time because of some bad news.

Camila was pretty laissez-faire and open about sex, so that hadn't been the hardest part about the last few years. It was losing her autonomy, her freedom, being treated as lesser, and being torn away from her life on Earth that had hit the hardest. Still, she knew that Earth wasn't the same planet now that the Dominion owned it, and there was no point in going back. There were still uprisings here and there, but it would never be the same again. So yeah, Reka 5 was the way to go.

The door to the greenroom slid open, and Camila quickly ducked and hid behind a large leaf in case it was Rehden coming to look for her.

"It's okay." Delaney put out a calming hand. "It's just Berus. I asked him to come help me move the substrate into the firing pit so I can disinfect it and reuse it."

Cami honestly wasn't sure Berus was any better. He looked like he could break her in half if he got angry. But she decided to be friendly anyway. This crew had agreed to bring her to Reka 5, and it was the least she could do.