Hijacked by Lolita Lopez
Chapter Two
Safely tucked away in her private suite aboard her space yacht the Misbehavior, Camila studied the color options available in the newest nail polish upgrade. The screen of the automatic manicure machine showed the shades true to life, presenting them in full 3D under indoor and outdoor light. Scanning through the season’s newest collections, she decided something purple was exactly what she wanted today.
Oh, but which hue? Heliotrope? Lavender? Phlox? A pinky-purple? A reddish purple? A bluish purple? Thistle? Orchid? Pansy?
Heliotrope. Yes. Definitely heliotrope.
But matte or shiny?
Shiny. For sure.
Wanting to cover her short natural nails with a more glamorous shape, she selected an elongated form and picked out the thickness of the biodegradable monomer. Before she jammed her hands into the machine to let it work its magic, she moved her holographic pink tumbler closer and filled it to the top with the last of the wine in the bottle she had opened earlier in the night. She grabbed one of the loopy glittery straws from the wet bar and plunked it into the tumbler for easy access. She snatched a bag of cookies for good measure.
She hadn’t expected to have extra time to fill on this trip, but a strange debris alert had caused the ship’s navigator to alter their route. She didn’t mind taking a more scenic journey, especially if it meant they would get close enough to Viridian-6 to see the shimmery red-gold rings orbiting the green gas giant. It had always been one of her favorite sights on long-haul trips to Sector 12. She had asked Captain Jantus to alert her as soon as the planet was visible from the observation deck.
Once she had her favorite reality show casting on the giant screen, she pressed the green button on the nail machine and inserted her hands. The intergalactic matchmaking show was absolute melodramatic trash, and she loved it. It featured a single male or female humanoid searching for love. There were ridiculous challenges, outlandish dates and scandalous happenings behind closed doors. At the end of each season, there was an over-the-top wedding and piles of ostentatious prizes for the newlywed couple.
This season featured Emmaline, a woman from Kirs, Camila’s home planet. Emmaline had started the season as a sad, dumpy little thing, a poor girl from the worst part of the capitol, but the makeover episode that kicked off the season had transformed her into a violet-haired knockout. She had blossomed over the following seven episodes, but there was still something innocent and naïve about Emmaline that frustrated Camila.
“Girl! No!” She shouted at the screen. “Don’t you dare cut Zargo! He’s perfect for you!”
Aghast that Emmaline would even consider getting rid of the sexy blue-skinned male from Orkanus, Camila sipped wine through her straw. If Emmaline eliminated Zargo instead of that arrogant assbag Vinze from the Gersanna mining colony, Camila was going to have to log onto her Chirrup account and send epic levels of shade at her Kirsian sister.
“Who cares if Vinze has more gold than a dragon in his bank accounts? He’s a douche!” Camila yelled. “Oh, my stars! Emmaline! I swear! Girl! NO! Listen to me! Zargo is drop dead sexy—and he has two dicks! Two! Live your best life, Emmaline!” The show cut to a commercial before Emmaline made her choice, and she groaned. “Come on!”
Camila grumpily slurped more wine out of her tumbler and glanced at the progress screen on the manicure machine. It zipped along, applying and drying the top coat as she wondered if she could open a bag of cookies with just her teeth. Probably not, she decided, and counted down the seconds until the progress bar turned bright green.
As the commercials came to an end, she admired the gorgeous purple color and the almond shape to her newly applied nails. Perfect! She couldn’t wait for the vacation awaiting her on the pristine and ultra-exclusive pink sand beaches of Falonissa. The tiny planet had only just been developed as a vacation destination for the wealthy. Her father’s company had had a hand in the infrastructure work which meant she had access to a private, luxury villa any time she wanted.
The only thing that would have made this getaway better was having her sisters at her side to enjoy it with her. Her youngest sister Willa, a bioengineering wunderkind, was knee-deep in her second dissertation for yet another doctorate and couldn’t be bribed from her lab for anything less than an exotic and totally new progenitor cell. Her elder sister, Sara, a scarily brilliant tech whiz, had runaway as a teenager and had minimal contact, usually via bizarre and cryptic messages.
Long ago, Camila had accepted that her sisters didn’t have time for her. They were both so incredibly gifted and destined to change the universe. After a while, she had simple stopped asking to share their company. It was less disheartening that way, no chance of disappointment. That didn’t stop her from sending gifts on birthdays and holidays or little souvenirs and trinkets she found on her travels. She suspected Willa never opened the boxes, and Sara probably threw away the gifts while muttering about materialism and capitalism run amok. But—at least they knew Camila cared enough to try.
With their late mother’s constant comparison between her daughters, Camila found it easy to accept she would never be the smartest sister or the bravest sister. So, she settled for being the prettiest, the most fun, the wildest. Willa made the news for being the youngest graduate in the history of the Science and Engineering University of Kirs? Camila made the news for her obscenely expensive sixteenth birthday bash. Sara made the news for creating a novel digital cryptocurrency that was completely anonymous with unbreakable encryption? Camila made the news for using that new currency to run an illegal casino out of her sorority house.
Most people would have expected their father, one of the most successful and wealthy men in the galaxy, to be disappointed with her. Oddly enough, he seemed to approve of Camila the most. She figured it was probably because he didn’t feel the least bit threatened by her eclipsing him. If she couldn’t get love from her father, she was perfectly content to have access to an endless supply of money and all the happiness it could buy.
The show returned, and she sat forward, her straw clamped between her lips as she sucked down the last of the wine in her tumbler. Just as Emmaline wavered between presenting the black ticket home to Zargo or Vinze, the feed blinked twice, and a familiar blood red logo featuring a backwards capital D appeared.
“Are you kidding me?” Camila threw her straw at the screen in frustration. The anarchist group, Civil Disobedience, had an annoying habit of breaking into primetime newscasts or extremely popular shows. Frustrated, she flopped back against her chair and reached for the bag of vanilla cookies with strawberry sprinkles. As she tore it open and jammed a cookie in her mouth, the Civil Disobedience logo faded away, and an unsettling harmonic, robotic voice filled her cabin. Whatever they had to say had better be damn important!
“See. Act. Rebel. Fight.” As the robotic voice spoke their slogan, images of Emperor Shui flashed on the screen. Camila grimaced at the sight of her late mother’s cousin. She had known him her entire life. They existed in the same sphere of society, but Camila had done her best to stay as far away from that psychotic creep as possible.
“We accuse the emperor of war crimes.” Images of the horrific battles on Bionus, the planet the empire was currently trying to conquer, made her stomach churn. The bombed hospital was bad, but the razed school, with the mangled bodies of children in the rubble, caused her to gag. She spit her mouthful of cookie into the bag and tossed it aside. What the fuck?
She had known the war was horrible. War was always ugly, right? But this? This was beyond the realm of what should be acceptable in times of war.
“We accuse the emperor of genocide.” Dreadful images of bodies piled high in the streets of Bionus flashed before her eyes. Why hadn’t these images been shown before? Why hadn’t the people of Kirs—her people—been informed of the ungodly death toll. The emperor was cruel, but surely, he wasn’t trying to wipe out the entire planet?
“We accuse the emperor of conspiracy.” Audio clips of the emperor talking about framing and killing all cyborgs shocked her. The cyborg unit of the military was the most elite, beloved and trusted of Kirsian armed forces. Or, at least, they had been until the news broke about the mutiny in their ranks and their lust for power.
News that hadn’t ever quite made sense to Camila. Her mother had been heavily involved in cyborg tech before her death, and Camila had always been taught that cyborgs were incapable of those types of actions. The emperor, on the other hand...
“We accuse the emperor of organizing a show trial.” There were images of the emperor and his cronies huddled together interspersed with transcripts of the conversations proving the cyborgs had never had a chance at a fair trial.
“We accuse the emperor of plotting the murders of cyborgs and civilians, including infants and children, aboard the prison transport ship.” As the violent explosions lit up the screen, Camila recoiled in horror. Children? Babies? She didn’t want to believe it.
“See. Act. Rebel. Fight.”
The transmission ended, and the satellite feed returned to the scheduled programming. Camila’s interest in Emmaline’s choice had vanished. Cozy and safe on her luxury space yacht, she felt guilty. She wasn’t a supporter of the emperor, but she had benefited her entire life from her family’s connection to his late father and him. Her family had made an obscene fortune through intergalactic shipping and military tech contracts with the Kirsian government.
Looking around the opulent cabin, Camila experienced a wave of discomfort and nausea. Everything in here was purchased with blood money. Her family’s military tech helped the government blow up those hospitals and schools. Her family’s shipping empire carried the tech to the war zone.
There’s nothing you can do about it.
Camila repeated the same thing she always told herself when she became uncomfortably aware of the realities of the world. She wasn’t brave like Sara. She couldn’t imagine running away from the only life she had ever known to embrace the life of an anarchist. Playing the role of socialite was all she knew—and she did it well.
It doesn’t matter anyway. The emperor is the emperor, and the government will never stop backing him.
But those babies, those kids.
The civilians on the ship.
The cyborgs.
The people of Bionus who didn’t want to join the empire.
Camila swallowed hard at the injustice. Helplessness overwhelmed her. Not wanting to think about any of this awful stuff a moment longer, she jumped up from her chair and strode to the beverage cooling unit. She yanked it open expecting to find a bottle of her favorite white wine waiting, but it was empty.
Refusing to admit that she had already guzzled the other two bottles since embarking, she decided to go down to the wine cellar attached to the galley and get another. If she asked for one from the staff, Captain Jantus would come down and give her another one of his I’m-not-your-dad-but-I-care talks. She really didn’t think she could stomach hearing what a disappointing, rotten shit she was from a man she had always respected and trusted.
The chime of an incoming message startled Camila as she crossed her cabin. She glanced up and addressed the system. “Accept message.”
“Camila?” Captain Jantus called her name.
She glanced around guiltily. Did he know where she was headed? “Yes?”
“We’ve received an emergency ping. I’d like to divert course to intercept and offer aid,” the captain explained.
Camila grimaced at the thought of having her ship overrun with strangers if the emergency beacon led to a crippled ship. “Can we just let the space patrol know about the beacon location?”
There was a pause before the captain answered, and she winced, knowing full well he was thinking what a spoiled little brat she was. “No, Miss Camila, we cannot. It’s a ship filled with women and children.”
His disappointment stabbed at her like a knife, and she felt immediately embarrassed. Face flushed, she said, “Fine. Whatever. Stop or don’t. It’s your choice.”
“As you say, miss.”
Wanting a drink even more after that short back-and-forth, she left her cabin without even bothering with shoes. There was no direct access between her deck and the kitchen areas so she used her private elevator to travel down two decks where she could change to a staff elevator. Somewhere along her trip, the ship slowed and slipped into idle, hovering in place.
For such a short trip, the yacht had only a skeleton crew on board. Even so, Camila was surprised when the galley was completely empty. There wasn’t even a janitor mopping up the floors. She suspected the captain had called all hands on deck to help with the possible rescue.
On her way to the wine cellar, she passed through the ship’s pantry and paused. Her gaze scanned the shelves packed with provisions. There was one sectioned area where where Almita, the ship’s cook, kept all of Camila’s favorite things. Knowing Almita’s big heart, the old cook would offer up the entire kitchen to any children that were rescued. Selfishness flared, and Camila grabbed an armful of the expensive sweets and treats. A box of crispy cookie fries. A tin of blueberry cream candy bites. A package of tropical fruit rope. A container of rich, velvety chocolate frosting.
Realizing she wouldn’t be able to carry everything, she glanced around the pantry and found a box half-filled with packages of instant soup. She transferred the packages to an empty space on the nearest shelf and used the box for the snacks and treats she planned to hoard in her room. With that handled, she made her way to the wine cellar and selected two bottles.
Lush, she silently chastised and put the extra bottle back.
With her box of provisions packed, she hefted it up and left the galley. She stepped into the staff elevator and used her elbow to tap the touchscreen. The elevator started to crawl slowly upward, but suddenly stopped, jostling her hard enough that she nearly dropped the box. “What the hell?”
Before she could select the diagnostics tab on the screen, the elevator unexpectedly shot upward. She screamed and dropped the box, desperately grabbing at the slick walls of the elevator car. The elevator lurched to a stop, the metal popping and squealing, and she fell forward onto her knees. “Sweet fucking nebula!”
Her shouted curse escaped the elevator as the doors opened faster than usual. The lighting overhead shifted from bright white to red, flashing quickly seven times before sliding back to white. “Please evacuate the elevator. Proceed to the nearest safe room. Please evacuate the elevator. Proceed to the nearest safe room.”
The repeating instructions sent a chill down her spine. There was only one reason the captain would send that alert across the ship. Space pirates!
Unsure what floor she was on, Camila crawled out of the stalled elevator and regained her balance. She glanced to the right, finding the deck number plaque. She was one level below the bridge and four levels below her own much more secure cabin where she had a weapon available. The staff stairwell at the end of the hall could take her to the bridge or her cabin. Did she dare try to make it?
There was no other choice. This floor had no secure rooms to hide. Her entire life, she had been warned about space pirates. Camila and her sisters were the perfect hostages for pirates. The ransoms they could command were exorbitant. Though, Camila did wonder if her father would actually pay.
She hurried down the long corridor, desperate to reach the stairwell. Even in the grip of panic, she had a fleeting moment of smugness. When this was over, she was giving the captain the biggest I-told-you-so. Obviously, the emergency beacon had been a ruse. If they had done what she wanted, none of this would have happened.
Camila skidded to a stop as the stairwell door was flung open with a bang. The tallest man she had ever seen stepped through the door and into the corridor. Her terrified gaze moved from his red hair to the shocking brand on his face. She recoiled in fear.
The red-haired giant zeroed in on her, and she stumbled backward. This wasn’t any regular run-of-the-mill criminal or space pirate. He was a cyborg. A cyborg who probably had a really big bone to pick with the emperor and his ilk.
People like her father.
People like me.
Oh, shit.
