With the girls back in for the night, I released Brando and Coro to go have some fun.
It had been a while since they'd had a date night, but I still had to spend a moment reassuring Brando that we wouldn't need visible muscle on call. Taj was plenty of deterrent all on his own and I was pretty confident that Sin wouldn't be as gentle if she had to beat Piotr's ass a second time, so if he showed up again then he deserved whatever he got.
Technically, I got a liberty too, but we always seemed to run into some trouble at Elladan and I could never relax enough to actually enjoy my break. We were a little more loosey-goosey about port stays than other merchant vessels and didn't maintain a port watch. Elladan made me question that choice sometimes. So whenever we docked here, I turned my liberty into small staycation where I ordered takeout delivered to the lock and hung around my cabin so I could catch up on my reading and listen for the call buzzer.
Fucking Piotr was only the most recent in a string of chronic issues we ran into at Elladan. Before him, there was a cargo inspector stationed here that had it out for us. He was convinced we were drug runners and searched the Cassandra more than once, looking for contraband. He finally got reassigned, but the Elaine started having trouble with Piotr.
At least Sin was there when he struck.
Once I got the lock buttoned up again, I went to go check on my crew. Sin's biometrics in the feed said she'd gone straight to sleep, but Elaine was still awake.
She was sitting up on her bunk with the door open when I found her. Amanda was there too with her helmet open and her shoulder hitched against the door frame. She noted my approach and grinned at me. "Did you come to get the after action report too?" she asked, quietly.
"I was more interested in hearing how she ran into Piotr again after he'd been evicted from the station after last time," I replied.
Elaine shot both of us a half-hearted glare and moved the chilled water bottle she'd been holding against one cheek over to the other. I was worried for a second that she was nursing a bruise, but then I realized she was trying to cool down a blush.
Oh, maybe Amanda was onto something.
"Fucking Piotr is back?" Amanda snarled. She, along with the rest of us, hated that guy.
"He's in lockup now," I reassured her. "There was a reason that I wasn't worried about the girls going out on their own."
"I'm seeing that," Elaine sighed and let her head thump against the wall behind her. She covered her face with her hands and let them slide down her cheeks. Her face was deep red when her hands cleared her cheeks. "Guys, I might be in real trouble this ti… Amanda quit laughing at me, this is serious!!"
Amanda did not stop laughing, but at least she kept her volume down so the conversation didn't spill out into the corridor as she pointed at Elaine and snickered.
"Taj owes me twenty credits. I said when you finally fell then you'd go down fast. So that's your type? This explains so much about all the guys I've had to turn away at the lock."
Elaine threw a cushion at her head.
Amanda caught the cushion in one hand and gestured at me. "Jack, tell her!"
"You do remember that I'm your boss, right?" I asked. I wasn't sure either of them had remembered that in the moment.
"You won't be our boss again until we pull out," Amanda shot back with a pfft noise that I, sadly, probably deserved. I gave up and settled in for the gossip.
This is what came of being friendly with your crew. The camaraderie got you through the long hauls, but you did have to tolerate a certain amount of friendly insubordination.
I ignored my XO and looked at Elaine. "Seriously, though. You're alright? I know he escalates fast."
She nodded and rubbed the back of her neck. "No, he barely managed to get a hand on me before it was all over."
"Well, at least you got to experience being rescued by a cute spacer lady," Amanda teased her. "That's how I landed Karae."
Elaine gave her a flat look, but she'd also relaxed a bit and uncurled her legs out from under herself so she could stretch out again. "Doc tells it the other way around. She says she gassed those muggers before one of them shivved you."
"It was a team effort," Amanda said dismissively. Then she smiled a little softer. "So, trouble, huh? I take it your date went well—although I guess not that well if you're in here and she's in here cabin."
"It was nice," Elaine shot back and started to describe where they'd gone and what they'd done.
As I listened, I started to notice a problem. Unfortunately for Elaine, Amanda noticed it too and she had no qualms about saying so.
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"So, you did a bunch of errands and had a friendly drink afterwards," she summarized. "I am not seeing any 'date' in this date as you've described it."
"Of course it wa…" Elaine started to defend herself, but I saw her face fall as she realized she had no defense. "I-I asked if we could go out again next port stay and she agreed when I said it was a date."
Amanda and I both let the silence hang and Elaine sunk down onto her mattress.
"Noooo!" she groaned. She planted her face in her pillow before peeking out at me. "Jack, what do I do?"
I scratched the back of my neck. "Why are you asking me? Amanda is just as married as I am."
"Yeah!" Amanda agreed in mock offense. "I have the civil partnership forms to prove it! Why don't you want my advice?"
Elaine glared. "I've seen the nudes you send to Doc. They're xrays. I don't deny that worked for you, but I need normal person advice."
Boy, was she looking in the wrong place if that was the case.
Amanda snorted and crossed her arms over her chest. "I take those because I learned about my quarry, which is what you should do if you're serious about this. Learn what she likes. Give it to her. Wear a low cut top while you do it. It's not hard."
I frowned at Amanda, noting her armor suit. I think the only time I'd seen her out of it in the past quarter was during the all-hands when I asked the crew about curse marks.
"You wore a low cut top for Doc?" Elaine said, echoing my thoughts.
Amanda rolled her eyes. "No. That's what the nudes were for."
I sighed and tried to keep it from sounding like it came from as deep within my soul as it had. Someone was going to have to give real advice and, against all odds, it seemed that person was going to have to be me.
At least I had insider info to share.
"Just be up front about your interest," I advised Elaine. "Courage is sexy. Saying what you mean without playing guessing games is your best bet. Sin seems like a very straightforward and professional person. Just because we're all paired up doesn't mean she's used to that as the normal."
Amanda's mouth twisted and her gaze slid towards Elaine. "If we're being adults now, then just bear in mind she might not be interested in a relationship—now or ever. She reminds me of some of my battalion sisters who lost their interest in that kind of thing after a bad mission. Trauma can affect the human body in strange ways and my gut says she's got some."
Elaine and I both kept our mouths shut as Amanda talked. She didn't discuss her past prior to joining us on Cassandra. I knew she was a former gray spacer like Coro and I'd guessed that she came from one of the militaristic colonies, but not which one. She never pressed me about my past or why I didn't like being around large bodies of water. In return, I didn't ask questions about where she came from after the first time I saw her lock down about it.
This was like getting a peek behind the curtain of her persona and I almost wanted to hold my breath, afraid that making a sound would break the moment.
Amanda caught us staring and jerked her gaze away before sealing her helmet and her expression away from us. "Go carefully, alright?"
"I will," Elaine promised quietly.
Watching this made me really grateful for my history with Taj. We'd just hooked up a bunch in school, lying both to ourselves and each other that it was a casual fling despite the fact that we were basically monogamous. Then we got screaming drunk after graduation, right before we were scheduled to ship out on different vessels for our first tours, and woke up married the morning. The Commandant was furious that he had to rework our contracts at the last second because it was against the Merchant Academy's regulations to separate married couples and the first tour was technically a school-sponsored internship. Knowing what I know now about command, we were probably far from the only people he'd had to do that for, but I'd been mortified at the time—although not mortified enough to seek an annulment.
Despite our beginning, we'd been together ever since.
Taj was hanging out on the deck at the comms station when I found him, nursing a coffee and listening in on the open feed between ships. He looked up with a smile as I put my hand on his shoulder and kissed the top of his head.
"How are the girls?" he asked.
I gave him the highlights, "Elaine is having a crisis, Amanda isn't helping, and Sin went to sleep."
"Good, good," he said with a nod. "What's the crisis?"
"She thought she planned a romantic date and just realized she planned a friend date."
"Oof."
"Oof, indeed," I agreed and sat on his lap to lean my side against his chest. "Any interesting gossip?"
"Nothing better than the gossip we already have at home," Taj chuckled as he slipped an arm around my waist to hold me in place. He sobered. "I asked a friend in station security to look into how Piotr knew to find Elaine when she was deliberately avoiding familiar places. They think he had a trace put on her."
My face twisted in a scowl. "He better not have," I growled.
If there was one thing no independent merchant captain could tolerate, it was any member of his crew being traced. That meant scalpers could potentially trace our cargos and swoop in to snipe them or ruin our relationships with vendors. I paid a lot of money to keep us out of the transit databases and some pissant stalker station rat had somehow managed to circumvent that? Staying un-trackable didn't just protect our bottom line, it protected us from piracy.
Contrary to what the entertainment feed imagined, pirates didn't just lurk around waiting for a cargo hauler to drop into their open mouths. They did their research. They identified their prey through networking and surveillance before they ever moved their ship to intercept.
"Sounds like it's just an alert to let him know when she's on station," Taj explained "He was spotted coming up the space elevator within a few hours of us docking. They think he had spyware installed in a security camera outside a salon her family patronizes. Then he paid someone to trace her to the bar where she and Sin went for drinks."
Well, that was something at least. We still needed to get our asses out of this system. Piotr wasn't smart enough to have accomplished this on his own. That meant he'd hired someone to do it and information brokers never sold their intel to just one customer.
I still got out my tablet and shot off a message to Evander. I was too pissed to use my implant to access the feed.
"Babe, what are you doing?"
"Asking our business partner for a life-ruin," I growled. I probably should have done this before, but I'd thought that getting him sent down to the planet to rot with the squid trawlers who formed the sole industry of Elladan's host planet was punishment enough. Elaine hadn't wanted a fuss and I wasn't inclined to make waves, but now it was personal.
"Hoo boy…" Taj said, but he also didn't try to stop me.
Evander sent back a wordless acknowledgement.
Hopefully, I wouldn't regret this once I'd calmed down, but I suspected that I wouldn't