Page 8 of Under Control

Some of Espinosa’s attitude deflated, which gave Alex no small amount of glee. He smirked when she looked at him. And she’d thought Alex was wrong about the container. Served her right. Tracht might sometimes pull Alex around on a leash in front of the entire crew, but Alex still knew Tracht better than she did.

“Of course. Yes. Sorry to have wasted your time, Captain,” Espinosa said, her lips pressed tightly together.

“Not a problem. I know you have the ship’s best interests in mind. But if that’s all?”

Espinosa gave a sharp nod. “Yes. I’ll get back to my other duties.” She hesitated for one moment, then headed out. Alex caught her scowling the moment her back was turned to Tracht, and he suppressed a laugh.

As soon as the door closed behind her, Alex said, “That was pretty great.” His own grin slipped from his face when he noticed Tracht’s frown.

“No. No, that was not great.” Tracht rubbed his eyes. “She didn’t look convinced. Now I’m going to have to find ways of keeping her busy, but if I give her too much work, she’ll end up getting suspicious about that.”

“What are you talking about? She totally bought that! She got super annoyed that I was right and she was wrong.”

“She was annoyed because you were gloating like a ten-year-old. Don’t antagonize her anymore.” Tracht made a frustrated sound. “This entire trip is going to be a complete headache.”

===

Once they slipped into the comm-free zone, Tracht relaxed a bit. He’d been half expecting Espinosa to try to contact Paris & Lyons about the container. Even worse, she could have attempted to contact the authorities on Cadmus or Atalanta. He had a two-month reprieve before he had to worry about that particular aspect again.

He did find extra tasks for Espinosa to do, just in case. Some of the tasks were simply things he’d delegated to Alex; she was happy enough about getting the duties returned to her, and Alex’s minor restlessness was an acceptable trade-off. Other tasks were things that could probably be put off, but there wasn’t any harm in doing them now either.

The security footage showed Espinosa in the cargo hold more often than necessary, but so far she’d limited herself to simply staring at the container or knocking on its side. He didn’t know what she expected to gain from doing that.

For the time being, Tracht would just have to wait and see.

Espinosa wasn’t the only crew issue though. He’d stopped by the medbay to see about arranging a new scene with Singh and had caught her watching a vid on her tablet: a vid of Fontaine and Nadia, both of them smiling and waving. Normally that would have put Singh in a good mood, but her expression was sour.

Against his best judgment, Tracht asked Singh what was wrong. That had led to a good ten minutes of her complaining about her relationship drama. Tracht had to tread carefully here, because as little as he actually cared, he didn’t want Singh to leave his crew. It was hard enough finding a doctor who was just as happy to degrade bondservants as he was, let alone one who was willing to be out in space for so many months at a time.

“It’s just… have you seen Nadia lately? Charles gave her another piercing. And he didn’t even ask me this time,” Singh whined. Maybe that was being a bit unfair; her whining didn’t have the same tone as Alex’s whining. But either way, her complaining grated.

“Does it matter?” Tracht shifted in the uncomfortable chair. He needed to upgrade these if he was going to spend a lot of time sitting in the medbay.

“She’s starting to look like a pincushion.”

Tracht snorted. “Starting to?”

“I see your point, but there’s a line between tasteful, artistic piercings, and a sewing project gone wrong.”

“The sewing project has less holes in it than your Nadia.”

She gave a startled laugh. “Exactly what I’m saying. Anyway, I’m more upset that he pierced her without asking me. We could have made a thing of it. Set up the camera so I could see the whole event and participate. Instead, they simply sent me a picture with ‘surprise!’ in the mail subject line.”

“Why does it bother you? Piercing has always been more Dr. Fontaine’s thing than yours. And you’ve participated in plenty of kink without them on this ship.” Tracht also knew for a fact that she wasn’t sending any video footage back to them, since he monitored all large outgoing messages from their servers. It wouldn’t prevent Singh from recording footage and delivering the recordings manually once they were on Atalanta, but he suspected she wasn’t bothering.

“It’s the principle of the matter,” Singh said. “How would you feel if I pulled Alex into a scene without you present?”

“You would need to find yourself a new job on the spot,” Tracht said without hesitation. “However, you and I don’t have the same arrangement that you and Dr. Fontaine do. How does your joint ownership over Nadia work anyway?”

“We’re paying her debt out of our shared account. She obeys both of us, although… I guess this is my own fault. Getting a bondservant seemed like such a great idea at the time. Since I was away so often, and it was hard to keep a sub in that situation. We’d tried a few, and my presence or absence always ended up causing trouble.”

“But Nadia can’t leave.”

Singh grimaced as she said, “She can’t leave. Yet.”

They were finally getting to the real crux of the matter. “So her contract is over soon?”

“Yes. It’ll be paid off during our return to Cadmus. And I… Captain, I haven’t done to Nadia what you’ve done to Alex. She could leave. What if she wants to leave?”

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