by Lyn Gala
Max took offense at her tone. “What do you do?”
“Random alien one, random alien two, random alien three.” She shrugged. “And then there’s the big alien with the weird neck who hired me to translate technical specifications into Earth math. And since your translation program made my last job obsolete, getting this job seemed like a godsend.”
Max’s heart sank. “Technical translator?”
Dee glanced at the front guard, but they were marching toward the city center. They might have been short, but they were all legs under a round elf-body, so they could keep up a good pace. And they didn’t seem to care that their two prisoners were comparing stories. They sucked as police officers.
Dee edged closer and lowered her voice. “They showed me a lot of technical theories and practical applications and asked me to explain the math in human terms. Some of it made absolutely no sense at all, some of it violated every theory of physics that I know, and some of it made sense if I squinted and tilted my head to the right three degrees.”
Oh fuck. Max had underestimated Carrington. At least he assumed Carrington had arranged all this. If that was his hypothesis, he needed to test it. “Did they have you translate specifications for a weapon?”
“Yeah. That one I could almost understand,” Dee said. “It focused a beam of energy. You totally would have been into it because it had science fiction written all over it.”
There was a compliment in there somewhere, but Max was too freaked-out to care. “What else were you translating?” Max’s guts were turning to stone. “Were there any programs related to navigation?”
“Shields, navigational programs, energy usage in engines, energy dispersal patterns on what might be some sort of tac vest, all sorts of things.” She shrugged as if she hadn’t confirmed Max’s worst fears. “Like I said, most of it didn't make any sense, and if the autopilot they showed me is accurate, I have no idea why their ships don't slam straight into the nearest port because I do not understand how they are compensating for the gravitational mass of nearby objects. But then, we aren't all dead, so their ships have to be compensating somehow.” She laughed, but the sound had a hard edge.
Max had stopped listening somewhere around the time she’d said navigational program. That bitch. Max had named her entirely too accurately. She had hired someone to prove that Max was not the author of all of the programs he was offering. It was the only thing that made any sense. But the problem was, that didn't make a lot of sense. Why the hell did she care whether or not he wrote the program? She was running an angle, but he couldn't figure out how bringing in law enforcers helped advance her position.
And he couldn’t figure out how any of this explained Dee’s actions. “Translating technical specifications doesn't seem like a good reason to yell at me to run,” Max said. “Why did you think I was in danger?”
“I wouldn't say danger,” Dee said.
Max gave her an incredulous look. “You came bolting out of a side corridor door and screamed at me to run. That sounds like danger, and as someone who was stationed very briefly in a war zone, I know what danger sounds like.”
“No one was shooting or threatening to shoot.” Dee grimaced. “I might have overreacted, but I had a gut feeling.”
Given that they were under guard and walking toward the city center like the universe’s slowest, saddest parade, her gut was in good working order.
“An alien I was working with showed me a new program, and it had weird-ass mathematical symbols. When I asked the computer to clarify them, I got back essentially gobbledygook. I told them the math didn’t exist on Earth.”
Max already knew that much. Even when Rick tried to explain in simple terms, all Max ever got was belches and whale song and aspersions about human intelligence in general, which Rick would then immediately follow up by repeatedly saying that Max was a not-moron, even if his species couldn’t find space with a dozen tentacles. “That doesn’t explain why you believed I was in danger.”
“One of the aliens turned to another, and said, ‘I knew it. Go tell him before the human leaves the ship.’”
Well, that ended any lingering hope that this was a big misunderstanding fueled by alien confusion over why Max had tried running. Now he needed to figure out how to minimize the legal liability.
He hoped aliens had some version of Miranda rights. After all, they did have some sense of justice as evidenced by the fact that they had given him a social worker of sorts. But that sense of justice was limited. Dee had been on the same ship with him, and they had never seen each other. That had been a dick move on the crew’s part. Serious dick move, and Dee had suffered for that way more than Max. It wasn’t lost on him that she wasn’t even trying to name aliens or have relationships with individuals.
And then there was the whole shady habit of discriminating against Hidden ones. The universe had no problem screwing people over on a monumental scale. And since Max allied himself with Hidden ones, he suspected some of the perceived cooties were going to land on him. That was the way it worked in racist societies. Straight people could love the Queer Eye guys and tell people to sashay away without any repercussions, but gay guys were effeminate or flaming or shoving their sexuality in other people’s faces if they did the same damn things. Sentient life sucked. The longer Max lived, the more he joined team Thanos.
“Don't say anything to anyone until we figure out what the legal recourse is,” Max whispered as he spotted uniformed aliens standing outside a building that had impractical spires and fantastical angles.
Her eyebrows went up. “Legal recourse?” She leaned closer. “What the hell are you involved with?”
“Nothing unethical.” He couldn't claim nothing illegal since he didn’t know the wider universe’s views on running cons. If they were on Earth, nothing he had done would be illegal. Of course, given that Nathan Ford would have approved of these schemes, there was an implication that he was skirting the edges of the law a bit. He was about to find out how this part of the universe viewed scofflaws.
“Great,” Dee muttered sarcastically.
The guards ushered them up a set of shallow steps toward a metallic blue building. Max couldn’t have agreed with her more.
Chapter Eighteen
Max paced the length of the narrow room where he'd been placed. Compared to a spaceship, it was downright palatial; however, he still didn't have room to do more than pace twelve steps in one direction before he had to turn and pace the same twelve steps back.
A narrow slot window gave him a view of most of the sprawling city, but they were up high enough that Max couldn’t see any detail. Even the ships were tiny models fit only for grasshoppers and ants, that was how far up he was. The misty clouds were a beauty filter over the entire sprawling metropolis.
Cables ran from one tower to another, and small cars zipped along. Max suspected they were as much to support the great heights of the inner towers as to provide transportation for people who didn't feel like going down a mile to the ground to walk a few hundred feet and then go another mile up into the air. He might be exaggerating with a mile, but it felt like it.
On the good side, he had finally seen what he thought was alien mass transit. There were concentric rings that vanished out of the narrow line of sight the window offered. At each of those rings, the nature of the city changed. Max's tower prison faced the direction of the spaceport, which was outside those rings.
In fact, the outermost ring was broken, leaving a gap for the spaceport and crowded marketplace of traders. Maybe the rest of the city didn't want to make it too easy for the trash that came in with the ships to get to their core community.
And maybe Max was putting human motives onto aliens, something which never ended well. For example, he had assumed that Carrington would want access to the various programs Max could sell her. So he had assumed it would be counterproductive for her to report to the authorities that his programs were beyond the scope of human capability. Sure, he thought blackm
ail was possible, but not this counterproductive involvement of the authorities when the program hadn’t sold yet. Or maybe Carrington and Bundy were in it together and they were going to steal the program.
Max sat on the edge of the world’s narrowest bunk and dropped his head into his hands. He was so screwed. The only way into the cell was an elevator, there were no door controls or access panels, and even if his captors had left the wiring out for him to poke around in, he didn’t know how to hot wire an alien door. The window was equally worthless as an escape route.
It meant he was stuck. All he could do was figure out a plan to minimize the danger to the rest of his family. And he would do that as soon as he knew what the danger was. He now knew why Hannibal Smith and Nate Ford avoided personal relationships. Putting others in danger was so much harder than walking into it himself. Well that and the writers had a bad habit of killing all the women who got too close to a lead in a male-dominated series, but Max was fairly sure that had more to do with the general suckiness of American culture than the inherent danger of running a con and being in love.
The door set into the long wall of his cell beeped, and Max turned toward it. Either aliens weren’t worried about elevator breakdowns, or they didn't give a shit if prisoners were stranded during a fire. Then again, given how high up they were, having access to a stairway wouldn't be much of an improvement.
The door opened and Max only realized he had dropped into a fighting stance when he let his hands fall to his sides. Kohei walked through the door. Kohei. Yep, those were Kohei’s giant freckles and his streaks of mint-green.
“What are you doing here?”
“I come to see you, Max Father,” Kohei said. Oh thank god, the fancy translator was turned on.
“Is the family safe?”
“Stupid James wants to shoot stupid people.”
“Well don’t let him!” Fuck. Max was going to give that idiot a tongue-lashing to be the end of all parental tongue-lashings if he even tried taking on an entire fucking planet of enemies.
“Rick Father locked controls and put all weapons away. Xander called him stupid.”
“Maybe don’t call him ‘stupid’ to his face,” Max suggested. He knew when his dad called his ideas dumb, he tended to double down on whatever dumb-ass plan he was working on.
Kohei came the rest of the way into the room and the door closed. With one of the kids in the middle, Max couldn’t even rush the door. Kohei continued. “I promised to listen if stupid people don’t stop seeking to advance their own stupidity.”
Max snorted. The problem was that the aliens weren’t actually stupid. They hadn’t fallen for Max’s con. “What are they charging me with?” Once Max knew he could start to figure out how to jack himself out of this hole, or he could resign himself to it.
“Max Father, they do not accuse you of any crime.”
“Really? This feels a lot like a prison cell.” Max gestured to the room as a whole.
“I have seen Earth prison cells. This does not appear equivalent.” Kohei slid toward the window. “This has much better view.”
Max's children were annoyingly logical. “Yes, but this also has a locked door.”
“Most doors are locked against people walking where walking is unwise.”
Max frowned. Maybe he wasn’t as screwed as he’d thought. But... “They brought me here using guards with guns.”
Kohei’s tentacles curled up a bit, and they should. Max did not appreciate being threatened like that. “Did you kill guards?” Kohei asked.
Max raised his eyebrows. “That's the sort of question your Rick Father might ask, and your Rick Father is paranoid about my past as a warrior.” Kohei’s tentacles relaxed, and Max shook his head. “Just because I know how to fight doesn't mean I fight everyone. Besides, I was outnumbered.”
“You were outnumbered by Hunters, and you killed,” Kohei said.
Max had to admit that had there not been so many guards he might have considered trying to fight his way through. He probably would've gotten his ass kicked, but he would've tried. “I had the advantage being on my home turf, and they didn’t give me a choice. I tried cooperating, and they were going to kill us anyway.”
Kohei’s tentacles twitched. Hard. “I believe authorities have concern over reports that humans are warriors, so they send many escorts in case humans make troubles.”
At least they respected his ability to defend himself. That was more respect than most Marines gave him. “Why were they escorting us? You keep saying I'm not under arrest, but this feels like an arrest. And where is Dee? They separated us.”
“I am ignorant of location of Dee, but I understand the reason for the escorting. The authorities have accused Rick Father of manipulating a moron species in order to avoid sanction penalty on his navigation program. They also accuse Rick Father of being the source of weapon modification and armor that Max Father sold to others.”
“Oh fuck.”
Kohei’s tentacles snapped up into coils. “Translator translated oddly,” he said with a bugle.
It took Max a half second to realize that the computer must have translated the word fuck literally. That was a glitch he had fixed in the translator on the ship, but for all its improvements, the trading translator needed fine-tuning. “I meant that only as a general expression of dismay.”
Kohei’s tentacles uncurled. “Dismay is appropriate, Max Father. Rick Father is distraught.”
“Fuck.” Max sank onto the narrow cot. “What do the authorities want to do?” If they touched one finger on Rick’s smallest tentacle, Max was going to demonstrate the term “homicidal rage.”
“They wish to take Rick Father’s everything.” Kohei moved closer and brushed a tentacle across Max’s arm. Max caught the tentacle and used it to pull Kohei close enough to hug. Kohei’s tentacles wound around Max’s neck and then Kohei was pulling hard enough that Max almost got dragged to the floor. He braced himself as Kohei hauled his bulk up into Max’s lap and then curled his walking tentacle around Max’s waist. Xander was the only one who had ever wanted to sit in Max’s lap before, but if Max’s mother had been there, he would have had the same urge.
He wanted to curl up in someone’s lap while they figured this out. However, he was the parent, and now he had to pretend to have the situation under control when it was one giant FUBAR. He held Kohei and rocked the way he had when Xander had been small... all of three or four month ago. They grew up so fast.
“I need information. We have to save the family, and that means I need you to tell me everything. Why do they think they have a right to take the ship? What will the authorities do? What will Rick do? Is there any way to get a lawyer?”
Kohei kept his leg tentacle tight around Max’s waist. “They believe Rick Father will flee. They hope to take the ship before he can.”
“They think he will flee?” When Kohei didn’t respond, Max realized that he thought Max was simply repeating information. “Query, why do they think Rick Father will flee?”
“Every instinct tells Rick Father and Xander and James and Kohei to flee. Hide. Preserve as many tentacles as possible from predators. But Max Father is here, and that is like having walking tentacle caught by big predator and James is lashing tentacles and Rick Father is doing math and I am here and Xander is making words that are not words.”
Max leaned back so he could see at least a couple of Kohei’s eyes. “I need to speak with an authority. I want the right to argue my case that Rick Father did nothing wrong. Humans believe in the right to defend ourselves with words.”
“I will call for...” And once again, Max was treated to untranslated whale-song. He had to assume from the context that Kohei knew what Max was asking for.
“Then, I need you to give Rick Father a message.”
Kohei loosened his hold enough that he could rotate so a larger eye was centered on Max.
“If the authorities don’t listen, if they keep trying to blame Rick and take his ship away, I wa
nt you to tell him to run. Hide. Do not wait for me or give the authorities anything to save me. If I know that any of you are suffering because of me, I will be far more hurt than anything the authorities can do to me.”
“But Max Father—”
“Nope. If I can get free, I will come to the Hidden Planet, but you tell Rick Father he has to take care of himself and you kids. That is priority number one. I can take care of myself.”
“Max Father!” Kohei bugled and all his tentacles tightened until they were almost choking Max. Max held on, wishing he could hug all his kids, desperately wishing he could hold Rick. However, his feelings didn’t matter as much as protecting his family.
“You tell Rick Father that. Promise me you will give him that message exactly.”
“I no wish to give such promise.” Any tentacle not wrapped around Max was curled into a tight ball. Max could imagine primitive Hidden ones on their home world, hiding in some crevasse when a predator came too near.
“Promise me,” Max demanded. “I will hurt more if I see you hurt. You can only protect me by protecting yourself.”
After a long silence, Kohei said, “I hate promise, but I give it.”
“I hate it, too, kiddo,” Max said, and he hugged Kohei as tightly as he dared. “Me too, but we do what’s right for the family.”
Sometimes doing right sucked. Max wished the universe would stop trying to teach him that same lesson.
Chapter Nineteen
Max didn’t know what he expected from an alien version of a competency hearing, but this wasn’t it. The short wall opposite his narrow window was one huge screen, so it looked as if Max was in a cubby on the side of a large room. A few people glanced his way, so Max assumed the camera was projecting his image as well. He gave them credit for security. This setup gave Max zero opportunities to break out.