by Lyn Gala
“Max useful.” Xander tightened his tentacles around Max’s wrist.
Max opened his mouth and then closed it again. He would call Xander a manipulative little shit, but the kid was learning English too quickly for Max to take the risk. “Max is a pilot. I'm a fighter pilot. I fly jets and shoot down any enemy.” Max brought Xander up to eye level, and Xander reached for Max's neck.
“Max translates.” He shifted over to Max’s shoulder and pressed his body against Max’s head. He’d grown so much that he was about the same size.
Max sighed. These days he was far more of a translator than a pilot. Watching a few of the videos that featured pilot technology convinced Max he could never take up his old profession. On those videos, pilots had eight or ten tentacles all working different instruments at once. Max was a few tentacles short. Back home, the computer assisted with much of the flight. “Yes, I do.” And when the translation job was done and Xander had asked for his last cuddle, Max would have to figure out something else to do.
Rick would let him stay. Max knew that. If anything, Rick seemed a little awed by the idea that Max liked him, and boy didn’t that say something about Rick’s self-esteem. However, Max needed to work. Even as buying a ticket home became a less likely possibility, Max refused to sit on his ass and let Rick support him.
“Down!” Xander said.
“I tell you what, why don’t we go swimming together?” Max asked.
“Yes. Max swim with brothers,” Xander replied enthusiastically. He was more verbal in his own language, but he liked to use English. Max stood and started unbuttoning his shirt. Xander was holding onto his neck so tightly, Max had to tug to get the fabric out from under him.
Max dropped his clothes over his desk chair and headed for the pool in his underwear. James could have cared less. He was far too involved in a technical explanation for the internal function of some sort of engine. It was the sort of information that the engineers back home would have given their firstborn to access, but Max didn't understand enough about the basics of alien engineering to even understand what was happening on the screen as blue smoke worked its way through what looked like a series of soda straws.
He would far rather swim with the children than watch that. He sank into the water, and Xander separated so that he swam next to Max's head. “What did you learn today?” Max asked.
Rick had said the children needed time to discuss their new understandings of the world in order to solidify information. That was why his people had three to five children at a time. The oldest would become a mentor of sorts for the others. Rick had then pointed out that Max had taken over as the eldest brother in the group.
Max could handle being their big brother. There was no way Max would call Rick daddy, though. That would fuck with his head more than he could handle.
At least his sex drive had returned. Max could indulge in a few “bunk” moments. Unfortunately, his imagination kept returning to Rick and all those tentacles. Even reenacting his favorite porn with himself in the starring role was hit or miss these days.
Luckily, Rick understood that Max was too emotionally involved to share any sort of sexual entertainment with him. Max couldn't enjoy cheap sex with a man who he had seen grieve over the near death of his son, one who had driven himself into the ground trying to make sure Xander survived, and who was kind to an alien stranger. Cheap sex was for men he didn’t plan to see again, and who could be pricks, for all he knew. Rick was too kind and too insecure for any of that. If Max had sex with Rick, he would fall madly and deeply in stupid. So Max's only hope lay in avoiding any sort of physical entanglements.
When Xander started to talk, Max was pulled out of his own musings, and he had to mentally rewind the conversation before remembering that he had asked what Xander had learned during his time on the video display.
“Pajekh children are born with three sets of genitals, and when they reach maturity, they can choose which two of the three to keep, and the third is reabsorbed into their body.” Xander sounded freakily excited by the idea. Max suspected their little munchkin was odd.
“Oh. Well that’s special.” Sometimes aliens were just so damn alien. “Are Pajekh nice people?”
Xander shot ahead, dove underwater and then he bobbed back to the surface. “They are all kinds of different people. Nice and mean and smart and dumb. They build big spaceships. The moon of home planet could fit in the belly of their spaceship.”
“That's impressive.” Either Rick's people had a small moon, or the Pajekh built damn big ships. Either was possible. A series of strange thunks went through the ceiling above them. “Your daddy is working on something.” Max told Xander. Kohei stopped swimming the figure eights around the two filtration islands and darted their way. Max held his hands out so that his arms formed a circle and Kohei swam right for it. He shot through the center before catching Max's arm with his tentacles. His whole body swung around three-sixty so that he was eye to eye with his little brother.
“Do human children choose gender?” Xander asked.
Well that was a loaded question. “Not most of them.” Max paused to unwrap Kohei’s tentacle from around his neck. “Some humans are born with a little bit of each of the two genders. Sometimes their parents pick for them and sometimes their parents leave all the parts there until they're old enough to pick for themselves.”
Kohei wrapped a new tentacle around Max’s neck and pulled so he floated right in front of Max’s face. “How can parents pick for them? Individuals have autonomy over their own bodies.”
And that was another field of landmines. To hell with needing a linguist, Max needed some sort of diplomat up here, or maybe a sociologist. He was not qualified to answer the children's questions. His brother had never been quite so annoying. He’d asked stupid and innocuous questions like why the sky was blue or why didn’t airplanes fall down. Max could answer one of those two.
The pool room door opened, and Max swiveled to greet Rick, thrilled at having another adult to rescue him from overly inquisitive children. Instead two strange aliens slid in, both pointing what appeared to be weapons straight at Max.
“Surrender!” one cried. The computer translated its chittering voice, but Max didn’t need any help translating the way the smaller one raised his weapon. Fuck.
Chapter Fourteen
The two invaders stood near the door. They were four or five feet tall with oddly square bellies and muscular tentacle legs at each of the four corners. They had orangish, pyramid shaped torsos, and rounded edges made them look more like carved pieces of abstract art than living creatures. Each had a pair of plate-sized eyes on either side of the “front” rounded edge. Below their eyes, they wore a wide, metallic belt with hooks and pouches.
A fringe of shorter tentacles hung along the bottom of the torso, and each alien pointed a triangle-shaped instrument at Max. Considering that Max could see down the length of a barrel, he was guessing that was a weapon. A big-ass weapon the aliens held in three tentacles.
The invaders shouted at Max, but only two words translated, “Come” followed shortly thereafter by “Death.” Despite the lack of common vocabulary, Max understood their intentions. He raised his hands to show they were empty, and hoped that was a universal gesture. He did not want to die in his underwear in an alien pool.
Actually, he didn't want to die, period. The specific details of his death would be the shit cherry on the fuck sundae. “I'm coming.” Max inched closer. He pulled Xander's tentacles away from his arm and tried to push him back.
The invaders chattered again, and this time the translator offered, “Bring” and “also.”
“They’re children,” Max objected. “Offspring. They're not part of this.” Max didn't point out that he wasn't part of it either, but if he got the assholes to leave the kids alone, he would put that in the victory column. He was just grateful that James was nowhere in sight. Never before had Max been so appreciative of that boy’s habit of wandering.
&nbs
p; “Bring” and “also” came out in another round of chittering. The translator then spit out the words “Never” and “children,” which they reinforced by adding “Born adult.”
Rick had insisted that the people’s offspring were cognitively mature from birth, but Max could not call these three adults. They were too small and too fucking naïve to deal with armed assholes. “Offspring can't leave the water. Children water. Adults land,” Max argued. Kohei tried to pull himself around to the front of Max, but Max pushed the boy behind him.
“All come or die.” That came out clearly and with a minimum of untranslated chitter. Max was not in a position to fight. He had no weapons, no clothing, and no idea what sort of conflict Rick had gotten them into. Was this an alien species that Rick's species had gone to war against, or had they been boarded by the intergalactic police?
Max had no idea. Well, he had some idea. He liked to think that no version of a police force would execute children for refusing to come. That put these invaders on his enemies-to-exterminate list.
But he had no way to kill them right now, so his best bet for survival and the survival of the children lay in cooperating. The boys were still clinging to him, so Max waded into the shallows. Walking toward an armed alien while wearing nothing but wet underwear was not a comfortable feeling. Not even a little. “Let me get my clothing.” Max pointed at the chair.
The short invader chittered.
“Clothing.” Max crossed his arms across his shoulders and mimicked shivering. Sadly, he had been playing this translating game long enough that he knew which ideas were easiest to translate. “Humans require covers. Humans cold.”
Maybe these invaders had some sort of sympathy, because one of them walked over to the chair and used a small dangling tentacle to grab the clothing. He pulled it up toward what would, on Rick, be his mouth and flipped them around as though searching them. Max didn’t even have a knife, so after a few minutes, he dropped them. Before Max could retrieve them, the alien kicked the shirt and pants in Max’s direction. The hem of the pants landed in the water.
“Warm,” it told Max.
“Yeah. Gee, thanks.” Hopefully aliens didn’t understand sarcasm, but given how few words were getting through the translation matrix, Max figured he was safe. He pulled his pants on over his wet underwear. This would not be warm. But he had a bigger concern.
He could not let the children’s skin dry. Split skin could lead to them bleeding out. But these invaders did not seem to care. So Max dunked his shirt in the pool before he slipped his arms through the sleeves. It took a little poking and prodding, but he finally convinced the children to shift onto his back, so that they were between him and the wet shirt.
That would give them some protection. Kohei’s long tentacles came up and curled around Max's neck. When Max tried to button his shirt, he discovered his uniform shirt did not fit two children under it. He tied the shirt tails around his waist instead, which left him bare chested.
Warm spots pressed against Max’s back as the children pressed close. The small Xander spot slipped down near Max’s waist where the shirt was tied, but Kohei stayed close to Max’s neck, his tentacles shivering. The two invaders watched him, their symmetrical eyes locked on him, which was good because James was behind them. James’s tentacles quivered a bit as he stood in the crevice by the environmental control machine. “Stay,” Max said. The two invaders looked at him, and the taller one said, “Come.” Clearly he assumed Max had been talking to him.
Max had to keep their attention off the far corner. “I come. Offspring stay.” The shorter invader stepped forward and raised his gun.
“All come,” Max agreed.
The taller alien turned and walked out of the pool room, and Max followed. Max's skin was already turning to goose flesh. The children had warm torsos, just like their father, so Max’s back and neck were warm, but cold water ran down the crack of his ass and made his pants stick to his legs. Max suspected his brain was focusing on that because he was trying to avoid thinking too much about the armed invader walking behind him. If he fired, that weapon would hit the boys first. Fear knotted his stomach.
The invaders led Max up toward a part of the ship that Max thought of as Rick's territory. Back when Max had first started exploring the ship, these doors had all been locked, and at one point, he had seen Rick coming out of one of them. Behind Rick, Max had spotted a complicated computer panel that was four or five times larger than the one Max used for his translations. He had mentally labeled this the control level and had not tried coming back.
The large invader stopped in front of a door and pressed a short tentacle to the panel beside it. The door slid apart, showing a fairly large group of computer panels hung on the seven walls. None of the other rooms were hexagons, and this room was larger than any space other than the pool. Max had to assume this was an important room. An eight-sided couch dominated the center of the room and a large glass column rose from the center of that couch. The glass contained lightning, sparks that flowed from one pin-sized bit of metal embedded in the glass to the next.
Rick stood near the couch, so pale that his green appeared gray, and his tentacles were all curled into miserable little balls. Someone had thrown his hat into the corner, and Max knew the someone in question was not Rick. That man loved his tool hat.
“Rick, are you okay?” Max asked. He moved toward Rick, but an invader caught Max’s arm.
“Max!” Rick’s voice was unnaturally loud and belchy. “Query. Offspring?”
Max touched the tentacle still wrapped around his neck. “Kohei and Xander are right here. They're fine, and I'm doing my best to keep them wet.”
The invader spoke so quickly that it was all one long chirping sound. The translator picked up a few random words including “work” and “die” and “offspring” and “aubergine.”
Aubergine. Max had programmed that word himself, but he could not figure out why an alien would be using it, and he didn't like the implication of the other words the invaders were using. The flunky who had grabbed Max let go and backed toward his boss, but Max stayed put. He had to defuse the situation, but the problem was that he didn’t understand it.
“Human. I offer compensation for surrogate care. Offspring,” Rick said with a few extra belches standing in for words Max had not yet provided an English translation for. Unsurprisingly, Max had not covered hostage situations in his translation work.
Something in the translation matrix changed because coherent statements came out of the translator as the invader leader chittered. “Complete work or offspring die.”
Rick quivered. “Conditional. I complete work. You kill offspring. Kill Max. Kill me.” That was a little more direct and confrontational than Max would have preferred, but he couldn’t fault Rick’s logic.
“Conditional,” the boss countered him. “You fail work. I torture offspring. I torture Max. I kill you.”
As choices went, that did not sound promising. The threat made Rick shrink down on himself so that he was no taller than the invaders. Max had never seen Rick’s leg tentacle curl in stress, not even when they had thought Xander might die. But right now it was wavy and quivering. This situation was about to go from a hostage negotiation to a fucking bloodbath.
“Rick.” Max said the name loud enough to demand Rick’s attention. Rick quivered more. “Do the work,” Max said firmly. The first rule of capture was to avoid death. Well, the first rule was to be prepared to give one’s life in defense of country and the second rule was to continue to fight as long as one had the means to resist. However, the third rule for prisoners of war was to make every effort to escape, and escape required them to avoid catching a case of sudden death.
“Intelligent,” the leader offered. Max didn't give a shit what that asshole thought. Anyone willing to kill children in order to extort someone and exploit their terror deserved to die, and Max would love to be the one to make that happen.
Chapter Fifteen
The leader alien stayed with Rick, and Max inherited one of the flunkies, who shooed him into the hall with a waving of tentacles and a few decisive air jabs of the triangular gun. One of the edges of the pyramid shape appeared to be the alien’s front, based on its eyes being on either side of that particular ridgeline, and he held the gun on the left side of that center line.
Max had no idea how that helped, but he did try to stay closer to the right side of the alien, since the invader would have to shoot around his own body. His fringe of tool tentacles was shorter than the four leg tentacles, so he might hesitate to shoot across his own edge... nose... protuberance. It appeared an illogical body design.
“Go,” the asshole ordered, with a leg wave to the left when they reached the first intersection. Max didn’t argue because this little shit didn’t have the power to negotiate. The boss had stayed with Rick, but Max had no way to help him. Hopefully, they would leave if Rick cooperated, but Max wasn’t counting on that. He was counting on these guys putting him in a room with Rick. Then he could get more information and start planning.
The flunky ordered Max into a lift. The lifts were designed for one person, so Max had a moment of irrational hope that the guard would send him down before following. Max had explored every bit of the ship outside the command level, so he only needed a few minutes to lose himself in the labyrinth. The alien squeezed into the cramped space, his damn gun pressing into Max’s stomach. Max braced himself against the corner walls and refused to give the asshole any more space. Rick might insist the offspring were tough, but Max would not lean against them, not when his damn shirt was already drying.
“You’re safe, Xander. You’re good, Kohei,” Max said, but he kept eye contact with the alien. If these assholes saw the offspring as children, maybe they would be more inclined to show mercy. “Don’t worry, kids. I’ll protect you.”
“Cold,” Xander said in a small voice.