by Lyn Gala
That was four more enemy in addition to the leader. One yellow and one bluish-green dot were still in the “control” room.
The medical corridor was the closest, so that was Max’s first stop. Time to figure out the weapon. He urged James to move, so James curled his strong walking tentacle around his neck as Max dashed for the service shaft.
With every step, he expected to hear an alien voice shout or a weapon discharge or an alarm sound. So far the invaders were as tactically oblivious as Rick. Once he was far enough away from the filtration room that any noise he made would draw invaders away from the children, Max pulled out the triangular weapon and studied the short part of the triangle where the aliens had held it.
It had long grooves, and Max ran his finger along the indentations. He felt the slightest seam. He pointed the weapon away from the filtration room and pressed it. Nothing happened.
All the work on the translation computer had taught Max to seek creative work-arounds, so he switched to using his thumbnail. He ran a finger forward over the seam and then backward. He feared the weapon had a security lock, but then he drew a circle over the seam. The last-ditch effort paid off when energy gathered along the sides of the triangle and then discharged with enough energy to send the deck plates exploding up into the air before they clattered back to the floor in a twisted heap of rubble.
“Win,” James said. He waved two long, slender tentacles.
James might be right. They might win. However, Max had to keep in mind that the other side had the same weapons, so Max had to play this smart. Time to move fast.
Chapter Seventeen
There was so much tactical information that Max wished he could ask for. However, he had never programmed certain words into the translator. He would frustrate James if he asked whether the weapon he had scavenged could breach the ship’s hull. Max could only try to avoid weapons fire unless necessary, and then make sure that the energy hit the invaders and not the ship. Or at least not to hit the ship again. He hoped Rick would forgive him for the mess he'd made out of the decking.
Max stopped by one of the access vents set high into the wall and used the indented handhold to lift himself high enough to pry the cover off. He had done this dozens of times when he’d been exploring, but never with little tentacles in the way.
“Careful with tentacles,” Max said.
“Careful with enemy,” James replied. Either James had a wicked sense of humor or the translator was glitchy. It was a little hard to know which. Max gave James a little push to get him to slide back farther so he wouldn't interfere with arm movements. James shifted. That allowed Max to haul himself up into the service shaft before he started shimmying down to the level below.
He had hoped that he would be able to locate the enemy from within the shaft, but he couldn't hear anyone. For a time, Max considered doubling back and having James check the internal scanners again, but they didn’t have time. Then in a wild tangent, his brain conjured an image of an ex-boyfriend.
At one point he’d had a brief but torrid affair with a man who wrote children’s books. Bobby had always said he loved that for children, cliché didn't exist. An author could have the most clichéd, stereotypical villain, yet children would soak it all up because it was new to them. At the time, Max had thought that Bobby was a little too cynical to write children's literature.
But Bobby's words haunted Max as crawled back up the vent shaft.
“Max win enemy, query?” James asked.
“Watch and learn, young padawan. Watch and learn.” Max had snagged several small chunks of metal from the exploded decking, and now he took the two smallest and dropped them down the shaft. He ran like a demon for the next shaft. This trick was so old that even cartoons considered it too clichéd to work. This was Wile E. Coyote territory. Max levered himself back up into the next ventilation shaft and shimmied his way down a level.
Sure enough, the chattering of agitated guards filled the air. Max found a horizontal shaft intersecting his original one to rest and reposition himself so that he could get his head down and peek through the grate. The two invaders were coming back down the corridor. One had a piece of metal clutched in a small fringe tentacle, and they chittered at each other without looking around. Hopefully they were stupid enough to investigate without reporting anything by radio.
Max slid out of the horizontal space. His shoulders ached from the awkward position in the narrow vertical shaft. It required him to brace himself like freaking Spider-Man, and James made that even more awkward by resting his weight against Max’s head. A few extra shoulder muscles would have come in handy, but Max was Air Force. He went out of his way to avoid the sort of PT the masochistic Marines indulged in.
Despite his body's complaints, Max worked his way back up to another horizontal shaft and sat on the edge of it, watching the ventilation grate below him. He knew from experience that if he landed on the grate, it would open cleanly and let him drop to the floor below. He knew that, but he suspected that any alien walking under the grate might be a little surprised to find a human falling out of thin air. At least that was the plan.
The chittering came closer and Max braced himself on the sides of the shaft. At the same time, James tightened his leg tentacle a little too much. Max tapped the tentacle, and James loosened it immediately.
Then the two invaders walked under the ventilation shaft. Max pulled the maintenance hook out of his waistband and dropped down. His feet slammed the grate open with a reverberating metallic clang. Before the first invader even turned, Max lunged forward and drove the maintenance hook up into the invader’s underbelly.
The enemy gave a chattering cry, and then screamed like a cat in heat. When Max tried to rip the hook back out, it caught on something. Rather than struggle with injured alien number one, Max abandoned his first weapon and turned to deal with the second invader.
The alien might not have anticipated an attack, but it was already moving fast. Alien two had his triangle weapon halfway out of what appeared to be a holster. Max pulled his own weapon and circled his thumb on the trigger even as the other alien was scuttling backwards.
Energy burst from the gun and slammed into the alien so hard that its body split above its wide disco belt. A fraction of a second later, the heat of the energy backwash blasted Max. He flinched away, raising his hands to protect his face and James. Burnt hair smell and the sensation of a cold breeze across his hands suggested Max had gotten burned badly.
When Max opened his eyes, the back of his hands and arms were lobster-red. The skin was damaged, but it appeared to be either a severe first-degree or mild second-degree. In an ideal world, Max would’ve gone to find something to cool the flesh. However, that was not possible.
“Query, James, healthy?” Max asked as he turned back to alien number one, the alien who didn't have his guts blasted across the corridor.
“Heathy, healthy,” James said.
Then he was doing better than alien number one. The impaled invader was making soft chirping noises of distress, or at least Max assumed it was distress. But any sympathy vanished when it reached toward the dropped weapon. Not willing to risk another close encounter with an energy discharge, Max grabbed the bottom of the maintenance hook and yanked.
The hook came free with a whoosh of fluids, and the alien slowly sank to the floor. When its head began to indent like a sinkhole, Max grabbed the second alien gun and fled the scene. As he ran, he tucked both triangle weapons into his waistband, but he dropped the maintenance hook because it was too slick with the viscera for him to risk using it again. He’d have to grab another.
“Max hurts.” James said with an unhappy burp.
“Enemy hurt more,” Max replied. He wished he had the vocabulary to comfort James or explain the situation, but he didn't. They reached a ventilation shaft, and Max climbed up to grab the edge and pop it open. As he was scrambling into the narrow space, he hit his arm on the edge of the opening.
“God damn mother
fucking son of a mother-fucking bitch!” The pain nearly made him fall back out, but he gripped the cover with one hand and the edge of the latching mechanism with the other. After a couple of breaths, he pulled himself up into the shaft and started climbing to the nearest horizontal shaft.
“That is why you do not use unfamiliar weapons,” Max whispered as he crawled. He didn't think that he could pull that trick off again, not when climbing required him to brace himself with his arms.
With every enemy he took out, he took more damage to himself. If these aliens had reinforcements on a ship nearby, he was so very screwed. Max wasn't some bad-ass Ranger. He wasn't even a Marine. He was a fucking zoomie. He wasn't supposed to be the one engaging in hand-to-hand combat with alien invaders.
“Max hurts,” James said again, this time without any additional burps.
“Max hurts,” he agreed. There just wasn't anything he could do about it. He needed to make a pit stop to get James wet, and he needed to kill the rest of the invaders before his injuries could slow him down too much. “Where is the next console? We need to check for enemy.” The idea of having to fight again made Max teeter between feeling homicidal and despairing.
James pointed up with a free tentacle, and Max wanted to groan. He had to climb again. Never one to postpone the inevitable, especially when postponement would give the injured tissue more time to swell and cause more pain, Max started climbing.
A quick check on the computer revealed that the next two aliens were still near the empty storage hold. If Max could get them both to stand in front of the doors and open them, he could shoot them from the far side of the hold, but he didn’t know the weapon’s accuracy. Worse, if he missed, he would have precious few options for cover in that area of the ship.
James touched one end of the hall. “I take weapon here.”
For a second, his horror was so intense that Max couldn’t find words. He wanted to scream and rail, but he knew how the children reacted to any suggestion that they needed help, particularly James. He was the most contrary, self-reliant, stubborn little octopus in creation. “I don’t want you to kill.”
“Query. Reason.” James sounded offended. Maybe Max was projecting because the translator’s voices didn’t seem to convey tone.
“You are young. I don’t want the young to kill.” Max wished he could explain better because the end of James’s tentacles were curling in frustration. Xander had done that a lot when he’d been too young to follow his brothers around the pool.
“I am cognitively mature.”
“You are young and you have not had many experiences. You should not have to remember killing.”
“You killed.”
The words were so simple, but Max felt them like a fist. He had killed. He’d shot down an enemy plane back when he’d been stationed in the Middle East for a few months, and now he’d used his hand-to-hand training to take the lives of three aliens who had as much right to live as any other sentient creature. Max didn’t regret his actions, but he regretted that he’d been forced to take them. He knew that fine line would cost him a lot of sleep in the near future.
“I have more experiences with life, with protecting life and loving people. That makes the pain a little less.”
“Pain? Query. Physical pain?”
Right now Max was in physical pain and relying on adrenaline to control the worst of it, so he didn’t have time for this conversation, but James would do something stupid if Max couldn’t convince him to stay out of the fight. “No. Pain in the soul, in the emotions. All life has value, and ending a life means ending that value.”
“Clarify. They would kill you.” Maybe James assumed Max was too stupid to understand that.
“Yes. That is why I kill them. I will not allow them to kill either of us. But I don’t want you to kill. You need time to learn to value life before taking it.”
James tightened his leg tentacle around Max’s neck before loosening it again. Maybe he understood. Max decided to push his luck. If he had to take a big risk, he wanted James safe. Max pointed to the map. “Stay here. Wait.”
Max knew he was in trouble the minute James’s tentacles curled. “No. I go with Max. Max not alone.”
“I move faster alone. I don't have to worry about hitting you or you holding too tight,” Max explained.
“I hold loosely. I go with Max.” Despite his words, he tightened his leg tentacle.
“I move more quickly if I'm not worrying about you. I need you safe. Wait here.” Max touched a guest room on the opposite side of the ship from the storage space where the two remaining aliens were standing guard. It wasn't the best solution in the world since Max still didn't know how the aliens had gotten onto the ship or whether they had reinforcements ready to board. He was flying in the dark, and unlike when he literally flew in the dark with his fighter jet, he didn't have any instruments or an onboard computer feeding him the data he needed to avoid slamming into the side of a mountain.
“No.”
Max closed his eyes. His best shot at killing quickly and without risking any more physical damage to himself required a frontal assault. If he threw small chunks of broken decking into the storage room, maybe even threw it hard enough to hit the door, they would open the door. After all, these invaders had an issue with their curiosity outstripping their tactical good sense.
If Max waited three or four minutes to give the guards time to get into the storage area, he could then open his door and attack. It wasn't a surefire plan, but it was better than his plan for taking out the previous two aliens had been.
James’s stubborn streak showed up. “I go with.”
“I fight better alone.” Guilt gnawed on Max when James’s tentacles turned into little curly fries that reminded Max of how upset Rick had been when they thought they might lose Xander.
“I want you safe. I protect you. I can't put you in danger.”
“I am cognitively mature.”
“I wouldn’t care if you were at the end of your lifespan. I would still want to protect you.”
James hesitated before asking, “Query. Reason.”
Max could've offered any number of explanations. He was trained to defend civilians. He had a bias toward protecting the young. It was a rather unreasonable bias in this part of the universe, but he wasn't ready to let go of his human tendency to shield younger members of sentient races.
But in the end, there was only one reason that mattered. He tangled his fingers with James’s tentacles. Xander had always loved the gesture, but James and Kohei were so full of energy that they rarely sat still long enough to embrace Max's hand. But this time James reached out with as many tentacles as he could fit around Max's fingers.
“I gave birth to you. You grew in my body. That makes me your father. It makes me responsible for seeing that you are safe and happy. I will kill every bastard on this ship before I will let them touch you. But I can't do something that puts you in danger. I need you safe.”
James tightened his tentacles around Max's hand. “Max goes into more danger.”
James wasn't stupid, and Max wasn't going to lie to him. “Yes. I'm going to try to get these two guards to enter the storage area, then I'm going to open this door and fire on them.” Max touched the screen to show where he planned on carrying out his attack.
The access passage he would need to use was a vertical shaft with no intersections anywhere close to that deck. If Max had to flee, if the aliens got to that door fast enough, Max would have nowhere to hide. That access shaft was so long that Max had never found the bottom before abandoning his explorations.
“Danger,” James said with a little burping noise added at the end.
Maybe it was some sad and lonely piece of his psychology needing to feel loved, but Max imagined that James was distraught. “Yes. That's why you need to stay here.”
James pulled his tentacles away from the screen. He tightened his hold on Max's hand before he spoke. “Conditional. If Max is hurt, invaders co
me for me and brothers and other father.”
Bands of fear tightened around Max's chest so much so that he couldn't speak, but he did nod.
James touched the corridor door next to the one where the invaders were guarding. “I need me here. I wait for Max. Conditional. Max fails. I protect. I am cognitively mature.”
Max closed his eyes and swallowed. He didn't want to think of James having to pull the trigger. James was his hyperactive little boy, his explorer. He wanted James to grow up and chase skirts and, like his namesake, find peaceful solutions.
However, Max couldn't deny the real danger that he might fail. If that happened, he couldn't leave the rest with no defense at all. Max had seen how fast the children absorbed new ideas, and unfortunately, James had seen him fight. Of everyone on the ship, James was probably best positioned to defend the family.
Max hated it.
Max curled his arm around James's body and leaned in, so that he could rest his forehead against a section of James's oversized head. He was surprised when James allowed the touch. Of the three children, he had always been the least tactile and affectionate. After a second, James pushed him away.
Max tugged on James’s leg tentacle, urging him to uncurl it. “You have to protect yourself. Don't let them hurt you,” Max said. He pulled on the hand he had intertwined with James’s tentacles and drew the second weapon. When he handed it to James, James curled several tentacles around it. “Don't fire if you're too close to them.”
“I watch. I learn.”
Max nodded and then put James down on the floor. They were close enough to the storage room that James would be able to get himself there. But Max was going to have to do some climbing to reach the access point to the shaft he needed. “Be careful,” he told his little explorer.
James made a soft whale sound and then said, “Don't be dead.”
That was the best advice Max had ever received.