by Lyn Gala
“I didn’t set the statement to truth.”
“Ah.” That made sense. “Clarify. Correction. You thought I lied.” Max leaned back against the exam table.
“Yes. Lied. I thought you lied.” Rick stretched out his tentacles and then squiggled them back up again.
Max sighed. “I didn’t. I worked hard to become a fighter pilot. I don’t like to kill, but I trained to protect my home.”
“You are a warrior,” Rick repeated.
This was getting a little obsessive, even for Rick. “Query. Why do you care?”
Rick slid into the room and curled a tentacle around the nearest support leg on the exam table. “I hired a warrior to surrogate offspring for compensation.” Rick trumpeted and curled two tentacles.
“I accepted compensation to surrogate. I love Kohei and James and Xander.”
“Query. Clarify love.”
This was territory Max didn’t know how to navigate. He wanted the children healthy and successful. He felt pride when they handled a situation with cool efficiency, and Max didn’t normally internalize others’ performance. He felt all that and more for Rick. The children were... well... children. But Rick was sweet and caring and not a child. And Max had no idea how to explain any of the various forms of love he felt for the family. He said something that Rick would understand. “I would kill for them.”
Rick trumpeted again. It was a noise Max hadn’t heard often. Rick then added, “You did kill for them.”
“Yep. Hopefully the pirates won’t come back.”
“Unintelligent energy shapes,” Rick said with an unhappy belch.
“Energy shape? Clarify.” The translator had missed that one.
Rick touched the computer and a screen appeared. The general display switched to the curved and expanded alien version of a periodic table. Rick chose an element on the lower right side and selected it. A structure with dozens of electrons zipping around the central nucleus appeared and then a yellowish brown rock appeared, and then an image of the refined metal. It had crystalized into squares that dully reflected the light. Luckily chemistry had always been Max’s favorite class.
“Polonium. They’re stupid polonium-headed pirates,” Max translated. He would have gone for poopy heads. He would not associate the pirates with something as deadly as polonium, not when an unarmed prisoner could take out their entire boarding party. But insults didn’t seem to translate well.
“Stupid polonium-headed pirates,” Rick echoed. “Query. You are warrior and you accepted compensation for surrogacy.”
Max assumed that Rick wanted to know why. “Can we have this discussion after I pee?” he asked. He hoped that would send Rick running. He avoided bodily fluids as a general rule. However, Rick simply watched. Silently. Slightly creepily.
With a sigh, Max headed for the recycling unit. He pulled out the low drawer-like trough and peed. The pain made him hiss and he had a touch of pink in with the yellow. He had taken a body blow, but if something important had ruptured or cracked, he would have felt worse.
“Query. Have you cleaned up the bodies?” Max asked.
“I discarded without cleaning. Query. Do humans have rituals for cleaning dead before removal?”
Max huffed. “Yeah, we do.”
“Regrets. I did not clean first,” Rick said. “Apologies.”
“Clarify. We clean our dead. We discard the dead of enemies. I was asking if the ship was clean.”
“The ship is clean. I removed personal shielding and weapons. I can bring you items salvaged from enemy you killed.”
Max nodded. He assumed that was a peace offering, but there was something he wanted more—a subject he was stuck on as firmly as Rick seemed stuck on the idea that Max was a warrior. Once he finished peeing and breathing through the pain, Max folded the piss trough back into the wall and opened the hatch to the sink. “Query. Why were the invaders here?”
“To invade.”
Max imagined the “no-duh” tone Rick was probably using in his own language. After he finished washing his hands, Max pushed the sink back into the wall and headed for the door. This shirt had alien blood and viscera or something on it, and it was torn in several places. He’d talked the computer into producing one spare and now he hoped he could convince the computer to fabricate another one because he’d gotten used to having a spare on washing day. “I need to change shirts,” Max said as he passed Rick.
Part of him expected Rick to leave and go back to his control room. He wasn’t willing to talk to Max about the invaders, and Max wasn’t sure what he wanted to know about Max’s past as a service member. Instead, Rick followed him down the corridor. However, he kept a far greater distance than Max was used to.
Rick was a pretty touchy-feely alien. Even after the offspring had been born, he’d tended to swim or walk within tentacle reach. More than once, he’d rested one of his light green tentacles on Max’s shoulder, allowing the red tip to dangle. Rick had explained that thousands of years ago, his people had used the red color to attract prey, but now it was decorative. He’d explained that he was quite proud of how much red he had on his tentacles. Apparently, Rick was a real looker.
Once in his quarters, Max left the door open as an invitation. Instead of coming all the way into the small room, Rick hovered near the door. The change in Rick’s behavior bothered Max more than he would have expected. He hoped that he hadn’t ended their easy friendship by showing how willing he was to kill. Max didn’t regret what he had done; he’d saved the children. But he did wish he could have found another method.
“Query. You are a warrior and you accepted compensation for surrogate.”
Max sighed. Rick was going to stay stuck on that point until they had this discussion. Rick had a quick fantasy of siccing Major Jones on him. When some idiot airman had commented on her being a kickass pilot yet taking time off for her kid’s birthday party, she had verbally striped the skin from his hide. That woman had been five-foot-three of muscle and attitude. “I am a warrior. I am surrogate father for your offspring. I am both.”
Rick blurbled. That was a new noise and Max tentatively labelled it confusion. The other alternatives were distress or fear, but Max never wanted Rick to feel that around him. However, the sudden distance between them suggested Rick’s comfort level had dropped.
Max pulled the edge of the bunk down and sat on it. The bunks were mere inches off the floor, so the position required Max to look up at Rick. “I am far from my people. I don’t know the strengths or weaknesses of any race. I do not know weapons or security systems. I cannot hire myself out as a warrior. The two offers for compensation were surrogate or translation. You compensated more.”
“Impossible. Fee for translation of warrior species is valuable.”
“Yeah, apparently not,” Max said with a shrug. And ironically, he had ended up doing the translation work anyway, at least on Rick’s computer. “I would have needed to work for centuries to earn enough money to get back to my planet of birth.”
Rick whistled. “They offer you compensation for child’s language.”
“I think the translation matrix failed. I am not a child.”
Rick whistled and settled down farther so he was eye to eye with Max, although he stayed well out of tentacle reach. “Our offspring are not children. They lack experience, but they have cognitive ability.”
“Query. Clarify. Are you using child to mean lacking in cognitive ability?”
Rick rotated his body to consider Max out of a new set of eyes. “Yes.”
That did explain why Rick would get so twitchy when Max called the offspring children. “Clarify. Child means offspring when they are small.”
“Clarify. Child means offspring who lack cognitive ability or species who lacks cognitive ability.”
Max rubbed a hand over his face. He had screwed up that bit of translation. “Clarify. Child is only for offspring.”
“Query. The word for those who lack cognitive ability.”
Max thought about that for a moment. He was tempted to shoot off at the mouth and say idiot, but then if Rick’s people ever reached Earth, they’d call some baby an idiot, and that would not end well. “If the individual will grow into cognitive ability later, they are immature. If they will never grow into cognitive ability we would say they are...” Max mentally sorted through his many, many choices. “Simple,” he settled on. “Unless we don’t like them. Then we call them a moron.”
“Earth children are immature. Query. Correct or not?”
“Correct,” Max said. “Query, were they offering me payment based on my language being simple?”
“They offered compensation for language of morons.”
Max blinked. They invaded his fucking world and then assumed his people lacked cognitive abilities? That was illogical and just plain rude. “They visited my world. They saw jets and cities and civilizations based on cognitive abilities. They had to know that humans are intelligent creatures.”
“Their logic is...” Rick’s last word was lost in translation, but Max could fill in the blanks. “If you as individual could not solve problems, then you as individual is a moron.”
“I want to go back and punch Heetayu.” Max leaned back, bracing himself on his elbows as he lounged. Maybe he was being a little obvious—making himself look less dangerous—but he needed Rick to see nothing had changed. He wasn’t kidding about Heetayu, though. Those bastards had invaded his world, and when he had been confused and panicked, they assumed that made him a moron. They deserved an ass kicking.
“I would rather overcharge them for gathering of new translation matrix.” Rick moved to the side of the bunk and rested several tentacles on the edge of it. “They will pay for translation of language with warriors. Not all species produce warriors.”
“Few humans are warriors,” Max said. Some days he questioned his own suitability. Back on Earth, he had been ashamed of how grateful he was that the advent of drones meant that he was less likely to pull the trigger on an enemy. He hadn’t wanted to take a life. He had, but he hadn’t wanted to. And his shame came from his relief that some poor drone pilot sitting at a computer in the Midwest would have to push the button, and that poor schmuck wouldn’t even get combat pay for doing it.
“You are one,” Rick said. He lowered himself by curling his leg tentacle into a neat coil on the floor. “Warriors do not respect me.”
Max blew out a long breath. That was a rather broad and depressing statement, one that broke his heart a little. When those invaders had held Rick at gunpoint, Max had been nearly homicidal. He hadn’t understood how much he cared about Rick until that point, and now Rick questioned whether Max respected him at all.
“I respect you,” Max said slowly so the translator would get every word. He needed Rick to understand this. “I respect how you exhausted yourself caring for Xander. You are an incredible father. I respect your skills that allow you to afford such a nice ship. However you earn your compensation, you are effective. I respect you for being so honest and having so much patience with me. When I got here, I didn’t understand much, and you helped me with the computer and how to use the bathroom and how to open doors. At one point I thought you didn’t care about me, that you only cared about the offspring I carried, and it hurt,” Max confessed. He remembered sitting in the access shafts crying. Not his finest moment.
“Clarify pain.”
Max closed his eyes. “I hurt because I do like you. I respect you. I thought you liked me, but then when I found out about the surrogacy, I thought I was wrong. I thought you didn’t like me. It turns out, you thought I was a liar.” Max laughed. His feelings were one big tangled mess. He didn’t know what he felt. He did know Rick’s touchy-feely period hadn’t ended when Max had given birth. Rick had been just as quick to touch or to share conversation after the offspring were born. And now Rick wouldn’t come close.
Max wondered if this was what the soldiers from Vietnam had felt like when they’d come home and had been called baby killers. Rick acted as if Max was suddenly someone different—someone dangerous and unstable.
“I was wrong. You are not lying. You are a warrior,” Rick said. He reached out as if he wanted to touch Max, but then he pulled his tentacle back.
Max grimaced. He hated this new distance between them, but he would never regret protecting the family. Now that he had nearly lost them, Max could admit to himself that he felt like these people were his family just as much as Pete and his parents were.
Rick rotated his whole body to watch Max out of a different set of eyes.
Maybe it was time to change the subject. Max leaned forward. “Query. What did invaders hope to take?”
“Query. Reason for knowing.” Rick had his paranoia dialed up to ten, and his reluctance didn’t make Max feel any more warm or fuzzy.
“Answer. I want to know what to defend. I want to know who else might come.”
Rick inched closer, but the silence was pretty telling. He didn’t want to tell Max what the bad guys wanted.
“Query,” Max asked, “do you have something illegal on this ship? Something dangerous?”
“No,” Rick said immediately. “No additional ships will come. I move ship farther from developed planets. Too expensive to pursuit. You do not need to be a warrior.”
Max was starting to form a few hypotheses. “I am always a warrior. I can’t stop being one, even when I have offspring in me. I will always protect you and the offspring.”
Rick’s tentacles twitched. “You protected offspring. Humans have imperative with surrogate offspring.” He had left himself out of that list of people Max would protect. And actually, he had reduced all of Max’s efforts to a biological imperative. Max had issues with that.
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, appreciating again how good the burn cream was. He didn’t have a single blister—just some pink, healing skin. “Some humans fight to protect others. Some humans hurt others. Most humans protect offspring. Some don’t.” Max thought about the assistant football coach who had been arrested for child porn. He’d had a long conversation with his brother, and he remembered the fear that the man might have touched Petey. “Humans rarely prey on offspring,” Max added after a pause. Rick’s tentacles all curled up, which was fair because that’s how Max felt about pedophiles. “Query. Are all your people the same?”
“No,” Rick said slowly. “But no my people are warriors. We hunt from secrecy.”
“Some of my people do that too,” Max said. “This is not about humans. This is about me. I would always protect you. I would always protect the offspring.” As Max said the words, he felt a tightening in his chest at the idea of someone threatening his adopted family. In the past, Rick had always been the one to initiate touch, so Max took a risk. He held one of Rick’s tentacles. “The invaders deserved to die because they would have hurt the family. I only killed them because of that.”
Rick curled his tentacle around Max’s wrist. “Clarify. Family is a genetically related grouping of individuals.”
“Correction.” Max squeezed Rick’s tentacle. “Family is grouping of individuals committed to helping each other without seeking compensation.” Maybe that wasn’t the most linguistically accurate definition, but it described how Max felt about the people on this ship.
Rick tightened his hold on Max’s wrist. “Invaders want me. I create numbers that computers use.”
“Clarify. You’re a programmer,” Max said.
“Programmer,” Rick echoed. “I computer programmer for instructions that...” At this point the translator completely broke down, but Max could think of a number of different endings for that sentence. Rick could be involved in cybersecurity or weapons development or any number of other valuable fields. Hell, maybe Max was sitting in a room with the alien version of Tony Stark. Max considered Rick and the shy way he held Max’s wrist and inched closer bit by bit.
Maybe not. Rick was far too shy to be Iron Man.
; Rick continued. “I thought ship safe. I thought I hidden my work.”
Max didn’t need to understand the various belches to hear the guilt. “I should have killed the last guy,” Max said.
Rick blasted a whale song. “Better this way,” Rick said. “He will tell others that humans are terror-causing and violent to defend offspring. Scare universe. They treat you like moron, so they deserve terror.”
Max laughed. “You have a mean streak.”
Rick twirled slowly. “No streak. Just mean.”
Max’s laughter grew so wild that he collapsed back onto his bunk. That was the sort of meanness Max could get behind.
Chapter Twenty
Max walked into the pool room, trying to ignore the sudden distance between himself and Rick. Rick followed several steps behind, and until this moment, Max had not realized how he had grown used to having Rick hovering at his elbow all the time, even after the offspring were born. Sure, there was a period where they spent almost no time together because they were taking shifts with Xander. At most one of them had sat at the edge of the pool and talked.
But when Xander had gotten large enough to push them away and swim on his own, they had fallen back into their old patterns. When Max had given up on translations for the day, he would get into the pool with the kids, and Rick would show up shortly after.
The minute Max saw Kohei spinning in circles, the tightness in his chest eased. He stripped off his shirt as he walked toward the pool. “Hey kids, looking good,” he called out.
Three translator voices using three different pitches all cried out, “Max!”
Max slipped out of his pants so that he could get in the water, but James was already out and reaching for him. “Max Father, I told them. I told them how you...” At that point, the computer failed and all Max heard was whale song. He needed to spend some time with the translation matrix trying to define the more violent end of the universe. Maybe the work would distract him from the guilt of exposing James to that sort of brutality.