Suddenly all of his guilt over turning Rick's medical exam into a sexual encounter vanished. If Rick could run around shoving his offspring into other people, Max could be a pervert who turned a medical exam into a kinky fantasy that made him reconsider his position on tentacles. He was okay with that. He was just not okay with sex leading to pregnancy. That was something straight people had to deal with, not him.
“Query. Surrogate for compensation?” Rick's tentacles were still all little balls of unhappy wiggly fingers.
“Well clearly I am,” Max said dryly. This would inspire wild porn if anyone on Earth found out. “I can't say I'm happy. How soon are they going to come out?”
Rick hesitated. “Query. Remove offspring?”
Hope blossomed. “You can remove the offspring?”
Rick stared at him.
With a frustrated sigh, Max rephrased his question. “Query. Can you remove offspring?”
“Yes.”
That was rather literal. Max felt like he was having a conversation with his ninth grade English teacher who refused to let anyone use the bathroom unless they said, may I instead of can I.
“Query. Will you remove offspring?”
For several minutes, Rick did not answer. That was Max's first indication that something was wrong. Usually, Rick enjoyed conversations, even when he did not understand what Max was saying. He was a laid-back guy that way. Max frowned. Wait. Rick wasn't laid-back. He was overprotective. The fucker had been keeping track of Max because Max was pregnant with his children. Max had a moment where his brain reassembled itself, and when it was done, he liked Rick a little bit less.
“Answer. I can,” Rick finally said.
He could, but he wasn't offering to. Max was not a stupid man, and he had made a few connections.
He sat up. “Query. Can offspring come out?”
Rick turned to the hatch that Max associated with medical equipment. “Answer. Yes. No damage to Max.” Rick had retreated to a formality and simplicity in language that the translator could handle. No temporary failures and whale song or belches. Just simple, cold fact.
“Query. Damage to children?” Max asked.
Rick turned and he held a silver and blue tennis racket looking thing with one tentacle. Rick walked over to the active scanner image and used a tentacle to poke right in the middle of the figure of the tiny gymnast octopus currently trying to do somersaults in Max's gut.
“Likely to survive. Might not.” That included a number of whistle sounds the translator missed.
“Query. Will the other two survive?” Max had a horrible feeling in his gut.
“Clarification. Smaller two offspring...” The translator failed again, but Max was a bright guy. He got what Rick was trying to say.
Max hated the way he felt, and he didn't want aliens in his gut, but he didn’t want those lives gone because a fucking computer had mistranslated nanny and Rick hadn’t kept his tentacles to himself. Max gripped the edge of the med bay bed so hard that his forearms trembled. He assumed Rick felt equally bad because most of his tentacles were still drawn up tight. The whole of his walking tentacle was visible in its pale fleshy color. A hint of the orange-red showed on one side. Max looked at that rather than at the silver instrument.
After a painfully long silence, Rick asked, “Query. Remove all I offspring now?”
Max opened his mouth, but words didn't come out. He wanted to say he’d never been pregnant. He didn't want to be the cause of Rick's triplets dying. But he wanted them alive somewhere else, which was impossible, because they were in him.
Max's brain started spinning in a circle. His brain and Rick's oldest child were equally fond of spinning and turning in spaces that were far too small for that. Rick inched closer with that silver instrument, and Max scooted backwards without making a conscious choice.
“I can't do this,” Max said softly.
“Understood. Removal of children is optimal.” Despite his words, Rick's tentacles were still balled up and his finger tentacles waved like leaves in a high wind. Correction, in a hurricane.
When Rick reached out a tentacle, Max slid off the far side of the table. “No. I mean I can't do this now. I can't make this decision now.” Max couldn’t explain what was going on in his head. Hell, even if he’d had another English speaker around, he still wouldn't have the words. It would take a team of psychiatrists to drag anything coherent out of his brain. So instead, Max turned and fled from the room. His last view of the medical scanner was of the largest offspring, slipping two more tentacles free.
Instead of going back to his quarters, Max headed for a hatch that led into a network of crawl spaces that crisscrossed the spaces between decks. He had found it early in his explorations, and he liked the privacy. Rick was large, and Max hoped he couldn’t fit into the narrow passage. As an octopusish alien, he could probably squeeze himself into impossible shapes, but right now Max wanted the illusion that he could escape.
He climbed the peg ladder into the shaft and ignored the possibility that Rick could reach him or use the ship scanners to find him. The military was far too frugal to install internal sensors with the ability to track individuals, and Max hoped aliens had the same streak of cheap.
When he reached the first junction, he scooted around and let his legs dangle over the edge. The other possibility was that this was some sort of venting system and Max was exposing himself to alien radiation, but he didn’t worry about that too much now. If this were dangerous, Rick would have stopped him.
Fuck.
Max had started to think of Rick as a friend, a lonely alien bachelor whose mate had taken off with the kids. He had liked Rick. Really liked him. Max was an idiot. Officially.
He leaned against the side of the shaft and rested his hand over the area where he kept getting cramps. “It was you the whole time. You think you’re Kohei Uchimura in there, don’t you?” Max asked. “Well he had an Olympic mat for his routine. You need to stop your tumbling practice in my gut, you little monster,” Max said as he rubbed his side. “Your dad is going to have his tentacles full with you.”
Max frowned. If Rick was the dad, where was the mom? Maybe he was being too Earth-centric in his thinking, but he assumed complex creatures needed sexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction was nature's form of cloning which would not allow adaptation. At least that's what Max had learned in his biology courses in school, not that his biology teachers had a whole lot of experience with tentacle monsters. So maybe he should stop assuming he understood anything. Clearly he didn't understand the word nanny.
Another cramp hit, but it was a small one that Max would have dismissed as gas a few hours ago. Hell, he had been dismissing the random pains as gas. “Will your siblings get this active or are you the pushy one?” Max’s mother always talked about how much easier her second pregnancy had been because Max had turned and stretched and rammed his head into her cervix and given her false labor pains and generally made her life a living nightmare.
Max didn’t think he should pay for anything he had done pre-birth, but she still sometimes brought it up when she was annoyed with him. “Don’t you even start,” she’d say. “You’ve been giving me grief since you were six months in the womb and you started head-butting my cervix.”