“Earth people are weird,” Rick said, but then the world started fading away. Max dimly realized that word the translator had missed was some sort of general anesthesia. Max fell asleep as Rick was telling him something about Offspring Two.
Chapter Eleven
When Max woke, he was in his bed alcove in the tiny space he thought of as his bedroom. The thin sheet was tucked around him and any evidence of bodily fluids had been removed. Rick had been busy.
Max sat up and winced as his ass complained about the abuse it had suffered. He touched the puffy entrance. It was sore, but no worse than if he had overindulged in some vigorous sex while drunk. He never used enough lube when he was drunk.
Max swung his legs over the edge of the bed and cradled his head in his hands for a couple of minutes. He was strangely woozy, which he hoped was a simple case of hunger. He was thinner than he had been. It made sense that the children would create some sort of membrane around them and store up liquid, but for some reason, that hadn't occurred to Max. He had thought alien food had too many calories, and he’d been trying to run off the paunch he had developed.
For the first time in his life he had those Adonis creases over his hip bones all the male models had in gay magazines. Max had wondered if they only appeared through the magic of photo manipulation. Not even the gym rats on base had them.
Apparently a lot of running plus working out added to an alien pregnancy resulted in hot hips.
Max stood and grabbed the wall to keep his balance. His first stop needed to be for food. A lot of it. And after that, he needed to go find out what had happened to the children. That was a conversation Max was not looking forward to having.
If they had lost the third child—and given how small it was, Max assumed they had—Rick would be miserable. Max had no idea what he was supposed to say to a father who'd been forced to watch a child die. Aliens had all this advanced technology and spaceships and intergalactic drives, or at the very least, interstellar drives, but they couldn't save one premature baby.
Max wondered if that was some philosophical stand on medical intervention. Maybe aliens were Christian Scientologists. Or maybe Rick didn't have enough money to buy the right medical equipment. Maybe he had spent his last dollar hiring a surrogate.
The thought inspired the intense levels of guilt that usually required his mother and a major national holiday, but it made sense. It wasn't as if Rick had a lot of crew around to draw salaries, so whatever he did, maybe he didn't make enough to have underlings. And Max assumed medical equipment was expensive in any culture.
Max wandered to food storage and grabbed a couple of the bars that had an almost chocolatey black bean flavor to them. Those were not two foods Max would've put together, but the combination worked. It was better than the small round discs that tasted like someone had chemically joined an asparagus and a fart.
He had finished one bar on his way to the infirmary. Since Max had woken up naked, Rick must have left Max’s clothing somewhere. Max normally swam in his underwear, so the swimming pool was the most likely place to find his pants and shirt; however, Max wasn’t ready to deal with a grieving father yet. And since the children needed water, Rick was going to be there. As long as Max didn’t track Rick down, he could hope the third offspring was alive. Once Rick told him the child had died, it would be real.
The exam room was empty, but a half dozen tools were scattered on the floor and table. Rick was usually meticulous about putting everything away, which made sense in an environment where an emergency could lead to zero gravity or unexpected acceleration that would turn objects into projectiles. Max gathered the tools off the floor and grimaced at the slime that had pooled around a few. It smelled like urine and had the viscosity of dog slobber. Using two fingers, Max carried them over to the cleaning unit. When he opened the drawer, he found his underwear.
A little grossed out at the alien wash-all, Max took his underwear out and put the medical equipment in the same drawer before securing it again.
With his underwear on, he felt a little less vulnerable, although he doubted he would feel normal anytime soon. Kohei had been incredibly cute, and now Max wondered if he would be welcome around the children he had given birth to. If Rick didn't want Max near his children, Max couldn't blame him. From Rick's point of view, Max was a strange alien from an unrecorded species. That was not an ideal situation for a nanny. Which was another reason why Max should have figured out the truth long before he had.
Walking toward the pool felt like a funeral march. Max hated himself for getting too fucking involved. He always led with his emotions, even when common sense warned him to avoid getting too invested in someone who didn’t feel the same.
Max walked into the pool room with his stomach churning. He spotted Rick in the water. He had taken his hat off, something he didn't do unless he feared getting in a splash war. Before Max had introduced him to the concept of horseplay, Rick had always floated upright with his weird fisherman's type hat in place. Right now he was floating so low in the water that only a few of his eyes were visible above the surface.
Max spotted the rest of his clothing in the corner, but he ignored it for the moment. He edged closer to the water, stopping when he was ankle-deep. “Rick?”
Calling Rick's name caused three or four of his tentacles to flail and splash. Rick rotated, and Max spotted the first child. He was the size of a football but beige with a few streaks and spots of mint green. All the gray had vanished. He spun in mad little circles, and his tentacles waved faster and faster until his head resembled a top. Max was guessing that was Kohei. Either that or Rick had two insanely athletic gymnasts for children.
“Query. How are the offspring?” Max left the question generic so if Rick chose to avoid talking about the third child he could.
Rick floated toward him. “Offspring One,” he said as he touched the whirling dervish of a baby octopus. He paused with his tentacles curled up under his body before resuming his wild athletics. He was going to be a handful. “Healthy and absorbing nutrients quickly,” Rick said. A tentacle pointed toward a water filtration island. “Offspring Two healthy and absorbing nutrients quickly.”
Max looked, and the second offspring had climbed halfway up the water purification pipe using his walking tentacle, which was only slightly less stubby than his other tentacles. This one had less green and more beige and white. While Max watched, he slipped, falling back into the water with a splash. Max took a step closer, half afraid the child had gotten hurt, but the little one pulled his smaller tentacles up tight against the underside of his body and swam away to explore the far end of the pool.
“Good.” Max nodded and did not ask after the third child. His heart ached at the thought of that tiny creature swimming madly in his brother’s birth sac. He had been so full of life. Max’s eyes stung, and he brushed the back of his hand across them. “Good. I'm glad they're healthy. And I was right, they're cute.”
Rick came into the shallows and braced his walking tentacle on the bottom before he tilted his body. Two of his tentacles parted to show a palm-sized octopus tucked up against the place where tentacles joined the bottom of his body. “Offspring Three is small.”
Max's legs turned to jelly, and he couldn't support his own weight. He sat down so fast that water splashed up around him and Rick slid backwards into deeper waters. “Oh, thank God. He’s alive.” A few tears slipped free, and Max scooped water up and splashed his face. “Query. Is he healthy?” He was so damn small.