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.
“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.