Max tucked the alien gun into his waistband and prayed that the thing had a safety. He needed both hands to grip the maintenance hook. He forced himself to breathe and steadied his nerves as the lift doors opened on the pool level. Empty corridor. “Thank God,” he whispered. And then he ran as quietly as he could for the pool room.
The pool took up most of this level, so the invaders should have dismissed it from their minds as soon as they believed they had everyone captured. Aliens might have had great technology, but they couldn't tactically think their way out of a wet paper bag. He planned to take full advantage of that blind spot.
The pool room was dark when he went in, the illumination set to half power. “James?” Max let the door slide shut behind him, and he inched into the room. He was met with an anxious round of blurbles and burps and whale song.
“Max. You returned. Query brothers? Max. Query Rick? Query...” The translator failed, leaving ugly burping. Either James was practicing profanity or that was the name of their invaders. Max spotted James on the edge of the pool, his tentacles all curled up under him. Max hurried to the edge and let the shirt sling down into the water so that Xander and Kohei could soak themselves.
“You're going downstairs to the small pool room. I will find Rick,” Max said.
All James’s tentacles waved madly. “Max. Danger.” James added a warbling cry the translator missed. He had a whole new set of experiences to program into the damn thing, just as soon as Max finished killing all the motherfuckers.
Xander countered with a long string of whale song that the translator was inadequate to handle. Out of the entire soliloquy, the translator only picked up “Max,” “Rick,” “maintenance hook,” and “wet.” However, with those clues, Max had a pretty good idea of what Xander was explaining. He was just glad the children hadn’t seen the killing. It was bad enough they had heard it. If they didn't need therapy, Max would for exposing children to that kind of shit. The one thing he had always hated about shows like The Tomorrow People and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was how children were pushed into a fight that they were far too young to understand or emotionally cope with.
Max didn’t care what Rick said about them being adults, they weren't. They might have the cognitive abilities of an adult, but they did not have the wealth of experience. A strong foundation in love and honor added to a long history of family support would help blunt the sharp edges of death. The children didn’t have that yet.
Max went to his knees next to the pool. “Come on, we need to run.” None of the children argued, and Max gathered them up and slipped them back into his sling after he'd wrung it out a little bit. Now was the time they couldn't afford to drip or leave any sign of their passage. The easiest way for these invaders to win was for them to find the children and use them as hostages. That made hiding them priority number one in Max's book.
He chose the exit that led to the mechanical workings of the ship instead of risking the lift. There was a narrow passage here, one Max had carefully shimmied down when he’d explored this level. At the time he’d hoped to find any cure for boredom as he waited for the mysterious children he was supposed to nanny. Now he slid down the shaft, slowing himself enough that he could control the six-foot drop to the floor at the next level. Max suspected the shaft had something to do with overflow of from the pool because it led into the lower filter room.
The light dribbled in from above where the filtration pipes led to the upper pool. It gave the room an ominous glow as that light bounced off the waves. Max walked to the edge of the pool, but he held on to the sling tightly. “Kohei, hold Xander. Protect Xander from moving water,” Max said. Kohei was the most athletic, and Rick had said the eldest had a certain instinct to care for younger siblings. Max had to trust him to take care of Xander now, because Xander was not a strong enough swimmer to fight the current.
Kohei wrapped two tentacles around a pipe and held his brother with the rest. His tentacles and Xander’s tangled together until they were one knot of octopus. “James, if enemy comes, hide your brothers. Show how to hide.” Hopefully, he would find some good hiding spots in the room.
James curled his tentacles around Max’s wrist. “I continue with Max.”
“Absolutely not. No. You stay here with your brothers.” Max tried to pull James’s tentacles away, but he had more strength than Max had anticipated.
“I go Max. I know ship. I know access codes and internal scanners.”
Max cringed because James did have a point there. If Max could use internal scanners to identify where the enemies were, his odds of success went up. But that did not justify putting James in the middle of a damn counterattack. “No. Show me how to access scanners.”
“Too complex. Time too short. Must win enemy.” For someone with a limited understanding of English, James was good at choosing words that would translate in order to communicate his ideas.
“No. Dangerous.”
“All danger.” James wrapped two more tentacles around Max’s arm. “Quickly win enemy. I work scanners.”
Max's hands started to lose some feeling. Fear and dread built in the pit of his stomach. They did not have time to fight about this because the enemy could find that body at any moment. Max lived in constant terror of hearing some alarm over the ship’s systems. Of course, that was assuming that the ship had alarm systems because at this point, it didn't seem like anyone had considered internal security during its design. “I must go,” he said firmly.
“I must go also.”
Xander chimed in. “Max and James work against enemy together. Let James help.”
Max glared at the obnoxious little traitor. Any other time he would have argued, but he couldn’t waste another second. “Kohei, take care of your brother.”
With one last look toward the two of them huddled together, Max took off for the door. “Query, where’s the nearest console?”
James reached toward the wall, and Max checked both directions before he stopped near a glass panel. He had suspected they were control panels like on the translation computer, but nothing he did activated them.
James’s motions were sure and quick as he called up an internal schematic of the ship. What Max had thought was a command deck was a transition of some sort between what appeared to be the lower decks and some sort of higher-security upper deck structure. With a few quick taps, James changed the display, and a number of dots moved around the various sections.
Two yellow dots were in the filtration room, and Max pointed at the display. “Hide them,” he said.
James jerked his tentacles back. “Can’t. Can only distract display.”
Even though Max didn’t understand what that meant, he dropped the issue. If James couldn’t accomplish some piece of programming, Max wasn’t going to guilt him about it. So he focused on his job. In the corridor outside the filtration room, one yellow and one blue dot blinked. That implied the computer was tracking different species rather than intruders and people who should be on the ship. Two dots were in the corridor by the medical room and two were outside the lower storage decks. The cavernous rooms were empty.
That was four more enemy in addition to the leader. One yellow and one bluish-green dot were still in the “control” room.