“I won’t live that long, so what are the other options?”
Heetayu lowered his head slowly. “One options pay ticket in three and almost one years.”
Max assumed that meant almost four years. Fuck. However, in the grand scheme, that was better than dying of old age on an alien planet. “What do I have to do?”
“Translation matrix failure.”
Max closed his eyes and counted to ten. Heroes in movies never had language problems. Alien abduction was not living up to the hype, but hey, at least he had avoided the alien probes. That was a small blessing.
“In return for compensation, what action will I need to take? Will I help improve translation matrix?” Max knew he wouldn’t be, but hopefully that would help clarify the question.
Heetayu raised his head again. “Raise young.”
“A nanny? Someone wants to hire me as a nanny? Or, someone put out a job that anyone could answer. I could get there and they wouldn’t want me.” If Max was honest with himself, he wasn’t any better with kids than he was with English grammar. Every time he was around his little brother, Max managed to disappoint him or piss him off.
Heetayu touched Max’s shoulder. “Jobs only for individual touches...” He pointed to the glass square. “Mass have compensation.”
Max frowned. That sounded weird for more reasons than the questionable grammar. “Why would someone hire me to take care of their children?”
Heetayu’s head lowered. “Compensation giver. Unpopular. Loud.”
A bad boss. Well fuck. Of course Max would travel to another planet and find the alien version of Colonel Wilks from flight school. The man was an asshole, and apparently so was this alien. However, Max had sucked it up to get his papers to fly jets, and to get home, he’d endure a whole lot more than loud. However, he couldn’t walk into a job blind. He turned to face Heetayu, hoping that the alien would understand the seriousness of his next words. “I take compensation. Soon after, I regret it. How do I leave?”
Heetayu lowered his head so they were eye to alien eye. “Translation matrix failure.”
Max sighed. “I hate that phrase. Okay, question. How do I leave if this compensation giver is too unpopular or too loud?”
“Leave ship. Find console.” Heetayu pushed his face toward Max. “Offspring hurt.”
Max snorted. He sucked as a babysitter, so he doubted the kids would get close enough to him to suffer any emotional damage if he left. However, maybe alien kids were clingier. “I’ll try to avoid hurting offspring. How easy is it to find console?”
“Translation—”
“Matrix failure,” Max finished for him. He was grateful he didn’t have a sidearm because he was feeling the need to shoot someone. “How many consoles are there?” He looked at Heetayu, but the alien just looked back at him. Max tried again. “Question. Number of consoles?”
Heetayu blinked. “Many.”
Right. While vague, that did imply that Max would be able to find help if he wanted to leave the job. Max had signed up for the military despite an equally profound lack of information. Of course back then, Max had been young and stupid and desperate for an ROTC scholarship to pay for college. Now he was middle-aged and stupid, and desperate for a ticket home. Funny. Life hadn’t changed as much as Max had assumed. “Let’s go talk to this giver of compensation who needs a nanny,” Max said with false cheerfulness. If his life was turning to shit, at least he could smile. It always creeped people out.
Heetayu lifted his head back up without reacting to Max’s expression.
Unfortunately there was a lack of actual people in Max’s life right now.
Chapter Three
Heetayu led Max through a series of ever-smaller lanes. If Max had to guess, he would say they were leaving the official government and military landing sites, passing through the major commercial ones, and heading toward the sort of area where crime would lurk at the edges of society.
Of course, that was assuming this world had criminals who thought as humans did. Max decided that was a safe assumption because this area did not have as many resources allotted to it in terms of computer interfaces and lighting. And fewer aliens walked the lanes. Those who did were larger. The two- and three-foot tall aliens had vanished. Heetayu walked toward a number of enormous ships that squatted at the edge of the yard. Hopefully the aliens inside wouldn’t be too big because Max did not want to deal with two-year olds that outweighed him.
“Giver of compensation here,” Heetayu said.
Max started second-guessing himself. “Question. Describe giver of compensation,” he asked.
“Loud.” Heetayu stopped there, so either he was a particularly polite alien or the translation matrix was not up to the job. Max wondered if the aliens had a communication system set up that would allow him to do the translation matrix work as a side hustle. If he had to survive four years of bad translations, he would shoot someone. That made fixing the translation matrix was a mission-critical priority. He wasn’t sure what alien jail looked like, but he knew he sure as hell didn’t want to find out.
Of course shooting someone required him finding a weapon, but he was resourceful. If MacGyver could make a harpoon gun out of a telescope and mothballs, he could improvise something.
Heetayu touched a short pedestal and the top glowed amber. After several seconds, a hologram of alien letters appeared above the plinth. Heetayu spoke quickly, but the translator only caught a few words. Compensation. Nanny. Human. The hologram vanished, and then Max and Heetayu were left standing outside the closed ship. Since Heetayu didn’t seem interested in leaving, Max assumed that meant the employer was coming out to meet them.
“I want to thank you for helping me,” Max told his alien tour guide/social worker.
The alien’s head came down again. “Translation matrix failure.”
Max rolled his eyes. “Of course it did.” Since he couldn’t communicate anything important, he fell silent—a condition antithetical to him. He might talk slow, but he rarely stopped. Even alone, he kept up a nice monologue, but talking to someone who couldn’t understand felt a touch awkward.
The ship gave a thunk and the door rose. The alien who appeared fell into the tentacles camp. He had a minty green skin that seemed to be the fashionable color among all the best aliens, but as he glided, he flashed the rusty-red undersides of his tentacles, and the tiny fingers where an Earth octopus would have suckers. A few of the tentacles had red bands near the tips that reminded Max a little of a copperhead. Hopefully the vivid colors didn’t mean his new employer was venomous.
He had a thick central tentacle he used for movement, and above a waistline bristling with tentacles, he had a bulbous head. Near where a human’s neck would be, he had dozens of eyes, and no two matched. It was as if Jackson Pollock or Dali had painted eyes on an octopus. Max wasn’t sure which of the freaky eyes he should look at.
When the alien stopped, it blasted the air with a noise that crossed a whale song with an air horn. Loud. Yeah, that made a lot more sense now. At least the guy didn’t use the high tones most of the other aliens did. Those higher pitches hurt Max’s ears more than this guy.
“Query: purpose,” the new alien’s translator said.