by Lyn Gala
“Max Father!” he bugled.
“It’s a sneeze.” Some days Max did not understand the family. They’d heard him sneeze dozens of times, and it never failed to freak them out. Apparently the idea of losing control over breathing ranked right up there with spiders and heights. Worse even. None of them could understand the fear of spiders at all, which had turned a night of watching Big Ass Spider into a week-long running joke about human illogic. Max never wanted to see a spider again, because then he would have four obnoxious family members pointing out the ridiculousness of being afraid of one. “I sneeze all the time.” He headed down the empty boardwalk that led to town and the nicer part of the docks. Carrington had her ship in that section.
“Disturbing!” Xander said as he followed.
Max ignored the complaint. “I wish you would be more understanding with your brother.”
“James is poop head.”
“James is frustrated that he doesn’t get to help. Look at it from his point of view—you get to help and he’s left behind.”
“Kohei and Rick Father are left behind.”
“And he probably expects them to be equally frustrated.”
“I never acted like poop head when you spent time with James. His work with weapons were of benefit, so I worked my project. I was not a poop head.”
Max stopped and caught the cart to force Xander to stop, too. “Did I ignore you?”
Xander did a quarter turn. “Max Father spent most of his time with me when I was small. I was not small when Max Father worked with James.”
That was definitely not an answer. “I spent too much time with James, didn’t I?”
“You spent enough time to make James all, ‘Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.’” Xander even raised his voice to mimic a girl’s voice.
“Now you sound like Rick Father,” Max said dryly.
“I sound more like Max Father, who loves human entertainment. My words are still truth. James is spoiled. Kohei never becomes poopy head.” Xander started the cart moving again, leaving Max to stare at his retreating back.
Now Max felt worse. After a second, he ran to catch up. “I didn’t mean to make any of you unhappy.”
“James is unhappy because he is James,” Xander said without an ounce of sympathy. “Max Father does not make offspring unhappy. He is like a brother in making me happy.”
Max was almost sure that Xander was trying to say that Max spent lots of time teaching them, but that didn’t assuage his guilt. “With humans, parents are supposed to treat children equally.”
“Marsha, Marsha, Marsha,” Xander repeated. “Humans have unreasonableness for parents.”
Max snorted. “Asking parents to treat children equally isn’t unreasonable. And I’ve hurt James, so I need you to be a little understanding.” No wonder Kohei was being so supportive. As the offspring most likely to get ignored, he could probably sympathize. Max sucked at fatherhood. Sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked.
“Did your parenthoods always treat you and co-offspring equally?”
Max judged the length of the empty boardwalk between them and the ships in the posher end of the port. They had time, especially with the cart slowly bumping over the lines set in the walk. “My parents tried. I think my brother was frustrated because I got to do more than he did. He is six years younger, so it frustrated him that I got to go out on my bike and run around with friends when he had to stay with the babysitter.”
“Did he torture the babysitter?” Xander asked.
“What? Of course not. Why would you ask that?”
“In entertainment, the offspring often torture the babysitter.”
“Television isn’t real.” Max regretted letting them watch television. If they hadn’t been hanging out on the edge of Earth space hijacking signals, Xander wouldn’t have screwed-up ideas about humans. Actually, he would rather the kids not have accurate ideas about them either.
“Are families together the way entertainment shows?” Xander asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do genetic relatives gather for celebrations and continue with alliances after reaching independence?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Of course we do.” The second the words came out of his mouth, he realized that the question implied that the Hidden People didn’t live like that. Xander was implying that he would grow up, move away and never come back. His breath caught and he stopped dead on the boardwalk. Xander continued for several feet before he stopped. Maybe something in Max’s expression registered because Xander abandoned the cart and hurried back.
“Max Father. Identify wrongness.”
The air burst out of Max’s mouth and he didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath. Xander curled tentacles around Max’s wrist and tugged at him. “Max Father.”
“I just realized you plan on leaving,” Max said weakly. Fuck. No wonder Rick tried to keep his distance. The cute little bastards were going to break their fathers’ hearts, or Max’s anyway.
“Query. Do not human offspring leave? Query. Did not Max Father leave?”
Max sat in the middle of the boardwalk. The raised seam dug into his ass, but he didn’t give a shit. After a second, Xander inched close enough to rest his leg tentacle against Max’s knee. “I left, but I never meant to leave forever. Before the law-enforcement poop faces took me away from Earth, I called my parents every few weeks.” Okay, that was almost true. Max hadn’t called them often enough, but if six or eight or ten qualified as a “few,” then he managed it every few weeks. “My mom was always asking if I had met anyone I wanted to pairbond with.” When Max had failed at having any long-term relationship work, he’d started avoiding her. “But I planned to go home for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. I always visited home.”
Max stared at Xander, wondering how he was supposed to react to the idea of losing his little boy. Intellectually he knew that Rick’s people preferred novelty. Intellectually, he knew they weren’t the most affectionate parents in the world. Emotionally, he was an idiot because he had never processed what steps one and two meant.
“Query. Identify wrongness,” Xander said in a voice that was almost soft.
“I want you to be happy, but I don’t want you to go away and never visit. I want to know your happiness. I want to meet anyone you feel is worth pairbonding with. I want to see your offspring. Shit. I’ll never get to spoil grandbabies.”
Xander rotated, catching Max’s wrist with a new tentacle when he rotated too far to hold on.
Shaking his head, Max pushed himself up off the walk. “I can have a mental breakdown later. We have business to do.”
“Max Father,” Xander said, but Max had to focus. It was like when he was flying into difficult maneuvers—he had to focus on the horizon, on the instruments, on the feel of the engine vibration in the seat and the stick in his hand. He didn’t have enough space in his brain to worry about anything else, so it all had to wait until after he’d landed the plane.
He strode down the walk, all his attention on the tall, black ship that Carrington owned. He tried very hard not to hear the click-clack of the cart behind him.
Chapter Twelve
Max touched the pedestal in front of Carrington’s ship . The yellow glow shifted to a darker orange, and Max went to parade rest as he waited for someone to answer his call. Xander stopped behind him, and Max hoped he would remain silent. Max needed to concentrate on the enemy in front of him, not on his own personal dramas. It was a rule in the air that pilots forgot any conflicts and focused on the plane, the instruments, the act of flying itself. If a wife ran off or a kid was in the hospital, pilots drank and complained and emotionally fell apart on the ground—not in the air. Never in the air.
The door opened and a Tribes alien stood in the opening. It was so much smaller than the other two Max had seen that he wondered if it was fully grown. The creature raised its four-fingered hands in a strange yoga-looking pose before coming down the ramp.
“Leader of ship Tribe wit
hin,” it said.
Max glanced at Xander, but he didn’t appear alarmed at anything the alien said. When Max had to rely on a child a few months old for intelligence, he hadn’t prepared well for the mission. But in his defense, human-to-anything except Hidden language pretty much sucked without the fancy business translator.
“Lead away,” Max said. Oversized eyes blinked at him, and the neck gill flaps fluttered before the alien turned and headed into the ship.
“Max Father weird,” Xander said softly.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Max muttered before he followed the Tribes alien. Max was halfway up the ramp when the wall of humidity hit him. He felt as if he’d been dropped in the Deep South in the middle of summer, and not the literary version of the South with magnolia trees and wide verandas, but the real one with sweat stinging his eyes and doorknobs that burned off a person’s fingerprints. A bead of sweat rolled down Max’s spine and he scratched it. “Are you okay?” Max asked Xander.
“Uncomfortable but healthy,” Xander said.
With a nod, Max headed into the ship’s interior. The light was bluish and uneven and the air even more humid as he stopped in the central corridor. A familiar computer display blinked for attention, and Xander moved to the controls and hooked up their computer. The business translator flashed.
“Are we connected?” Max asked. He disliked giving Carrington access to the English database, but Bundy and Rick both insisted that the business translator’s internal security would prevent pirating. And since Max trusted one of the two, he had to take the chance.
“Done,” Xander said.
Max looked toward the end of the corridor, but his short guide had vanished. A Tribes alien stood near a door. This one was closer in height to Carrington, but the wide-brimmed eighties hat was missing, which made it hard to tell. Without the hat, the illusion of gender vanished, and Max had to consciously avoid staring at the weirdly proportioned arms with their long forearm at the end of a very short humerus.
“Hello.” Max started down the hall, his boots echoing against the metal decking. The plates were solid instead of the grating he had grown used to on their ship. “Are you the trader I met yesterday?”
Neck gills fluttered. “Would it be customary to offer welcome to my ship?” She crossed her freakish forearms across her chest.
“A greeting of some sort is usual for humans. Good morning.”
Carrington uncrossed her arms. “What an interesting expression.” Her voice sounded curious, so the business translator was on. Max wondered if she had it hooked to her ship’s main computer or if her wrist communicator had a connection. It would be awesome to have a system that always worked on their ship. Sometimes after sex Rick got very chatty, but if he didn’t remember to put his communicator back on, Max missed most of the words. After Max had bashed his wrist communicator against the headboard once, he’d banned his translator from bed. They couldn’t afford to replace it too often. Carrington continued. “If you do not like someone, do you recommend they have a less than good morning?”
“Sometimes,” Max admitted. “Most of the time, we ignore them, or we say good morning anyway to avoid conflict.”
“Avoidance of conflict is a positive social trait. I am gratified to hear humans possess such a behavioral imperative.” She studied Xander, and Max’s temper frayed. Maybe she hadn’t meant to imply that his love for Xander was a less gratifying behavior imperative, but Max was a hair breadth away from unloading all his frustrations on her, and he had a lot since his conversation on the boardwalk.
“Humans also have a behavior imperative to protect their children,” Max warned.
She made a clicking noise. “I have no difficulty accepting your fondness for the asymmetrical ones.”
That felt too similar to calling Rick’s people ugly, but at least it was a factual version of an insult. Max chose to ignore it and focus on the job. “So what concerns you about your defenses?”
“Many things,” she said vaguely. “What convinced you to work with Bundy? He is a questionable choice of partner to broker compensation for your efforts.”
“I thought you traded with him,” Max said. He had expected Carrington to fish for information, but naively he’d thought she would be more subtle. Instead, she was approaching the topic of Max’s motives with all the grace of a drunk elephant.
“I trade. I do not trust.” Carrington turned and headed farther into the ship. “Come. Leave the equipment here, and it will be left unmolested.”
That was an interesting verb. Xander was already locking the wheels. Max waited so Xander could come with them. He wasn’t going to leave his son in the middle of hostile territory, that was for sure. Max only followed Carrington once he made sure Xander was coming. “I don’t trust either him or you.”
“A wise choice,” Carrington said without turning. The light was shifting toward more green tones and getting darker. “Do you avoid any answer to my question by intent or accident of verbal ordering?”
Max had wanted to avoid the question of his relationship with Bundy since it wasn’t exactly legitimate, but nothing communicated guilt faster than evasion. As someone who was guilty, Max would’ve liked to avoid the appearance of it. “I chose him because he had tried to get a license to trade on the Hidden World. He was turned down.”
“So his lack of trustworthiness from the perspective of the Ugly Ones led you to trust. An interesting logic.”
Max reined in his aggravation. “I assumed if he would trade with the Hidden People that he would trade with me. After all, I understand the government computers listed me as a moron.”
Carrington turned. “Humanity in general. No doubt they did not judge you personally.”
“Considering that the universe has almost no experience with humans, I assume that judgement is based largely on the observations of me when I was suffering from panic and confusion,” Max said. Thinking back to his time on the police ship, he was man enough to admit that he’d been a whiny, panicked, annoying baby. “My people assumed aliens existed somewhere, but I did not expect a ship of aliens to take me off my planet.”
Sure, there were people who assumed exactly that, but generally they didn’t pass the psych eval to become an Air Force pilot.
“So you trusted Bundy’s lack of judgment when seeking trading partners. That does have merit. I notice the translator has assigned the verbalism ‘Bundy’ to the trader, but the computer offers no translation of such mouth noises.”
Since Carrington hadn’t asked a question, Max ignored the comment. “When we were boarded by Hunters, the ship had no internal sensors to warn us. Do you have internal alarms?”
She turned so fast that Max nearly lost his balance trying to brake fast enough to avoid running into her back. “Why would we require internal alarms? Do not external alarms provide more effective defenses?”
“Assuming they work,” Max said.
“Would not a captain immediately land a ship with defective proximity alarms?” Carrington asked, her voice higher and faster now. Tribes aliens were the only ones who had any passing resemblance to humans, so Max’s brain told him that meant she was panicking, but his common sense warned him not to apply human assumptions.
“If I were a Hunter, I would do something to trigger your proximity alarms over and over, particularly at a time when you were not near a place to land.”
“And how would that provide you access to my ship?”
Max smiled. “I don’t know your people well, but is it possible that an individual might get so tired of having to check a seemingly faulty alarm that he might turn the alarm off?” Max didn’t know if that was what the Hunters had done to Rick or if Rick’s ship had malfunctioned so the alarm sounded often enough to annoy Rick into deactivating it. Their translator wasn’t nuanced enough to ask, and Max wasn’t sure he wanted the answer.
“An individual would have to suffer a lack of logic to make such a mistake,” Carrington said.
Max didn’t say it, but he agreed. Rick was brilliant, but not necessarily smart. “And would any of your crew be tempted to turn off an alarm if it annoyed them?”
Carrington didn’t answer for a long time. Eventually, she turned her back on him and started walking. “Would the installation of internal alarms negate the danger?”
“Possibly. I would like to look at the ship’s schematics to consider weak points in your security. If I get a sense of where someone might want to breach your ship, we can work on sensors. And who would be responsible for security inside the ship? Do your people fight or hire fighters for your ship?”
“Your people think like Hunters,” Carrington said.
“I’m not sure if I should be offended.”
She turned. “You should only take offense if I describe you inaccurately.”
“I am trained to hunt.” That was a slight distortion since hunting people was generally off limits, but he hunted targets in his jet, so close enough. “However, it is not in the nature of my people to steal. Many of my people will steal, but the rest of us consider that unacceptable behavior and we will punish it.”
She studied him. “The initial assessment of human nature was critically flawed.”
“Yes, it was. So, do you want a security assessment of your ship, or did you invite me here because you hoped to do your own assessment of my nature?”
“I purchased your weapon design. Does that not imply my respect for judgment?”
“You haven’t answered my question about whether your ship has fighters on it,” Max said. “If you don’t give me information, I can’t assess your security.” Max looked at Xander. “I get the feeling she doesn’t trust us.”
Xander made a spitty sound, which usually meant amusement, but his tentacles were a little stiff and jerky. Max wasn’t sure how to read that.
