cold exam table. Rick’s tentacles offered comfort in the form of small strokes, which made Max feel even worse. Rick might lose a child. He shouldn’t be the one offering comfort.
Max watched the children. Kohei was wriggling now, desperate to get free, and Max felt the strain in his entire body. If he hadn't been able to see Kohei, he wasn't sure he would have the strength to avoid pushing. Offspring Three swam like a jellyfish with all his tentacles flowing out before they all rushed back together again. He wasn't getting anywhere because he didn't have the room inside what appeared to be his brother’s birth sac, but he was sure trying. His little tentacles kicked and twitched and curled, and Max felt sick to his stomach. “Query. Could small offspring survive being born now?”
“Unknown.” For long minutes, Rick said nothing. Kohei’s first few tentacles reached the exit ramp, and Rick pulled his tentacle out right before Max felt small slapping movements against his ass. “Survival requires a body large enough to maintain internal warmth and limbs strong enough to maintain movement. Nutrients are absorbed through movement in water,” Rick said.
Max looked at the smallest offspring with those tentacles madly kicking, and he had to hope that Offspring Three could survive. Suddenly all the pain vanished. The sense of having a butt at all vanished. Half of Max’s body disappeared.
“Offspring three has ejected the....” And Rick’s sentence ended with a series of ear-splitting shrieks.
“Translation matrix failure,” Max said.
Rick’s tentacles uncorkscrewed a little. “Offspring eject hormone to relax host muscles. You may be gross after offspring appear, but birth will move quickly now.”
“Wait, what?” Max propped himself up on one elbow. His body was still there. Thank God. But Max couldn’t feel anything as a mini-Rick, smaller than a football, slipped free of his body. The stubby tentacles waved in the air and curled, but it was silent. Unlike his father, he lacked any red markings and his body was mottled gray and beige.
“Query. Is offspring healthy?” Max asked, slurring the words. His elbow slipped and he would have face-planted onto the table, but Rick’s tentacles caught him and eased him down.
“Offspring One is healthy.”
“Cute,” Max mumbled. It was. Its eyes were huge, and sure there were too many, but that couldn’t counteract the frilly mantle that wrapped around the bottom of his head or the stubby tentacles or the oversized head. It was absolutely adorable.
“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