Earth Fathers Are Weird (Earth Fathers #1) - Lyn Gala Page 0,43
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.
“Human. I offer compensation for surrogate care. Offspring,” Rick said with a few extra belches standing in for words Max had not yet provided an English translation for. Unsurprisingly, Max had not covered hostage situations in his translation work.
Something in the translation matrix changed because coherent statements came out of the translator as the invader leader chittered. “Complete work or offspring die.”
Rick quivered. “Conditional. I complete work. You kill offspring. Kill Max. Kill me.” That was a little more direct and confrontational than Max would have preferred, but he couldn’t fault Rick’s logic.
“Conditional,” the boss countered him. “You fail work. I torture offspring. I torture Max. I kill you.”
As choices went, that did not sound promising. The threat made Rick shrink down on himself so that he was no taller than the invaders. Max had never seen Rick’s leg tentacle curl in stress, not even when they had thought Xander might die. But right now it was wavy and quivering. This situation was about to go from a hostage negotiation to a fucking bloodbath.