Earth Husbands are Odd (Earth Fathers #2) - Lyn Gala Page 0,55

got this far, and they would. Max knew his people. As soon as they got their heads around the idea of aliens, they were going to build clunky, cramped spaceships so they could come up here and yell at them.

The Hunter stood, slower this time. “The human killed several Hunters and threatened death to Hunter Leader. He released Hunter Leader so Hunter Leader would take message back to all Hunters to avoid the ship with Ugly Offspring.”

“Damn right,” Max muttered even though no one could hear him. Several aliens did glance at him. The Hunter sat and the judge’s platform started to rotate again.

An enormous alien stood. “Human Max hit my tentacle,” he said before sitting. Damn. That was the guy who had tried to push past them on the boardwalk. Max had stepped on one of his tentacles. Okay, maybe it had been a stomp, but still. It seemed strange to come to court to tattle about something like that. Aliens were odd.

One of Bundy’s customers stood and testified about Max’s accuracy with weapons. Every time someone fell silent, the judge was facing away from Max, and he suspected that was intentional. People didn’t want to hear what he had to say, but Max had a right to speak his mind. Or he didn’t because this was an alien legal system and they had never heard of Miranda or the Constitution, but damn it, Max wanted to speak his mind.

He leaned forward, ready to leap from his seat, given the opportunity, but it never came. Instead alien after alien testified about Max’s threats to cut off limbs and his habit of stepping on tentacles and his proficiency with weapons. This was going sideways. Rick had a right to two lifetimes of I-told-you-so.

Squirming in his seat, Max watched another alien sit, and then Kohei shot up even though he wasn’t directly in front of the judge. However, no one said anything. Kohei waited until the judge had rotated the last degree or two before he told the story of Xander’s birth and how Rick and Max had to keep him moving. He described such weird details, like how Max would stand in the water until the oils had washed away from his skin and the water soaked into his cells so his skin wrinkled. Personally, Max considered wrinkled skin pretty damn normal. He liked baths.

However, more and more, aliens turned to study Max. He was starting to feel like a bug pinned on a board.

Kohei rotated his largest eye toward Max and waited until the judge was turned in Max’s direction before he sat.

Blessing Kohei’s insight and strategy, Max leapt up. If he was going to be condemned as a psychopath instead of a moron, he had a few things to say to these aliens. And they were damn well going to listen. Hopefully.

Chapter Twenty

Max took a deep breath. If this was his only chance to speak, he needed to make it count, so he had to suppress the urge to run in a circle and scream in frustration. That wouldn’t exactly disprove the theory that he was a moron.

“I came up with the concept for that weapon, and I had every right to sell it.” Max remained as calm as possible. These people liked facts, so that was what he had to focus on. And he would apologize to James later for not giving him co-credit. “Dee would be able to do that math, only she has been isolated and afraid for so long that she probably can’t think straight. And that would be the fault of the so-called smart individuals on that police ship. We were both on that ship, but instead of letting us see each other, the assholes on that ship kept up separated and confused.”

Max took another calming breath. He was not doing well at remaining factual. It didn’t help that he recognized the stress in Dee’s eyes. In SERE training they said that nothing was more damaging than being alone. A person could handle broken bones better than systematic isolation. But these aliens wouldn’t understand profanity, and if the translator was being too literal, Max’s point would get lost under the verbal garbage.

“My people dislike most bodily fluids, and we have a special hatred for excrement. So when we find an individual as dislikable as excrement, we call them an asshole. The association of the body part with that particular bodily discharge makes our feelings known.” Max had grown disturbingly good at that sort