Earth Fathers, chapter 16 (Patreon)

Max needed to get to water fast. He doubled back and headed for the nearest crew room. “Let’s get you guys wet, and then we’re going to get back to the pool room.”

The clock was working against them. The second the enemy found that body, they would all be on high alert. Any advantage Max had would be lost. However, he had taken the risk in order to save the children, so letting them dry out was not an option. 

He rushed to the nearest room. “Let's get you wet. Kohei, hold your brother.” 

As he started untying the bottom of his shirt, he felt the boys shifting around at his back. There was a small service room under the pool room that had an open tank to feed the water filtration towers. The water ran too fast for comfort and Max worried that a stray tentacle could get sucked into the filter system, but that might be the safest place to hide the children. Once the invaders realized that Max was on the run, they would look in the pool room.

Max toyed with the idea of leaving them in one of the crew rooms with access to a sink, but he didn't like their odds of they were trapped in such a small space. At least in the filter room, mechanical pieces created niches and hiding spaces. And as James had already proven, the children knew how to hide.

Max slowly slipped the shirt off and pulled the two children around. Sure enough, it was dry. Kohei wrapped his tentacle around the edge of the sink where Max had turned the water on, and he pulled himself and his brother up to the rim. 

Xander was disturbingly pale, so Max quickly soaked his shirt and then wrung it out over Xander before doing the same for Kohei. They were slopping water everywhere, but Max didn't care. He didn't even care that they were leaving a trail for the invaders. He would care about that when they left the pool room. Once they got James, then Max could not risk having their movements tracked.

“Xander, query. Good?”

“No.” Xander said, and that was the most heartbreaking syllable Max had ever heard.

“Okay, let's get you to the water. Let's get to James.” Xander gave a low belching noise that the translator completely missed. But Max had to put Xander's distress out of his mind and focus on the mission. 

If he did not clear the area of enemy, all of them were in mortal danger. The same adrenaline that had driven him when he leapt into his jet as the sirens had gone off on the tarmac drove him now. He scooped up Kohei and Xander, tucking them into his shirt without bothering to put it on. He just tied the two arms around his neck to create a sling and then grabbed his weapons. He didn't even know how to fire the alien gun, but once he got the children to a safe place, he'd figure it out. These assholes were going to regret ever walking on his ship.

Then Max was going to figure out what the fuck Rick was doing with his security that they could walk around the ship without any alarms going off. Max was starting to think that Rick had a few screws loose in the old head sack.

Max checked the corridor before he dashed for the lift. The lift was the most dangerous part of this. If the doors opened onto a pair of aliens, he would have almost no ability to defend himself. He was confident he could take at least one with a good solid hook to the bottom of their body mass. Now that he killed one that way, he knew how much force it would take to pierce that skin and do a lot of internal damage. 

But that would give the second one time to counterattack. But, if Max tried to use the service corridor doors that he had found during his explorations, it was going to take too long. He would have to make more stops to keep the children wet and that gave the enemy far too much time to find their fallen comrade.

Max talked to the alien gun into his waistband and prayed that the thing had a safety while he gripped the maintenance hook in both hands. He forced himself to breathe and steadied his nerves as the lift doors opened on the pool level. Empty corridor. “Thank God,” he whispered. And then he ran as quietly as he could for the pool room. 

The pool took up most of this level, so hopefully the invaders would have dismissed it from their minds as soon as they believed they had everyone captured. Aliens might have great technology, but Max was starting to think they couldn't tactically think their way out of a wet paper bag. He planned to take full advantage of that blind spot. 

The pool room was dark when he went in, the illumination sets to half power. “James?” Max let the door slide shut behind him, and he inched into the room. He was met with an anxious round of blurbles and burps and whale song. 

“Max. You returned. Query brothers? Max. Query Rick? Query…” The translator failed, leaving only ugly burping. Either James was practicing profanity or that was the name of their invaders. Max spotted Xander on the edge of the pool, his tentacles all curled up under him. Max hurried to the edge and let the shirt sling down into the water so that Xander and Kohei could soak themselves.

“You're going downstairs to small pool room. I will find Rick,” Max said.

All James’s tentacles waved madly. “Max. Danger.” James added a warbling cry the translate missed. They had a whole new set of life experiences to program into the damn thing, just as soon as Max finished killing all the mother fuckers. 

Xander countered with a long string of whale calls that the translator seem wholly inadequate to handle. Out of the entire soliloquy, the translator only picked up “Max,” “Rick,” “maintenance hook,” and “wet.” However, with those clues, Max had a pretty good idea of what Xander was explaining. He was just glad the children hadn’t actually seen the killing. It was bad enough they had heard it. If they didn't need therapy, Max would for exposing children to that kind of shipped. The one thing he had always hated about shows like The Tomorrow People and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that children were pushed into a fight that they were far too young to understand or really emotionally cope with.

Max did not care what Rick said about them being adults, they weren't. They might have the cognitive abilities of an adult, but they did not have the wealth of experience. A strong foundation in love and honor added to a long history of family support would help blunt the sharp edges of death. The children didn’t have that.

Max went to his knees next to the pool. “Come on, we need to run.” None of the children argued, and Max gathered them up and slipped them back into his sling after he'd wrung it out a little bit. Now was the time they couldn't afford to drip or leave any sign of their passage. The easiest way for these invaders to win was for them to find the children and use them as hostages. That made hiding them priority number one in Max's book. 

He chose the exit that led to the mechanical workings of the ship and instead of risking the lift. There was a narrow passage here, one Max had carefully shimmied down when he’d explored the level. At the time he’d only hoped to find any cure for boredom as he waited for the mysterious children he was supposed to nanny. Now he slid down the shaft, slowing himself only enough that he could control the six foot drop to the floor when he reached the next level. Max suspected the shaft had something to do with overflow of water because it led directly into the lower filter room.

The only light dribbled in from above where the filtration pipes led to the upper pool. It gave the room an ominous glow as that light bounced off the waves in the rapidly moving water. Max moved to the edge of the pool, but he held on to the sling tightly. “Kohei, hold Xander. Protect Xander from moving water,” Max said. Kohei was the most athletic, and Rick said the eldest had a certain instinct to care for younger siblings. Max had to trust him to take care of Xander now because Xander was not a strong enough swimmer to fight the current.

Kohei wrapped two tentacles around a pipe and held his brother with the rest. His tentacles and Xander’s tangled together until they were one knot of octopus. “James, if enemy comes, hide your brothers. Show how to hide.” Hopefully he would find some good hiding spots in the room.

James curled his tentacles around Max’s wrist. “I continue with Max.”

“Absolutely not. No. You stay here with your brothers.” Max tried to gently pull James’s tentacles away, but he had more strength than Max had anticipated.

“I go Max. I know ship. I know access codes and internal scanners.”

Max cringed because James did have a point there. If Max could use internal scanners to identify where the enemy were, his odds of success went up dramatically. But that did not justify putting James in the middle of a damn counter attack. “No. Show me how to access scanners.”

“Too complex. Time too short. Must win enemy.” For someone with a limited understanding of English, James was remarkably good at choosing the words that would translate in order to communicate his ideas. 

“No. Dangerous.”

“All danger,” James said as he wrapped two more tentacles around Max’s arm. “Quickly win enemy. I work scanners.” 

Max's hands started to lose some feeling. Fear and dread built in the pit of Max's stomach. They did not have time to fight about this because the enemy could find that body at any moment. Max lived in constant terror of hearing some alarm over the ship’s systems. Of course, that was assuming that the ship had alarm systems because as of this point, it didn't seem like anyone had considered internal security during ship design. “I must go,” he said firmly.

“I must go also.” 

Xander chimed in. “Max and James work against enemy together. Let James help.” 

Max glared at the obnoxious little traitor. Another time he would have argued, but he couldn’t waste another second. “Kohei, take care of your brother.”

With one last look towards the two of them huddled together, Max took off for the door. “Query, where’s the nearest console?”

James reached toward the wall, and Max checked both directions before he stopped near a glass panel. He had suspected they were control panels like on the translation computer, but nothing he did activated them.

James’s motions were sure and quick as he called up an internal schematic of the ship. What Max had thought was a command deck was actually a transition of some sort between what appeared to be the lower decks and some sort of higher security upper deck structure. With a few quick taps, James changed the display, and now Max could see a number of dots moving around the various sections.

Two yellow dots were in the filtration room, and Max pointed at the display. “Hide them,” he said.

James jerked his tentacles back. “Can’t. Can only distract display.”

Even though Max didn’t understand what that meant, he dropped the issue. If James couldn’t accomplish some piece of programming, Max wasn’t going to guilt him about it. So he focused on his job. In the corridor outside the filtration room, one yellow and one blue dot blinked. Two blue dots were in the corridor by the medical room and two dots were outside the lower storage decks. At least that’s what Max assumed they were for. The cavernous rooms were empty.

That was four more enemy in addition to the leader. One yellow and one blue dot were still in the “control” room.

The medical corridor was the closest, so that was Max’s first stop. Time to figure out the weapon. He urged James to move, so James curled his strong walking leg around his neck as James dashed for the service shaft. He could reach the level right above medical and then cross over to the far side before dropping down through one of the various ventilation shafts.

With every step, he expected to hear an alien voice shout or a weapon discharge or an alarm sound, so so far the invaders were as tactically oblivious as Rick. Once he was far enough away from the filtration room that any noise he made would draw invaders away from the children, Max pulled out the triangular weapon and studied the short part of the triangle where the aliens had held it.

It had long grooves, and Max ran his finger along the indentations. He felt the slightest seam. He pointed the weapon away from the filtration room and pressed it. Nothing happened.

All the work on the translation computer had taught Max to seek creative work-arounds, so he switched to using his thumbnail. He ran a finger forward over the seam and then backward. He was starting to fear the weapon had a security lock or that he was feeling a manufacturing defect, but then he drew a circle over the seam. The last-ditch effort paid off when energy gathered along the sides of the triangle and then discharged with enough energy to send the deck plates exploding up into the air before they clattered back to the floor in a twisted heap of rubble.

“Win,” James said. He waved two long, slender tentacles.

James might be right. They just might win. However, Max had to keep in mind the other side had the same weapons, so Max had to play this smart. Time to move fast.

Chapter 17: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-17-23902574 

Chapter 18: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-father-18-23938595 

Chapter 19: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-19-23961630 

Chapter 20: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-20-24034384 

Chapter 21:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-21-24119410 

Chapter 22: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-22-24165545 

Chapter 23: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-23-24253737 

Epilogue: https://www.patreon.com/posts/earth-fathers-24266071