Earth Husbands, chapter 15 (Patreon)

Yes, yes. I know there is no chapter 14. I think I may have some tentacle sex there, and I don't feel like writing that today. So it's on with the plot.

Chapter Fifteen

Kohei came into the room, moving fast enough that Max immediately abandoned the computer model of Tribes armor he was designing. Carrington’s lead warrior now understood the value of having weapons caches on board, and he needed to strike while the purse strings were open and the Tribes people were thinking about invasions and the need to stockpile a few supplies. “Max Father, a human wants to come into the ship.” He blasted the words loudly enough that he sounded like James.

For a second, Max could only stare. “What?” he finally asked.

Kohei rotated a quarter turn. “Query to clarify.”

Max stood. “Query. Did you say a human? Are you sure?”

Kohei blew raspberries. “I know species of father mine. Is human. Two boned leg tentacles with unbalanced walk. Small head very far off body. Two boned arm tentacles with only three major joints. Long, oddly placed finger tentacles. Human.”

That was a creepy description of humanity, but weirdly accurate as well. “Where? The main door?” Max trotted past Kohei on his way to the elevator. “Query. What name did he give?”

“Asking of name intimate. I am no rude.”

Max stopped in the elevator and forced himself to wait for Kohei to get all his tentacles inside when really he wanted to hit the urgent button on the thing. “Wait. Do all species consider asking for a name rude?”

“Clarify. Query. Statement was query?”

“Yes, that was a question.” Kohei did not have Xander’s familiarity with the language, but then again, he was the child Max had apparently been ignoring, so that was his fault. “Query. Do all species consider asking for a name rude?”

“Many species,” Kohei said. “Hidden people do not, but they will often give different names depending which personality to display. Other peoples often do equate rudeness with asking of name where name does not correlate with close relationship. Official designation is enough.”

That had so many cultural bombshells in it that Max couldn’t deal with all of them. For now, he cared about the human at his door. The elevator opened, and Max hurried out with Kohei trailing after him. “Query. Did the human leave his official designation?”

“Official designation: human seeking entrance to ship of Hidden people.”

Max sighed. Gene Roddenbury must have been kidnapped by logical aliens at some point because aliens were more like Spock than coincidence could explain.

He opened the main door and froze. He stared at her and she stared at him, and both of them had their mouths hanging open. Max found his voice first. “Dee?”

“Max! Oh my God, it’s you!” Dee had never been a touchy-feely person, but she threw herself at Max and caught him in a huge hug. Kohei went all curly fries, and then his tentacles got stiff and he moved forward.

“Dee! It’s so good to see you. I saw your plane shot out of the sky.” The second he said that, Max knew what had happened. Just like with him, the aliens had plucked her out of the plane so she didn’t die the way Dan had when debris tore through his parachute. “Fuck. Were you on the same police ship that took me in?”

“I have no idea,” she said, “I was unconscious for a time, and then I hid in the world’s tiniest room.” She backed up a step and gave Kohei a dirty look. She probably figured he was rudely eavesdropping.

Rather than dribble and drabble out the weirdness, Max decided to get it all out on the table. “Dee, this is Kohei. He is one of three offspring I was a surrogate for.”

Her looked turned to shock. This is why he had avoided his home planet… that and technically he could be arrested for desertion because he had chosen family over returning to the Air Force. Eventually she said, “Max” in a low, horrified voice.

Max didn’t want his children exposed to even more prejudice, but he didn’t want to tell Dee to go fuck herself. It was a difficult position. “Kohei, why don’t you go in and ask James to look at the work I’ve done on the Tribes armor.”

“Max Father,” Kohei said. His tentacles were a confused mass of curly fry and stiff outrage.

“We’re going to go for a walk and talk,” Max said firmly. “Go back and check with your brother.”

Kohei placed two tentacle tips against Max’s leg. “It’s fine,” Max promised. “Go back inside.” Kohei’s tentacles pulled up a little tighter, but he did turn back toward the elevator, and Max headed out of the ship. Only then did it occur to him that he wasn’t armed. The news of a human visitor had apparently knocked the common sense out of him. Well, they didn’t have to go far, and if Max knew his family—and he did—they would be watching as long as he was in sight of the cameras. But the cultural taboo against listening in public would come in handy because Dee was about to say some heinous shit. He could tell from her expression.

In the air, she was focused, aggressive, direct. And that tended to be her conversational style, too. When you could get her away from a book she was grotesquely honest. They called her Ditzy because she was the polar opposite of that term.

“Let’s go lean awkwardly against the informational kiosk,” he suggested. Names, mass transit, and chairs. Aliens didn’t know what they were missing. 

Dee chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve spent lots of time wandering the streets, and I haven’t yet found a decent place to sit. Do you think they do that to prevent people from congregating?”

“Or tentacles just don’t get tired like boned tentacles do.”

“Boned tentacles. Yeah. I’ve heard that one.” She leaned against the kiosk Max had pointed out and stared at Rick’s ship. Max cleared his throat and tried to compose his thoughts. He thought it was hard communicating with aliens, but apparently humans left him just as tongue-tied.

“Hey, I get it,” she said softly. “You do what you have to do. Isn’t that what they taught us in those survival classes? I’m not judging.”

Funny. Her promise to not judge made him feel pretty damn judged. “When I took the job, the translator said I would be a nanny.”

She snorted. 

“It was the only job that paid enough that I would have some hope of getting home.”

Her face contorted. “Yeah.” She gave a soul deep sigh. “I would have taken the job, too. Up until two days ago, I was working as a translator for pennies. Of course, that was before I was told the work was no longer necessary because someone had a much more complete human translation interface than the sad attempt I had made. Now I’ll have to find another crap job. If someone told me that I could get home by acting as a surrogate for one of those parasites, I would have.”

The word hit Max like a punch. “Whoa. Rick and the kids are not parasites.”

Dee’s expression turned slightly pitying. “They lay eggs in the bodies of other animals. I'm fairly sure that's the technical definition of parasite.”

“They ask before laying eggs and pay quite well. Humans hire surrogates all the time. Are we parasites?”

“Um, we have the ability to have our own children. The Uglies literally can't give birth to their own children. And if one really wanted to have a child and couldn’t pay a surrogate, don’t you think they would put their eggs in someone anyway? In fact, as I understand it on their home planet they raise animals specifically for the purpose of carrying their young.”

Max crossed his arms over his chest. “As I understand it,” he said, mirroring her words, “humans raise animals for the sole purpose of killing them, ripping their bodies apart, and then eating pieces.”

She had the grace to look chagrined. “That does sound bad.”

“I'm fairly sure that every sentient species is going to sound psychopathic if you describe them honestly enough.” That did not say good things about the nature of sentient life, but Max was pretty sure he was right. Maybe it took a certain level of aggression to reach space. But of all the species Max had read about, the Hidden ones were the least psychotic of the bunch. Either that or Rick was hiding the really embarrassing informational tapes. 

“Okay, okay. I am working on the required mental adjustments here,” she promised. “They’re just sort of creepy. I mean, if you have just one of them, they can have sex with themselves and then drop hundreds of eggs in hundreds of different animals and the next thing you know, the planet is buried in Ug— Hidden ones.”

“Have they done that?” Nothing in Rick’s nature suggested that he would shove eggs in an animal and walk away. He had hovered over Max and even though he kept a certain distance from the children, he would shiver in pleasure when Max described how well they were doing in their studies. He was a proud papa octopus.

“Not that I’ve read about,” she admitted. “But I haven’t heard of anyone actually having spider eggs erupt from their bodies, and that is still an ongoing nightmare of mine. Sometimes the fact that it could happen is enough to give someone the creeps.” She gave a dramatic shiver.

“I consider Rick my common law husband,” Max said.

Her mouth fell open. Literally. He could count her teeth if he wanted to. He didn’t.

“When he found out that I had misunderstood the job description, he offered to abort the children. He was a big ball of curled up tentacles and misery, but he would have done that if I wanted. He respected that I had a choice about whether or not to have babies in me.”

She opened her mouth without speaking, closed it, and then cleared her throat. “So, he wasn’t a sick fuck who knocked you up and forced you to carry his children, so you married him?”

And that was the Dee Max knew and generally tried to avoid. “No, that’s when I started looking at him as a person and not an employer. He’s kind and a giant worry wart and a good father and weirdly obsessed Darth Vader and Jar Jar Binks.”

“What? How the hell does he know about Star Wars?”

A half-second too late, Max realized that he didn’t want Dee to know how close he had been to Earth. Being stranded was one thing, but she would definitely not approve of his plan to go AWOL… or rather to stay AWOL. “I like to tell them stories,” Max said. “By the way, I’ve told them the version where Jar Jar is a secret sith who uses the drunken monk martial arts to make everyone underestimate him. So if they start talking to you about Jar Jar, be prepared for weirdness.”

Both her eyebrows were making a run for her hairline. “So this Hidden one,” and boy couldn’t Max hear the air quotes around that, “likes Darth Vader and sith infiltrators and you think he’s a keeper?”

“He’s equally obsessed with Galen Erso and Buffy Summers.”

“Who?”

“Galen Erso. The Empire forced him to help design the death star, so he built in a way to destroy it and then gave the plans to the rebellion, and Buffy Summers is the vampire slayer.”

She studied him for several long minutes. “You watch too much TV.”

“I did before I enlisted. Afterward, I didn’t have enough time to truly indulge my addiction.” He grinned at her, but she did not seem to appreciate his humor.

She rubbed a hand over her face. “Look, I get that this Hidden one has been kind and that you have an emotional connection to its kids. I get that.” She took a breath and Max jumped in before she could say anything more offensive than the shit she had already said.

“Don’t even assume this is some sort of fucking Stockholm syndrome. Rick hired me. He didn’t threaten me, and when Hunter aliens invaded the ship, I protected my family because they are my family.”

She leaned closer. “But did you have a choice? I know what it feels like to be alone. I get it. Aliens are not exactly touchy-feely sorts. I always thought of myself as an introvert, but I am crawling out of my own skin without someone to talk to, someone to touch or hear laugh.” Her voice grew more desperate. “It’s so fucking hard that my head aches with the pressure of being alone most of the time. However, the Uglies are not your only choice. The main docks have small living quarters that anyone can claim for the night. They’re clean and secure. And food is free if you don’t mind bland staples. Living with this alien is not your only choice. You can have a decent life here. I’ll show you the ropes. And now that the translation computer works, maybe there will be more opportunities… other opportunities. You can’t limit yourself to one plan. There will be other ways to get home.” She caught his hand in her and held on with a strength that startled Max. 

He stared at her, horrified by the pain he could see reflected in her features, but repulsed by the suggestion that he should choose her over his family. He squeezed her hands back and wondered how long it had been since she touched anyone. Had anyone offered her any kindness. His heart warred with two obligations. He couldn’t abandon her, but he couldn’t expose his children to the sort of casual prejudice she was showing.

“I love them,” Max said gently. “Come get to know them. Eventually we will have the money to fly back to Earth, and you can come with us.”

She backed away a step. “You have to know how much those things creep me out.”

Max loved Dee the way he loved all the guys in his unit. These were the people he trained with, fought with, drank with. He knew them better than he knew his biological family, and lots of spouses got jealous of how close the guys in the unit were. However, he would not choose her over his family. “You can’t come into my house and insult the children I’m raising,” he said firmly. “My children.”

“You can’t—”

Max didn’t wait to find out what she thought he couldn’t do. “I’m happy to introduce you to Rick if you can be polite, but I really don’t want to argue with you, and I have work I need to finish. I’ve convinced a trader that her ship has security vulnerabilities, so now I hope to make a little money by selling her equipment to fill in those gaps. Come back in three or four hours, and we can share some food and you can meet Rick. He backed away from her.

He read shock in her expression. And as Max backed away, that transformed to dismay. Max turned and fled up the ramp to the ship before he guilt made him do something stupid… like invite her to move in with them so she didn’t have to be alone.

He didn’t have to trigger the door mechanism or wait for it because Kohei stood watching through a crack in the door. As Max approached, he moved back and the door slid open. Max ran home.