Earth Husbands, chapter 19 (Patreon)

Max didn’t know what he expected from an alien version of a competency hearing, but this wasn’t it. The short wall opposite his narrow window was one huge screen, so it looked like Max was in a cubby on the side of a large room. A few people glanced his way, so Max assumed the camera was projecting his image as well. He gave them credit for security. This setup gave Max zero opportunities to break out.

Aliens wandered in and out of circular benches that were interrupted by four paths. Max’s camera was lined up with one of those breaks, and he could see straight across to the opposite end of the room where an actual alcove sat empty.

The whole room was probably fifty feet by fifty feet, and there were far too many aliens in it for Max’s comfort. He understood why some of the aliens were there. He spotted Carrington in an even more ridiculous hat than before and Xena at her side. Bundy was on the far side of the room and he kept glancing over toward Max and then quickly looking elsewhere. No doubt his bad mood had returned double. There were three pith-helmet Pajekh and many of the tall, nostrilly Chosen. The former were clustered in a group and the latter walked the room in a way that made Max think of guards or politicians.

A goose poop green Smarty alien sat on the bench closest to Max’s camera. Max wondered if that was the same one that had come to Bundy’s meet-and-greet. And then there were a scattering of aliens Max didn’t know. A green jellyfish with an enormous trunk and a set of tentacles growing out of the center of its head shifted to the right, and Max spotted two Hunter aliens, their orange pyramid bodies standing out in a room that had more greens and blues and purples.

Max’s stomach heaved at the sight of them, and his hands itched with the ghostly memory of warm guts sliding over his skin. He shivered. And here he thought the day couldn’t get worse. Whatever Max had done wrong in a previous life, it must have been bad. Really bad. 

The aliens fell silent and looked off to Max’s left. Max instinctively moved closer to the wall to try and see around the corner, but of course that was an idiotic thing to do because he couldn’t see around corners on a television screen. No wonder the aliens kept calling him an idiot.

Max’s moment of levity as he silently made fun of himself vanished when he saw Rick slide into the room. His tentacles were curled up so tight that he was having trouble even walking, and Kohei walked next to him.

“What the fuck are you doing here? Oh hell no.”

Rick and Kohei kept walking toward the center.

“Kohei, you promised you would give him my message. Rick! Rick!” Max screamed, but Rick didn’t even rotate an eye in his direction. Someone had Max on mute.

“You turn the sound on right now so I can tell Rick exactly what I think of him coming here. I have a right to tell that moron to get back to his god damn ship. Do you hear me? I demand the right to talk to him. I must have some rights, and I fucking well demand them.” Max screamed. Unsurprising, nothing happened.

A Chosen alien followed, and when Rick and Kohei sat on one of the inner benches, the Chosen one moved to the center and hauled his bulk up onto the table. Immediately aliens sat on the closest bench and the table in the center started to turn ever so slowly. It gave Max a nice profile of that huge upper lip. So this was the judge. Probably.

It would be awesome if someone had explained the proceedings to him, but apparently the universe didn’t have lawyers. The judge started wailing, and the volume on the microphone made Max flinch away from the screech. Luckily he only got a half second of that before the translated voice replaced it. 

“The Tribes Carrington charges the Ugly Rick of manipulation of a moron species to circumnavigate the sanctions against Ugly planet.” The judge gave that one sentence summary, and then Carrington stood.

“The Human Porter cannot work any math the Human Max claims to have created and hopes to sell,” she said. It took Max a half second to connect Human Porter to Dee, even when he knew that Dee’s attempts to do technical translating had led to this mess. “The Human Max lives with the Ugly Rick. The Ugly planet is under sanctions.”

She sat. The whole time, the table holding the judge slowly rotated.

Bundy stood. “Human Max and Ugly Rick came together once with the weapon. Human Max had knowledge of weapon. Human Max came alone after that. The navigation program was registered to the Human Max.” He sat.

If this was a trial, either humans or aliens had a truly fucked up idea of what it meant to argue a position. Clearly they were focusing on facts, but facts meant nothing. They could mean anything. True, some conclusions were just false, but if a recruit had an AFOQT score of 50, that could be good because it met the minimum standard for being selected for pilot training. It could be bad if only twenty slots were open and twenty other candidates had higher scores. It could be humiliating if the person had scored 61 on a practice or exciting if it was the highest score a person had ever gotten. The number was just a number. 

No one was trying to explain these facts.

The Smarties alien stood. “Human Max has separate account from Ugly Rick.” It hunkered back down more than actually sitting.

Max saw the pattern. When the last person sat, someone in the judge’s line of sight would stand and testify. So how long would she keep rotating, and would Max have a chance to speak? The speakers seemed to signal that they wanted the floor by standing. Okay. Max could play this game. 

He sat on the end of his narrow bench, bunk and prayed the judge looked at him before Rick. Max adored Rick—loved him beyond all reason. However, Rick had the self-preservation instincts of a stoned lemming. No, a tweaking lemming. At least a stoned one would have the good sense to lie on the couch and do nothing. This idiot had left the safety of the ship to sit in a room full of aliens who were calling him ugly to his face.

Before getting kidnapped, Max had thought of himself as being pretty non-confrontational, or as non-confrontational as a fighter pilot could get. But now… he had fantasies about cutting off tentacles and oversized lips.

A Pajekh was speaking. “Human Max used credits from his account to install new sensors on the ship of Ugly Rick.”

“Hey, that’s our ship, thank you very much,” Max muttered. The judge was looking in his direction, and Max stood.

“Can anyone hear me?”

Everyone turned to look at him, so clearly that was a yes. Max face heated, and he didn’t know why. It was a reasonable question. Max couldn’t claim the navigation program was his, but maybe he could mitigate the damage. “I created the weapon because Hunters invaded my ship and I didn’t like having to defend the ship and my family with a maintenance hook. I wanted a defense that would have less likelihood of me ending up dead. Can I ask a question of someone who is in the room?”

The judge’s table stopped, and he had to shift around so he faced Max. Max got the feeling that this was not how it was supposed to work in this part of the universe. Tough shit. “On my planet, a trial like this often includes people asking each other questions. Can I do that?”

“Who would you ask a question of?” the judge asked.

“Tribes Xena.”

“What question would you ask?” The judge seemed to push his lips out even farther, which elongated all the nostrils along the side of his nose and made him look sillier. 

“I want her to describe her impressions of me when we worked together.”

“That is not a question.”

Damn logical aliens. “Did I seem to know what I was doing with weapons? Better?” Max stomped down on his temper before he said something that would earn him a contempt charge in a human court.

The judge’s table began to slowly rotate again, and Max took his seat. Every court show he’d ever watched said that a lawyer should never ask a question he didn’t know the answer to, but these assholes would never believe a word out of his mouth. They had already dismissed him as an idiot. He needed a character witness, one that the rest of the universe thought was pretty. When the judge rotated around to Xena, she stood.

For a time, she was silent, and bile pressed at the base of Max’s stomach. He couldn’t defend Rick from a prison cell. What would happen to him if the authorities took their ship? Rick and the kids would be stranded here, surrounded by people who hated them. If Xena didn’t tell the truth, Max didn’t know how to convince these guys that he was competent to take the blame for his own actions.

“Human Max adequately explained the function of two different modifications to energy weapons, both of which will increase lethality. He also adequately explained the function of defensive garments he offered to sell and he identified weaknesses in the security of our ship and helped to design remediation plans.” She sat so quickly that her hat flopped even though it was much smaller than Carrington’s. Hopefully her testimony didn’t create a problem with her boss, but Max couldn’t care about that right now. Before the judge could swing back around to face him, Kohei stood.

Max held his breath. Better Kohei than Rick, but this was still the stuff of nightmares.

“I saw Human Max Father testing many weapons. He worked often with Ugly Xander Sibling. He brought human theories of weapon design to designs in the archives of the ship of Ugly Rick Father.” He sat.

As much as Max knew that Kohei was playing it smart, Max hated hearing Kohei refer to family like that. They weren’t ugly. Not even a little. They were graceful and beautiful and annoying, but never ugly. Max clenched his teeth and wished the judge were facing him. Instead the table stopped. No one stood. No one spoke. But the judge faced the far side of the room and the table did not budge.

Was the judge ready to make a decision? This felt entirely too arbitrary. Max hadn’t gotten to say half the things he wanted to. But Rick and Kohei stayed seated. Max had to follow their lead because he had no idea what was going on.

He was going to research every fucking judicial process on every fucking planet when this was over. Hopefully he wouldn’t be locked in a cell while he did it, but according to television, researching legal cases was standard fare for the unjustly condemned. And television never lied. 

Aliens shifted on their benches, some scooting sideways to get out of the judge’s view. Ah. He was looking at the Hunters.

The larger one stood. “One ship of law-breakers reported that humans are irrational and dangerous when offspring are in danger.” It sat. The judge remained motionless. Alien spectators inched away. The Hunters sat. It was the world’s strangest standoff with silence being the major weapon. Max didn’t understand why the judge assumed these Hunters would know about a pirate ship of Hunters, but then again, the universe seemed to focus on certain assumptions, like people didn’t go to war against their own species. So maybe species stuck together more than humans.

If so, the universe was in for a shock when humanity 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 aliens.

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 turn to look at him. The Hunter sat and the judge’s platform started to rotate again.

One of the largest aliens in the room 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 odd 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 was starting to think 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 to his seat given the opportunity, but it never came. Instead alien after alien testified about Max’s threats to cut off tentacles and his habit of stepping on tentacle 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 started telling 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.