The short female stopped near an alcove and wailed. A second later, another humanoid appeared. This one was taller and more bulky. The alien’s upper lip was huge compared to the lower one, making it look like the victim of a bee sting attack. The alien turned his head, and a half dozen nostrils went up the bridge of something vaguely nose-like. He wailed at the alien holding Max hostage, and she wailed back.
Max said, “I want to go back to my people.” He wanted that, but he wasn’t sure anyone cared. “Who are you people?” Max demanded. The pair holding him hostage, and probably discussing his painful death, were joined by a third alien. It was shaped like a pith helmet with a curtain of tentacles hanging below. Max shivered in horror.
The lavender alien shrieked, and the helmet wrapped a tentacle around Max’s leg. Terror made Max jerk back, but the tentacle held firm. When Max lost his balance, he tried to recover by grabbing lavender alien. That was a mistake. The boss alien shoved Max, and he fell to the ground hard enough to lose his breath. Luckily the floor was the consistency of a wrestling mat, so he didn’t injure anything beyond his dignity. He used his new freedom to scuttle toward the door.
Alien bogey one wailed, and Max got his feet under him. He threw himself toward the exit when tentacles wrapped around his knees. Max punched and kicked in every direction. Aliens chittered and bellowed and sang and wailed, using every note on the piano. Tentacles caught Max’s wrists, and soon Max could only thrash as the helmet-tentacle alien sat on him. Max might have bitten the nearest tentacle except he did not wantthatin his mouth and he wanted to retain a grain of dignity. He was a military officer. They couldn’t strip him of that honor or that responsibility.
A tentacle punched the air next to Max’s head, and he flinched away. The tip of the tentacle unfurled to reveal a crystal. A hologram of a tiny television set appeared above the bluish stone. The tiny screen showed television broadcasts. The image switched from one station to another every few seconds, but they were all talking about the same thing—the repelled invasion.
Repelled.
Max’s muscles turned watery, and he stopped struggling. Earth was safe. They had repelled the alien invaders. Except Max knew that wasn’t true. He’d been in the air, and nothing Earth owned had touched the alien fighters. But in the end, Max didn’t care as long as the planet was safe.
After all, his unit had given him the call name Bells after Mr. Belvedere. They’d hoped to insult him by calling him a servant, but Max had always focused on the service part of military service. If his planet was safe, he could handle whatever aliens could dish out until his body failed.
Chapter Two
The pith-helmet, tentaclealien Max had named Spaceballs led Max down a mundane ramp and onto an alien world. In the distance, a city was partially obscured by a greenish, grayish haze that might have been pollution or a poisonous atmosphere that would kill Max. During his days on the ship, he’d discovered that the alien computers had absorbed very little English, so his ability to ask about anything that mattered was extremely limited.
Spaceballs patted the ground with a tentacle. “Here. Here. You seek others here.”
Max walked the aisle of the bustling port. George Lucas did not have an imagination this vivid. Aliens of all sizes hurried past one another. Stacks of cartons rolled through the crowd on automated sleds that buzzed in high tones when some tentacle monster stopped too long in front of it. And then the alien in question would wave half its tentacles in the air while the other half carried it clear of the freight’s path.
Tentacles, tentacles everywhere.
Okay, that wasn’t fair. Only most of the aliens had tentacles. The others had some combination of more leg-like limbs. And several individuals were the same species as the first alien Max had seen. They had a center tentacle that undulated like a snail’s underside with two narrow legs on either side. One ran past, her two outer legs lifting the body and flinging it forward to land on the center leg, over and over. Max was developing a killer headache. Maybe the atmosphere was poison and he could look forward to an agonizing death.
“Here, where? Where do I go?” Max asked. In the Air Force, he’d resented how the military dictated every aspect of his life, but right now, he would appreciate a few rules.
“Here. Here.” Spaceballs tapped the ground again. The translation computer was particularly fucked today... or Spaceballs hated him. Either was possible.
“Where do I go?” Max illustrated by pointing first in one direction and then the other.
“Here.” Spaceballs turned and fled back up the ramp. Max tried to grab him, but the helmet-like top half was too smooth, and his tentacles moved him far too fast for Max to keep up, especially with his stomach churning. He still wasn’t sure if that was a symptom of stress or a sign that alien food was killing him, and he was reaching a point where he didn’t care. Totally fucked was total and fucked, and whether the level of fuckedness was multiplied by two or ten didn’t matter.
The ship door closed behind Spaceballs, and Max was left alone. With nothing better to do, he started wandering toward the city. On Earth, most of the cities he’d seen had a central island of high rises with a wide ring of smaller buildings. However, this city filled the skyline with towers of all shapes and angles. Several grew larger at the top, which seemed like a rather unstable shape for a tower, but Max had to assume aliens understood their own architecture better than he did. To his human eye, it made the city look wrong.
