Max needed to get towater fast. He doubled back and headed for the nearest crew room. “Let’s get you guys wet, and then we’ll get back to the pool room.”
The clock was working against them. The second an enemy found that body, they would all go 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 crew quarters. “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 area 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.
Max toyed with the idea of leaving them in crew quarters 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. The children clung to him, or Kohei did anyway, and he had a firm grip on his little brother. Max pulled the two offspring 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 scooped water over Xander before doing the same for Kohei. They were slopping water everywhere, but Max didn't care. He didn't even care if they left 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 it was the most heartbreaking syllable Max had ever heard.
“Okay, let's get you to the water. Let's get to James.” Max lifted the boys onto his back before he rinsed the worst of the blood out of his shirt.
Xander made 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’d leapt into his jet as the sirens had gone off on the tarmac drove him now. He tied the two shirt arms around his neck to create a sling and tugged on Kohei’s tentacles to urge him down into the sling. 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 would regret invading his ship.
Then Max would figure out what the fuck Rick was doing with his security that they could wander 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 would be 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 had 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 might 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 tucked the alien gun into his waistband and prayed that the thing had a safety. He needed both hands to grip the maintenance hook. 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 the invaders should have dismissed it from their minds as soon as they believed they had everyone captured. Aliens might have had great technology, but 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 set 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 ugly burping. Either James was practicing profanity or that was the name of their invaders. Max spotted James 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 the small pool room. I will find Rick,” Max said.
All James’s tentacles waved madly. “Max. Danger.” James added a warbling cry the translator missed. He had a whole new set of experiences to program into the damn thing, just as soon as Max finished killing all the motherfuckers.
Xander countered with a long string of whale song that the translator was 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 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 shit. The one thing he had always hated about shows like The Tomorrow People and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was how children were pushed into a fight that they were far too young to understand or emotionally cope with.
Max didn’t 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 yet.
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 instead of risking the lift. There was a narrow passage here, one Max had carefully shimmied down when he’d explored this level. At the time he’d 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 enough that he could control the six-foot drop to the floor at the next level. Max suspected the shaft had something to do with overflow of from the pool because it led into the lower filter room.
The 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. Max walked 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 had 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 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.”
