Chapter Seventeen
There was so much tacticalinformation that Max wished he could ask for. However, he had never programmed certain words into the translator. He would frustrate James if he asked whether the weapon he had scavenged could breach the ship’s hull. Max could only try to avoid weapons fire unless necessary, and then make sure that the energy hit the invaders and not the ship. Or at least not to hit the ship again. He hoped Rick would forgive him for the mess he'd made out of the decking.
Max stopped by one of the access vents set high into the wall and used the indented handhold to lift himself high enough to pry the cover off. He had done this dozens of times when he’d been exploring, but never with little tentacles in the way.
“Careful with tentacles,” Max said.
“Careful with enemy,” James replied. Either James had a wicked sense of humor or the translator was glitchy. It was a little hard to know which. Max gave James a little push to get him to slide back farther so he wouldn't interfere with arm movements. James shifted. That allowed Max to haul himself up into the service shaft before he started shimmying down to the level below.
He had hoped that he would be able to locate the enemy from within the shaft, but he couldn't hear anyone. For a time, Max considered doubling back and having James check the internal scanners again, but they didn’t have time. Then in a wild tangent, his brain conjured an image of an ex-boyfriend.
At one point he’d had a brief but torrid affair with a man who wrote children’s books. Bobby had always said he loved that for children, cliché didn't exist. An author could have the most clichéd, stereotypical villain, yet children would soak it all up because it was new to them. At the time, Max had thought that Bobby was a little too cynical to write children's literature.
But Bobby's words haunted Max as crawled back up the vent shaft.
“Max win enemy, query?” James asked.
“Watch and learn, young padawan. Watch and learn.” Max had snagged several small chunks of metal from the exploded decking, and now he took the two smallest and dropped them down the shaft. He ran like a demon for the next shaft. This trick was so old that even cartoons considered it too clichéd to work. This was Wile E. Coyote territory. Max levered himself back up into the next ventilation shaft and shimmied his way down a level.
Sure enough, the chattering of agitated guards filled the air. Max found a horizontal shaft intersecting his original one to rest and reposition himself so that he could get his head down and peek through the grate. The two invaders were coming back down the corridor. One had a piece of metal clutched in a small fringe tentacle, and they chittered at each other without looking around. Hopefully they were stupid enough to investigate without reporting anything by radio.
Max slid out of the horizontal space. His shoulders ached from the awkward position in the narrow vertical shaft. It required him to brace himself like freaking Spider-Man, and James made that even more awkward by resting his weight against Max’s head. A few extra shoulder muscles would have come in handy, but Max was Air Force. He went out of his way to avoid the sort of PT the masochistic Marines indulged in.
Despite his body's complaints, Max worked his way back up to another horizontal shaft and sat on the edge of it, watching the ventilation grate below him. He knew from experience that if he landed on the grate, it would open cleanly and let him drop to the floor below. He knew that, but he suspected that any alien walking under the grate might be a little surprised to find a human falling out of thin air. At least that was the plan.
The chittering came closer and Max braced himself on the sides of the shaft. At the same time, James tightened his leg tentacle a little too much. Max tapped the tentacle, and James loosened it immediately.
Then the two invaders walked under the ventilation shaft. Max pulled the maintenance hook out of his waistband and dropped down. His feet slammed the grate open with a reverberating metallic clang. Before the first invader even turned, Max lunged forward and drove the maintenance hook up into the invader’s underbelly.
The enemy gave a chattering cry, and then screamed like a cat in heat. When Max tried to rip the hook back out, it caught on something. Rather than struggle with injured alien number one, Max abandoned his first weapon and turned to deal with the second invader.
The alien might not have anticipated an attack, but it was already moving fast. Alien two had his triangle weapon halfway out of what appeared to be a holster. Max pulled his own weapon and circled his thumb on the trigger even as the other alien was scuttling backwards.
Energy burst from the gun and slammed into the alien so hard that its body split above its wide disco belt. A fraction of a second later, the heat of the energy backwash blasted Max. He flinched away, raising his hands to protect his face and James. Burnt hair smell and the sensation of a cold breeze across his hands suggested Max had gotten burned badly.
When Max opened his eyes, the back of his hands and arms were lobster-red. The skin was damaged, but it appeared to be either a severe first-degree or mild second-degree. In an ideal world, Max would’ve gone to find something to cool the flesh. However, that was not possible.
“Query, James, healthy?” Max asked as he turned back to alien number one, the alien who didn't have his guts blasted across the corridor.
“Heathy, healthy,” James said.
Then he was doing better than alien number one. The impaled invader was making soft chirping noises of distress, or at least Max assumed it was distress. But any sympathy vanished when it reached toward the dropped weapon. Not willing to risk another close encounter with an energy discharge, Max grabbed the bottom of the maintenance hook and yanked.
The hook came free with a whoosh of fluids, and the alien slowly sank to the floor. When its head began to indent like a sinkhole, Max grabbed the second alien gun and fled the scene. As he ran, he tucked both triangle weapons into his waistband, but he dropped the maintenance hook because it was too slick with the viscera for him to risk using it again. He’d have to grab another.
“Max hurts.” James said with an unhappy burp.
“Enemy hurt more,” Max replied. He wished he had the vocabulary to comfort James or explain the situation, but he didn't. They reached a ventilation shaft, and Max climbed up to grab the edge and pop it open. As he was scrambling into the narrow space, he hit his arm on the edge of the opening.
“God damn mother fucking son of a mother-fucking bitch!” The pain nearly made him fall back out, but he gripped the cover with one hand and the edge of the latching mechanism with the other. After a couple of breaths, he pulled himself up into the shaft and started climbing to the nearest horizontal shaft.
“That is why you do not use unfamiliar weapons,” Max whispered as he crawled. He didn't think that he could pull that trick off again, not when climbing required him to brace himself with his arms.
With every enemy he took out, he took more damage to himself. If these aliens had reinforcements on a ship nearby, he was so very screwed. Max wasn't some bad-ass Ranger. He wasn't even a Marine. He was a fucking zoomie. He wasn't supposed to be the one engaging in hand-to-hand combat with alien invaders.
