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 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 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 ignored, 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 Roddenberry 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. 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 glared at Kohei. She probably figured he was 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.”
She looked stunned. This is why he had avoided his home planet... that and he might 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. “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 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 she looked up from her 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 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 humans left him equally tongue-tied.
“Hey, I get it,” she said. “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 not to 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.” Her sigh was soul-deep. “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.”
