Not that Rick would say that. Rick would bugle complaints about Max never listening to his warnings. He would probably then add a few insults about Max not running fast enough. Even if Rick berated him for following this stupid plan, Max would want him here. And to be honest, Rick had a right to say “I told you so” about a thousand times.
They passed the three- and four-story buildings that housed traders and craftsmen and headed deeper into the city, always surrounded in front and back by the purple People of the Red. At one point, they passed an alley, and Max considered making a run for it, but when they got to the entrance, a police officer stood in the opening, his oversized lips moving withpuck-puck-pucksounds.
At five feet tall, it wasn’t impressive, but its weapon was. Bundy had tried to convince Max that weapons weren’t valuable commodities. He was either an optimist or an idiot. And the whole time, aliens stepped aside to watch as Max and Dee were escorted by the armed guards. As they passed, the chatter would quiet, and huge alien eyes would watch them pass.
They passed under an archway, and the boardwalk broadened and the buildings grew taller. Max had never been to this part of the city. Fuck. Max glared at Dee, but this time she narrowed her eyes and glared back at him. “Don't give me shit because I warned you too late for you to get out,” she snapped at him. She lifted her chin and probably hoped to project strength, but that was not the impression Max got.
A forward guard turned to consider them, and hysterical giggles floated through Max’s gut. Rick would have told the guard that it lacked eyes in appropriately asymmetrical rear-facing places.
No matter what had happened, the police were treating both of them the same. By trying to help Max, Dee had landed in the soup with him. Max waited until the guard turned back to the front before he leaned closer to Dee and whispered, “What did you tell people about me?” If he could figure out what he was being charged with, maybe he could minimize the damage.
She narrowed her eyes more. “I didn't tell them anything. I overheard them talking about you.”
“And you happened to be on Carrington's ship?” That was too much coincidence.
Dee’s anger vanished and she looked confused. “Carrington?” They both fell silent when an eight-foot-tall alien with a crown of tentacles took a step forward. A People of Red alien screeched, and the translator gave a sharp “Back!” The aggressive alien retreated, but Dee couldn’t stop staring at it.
Max was more concerned about the Hunters in the curious crowd. None of them came near, but Max’s palms itched with the ghost of a maintenance hook slick with viscera.
Max pulled his thoughts away from that morbid subject. “Carrington. The alien who owns that ship. Big hat, money hungry... you know, Alexis Carrington.”
“You give them names?” Shock colored Dee’s voice. “I mean, I knew you gave names to the ones you called family, but you name all of them?” She studied him as if Max were ten cards short of a full deck.
Max took offense at her tone. “What do you do?”
“Random alien one, random alien two, random alien three.” She shrugged. “And then there’s the big alien with the weird neck who hired me to translate technical specifications into Earth math. And since your translation program made my last job obsolete, getting this job seemed like a godsend.”
Max’s heart sank. “Technical translator?”
Dee glanced at the front guard, but they were marching toward the city center. They might have been short, but they were all legs under a round elf-body, so they could keep up a good pace. And they didn’t seem to care that their two prisoners were comparing stories. They sucked as police officers.
Dee edged closer and lowered her voice. “They showed me a lot of technical theories and practical applications and asked me to explain the math in human terms. Some of it made absolutely no sense at all, some of it violated every theory of physics that I know, and some of it made sense if I squinted and tilted my head to the right three degrees.”
Oh fuck. Max had underestimated Carrington. At least he assumed Carrington had arranged all this. If that was his hypothesis, he needed to test it. “Did they have you translate specifications for a weapon?”
“Yeah. That one I could almost understand,” Dee said. “It focused a beam of energy. You totally would have been into it because it had science fiction written all over it.”
There was a compliment in there somewhere, but Max was too freaked-out to care. “What else were you translating?” Max’s guts were turning to stone. “Were there any programs related to navigation?”
“Shields, navigational programs, energy usage in engines, energy dispersal patterns on what might be some sort of tac vest, all sorts of things.” She shrugged as if she hadn’t confirmed Max’s worst fears. “Like I said, most of it didn't make any sense, and if the autopilot they showed me is accurate, I have no idea why their ships don't slam straight into the nearest port because I do not understand how they are compensating for the gravitational mass of nearby objects. But then, we aren't all dead, so their ships have to be compensating somehow.” She laughed, but the sound had a hard edge.
Max had stopped listening somewhere around the time she’d said navigational program. That bitch. Max had named her entirely too accurately. She had hired someone to prove that Max was not the author of all of the programs he was offering. It was the only thing that made any sense. But the problem was, that didn't make a lot of sense. Why the hell did she care whether or not he wrote the program? She was running an angle, but he couldn't figure out how bringing in law enforcers helped advance her position.
And he couldn’t figure out how any of this explained Dee’s actions. “Translating technical specifications doesn't seem like a good reason to yell at me to run,” Max said. “Why did you think I was in danger?”
“I wouldn't say danger,” Dee said.
Max gave her an incredulous look. “You came bolting out of a side corridor door and screamed at me to run. That sounds like danger, and as someone who was stationed very briefly in a war zone, I know what danger sounds like.”
“No one was shooting or threatening to shoot.” Dee grimaced. “I might have overreacted, but I had a gut feeling.”
Given that they were under guard and walking toward the city center like the universe’s slowest, saddest parade, her gut was in good working order.
“An alien I was working with showed me a new program, and it had weird-ass mathematical symbols. When I asked the computer to clarify them, I got back essentially gobbledygook. I told them the math didn’t exist on Earth.”
Max already knew that much. Even when Rick tried to explain in simple terms, all Max ever got was belches and whale song and aspersions about human intelligence in general, which Rick would then immediately follow up by repeatedly saying that Max was a not-moron, even if his species couldn’t find space with a dozen tentacles. “That doesn’t explain why you believed I was in danger.”
“One of the aliens turned to another, and said, ‘I knew it. Go tell him before the human leaves the ship.’”
