Well, that ended any lingering hope that this was a big misunderstanding fueled by alien confusion over why Max had tried running. Now he needed to figure out how to minimize the legal liability.
He hoped aliens had some version of Miranda rights. After all, they did have some sense of justice as evidenced by the fact that they had given him a social worker of sorts. But that sense of justice was limited. Dee had been on the same ship with him, and they had never seen each other. That had been a dick move on the crew’s part. Serious dick move, and Dee had suffered for that way more than Max. It wasn’t lost on him that she wasn’t even trying to name aliens or have relationships with individuals.
And then there was the whole shady habit of discriminating against Hidden ones. The universe had no problem screwing people over on a monumental scale. And since Max allied himself with Hidden ones, he suspected some of the perceived cooties were going to land on him. That was the way it worked in racist societies. Straight people could love theQueer Eyeguys and tell people to sashay away without any repercussions, but gay guys were effeminate or flaming or shoving their sexuality in other people’s faces if they did the same damn things. Sentient life sucked. The longer Max lived, the more he joined team Thanos.
“Don't say anything to anyone until we figure out what the legal recourse is,” Max whispered as he spotted uniformed aliens standing outside a building that had impractical spires and fantastical angles.
Her eyebrows went up. “Legal recourse?” She leaned closer. “What the hell are you involved with?”
“Nothing unethical.” He couldn't claim nothing illegal since he didn’t know the wider universe’s views on running cons. If they were on Earth, nothing he had done would be illegal. Of course, given that Nathan Ford would have approved of these schemes, there was an implication that he was skirting the edges of the law a bit. He was about to find out how this part of the universe viewed scofflaws.
“Great,” Dee muttered sarcastically.
The guards ushered them up a set of shallow steps toward a metallic blue building. Max couldn’t have agreed with her more.
Chapter Eighteen
Max paced the lengthof the narrow room where he'd been placed. Compared to a spaceship, it was downright palatial; however, he still didn't have room to do more than pace twelve steps in one direction before he had to turn and pace the same twelve steps back.
A narrow slot window gave him a view of most of the sprawling city, but they were up high enough that Max couldn’t see any detail. Even the ships were tiny models fit only for grasshoppers and ants, that was how far up he was. The misty clouds were a beauty filter over the entire sprawling metropolis.
Cables ran from one tower to another, and small cars zipped along. Max suspected they were as much to support the great heights of the inner towers as to provide transportation for people who didn't feel like going down a mile to the ground to walk a few hundred feet and then go another mile up into the air. He might be exaggerating with a mile, but it felt like it.
On the good side, he had finally seen what he thought was alien mass transit. There were concentric rings that vanished out of the narrow line of sight the window offered. At each of those rings, the nature of the city changed. Max's tower prison faced the direction of the spaceport, which was outside those rings.
In fact, the outermost ring was broken, leaving a gap for the spaceport and crowded marketplace of traders. Maybe the rest of the city didn't want to make it too easy for the trash that came in with the ships to get to their core community.
And maybe Max was putting human motives onto aliens, something which never ended well. For example, he had assumed that Carrington would want access to the various programs Max could sell her. So he had assumed it would be counterproductive for her to report to the authorities that his programs were beyond the scope of human capability. Sure, he thought blackmail was possible, but not this counterproductive involvement of the authorities when the program hadn’t sold yet. Or maybe Carrington and Bundy were in it together and they were going to steal the program.
Max sat on the edge of the world’s narrowest bunk and dropped his head into his hands. He was so screwed. The only way into the cell was an elevator, there were no door controls or access panels, and even if his captors had left the wiring out for him to poke around in, he didn’t know how to hot wire an alien door. The window was equally worthless as an escape route.
It meant he was stuck. All he could do was figure out a plan to minimize the danger to the rest of his family. And he would do that as soon as he knew what the danger was. He now knew why Hannibal Smith and Nate Ford avoided personal relationships. Putting others in danger was so much harder than walking into it himself. Well that and the writers had a bad habit of killing all the women who got too close to a lead in a male-dominated series, but Max was fairly sure that had more to do with the general suckiness of American culture than the inherent danger of running a con and being in love.
The door set into the long wall of his cell beeped, and Max turned toward it. Either aliens weren’t worried about elevator breakdowns, or they didn't give a shit if prisoners were stranded during a fire. Then again, given how high up they were, having access to a stairway wouldn't be much of an improvement.
The door opened and Max only realized he had dropped into a fighting stance when he let his hands fall to his sides. Kohei walked through the door. Kohei. Yep, those were Kohei’s giant freckles and his streaks of mint-green.
