Aliens wandered in and out of circular benches that were interrupted by four aisles. Max’s camera was lined up with one of those breaks, and he saw straight across to the opposite end of the room where an actual alcove sat empty.
The whole room was fifty feet by fifty feet, and there were far too many aliens in it for Max’s comfort. He understood why some of the aliens were there. He spotted Carrington in an even more ridiculous hat than before, and Xena at her side. Bundy was on the far side of the room and he kept glancing toward Max before ignoring him. No doubt his bad mood had returned double. There were three pith-helmet Pajekh and many of the tall, nostrilly Chosen. The former were clustered in a group and the latter walked the room in a way that made Max think of guards or politicians.
A goose poop-green Smarties alien sat on the bench closest to Max’s camera. Max wondered if that was the same one that had come to Bundy’s meet-and-greet. And then there were a scattering of aliens Max didn’t know. A green jellyfish with an enormous trunk and a set of tentacles growing out of the center of its head shifted to the right, and Max spotted two Hunter aliens, their orange pyramid bodies standing out in a room that had more greens and blues and purples.
Max’s stomach heaved at the sight of them, and his hands itched with the memory of warm guts sliding over his skin. He shivered. And here he thought the day couldn’t get worse. Whatever Max had done wrong in a previous life, it must have been bad. Really bad.
The aliens fell silent and turned toward Max’s left. Instinct had Max moving closer to the wall to try to see around the corner, but of course that was an idiotic thing to do because he couldn’t see around corners on a television screen. No wonder the aliens kept calling him an idiot.
Max’s moment of levity as he silently made fun of himself vanished when Rick slid into the room. His tentacles were curled so tight that he was having trouble even walking , and Kohei walked next to him.
“What the fuck are you doing here? Oh hell no.”
Rick and Kohei kept moving toward the center.
“Kohei, you promised you would give him my message. Rick! Rick!” Max screamed, but Rick didn’t even rotate an eye in his direction. Someone had Max on mute.
“You turn the sound on right now so I can tell Rick exactly what I think of him coming here. I have a right to tell that moron to get back to his god damn ship. Do you hear me? I demand the right to talk to him. I must have some rights, and I fucking well demand them.” Max screamed. Unsurprising, nothing happened.
A Chosen alien followed, and when Rick and Kohei sat on an inner bench, the Chosen one moved to the center and hauled his bulk up onto the table. Aliens sat on the closest bench and the table in the center turned ever so slowly. It gave Max a nice profile of that huge upper lip. So this was the judge.
It would have been awesome if someone had explained the proceedings to him, but the universe didn’t have lawyers. The judge started wailing, and the volume on the microphone made Max flinch away from the screech. Luckily he only got a half second of that before the translated voice replaced it.
“The Tribes Carrington charges the Ugly Rick of manipulation of a moron species to circumnavigate the sanctions against Ugly planet.” The judge gave that one sentence summary, then Carrington stood.
“The Human Porter cannot work any math the Human Max claims to have created and hopes to sell,” she said. It took Max a half second to connect Human Porter to Dee, even when he knew that Dee’s attempts to do technical translating had led to this mess. “The Human Max lives with the Ugly Rick. The Ugly planet is under sanctions.”
She sat. The whole time, the table holding the judge rotated.
Bundy stood. “Human Max and Ugly Rick came together once with the weapon. Human Max had knowledge of weapon. Human Max came alone after that. The navigation program was registered to the Human Max.” He sat.
If this was a trial, either humans or aliens had a truly fucked-up idea of what it meant to argue a position. They were focusing on facts, but facts meant nothing. They could mean anything. If a recruit had an AFOQT score of fifty, that could be good because it met the minimum standard for being selected for pilot training. It could be bad if only twenty slots were open and twenty other candidates had higher scores. It could be humiliating if the person had scored fifty-seven on a practice or exciting if it was the highest score a person had ever gotten. The test score was just a number. The context of that number was more important than the bare fact.
No one was trying to explain these facts.
The Smarties alien stood. “Human Max has separate account from Ugly Rick.” It hunkered back down more than sitting.
Max saw the pattern. When the last person sat, someone in the judge’s line of sight would stand and testify. So how long would she keep rotating, and would Max have a chance to speak? The speakers signaled that they wanted the floor by standing. Okay. Max could play this game.
He sat on the end of his narrow bench/bunk and prayed the judge allowed him to speak before Rick. Max adored Rick—loved him beyond all reason. However, Rick had the self-preservation instincts of a stoned lemming. No, a tweaking lemming. At least a stoned one would have the good sense to lie on the couch and do nothing. This idiot had left the safety of the ship to sit in a room full of aliens who were calling him ugly to his face.
Before getting kidnapped, Max had thought of himself as being pretty non-confrontational, or as non-confrontational as a fighter pilot could get. But now... he had fantasies about cutting off tentacles and oversized lips.
A Pajekh was speaking. “Human Max used credits from his account to install new sensors on the ship of Ugly Rick.”
“Hey, that’s our ship, thank you very much,” Max muttered. The judge was turned in his direction, and Max stood.
“Can anyone hear me?”
Everyone turned toward him, so that was a yes. Max's face heated, and he didn’t know why. It was a reasonable question. Max couldn’t claim the navigation program was his, but maybe he could mitigate the damage. “I created the weapon because Hunters invaded my ship and I didn’t like having to defend the ship and my family with a maintenance hook. I wanted a defense that would have less likelihood of me ending up dead. Can I ask a question of someone who is in the room?”
The judge’s table stopped, and he had to shift around so he faced Max. Max got the feeling that this was not how it was supposed to work in this part of the universe. Tough shit. “On my planet, a trial like this often includes people asking each other questions. Can I do that?”
“Who would you ask a question of?” the judge asked.
“Tribes Xena.”
“What question would you ask?” The judge seemed to push his lips out even farther, which elongated all the nostrils along the side of his nose and made him look sillier.
