Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr

by JS Rowan

  Leona was slightly amazed by how many layers of clothing the Canadians had to peel off. The North must be pretty cold, if they needed so much.

  Thor was looking at the very attractive, scantily clad women with a little too much interest. “Well, how about that!” said the system-amplified Thor-voice.

  Leona turned to him with a jealous look. “Hey, wolf boy! Look somewhere else—I can hear your thoughts, remember? That goes for the rest of you wolves too!”

  The commandos hastily averted their eyes, looking abashed. Huge werewolves, looking embarrassed? Quite the sight. The Canadians looked a bit reassured by this, though Rebecca still looked very anxious.

  “This has got to be some sort of special hell—my wife can hear every naughty, lecherous thought that goes through my head,” thought Thor. “I’m so screwed!”

  “I heard that!” Leona said with menace in her voice.

  Commander Gupta decided that he and Constable Bhatnagar would go and reconnoiter the storage room. Leona had obtained a task pass for them, but it was still tense in the lab as they left, arms full of the Canadians’ clothing.

  Most of the wolves were sleeping masses of fur, lying all over the floor. Except, that is, for the poor wolf that had been released from the torture chamber—he was lying in a corner with a long dog-whine going. One of his comrades tried to comfort him and he just growled at him. Thor decided to keep a close eye on that wolf.

  Thor was also getting some mental blocking training from Arjun, who was the most talented of the telepaths.

  “There are three kinds of telepathic interactions. They are what I call broadcast, specific, and invasive or intrusive. Broadcast is basically what transpires when you are shouting with your mind. I may not wish to hear what you are saying, but I cannot prevent myself from hearing it. Specific is direct contact between two or more persons. This was the communication between you and Mrs. Stevenson, your wife, when she was talking to you telepathically at our prison. Intrusive telepathy is what happens if one of the Mind-Breakers goes into one’s mind and pulls out information that one did not want to give up. I will teach you how to block this, but not how to do it,” said Arjun.

  “Right, three types—got it,” thought Thor, already getting bored with this training. On the other hand, he had managed to get his engineering degree, hadn’t he? A mental image of his old university textbooks flashed before his inner eye.

  “Yes, yes, very basic!” said Arjun. “However, these skills are essential to being able to hide or wage war in our present situation. So we will begin with avoiding broadcasting and then progress to doing specific transmissions.”

  “OK, sounds good,” agreed Thor. “How do we do it?”

  “You will try to talk with me specifically, and if Vihaan hears you,” Arjun said, pointing to the other adept sitting beside Will, “he will get up and hit you.”

  “Riiiight…wait, what?”

  Leona was sitting at the desk with a vacant look in her eyes, which meant she was in contact with the system. She gave direct instruction to one of the wolves to bring the corpse of one of the aliens over to the retinal scanner. She helped the commando position the dead Supe’s head where the system could take a picture of its eyeball. One of the COBRA adepts looked over for a moment, without commenting.

  “Please warm up the arm of the dead Supe,” Leona said to the same wolf, “and bring it over to me at this other scanner, so I can do a scan of the alien’s hand.”

  The thought occurred to her that in this situation, they were all aliens now. She pouted a little and the commando werewolf made a kind of shrug. She nodded and their eyes met.

  There was a thump and then a growl from Thor. So far his lesson was not going well.

  The commando wolf brought the arm to Leona. It smelled like cooked chicken, and the werewolf looked hungry. Leona hoped this procedure with the eyeball and hand worked, or there might be alarm bells going off somewhere. She held up the hand and scanned it. And—waiting, waiting—aha! It worked! Although the system told her that Mixaucnnhet was running a fever and should have the auto-doc help him before it got worse, the system accepted the dead Supe’s ID.

  Another thump and a yelp of pain came from Thor. Leona wondered how bad his thoughts could be if he was willing to put up with this much pain to conceal them? Comes under the heading of “things a wife should not know,” she thought, and went back to her tasks.

  Leona decided to contact the COBRA commander. “Hello, Commander, it’s Leona. Did you make it to the room?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mrs.—Leona, we have arrived, and there are a lot of weapons here. However, I do not see any way of getting them out of here without a great deal of firepower. I do not think we can get enough wolves in here to start a firefight to bring them out. We would be fighting every other wolf on the ship in a matter of minutes if we tried that,” thought Commander Gupta.

  “Commander, can you tell me the designations of the lots with the weapons in them?” asked Leona.

  “That I can most certainly do,” said the commander.

  Suddenly there was a fight in the corner of the conversion chamber. Thor had gotten hit one too many times, and wolf temper—not being known for restraint—had flared up. The other wolves that were soundly asleep at the start of the fight were wide-awake in an instant, and they all ran to join the fray. The whole scuffle got sorted out soon enough when the initial energy of the pack died down.

  “It’s a good thing you guys heal quickly,” Leona said, noting tufts of reddish wolf fur and blood littering the chamber floor. “OK, I need all the wolves lined up over here.” She motioned along one of the chamber walls.

  None of the commandos uttered any kind of protest. The werewolves lined up and Leona started scanning them, the same way Thor had been scanned before. Some of the COBRA werewolves eyed her askance, but the system did not pick up any kind of comment.

  Once they were scanned, Arjun went back to training Thor, and Vihaan returned to Mary’s side and the conversion table holding Will.

  Leona then started working with the Canadians. She tested them to see if any of them could work the system telepathically. As it turned out, Ashley Murray had some aptitude in this area. Leona showed her how to make standard slave garments for her group. This was something Leona herself had only just discovered. They knew that they had achieved success when lime green smocks came pouring out of a hopper on the inner wall of the lab.

  The Canadians put on the garments. They were still barefoot.

  While Ashley was making the slave garments, Leona discovered that there was coffee on board the ship. She puzzled over this at first. Then it made sense to her. These aliens were basically pirate raiders, taking everything they could from a planet—so why not take coffee. They might be able to sell it somewhere.

  When Ashley was done with the clothes Leona showed her how to work the auto-feeders. The wolves already knew how to use those and looked on without interest, except for Thor. It had been a very long thirty hours before Leona had it figured out at first. The Canadians looked like they could use a meal. Leona made food for herself, Thor, and her mom too.

  Well, the kibble texture was a turnoff, and the water was just water, but finally putting something into her stomach was wonderful! Mary gave her daughter a big hug before returning to the conversion table and Will.

  Leona went to work trying to figure out how to get some of that coffee. Hot, dark, black, wonderful-smelling coffee…hmm. She looked up to find that all the wolves were looking at her.

  “Sorry, guys, I’ll try to stop broadcasting my coffee fantasies to you.”

  Thor gave a short bark of laughter. His eyes smiled at Leona, and she smiled back.

  Thor was finally getting the hang of that specific transmission stuff. He wished that he had paid more attention to the ESP work when he was in school with Leona. He had only done it at first so he could get close to this extremely hot coed. She didn’t know it, but he had spent a lot of his time looking at her an
d not the Zener cards. Still, four years of experiments had changed that ESP center in his brain so that he at least understood how it should feel to communicate with one person and not another.

  The last three times that he had transmitted to Arjun, Vihaan had not stirred from his spot on the floor. Thor decided to be bad, so he sent an extremely sexy memory (one of the few that had come back to him) to Leona, and watched her start to blush. She glanced around the room, and when she saw that no one else was paying attention to them, she looked at him with a smile.

  “You’re doing much better with that.”

  Their flirty moment was interrupted by the return of Commander Gupta. He was very agitated.

  “I cannot not see how we can break in and get the weapons,” he thought, amplified by the system. “We need them desperately to even up the odds with the Supes and their werewolves.”

  “I have good news, Commander,” said Leona. “I have figured out how to purchase coffee.”

  “I cannot see how this is good news. I have just told you the weapons are not accessible, and you tell me you have bought coffee?”

  “She really likes her coffee,” commented Thor, trying to be helpful but not succeeding.

  Leona gave Thor a look and then proceeded to brief Commander Gupta. “In order to buy the coffee, I had to register myself as an administration slave of Mixaucnnhet. Once I was registered, I discovered that I could buy numbered lots from any supply of the things that have been brought on board the ship.”

  “That is why you had me transmit the lot numbers to you,” thought the commander.

  “Correct. After I had those lot numbers, I bought all the weapons that were in those lots. I also bought some other random stuff so that the system would not isolate that I was purchasing only weapons,” said Leona. “Then I rented a storeroom near here, to move all the items into.”

  Thor was smiling his big wolf-dog smile at her. “You are so clever!” he thought.

  “Was Mixaucnnhet rich, then, to afford all of that?” asked Arjun.

  “He was well-off by their standards, but no, he couldn’t afford all of that,” said Leona.

  “Then how…?” thought Thor.

  “Well, the Supe that owned our COBRA guys was getting tired of feeding them for very little return. He had them up for sale as untrained werewolves with an option for agricultural use as, ahem…feedstock.”

  Leona cleared her throat. All the werewolves stood up and started growling, even Thor.

  “Hey, guys, settle down! I didn’t like that outcome, so I bought the COBRA lot. Then I reclassified you and your men, Commander, and advertised you for sale as ‘Thinking Converted House Servants’ at a hundred times the price I paid for your lot. I also put Thor up for sale as well.”

  “You did what?” Thor asked incredulously.

  “Turns out, I sold you all. I have ten days to deliver.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Werewolves for Sale or Rent

  November 6, 2038, 1:24 a.m.

  On Board Alien Ship

  “I can’t believe you sold me. I’ve only been a wolf for a week and you sold me!” thought Thor. The thought-amplifier picked up his aggrieved emotional tone. “What happened to ‘til death do us part’?”

  “More important than even that is, to whom did you sell us?” thought Commander Gupta.

  Leona decided to ignore Thor’s complaints and answer the commander. That was hard. She chewed on her lower lip.

  “I sold you to a ship that’s orbiting Jupiter. They have a space station being built there. This ship is gathering fuel there for the run to Alpha Centauri.”

  “So in ten days you expect us to leave this ship for another Mind-Breaker ship? My men and I will not welcome a life of servitude to the aliens, madam.”

  “No, I expect that in ten days we will control this ship,” said Leona.

  “Wow, dear, when you plan—you plan big,” thought Thor.

  “How do you expect that we can execute a plan to take this vessel?” thought Commander Gupta.

  Leona noticed that Thor and all the commando werewolves had their ears pricked forward. The Canadian fighters were also looking very excited.

  “I don’t know. I got you the guns, I managed to get you access to most parts of the ship, and I got your meat-stock status removed by buying and selling you. The rest, my dear military commander, is up to you,” said Leona.

  Thor sent her a private thought-message of a passionate kiss. Leona blushed, but no one else seemed to have perceived it.

  “Actually, I do have an idea that I considered when we were locked up. Can you rent a large room near here with an auto-feeder? Also, I am going to need a very large quantity of thought-helmets,” replied Commander Mukesh Gupta, with an exceedingly wolfish grin.

  The next afternoon, Thor and Constable Chatterjee were casually hiding in a side hallway. That is, they were hiding while trying not to look like they were hiding. They saw some of their prey approaching, a pair of green-collar werewolves. When the pair were almost at the hallway, Thor stepped out in front of them.

  “You two! Who are you attached to, and where are you heading?” he growled.

  The appearance of a large command wolf startled the two green-collar wolves. They froze.

  Thor bellowed in their minds and growled out loud. “Well, answer me, you misbegotten curs!”

  If the green-collar wolves could have paled, they would have. One of them lost control of his bladder and peed on the floor.

  “Constable, come over here,” thought Thor.

  Constable Chatterjee came from where he had been peeking around the corner.

  “Take these two to the holding facility with the others,” thought Thor to the commando. He fixed his gaze on the two wolves, and glowered with menace and bared fangs. “Put these helmets on, and don’t give this other wolf any trouble.”

  Thor handed over the thought-helmets and the two wolves could not put them on fast enough.

  Two days later Arjun stared intently at a werewolf after Ashley removed his collar. They were using empathy to evoke emotions that would trigger memories. The memories would unlock the werewolf’s humanity, which had been buried in the conversion process.

  The process only worked on green-collar wolves. Werewolves that had “graduated” out of their collars were too far gone to be anything resembling human again. They were still excellent fighters, though, and could still be useful—but as werewolves only.

  With green-collar wolves, the empathic procedure only worked about 60 percent of the time. So Arjun said nothing to the subject. He blocked any attempt that the werewolf made at verbal telepathic communication. This meant that if the green-collared wolf did not respond to the treatment, there was no risk of the subject reporting this project to the Supes.

  As far as the green-collar wolves knew, this was just another of the confusing tests on their way to getting their collars removed. The failed wolves had their collars put back on and were escorted back to where they were found. They were told not to tell any of the other green-collars about the testing, because they might ruin future testing. All the green-collar wolves cooperated, since they wanted to be promoted to leader-wolf someday.

  After the latest wolf was rejected, the commander signaled Arjun to talk with him.

  “How is the backup plan going?” Commander Gupta said.

  “I cannot tell for sure, but I think it will work as planned.”

  Commander Gupta walked to another room, where wolves that had started to get their memories back were being moved. The commander and Constable Mistry would help them the rest of the way. They would never fully recover their memories, just like Thor would never recover all of his. However, they would recover their personalities and would no longer be savage beasts fit only for combat.

  “All going well, Constable?” he asked Mistry.

  “Very well, sir,” replied the constable. Had he been a human in uniform, he would have come to attention, but even in werewolf fur he made
a fair approximation of the military courtesy.

  Commander Gupta left the room, leaving Constable Mistry working with the recovering wolves. The last room in the series that Leona had procured for them was just down the hall. It was the combat training room—functionally, a dojo. During their year of captivity, the COBRA unarmed combat specialist, Constable Jayaraman, had devised his own form of wolf Bhimaseni. The moves were based on a South Asian martial art that focused on sheer strength, something the werewolves had in abundance.

  “Constable Jayaraman, how is it progressing with the new wolves?”

  “It could not be better, sir. The wolves are very fast learners of the fighting styles. They are designed for fighting, so this comes naturally. Also, with werewolf endurance, we can work on new techniques for hours. The rapid healing is a plus, because we do not have to hold back much on the strikes. If a wolf is injured, then I need only have him rest for twenty minutes and he is ready to fight again.”

  “How many have we trained so far?”

  “In the last day we have achieved two werewolves fully trained. But that is because they were already martial arts experts when they were human. I have made both of them instructors now. Another eleven are much better fighters than when they came in here. I would say two more days of training and they will be as good as they can be in this time frame.”

  “What about the other twenty-two that we have brought back?”

  “They are werewolves so they are already good at fighting, but they may not be much better than the older, tougher ship wolves. They should, however, be able to take the newer, less experienced wolves in an even fight.”

  “What about in an uneven fight?”

  “Then…they should have some sort of weapon they could use. Otherwise, they will not stand much of a chance.”

  Leona stepped into the room. She caught the gaze of the COBRA leader. The two former martial arts instructors, as well as their students, looked at her surreptitiously with wistful expressions on their faces. They had not seen a human female in months.