Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr

by JS Rowan

  Back in the lab, Ashley looked a bit frightened at the thought. She remembered that her brother, Sid, had been scheduled to be put on the conversion table for transformation into a werewolf, just like Thor and Leona’s father, Will. Ashley’s gaze strayed into the conversion chamber, where Thor lay unconscious under the medical care of an auto-doc table.

  In the hallway, Leona checked her ten guard wolves to ensure that no enemies were approaching. All seemed well for the moment.

  “Ashley, all the werewolves were originally fighting men that opposed the Masters and their attack ships. And the Alpha is over seven hundred of our years old! And…and…Thor was conversion subject number three-five-four-four-one-one-one-three. Do you get that? This ship, this ship—which is about twenty-five thousand years old—has converted more than thirty-five million people into werewolves!”

  Ashley made a sound as if she were about to be sick to her stomach.

  “Oh, Leona, I should check on Commander Gupta. Hold on and I will add him to this chat.”

  “Oh, ladies! I hope you are not having any serious problems!” came the thoughts of Commander Gupta, connecting through Ashley via the lab console.

  “No, Commander!” chorused Leona and Ashley.

  “I was just going to mention to Ashley that every green-collar werewolf has the potential to regain his human memories.”

  “Only about sixty percent of them do get their memories back,” thought Gupta sadly.

  “Even so!” said Leona. “When we have taken this ship, we must make every effort to bring those reclaimable werewolves back into human society.”

  “First things first, Leona,” replied Commander Gupta. “We must be successful in taking this ship from the Masters and their wolves before we can move on to more humane measures.”

  “Yeah, like helping the human captives get baths! And decent food, not kibble!” said Ashley.

  “Well, Ashley, you can start with the marine unit and their dependents. Please find rooms and decent food for them,” said Leona.

  “When you get them out, you mean?”

  “Yes,” Leona said determinedly.

  “Properly speaking,” thought the COBRA commander, “an enclosure aboard a ship is called a cabin or a hold, but let us not quibble over inconsequential matters, particularly when I need to concentrate!”

  Twenty minutes later, after talking with the Alpha again and ensuring that all the cell doors were open, Leona went over to the console and accessed the ship’s remote communication system.

  “Commander Gupta, are you in position?”

  “We are set up and ready when you are. Is the Alpha going to join us?” replied the COBRA commander.

  “Yes, he is. How long until you take action?”

  “We are beginning right now.”

  Commander Gupta signaled to his wolves and the red-furred COBRA team started moving forward.

  Two commandos entered at the doorway and threw satchel charges into the prison barracks. Using explosives on a spaceship was an incredibly bad idea. However, Leona, Thor, and Commander Gupta had never fought a space battle before. The satchel charges detonated, and unfortunately the barracks were against a bulkhead—with the vacuum of space (silent, airless) on the other side. The explosion caused a large breach in the inner hull wall, and a very small breach in the outer hull.

  On the deck below the cells were the electromagnetic gyroscopic gravity plates. The explosion knocked the gyroscopic plates out of balance. The ship’s computer system detected the imbalance and immediately began a shutdown procedure for those gravity plates. Additionally, the drive system of the ship also began a shutdown procedure, because without the gravity plates, anyone in the area affected by the explosion would otherwise be immediately subject to a force of more than fifty gravities of acceleration. Squished to ooze—an outcome to be avoided!

  Alarm bells sounded in every area of the ship. The emergency decompression doors closed in all parts of the vessel. What had begun as a bid to lure the guard wolves away from the cells turned into a massive ship-wide emergency.

  Commander Gupta was horrified when the decompression door closed between him and the cells. The safety measure effectively cut off the cells from the barracks, leaving all the people he was trying to rescue inaccessible.

  To the captain of the guard, it was the middle of the night. Other parts of the ship worked on different day/night schedules than did the cell blocks. However, in order to get the slave laborers to work cleaning the vessel when the rest of the ship’s complement was sleeping, the cells were on opposite time.

  “Why do these inconvenient things always happen in the middle the night?” thought the captain.

  “You, wolf, report!” he demanded of his duty subordinate.

  “There was some sort of explosion, sir. We have a hull breach in the barracks, and we seem to be losing gravity.”

  The captain did a scan of the barracks with a handheld scanner. He detected a number of wolves apparently dying, with a great number more injured. He could not tell how many dead wolves there were. However, at least eight uninjured wolves were working on patching a hull breach.

  The captain turned to the wolf and thought, “What is the status of the cells?”

  “Cells fifteen to twenty-eight are not reporting, sir. The rest of the cells are reporting no damage.”

  The captain decided to do a telepathic scan of cells 15 to 28. He detected that thousands of sentients were terrified, probably injured or dying. There were nowhere near as many life signs as he had felt in the previous scan.

  The captain ordered that, in cells 1 to 14 and cells 29 to 42, the main doors be opened so that the guard wolves in those areas could come out and help with the emergency. The captain then ordered his assistant wolf to check the air pressure and hull integrity in cells 15 to 28.

  “Air pressure appears to be normal, hull integrity checks OK. You’re clear to open the doors, Captain.”

  The captain was just about to order the doors to cells 15 to 28 be opened when his assistant added a comment.

  “Captain, air pressure is returning to normal in the barracks. Shall I open the door to the barracks so that we can assist our wolves?”

  “Do it!”

  They tried to open the door but the blast had sealed it shut. So through the werewolf-enabled console, the captain communicated telepathically to the wolves inside to start pushing on the door, and his wolves outside rigged a chain so that they could start pulling on it. After several minutes of intensive effort on the part of the wolves, the door let go with the sound of rending metal.

  Walking over to the barracks from the ship’s console, the captain looked into the room and saw that about half the wolves in it were dead. There would have been more had the captain not sent fifty wolves to see about a disturbance six decks up. The captain walked over to look at the quality of the patch on the inner hull breach. The patch was a large piece of metal with a hot-burning plastic explosive that would weld the metal to the hull once it was ignited. The captain checked the quality of the weld and was satisfied.

  The Ship Master contacted the captain telepathically and said, “Wolf, report!”

  “We seem to have been hit by a meteor in the barracks. There was an inner and outer hull breach, but we have patched it.”

  “I’m turning off gravity to your area before the gravity plates fail completely,” boomed the Ship Master.

  Without waiting for a response from the guard captain, the Master turned off the gravity for the prison. He also noted that the out-of-vessel repair auto-bot was working properly to seal the outer hull breach.

  The werewolves were designed for shipboard living in combat. The reason they did not use weapons was because they were weapons. They were also adept in zero-gravity situations. Their legs allowed them to jump long distances through the air. Their claws allowed them to grab even smooth surfaces in order to propel themselves along the walls. In zero gravity, the wolves moved as quickly to take care of the w
ounded as they would have been able to do with gravity in effect. That could put scratches on the bulkheads, of course, but the Masters did not care overmuch about the appearance of areas outside their own quarters.

  Some of the wounded wolves were given an injection called XN that combined a steroid, adrenalin, and a high-energy sugar to kick-start their accelerated healing process. Others needed to be taken to a healing tube for care by an auto-doc. Unless the wolf was one of the dead that were killed outright in the blast, he would be healed back to full health. The more serious cases would take a much longer time on a medical table, but, on a generational ship, time was not usually at a premium.

  With the crisis taken care of and the wounded dealt with, the captain now needed to deal with cells 15 to 28. That was when he made the biggest mistake of his life.

  “Open the door to cells fifteen to twenty-eight. Stand ready to assist,” he thought to the assembled werewolves in the barracks and the foyer.

  Ashley Murray was in the middle of a 100 percent grade-A Canadian freak-out. Thor had just been brought into the lab by Constables Bhatnagar and Chatterjee, and he looked in really bad shape. She danced nervously on her feet at the desk while she decided what to do. Finally she figured out how to get the ship’s computer to teach her about medical care and first aid.

  “Medic tables can fold down from the wall in the same chamber as the conversion tables! Fantastic!”

  Ashley asked the constables to put Thor on a medic table that she caused to fold down from the wall of the brightly lit chamber next to the office. Thor’s table included an auto-doc and was close to the conversion table where Will O’Brien, Leona’s father, was still being changed into a werewolf. The auto-doc started to beep and lights flashed on its complicated readout panel, and Ashley decided to believe that it was working as it should. If it wasn’t working properly, well, there really wasn’t anything she could do about that, eh?

  The Canadian woman could not raise Leona on the comm system, and the ship’s alert system was talking about large explosions in the area where Leona had gone. In addition, Commander Gupta was signaling her. More nervous dancing ensued, which caused the two COBRA commandos to take up defensive positions near the outer door, just far enough away to avoid creating further anxiety for the poor lady. The two reclaimed werewolves in the chamber moved near them.

  The COBRA adept, Vihaan, who was in telepathic contact with Will, appeared not to take notice, though one of his ears twitched; nor did Ashley’s sister, Rebecca, asleep on the chamber’s only bed. Mary, Will’s wife, looked worried, but stayed near Will and Thor, seated on the floor with her back against the wall.

  “Ashley, please find an area near my current location where I may move my commandos for concealment,” thought Gupta.

  “Um, Commander…I can’t exactly pinpoint your location. Just give me a moment.” Ashley swept a hand through her already disarranged blonde hair. “OK, I see a group of werewolves that are near a bulkhead door that just closed, outside the prison section. Is that your group?”

  “Yes, finally.”

  “You have a group of werewolves moving toward you. Would they be ship werewolves coming to deal with that explosion?” asked Ashley.

  “Dear lady, what you need to concern yourself with is finding us a place to hide!”

  “Uh, yeah, right. It seems—I mean—I can’t find anyplace empty near you.”

  “Then find us someplace not empty, and hurry!”

  Ashley saw a room on her display that was only about one hundred feet back up the hallway from the commander’s position.

  “Commander, please move forward, and look for a door to open at your left-hand side.”

  Ashley instructed the door to open via the ship’s system, and to her great surprise, it opened without any alarms going off.

  “Thank you, Ashley. I will get back to you,” thought the COBRA commander.

  Gupta signaled his werewolves to follow, and moved forward. He peeked through the doorway and looked into the room. No one was in there—very good. He signaled the group to move into the room and bring the guns and equipment with them. The werewolves took cover behind the objects that furnished the room, some kind of alien furniture or equipment. The Canadian fighters, Sid and Betty, followed silently.

  Gupta and Arjun moved to the next door. Arjun had a fifty-caliber handgun in his paw-hands, but the commander had nothing but his long werewolf claws.

  When they opened the door, they saw four green-clad Mind-Breakers sitting around a table, with three picture cards each cradled in their hands. Aha! A card game! The aliens’ green feathery head plumes were nodding up and down as they played.

  He had seen the game before, when they were first captured. It seemed to be a game like liar’s poker or liar’s dice, where the telepathic aliens would look at the cards and try to project other images to their opponents. The winner was the one that could correctly identify the cards in each of the opponents’ hands first. In a telepathic society, what other kind of bluffing could there be?

  The commander tried to duck back out of the room before he was noticed, but it was too late. One of the Mind-Breakers noticed him and took control of his mind. In an instant the alien knew of the plans to seize the ship.

  The Mind-Breaker immediately started transmitting this information to the Ship Master. However, luckily for the commandos, the Ship Master was concentrating on another problem (the hull breach) and told him to wait. The card-playing alien’s transmission was permanently interrupted by a .50-caliber round passing through his cranium.

  Arjun rapidly discovered why handguns and spaceships don’t mix. On a steel ship, the bullet bounced around until it found something soft to stop it. He had fired five rounds from his handgun, in quick succession. Only one projectile found its target—the Mind-Breaker—before its first bounce. Even so, that bullet bounced off two bulkheads and found its way into Commander Gupta’s leg. Another bullet wound up killing the second Mind-Breaker after only one bounce off the bulkhead. Arjun was the recipient of pieces of the other two bullets, but he was kind enough to share them with the third Mind-Breaker.

  “STOP!” The command was like an explosive blast. It came from the only card-playing alien still upright. “Wolf: shoot yourself in the head now.”

  Arjun had no choice, so he did the only thing he could—he shot himself in the head. Fortunately, he retained enough control to aim the weapon poorly, and managed to only shoot off part of his right ear and knock himself to the ground.

  The Mind-Breaker thought Arjun was dead, so he released control of him after he collapsed on the floor. The alien then took control of a passing werewolf visible through the door, in the hallway. That wolf ran in and attacked Commander Gupta.

  The werewolf (a green-collar wolf that had not been through the empathic testing) had the commander down in an instant and the Mind-Breaker was enjoying making the werewolf attack Gupta with its claws. If he had ordered the commander killed right away, the alien might have survived the encounter. However, while the Mind-Breaker was having his fun, Arjun recovered enough to put a .50-caliber round through the middle of the alien’s chest. The ricochet of this round found its way into Arjun’s other shoulder.

  The wounded Mind-Breaker didn’t fall down as a human would have, and started to recover from his initial shock. But in the meantime, the werewolf that had attacked Commander Gupta was released from the Mind-Breaker’s control. Arjun killed the alien before he could issue any more commands. The green-collar werewolf shook his head and snarled, then turned toward Arjun, who shot him dead. Arjun dropped the pistol and levered himself painfully up from the floor.

  “If I decide to use one of those firearms on a spaceship again, please shoot me,” he thought.

  Gupta, who was still on the floor and in intense pain, snickered slightly. “I would, but you seem to have done a good enough job of that yourself. Now, could you get me some help?”

  Arjun nodded and went to the room next door to get some as
sistance.

  “Ashley, are you there?” thought Gupta.

  “Yes, Commander, is everything all right? I can feel that you’re in pain. The system says to use an injection called XN, and it’ll make you feel better soon.”

  “Ashley, don’t worry about that right now. The Mind-Breaker just read everything about our operation. It is very possible that the Ship Master now knows about the lab. You need to get out of there as soon as possible,” thought the commander.

  Ashley broke communication with Gupta. She telepathically relayed everything the commander had said to the nearest werewolf constable. However, she made a decision to disobey the commander. There was no way to move Will or Thor.

  “Please, guys, go and get the last of the ammunition and weapons and bring them in here right away—along with any medicine and food or anything else you think is useful. Hurry!” she said to the four werewolves.

  She felt guilty about it, but she left Constable Vihaan out of the loop. If the telepathic connection was disturbed, Will O’Brien might become like those horrible werewolves that had taken apart her town. Anyone who couldn’t be taken captive had been literally ripped to shreds. And the thought of Mary Stevenson being subjected to that by her own husband—no, that could not be allowed.

  In the meantime, Mary had noticed that something was up and had woken Rebecca.

  “Mary, we have to either evacuate or else barricade ourselves in here and hope for rescue,” said Ashley.

  “Yeah, I thought that would come up eventually,” said Mary evenly. “I’m not leaving my husband.”

  “I knew that,” replied Ashley, nodding.

  “Ashley, please don’t send me away with those savage werewolves!” cried Rebecca. “Let me stay with you. Even if we die, at least we’ll be together.”

  Ashley looked at her fashionista sister, now a dirty and smelly woman with tangled hair like her own. She knew that for a hairstylist with zero appreciation for world events, this was as courageous a moment as Rebecca could achieve.