by JS Rowan
The deck immediately above the cells was a shopping mall. Deck Four was the favorite destination for those Masters that liked to get out of their quarters. The newest addition to the mall from the planet known as Earth was a doughnut store. It was located behind the stairwell that the werewolves were currently streaming up from. The doughnut store was also unfortunately in the area where there was no gravity, so all the doughnuts were floating weightlessly in the air.
The shopping mall was very spacious and luxurious. It doubled as a meeting area, and the ceiling looked like the daytime sky of the Masters’ home planet. Of course, none of the beings on this ship had ever seen that planet. It had been many generations since the ship had visited the Masters’ home world.
At first glance, the shopping mall appeared to be completely empty—except for the three hundred werewolves standing in the middle of the concourse.
Almost five hundred werewolves from the Alpha’s group were facing the mall wolves when the Alpha wolf crested the stairs. The eyes of all the werewolves fastened on the Alpha when he came into sight.
“I am the Alpha of the ship. Do not fight your brothers! Stand with me, and live this day!”
The thoughts of the Alpha boomed almost as loud as those of a Master.
“I am sworn to protect the Master of the ship. We will not stand with you,” thought the leader of the mall wolves.
“So be it,” replied the Alpha. His lips lifted to reveal his fangs, and his ears went back.
The mall werewolves charged, and so did the Alpha’s wolves. They met with a tremendous clash of fur, fangs, and vicious snarling. More of the Alpha’s wolves kept pounding up the staircase as the struggle went on.
The Alpha felt an intrusive mind-probe trying to take control of his consciousness. He fought through a brief internal struggle and then was able to overpower the intruder. The probe stopped. An echo of shock came from the Master—yes, it had been a good decision to poison the Alpha!
The floor of the mall was slick with the blood of werewolves, and the sick tang of werewolf blood hung in the air, but the fighting continued unabated. The Alpha’s wounded wolves were being pulled from the fray by the newcomers and helped to perches sitting against the concourse walls. The wounded mall werewolves were being set upon and torn apart. There were almost a thousand of Alpha’s follower wolves in the mall now.
The Alpha looked around for the Master that was behind the intrusive mind-probe. That kind of attack had to be line of sight. Suddenly, four of the Alpha’s own werewolves turned and attacked him. The Alpha hit the first one in the back of the head, knocking him down—but it was not a killing blow. Another wolf bit the Alpha in the hamstring. It hurt very badly but the Alpha ignored it. He was still searching for the Master. Some of the follower wolves saw the Alpha being attacked, and they came to his defense.
A Master-controlled werewolf went for the Alpha’s throat. The Alpha, with his immense height and reach, scooped up the attacker and grabbed him by the neck. He was holding the wolf in one paw when he saw a glimmer out of the corner of his eye. He realized that the Master’s probe had not been entirely unsuccessful. While the Alpha wolf was blocking the main attack, a second one had slipped in. The skill of the combined attacks was…masterful!
The Master had managed to plant a false image of the rear of the mall concourse in the Alpha’s mind. Now that the Alpha wolf had noticed that there was an illusion, the stratagem failed. The Alpha perceived the Master floating against the wall among the doughnuts in the zero-gravity area.
The Alpha felt a new attack being launched. Without the Master being constrained by the requirement of keeping up a false image, the Alpha knew that this attack would be much more intense. He did the only thing he could—he threw the controlled werewolf that was in his grip overhand at the Master.
His aim was true, and the werewolf hit the Master at about ninety miles per hour. The three-hundred-pound werewolf collided with the one-hundred-and-twenty-pound Master. The Master was crushed against the steel wall and died instantly. Without the Master’s thought-control fueling their rage, the mall werewolves stopped fighting and turned their bellies up in surrender.
The controlled werewolf that the Alpha had thrown looked dead, but he could not be sure. He felt a pang of regret—he had liked that wolf. The battle had to end, lest more good werewolves be killed or injured. The Alpha roared, and telepathically blasted all the werewolves with the command: “STOP!”
All the werewolves ceased fighting. There were probably one hundred dead wolves on the floor. More than five hundred were injured, but the Alpha was happy—they would fight again.
“I am the Alpha of this ship. I give you another chance to live this day. Who do you serve?” he growled, his bass tones shaking the light fixtures and making the floor tremble.
“WE SERVE YOU, ALPHA!” came the telepathic roar from all the werewolves in the vast hall.
Thor woke up, wondering, “Who is doing all the pounding?”
He had been dreaming that he was at home and that a construction crew was making noise outside his house. Instead, as he woke more fully, he realized that he was still on an alien spacecraft, and he was still a werewolf.
He got stiffly out of the bed that he was lying on, having no idea how he got there. The last thing he remembered was the Supe in the hallway near the compressed-gas explosion turning to look at him. Everything else was pretty much a blur.
Dimly, he noticed the high-tech readouts on the bed. Huh, not in English. No way to tell what time it was, or where he could go for a cup of coffee.
Thor walked out of the brightly-lit chamber and into the main lab room. Ashley was there with several werewolves, his mother-in-law, and Ashley’s sister whose name he couldn’t remember. Since they weren’t fighting with each other, he guessed the werewolves must be some of Gupta’s commandos. Yeah, he remembered them from before.
“So, what’s going on?”
Ashley turned in his direction. Thor saw that she was holding a .95-caliber rifle. The relief on the blonde’s face upon seeing Thor was amazing.
“Thor! You’re awake, you’re alive!”
Constable Vihaan, one of the COBRA commandos, turned toward him. “Thor, we are trapped here in the lab behind closed doors and also a blast door. There are hostile werewolves on the other side of the door. We are trying to hold out until help can arrive. I am so very glad to see you awake.”
“Where is Leona?” he asked.
Constable Vihaan smiled wolfishly. “It is she and Commander Gupta that are coming to rescue us.”
Just then, a bright spot appeared on the door to the corridor. At first it was a dark red, and then it started turning white. Thor realized that someone was trying to burn through the door. He also realized that he, personally, could not let them finish that task. So he grabbed the rifle from Ashley, walked up to the door, and fired point-blank into the glowing spot.
The effect was immediate and deadly. When the round hit the glowing spot on the door, it blew all that molten metal back onto the aliens, on the other side, that were trying to open it with a laser. The round carried on through the laser, which immediately blew up. The resulting explosion killed the two low-status Supe technicians working on the laser, and the eight werewolves that were guarding them. It also bent the door to the lab, which meant it would not open until somebody tore it off.
A small part of the explosion blew back through the hole left by the round. Almost all the explosive force of the blow-back hit Thor, who was knocked across the room by it. Thor looked down at the bloody mess of his chest. He had a broken rib sticking out, his skin was blackened, and virtually all the fur on his chest was burnt off.
His last thought before passing out again was, “Man, I’ve got to stop doing this.”
Constable Vihaan and the other four wolves dragged Thor back to the medic bed that he had just climbed out of. Then they picked up another hull-breach patch and set about sealing up the door. Again.
Comm
ander Gupta’s commando and reclaimed wolves now were teamed up with the human fighters clearing the cell block deck. In each of the three corridors, when they came to a new room, the werewolves would telepathically tell anyone in it to come out and surrender. Any Mind-Breaker that did this was bound, and a thought-helmet put on the alien to stop him or her from creating telepathic havoc.
What with the thought-helmets on both the human fighters and the captured aliens, the scene was somewhat evocative of the fighting in World War One, Leona thought.
However, in any room where there was no entry allowed and no answer, or a room where there was a psychic attacker, a .95-caliber round would be fired point-blank at the door. The round and parts of the door would explode into the room, killing or maiming any persons inside. Each sudden ingress was then followed by a team consisting of one wolf and eight human fighters. The team would run into the room and quickly disable or kill any aliens inside.
By working in teams of nine, the combined forces were able to insert ten entry teams per hallway. They made rapid progress. They only had about one hundred meters to go on this deck when the Mind-Breakers mounted a counterattack. Traditionally, the Supes relied on their werewolves to fight their battles for them—this, however, did not mean that the aliens didn’t know how to fight.
The Mind-Breakers had two main weapons for shipboard combat.
The first one was a laser-cannon that could kill a werewolf that was visible. There was no range limitation except for the requirement for a line of sight.
The other weapon was like a cross between an Earth paintball gun and a regular firearm. The projectile was a piece of iron surrounded by about a half inch of polymer. The round was initially launched by compressed air, and then a linear accelerator would accelerate it to around eleven thousand feet per second. If this hit any kind of soft tissue, the polymer would do massive shock damage, and the iron would continue to travel into the body and deliver the killing blow.
If the round hit a bulkhead, however, the polymer would flatten out and stick to the wall, and the rebound of the metal would be largely absorbed by the polymer trying to stick to the wall. Thus, there was very little ricochet to inflict random damage or injury. A ricochet would be mostly limited to an area near the target.
Team Two in the right-hand hallway (as starting from the prison section) had just entered a room. Team One and Teams Four through Ten were busy in recently opened rooms.
Team Three was trying to gain access into the next room when some Supes at the end of the hallway moved an automated laser-cannon out into it. Team Three did not even notice them until the laser-cannon vaporised the werewolf and two of the team’s human fighters.
After that, the Supes succeeded in placing nine or ten auto-cannons, set up very quickly, in the three hallways. They must have been coordinating their actions. Anything that moved in any of the three hallways ended up getting fried by a laser beam.
Corporal Meighen, formerly of the Second Battalion, PPCLI, in Winnipeg, Canada, was able to aim and fire a .95-caliber rifle at one of the auto-cannons, which exploded. Unfortunately, as he fired his second round at the laser-cannon, he was hit by a beam and killed. However, his group sent runners to the other two corridors to yell about the tactic to the other fighters, and that rallied the troops. They all started firing at the cannons. Within seconds, under a massive hail of heavy rounds, the cannons fell in all three corridors.
The thirty-man teams equipped with .45-caliber pistols then charged the positions held by the Supes. The Supes were hiding around the corners from where they had placed the laser auto-cannons. When they got to the corners where the Supes were hiding, the men started firing around them, with the barrels of their weapons poking out, using the corners as cover. Some of the fighters used ricochets to their advantage by bouncing rounds off the walls behind where the Supes were hiding. Many of those rounds actually hit their targets. It was a short but intense firefight. The humans took the positions they had won from the Supes, and were able to finish sweeping Deck Three shortly after that.
The most damage, proportionately, was done to the werewolf group. The commandos lost fourteen of their thirty-two COBRA and reclaimed wolves, and there were forty-five human casualties. Commander Gupta reported this to Leona, including the deaths in action of Constables Saxena and Mistry. With his clipped Indian delivery, his report seemed very dispassionate—until she saw the sadness in his eyes.
She decided to contact the Alpha wolf. She went over to a communications console nearby and signaled to him.
“Alpha, we have lost a number of our werewolves in a firefight. Can you send some to us as reinforcements?”
“I will send you thirty wolves to assist,” the Alpha replied. “We have taken Deck Four and are moving on to Deck Five.”
The Alpha broke communication with Leona and then turned to one of his wolves.
“Yellow Fang, take thirty wolves with you and go help the humans. They have just taken Deck Three. Also, you might have to do this.”
The Alpha wolf telepathically showed Yellow Fang what Leona had shared with him. It was an image of a werewolf purring while a little girl patted his head.
“I’m not doing that,” Yellow Fang replied, baring his fangs.
The Alpha shrugged. “You can do that, or you can get shot by the humans. I guess that’s your choice.”
CHAPTER 6
Onward and Upward
November 12, 2038, 11:00 a.m.
On Board Alien Ship
For the Alpha, the hardest thing about the task was not taking Deck Four, it was leaving it. Deck Four was the same size as Deck Three, one kilometer long by half a kilometer wide. It was filled with shops and, most importantly, restaurants. Most of the wolves had been in captivity in the Alpha’s cell for the last six months. None of them had ever been permitted on Deck Four before that day.
While all the Masters had fled the deck, the humans and other sentient life forms were currently hiding in the stores and restaurants where they lived and worked. The Alpha told his troops not to harm any of the humans. As a result, the human slaves were extremely happy about being left alive and being freed by the wolves, and were more than willing to serve the werewolves lots of food.
The open area in the center of the mall where the battle had taken place was cleaned up at a rapid pace by both cleaning staff and robots. In less than an hour, the blood and fur were gone from the floor. The only thing that looked out of place was at the end of the mall, where gravity had not been restored. There was still a myriad of doughnuts floating in the null gravity, in a cloud of swirling color, which some wolves were playing with. They had made a game of trying to launch from the floor outside the zero-gravity zone, and grabbing the doughnuts with only their teeth.
The group of rust-red-furred werewolves playing the game were starting from a standing position, with their upper limbs down at their sides. Then they (each in turn, with minimal snarling or jostling) leaped like furry missiles into the floating cloud of pastries. Turning their heads from side to side and snapping their jaws, they were usually successful in grabbing a colorfully decorated doughnut out of the cloud before caroming off the bulkhead at its far side. The grinning werewolf then made his way to the point of entry, where he suddenly dropped into the normal gravity zone and could gobble his tasty prize.
The Alpha wolf watched the fun out of the corner of his eye and then turned away. As a younger wolf, he could have joined in the game, but at the age of seven hundred plus ship years, and with his accumulated rank, it was not a pastime that he could be part of without a loss of dignity. Still, he suffered a pang of envy, and his ears tracked the yips and barks of the happy doughnut seekers briefly.
The Alpha had found a store in the center of the mall that sold a variety of human weapons. The weapons that most caught his eye were the swords. There was a small black-haired man in the store that was an expert with them. He exhibited what he described as a samurai sword, or kitana.
The Alp
ha wolf discovered that his old Master had commissioned this man to make a sword for him before he was killed. The Alpha growled that his werewolves were rebelling against the Masters. The small human showed him not only a beautiful twelve-foot sword, but also a smaller seven-foot companion sword. He gave the swords to the Alpha, who was extremely happy with his new toys.
The man also showed the Alpha a variety of throwing axes and large throwing knives, complete with belts designed for werewolves that would hold a multitude of these weapons. The Alpha took six of the belts and as many of the axes and knives as would fit. He had so many handles of weapons sticking out of scabbards that he looked like a large, extremely lethal porcupine.
The sword-maker was plainly no ordinary slave—still in possession of all his memories and skilled knowledge. When the human bowed ceremonially to the huge Alpha, the startled werewolf leader bowed in return. The Alpha was not able to interpret the stern facial expression on the human’s face.
The sword-master’s name was Isamu, and he said he came from a place on the planet Earth called Japan, or Nihon. The Alpha wolf didn’t understand why a place would have more than one name, but the expert slave just let the subject go rather than lecture a six-meter-tall werewolf about Earth languages and international trade.
The Alpha walked out of the shop into the main area as five hundred werewolves came pouring down three of the staircases and started filling the open area. The Alpha stood there facing these stranger werewolves, and they looked around at all the other werewolves that were eating in the various restaurants. As they stood there, they started smelling the wonderful smells coming out of the food court. The Alpha saw a lot of sniffing noses, so he addressed the group forcefully.
“Did you come here to fight, or would you rather have good food and join us?” he thought to them.
The Alpha’s telepathic strength made the mild question seem like a warm summer gale in their faces.
The wolves stood there, obviously agitated, tails wagging furiously with indecision. The Alpha felt them being pushed by a hidden Master. He focused on trying to find him, then realized it was not him but them. Standing on the fourth stairwell—the one the werewolves were not using—were four Masters projecting an image that they were part of the stairs.
