Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr

by JS Rowan

  “No, sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you. He was escorting the transport that was removing the last of the Supes from the Space Dog. I didn’t have time to wait for him to return from his last trip. He is still on board the Victory.”

  Leona felt her knees buckle, and managed to sit down in one of the pilot chairs as if she weren’t in the process of falling. A dual image of Thor’s human and werewolf faces played before her mind’s eye. Leona took herself in hand and signaled for Hiroshi to continue.

  “Our course is a slingshot around Jupiter and we are on a parabolic heading that will take us above the solar orbital plane. So, we can avoid the asteroid belt and most of the other debris that is between us and home. It will take us about fifty-eight days to get there.”

  “We have passed Jupiter already? But it’s huge!”

  “At our speed of point-zero-zero-five of light-speed—or about fifteen hundred kilometers per second—it took us one hundred fifty-five seconds to complete the slingshot and leave Jupiter’s orbit.”

  “Um. Impressive. Wow—home. I never thought I would see that again.”

  Leona sat up in the oddly shaped alien-style chair.

  “I should tell you, though, there is one Supe ship orbiting our planet.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I found a telescope routine in the ship’s system that can be displayed on the main viewer. See?”

  Leona looked at the main viewer. There was a picture of Earth with a Supe ship orbiting it, just as Hiroshi said.

  “Well! Thank you for the info on that, Hiroshi. Now, what are we going to do about it?”

  Thor was still sitting in the shuttle in stunned disbelief. He had been waiting for the shuttle to take off and return him to the Space Dog when the vessel had simply disappeared from view of the off the end of the Shuttle Deck.

  Thor frantically contacted Ashley, and she relayed a view from the ship’s telescope. For a time they had the Space Dog on screen, literally spinning toward the far side of Jupiter. Thor didn’t even breathe until the Space Dog emerged from the other side of Jupiter. While Ashley was looking at the Earth, he was watching Leona’s ship disappear.

  Thor continued to sit in the empty shuttle for a long time. Some quiet whining might have been heard, had anyone else been there to witness it.

  “Oh crap, oh crap. She is going to be so mad at me,” Thor thought to no one in particular. He was surprised when Ashley answered him.

  “Actually, I think she’ll just be happy to see you.”

  “Oh, Ashley! I did not see you there.”

  “It’s OK, I didn’t want to disturb you, but Admiral sent me to bring you to the Command Deck.”

  “Admiral?”

  “Our former Alpha wolf. He renamed himself with his old rank before he was a werewolf. The Hijan—oh yeah, he renamed the ship Victory too—the Victory Alpha is good with it.”

  Ashley walked with Thor to the elevators and up to the Command Deck. Before they entered the presence of Admiral, Thor stopped Ashley with his big paw-hand on her forearm.

  “This is so strange. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.”

  Ashley giggled, then clamped her hand over her mouth, and telepathically apologised. “Sorry.”

  Thor started feeling a little irate with Ashley because of the giggle. But he dropped his hand from her arm. “What in this situation do you find to be funny in any way?”

  “It was your comment that ‘this is so strange.’ In the last couple of months, you have become a werewolf and captured not one but two alien spacecraft. You and Leona saved the lives of my family and me, and kept the Supes and their werewolves from eating us. You and Leona and I, and those Indian commandos, and those Japanese dudes, are all telepathic. And you felt that seeing Leona and the Space Dog disappear was the strange part.”

  The more Thor thought about that, the funnier it seemed to him, too. He was laughing on the inside and barking slightly when he entered the Command Deck.

  “Not the reaction I was expecting,” thought Admiral.

  Thor started to explain, then decided that maybe he shouldn’t, so he just stayed silent.

  “No matter, there is a space station at Jupiter that we are approaching. We need to take the space station intact if possible. Thor, I want you to be Alpha’s Number Two until we can get you back aboard the Space Dog. What do you say?”

  “I’m good with that temporarily, but I do not want be called Two. Thor will do nicely.”

  Admiral motioned for Thor to talk with a werewolf that was standing near him. The other werewolf had a different shade of reddish fur than Thor did, and his height was between the heights of Thor and Admiral.

  “I’ve never had a Two with a name before. But then, I’ve ever had a Ship Master that was a werewolf before. So I guess I’m going to have to get used to some changes,” thought Victory’s Alpha.

  “On the plus side, you don’t have to worry about me waking up one day and deciding to kill you so I can be Alpha,” commented Thor.

  “That is good news indeed,” thought the Alpha.

  Admiral clicked his fangs together to attract their attention. “Enough now, time to talk battle plans. We will be docking with the space station in one ship’s hour. As far as we can tell, they know that the werewolves are running the ship. However, we are pretty sure they don’t know how many werewolves we have.” Admiral bared his fangs slightly. “I would think that they would stop us from docking if they knew how many wolves they are up against. But thankfully we can always count on the arrogance of the Masters,” thought Admiral.

  “Do we know how many wolves they have?” asked Thor.

  “I was just on Jupiter Station before we came to ‘rescue’ you in the Alpha transition,” thought the Alpha. “There are just over five hundred werewolves, and two hundred armed Masters. We have three thousand one hundred fifty wolves and seven hundred human fighters.”

  Admiral telepathically shared an image of a standard-plan Masters’ space station, oriented parallel to the planet’s equator.

  “We will be docking in the middle of the station. Alpha, I want you to take half of the werewolves and work to the right. Thor, take the other half and work to the left. We are docking near the ‘bottom’ decks of the station, so send only a small number of troops ‘down’ and have the rest of them work ‘up.’ Any questions?” thought Admiral.

  “No. Go left of the Docking Bay, work down, work up, kill everything. Yep, I got it,” thought Thor.

  The Alpha just grunted and gave Thor a pained look.

  “OK, then, I’m going to go and meet my team,” thought Thor.

  Ashley looked at his furry back and pricked ears as Thor left the Command Deck, and said not a word.

  The Jupiter Station was orbiting Jupiter near Europa, the densest Jovian moon. In fact, most of the space station was Europa. The iron core of that moon had provided the source for the metals used in building the space station. Europa’s abundant water supply provided all the water the crew of the space station would require, plus provisioning of water to incoming spaceships. The silica that Europa had provided was an important building material for constructing the space station as well. Over half of the mass of Europa had been taken by the Supes for the building of the space station.

  None of this mattered to Thor, who was waiting for the air lock to finish cycling. Thor had never been in a military unit. All his fighting, on Earth and the Space Dog, had been spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants engagements. There’d been no planning and then waiting to attack. He was finding that waiting was the hardest part of his new duties. He had butterflies in his stomach, and he wobbled back and forth between wanting to throw up, and having an intense need to go to the bathroom. Thor’s heart was pounding so hard, he could hear the blood flowing in his ears.

  Thor was at the front of the group waiting to charge left. They were expecting heavy resistance, but when the door opened, they saw a sight they were not expecting. Thor found himself looking in t
he navel of a werewolf even larger than Admiral. He was huge, and pure white in color. He had a red explosive collar around his neck. Behind the white Alpha (which he surely was) stood hundreds of other werewolves who also wore red explosive collars. The white-furred werewolf blocked most of the entrance with his bulk. He was standing completely still.

  “Where is your Alpha?” the huge white werewolf boomed.

  “He is at the other air lock,” thought Thor.

  “Is it true that the Master of the ship is a werewolf?”

  “Yes, he is the former Alpha wolf of that ship that passed by here.”

  “Ah, yes, I know him.”

  “He wants to be called Admiral now,” thought Thor.

  “Ask him to come and talk with me,” commanded the white wolf.

  Thor walked over to a communications console and found the big “inter-ship for werewolves” button.

  “Admiral, there’s a very big white werewolf here that wants to talk to you.”

  “Very well,” answered Admiral. “I will be there soon.”

  Thor stood there for ten minutes waiting for Admiral to arrive, wondering whether or how he could fight this huge werewolf—and have any hope of survival.

  Admiral arrived and approached the large white wolf with flattened ears but a slowly wagging tail.

  “Alpha Twelve-nineteen, my old friend, what are you doing here?”

  “I was made Alpha wolf of the station—it was quite an honor. But then there was news of the wolf uprising on your ship, and the Masters decided that none of the werewolves could be trusted. So they slapped these red collars on us, to ensure our loyalty.”

  “They have no honor,” thought Admiral.

  Thor could feel the eyes of the assembled red-collar wolves staring at him and his fighters.

  “I am supposed to fight you in one-on-one combat for command of this space station. It is to be a fight to the death, unless one of us concedes, after being beaten. If you accept this challenge, I will give you the first blow,” said the station’s Alpha.

  Admiral did not say anything. He responded to the challenge by walking up and hitting the white-furred Alpha with all his might. The Alpha fell to the deck and did not move.

  Admiral was more than a little confused by this. He had in the past seen the station’s Alpha take harder blows than this without flinching.

  Admiral pounced on the white-furred Alpha and grabbed him by the throat to deliver a death squeeze. Alpha 1219 looked Admiral in the eyes and did not fight back. As soon as the station’s Alpha passed out from lack of air, Admiral stopped squeezing his windpipe. He checked his opponent and the white-furred wolf was still alive.

  Admiral stood and another werewolf walked up to him.

  “I am Two. I am acting on the instructions from my Alpha, should he lose the fight. I and the other wolves of this space station now surrender to you.”

  With that, the station’s Number Two, and the rest the werewolves, all sat down on the deck plates of the Docking Bay.

  Admiral turned to Thor.

  “I don’t think that is the outcome the Masters had in mind. Quickly, before they realize what is going on, charge.”

  There was no more waiting: Thor and fifteen hundred free werewolves charged into the decks of the space station.

  Mary joined Leona in the room where they had started their new life in space. She walked up and gave her daughter a heartfelt hug.

  “How’s it going, dear?” Mary asked.

  She mentally kicked herself because of the question. Thor was still a werewolf, and she had heard he was on another ship that was growing more distant by the second.

  “Oh, I’ve just been learning some more about the ship and its systems,” Leona said. (She totally skipped over all the battles that had been waged.) “How’s it going with you, Mom?”

  “Well, after you left, I had a very interesting time watching your father working with Axel Chin, the reclaimed wolf.” Mary’s tone was a little ironic, but a series of emotions flitted across her face. “Axel was a very nice werewolf, and he showed your dad all kinds of stuff about his new situation. And that was a real eye-opener, I’ll tell you!”

  Leona’s gaze strayed into the brightly lit chamber where Thor had lain unconscious under the medical care of an auto-doc table, while she was decks away, fighting for her life.

  “What did he show Dad?”

  “All kinds of things: how fast the werewolves can run, how high they leap, how to fight with those really sharp fangs and claws. Your dad took to it like a duck to water, and he was having fun. His arthritis was all gone and he was like a high school senior again.”

  “Yeah, if they aren’t your enemy, and are well fed, the werewolves are OK guys,” Leona said with a crooked smile.

  “Leona, I have a serious matter to discuss with you. It’s the reason I wanted to talk with you here, with the privacy barrier in place.”

  “What is that, Mom?”

  “I want to become a werewolf so I can be with your father,” Mary said.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Station

  November 14, 2038, 1:25 p.m.

  Cannon to right of them,

  Cannon to left of them,

  Cannon in front of them

  Volley’d and thunder’d;

  Storm’d at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of Hell

  Rode the six hundred.

  “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was stuck in Thor’s mind. Their own charge had faltered; the entire front line of werewolves that had been charging was now dead on the deck plates of the station. Thor had been at one side of the group and had escaped death “by that much.” He heard the brief high-pitched whine that preceded an auto-cannon turret blast, and he dodged right. It missed him.

  Other werewolves were advancing to fill the breach left by the dead. Thor looked back and telepathically sent all the wolves the sound of the high-pitched whine that preceded the laser-cannon firing. He hoped that would save some lives.

  Thor was almost on top of the first auto-turret. He leaped over it, reached up to a control panel, and turned the mechanism off. He then ran along the line of auto-turrets, turning them off as he went, while dodging fire from still-operating auto-turrets.

  The charging wolves caught up to him and passed by, attacking the second line of turrets. Thor turned off the last turret in the first line and rejoined the charge.

  Some of the wolves had reached the second line of turrets. They were copying Thor’s tactic and turning off the mechanisms. Even so, a lot of wolves died, and Thor was trying to avoid stepping on all the bodies as he moved quickly past.

  Thor rallied the troops and continued the charge. The turrets were silent but every Master on the station was armed. They had set themselves up behind defensive positions and were firing rapidly. Thor directed groups of werewolves to charge each of the defensive positions.

  Some of the Masters tried mind-blasts on the werewolves charging them. The intrusive mental attacks left those wolves stunned; however, other wolves coming in behind them rapidly overtook the positions anyway.

  Other Masters seized control of werewolves and tried to make them fight for the defense. Thor had instructed the werewolves to ignore the seized wolves and go after the Masters controlling them. The seized wolves could only inflict a nonlethal amount of damage before the Masters controlling them would be killed.

  Thor stepped around a bulkhead corner and heard the whine of an auto-turret. Almost too late, he ducked back around the corner, but the auto-turret managed to catch him in one leg. It left a large hole in his leg and blew out a big chunk of what used to be his femur.

  “That’s gonna hurt in the morning,” thought Thor.

  A Master ran past him trying to escape from another defensive position that had been overrun. Thor ripped him in the legs with his claws and finished the Master off after he fell.

 
Thor then grabbed the blaster that the Master had dropped and threw it as hard as he could at the auto-cannon. The blaster hit the capacitor area of the turret and both exploded. The explosion killed some Masters that were crouching behind a barricade next to the turret.

  Thor telepathically signaled some werewolves to come over to him.

  “Take those blasters that are over there.” Thor pointed to the recently killed Masters.

  “But Thor, you know we can’t use those, they need to be coded,” thought Arjun, who had been stranded with Thor.

  “I know werewolves can’t fire them, but their batteries blow up if you throw them hard enough.”

  “I like it! Wolves, pick up the blasters from the positions we overran. Throw them as hard as you can at the bulkheads near the Masters’ positions,” relayed Arjun.

  Arjun ran over, took one of the blasters and threw it a bulkhead near a Master barricade. It hit handle first and exploded. The blast killed two of the Masters outright and stunned three more. The werewolves were upon them in an instant and swiftly shredded the hated slave-masters with their claws.

  More explosions could be heard occurring up and down the corridors of the space station. These were accompanied by the screaming of the dying Masters. None of the Masters surrendered. They fought like they were possessed by demons until none of them were left.

  Arjun walked back to where Thor still lay on the deck and looked down at him. Thor realized the explosion had hurt him more than he thought.

  “You look terrible, old sport,” thought the COBRA adept. A background image of soccer injuries followed the observation.

  Thor realized that he was wounded in more places than just his leg. Now that the battle seemed to be won, he had time to notice these little things.

  “You know, Thor, I seem to be making a habit of carrying your poor broken body back to the healing centers.”

  Thor was going to make a snappy reply to Arjun when the pain set in and he passed out.

  It was Ashley’s intent to help with the wounded werewolves. However, when she saw how many dead wolves there were and how much blood was everywhere, she decided instead to take on the job of removing the red collars from the necks of the station wolves.