by JS Rowan
The video showed a shuttle coming toward the Earth at a tremendous speed, wobbling out of control. Then, just before impact, the shuttle righted itself and managed to slow considerably before plowing into a sunflower field.
Leona became aware that everyone in the restaurant was watching the news report.
The screen showed through-the-windshield video as the TV camera crew raced in a car and pulled to the side of the road near to the scene of the crash. The camera jounced from its operator exiting the car and running across the field. The camera person got there just in time to show one of the shuttle crew pulling another one out of the now burning shuttle.
The video zoomed in on the two crew members, and Leona gasped as she realized that the unconscious one was Sarah. Someone in the background could be heard calling to emergency services and asking for an air ambulance. As the camera continued to look at Sarah, she woke up and looked around with a very confused look on her face.
“The injured female was taken to Green Bay’s St. Vincent Hospital by air ambulance. She is now listed as being in serious but stable condition. Her name and address is being withheld pending notification of next of kin,” Bob the newsman said.
Mergnot came to stand beside Leona at the console.
“My queen, you have been notified.”
O’Neil found himself growing frustrated. Thor was glaring at him from across the room, and O’Neil’s blocks (painfully learned, painfully) were up, but he was feeling the pressure. O’Neil decided to ignore the large werewolf and looked down at the status report about the evacuation.
“Would you please lower your blocks and talk to Thor! Having a ten-foot-tall werewolf complaining in my brain is not what I wanted from my day!” said Ashley.
“In my dreams of being in command, nothing like this ever happened. Damn it anyway, I’m captain of a bunch of civilians with no clue of the chain of command,” O’Neil thought.
“I heard that,” said Ashley.
“Crap, and a telepathic girlfriend,” O’Neil thought.
O’Neil looked over at Ashley and realized she had heard that too, because she was giving him that “we can solve the telepathic girlfriend problem” stare. Oops, his blocks must be slipping; he still was not too good with them. Using them was like trying to think with a gag on his thoughts—except against Supes. His brain evidently thought survival was what blocks were for, not social interaction.
He decided to face the large werewolf instead of the furious blonde.
“Thor, are you aware that when a captain of a ship gives an order, the crew of that ship follows that order?”
“Are you aware that I was never in the military, and I don’t give a shit about your military chain of command when my little girl is in the hospital and I can’t go to her?”
“For the last time, we are down to one shuttle, the one that Gupta used to come to the Semper Fi. The other shuttle from the asteroid push that did not crash is now in India being repaired. I cannot risk our one shuttle on a trip to the hospital when the president has said that any shuttles over US airspace will be fired upon.”
Thor did not say anything; he just stormed off the Command Deck. O’Neil let out a heavy sigh and thought, Well, that problem was solved, for the moment. Then he remembered Ashley and saw that she was still glaring at him. O’Neil heaved another sigh.
Thor stomped through the corridors, with his ears laid back and his fangs bared. This caused everyone in the hallways to give him a wide berth—but also looks of sympathy. Everyone knew where his daughter was.
He arrived at Gupta’s position, which was at Air Lock 63. Ambassador Gupta was supervising the evacuation of the ruined ship.
“Is there anything I can do to help speed this along?” Thor asked.
“Yes, I need another wolf who can understand spoken English over here”—he pointed to a display of a junction corridor on the ruined ship—“to help people understand what is going on. Take this digital whiteboard to write your responses. We don’t have any connecting tubes there, so you are going to have to go to Air Lock Fifty-one and make an airless jump.”
Even telepathically, Gupta’s Indian-accented English made an excursion in vacuum without a space suit sound very civilized.
Thor worked his way down to Air Lock 51 and looked out a porthole across at the other ship. Wolves were designed to be able to live and fight in a vacuum for up to twenty minutes without harm. “Living” and “fighting” didn’t mean it would be pleasant. The pressure from inside the wolf in the vacuum made every part of the wolf hurt, and not just a little. Thor cycled the air lock and made the jump; he realized that the pain in all his joints suited his mood.
He made it to the other air lock and opened the door. After cycling through the air lock, he started searching for the corridor where the people would be waiting.
The smell of the (unbathed!) people guided him the rest of the way to the group of survivors. There were about six thousand people in this group, held in the Supe usual prison section, but with all the doors opened by the free werewolves.
Thor saw about fifteen Semper Fi werewolves trying to help, but the frightened people would just back away from any approaching wolf as fast as they could.
The wolves were very happy to see Thor. They pricked their ears and started wagging their tails as soon as he entered the prison area.
Thor took out the digital whiteboard and wrote a message for the anxious humans: “My name is Thor; I am here to help you. I can understand English and some Spanish. I cannot speak; my vocal cords no longer work that way.”
“What is happening, are you going to kill us all?” yelled a man’s voice from the back.
A wave of panic seemed to surge through the tired and defeated crowd.
“No, you are being returned to Earth. I am from Texas. I and some of the people that the aliens captured have taken over several ships. You are safe for now,” Thor wrote.
“How can you be from Texas when you’re an alien wolf thing?” a woman’s voice yelled, clearly panicked.
“I can’t answer all your questions right now,” Thor wrote, “but do you want to go home?”
“This is just like the rest of the alien cruelties, and I am not falling for anymore. Just kill us and get it over with,” said another man in an exhausted tone.
“Man, oh man,” Thor thought, “It’s no wonder this evacuation has been taking so long. We need trauma councillors here, not wolves.”
Thor puzzled for a minute about what to do. The other wolves watched him hopefully, wagging their tails slowly.
“Trying to get a human over here is not going to happen for hours. All the humans on board the Semper Fi are busy getting the other evacuees sorted out. This is the last group that has to be prepared for evacuation, and we can’t head back to Earth with the survivors until these last ones are on board the ship,” Thor thought, his ears drooping.
Since neither Thor nor the other werewolves were attacking, some of the braver members of the crowd moved forward to get a better vantage point.
Thor puzzled over it a minute or two longer and then he broadcast to all the wolves. “Think of the color red—not the word red, but something that is colored red.” Then Thor wrote on the whiteboard and held it up. “Does anyone have a color in mind?”
Many in the crowd muttered that the weird werewolf had lost his mind. But slowly, twelve people stuck up their hands.
Thor wagged his tail and tried to look friendly.
“OK, you twelve, when I lower my hand, please say the color that is in your mind, all of you together,” he wrote on the board.
Eleven of the people said, “Red!” in unison. One of the guys said, “Purple!” with enthusiasm.
“You eleven, come over here. I promise that you will not come to harm,” Thor wrote, and held up the whiteboard yet again.
The guy who said “purple” came up to Thor. He wasn’t shy about it either—it seemed that he had gotten over his fear.
The man was a l
arge African-American with an oversized NFL line-backer body-type. He touched Thor and was about to say something, but Thor heard his thoughts first: “You’ve got to give me another chance, I am color-blind.”
Thor touched the man slowly and gently on the head. “I don’t need to test you again, you just passed.”
The guy jumped back and knocked over the person behind him.
“What the hell was THAT?”
The crowd seemed divided between those who were afraid and others who leaned forward to see what would happen next.
“That was telepathy,” Thor wrote on the board. “It is how we werewolves communicate. I need to touch the head of each of the ‘red’ group to see if you already have some telepathic ability.”
People in the crowd close enough to read the whiteboard started to repeat to those behind them.
“The werewolves communicate by telepathy! Maybe these ones really are here to save us.”
Thor went to the eleven members of the “red” group of responders and found that all of them could understand him. The eleven all wanted to ask a host of questions, but Thor held up his hand in a “stop” gesture.
Thor turned to three of his wolves and gestured to them, so that the crowd could see.
“Spread out through the prison and see if you can find some of that telepathic booster juice that the Supes had,” Thor told the wolves.
While Thor was waiting, the guy who had yelled “purple” came up to him and looked into his eyes.
“If you’re from Texas, how come you are a werewolf?”
Thor held up his hand and waited for the guy to put his head under it. The guy moved his head in contact with Thor’s paw. Thor meant to just talk with him, but instead, to Thor’s surprise, they were locked in a memory transfer.
They both stood there transfixed for a moment, and then they fell back from each other. Thor had sent almost all his active memories. At the same time, he had shared almost all the man’s active memories. His name was Darrieus Montgomery. He had gotten the name Darrieus because his dad was a big fan of wind power. The type of wind turbine was spelled differently from the name Darrius, but people tended to think it was a parental choice of spelling. He was a New York City detective, but he lived in Hoboken, New Jersey. He thought the pizza there was the best in the world. He loved the Jets and tolerated the Giants. He was a US Army Ranger before being a cop, and still woke up in a panic, unable to breathe some nights because of it. So many thoughts—it took Thor a minute to regain his sense of himself.
Darrieus shook his head. “Shit, man! That is some serious crap that you have been through. How are you still sane after all that?”
Then Darrieus turned to the crowd, many of whom were watching closely.
“Everything he told us is true. He really is a Texan who was changed to a werewolf by the aliens. The werewolves that are here are from a spaceship that was taken over by humans and werewolves, and they really are here to help us.”
Darrieus passed his hand over his forehead, as if still overcome by the enormity of what he had seen.
“We need to get organized so that we can get the hell out of this brokenass wreck of a ship and get ourselves home. You guys need to start by lining up at this machine and putting your hand right on that shiny glass plate. Then state your name and place of residence. After that, follow one of these wolves and they will lead you in groups of sixty to the tube that will take you to their ship. After we are all loaded safely they will take us home.”
Thor knew that message would have to be repeated over and over until all six thousand of the survivors heard it. He tried to communicate telepathically without touching Darrieus, like he could with his telepath friends like O’Neil, and found that he could.
“Thank you for getting that organized, you and I will work well together.”
“After what we just shared, I hope so. Now don’t you be telling some of those things that you saw to my girl when you meet her. She is over there,” said Darrieus, nodding to a tall chocolate-colored woman in the crowd.
“Darrieus, I think you can relax. You’re the only human in the room that can hear me right now.”
“Oh, yeah. Good point. Now there are some people over here that you need to meet. My fellow rangers have been keeping her as protected as we could.”
He led Thor to the back of the hall and then into a separate cell. One of the rangers saw them approaching, and took a martial arts stance.
“Montgomery! Why are you bringing that wolf back here? Have you gone nuts?”
“It’s OK, he’s cool. Back here you didn’t see and hear what just happened in the other room. This wolf here is an American like us. He is an engineer from Texas and the aliens took him and his family up into their ship. He was converted into a werewolf back in November.”
“And you know this, how?”
“I can talk with him,” Darrieus said.
The ranger looked confused; Thor made his best nonthreatening happy face—which, as it turned out, didn’t look either nonthreatening or happy. However, despite that, the ranger relaxed and stepped aside.
“OK, go in.”
Then the ranger turned to the other rangers as if he were in command of them.
“Boys, keep an eye on the wolf and stop him if he gets frisky.”
Thor was wondering what they thought they could do against a werewolf unarmed, but he stopped thinking that when Darrieus gave him a look.
Thor went into the room and stopped short when he saw the woman and her kids. After that, he walked over to the ship’s computer console, shaking his head bemusedly. The communication system was mostly knocked out from the latest asteroid strike. However, the telepathic comm system still worked, even if the voice translation didn’t.
“Hello, Semper Fi! Ashley, it’s Thor here. Is O’Neil there?”
“I don’t think he wants to talk with you right now, Thor.”
“Fine, just tell him to get in the shuttle and get to Air Lock Fifty-one over here, ASAP. I will have some wolves meet him there. I have met some people here among the survivors that he is going to want to see with his own eyes. Pronto!”
Thor stepped away from the console. Everyone in the room was looking at him anxiously. Thor stepped out of the cell to get line of sight with one of his wolves and give him instructions.
After Thor returned, Darrieus said to Thor, “What’s going on?”
“I have summoned the captain of the Semper Fi to meet our guest here. You’ll like him, he was a marine.”
Darrieus shook his head with a wry smile.
“Hey, wolf! What makes you think a one hundred percent Grade-A All-American US Airborne Ranger like me would like a marine?”
Once Mergnot and Leona saw the news report about Sarah, all Leona could think about was getting back to Earth. Mergnot had immediately offered his ship, the Vengeance, for her to use. He also volunteered to stay with the Space Dog and make sure that it got safely back to Jupiter Station for repairs.
She had left within the hour, and had traded pilots with Mergnot so that Will was flying the Vengeance.
Leona had taken the time before she left to collect some crew who wanted to get back to Earth. About two hundred people were now working passengers. These included some people that had been liberated from the Supe ships in the recent engagement.
Because of the quick departure, the werewolves on board were mainly Mergnot’s “non-Supe alien” werewolves. (Most of Leona’s follower “reclaimed and freed human” werewolves were still on board the Semper Fi.) Leona acknowledged the temporary nature of her command of the vessel and werewolves in a telepathic broadcast to the crew. She promised that she and Mergnot would trade places as soon as the present emergency was handled. Maybe it was a good thing that she was, apparently, their “queen.”
Will was wasting no time getting to Earth.
“Mom, this ship is even more amazing than the Space Dog. It’s newer, and it has four accelerators compared to two on the Dog. The magn
etic collection field is way bigger than the Dog’s too. We have no problem getting all the solar particles that I need for full drive. We just got up to zero-point-seven-five light-speed twenty minutes ago and already I have enough particles for a full power deceleration.”
Will looked like a young man that had fallen in love with the newest car rolling out of the designer’s fabbing shop.
“There is no way we’d be able to do that in the Dog. We just wouldn’t have enough time to collect enough particles while in system to brake.”
“So I take it you’d like to see some upgrades done to the Space Dog?” asked Leona.
“That would be great!”
“I’ll ask Mergnot and Frosty to see what they can do.”
Will had turned on the television feed on the Command Deck of the Vengeance, and they were watching continuing coverage of the heroics involved with saving Earth from the asteroid fragments.
Some of the experts had taken the time to calculate how many people would have been killed if the six asteroid fragments had been permitted to hit the planet, and how many would have died if just the biggest piece had landed. The figure of one hundred twenty million people dead with just the biggest piece landing caught the world’s attention.
Following that analysis, there was an item about a report coming up concerning the captured pilots.
“Captured pilots?” said Leona. She got up and moved closer to the TV. “William, turn that up, please.”
He did so, noting that his mother only called him William when seriously upset.
A British-sounding announcer identified himself and his network, and then launched into his report.
“The United States drew worldwide condemnation today as it formally arrested four of the surviving pilots from the asteroid strike. Four of the pilots are still in the hospital at Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA. Consequently the arrest was largely symbolic, but federal agents have been posted at the hospitals to take them into custody when they are fit to be moved. Ahem… the fifth and sixth pilots remain free because of flying the other damaged Jupiter Fleet shuttle to India, where it now is undergoing repairs.”
