Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr (13 page)

The auto-feeders on board the spaceship dispensed a kibble for the wolves made out of both
rach
and
aarach
. It came in twenty-four flavors. Given that werewolves would eat almost anything, rapidly, it was a system that worked.

“Hey, Leona, what’s happening?” asked Ashley.

“Oh, I’m at a console in a hallway, just learning some more about the ship and its systems,” she said. “How’s it going with you? Are Gupta and his team almost ready?”

“I’ve been having a lot of fun monitoring the training Commander Gupta and his guys have been doing with the ‘reclaimable’ wolves.”

Ashley’s tone made it clear that this “fun” was similar in nature to watching a football practice, right down to the sweat and bruises of the players.

Leona stood up from the Supe-shaped chair at the console and stretched. She paused for a moment with a distracted look on her face.

“You know,” she said, “I think we are very fortunate that my Thor and the COBRA team didn’t become tools of the Masters like most of the other werewolves on this ship. When I think of the difference between them—and the Alpha wolf too—and all the rest of the werewolves…” Leona blinked back tears, and cleared her throat. “What I mean is, the regular werewolves are like shock troops, that follow their leader like a mob, a force of nature. Our COBRA guys and Thor and the reclaimed wolves, they’re like human men in Halloween costume.”

“I doubt the Alpha wolf was ever a
human
man,” said Ashley, pursing her lips grimly.

“No, I guess you’re right.” Leona nodded. “He came from some faraway planet—who knows what his original species looked like. But, what I mean is, Thor and the commandos and reclaimed wolves—and the Alpha—are unquestionably
people!
The regular werewolves that the Supes use as raiders—they have no memory of Earth or any other planet, and will kill whoever they are sent after like a pack of wild dogs.”

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 wounded 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.