Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr (14 page)

“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 assistance.

“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.

“All right,” she said. “But no screaming unless I tell you to, all right?”

Ashley went back into the system and started looking for ways to isolate the lab from the rest of the ship. Fortunately, she found a protocol to do just that. In the event of an invasion by a hostile force, the lab and residential areas could be isolated in order to allow the werewolves to do the fighting in the hallways, without endangering the Supes in their quarters.

She also found a note that said the “lab” was actually the brightly lit chamber and the office part with the desk was really the living quarters of the Supe that Leona had been impersonating. Yay! There were bathing facilities, and more beds and chairs! But there was no time for that now.

Ashley contacted Commander Gupta. “Sir, I’m isolating this lab, so the Ship Master will not be able to communicate with me. I…I can’t leave Will and Thor and Mary behind. Please come and rescue us as soon as you can.”

“I understand. We will come and get you, Ashley.”

The four werewolves with Ashley had just finished moving everything from the adjacent rooms into the lab when they heard a group of werewolves moving quickly along the corridor. Ashley waved everybody inside, and willed the door to close. Well, it was too late to get the constables out, after all. She hoped the commander wouldn’t be too upset with her.

Ashley enacted the isolation protocol, which gave the room its own energy, food, light, water, and air. It also caused a pair of blast doors to close over the normal doors. Ashley wasn’t done yet—she asked the werewolves to take a large hull breach repair patch and weld that to the blast doors to strengthen them.

Mary came over to the quarters part of the lab, shotgun in her hands, and sat on one end of the desk. Rebecca screwed up her courage and sat down timidly behind Will’s conversion table, near Constable Vihaan. The werewolf foursome armed themselves with the weapons from the other rooms and stood on either side of the welded blast door. With all precautions taken that she could think of, Ashley fell into the chair, her hands and legs shaking.

“Come and get us, Commander,” she said in a small voice.

Inside cell block 15 to 28 on Deck Three, it was sheer pandemonium. All the cells had been opened by the reluctantly cooperating guard wolf. The human captives started coming out of the cells, along with all the werewolves that had been locked away with the Alpha wolf. The Alpha had restrained his followers from menacing the other captives.

The Alpha took a hundred of his best telepaths and positioned them throughout the vast crowd of humans. When the Alpha felt the captain of the guard wolves starting to do a scan of the area, he let out a huge roar that terrorized the humans. The mental screams of nearly eighteen thousand humans were picked up by the Alpha’s telepaths and broadcast to the guard captain.

“Was that necessary?” asked Leona. A fierce headache had started up behind her forehead.

“It is important to put the guard captain in the right frame of mind. He now thinks he is attempting a rescue, and has no idea what is waiting for him on the other side of the door,” replied the Alpha.

The extreme vigor of the Alpha wolf’s telepathic “voice” made Leona feel like she was facing a gale-force wind.

More than eight hundred of the Alpha’s wolves waited to rush the wide door.

After the gravity went off, the mental screams of many of the humans became even louder. It was almost more than Leona could bear with her newly acquired telepathic sensitivities.

The group of eight hundred and more wolves positioned themselves along the walls so that they could propel themselves through the wide door once it opened. Meanwhile, the Alpha went to a control panel and managed to turn out all the lights in the chamber. Being in a pitch-black chamber with thousands of people, in the midst of all those wolves, and without gravity, was a horrifying experience. The tumult of physical screams and the crying of the children assaulted the ears, too. The air stank of unwashed bodies, terror, and werewolf.

The door opened and the guard captain peered into the dark chamber. He was floating with approximately a hundred of his wolves, when more than eight hundred furry missiles with claws and teeth attacked. The wolves propelled themselves from their perches on the walls, going through the door in groups of three. All three wolves in each group were aiming themselves at one guard wolf. The effect was like a machine gun spray of furry bullets.