Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr (20 page)

Yoshihara Isamu had worked and trained with swords since he was very young. He had become a master sword-smith by the time he was thirty-five. He also was a Judan (Tenth Dan black belt) of Iaido, a Japanese sword-based martial art.

His town was one of the first hit by the ship of the Green clan when it had arrived at Earth eighteen months ago. It was not the first of the Masters’ ships to arrive, but was among the first. The Ship Master had targeted specific areas for raiding. Securing a sword-master for this ship made the Ship Master the envy of the fleet, or so Isamu had been told.

The raiders had paid a heavy price to capture him. He had stood shoulder to shoulder with his family, and his students. They had killed werewolves by the dozens, but in the end he was knocked unconscious and captured.

The Masters had treated him for months with the telepathy drug and with
invasive
attempts to convert his mind. They couldn’t push too hard, since they did not want to lose his sword-making talent. In the end they could not break him; however, they did capture more of his family. So in exchange for good treatment of them, he agreed to make swords for the Masters.

Everything he had ever used for making swords had been brought to the ship from his forge. The Masters also supplied some new things for him to work with, such as the laser sharpener, which could sharpen a sword to a fine edge in minutes. He resisted using it at first; however, it made him feel better to withhold part of his talent from the Masters, so he used it on the “inferior” swords he made for them.

When the Alpha wolf came to Deck Four and Isamu saw him use his swords and axes to kill some of the hated Masters, he was overjoyed. Isamu spoke English, after a fashion; he was also able to communicate with the werewolves. This was something that the human fighters desperately needed.

He saw a young US Marine trying to communicate with a werewolf. He walked over and addressed the young captain.

“I can help you talk to this wolf.”

The American seemed very relieved.

“What can we do to help the wounded wolves?”

“There are rooms on the floor below us with med-beds. Would you like me to show you where?” said Isamu.

The officer nodded. Isamu guided him over to the ship’s console in his sword shop. The sword-master then brought up a three-dimensional map of the deck below.

“How many wounded wolves are there?”

“Two hundred and thirty-seven wounded wolves, thirty-five wounded humans.”

“Oh, humans and werewolves are fighting as one force against the Masters?”

“Yes,” said the American officer.

“This is very good!” Isamu smiled broadly. “Bring the wolves to this room
here
and this room
here
. You can treat the humans in this area right
here
.” Isamu pointed at three rooms on the map for Deck Three below.

The officer said, “Thank you,” and waited for Isamu to introduce himself.

“Yoshihara Isamu, former master sword-smith from Japan.”

“I am Captain O’Neil. It is a pleasure to meet you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have wounded to attend to.”

Captain O’Neil gathered up the wounded and some other fighters to guard them, and departed to Deck Three. Yellow Fang met him on his way out of Deck Four.

Soon afterward, Yellow Fang walked over to Isamu and thought to him, “Can you help me communicate with the humans?”

Isamu nodded.

“We need to find out what is happening with the rest of the attack teams, and then we need to find a way to disable or destroy the auto-cannons on Deck Five,” thought Yellow Fang.

“I will not help you wolves take over the ship and enslave any more humans, wolf.”

“Then the fortunes smile on you, human. The Alpha wolf whom I follow has agreed that this ship will belong to the human Leona. You saw that the human fighter that just left accepted me.”

“The Alpha wolf will keep his word?” Isamu’s mind conveyed the images of Master lies and manipulation that he had witnessed.

A deep anger passed through Yellow Fang’s mind, and it took a moment for him to calm himself.

“The Alpha always keeps his word.”

Leona was worried. After that last transaction (finding the room on Deck Eight), the ship had cut off her access to the comm panels and the ship’s computer system. That meant the Supes knew where she was, and she had no idea if they were coming to get her. She passed that troubling information on to Thor and Commander Gupta.

“That is very bad news indeed,” thought Gupta. He then readied his wolves for the anticipated and unwelcome visitors.

Leona was trying to figure out what to do when an unfamiliar voice contacted her.

“Leona, this is Isamu and Yellow Fang, on the fourth deck.”

“I don’t know either of you,” answered Leona. “Yellow Fang, do you know the contact protocol?”

“Yes, but I won’t do it,” replied Yellow Fang. “That is OK,” said Isamu, “I saw him do it when he met Captain O’Neil.”

Isamu transmitted an image of Yellow Fang kneeling down and purring and Captain O’Neil tentatively patting him on the head.

Leona giggled.

“That is why I will not do your stupid contact protocol anymore,” thought Yellow Fang. “I will not make a joke of myself.”

Leona told Isamu and Yellow Fang about the problem she was having with the comm system.

“That will not be a problem,” said Isamu. “I have been capturing the identities of these horrible aliens for the last six months. I was planning to use their identities to steal a cargo craft and escape. Helping you will be a much better use of those identities.”

Isamu transmitted a high-ranking Master identity to Leona, along with the new slave classification for her. She had no trouble logging in.

“Thank you very much, Isamu. I will contact you after I have talked with the Alpha wolf.”

The first thing Leona did was to check the battle net and see if any Masters’ forces were to being deployed to her location. She saw that all the Supes’ “loyal” werewolves were at other locations. There were none to spare to track down a slave causing mischief. She also saw that there were 2,342 werewolves still in service to the Ship Master. There were 5,895 armed Masters still in the fight. And 4,920 noncombatants, mainly Masters too young to fight, were in the Shuttle Bay preparing to evacuate.

Evacuate to where?
Leona mused. The ship’s computer system did not recognize her thought as musing and treated it as a question. The computer gave her the answer, with vivid pictures in full color. Leona was shown the image of a ship that had been in Jupiter orbit. It was on an intercept course with their ship.

“I’ve got good news and really bad news,” Leona said.

“Let me have the good news first, then the really bad news,” thought Thor.

Leona summarized the situation for him, and then she contacted the Alpha wolf.

“Are you in position?” she asked. She had a hard edge to her voice.

“Where have you been? I have been trying to contact you,” countered the Alpha.

“I had some communication problems. I’m in a new location and we should be secure for now.”

“I am in position. What is the status of the troops near the Command Deck?”

Even from far away, the force of the Alpha’s personality was apparent.

“The system shows there are still about fifteen hundred wolves and five hundred Supes defending the Command Deck.”

“Are the humans still trapped on Deck Five?”

“Yes, and I have more bad news. There’s another ship on an intercept course with our vessel.”

“That is not bad news, Leona. How did you expect me to get my own ship?” replied the Alpha, laughing. “I think you are going to have to attack from above. Free the humans so they can be brought into the fight. Also, look for storage areas that the Masters use to store their weapons—they were on Deck Five before I was locked up. Probably the weapons lockers are still there. If you can find some, several thousand armed humans would even up this fight.”

Leona briefed Thor and Commander Gupta on what the Alpha had said.

“That was a good idea, and I have a plan that might make it work,” commented Gupta, wagging his tail slowly.

Captain O’Neil had divided the weapons among his men. Altogether, after distributing the stored weapons and those that were available for sale on Deck Four, he had eight hundred armed men. There were two hundred men at each stairwell. They were waiting for Leona’s signal to rush the stairs.

Leona’s signal went off with a bang. The rebel werewolves had divided themselves in groups with the human fighters and furnished themselves with all the Earth grenades they had found. Pulling the pins with their teeth, the wolves lobbed grenades from the deck above down onto the laser auto-cannon turrets. For every grenade that went off, an auto-turret exploded, with much more force than the grenade itself. All the Masters near the stairwells died quickly.

Captain O’Neil waited for the explosions to die down and then signaled his men to rush the stairs. At the same time, Leona’s wolves rushed down from the floor above. The Masters who were alive in the hallways were not prepared for such an onslaught of troops. However, the auto-turrets did not care. They engaged the humans and the rebel werewolves, with devastating effect. There was more bad news for the humans, in that the auto-turrets that survived were toward the outer areas of the ship.

Captain O’Neil compared the chances of a hull breach against the slaughter of his men, and gave the order to engage the auto-cannons using .95-caliber rifles. The men using the rifles were excellent shots and the auto-cannon turrets were destroyed in a light show of electric sparks and explosions.

After the auto-turrets were destroyed, there were less than two hundred Supes left on the deck. The fighting was intense but brief.

The werewolves did most of the work by charging the Supes and killing them—often with just one swipe of their large clawed paws. This panicked the Supes and they ran blindly toward positions held by humans.

The humans held their gunfire, for fear of hitting each other or the werewolves, and resorted to knives, swords, and even clubs to kill the Supes that came near them. It was exhausting and bloody work; however, the humans released all the rage they had been storing up for months and years in this battle.

Leona came down the stairs near the end of the battle. She wanted to be part of it, having no shortage of rage herself, but Commander Gupta would not allow that. It seemed that she was to be relegated to the role of a general that commanded from the rear. Since that was not the usual method seen in adventure movies, she felt both left out and also vaguely guilty. She was letting everyone else take the brunt of the battle!

Wanting to make a more significant contribution to the fight, Leona addressed Captain O’Neil.

“If I remember the ship’s plan, that room right beside you should be one of the weapons storage lockers.”

Leona looked around for a communication console, so that she could contact Isamu the sword-smith.

“I wonder if Isamu has access codes to get those doors open. Otherwise, it’s going to take a while, and the doors might be booby-trapped,” she thought.

To Leona’s surprise, Isamu replied to her telepathically.

“I do indeed have access codes. I had to access the rooms as part of my duties for the aliens,” he replied.

Leona quickly looked around to see where the communication was coming from, since she hadn’t been communicating through a console. There he was—the short Japanese was standing near another weapons locker about forty feet away.

“That is excellent!” she thought, “You are a very handy person to know!”

Isamu bowed slightly, and Leona smiled and waved.

From the distance, Leona could not see that Isamu was blushing slightly. It was so long since he had received any praise or appreciation from anyone (other than the stark warrior’s lust for fine blades shown by the Alpha wolf) that he was out of practice at receiving compliments.

Leona and Isamu started configuring the energy weapons to work for the humans. There was a lineup of human fighters that needed arming. Of the eighteen thousand people that had been held in the cells, most of them had been fighting the werewolves. (Some, especially the children, had been dependents of the captured military.) There was no shortage of fighters, only of weapons.