Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr (33 page)

Ashley was standing on the platform of Jupiter Station next to an air lock where the Supe ship was supposed to dock. O’Neil was late, really late. He was supposed to arrive fifteen minutes ago. The shuttle craft was waiting to dock, and O’Neil was supposed to be front and center to welcome it when it did.

Ashley did a little dance of impatience, then smoothed her hair with her fingers in lieu of a comb. Though, what would an alien monster know or care about how she looked?

She gave the order to proceed with the docking and sent a runner to find out where the marine officer was. O’Neil came around the corner a moment later. He was wearing a thought-helmet.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” said Ashley, looking pointedly at the thought-helmet.

“Yes, I do,” was all O’Neil said.

Ashley waited for some sort of explanation but O’Neil said nothing. Her internal temperature started to go up.

“This is going to be a long day if I have to translate everything,” she said, giving him a hard look.

“Yes, it will,” said O’Neil.

Ashley’s eyes narrowed and she bared her teeth a bit in frustration.

“Careful,” O’Neil said, “they might mistake you for a wolf.”

A mental picture of a tiny Ashley-blonde werewolf played in her imagination.

O’Neil looked around and nodded, and fifty heavily armed human troops came into the Docking Bay, all wearing thought-helmets.

The troops formed themselves into two ranks and stood at attention. The air lock opened, and ten regular werewolves and one Alpha wolf came out onto the platform. The Alpha looked at the troops present and decided that they were not intended as a threat.

The Alpha wolf turned back toward the shuttle and an average-sized Supe came through the door. He had the same chicken-like skin and beaky nose as the ones from the
Space Dog.
But Ashley raised an eyebrow. Whereas the Supes they had met to date had been dressed mainly in green, this one wore purple and yellow. His head plumage was purple too.

The Supe looked at the troops wearing the thought-helmets. He tried to scan O’Neil and got nowhere. He then tried to scan Ashley, but she blocked him and gave him a stern look. The Supe decided to push harder. He did an
intrusive
force-scan with all his telepathic power.

Ashley had deflected more powerful mind-blasts than this during the battle for the
Space Dog
, so she decided to turn the tables. She pushed his scan back and gave him a small painful telepathic punch, too.

“Try that again and I’ll turn you into a zombie,” said Ashley, not sure if the Supe would know what a zombie was.

The alien looked like he was going to try something else on her, so she sent him a mental picture of a zombie’s decayed flesh and shambling walk. The Supe showed disgust and stopped trying to pry.

“Shall we proceed to the negotiations?” thought the Supe.

“What is your name?” asked Ashley.

“That is not for worms like you to know,” said the Supe.

“Ashley, tell him that we will proceed into the room next to us. I have set up the room to translate speech into thought, and vice versa,” said O’Neil.

“Thanks for telling me!” said Ashley, clenching her jaw, unable to decide who was a bigger jerk, O’Neil or the Supe.

“Oh, and tell the Supe that his guard wolves can wait outside. We don’t need any unnecessary accidents happening during negotiations,” said O’Neil.

Ashley relayed the message. The purple Supe’s wolves objected to the arrangement at first. The Supe then had them check out the adjoining room. There were no other exits and no apparent weapons. The werewolves relented and left the room.

The door closed and everyone sat down at the table. The sharp-eyed Supe noted that the humans were uncomfortable in the Supe-type chairs. He seemed to take pleasure in the fact.

“You have done us a great service by taking this ship and station,” thought the Supe.

The thought-amplifier broadcast the alien’s words audibly.

“That is kind of you to say, but I must ask why?” said O’Neil.

Ashley heard the system echo the question telepathically.

“I won’t bore you with politics, but we were in competition with the Merkenaucht clan for the last seat in the great council,” said the Supe.

“And by competition, you mean war,” said O’Neil.

“I don’t think of it quite so dramatically. However, given your limited capacity for understanding these things, I suppose war is as good a term as any,” thought the Supe. “Frankly, I don’t think you know how bad it is going to be for you and your species,” he continued.

The Supe leaned back in his chair. To Ashley’s telepathic sense, it was apparent that the purple-plumed alien was gloating.

“When the Merkenaucht clan finds out what you have done here, they will bring ten thousand of their finest ships and exterminate your species.”

“And you can help us?” said O’Neil.

“Certainly—for a price, of course,” said the Supe.

“What do you have, and what
is
your price?”

“Straight to the point, I like that. We have two new missile fabricator robots, and a more powerful laser-cannon design.”

“How much more powerful is it?” asked O’Neil.

Ashley saw that not knowing how much the Supe despised the humans meant that O’Neil could be dispassionate about the negotiation. She gritted her teeth.

“Nearly three times the power of the laser-cannons you have on your ship now. Additionally, they have a faster recharge rate and smaller generating systems. So your ship can have two additional cannons forward and four new cannons aft. Your engagement range will also increase to almost three million of the measurement units that you use, kilometers, I believe you call them.”

“That sounds good. What do you want for them?”

“We have identified twelve of the smaller moons orbiting this planet as having minerals we need—we have a list.”

The Supe glanced toward the console and it lit up, showing the locations of all the moons in question, plus a list of the minerals, and the quantities of them.

“That is most of the minerals available in this system. I will pay you half of this list,” said O’Neil.

“There are plenty of moons around this planet. You can afford eighty percent of that list.”

“Not if I am going to build enough ships to defend my species from the Green clan. Make it sixty-five percent of the list.”

“This haggling is quite beneath me, so I will consent to your barbaric demands,” thought the Supe.

“Does that mean we have a deal?” asked O’Neil mildly.

“Yes, we have a deal. Now, what identification do you use to seal a deal on your planet? We use a handprint. No two are the same for us. Or we could use DNA,” thought the Supe.

“A handprint will work just fine for us. However…when is delivery of the weapons systems?” said O’Neil.

“Well, it is immediate, of course, as soon as the minerals are on our ships. It would not do to bargain for things one does not have in one’s possession. That is one of our basic laws. We can also provide the installation of the weapons. We will have to dock with your station to unload and begin the installation.”

“That will do just fine,” said O’Neil.

“Then I will return to my ship and begin preparations. We will send docking instructions to the humans controlling the station systems when we are ready.”

The Supe and the humans got up and left the room. The Supe headed straight for his shuttle without a farewell or backward look. O’Neil knew from his studies of their culture, on the computer consoles, that the alien considered it beneath him to notice the werewolves that were providing his protection.

Too bad for him
, O’Neil thought,
otherwise, he might have noticed that the wolves he is going back with are different from the wolves he came in with
.

“OK, Leona, the shuttle is approaching the pickup spot,” said Hiroshi.

Hiroshi had insisted that he was going down in the shuttle and was going to be the pilot. They had left Isamu as the pilot of the
Space Dog
and Commander Gupta in command of the ship.

“Thanks, Hiroshi,” said Leona. “I will move to the back.”

Her father, Will, had also come with her, so he could protect his daughter and grandkids. He looked just as young as all the rest of the red-furred werewolves, and had learned the basics of werewolf combat from Axel Chin.

Commander Gupta had insisted on a complement of wolves and marines to also be on the shuttle. Everyone sat quietly—the kind of “relaxed” that could explode into action at an instant’s notice.

Quite a crowd to pick up two scared kids
, thought Leona to herself.

She worried about Thor’s father—for some reason his mobile phone was not taking calls. Maybe Gramps had forgotten to charge it again, or had left it beside the coffeepot or in his car. She worried about whether Gramps was being scooped up by the feds like they were trying to do with her kids.

One of the werewolves gave Leona a gravity harness and helped her put it on. Then Hiroshi opened the back door. Leona gasped in the buffeting wind. The shuttle was about fifteen feet off the water and traveling so fast that the shock of their passage was making a rooster tail of water behind them.

Suddenly the shuttle slowed and they were above the small white boat. Hiroshi engaged a gravity lift, picked the entire boat out of the water, and deposited it in the back of the shuttle. The whole operation took less than a minute.

Leona smiled and waved at the kids, whose mouths were open in shock. Once they realized it was her, Will and Sarah waved back hesitantly.

Hiroshi closed the rear door and engaged a local gravity field to keep the boat upright, then cut off the grabber field. Immediately, he sent the shuttle rocketing upward at a steep incline, and Leona was glad to have the gravity harness that was keeping her upright.

She slowly and carefully walked over to the boat, which was dripping water onto the deck plates. Her son and daughter, still seated in the boat, were just looking around in shock, especially at the werewolves in their seats in the shuttle’s midsection.

“Uh, Mom,” said her son, Young Will, clearing his throat.

Leona leaned near to the gunwale, careful not to get caught in the stabilizing field.

“Hi, Will, hi, Sarah,” she said, with a wide grin but a furrowed brow. “We had to get you out of Miami quick before the federal agents could grab you.”

“Agents? But, we haven’t done anything wrong!” exclaimed Will.

“You’re related to me and your father. Believe me—their idiot minds don’t need anything more to put you in prison for the rest of your lives, apparently.”

“But, what could you have done wrong?” asked Sarah, wide-eyed.

“Oh,” said Leona, her mouth turning downward at the corners. “Surviving capture by aliens and fighting battles in space to protect the Earth is crime enough in their moronic brains!”

“Now I know you’re really our mom!” said her son, with a strained smile.

“Yes, it really is me—but I’m not just a social worker anymore, and not fighting the raiders in the farmland near our home. Now I’m the captain of a spaceship that we captured from the aliens.”

“A spaceship!” Young Will’s eyes lit up, as did Sarah’s.

“Yes, we discovered that many of the werewolves were really humans that the aliens transformed into slave warriors. And we met a group of werewolves that were commandos from India. Together with them and various military people that were still humans, we were able to kill the aliens and take the ship, which we renamed the
Space Dog
.”

“Leona, please be advised that we are in vacuum now and taking evasive action from Earth’s lasers,” said Hiroshi over a loudspeaker.

“Who is that?” asked Sarah.

“That is Hiroshi, a young Japanese man that is piloting this shuttle,” said Leona, smiling.

“They’re shooting at us?” asked her son, frowning.

“Yeah, no good deed goes unpunished, you know,” said Leona, grimacing. “They won’t take our word for it that humans control the ship and this shuttle, or that we are protecting the planet from the Supes.”

“Supes?”

“Oh, the aliens—they think they’re
so superior
, we sneer and call them Supes.”