Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr (11 page)

Leona glanced at the
telos
for pickup of the humans. The small document cited a Supe lot number, and gave the leader’s name as a footnote.

“US Marine Captain Lance O’Neil,” Leona shouted.

A large blond man in a tattered uniform stood up. He was obviously trying to keep his appearance up to Marine Corps standards despite the conditions. He walked up to Leona and stared down at her menacingly.

At six feet tall, Leona hadn’t met men who could tower over her all that often. However, aboard the spaceship she had become used to it, because all the werewolves were at least nine feet tall.

“Relax, Captain, we’re friends,” said Leona.

“Pardon me,
ma’am
, but a human in the company of wolves is no friend of mine.”

“How about I prove it to you?” said Leona.

She glanced at her wolves and gave a long blink. On that signal, Alex Chin grabbed the guard wolf from behind. The other of Leona’s wolves moved in front of the guard wolf and with three massive blows ripped out his throat.

“Do you believe me now, Captain?” asked Leona. The smell of werewolf blood had become familiar to her, but mixed with
eau d’unbathed human
it turned her stomach.

“Nah,
ma’am
, that don’t mean a thing. These wolves kill each other for sport,” said the marine officer.

“A skeptic, I see. Well, in that case…” Leona turned and looked at the prison door.

Leona waited. And waited. She started to worry that something had gone wrong.

“Pardon me,
ma’am
, can you tell me why we are all staring at the door?” The officer kept putting extra emphasis on
ma’am
in a most insulting way. Plainly he thought of Leona as a traitor to the human species.

Leona looked at him. She decided not to tell him. If the plan had gone wrong, the captain did not need to die too. Instead, she just turned and looked at the door. It opened, and standing there was the rest of Leona’s escort, as well as one very beat-up guard wolf.

Constable Saxena, one of the COBRA team, thought-said, “It took longer than we expected to convince our friend here to open the door.”

The constable then shrugged and went out the door, dragging the beat-up guard wolf with him.

Leona remembered that the human captives could not “hear” the telepathic communications of the werewolves. She mentally shook her head. This was like Thor and her mother all over again—only without the bonds of love and family to keep things cozy!

She looked Captain O’Neil full in the face, and her eyes flashed dangerously. “Captain, I don’t have a lot of time. These werewolves are all converted humans. They didn’t volunteer for that. Before being taken captive they were all fighting against the aliens, just like you were—and
so was I.
None of us would willingly help the aliens attack our people—our planet. And unlike the enemy wolves,
our
werewolves remember what it’s like to be human. They are on
our
side! We intend to take this ship away from the aliens. We have secured weapons, and I need your and your unit’s help. I know that almost all your rifle company is here so what say you?”

Thor threw the body of the dead Supe at the other wolf’s head and charged at him. He caught the other werewolf in the midsection and knocked him backward into the liquid helium tanks. The containers were each about six feet tall and very solid-looking. The air left the other werewolf’s lungs with a grunting
oof!
sound.

Thor leaped across the room and tried to kill the other wolf with a blow to the head. His opponent ducked and gave Thor a counterblow that sent him sprawling. Thor was on his feet in an instant, but the other wolf was already striking. The six-inch claws sliced through Thor’s thick hide. Thor’s red fur started to darken with darker red blood.

Out of the corner of his eye, Thor saw that the door to the corridor had partially closed enough to block most of the view from the hallway into the room. That was fortunate.

Thor backed up a step and the other wolf went for a killing blow. He leapt at Thor’s exposed throat, massive jaws open wide. Thor swung with an uppercut just before those jaws struck, hitting the wolf in the open jaw. As a boxing blow it was clumsy, since Thor had been a little off balance. However, his big werewolf fist (fueled by adrenaline no doubt) snapped the jawbone nearly off the other wolf’s head. The wolf jumped back in a howl of pain.

“Thor, what is going on?” asked Ashley in his head. “There are alarms going off in your area.”

Thor did not respond, but he somehow transmitted an image of the other wolf picking up a liquid helium bottle and hoisting it over his head. The flopping jawbone gave the other werewolf a grotesque laughing appearance.

“Oh, I see,” was all she said. Then Ashley went quiet.

The other wolf threw the helium container at Thor, but missed. The bottle hit the opposite wall and exploded. Thor felt a piece of shrapnel from the bottle tear into his back. He picked up a bottle that was lying near his feet and swung it like a club. The other wolf had already grabbed another container and decided to use it to block Thor’s blow.

That turned out to be a bad decision. Both bottles broke and most of the liquid helium hit the other wolf. Thor’s opponent was instantly flash-frozen from the head to about mid-chest. Covered in frost, the other wolf fell backward and his head shattered on the floor.

A wisp of memory from his engineering knowledge echoed through Thor’s werewolf consciousness. Some of these probably contained methane pressurized to eighteen thousand pounds-per-square-inch. That many psi of compressed gas… Thor picked up a bottle and threw it as hard as he could at the other bottles that were lying near the Supe’s dead body. The steel bottle smashed open and exploded, flash-freezing the alien’s body. A second later, two of the other containers, weakened by the impact, broke open and exploded.

Thor had pivoted and run out the door at werewolf speed as soon as he had thrown. Even so, the blast caught him and propelled him down the hallway. Thor lay on the floor, groaning. A Supe ran up and demanded to know what was happening.

“It was accident with a faulty bottle, I think,” Thor signaled telepathically. Thor thought-projected the image of the bottles flash-freezing the other Supe, and then the explosion. He was careful not to look at the Supe that stood over him.

Just then, Constables Chatterjee and Bhatnagar ran up, along with other wolves that were coming to combat the fire.

“Ashley sent us. We arrived as soon as we could,” thought Constable Bhatnagar.

Thor passed out a mess of metal fragments, frozen skin, blood, and burnt wolf fur. The two commandos carried him quickly away from the “accident” before more questions could be asked.

Captain O’Neil had gathered his troops around him. All of them had varying degrees of caution showing on their faces.

A grey-haired gunnery sergeant was sitting with his blonde-haired little girl on his lap. Despite the tense situation, when Leona looked at the girl, her heart melted. It must have shown in her expression.

“This is my daughter, Amy. My wife—her mother—was killed last month. Since then, she won’t let me go anywhere without her,” the gunny said.

“Do you think she might stay with another woman while we take over the spaceship?” asked Leona.

Amy cuddled close to her father, sucking her thumb. The gunnery sergeant’s eyes went to his captain.

“So, you and your used-to-be-human werewolves think you can beat out the thousands of alien werewolves on board this ship? Who all know its internal layout?”

“Yes. In addition to werewolves like Axel here,” she said, motioning to Axel Chin, “we also have a company of commandos from India, and some Canadian human fighters. But we need more humans to use the weapons that we have…‘liberated’…and we have access to the ship’s computer for gaining intelligence. Our plan, Captain, will work a lot better with your participation. What do you think?”

“Your plan sounds long on hope, short on details,” said Captain O’Neil.

“I dunno, sir,” said the gunnery. “It’s better than waiting for them to take us one by one and kill us—or worse.”

The gunny looked at the nearest werewolf. Axel looked back at him calmly, and then looked toward Leona.

“Heh,” thought Axel wistfully to her, “a werewolf body is strong, but he’s right about that ‘worse’ part. I don’t know if I could ever hold chopsticks in my big werewolf hands again. And typing on a keyboard? Impossible!”

“Axel says that the werewolf body has its strengths, but I think he’d jump at the chance to be in human form again. Of more interest to you, Captain, should be that your women are likely to be sold as slaves, and your children…” Leona paused and cleared her throat, thinking about the “agricultural feedstock” classification she’d found on the computer.

Axel put his ears back at that thought. The captain looked thoughtful while he weighed the options.

“All right, men,” he said, “being as some of you have your families here, I am going against military tradition for the moment. I am going to ask for a vote. Don’t get used to it, it won’t happened again. Please raise your hands—who is for this woman’s crazed plan?”

A shout went up, and almost all the hands were raised. The marines’ spouses looked on stoically, and the older kids took their cue from their parents.

“Well, there it is. For better or worse, crazy wins the day,” announced Captain O’Neil.

“The good thing about crazy is, it’s so…unexpected,” the gunny said.

The gunnery sergeant got up to shake Leona’s hand, and little Amy went over to Axel the werewolf. She stood looking gravely up at the towering red-furred form, then took her thumb out of her mouth. The girl turned to Leona.

“Can I pet your wolfy?” she asked.

Leona smiled warmly at the child. Despite the dead guard wolf outside the cell, the kid could evidently tell from the expression in Axel’s eyes that he was trustworthy.

“Could you bend down so the cute little girl can pat your head?” Leona thought to Axel.

“No. And I am not a ‘wolfy,’” replied Axel.

“Please, Axel, it would go a long way to showing our good intentions toward these people.”

“No.”

“Axel,” Leona thought, and gave him a stern look. Her eyes flashed darkly.

“Oh, all right,” Axel conceded. Then he looked at the other reclaimed werewolf. “If you so much as make a snort—”

“No, man, I’m cool,” the other werewolf replied.

Axel lowered himself to the floor and the little girl started happily petting the top of his head. The gunnery sergeant, her father, was alert, but relaxed as it became clear that Axel really
was
different from the werewolf raiders.

“If we encounter other werewolves, how do we tell if they are our wolves or enemy wolves?” asked Captain O’Neil. “They could indicate that they are ours, then lead us into a trap, or turn on us.”

Leona had not considered this. With her growing telepathic communication with the wolves, this wasn’t a problem for her.

“Does your wolfy purr?” Amy asked. Axel’s left ear was twitching a little as the girl tickled it with her pats.

In a flash of inspiration, Leona remembered the story of the word
shibboleth
. The ancient Israelites of the Old Testament had used it as a password. The enemy kingdoms of those times could not say that word. So, anyone who could say
shibboleth
was a friend. The same would work here! The enemy werewolves could not conceive of
purring
!

“Do what the girl asks, and purr,” Leona told Axel.

“Are you out of your mind? Werewolves don’t purr!”

“I’m not asking, Axel: start purring.”

The other reclaimed werewolf was grinning at Axel being told to purr.

“What are
you
grinning at? Get down there on one knee like Axel, and start purring.”

With a sheepish expression, the other werewolf joined Axel in kneeling on one knee.

“RR-rr, RR-rr,” they chanted softly in unison. Amy chortled, and the child’s laugh eased Leona’s heart in a way she could not have predicted. How long had it been since she had heard childish laughter?

“There you have it, Captain. If a werewolf tries to get you to follow him, then he will get down on one knee and purr.”