Jupiter Fleet 1: Werewolves Don't Purr Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by JAR USA Publishing Inc

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1483986829

  ISBN-13: 9781483986821

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63002-384-3

  Published by JAR USA Publishing Inc.

  PO Box 30633

  Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33420

  www.jarusapublishing.com

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the author and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for the author or third party web sites and their content.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  The werewolf and woman cover picture, the name Jupiter Fleet and the JAR USA logo are trademarks of JAR USA Publishing Inc., all rights reserved.

  In the Jupiter Fleet universe, anyone violating copyright could expect an unpleasant visit from a large werewolf. In this universe, we have to content ourselves with sending lawyers instead. Hmmmm.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1: The Man

  CHAPTER 2: The Werewolf

  CHAPTER 3: The Team

  CHAPTER 4: Werewolves for Sale or Rent

  CHAPTER 5: Rise Up

  CHAPTER 6: Onward and Upward

  CHAPTER 7: Would the Real Alpha Please Stand Up

  CHAPTER 8: Admiral

  CHAPTER 9: The Station

  CHAPTER 10: Homeward

  CHAPTER 11: The Squadron

  CHAPTER 12: My New Home

  CHAPTER 13: Come Out, Come Out

  CHAPTER 14: Money, It’s a Hit

  CHAPTER 15: You Can’t Get There from Here

  Acknowledgements

  Excerpt from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” from Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Boston: J. E. Tilton and Company, 1870).

  Humble thanks to our readers and editors. This narrative has been grammar-and fact-checked by named and anonymous helpers. Special thanks to Thomas Priest-Brown, and Jim Wywrot, BSc, MEng, PEng, both of Ontario, Canada.

  We especially thank our daughter, Elizabeth Rowan, BS (Hon), MASc for giving us “the look” when our science got too wacky, and our niece, Jennifer Lord-Rowan, for the cover art.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Man

  August 4, 2038, 4:23 p.m.

  North of I-40 Near the Texas-Oklahoma Border

  Theodore Stevenson (who preferred to be called Thor) sighted down his MacBros rifle. It was loaded with .950 JDJ silver rounds. This brand of rifle had become the most popular weapon in the world. Probably the best-selling item in the world, and for good reason.

  It was the smallest size of rifle that would put down a werewolf with one round. That is, if you used a silver or gold round.

  Werewolves could heal so quickly that anything less and they would be healing as they killed you. The gold and silver seemed to interfere with their healing ability. So if you could put a large enough hole in them, they would die.

  The werewolf was standing still. Thor saw the werewolf’s ears turning back and forth. It was listening for the decoy noise that Thor had set up to sound another time. Thor gently squeezed the rifle trigger. The round exploded out of the barrel with a terrible roar. It caught the werewolf just below the neck. The neck and head disappeared in a haze of red gore.

  “It’s safe to come out now,” Thor yelled.

  Leona, Mary, and Will came out from their hiding spot in the underbrush.

  “That is the third one today,” said Will. His voice was flat.

  “Yeah, at a hundred dollars a round these werewolves are driving me to poverty,” said Thor.

  “Better that than to be driven to the funeral home,” said Mary.

  They all traded glances of agreement.

  Will and Thor carried the rifle and the rounds back to the pickup truck. With the carbon fiber stock, carbon fiber tripod, and steel recoil absorber, the rifle weighed in at 105 pounds. So Thor—a big man at six feet five inches tall, and very muscular—carried the rifle. Each round weighed over half a pound, so Will’s job was to carry the one hundred rounds they kept with them.

  In the back of the truck was a .50-caliber M2 Browning belt-fed machine gun with a two-hundred-degree swivel mount. It took at least two rounds from this weapon just to knock down a werewolf. That would allow you to escape. If you got on the CB after, and could raise anyone that was alive, then someone could try to snipe the wounded wolf. Of course, you might get lucky and hit the werewolf in the head.

  “Those wireless decoys you set up all over the county sure have proved useful,” Will said.

  “Yeah, but let’s get home before dark or the decoys won’t help,” said Thor.

  “Well, it should be clear sailing between here and home,” said Mary.

  “I can’t believe you just said that, Mom,” said Leona, sounding disgusted.

  “You and your superstitions, dear. You know my saying—it makes no difference.”

  Will got in to drive and Thor took a stance on the fifty-caliber. Mary and Leona were in the backseat with twelve-gauge shotguns loaded with slugs. If they hit a werewolf with one, it would slow it down some.

  As they started to drive home, Thor saw the sun reflecting off the large starship in orbit. It reminded him of the time when he first saw the ships.

  The aliens had arrived about two years ago. Three ships: one over China, another over Europe, and a third over North America.

  They did not destroy the human cities from orbit as the aliens did in most of the movies. Instead, they pretty much ignored the Earth’s military forces. Their ships were completely invisible to all the distance detection methods, including radar. Their camouflage was incredible, making them nearly invisible until they got close to the ground. Occasionally sunlight would glint from them, high in the sky, but even with a telescope there was little to see or photograph.

  Earth’s missiles never got close to the main ships before being destroyed. Various nations’ fighter jets fared no better against the transports and shuttles.

  The aliens sent two kinds of vessels down to the planet: large ones that they took captured humans in, and smaller ones that just contained werewolves.

  Two of their transport craft had been shot down. The news media hailed that as a victory, but both military and civilian members of all nations had started to walk hunched over, eyes wary at any sudden sound. Only two alien craft destroyed—out of so many.

  The first kill happened just as the alien crew opened the door to let loose some werewolves. A sniper had been able to shoot a heavy round through the door and the whole ship exploded. Well, actually the whole county exploded. The ship went up in a megaton explosion.

  When it was reported on the news, everyone cheered. Except for the shooter and the other people close to the blast. And their relatives. And their neighbors. And all the government departments and businesses with contacts in the disaster ar
ea.

  Various animal-rights activists set up a joint memorial for the trees and wildlife that were destroyed. Government and nongovernmental agencies erected plaques and wreaths to commemorate the dead people.

  The other transport ship that was shot down was destroyed with a three-terawatt laser. That made a nice fireworks display in the upper atmosphere. But in response, the orbiting mother ship fired a seven-hundred-petawatt laser (Earth scientists’ best guess) and obliterated the entire facility containing the laser.

  The news media spent a lot of time describing people’s reactions and profiling the dead. Meanwhile, eBay and “bricks and clicks” merchants struggled to satisfy the overwhelming demand for weapons and survival equipment—and video games. It was as if humanity had divided itself into the Passive digital party and the Active party of real-world action.

  After a year, two of the mother ships had departed, leaving just the third one, in an elliptical orbit that covered the whole planet every twenty-four hours. Where the mother ship was didn’t seem to have any correlation to where the werewolves went on the planet, though.

  The werewolves were the worst. No one ever knew where they would appear until the screaming started, and the signs of one of their small vessels approaching were minimal.

  Thor was jolted out of his thoughts by the sight of five werewolves tearing apart a car on the road in front of the truck. Will spun the truck around and Thor cocked the fifty. Thor waited until the truck stopped its fishtailing turn to open up with the machine gun. He hit the werewolf closest to him five or six times in the chest. That caused the wolf to collapse on the road. There was no time to see if it was dead, because another wolf was closing on the truck.

  Will hit some large bumps, flinging Thor against his retaining strap and causing him to shoot several large holes in the tailgate of the truck. Thor picked himself up, cursing loudly about the driving. By this time the werewolf was almost on them.

  Leona, alerted by the cursing, had poked her shotgun through the back window. The werewolf leapt into the box of the truck with a mighty crash. It knocked the barrel of the fifty-caliber away from Thor just as he was trying to get the barrel trained on it. This sent him flying over the side of the truck, again testing his retaining strap. Leona fired, hitting the werewolf in the right eye and through the brain. The silver slug ensured that the werewolf died. It fell backward out of the truck.

  Will slowed and Thor recovered his position. They went around a curve. One of the werewolves had gone straight over the hill. It was now closing on Mary’s side of the truck. She fired. The slug hit the werewolf on the forehead and bounced off its thick skull plating. The slug did, however, distract the wolf and made it break its stride.

  Will veered away from the werewolf and off the road. This brought the wolf into Thor’s sights at point-blank range, and he did not miss. Twenty rounds or more hit the wolf, leaving gobbets all over the landscape.

  The truck entered the tall corn in the adjoining field at high speed. Will was desperately searching for another road, but he couldn’t see anything, nor could he slow down much. With all the jouncing that the truck was doing, Will had a tough time keeping control of it.

  Thor was hanging on in the back of the truck, unable to see or sight in on anything due to all the flying corn chaff.

  Suddenly they were out of the corn, and there was a werewolf standing right in the path of the truck. In the contest of werewolf versus truck, the werewolf lost—but not by much. The truck’s front end bounced up with the werewolf’s unintentional help. The bottom of the bumper hit the wolf in the upper chest. It felt to the humans like they had hit a light pole, or a tank.

  The truck lurched to a stop, with the werewolf dragged under it. Thor grabbed his big rifle, hit the quick release, and hopped out of the vehicle. Will activated a timer switch and jumped out as well, avoiding the swipe the werewolf took at his legs with its claws. Mary and Leona were not far behind, running grimly with their shotguns held high.

  They ran for cover as fast as they could. Just as the werewolf was starting to push the truck off, it exploded, killing the wolf instantly.

  The blast knocked the party off their feet. Thor was the first one up. He helped the rest to their feet.

  “We have to keep moving. There is still one more werewolf out there,” said Thor. “It’s going to be pissed that we just killed four of its friends.”

  Thor heard the first howl shortly after they started running. The wolf was farther away than he expected. It must have lingered over the car that the werewolves had been tearing apart. Thor hoped no one had been in the car, but he knew that was probably a vain hope.

  The cornfield was igniting into flame from pieces of the wrecked truck. He would have felt bad about that ordinarily, but Bill and Sandra, who had owned the field, had been “disappeared” about sixty days ago.

  Disappeared, Thor thought, what a nice way to say abducted by alien werewolves.

  The digital game-playing crowd were all hiding; the fighters were all fighting. No one would ever harvest the crop on this farm.

  Thor and his family ran through the cornfield, staying upwind of the fire. The smoke would hide their scent from the werewolf. The corn was tall enough to hide in. They were careful to stay between the rows so that the sharp-eyed wolf would not see the stalks of corn waving, and know their position.

  Another howl came from about a half mile closer. Damn, that wolf was moving fast. There was no way to outrun it. Thor signaled to the group to slow down and move very quietly.

  The fire was grew rapidly in the cornfield. Thor tried to keep the smoke between the group and the howling.

  A third howl was heard—seemed to be in the same location. Then Thor’s blood froze. From in front of them, at least a mile off, came a return howl.

  “Crap, did you hear that?” said Will. His voice was hoarse.

  “Kinda hard to miss,” replied Mary. She shifted her grip on her shotgun nervously.

  “Were you able to save any of the JDJ rounds?” Thor asked Will.

  “Only one bandolier. It’s full, so, twenty-five rounds.”

  “Shotgun rounds?” asked Thor.

  “Forty,” said Leona.

  “Twelve,” said Mary.

  “I have the fifty-cal handgun, let’s see…twenty rounds for that,” said Thor. “Will, give me the JDJ rounds. You take the Smith and Wesson, and this belt of ammo for it. OK, if it just stays the two of them, then we have a chance.”

  The men traded the weapons and ammunition. This gave the two women a chance to catch their breath.

  “I’ll try to get some range on one of them, while you guys keep an eye out to make sure the other big SOB doesn’t sneak up on me,” Thor said.

  Thor saw that the group was coming to the edge of the cornfield, so he motioned to the others to stop and take concealed positions. He crept slowly to where he could see.

  There! On the roof of Bill and Sandra’s farmhouse was a werewolf. It was obviously trying to figure out where they were. Thor froze. When he was certain that the wolf was not looking in his direction, he backed up so that he could just barely see it. With luck, the werewolf would not see him.

  With no room to set up the tripod for the rifle, Thor decided that it was best to shoot from the prone position. Just as he was about to fire, another shot came from behind the werewolf. It hit the wolf in the back of the head and its lifeless body was flung from the roof to the ground.

  Another werewolf, just thirty feet from Thor’s position, charged toward the shooter and away from Thor.

  Lucky for me the other guy shot first. That wolf would’ve had me before I could’ve reloaded, Thor thought.

  Thor sighted on the back of the charging werewolf and fired. The round hit the wolf in the lower back. It fell, but was trying to get back up. The wolf let out a howl of pain and anger.

  Thor fired again. The wolf’s howl ended abruptly. However, the shot was too late. Two answering howls came from the far side of the cornfi
eld.

  Upon hearing the answering howls, the other shooter broke from his position and started running to the burning section of the cornfield. Thor thought he was crazy, but without a better plan he decided to follow. With a quick shout to the group, Thor was up and running. He glanced back make sure that everyone was behind him. He then tried to look through the smoke to see where the shooter had gone.

  The shooter was bent low to the ground in the middle of the fire, holding open a dirt-camouflaged trapdoor. Thor took up a covering position near the door as he waited for the rest of the group. Once they were inside, he followed, quickly going down into the hidden shelter. The shooter was the last one in, and he made sure the door was securely bolted.

  Thor and Leona had owned a book called The Zombie Survival Guide. When the werewolves first arrived and the family were teaching themselves how to survive, that book had taught them a lot of interesting survival tips. The most important were probably the cautions to keep quiet, and keep moving.

  Guess we didn’t keep quite quiet enough, thought Thor. Nine dead werewolves in two days—couldn’t help but catch the aliens’ attention.

  Bob McCoy was the group’s new best friend who had led them into the shelter. He was a thin man who looked tired and hungry.

  “We should be safe here,” he said.

  “No place is safe, only safe-er,” said Leona.

  Ah, my star pupil, thought Thor. That was the second important point from that Zombie book.

  Bob looked nonplussed for a moment. “Yeah, well, it is a hell of a lot safer in here than out there,” he said. His voice was just a bit louder than it need have been to make the point—like he was trying to convince himself more than Leona.

  The shelter was a quick-build bomb shelter. It was a simple design: take two shipping containers, dig a hole with an excavator, drop the containers in, pour some cement, reinforce with quick-build supports, and add access tubes. Two guys with the right equipment could have it built in a weekend. Thor had built three just like this with Will’s help.