Rogue Galaxy, Episode 1: The Captain and the Werewolf

by J. Boyett

  Blaine looked down at their warming mugs, regretting that their simple outing had gotten complicated. “Roy—I'm your friend,” she said. “But I'm an officer of the Imperial Space Fleet, first.”

  “Commander, I wouldn't have it any other way. Nobody comes before the Fleet, as far as I'm concerned. And, speaking frankly, this ship may be its only remnant, and I'm scared the captain may not be aware of how his actions might endanger it.”

  Blaine gave him an even harder stare. Miller held his ground.

  Blaine said, “You don't believe the rest of the Fleet will emerge from the Bubble soon?”

  “I love the Fleet so much that even if none of the ships ever do emerge, I will do anything to keep it alive here, on the Galaxy.”

  She sighed and broke eye contact. This time it was she who wished the beer had real alcohol, as she picked up her mug and took a swig. “I'll talk with him, I suppose. I'll try to find a diplomatic way to bring your concerns up.” With a sudden spurt of anger she reflected that she shouldn't have to be concerned with how diplomatically she phrased such a serious concern to her captain—she should be able to just say it, and not worry about his feelings.

  Miller was leaning forward again, having taken her words as encouragement. “He wouldn't have to break up with her or anything. Just make sure the crew doesn't feel like Summers comes first. Not do things like leave Kimball prematurely because someone maybe might suggest leaving Summers there. And not give her such a run of the ship—I mean, it's crazy not to have her locked up when we come out of hyperspace. Our charts aren't always accurate enough to guarantee that we're not coming back into real-space in the presence of a moon. No one's sure whether the Provisional managed to introduce a scrambler-bug into our database before we broke contact, and the astro-mages aren't even sure what constitutes a full moon, in an outer-space context....”

  “I'm not going to get that specific with him, Miller,” Blaine snapped. “You don't talk this way with anyone else, do you?”

  “Never.”

  “Good. Keep it that way. The man is our captain, and we will respect him.”

  Miller couldn't control a sudden spasm of disgust that rippled across his face. “We both know which of you two should be the captain, Val....”

  “Hey!” Her bark was so loud that not only Miller, but the vacuum-hockey ensigns and everybody else in the cantina froze. “Belay that crap!”

  Miller's face was red. “Sorry,” he stammered. “I didn't mean....”

  Blaine stood up. “I think I better think of some work I need to get done, before this conversation goes any further.” She picked up her mug and drained the rest of her beer before leaving. Miller kept his eyes down, not meeting hers.

  As Blaine turned and left, her scowl sending personnel scurrying out of her way, she couldn't hide from herself the fact that Miller might be right. Would Farraday have made captain of a starship, if he hadn't been his mother's son? Maybe not ... but, God, what a mother! For the first time in months, Blaine felt again some of that excitement she'd once known at the prospect of serving under the son of that legendary Captain Farraday. Even if it hadn't been for her oath, even if the Galaxy had had a different captain, Blaine would have done a lot for Terry Farraday based on the family connection alone.

  TWO

  On the bridge, Captain Farraday sat in his captain's chair, mounted a few feet higher than the rest of the room on its dais, and watched his crew prepare to drop out of hyperspace. They were going to re-enter real space in orbit around Meyer's III, a planet that had been charted but never visited. Spectroscopic analysis had shown it was devoid of life and plentiful in miridium, a mineral the Galaxy could always use more of.

  He'd ordered Lieutenant Summers—Jennifer—to supervise helmsman Lieutenant Beach in the drop. This drop from hyperspace would be fairly simple, because according to the charts Meyer's III had no moons; because of Jennifer's condition, any time they dropped out of hyperspace near a world with moons they had to be sure to do so at such an angle as not to have the ship exposed to a moon with its surface fully illuminated by the sun, with no visible shadow; if there were only one moon, they preferred to keep the planet between it and them.

  Jennifer had left his bed and come to the bridge a few minutes before him, because arriving together would raise more eyebrows. Right now Terry realized he was staring at her as she took readings from her habitual post at the science station, so he began looking around the bridge at the other personnel. Those he made eye contact with, he smiled at. When he'd received the Galaxy command, most of the crew had been happy to serve under such a relaxed, firm but not harsh commander. He was good at coordinating a team and handling the sorts of crises they'd run into, back in those days. But he knew there were those who worried his manner might not be ideal for this new state of constant existential crisis they'd been in since their rebellion. Before it had been great, having a trusted big brother at their head—but now, what they needed was a father.

  Terry Farraday knew that many in his crew felt this way, and he even knew that they might be right. But he was what he was, and he was also the captain. Once or twice, during a harsh bout of insomnia, he had actually considered stepping down, handing command over to the probably better-suited Val Blaine. But that would only be shirking his responsibilities—besides, switching the C.O.'s around would not exactly reinforce stability or morale.

  And besides, the real truth was that he wanted to remain in a position where he could protect Jennifer. He sometimes suspected that resolve didn't line up with his duty. But there it was. He prayed he would never have to make the hard choice between the two.

  A curt gesture aimed at Lieutenant Summers by Lieutenant Beach caught his eye, and he snapped his attention towards the helm. “Lieutenant Beach, Lieutenant Summers,” he said. “Is there something I should know about?” Jennifer had moved a few paces away from the helm, where she'd gone to supervise Beach as per Farraday's orders. In his peripheral vision he saw her pleading with her eyes for him to drop it—but he couldn't.

  Short, skinny Beach had swiveled his chair so that he was facing the captain. He kept his gaze down and docile, but Farraday could sense the resentment emanating from him. “No, sir. Everything's fine.”

  Farraday knew he should let it go, that he would be perceived as showing favoritism to Jennifer, that that would be bad for her, for him, and for the ship as a whole. But his rage was like a big wave tossing him up and propelling him forward. That rage was not really due to whatever minor snub Beach was guilty of. It had been born the awful day that the Provisional Government had sent a subspace communiqué ordering him to eject from an airlock the dangerous Lieutenant Summers, newly infected during an away mission by a werewolf bite; the day he'd realized that he might be surrounded by people who feared his Jennifer and wanted to kill her.

  His friendly, boyish, outgoing exterior had not changed much. But that rage was always there now, determining his actions.

  “Really?” he said. “Are you sure?” Lieutenant Beach fidgeted almost imperceptibly in his chair, his jaw flexed. “Speak up, Lieutenant Beach.”

  Finally Beach said, with as much defiance in his tone as he dared, “It's not protocol, sir.”

  “What isn't protocol?”

  “For the science officer to supervise the exit from hyperspace, sir.”

  “Ah.” True, the helmsman usually did that on his own—but who cared? Farraday knew this kind of petty squabbling was due to general resentment of Jennifer, and that the way he was acting now would only fan the flames—but, again, he couldn't help it. “Lieutenant Beach, I always thought protocol was to obey the captain's orders on his own bridge. Am I mistaken about that?”

  “No, sir,” said Beach, eyes down, cowed.

  “Good. Just wanted to get that straight. Now, carry on.” He looked at Jennifer and nodded her towards the helm. Reluctantly, she returned there.

  Seeing that reluctance, the anger evaporated out of Farraday (for the moment, at least), to
be replaced by regret. He surveyed the rest of the bridge, caught the resentful looks being surreptitiously passed back and forth.

  I'm the one who's going to wind up getting her killed.

  The thought left him drained almost of the will necessary even to sit up straight, and he slumped in the captain's chair like a melted man.

  He remembered that awful day: he'd sent Jennifer down onto the surface of Cygnus VI along with the envoy, sent to interview the legendary Cygnian mages and sorcerers to see what secrets they might be coaxed into divulging to Galaxy's science department and astro-mage corps. That was the mission he'd been given by Admiral Bayonne—seek allies and useful knowledge till the return of the Fleet. At that very moment, a hundred light-years away, Bayonne and the rest of the Fleet had been entering the Bubble of Fakkalohn to escape the Provisional-controlled forces. Secretly Farraday's heart skipped a beat every time Jennifer went with an away mission, but they'd expected no special danger from this one. But then Jennifer had been bitten by an escaped werewolf that had been rampaging through the Sorcerers' City.

  Farraday had met the shuttle in the docking bay—he'd been frantic, almost unable to control himself. He remembered the shock of that first sight of her, shivering with the preliminary attack of were-rabies, and he remembered his guilt at having sent her planetside—never mind that no werewolf had gotten loose in the Cygnian Sorcerers' City for a hundred years. And then, two days later, while he was still waiting for word from Dr. Carlson and Witch Walsh in Sickbay on whether Jennifer would make it, then had come the order from the new Canadian Provisional to destroy her. That was the last direct contact Farraday had permitted with the current Earth government.

  He was still grateful to his crew for having stood by him when he'd refused to acknowledge the Provisional's authority. But he knew that many thought Admiral Bayonne might have given the same order, and he couldn't help but remain wary of them.

  If the crew, or a strong enough contingent of it, ever decided that it wasn't up for the hardships of rebellion, that the rest of the Fleet was never going to emerge from the Bubble of Fakkalohn, and that it was time to ask to be taken into the fold of the Provisional Government, the first thing that government was likely to do would be to require them to follow that standing order, and kill Lieutenant Jennifer Summers. And never mind that the werewolf threat could be neatly contained, by always keeping a planet between themselves and its moon, and by never transporting Jennifer down to a surface where she might look up at night and see a moon in its full phase.

  They were ready to bring the ship out of hyperspace. Farraday dragged himself out of his reverie and paid attention, even though dropping out of hyperspace was pretty routine. It could be chancy if your charts weren't up to date, but they had yet to venture so far out of Imperial space that the systems they were visiting hadn't been at least recently surveyed. On the viewscreen at the fore of the bridge, Farraday watched as the kaleidoscope of hyperspace resolved itself into the crystalline starfield and the bright ball of the system's sun. No surprises yet....

  A klaxon began wailing. Even though he'd never heard it before outside of a drill, a drill which had been instituted only after Jennifer's werewolf bite, Farraday's skin flashed hot and cold with horrified recognition; seconds later the standard red-alert klaxon also began to screech, and Ensign Basilio cried, “Full moon alert! I have multiple full moons!”

  For maybe two seconds, Farraday's gaze was fixed Basilio's way, in horror. What unfroze him was a cry from someone else: “Look! Look at Lieutenant Summers!” That, and the noise of a uniform ripping, and snarls, barely audible under the wailing alarms and yet somehow piercing through them all the same.

  He turned slowly, as if his neck were an old rusted mechanism. He turned so slowly he had time to see Beach and a couple of other personnel stationed near that corner scurrying away, before his gaze finally locked on Jennifer.

  Scraps of her uniform hung to her fur in tatters. Her shoulders had broadened, torso lengthened, her fur-sprouting limbs were harder and longer and dangerous black spikes of claws were sprouting from her fusing fingers and toes. Her forehead was sloping back and her jaw was extending out, into a muzzle. Already her teeth were lengthening and sharpening, filing themselves before his very eyes. The change wasn't yet close enough to completion to absolutely prevent her from speaking, and, glaring at him with red but still-recognizable eyes, she growled, “Kill ... me ... please....”

  It looked like Beach was ready to take her at her word—he leapt to the other side of the bridge, got the laser out of the armory cabinet, and trained it on Jennifer.

  Farraday jumped to him and knocked Beach's hand aside just as he squeezed the trigger. The laser-bolt went well clear of Jennifer, but the wild shot nearly killed a few other crew-members, and its red lightning scorched its way across instruments and consoles, setting off minor explosions.

  In the midst of the chaos the lift doors opened and Blaine came rushing out, only to get knocked aside by the wildly retreating werewolf. The creature's physical transformation was not yet complete, and apparently neither was her mental one, since she had the wherewithal to slap the button behind herself and send the lift car hurtling away from the bridge.

  Blaine stared at the closed doors, then around the shambles of the bridge. “What the hell?!” She marched to the Communications station and slapped off the full-moon siren, but not the red-alert klaxon. That was the captain's prerogative. “What the hell are full moons doing out here?!” she shouted over the noise.

  Farraday switched the red-alert klaxon off on his captain's chair. Red lights still flashed, but a swollen silence filled the bridge, one punctuated by the gasps of the crew and one noisy but quick spray of sparks.

  Struggling to control himself, he turned to Beach. “You fired a weapon on my bridge, Mr. Beach.”

  Beach scowled through his fear, and wouldn't meet Farraday's eyes. “I was trying to control the threat, sir. There didn't seem to be time to await instructions.”

  “Next time you decide to kill someone aboard my ship you wait for permission, Lieutenant.” Farraday was on the verge of pronouncing some disciplinary measure, but somehow he managed to control himself. Despite his anger, he realized that this needed to be handled delicately. Lots of people might think that Beach had behaved more correctly than he himself had. Hell, Farraday might have thought that, too, if it hadn't been his girlfriend.

  He looked back at the damage where the laser-bolt had ripped across a console and the bulkhead. Turning back to Beach, he saw that the lieutenant, at least, believed that that damage was the captain's fault, not his.

  THREE

  Blaine was exasperatedly shoving Ensign Basilio away from where she'd taken over Beach's place at the helm, and demanding, “Why are we not putting that planet between us and those moons?” as she worked the controls.

  “The helm's frozen, Commander,” said Basilio, just as Blaine was finding that out for herself. Blaine struggled another few moments with the controls, then sprang away from the post and went to look at the laser damage.

  Blaine looked grimly up at the big bright full moon in the viewscreen. “Well, it looks like we were wrong,” she said. “The Provisional did manage to introduce a bug into our astrocharts before we cut off contact. Who knows how many little surprises we have in store.”

  Miller's voice was crackling through the intercom: “Bridge! What's the alert?! I have readings of laser fire on the bridge, everyone okay up there?!”

  “We're fine, but ... but Lieutenant Summers has changed into a werewolf, and she's loose,” said Farraday. “She got away in the lift.”

  Miller cursed, then said, “I've got a team in transit, I'm joining them now. We're tracking that lift—can someone please jam it?!” This last bit was directed not at his superior officers but to some member of his team racing through the corridors alongside him. Through the speaker they could hear his subordinate say something, and then Miller grunted his satisfaction and said, “All r
ight, we've got it stopped on Deck Three. Except ... wait....” Miller exploded into curses, then said, “The damned doors popped open, Captain!”

  “So the werewolf is loose?” said Blaine.

  “Unless it's cowering in the lift,” said Miller. “Which wouldn't be very werewolfy.”

  “Capture Lieutenant Summers, Commander Miller,” said Farraday. “Use nets and stunners—you and your people stay safe, but try not to injure Summers either.”

  There was just the slightest hesitation from Miller. Blaine could hear his unspoken objections almost as loudly as if he'd voiced them—werewolves were notoriously difficult to net or stun. But there was only a slight tightness in his voice as he said, “Aye, sir.”

  “There's the Thompson Tubes entry on Deck Three,” Blaine said, urgently.

  “Miller,” said Farraday, “make it a priority to keep her out of the Tubes.”

  Another pause from Miller. Blaine guessed that he was checking his instruments. He said, “Uh, Captain, it looks like she actually is heading for the Tubes.”

  An icicle of horror formed in Blaine's gut and pierced her from within. “A wild creature loose in the Tubes could cripple the ship,” she said.

  “Damn,” said Farraday. “She knows we won't be able to track her once she goes in there.” Summers should have completely changed into the werewolf by now, and according to everything anyone knew about the creatures there should be no vestige left of the host's mind or identity, so the idea of the creature knowing any such thing was ridiculous. No one mentioned that to the captain right at that moment, though. “Stop her, Miller.”

  But almost before the captain's order was out, Miller was already grimly saying, “Sorry, sir—sensors show she just ducked in to the Tubes. We're almost there—I'm going to lead my team in, we'll be out of contact once we're in there.” The supernatural energies and spells in the Thompson Tubes would scramble their communications.

  “All right, Miller.” Blaine thought the captain was doing a pretty good job of controlling his emotion—on the surface, anyway. “Good luck, and keep safe. Keep everyone safe.”