LUPUS BELLI
Julie Frost
I lost everything in World War Werewolf, including my girlfriend, my family, and my humanity. The lycanthropes had tried to convince us that growing fangs and fur three nights a month didn’t make them monsters, and they were right, but we didn’t listen.
I fought on the wrong side of that war.
Now I paid the price. The humans won and relegated werewolves to second-class noncitizens, with brands scarred on their hands using silver and wolfsbane, in segregated ghettos a half step above homelessness. Me too, having survived a bite in battle. If one could call it “surviving.”
My hovel wasn’t much, but it was mine. And meth had a particular stink to it, so I knew exactly what I faced when a pair of human addicts busted my door down, armed with sawed-off shotguns and desperation. They really should’ve planned better; the night before the full moon is the second-worst time to break into a werewolf’s den.
With an actual weapon, I’d have had an open-and-shut case of self-defense. In Texas, even a werewolf was allowed to own guns.
Self-defense didn’t apply to fang and claw. Ironically, I would have been in more trouble had I left them alive. The court showed a bit of dubious mercy, taking my service in the war and the newness of my condition into account. Rather than a death sentence, or even life imprisonment, the judge shipped me off to the werewolf lunar penal colony for “only” ten to fifteen years.
To be brutally honest, I wasn’t sure this was preferable to a silver bullet.
The prisoner transport to the all-male colony was a special hell. Three days stretched over forever. Silver shackles stopped us from shifting to wolf. The closer we got to the moon, the more the agony grew. Its relentless pull fought the silver and lost, the worst pain I’d ever felt. Rough men bawled like babies, and I lay curled on my side choking on sobs, tears streaming down my face.
I barely noticed the landing bump or the airlock whooshing open. But I couldn’t miss when the remotely controlled cuffs fell off. It was as if a switch had been thrown—faster than ever before with a single bone-wrenching crunch leaving me panting on the floor as my body shifted to the intermediate wolfman form.
I took a few moments to collect myself before shaking free from the shreds of my prison jumpsuit. Bits of cloth wafted to the floor in one-sixth gravity, and standing up the normal way nearly launched me into the ceiling before I recovered. The electrodes clamped to my neck vertebrae stayed right where they were.
A chorus of growls greeted us as we exited the shuttle, along with distorted mutters of “fresh meat.” They’d dumped us right into the middle of the gen-pop yard. Shivering, I scanned the crowd. Many of them had actual scars, although new wounds healed without scarring, and old scars disappeared with a shift. Usually.
The first guy I noticed brooded in the back of the yard, bare space all around him. A huge bruiser nearly twice my size; four white stripes marred his head from between his ears to the left side of his face, a strike that nearly cost him an eye. He was far more wolf than human—muzzle longer, ears rotated to the top of his head, hands and feet more paw-like, incredibly shaggy, with black fur and orange eyes. He stood hunched over, almost on all fours rather than upright. A purple “21” was stamped on each shoulder.
Prisoner 35 stalked over to me. Less wolfy than 21 and not quite as enormous, he still outsized me by a good fifty pounds. His fur was the classic gray stippled with black, fading to white on his stomach. He grabbed me by an ear and hauled me across the floor. “Mine.”
“I. Wait. What?” I wrenched loose and scrambled away, which meant I bounced several times and slammed up against a table bolted to the metal floor. Something told me I’d better get used to the lower gravity quick, before someone turned me into a snack—or something less pleasant. “Leave me alone.”
His lips curled over his teeth in an expression only a psychopath would have mistaken for a smile. “Make me.”
I glanced around wildly. I was on my own.
I might not have been big—five-seven and one-fifty—but the Army had taught me hand-to-hand combat, and “small and light” also meant “fast and agile.” My tail and ears came up, and I bared fangs, bristling.
He laughed and charged me, arms wide and claws spread. I tried to flit aside like I would’ve done back home, but I wasn’t back home. I was on the moon in one-sixth Earth’s gravity. He was used to it. Not me; I ended up flailing in midair. He caught me by the ankle, thumped me onto the floor, and stood over me with a massive hand wrapped around my throat.
“Mine,” he said again.
Nope. I raked my claws down his arm.
He smiled, backing off. “What’s your name, little wolf?” he asked with a not-quite German accent.
“Jordan Palmer?” I hadn’t meant for it to sound like a question, but shit, he was huge. He could rip his claws through my throat without thinking twice. It wouldn’t kill me, but I wouldn’t like it.
“I am Christof Wagner.” He pronounced it “Vagner.” “And you are bunking with me.”
An annoyed voice sounded over the intercom. “Christof. Leave the newb alone. There’s enough space. Nobody has to share yet.”
I glanced up. A pair of human guards stood at a second-story window. One held a microphone.
Christof’s brow lowered stubbornly. “Mine.”
Before he could drive that point home, a scrum of werewolves boiled out of the shuttle and ran us over. Christof went sailing. Several feet stomped several parts of my anatomy before an errant kick sent me flying to slam against a wall to slide, winded, to the floor. The guard yelled something I couldn’t make out through the ringing in my ears.
Then a shockwave from the electrodes implanted in my neck vertebrae made me yelp with agony, convulsively banging my head against a table leg. Not just me, though—everyone. I bit my tongue, tasting blood and juddering.
A few moments later, the guards joined us. The tall heavy one, whose nametag said escobar, held a yellow metal box with a bunch of buttons; the short skinny one carried a silver-plated truncheon. His nametag read fischer.
Escobar punched a button on his box, shutting off the current. We all lay there panting. Fischer placed the end of his truncheon under Christof’s chin and tipped his head up. Christof abruptly turned human with a pained grunt, squeezing his eyes shut.
“Leave. The newb. Alone,” Fischer said. “C’mon, Christof, you pick the smallest guy every time we get a bunch in. I’da thought you’da learned by now.” He shot a glare around at the rest of us. “All of you shoulda learned by now. Maybe if you acted like civilized creatures insteada wild animals, you wouldn’t be here.” He jerked the truncheon away from Christof’s chin, causing him to shift back to wolfman. “Control. Your damn. Wolf.”
Fischer pulled me to my feet. “Keep your nose clean, Palmer, and you might survive the experience. Newbs!” he barked. “This way to your bunks.”
The silver in the place made me itch. I shied away from the bars, plated with the toxic metal. We fell in behind him, and he led us down a hall lined with spartan cells. Each held a thin-mattressed bunk, a sink, a frictionless toilet, and not much else.
“Listen up,” Escobar said. “This is what you get. There’s kit for you, toothbrushes and stuff. If you tear it up, you don’t get a replacement. Keep it clean, because if you make a mess, we”—he gestured at himself and Fischer—“are not dealing with it. Chow is at eight, noon, and five. A bell will ring letting you know. You can shower once a day. Please do. You’ll get your numbers soon. Your cells aren’t locked unless you get rowdy. Lights out at ten. Any questions?”
I raised my hand. “Number 21? What’s up with him? I’ve never seen one of us that . . .” I trailed off. “That,” I concluded.
“Ivanovich. He’s been here six years,” Fischer said. “The longer you stay, the wolfier you get. He’ll probably be confined to his cell twenty-four/seven as the wild takes over. He’s not leaving.”
What would I be like after ten years? “Do we go back to normal after we go home?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Nobody’s gone home yet.” I didn’t see a number starting with “1” on anyone’s shoulders. I wondered what happened to the first batch. Nothing good, probably.
It did not give me a warm fuzzy feeling that they hadn’t studied the long-term effects of werewolves living on the moon before they’d banished us. I wandered into my cell and flopped onto the bunk with my face in my hands.
We settled into a sick equilibrium. The routine helped, as did the fact that our guards put down any nonsense anyone started. We still had bullshit dominance fights, but I did my best to stay away from those and mostly succeeded. They’d stuck us here to teach us control, they said. If we could keep it together while permanently semi-wolfed, the thinking went, then we’d be better behaved when—if—we went home.
For whatever reason, Christof took a shine to me.
“Why?” I asked him one day at lunch. I’d decided—without consulting Christof—to sit with Ivanovich, who acted indifferent to our presence. “Lone wolf” was a bad look on anyone, even him. Maybe especially him.
Christof glanced up from his vat meat, which tasted vaguely of chicken. “Perhaps I wish someone had protected me from a vast bully when I first came.” He shrugged. “The guards, they misconstrue without asking. The newbs take their cue from them and fear me. I am rough, yes, but I mean no harm. You’re the first—” He stopped, shrugging again. “The first who did not avoid me out of hand.”
“To be fair, Christof, your approach needs work.” I took a couple of uneasy bites of my food. “But you looked like you needed a friend.”
I’d noticed Christof’s isolation after getting over my initial freak-out. Ivan was the same. Neither of them stared at me like I was a sex toy on legs—and, more importantly, didn’t emit an amorous odor—so I gravitated in their direction. It worked out for all of us. “Lone wolf” was a bad look for pack animals.
Since Christof wasn’t bearing the brunt of anyone’s animosity or untoward interest, I decided to ask. “What happened to your bully?”
He bared his fangs in that not-a-smile. “He had an unfortunate accident. Fischer and Escobar, they do their best to keep a, how you say, lid on things. They cannot always succeed. They are two and we are seventy-odd wolves; they must sleep sometime.” He swallowed his final bit of meat. “Our guards are not bad sorts. They see which way the land lies and sometimes facilitate a bit of self-defense.”
Good to know.
And completely useless when the aliens arrived a year later.
I was reading in my cell with the door open when they overrode the airlock controls and exploded into the compound. Enormous and reptilian, with crocodile teeth in extended muzzles and more dexterous hands than they had a right to, they cornered Escobar against the wall in front of me. Their armor was impervious to his blaster, the energy dissipating harmlessly across it. He only managed to scorch a face before they overwhelmed him.
Blood splashed through the hallway as they ripped through his throat and belly. The awful stench of internal organs filled the air, flashing me back to the war. Escobar let out a single, truncated scream and fell under snapping jaws.
One of the aliens looked at me through yellow-green, slit-pupiled eyes, its mouth dripping red as it gulped a hunk of . . . I didn’t know what. Over the past year, I’d gotten better at controlling myself, but this was a bit fucking much. The wolf strove to roar forth, but I was frankly more afraid of it than the aliens. I battled it back, barely, though my fangs bared of their own volition, and the hair on my shoulders stood on end. My hands curled into defensive claws as I straightened, trying to make myself look bigger without letting the wolf the rest of the way out. A submission display might actually goad these creatures.
They made no move to attack me. Once they were done eating Escobar, leaving stripped bone and shredded cloth, they headed toward ops. When I could smell they were well away, I edged past Escobar’s skull in the direction of the gen-pop yard, collecting fellow inmates on the way.
I found Christof talking quietly with a few of the higher-ranking wolves. He put a calming hand on my shoulder and glanced at my foot—I’d stepped in some of Escobar’s blood.
“They murdered—” I started, then stopped awkwardly. They knew who’d been murdered by the scent. “In front of my cell.”
“We are trying to decide what to do,” he said. “You saw how they moved, what they were armed with?”
“They’re fast,” I answered. “Savage. No hesitation, they killed him with their bare hands and ate him. The armor stops blaster fire, but one of them got his face scorched. They didn’t use weapons, just . . .” I shuddered. “Teeth and claws.”
“Like us, then,” 37 said. He’d come up with Christof. My own number was 86.
I glared at him wildly. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t kill and eat people for funsies. So, no. Not like us.”
37 curled his lip, exposing sizeable fangs. “Don’t you want payback for how the humans treat us?”
“Not like that!”
“Weak,” he snorted. “You are weak.”
Maybe I was, and maybe in this situation it was a liability, but I wanted to go home someday. I had to prove I was a good dog by keeping myself civilized while the moon yanked on every fiber of my being, and the wolf begged to tear loose and howl.
My chin came up a fraction. “I have family on Earth. Don’t you?” Just because they’d disowned me didn’t mean I didn’t still love them.
“A human family,” 37 huffed. “We’re your pack, 86.”
Not a pack I’d chosen. Before I could point that out, a voice came over the intercom. It hissed, harshly guttural. “May I have your attention.”
How the hell did they speak English? Some kind of universal translator?
We looked up to see one of the aliens talking into the microphone at the second-story window overlooking the yard. The creature was bigger than the ones from outside my cell, with a bony ridge above his eyes, dark orange rather than green like the others. Something about him said “ranking officer,” though I couldn’t put my claw—no, I thought firmly, my finger—on exactly what.
“I am Commander—” Something garbled.
Someone hollered, “What?”
The brow ridge lowered. “You may call me Commander, then. We are here to liberate your homeworld, using your moon as a staging area.”
Shouts of consternation and questions, along with a few cheers, greeted this announcement. Somebody said, “Man, fuck you!”
This echoed my own sentiment. Like hell did I want family or friends back home eaten by these . . . whatever they were. Reptoids. Croco-shits.
The Commander raised a four-fingered hand. “Our current force is a vanguard, sent to study and reconnoiter. We have observed that you are prisoners here, kept against your will by an oppressive species not your own. Ally with us, tell us what we need to know regarding defenses, and you will be rewarded, given places in our army, and raised to leadership positions when we have subjugated the planet.”
Helluva carrot for some of my more bloodthirsty compatriots, who had no love for humans in most cases, and active animosity in others. I wondered what the stick would be if we refused to go along with the program. I glanced uneasily between Christof and 37.
Christof was already shaking his head. “No. I have a family.”
37 sniffed. “Feh. When did they last send you a message? They dumped us and forgot us.”
“I care not. Earth is home. I won’t leave it to these.” Christof looked to me. “What is it like for us, Jordan? Have things changed?”
I shrugged. “From what? We have to register. We’re segregated. I’m here for basically defending myself.”
“They sent us up here to rot,” 48 said. “If you think anybody’s ever going home, you’re delusional.”
“This may be the only way we get home,” 56 said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I sure as shit don’t want to end up like—” He gestured at Ivanovich, who hunched alone in a corner, nearly full wolf, wholly nonverbal. Keeping him company hadn’t stopped his slide. My lips tightened, and I moved a chair to sit beside him, resting a hand between his ears. He leaned his head against my leg.
“Nevertheless.” Christof came to stand by me, solid as a rock. “I don’t wish my family and friends to be slaves or dinner.”
“These guys are assholes who smell funny,” I said. “Escobar didn’t even have a chance. They slaughtered him like a steer and ate him. Can you imagine them doing that to your mom? Did anyone see what happened to Fischer?”
“Same thing,” rumbled another old-timer.
Before we could discuss anything further, we all fell writhing to the ground—someone had activated our neck electrodes. The Commander joined us a few moments later, flanked by a quartet of underlings, one of whom held the control box. The Commander kicked people aside with a foot booted in the same armor they all wore, which absorbed the current and prevented secondary shocks.
My blood turned to ice when he stopped in front of Christof and pointed. “That one.” The Reptoid with the box pushed a button that stopped the electricity coursing through Christof’s body. Christof lay panting for a few seconds—
And launched, without so much as a growl of warning, straight at the Commander’s face.
He never made it. Two Reptoids took him down. His claws ripped a face open, proving they bled as red as we did. His fangs closed on a hand with an audible crunch.
Then the Commander snapped his enormous jaws around Christof’s head and wrenched it off in a spray of blood. I screamed Christof’s name. They dropped his twitching, suddenly human body to the floor. His head rolled to a stop in front of me, staring with blue eyes. I’d never seen their true color before now.
I choked out a sob, half grief and half rage. The one with the box pushed another button, releasing me from the shock. The Commander regarded me with a soulless glower devoid of pity. “Are you next?”
I turned my face away. My voice came out as a low, wounded growl. “No.”
“Good.” He eyed the others one by one. They all lowered their gazes as much as possible while being electrocuted. “Anyone else?”
No one stood up to him. Not after that demonstration. The Commander waved at the box, and the voltage stopped for everybody. “Now,” he said. “Join us, and be rewarded. Don’t? We’ll leave you here to die of starvation. Perhaps we’ll be merciful and let the air out of your dome to give you an easy death.” He clearly had no idea neither of those things would kill us, though they’d be hellish in the extreme.
“Let us have no more foolishness.” The Commander spun and left us there, jittering with aftershocks.
Ivan hitched over to me. He nosed Christof’s hair with a whine, then buried his head against my shoulder. No one looked our way. They dispersed, some to the corners of the yard, some back to their cells, leaving us with our packmate’s body. My hand snaked up to pet Ivan. I wanted to tell him it would be okay, but the lie stuck in my throat. I was pretty sure we’d never be okay again.
I decided to bunk with Ivan after that. I didn’t trust anyone else not to come and murder me in my sleep—or him. The others avoided us. Small knots of them muttered together, some casting us unfriendly glances, some speculative, some sympathetic, some a mixture of both.
I ignored them all, bitterly sullen that not a single one stood up and told the Reptoids “No.” Not that I let myself off easy; my own cowardice rankled in my guts like a burning ember.
Ivan’s growl startled me awake a night later. I raised up on an elbow behind him to see inmate 56 standing outside our bunk.
“What do you want?” I asked in a sleepy burr.
“Some of us aren’t on board with the invaders,” he said. “We’re having a meeting in an hour. You two should join us, since, well, you know.”
I did know. I just didn’t trust them. “We’ll think about it. I hope you’ll excuse us if we’re less than confident about you.”
“Fair enough.” He ghosted away.
“What do you think?” I asked Ivan. He should have been the alpha, but the others eschewed him, fearing they’d be like this someday, mostly wolf subsumed by instinct. But I knew he hadn’t forgotten his humanity; he wasn’t a ravening beast. Outward appearances deceived. He kept himself together better than some who’d been here for far less time.
His shoulders rolled in a shrug. He hopped off the bed, standing on all fours, looking at me with a tilted head and a slightly waving tail.
“Fine, I’m coming.”
Ivan led the way, turning off into an access hall we normally couldn’t enter. A pang pierced me as I realized why the doorway was cracked open—no one was left to make sure it stayed shut.
We slid into a maintenance room, where about twenty inmates assembled in various states of put-together. As one, they ducked their heads when we entered, subtly baring their throats—much to my surprise.
“You were right,” 56 said. “After what they did to Christof, we can’t let them invade Earth.”
About time they’d seen sense. But I was still angry that Christof’s death served as their catalyst for action. Too late for him. Ivan bristled at my side, and I crossed my arms and glowered. “What are you willing to do about it?”
“We have to stop them, here and now. We’ve got the numbers, I think,” 56 replied. “We just gotta catch them off guard.”
“Make them think we’ve agreed,” 45 said. “And coldcock them. They bleed, so they can die.”
A logical conclusion. “How many of us versus how many of them?” I put a possessive hand on Ivan’s ruff. “I’ve already lost one packmate. I’m not willing to throw away another on an ill-conceived plan.”
“I’ve counted.” 56 held up four fingers. “They like to do things in fours, apparently. So, forty of them in this vanguard, including the Commander.”
We had twice that, but how many were on our side? My fingers crept around to the prongs on the back of my neck. “What about these? Our numbers mean fuck-all if they can drop us whenever they want.”
45 smiled with all his teeth and held out a hand. A pair of blood-crusted electrodes sat in his palm. My stomach lurched. I’d dreamed of not being controlled by the damned things. “How—”
“It doesn’t feel good.” Understatement of the century. “But we can remove them with our claws. Are you in?”
I glanced down at Ivan. He shrugged again.
“We’re in.” I hoped it wasn’t a colossal mistake.
We peeled the electrodes off. Ivan didn’t trust anyone else to do it, baring fangs at their approach, so I removed his, as gently as possible, while he stood there stoically without making a sound. I wondered, again, at his self-discipline, and if they’d ever let him go home again.
First we had to survive the croco-shits.
The rumor flowed from cell to cell. When the chime sounded for lunch, we all trooped dutifully to the chow hall and grabbed our vat protein. The crocs assumed that food would distract us and keep us docile.
They discovered how wrong they were when we sprang to the attack. Blood, ours and theirs, spattered through the air. Ivan watched my back, and I watched his, as we coordinated our efforts to take a croc down. It turned out they could die, though killing them wasn’t effortless. We healed fast. They didn’t.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the moment 56 lost himself. Suddenly, he was all wolf, six hundred pounds of shaggy, ferocious rage with fangs as long as my thumbs and five-inch talons to rival a saber-toothed tiger. He tore through crocs, ripping throats with no regard for tactics or his own safety. I was honestly afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop with them . . .
Until he came face-to-face with me and Ivan. He skidded to a halt, panting jaws dripping red.
“Hey.” I gulped. “Are you—”
An energy bolt blasted from a weapon, and his head disappeared. Even one of us couldn’t survive that. He dropped to the deck, instantly dead and human.
The crocs launched a bare-handed counterattack. Some of our own joined them, the traitorous wretches. But 56 had shown us the way, and the Commander held the only weapon like that.
The final change took me like a flowing stream. Usually it hurt, on full moon nights, but I fought it every inch of the way. Turned out, when I just let it happen, there was only heady power. No wonder some of us got lost in it.
Ivan’s jaws closed around the Commander’s gun wrist and ripped the hand clean off. I leaped at the Commander’s throat. He didn’t get his arm up in time to stop me. He fell, and I rode him down, teeth locked so hard he couldn’t even gurgle. He tasted as bad as he smelled.
He’d murdered my packmates. I had no mercy or compunction. My head jerked nearly of its own accord and tore his life out.
It was easy, and I wasn’t sorry.
I left him and hunted for another Reptoid, but the other inmates had killed them all, along with the traitors, who’d frozen without shifting. Because shifting was unthinkable except under the most dire conditions.
Except when it wasn’t. Maybe the humans needed to learn that lesson more than we did. On the other hand, if I could kill another sapient creature without hesitation, maybe they were right to be afraid.
Ivan brushed my cheek with his nose. He’d reverted to what passed for normal with him, but I was still completely wolfed and not eager to go back. He whined at me, bumping my shoulder. Reminding me of my humanity.
I closed my eyes, huffed out a breath, and shifted as far as I could. Not a monster. Not a murderer. I’d done what was necessary to protect my home, and the beast hadn’t cut loose and torn a swath through my comrades.
None of the others had either.
After we’d regrouped, the authorities on Earth got a very interesting message from us. At first they didn’t believe, but they changed their tune right quick when Ivan pulled the Commander’s body into camera range.
They paid us a visit, faster than I would have credited them for, and we gave them an earful and an eyeful of the monsters we’d killed to save Earth. They were more shaken about the confirmation we weren’t alone in the universe than what we’d done to stop a wholesale invasion. I played up Ivan’s contribution, because, well, he was my pack.
They pardoned us and shuttled us back to Earth. How could they not?
I was relieved to be home, greeted as a conquering hero with my new friend—who, much to our relief, turned mostly human again. A grateful government awarded us a couple of upscale loft apartments in the same building. No more segregation.
We’d just sat down to enormous steaks I’d grilled in the park when my phone rang. Ivan’s went off at the same time. We glanced at each other, then at the screens.
Same number. We answered together and found ourselves on a conference call.
“We’re composing an invasion,” said the voice on the other end. “And thought you’d like to come along. You’ve got some unique talents, and we’d pay you appropriately.”
“How appropriately?” I asked, guarded.
“Check your email. There’s a compensation package in it. Get back to me when you have time to think it over.”
We ate first. I swallowed hard when I opened the attachment. Assuming I made it back, I’d never have to work again.
“Ivan? Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“It’s almost too good to be true. So I’m suspicious.” He stared dubiously at his phone, head tilted and bushy brows creased. “They have incentive to make sure we don’t come home. We should negotiate rights of survivorship.” His lip curled up, baring a tooth longer and pointier than human. “I think I shall discuss this further with them.”
“Those croco-shits murdered our pack, and they were just the vanguard. I’m in. I like the idea of taking the battle to them.”
And I loved the idea of fighting on the right side of a war.